The Crimean War

commander to push ahead for the victory he craved.

Where the French commander led, the British were obliged to follow: they lacked the troops or record of success to impose their military policies. After the catastrophe of 18 June, Panmure was determined to prevent a repeat of the unsuccessful British attack against the Redan, and for a while it seemed a new assault involving the British had been ruled out. But, with the victory at the Chernaia, things looked very different, and from the momentum of events a new logic developed that drew the British into a new assault.

By this time the French had sapped up to the abbatis of the Malakhov, only 20 metres from the fortress ditch, and were taking heavy casualties from the Russian guns. They had dug so close to the Malakhov that when they talked they could be clearly heard by the Russians. The British too had dug as far as they were able in the rocky ground towards the Redan – they were 200 metres from the fort – and were also losing many men. From the top of the naval library, the Russians could make out the facial features of the British soldiers in the exposed trenches. Their sharpshooters in the Redan could take them out without any difficulty as soon as they raised their heads. Every day, the allied armies were losing between 250 and 300 men. The situation was untenable. There was no point delaying an assault: if it could not succeed now, it would probably never do so, in which case the whole idea of continuing the siege should be abandoned before the onset of winter. That was the logic by which the British government now permitted Raglan’s replacement, General James Simpson, to join Pelissier in planning a last attempt to take Sevastopol by an infantry assault.²⁴

The date for the operation was set for 8 September. This time, in contrast to the botched attempt of 18 June, the assault was preceded by a massive bombardment of the Russian defences, beginning on 5 September, though even before that, from the last days of August, the intensity of the allies’ artillery fire had been steadily growing. Firing 50,000 shells a day, and from a much closer range than ever before, the French and British guns caused immense damage. Hardly a building was left standing in the centre of the town, which looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. The casualties were horrendous – something like a thousand Russians were killed or wounded every day from the last week of August and nearly 8,000 in the three days of the bombardment – but the last brave defenders of Sevastopol dared not think of abandoning the town. ‘On the contrary,’ recalled Ershov,

even though we were defending a half-destroyed Sevastopol, essentially a phantom of a town, without any more significance except for its name, we prepared ourselves to fight for it to the last man in the streets: we moved our stores to the North Side, put up barricades and got ready to transform every ruined building into an armed citadel.²⁵

The Russians were expecting an assault – the bombardment left no room for doubt about the allies’ intentions – but they thought that it would come on 7 September, the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, their famous victory against the French in 1812 when one- third of Napoleon’s army had been destroyed. When the attack did not come, the Russian defenders let down their guard. They were even more confused on the morning of the 8th, when the bombardment started up again with a furious intensity at 5 a.m. – the French and British guns firing more than 400 shells a minute – until suddenly at ten o’clock it stopped. Again the assault did not come. The Russians had anticipated that the allies would attack either at dawn or at dusk, as they had always done before. So they interpreted this new bombardment as an indication of a possible assault that evening. That idea was reinforced at 11 a.m. when the Russian lookouts on the Inkerman Heights reported what they believed to be a preparatory build-up of allied ships. The lookouts were not mistaken: the allied plan had called for the navy to join the assault by attacking the coastal defences of the city, but that morning the fine hot weather broke and a strong north-west wind and a heavy sea forced this part of the operation to be cancelled at the last moment; so the ships that had gathered at the mouth of the sea harbour did not look as if they could be ready for an imminent attack. And yet that is precisely what the allies had in store. On Bosquet’s wise insistence, the assault had been set to start at noon – just when the Russians would be changing the guard and would expect it least.²⁶

The allied plan was simple: to repeat the actions they had tried to carry out on 18 June but with a larger force and without the mistakes. This time, instead of the three divisions they had used on 18 June, the French would employ ten and a half divisions (five and a half against the Malakhov and five against the other bastions on the Town Front), a massive assault force of 35,000 men, supported by 2,000 brave Sardinians. The French commanders, who would give the signal for the assault to begin, had watches that were synchronized so as to avoid a repetition of the confusion caused by General Mayran’s mistaking of the rocket signal to attack. At midday they gave the order to begin. The drummers beat their drums, the bugles sounded, the band played the Marseillaise, and with a resounding cheer of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, General MacMahon’s Division, some 9,000 men in all, surged out of the French trenches, followed by the rest of the French infantry. Led by the courageous Zouaves, they ran towards the Malakhov, and, using planks and ladders to cross the ditch, climbed the walls of the fortress. The Russians were caught by surprise. At the time of the attack the garrison was being changed and many of the soldiers had retired for their lunch, thinking that the halt in the bombardment meant that all was safe. ‘The French were in the Malakhov before our boys had a chance to grab their guns,’ recalled Prokofii Podpalov, who watched in horror from the Redan. ‘In a few seconds they had filled the fort with hundreds of their men, and hardly a shot was fired from our side. A few minutes later, the French flag was raised on the turret.’²⁷

The Russians were overwhelmed by the sheer force of the French attack. They turned their backs and fled in panic from the Malakhov. Most of the soldiers in the bastion were teenagers from the 15th Reserve Infantry Division who had no experience of combat. They were no match for the Zouaves.

Once they had overrun the Malakhov, MacMahon’s men swarmed across the Russian defences, joining the Zouaves in fearsome hand-to-hand fighting against the Russians on the Zherve (Gervais) Battery, on the left flank of the Malakhov, while other units launched attacks against the other bastions along the line. The Zouaves captured the Zherve Battery but on the right they were unable to dislodge the Kazan Regiment, who bravely stood their ground until reinforcements were brought up from Sevastopol, enabling the Russians to launch a counter-attack. There followed some of the fiercest fighting of the war. ‘Time after time we charged them with our bayonets,’ recalled one of the Russian soldiers, Anatoly Viazmitinov. ‘We had no idea what our objective was, and never asked ourselves if it could succeed. We simply hurled ourselves forward, totally intoxicated by the excitement of the fight.’ Within minutes the ground between the Zherve Battery and the Malakhov was covered with the dead, the Russians and the French all entangled; and with each successive charge another layer of dead was added to the heap, on which the two sides went on fighting, treading on the wounded and the dead, until the battlefield became a ‘mound of bodies’, as Viazmitinov later wrote, ‘and the air was filled with a thick red dust from the bloody ground, making it impossible for us to see the enemy. All we could do was fire through the dust in their direction, making sure to keep our muskets parallel to the ground in front of us.’ Eventually, with more troops arriving all the time, MacMahon’s infantry overwhelmed the Russians with their superior rifle power and forced them to retreat. Then they consolidated their control of the Malakhov by building makeshift barricades – using the dead and even wounded Russians as human sandbags along with reclaimed gabions, fascines and embrasures from the half-destroyed defences – behind which they turned their heavy guns towards Sevastopol.²⁸

Meanwhile, the British launched their own assault on the Redan. In some ways the Redan was much harder to capture than the Malakhov. The British could not dig their trenches in the rocky ground in front of it and would therefore have to run across this open space and then clamber over the abbatis under close-range fire from the enemy. The broad V-shape of the Redan also meant that the storming parties would be exposed to flanking fire as they crossed the ditch and climbed the parapet. It was also rumoured that the Redan had been mined by the Russians. But once the French had occupied the Malakhov, the Redan was more vulnerable to attack.

As in June, the British waited for the French to take the lead, but as soon as they saw the tricolour on the Malakhov they raced forward towards the Redan. Running through a storm of roundshot, grape and musketry, a good number of the storming party of a thousand men managed to cross the abbatis and climb down into the ditch, although at least half the ladders had been dropped along the way. There was chaos in the ditch as the stormers