prepare in time. The troops from the reserve lines were rushed forward to join in the attack, but the sudden order to advance unsettled them, and many of the men ‘refused to leave the trenches, even when their officers threatened them with the harshest punishments’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Dessaint, the head of the army’s political department, who concluded that the soldiers ‘had an intuition of the disaster that awaited them’.63
Watching from the Vorontsov Ridge, Raglan could see that the disjointed French assault was a bloody fiasco. One French column, to the left of the Malakhov, had broken through, but its supports were being devastated by the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan. Raglan might have helped the French by bombarding the Redan, as agreed in the original allied plan, before launching an assault; but he felt bound by a sense of duty and honour to support the French by storming the Redan immediately, without a preliminary bombardment, even though he must have known, if only from the events of the previous hour, that such a policy was bound to end in disaster and the needless sacrifice of many men. ‘I always guarded myself from being tied down to attack at the same moment as the French, and I felt that I ought to have some hope of their success before I committed our troops,’ Raglan wrote to Panmure on 19 June, ‘but when I saw how stoutly they were opposed, I considered it was my duty to assist them by attacking myself … Of this I am quite certain, that, if the troops had remained in our trenches, the French would have attributed their non-success to our refusal to participate in the operation.’64
The British assault began at 5.30 a.m. The attacking troops ran forward from the Quarries and the trenches on either side, followed by the supporting parties carrying ladders to scale the walls of the Redan. It soon became apparent that it was a hopeless task. ‘The troops no sooner began to show themselves beyond the parapet of the trenches, than they were assailed by the most murderous fire of grape that ever was witnessed,’ reported Sir George Brown, who had been given the command of the assault. The first Russian volley took out one-third of the attackers. From the trenches on the left, Codrington observed the devastating effect of the barrage on the troops attempting to run across 200 metres of open ground towards the Redan:
The moment they showed themselves, fire of grape was opened upon them – it ploughed the ground – it knocked over many, the dust blinded them, and I saw many swerve away to the trenches on their left. The officers told me afterwards they were blinded by the dust thrown up by the grape; and one told me he was quite blown – out of breath – before he got halfway.65
Overwhelmed by the torrent of grape-shot, the troops began to waver; some lost their nerve and ran away, despite the efforts of their officers to regroup the men by shouting threats. Eventually, the first line of attackers and the leading ladder-men reached the abbatis, about 30 metres from the ditch of the Redan. While they struggled to squeeze through the gaps of the abbatis, the Russians ‘mounted the parapets of the Redan and delivered volley after volley into us’, recalled Timothy Gowing:
They hoisted a large black flag and defied us to come on. The cry of ‘Murder’ could be heard on that field, for the cowardly enemy fired for hours upon our countrymen as they lay writhing in agony and blood. As some of our officers said, ‘This will never do – we’ll pay them for this yet!’ We would have forgiven them all had they not shot down poor, defenceless, wounded men.
The storming party dwindled to the last hundred men, who started to retreat, in defiance of their officers, whose threats to shoot them were ignored. According to one officer, who had urged a group of men to continue the attack, ‘they became impressed with the conviction that another step forward and they would be blown into the air; they would fight any number of men, they said, but they would not step forward to be blown up’.66 It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.
Meanwhile, 2,000 men from the 3rd Division under the command of Major-General Eyre on the left flank broke through into the suburbs of Sevastopol itself. They had been instructed to occupy some Russian rifle pits and, if the attack on the Redan allowed it, to advance further down the Picquet House Ravine. But Eyre had exceeded his orders and had pushed on his brigade, defeating the Russians in the Cemetery, before coming under heavy fire in Sevastopol’s streets. They found themselves in a ‘cul-de-sac’, recalled Captain Scott of the 9th Regiment: ‘we could neither advance nor retire, and had to hold our ground from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., 17 hours under a tremendous fire of shot, shell, grape, canister, and hundreds of their sharpshooters, our only cover being the houses which crumbled about us at every discharge.’ According to Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of the 14th Regiment, the storming of the city became something of an escapade, as some of the Irish soldiers ‘rushed on into part of Sevastopol, got among houses with women in them, pictures, mahogany, furniture and pianos; they got also among strong wine … Some of the Irish boys dressed themselves up as women and so fought; some of them brought back looking glasses, tables and a gooseberry bush with the berries on it!’ But for the rest of the troops, sheltering in bombed-out and crumbling buildings from the enemy’s fire, the day passed with no such amusements. It was only under cover of darkness that they were able to retreat, carrying hundreds of wounded men with them.67
The next morning a truce was called to clear the killed and wounded from the battlefield. The casualties were enormous. The British lost about 1,000 men, killed and wounded; the French perhaps six times that number, though the precise figure was suppressed. A Zouave captain who was part of the team sent out into no man’s land to collect the dead described what he saw in a letter home on 25 June:
I will not tell you all the horrible sensations I experienced on arriving on that ground, strewn with bodies rotting in the heat, among which I recognized some of my comrades. There were 150 Zouaves with me, carrying stretchers and flasks with wine. The doctor with us told us to care first for the wounded who could still be saved. We found a lot of these unfortunates – they all asked to drink and my Zouaves poured them wine … There was an intolerable smell of corruption everywhere; the Zouaves had to cover their noses with a handkerchief while carrying away the dead bodies, whose heads and feet were left dangling.68
Among the dead was General Mayran, who was blamed for the defeat in Pelissier’s account to Napoleon, although, if truth be told, Pelissier himself was at least as responsible for his last-minute changes to the plan. Raglan certainly believed that Pelissier was principally at fault, not just for the changes of plan but for his decision to limit the attack to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than commit to a broader assault on the town which might have had the effect of scattering the Russian defenders – a decision he believed Pelissier had made from worries that the French troops might ‘run riot’ in the town, as he explained in his letter to Panmure.
But Raglan’s criticisms were no doubt coloured by his own sense of guilt for the needless sacrifice of so many British troops. According to one of his physicians, Raglan fell into a deep depression following the failure of the assault, and when he was on his deathbed, on 26 June, it was not from cholera that he was suffering, as had been rumoured, but ‘a case of acute mental anguish, producing first great depression, and subsequently complete exhaustion of the heart’s action’.69 He died on 28 June.
11
The Fall of Sevastopol
‘My dear father,’ Pierre de Castellane, an aide-de-camp to General Bosquet, wrote on 14 July. ‘All my letters should begin, I think, with the same words, “nothing new”, which is to say: we dig, we organize our batteries, and every night we sit and drink around the campfire; every day two companies of men are taken off to hospital.’1
With the failure of the assaults on the Malakhov and the Redan, the siege returned to the monotonous routine of trench-digging and artillery fire, without any signs of a breakthrough. After nine months of this trench warfare, there was a general sense of exhaustion on both sides, a demoralizing sense that the stalemate might continue indefinitely. Such was the desire for the war to end that all sorts of suggestions were made to break the deadlock. Prince Urusov, a first-rate chess player and a friend of Tolstoy, attempted to persuade Count Osten-Sacken, commander of the Sevastopol garrison, that a challenge should be sent to the allies to play a game of chess for the foremost trench, which had changed hands many times, at the cost of several hundred lives. Tolstoy suggested that
