The Crimean War

bombardment of Sevastopol to concentrate on the conquest of the Crimea as a whole, and was reluctant to commit his troops to an assault which he understood would cost a lot of lives when they might be better used for this new plan. He was further discouraged from an attack by his chief engineer, General Adolphe Niel, who had received secret instructions from Paris to delay a move against Sevastopol until the Emperor Napoleon – then still considering a journey to the Crimea – arrived to take command of the assault himself.

Unwilling to act alone, the British confined themselves to a sortie on the night of 19 April against the Russians’ rifle pits on the eastern edge of the Vorontsov Ravine which prevented them from developing their works towards the Redan. The pits were captured by the 77th Regiment after heavy fighting with the Russians, but the victory came at a price, in the loss of its commander, Colonel Thomas Egerton, a giant of a man at over 2 metres, and his second-in-command, the 23-year-old Captain Audley Lempriere, who stood less than 1.5 metres tall, as Nathaniel Steevens, a witness to the fighting, described in a letter to his family on 23 April:

Our loss was severe, 60 men killed & wounded, and seven Officers, of whom Col. Egerton (a tall powerful man) & Capt. Lempriere of the 77th were killed; the latter was very young, had just got his company and was about the smallest officer in the Army, a great pet of the Colonel’s and called by him his child; he was killed, poor fellow at the first attack in the rifle pit; the Colonel, tho’ wounded, snatched him up in his arms & carried him off declaring ‘they shall never take my child’; the Colonel then returned and in the second attack was killed.⁵²

For the moment, without the French, this was as much as the British could achieve. On 24 April Raglan wrote to Lord Panmure: ‘We must prevail upon Gen. Canrobert to take the Mamelon, otherwise we cannot move forward with any prospect of success or safety.’ It was vital for the French to clear the Russians out of the Mamelon before they could mount an assault on the Malakhov, just as it was crucial for the British to occupy the Quarry Pits before they could attack the Redan. Under Canrobert the action was delayed. But once he handed over his command to Pelissier on 16 May, who was as determined as Raglan to take Sevastopol by an assault, the French committed to a combined attack on the Mamelon and the Quarries.

The operation began on 6 June with a bombardment of the outworks which lasted until six o’clock the following evening, when the allied assault was scheduled to begin. The signal for the start of the attack was to be given by Raglan and Pelissier, who were to meet on the field of action. But at the agreed hour the French commander was fast asleep, having thought to take a nap before the beginning of the fighting, and no one dared to wake the fiery general. Pelissier arrived an hour late for his rendezvous with Raglan, by which time the battle had begun – the French troops rushing forward first, followed by the British, who had heard their cheers.^az The order for attack had been given by General Bosquet, in whose entourage was Fanny Duberly:

General Bosquet addressed them in companies; and as he finished each speech, he was responded to by cheers, shouts, and bursts of song. The men had more the air and animation of a party invited to a marriage than a party going to fight for life or death. To me how sad a sight it seemed! The divisions begin to move and to file down the ravine, past the French battery, opposite the Mamelon. General Bosquet turns to me, his eyes full of tears – my own I cannot restrain, as he says, ‘Madame, a Paris, on a toujours l’Exposition, les bals, les fetes; et – dans une heure et demie la moitie de ces braves seront morts!’⁵³

Led by the Zouaves, the French rushed forward, without any order, towards the Mamelon, from which a tremendous volley of artillery fire forced them back. Many of the troops began to scatter in panic and had to be regrouped by their officers before they were ready to attack again. This time the attackers, running through a storm of musket fire, reached the ditch at the bottom of the Mamelon’s defensive walls, which they climbed, while the Russians fired down on them or (without time to reload their muskets) threw down the stones of the parapet. ‘The wall was four metres high,’ recalled Octave Cullet, who was in the first line of attack; ‘it was difficult to climb, and we had no ladders, but our spirit was irrepressible’:

Hoisting one another up, we scaled the walls, and overcoming the resistance of the enemy on the parapet, launched a furious avalanche of fire into the crowd defending the redoubt … . What happened next I cannot describe. It was a scene of carnage. Fighting like madmen, our soldiers spiked their guns, and the few Russians who were brave enough to fight us were all slaughtered.⁵⁴

The Zouaves did not stop in the Mamelon but continued to rush on towards the Malakhov – a spontaneous action by soldiers caught up in the fury of the fight – only to be mowed down in their hundreds by the Russian guns. Lieutenant Colonel St George of the Royal Artillery, who watched the dreadful scene, described it in a letter on 9 June:

Then such a fire opened from the Malakhov tower as never was seen before I am sure: sheets of flame, with their explosion, followed each other in the rapidest succession. The Russians worked the guns wonderfully well (and it is my trade, I am a judge) and fired like fiends upon the multitudes of poor little Zouaves, whose pluck had carried them to the edge of a ditch they had no means of crossing, & who stood in hesitation till they were knocked over. It was too much for them, and they wavered and retreated into the Mamelon; and even this became too hot for them, and they had to retire into their trenches again. Reinforcements came in strength. Again they dashed into the Mamelon, whose guns they had already spiked, and killed its defenders, and again, foolishly I think, went through to try the Malakhov. They failed a second time and had to retire, but this time no farther than the Mamelon, which they are holding still, having won it with admirable courage, and left between 2 and 3 thousand killed and wounded on the field.⁵⁵

Meanwhile the British attacked the Quarries. The Russians had left only a small force in the Quarry Pits, relying on their ability to retake them with reinforcements from the Redan should they be stormed. The British took the Quarries easily but soon found that they had not enough men to hold them, as wave after wave of Russians attacked them from the Redan. For several hours, the two sides were engaged in fierce hand-to-hand fighting, as one side expelled the other from the rifle pits, only to be forced back yet again by reinforcements from the other side. By five o’clock in the morning, when the last Russian attack was finally repulsed, there were heaps of dead and wounded on the ground.

At midday on 9 June a white flag was raised from the Malakhov, and another appeared on the Mamelon, now in the hands of the French, signalling a truce to collect the bodies from the battlefield. The French had made enormous sacrifices to capture the crucial Mamelon and White Works, losing almost 7,500 dead and wounded men. Herbe went out into no man’s land with General Failly to agree the arrangements with the Russian General Polussky. After the exchange of a few formalities, ‘the conversation took a friendly turn – Paris, St Petersburg, the hardships of the previous winter’, Herbe noted in a letter to his family that evening, and while the dead were cleared away, ‘cigars were exchanged’ between the officers. ‘One might have thought we were friends meeting for a smoke in the middle of a hunt,’ Herbe wrote. After a while some officers appeared with a magnum of champagne, and General Failly, who had ordered them to fetch it, proposed a ‘toast to peace’ that was heartily accepted by the Russian officers. Six hours later, when several thousand bodies had been cleared away, it was time to end the truce. After each side had been given time to check that none of their own men had been left in no man’s land, the white flags were taken down and, as Polussky had suggested, a blank shot was fired from the Malakhov to signal the resumption of hostilities.⁵⁶

With the capture of the Mamelon and the Quarry Pits, everything was ready for an assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. The date set for the attack was 18 June – the 40th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo. It was hoped that an allied victory would heal the old divisions between the British and the French and give them something new to celebrate together on that day.

Victory was bound to cost a lot of lives. To storm the Russian forts, the attackers would have to carry ladders and run uphill across several hundred metres of open ground, traversing ditches and abbatis^ba under heavy fire from the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan, as well as flanking fire from the Flagstaff Bastion. When they reached the forts, they would have to use their ladders to get into the ditch and climb the walls, under point-blank fire from the enemy above, before overcoming the defenders on the parapets and fighting off the Russians, amassed behind more barricades inside the forts, until reinforcements could arrive.

It was agreed by the allies that the French would attack the Malakhov first, and then, as soon as they had silenced the Russian guns, the British infantry would begin their storming of the Redan. On Pelissier’s insistence,