The Crimean War

ammunition and artillery. Small mortar shells were the main problem. Battery commanders were ordered to limit their fire to one shot for every four received from the enemy. Meanwhile, the allies were now reaching levels of concentrated fire never before seen in a siege war – their industries and transport systems enabling their artillery to fire up to 75,000 rounds per day.¹⁰ This was a new type of industrial warfare and Russia, with its backward serf economy, could not compete.

Morale was running dangerously low. In June the Russians lost their two inspirational leaders in Sevastopol: Totleben was seriously wounded during the bombardment of 22 June and was forced to retire; and six days later Nakhimov was hit by a bullet in the face while he was inspecting the batteries at the Redan. Taken to his quarters, he lay unconscious for two days before dying on 30 June. His funeral was a solemn ceremony attended by the entire population of the town, and watched by the allied troops, who ceased their bombardment to watch the funeral cortege pass below them by the city walls. ‘I cannot find words to describe to you the profound sadness of the funeral,’ wrote a Sevastopol nursing sister to her family.

The sea with the great fleet of our enemies, the hills with our bastions where Nakhimov spent his days and nights – these said more than words can express. From the hills where their batteries threaten Sevastopol, the enemy could see and fire directly on the procession; but even their guns were respectfully silent and not one round was fired during the service. Imagine the scene – and above it all the dark storm clouds, reflecting the mournful music, the sad tolling of the bells, and the doleful funeral chants. This was how the sailors buried their hero of Sinope, how Sevastopol laid to rest its own fearless and heroic defender.¹¹

By the end of June the situation in Sevastopol had become so desperate, with not just ammunition but supplies of food and water running dangerously low, that Gorchakov began preparing to evacuate the town. Much of the population had already left, fearing they would starve to death, or fall victim to the cholera or typhus that spread as epidemics in the summer months. A special committee to fight the epidemics in Sevastopol reported thirty deaths a day from cholera alone in June. Most of those who stayed had long been forced to abandon their bombed-out homes and take refuge in Fort Nicholas, at the far end of the town by the entrance to the sea harbour, where the main barracks, offices and shops were all enclosed within its walls. Others found a safer home on the North Side. ‘Sevastopol began to resemble a graveyard,’ recalled Ershov, the artillery officer.

With every passing day even its central avenues became more empty and gloomy – it looked like a town that had been destroyed by an earthquake. Ekaterinskaia Street, which in May had still been a lively and handsome thoroughfare, was now, in July, deserted and destroyed. Neither on it nor on the boulevard would one see a female face, nor any person walking freely any more; only solemn groups of troops … . On every face there was the same sad expression of tiredness and foreboding. There was no point going into town: nowhere did one hear the sound of joy, nowhere did one find any amusement.

In Tolstoy’s ‘Sevastopol in August’, a story based on true events and characters, a soldier at the River Belbek asks another who has just arrived from the besieged town whether his room there is still in one piece. ‘My dear fellow,’ the other one replies, ‘the building was shelled to kingdom come ages ago. You won’t recognize Sevastopol now; there’s not a single woman left in the place, no taverns, no brass bands; the last pub closed down yesterday. It’s about as cheerful as a morgue.’¹²

It was not only civilians who were abandoning Sevastopol. Soldiers were deserting in growing numbers during the summer months. Those who ran away to the allies claimed that desertion was a mass phenomenon, and this is supported by the fragmentary figures and communications of the Russian military authorities. There was a report in August, for example, that the number of desertions had ‘dramatically increased’ since June, especially among those reserve troops who were called up to the Crimea: a hundred men had run away from the 15th Reserve Infantry Division, as had three out of every four reinforcements sent from the Warsaw Military District. From Sevastopol itself, around twenty soldiers went missing every day, mostly during sorties or bombardments, when they were not so closely watched by their commanding officers. According to the French, who received a steady flow of deserters in the summer months, the main reason the men gave for their desertion was that they had been given virtually no food, or only rotten meat, to eat. There were various rumours of a mutiny by some of the reservists in the Sevastopol garrison during the first week of August, though the uprising was brutally put down and all evidence of it suppressed by the Russians. ‘There has been a report that one hundred Russian soldiers have been shot by a sentence of Court Martial in the Town for Mutiny,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his father shortly afterwards. Several regiments were broken up and put in the reserve because they had become unreliable.¹³

Realizing that Sevastopol could not withstand the siege for much longer, the Tsar ordered Gorchakov to launch one last attempt to break the ring of allied troops. Gorchakov was doubtful that it could be done. An offensive ‘against an enemy superior in numbers and entrenched in such solid positions would be folly’, the commander-in-chief reasoned. But the Tsar insisted that something should be done: he was looking for a way to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia’s national honour and integrity, and needed a military success to begin peace talks with the British and the French from a stronger position. Sending three of his reserve divisions to the Crimea, Alexander bombarded Gorchakov with instructions to attack (though not suggesting where) before the allies sent more troops, as he believed they were about to do. ‘I am convinced that we must go on the offensive,’ he wrote to Gorchakov on 30 July; ‘otherwise all the reinforcements I have sent to you, as has happened in the past, will be sucked into Sevastopol, that bottomless pit.’¹⁴

The only line of action that Gorchakov believed had any chance of success was an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia river. By ‘capturing the enemy’s watering places, it might be possible to threaten his flank and limit his attacks on Sevastopol, maybe opening the way for further advantageous operations’, he wrote to the Tsar. ‘But we should not deceive ourselves, for there is little hope of success in such an initiative.’ Alexander would not listen to Gorchakov’s reservations. On 3 August he wrote to him again: ‘Your daily losses in Sevastopol underline what I have told you many times before in my letters – the necessity to do something decisive to end this frightful massacre [the Tsar’s italics].’ Alexander knew that Gorchakov was essentially a courtier, an acolyte of the cautious Paskevich, and suspected that he was reluctant to take the responsibility for an offensive. He concluded his letter with the words: ‘I want a battle, but if you as commander- in-chief fear the liability, then convene a military council to take it for you.’¹⁵

A council of war met on 9 August to discuss a possible attack. Many of the senior commanders were against an offensive. Osten-Sacken, who had been much affected by the death of Nakhimov and was now convinced that the loss of Sevastopol was unavoidable, argued that enough men had been sacrificed and that it was time to evacuate the naval base. Most of the other generals shared Osten-Sacken’s pessimistic view but no one else was brave enough to speak out in such terms. Instead they went along with the idea of an offensive to please the Tsar, though few had any confidence in any detailed plan. The most audacious proposal came from the gung-ho General Khrulev, who had led the failed attack on Evpatoria. Khrulev now favoured the complete destruction of Sevastopol (even bettering the example of Moscow 1812) followed by a mass assault on the enemy’s positions by every man available. When Osten-Sacken objected that the suicidal plan would end in tens of thousands of needless deaths, Khrulev answered: ‘Well, so what? Let everybody die! We will leave our mark upon the map!’ Cooler heads prevailed, and the meeting ended with a vote in favour of Gorchakov’s idea of an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia, though Gorchakov himself remained extremely doubtful that it could succeed. ‘I am marching on the enemy because if I don’t, Sevastopol will soon be lost,’ he wrote on the eve of the offensive to Prince Dolgoruky, the Minister of War. But if the attack did not succeed, ‘it would not be [his] fault’, and he would ‘try to evacuate Sevastopol with as little loss as possible’.¹⁶

The attack was scheduled for the early morning of 16 August. The evening before, the French troops had been celebrating the fete de l’empereur – also (not coincidentally) the Feast of the Assumption, a major holiday for the Italians, who, like the French, had been drinking late into the night. They had only just gone off to bed, when, at 4 a.m., they were woken by the sound of Russian cannon.

Using the cover of an early morning fog, the Russians advanced towards the Traktir Bridge with a combined force of 47,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and 270 field guns under the command of General Liprandi on the left (opposite the Sardinians) and General Read, the son of a Scottish engineer who had emigrated to Russia, on the