The Crimean War

the war should be decided by a duel.² Although this was the first modern war, a dress rehearsal for the trench fighting of the First World War, it was fought in an age when some ideas of chivalry were still alive.

Demoralization soon set in among the allied troops. No one thought a renewed attack had much prospect of success – the Russians were building even stronger defences – and everybody feared they would have to spend a second winter on the heights above Sevastopol. All the soldiers now began to write of wanting to go home. ‘I have fully made up my mind to come home somehow,’ Lieutenant Colonel Mundy wrote to his mother on 9 July. ‘I cannot and will not stand another winter. I know if I did, I should be a useless decrepit old man in a year and I would rather be a live jackass than a dead lion.’ Soldiers envied wounded comrades who were taken home. According to one British officer, ‘many a man would gladly lose an arm to get off these heights and leave this siege’.³

Despair that the war would never end led many troops to question why they were fighting. The longer the slaughter continued, the more they came to see the enemy as suffering soldiers like themselves, and the more senseless it all seemed. The French army chaplain Andre Damas cited the case of a Zouave who came to him with religious doubts about the war. The Zouave had been told (as all the soldiers were) that they were waging war against ‘barbarians’. But during the ceasefire to collect the dead and wounded following the fighting on 18 June he had helped a badly injured Russian officer, who as a mark of gratitude had taken from his neck and given him a leather pendant embossed with the image of the Madonna and Child. ‘This war has to stop,’ the Zouave told Damas; ‘it is cowardly. We are all Christians; we all believe in God and religion, and without that we would not be so brave.’ ⁴

Trench fatigue was the big enemy of the summer months. By the tenth month of the siege soldiers had become such nervous wrecks from living under constant bombardment, so exhausted from the lack of sleep, that many of them could no longer cope. In their memoirs, many soldiers wrote of ‘trench madness’ – a mixed bag of mental illnesses, as far as one can tell, from claustrophobia to what later would be known as ‘shell shock’ or ‘combat stress’. Louis Noir, for instance, recalled many cases when ‘entire companies’ of battle-hardened Zouaves would ‘suddenly get up in the middle of the night, seize their guns, and call to others hysterically for help to fight imaginary enemies. These incidents of nervous over-excitation became a contagion affecting many men; remarkably, it affected first of all those who were the strongest physically and morally.’ Jean Cler, a colonel in the Zouaves, also recalled seasoned fighters who ‘suddenly went mad’ and ran away to the Russians, or who were unable to bear it any more and shot themselves. Suicides were noted by many memoirists. One wrote of a Zouave, ‘a veteran of our African wars’, who appeared all right until, one day, sitting by his tent and drinking coffee with his comrades, he said that he had had enough; taking up his gun, he walked away and put a bullet through his head.⁵

The loss of comrades was a major strain on soldiers’ nerves. It was not the sort of thing that men would often write about, even in the British army where there was no real censorship of their letters home; stoical acceptance of death in battle was expected of the soldier, and perhaps was needed to survive. Yet in the frequent outpouring of sorrow at the loss of friends we may perhaps catch a glimpse of deeper and more troubling emotions than such letter-writers felt able to express. Commenting on the published correspondence of his fellow-officer, Henri Loizillon, for example, Michel Gilbert was struck by the anguish and remorse in a letter to his family on 19 June. The letter contained a long list of names, a ‘funereal accounting’ of the soldiers who had fallen in the previous day’s assault on the Malakhov, and yet, Gilbert thought, one could feel from it ‘how much his soul was haunted by the breath of death (souffle de la mort). The list of names goes on and on, endlessly despairing, friends who disappeared, the names of officers who have been killed.’ Loizillon appeared lost in grief and guilt – guilt because he had survived – and it was only with the final humorous lines of his letter, in which he described the unsuccessful prayers of a fellow-soldier, that his ‘vigorous spirit of self-preservation reappeared’:

My poor friend Conegliano [Loizillon wrote], at the moment when we were leaving for the attack, told me (he is very religious): ‘I have brought my rosary, which the Pope blessed, and I have said a dozen prayers for the general [Mayran], a dozen for my brother, and for you as well.’ Poor boy! Of the three, it was only me his prayers helped to save.⁶

Apart from the effect of witnessing so many deaths, the soldiers in the trenches must have been worn down by the horrendous scale and nature of the injuries endured by all the armies in the siege. Not until the First World War would the human body suffer so much damage as it did in the fighting at Sevastopol. Technical improvements to artillery and rifle fire made for much more serious wounds than those inflicted on the soldiers of the Napoleonic or Algerian wars. The modern elongated conical rifle shot was more powerful than the old round shot, and heavier as well, so it went straight through the body, breaking any bones along its way, whereas the lighter round shot tended to deflect on its passage through the body, usually without breaking bones. At the beginning of the siege the Russians used a conical bullet weighing 50 grams, but from the spring of 1855 they began to use a larger and heavier rifle bullet, 5 centimetres long and weighing twice as much as the British and French bullets. When these new bullets struck the soft part of the human body, they left a bigger hole, which could heal, but when they hit the bone, they would break it more extensively, and if an arm or leg was fractured, it would almost certainly require amputation. The Russian practice of holding their fire until the final moment, and then shooting at the enemy from point-blank range, guaranteed that their rifle power caused the maximum damage.⁷

In the allied hospitals there were soldiers with some gruesome wounds, but there were just as many in the Russian hospitals, victims of the even more advanced artillery and rifle fire of the British and the French. Khristian Giubbenet, a professor of surgery who worked in the military hospital in Sevastopol, wrote in 1870:

I do not think that I ever saw such awful injuries as I was forced to deal with during the final period of the siege. The worst without a doubt were the frequently occurring stomach wounds, when the bloody guts of men would be hanging out. When such unfortunates were brought to the dressing stations, they could still speak, were still conscious, and went on living for a few hours. In other cases the guts and the pelvis were ripped out at the back: the men could not move their lower bodies but they retained their consciousness until they died in a few hours’ time. Without a doubt, the most terrible impression was created by those whose faces had been blown up by a shell, denying them the image of a human being. Imagine a creature whose face and head have been replaced by a bloody mass of tangled flesh and bone – there are no eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, tongue, chin or ears to be seen, and yet this creature continues to stand up on its own feet, and moves and waves its arms about, forcing one to assume that it still has a consciousness. In other cases in the place where we would see a face, all that remained were some bloody bits of dangling skin.⁸

The Russians had far heavier casualties than the allies. By the end of July 65,000 Russian soldiers had been killed or wounded in Sevastopol – more than twice the number lost by the allies – not including losses from illness or disease. The bombardment of the town in June had added several thousand wounded, not just soldiers but civilians, to the already overcrowded hospitals (4,000 casualties were added on 17 and 18 June alone). In the Assembly of Nobles ‘the wounded were laid out on the parquet floor not only side by side but on top of each other’, recalled Dr Giubbenet. ‘The moans and screams of a thousand dying men filled the gloomy hall, which was only dimly lit by the candles of the orderlies.’ At the Pavlovsk Battery another 5,000 wounded Russian soldiers were just as tightly packed on the bare floors of wharves and stores. To relieve the overcrowding, the Russians built a large field hospital towards the River Belbek, 6 kilometres from Sevastopol, in July, where the less seriously wounded were evacuated, as dictated by Pirogov’s system of triage. There were other reserve hospitals at Inkerman, on the Mackenzie Heights and in the former khan’s palace in Bakhchiserai. Some of the wounded were taken as far as Simferopol, and even to Kharkov, 650 kilometres away, by horse and cart on country roads, where all the hospitals were filled to overflowing with casualties of the siege. But this was still not enough to cope with the ever-growing number of sick and wounded men. In June and July at least 250 Russians were added to the list of casualties every day. During the last weeks of the siege, the number rose to as many as 800 casualties a day, twice the losses officially reported by Gorchakov, according to Russian prisoners later captured by the allies.⁹

The Russians were coming under growing strain. With the allied occupation of Kerch and the blockade of their supply lines through the Sea of Azov from the start of June, they began to suffer from serious shortages of