The Crimean War

Russian right (opposite the French). The two generals were under orders not to cross the river before receiving orders from Gorchakov, the commander-in-chief, who was not sure whether to deploy his reserve divisions against the French on the Fediukhin Heights or the Sardinians on Gasfort Hill. He was relying on the opening artillery bombardment to expose the enemy’s positions and help him make up his mind.

The Russians’ opening cannon shots failed to reach their targets, however. They merely served to raise the alarm for the 18,000 French troops and 9,000 Sardinians to prepare themselves for battle and for those in the forward position to move up to the Traktir Bridge. Frustrated with the lack of progress, Gorchakov sent his aide-de- camp, a Lieutenant Krasovsky, to hurry out to Read and Liprandi and tell them it was ‘time to start’. By the time the message got to Read, its meaning was far from clear. ‘Time to start what?’ Read asked Krasovsky, who did not know. Read decided that the message could not mean to begin the artillery fire, which had started already, but the start of an infantry attack. He ordered his men to cross the river and storm the Fediukhin Heights – even though the cavalry and infantry reserves that were supposed to support an attack had not arrived. Gorchakov, meanwhile, had decided to concentrate his reserve forces on the left, having been encouraged by the ease with which Liprandi’s skirmishers had driven off the Sardinian outposts from Telegraph Hill (known by the Italians as the Roccia dei Piemontesi). Hearing the sound of muskets firing from Read’s men in front of the Fediukhin, Gorchakov redirected some of his reserves to support them, but, as he acknowledged afterwards, he knew already that the battle had been lost: his troops were divided and attacking on two fronts when the whole point of the offensive had been to deal a single mighty blow.¹⁷

Read’s men crossed the river near the Traktir Bridge. Without cavalry or artillery support, they marched towards their almost certain destruction by the French artillery and riflemen firing down on them from the slopes of the Fediukhin Heights. Within twenty minutes 2,000 Russian infantry had been gunned down. Reserves arrived, in the form of the 5th Infantry Division. Its commander suggested that the whole division should be committed to the attack. Perhaps by weight of numbers, they might have broken through. But Read chose instead to commit them piecemeal to the battle, regiment by regiment, and each one, in turn, was shot down by the French, who by this time were entirely confident of their ability to defeat the Russian columns and held off their fire until they were at close hand. ‘Our artillery played havoc with the Russians,’ recalled Octave Cullet, a French infantry captain who was on the Fediukhin.

Our soldiers, confident and strong, fired at them from two lines with a calm and deadly volley that can only be achieved by battle-hardened troops. Each man that morning had been given eighty cartridges but few had been shot; no one paid attention to the firing from our flanks but concentrated only on the approaching Russian troops … . Only when they were right onto us and threatening to envelop us, did we start our firing – not one shot was lost on this vast semicircle of attackers. Our men displayed admirable composure (sang-froid) and no one thought of retreating.¹⁸

At last, Gorchakov put an end to Read’s bungling and ordered the entire division to join in the attack. For a while, they pushed the French back up the hill, but the deadly salvoes of the enemy’s rifles eventually forced them to retreat and cross over to the other side of the river. Read was killed by a shell splinter during the retreat, and Gorchakov took over his command, ordering eight battalions from Liprandi’s forces on the left to support him at the eastern end of the Fediukhin Heights. But these troops came under heavy rifle fire from the Sardinians, who had moved across from Gasfort Hill to protect the open flank, and were forced back towards Telegraph Hill. The situation was hopeless. Shortly after 10 a.m. Gorchakov ordered a general withdrawal, and with one last round from all their cannon, as if to sound a note of defiance in defeat, the Russians retreated to lick their wounds.¹⁹

The allies lost 1,800 casualties on the Chernaia river. The Russians counted 2,273 dead, almost 4,000 men wounded and 1,742 missing, most of them deserters who had used the morning mist and confusion of the battle to run away.^bb It was several days before the dead and wounded were cleared away (the Russians did not even come to collect theirs) and in that time there were many visitors who saw the frightful scene, not just nurses who came to help the wounded, but war tourists, who took trophies from the bodies of the dead. At least two British army chaplains took part in the plundering for souvenirs. Mary Seacole describes the ground ‘thickly numbered with the wounded, some of them calm and resigned, others impatient and restless, a few filling the air with their cries of pain – all wanting water, and all grateful to those who administered it’. Thomas Buzzard, a British doctor with the Turkish army, was struck by how most of the dead ‘lay on their faces, literally, to use the Homeric phrase, “biting the dust”’, in contrast to the way they were usually depicted on their backs in classical paintings of battles (most of the Russians had been shot from the front while advancing up the hill and so had fallen forwards naturally).²⁰

Somehow the Russians had contrived to lose against an enemy less than half their size. In his explanation to the Tsar, Gorchakov put the entire blame on the unfortunate General Read, arguing that he had failed to understand his order when he moved his men against the French on the Fediukhin Heights. ‘It is grievous to think that if Read had carried out my orders to the letter, we might have ended with something like success and that at least a third of those brave troops who have been killed might have been alive today,’ he wrote to the Tsar on 17 August. Alexander was not impressed by Gorchakov’s attempt to shift the blame onto the dead general. He had wanted a success to approach the allies with proposals for a peace on favourable terms, and this setback had ruined all his plans. ‘Our brave troops’, he replied to Gorchakov, ‘have suffered enormous losses without any gain [the Tsar’s italics].’ The truth was that both men were to blame for the needless slaughter: Alexander for insisting on an offensive when none was really possible; and Gorchakov for failing to withstand his pressure for attack.²¹

The defeat on the Chernaia was a catastrophe for the Russians. It was now only a question of time before Sevastopol would fall to the allies. ‘I am sure that this is the second-to-last bloody act of our operations in the Crimea,’ wrote Herbe to his parents on 25 August, after being wounded on the Chernaia; ‘the last will be the capture of Sevastopol.’ According to Nikolai Miloshevich, one of the defenders of the naval base, after the defeat ‘the Russian troops lost all their trust in their officers and generals’. Another soldier wrote: ‘The morning of 16 August was our last hope. By the evening it had disappeared. We began to say farewell to Sevastopol.’²²

Realizing that the situation was hopeless, the Russians now prepared to evacuate Sevastopol, as Gorchakov had warned they would have to do if they were defeated on the Chernaia in his letter to the Minister of War on the eve of the battle. The evacuation plan centred on the building of a floating bridge across the sea harbour to the North Side, where the Russians would have a commanding position against the allied forces if they occupied the town on the southern side. The idea of a bridge was first advanced by General Bukhmeier, a brilliant engineer, in the first week of July. It was rejected by scores of engineers on the grounds that it would be impossible to build, especially where Bukhmeier had suggested, between Fort Nicholas and the Mikhailov Battery, where the sea harbour was 960 metres wide (which would make it one of the longest pontoon bridges ever built) and strong winds often made the water very rough. But the urgency of the situation persuaded Gorchakov to give his backing to the dangerous plan, and with several hundred soldiers to cart the timbers from as far as Kherson, 300 kilometres away, and vast teams of sailors to link them to the pontoons, Bukhmeier organized the building of the bridge, which was finally completed on 27 August.²³

Meanwhile the allies were preparing for another assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. By the end of August they had come to realize that the Russians could not hold out much longer. The flow of deserters from Sevastopol had become a flood after the defeat on the Chernaia – and they all told the same stories of the terrible conditions in the town. Once the allied commanders recognized that a new assault would probably succeed, they were all the more determined to launch it as soon as possible. September was approaching, the weather would soon turn, and there was nothing they feared more than a second winter in the Crimea.

Pelissier took the lead. His position had been greatly strengthened by the routing of the Russians on the Chernaia. Napoleon had had his doubts about Pelissier’s policy of persisting with the siege – he had been in favour of a field campaign – but with this new victory he set aside these reservations and gave his full support to his