came under point-blank fire from the Russian gunners on the parapets above their heads. Some began to waver, unsure how to climb the parapet; others tried to find some shelter at the bottom of the ditch. But in the end a group of men succeeded in scrambling up the wall and climbing into the fortress. Most were killed, but they had set an example, and others followed them. Among them was Lieutenant Griffith of the 23rd (Royal Welch) Fusiliers:
We rushed madly along the trenches, grapeshot flying about our ears. Several officers we met coming back wounded said they had been in the Redan and that the supports were only wanted to complete the victory. On we rushed impeded more and more by the wounded officers and men carried back from the front … . ‘On the 23rd! This way!’ cried the staff officers. We scrambled out of the trench into open ground. That was a fearful moment. I rushed across the space about 200 yards, I think, grapeshot striking the ground all the way and men falling down on all sides. When I got to the edge of the ditch of the Redan I found our men all mixed up in confusion but keeping up a steady fire on the enemy … [In the ditch] there were lots of men of different regiments all huddled together – scaling ladders placed against the parapet crowded with our fellows. Radcliffe and I got hold of the ladder and went up it to the top of the parapet where we were stopped by the press – wounded and dead men kept tumbling down on us – it was indeed an exciting and fearful scene.29
The ditch and the slopes leading up to the parapet quickly filled with new arrivals, like Griffith, who could not climb the parapet because of the ‘press’ created by the fighting above them. The interior of the Redan was strongly defended with a series of traverses manned by the Russians feeding in their supports from behind; the few stormers who managed to fight their way into the fortress were hemmed in by them, vastly outnumbered and subjected to a devastating crossfire from both flanks at the northern end of the V-shape. The morale of the soldiers crowded in the ditch began to fall apart. Ignoring the commands of their officers to climb the parapet, ‘the men clung to the outside of the salient angle in hundreds’, recalled Lieutenant Colin Campbell, watching from the trenches, ‘although they were swept down by the flanking fire in scores’. Many lost their nerve entirely and ran back to the trenches, which themselves were full of men waiting for the order to attack. Discipline broke down. There was a general stampede to the rear. Griffith joined the panic flight:
Feeling disgraced, tho’ I had done my best, unwillingly I turned to follow the men. I saw our trench at some distance but I never expected to reach it. The fire was fearful and I kept tumbling over the dead and wounded men who literally covered the ground. At last to my great joy I gained our Parallels and tumbled somehow into the trench … I should have said that on the way a bullet hit my water-bottle, which was slung at my side, spilt all the water and glanced off. A stone thrown up by a grapeshot hit me in the leg but didn’t hurt me much. Soon after we found … a few men and by degrees mustered most of the unhurt. It was very melancholy we found so many missing.
Henry Clifford was among the officers who tried in vain to restore discipline: ‘When the men ran in from the parapet of the Redan … . we drew our swords and beat the men and implored them to stand and not run, that all would be lost; but many fled. The trench where they ran in was so crowded that it was impossible to move without walking over the wounded who lay under our feet.’30
It was hopeless to attempt to renew the attack with these panicstricken troops, most of whom were young reservists. General Codrington, the commander of the Light Division in charge of the assault, suspended further action for the day – a day when the British had counted 2,610 fallen men, 550 of them dead. Codrington intended to renew the attack with the battle-hardened troops of the Highland Brigade the next day. But it never came to that. Later that evening the Russians decided that they could not defend the Redan against the French guns installed in the Malakhov, and evacuated the fortress. As one Russian general explained in perhaps the earliest account of these events, the Malakhov was ‘only one fortress, but it was the key to Sevastopol, from which the French would be able to bombard the town at will, killing thousands of our soldiers and civilians, and probably destroying the pontoon bridge to cut off our escape to the North Side’.31
Gorchakov ordered the evacuation of the entire South Side of Sevastopol. Military installations were blown up, stores were set alight, and crowds of soldiers and civilians prepared themselves to cross the floating bridge to the North Side. A good number of the Russian soldiers believed the decision to evacuate the city was a betrayal. They had seen the previous day’s fighting as a partial victory, in so far as they had beaten off the enemy’s attacks on all the bastions except the Malakhov, and they did not understand, or refused to acknowledge, that what they had just lost was indispensable to the continued defence of the town. Many of the sailors did not want to leave Sevastopol, where they had spent their lives, and some even protested. ‘We cannot leave, there is no authority to order us,’ proclaimed one group of sailors, referring to the absence of a naval chief following the death of Nakhimov.
The soldiers can leave but we have our naval commanders, and we have not been told by them to go. How could we leave Sevastopol? Surely, everywhere the assault has been repulsed, only the Malakhov has been taken by the French, but tomorrow we can take it back, and we will remain at our posts! … We must die here, we cannot leave, what would Russia say of us?32
The evacuation began at seven o’clock in the evening and went on all night. On the sea harbour quayside at Fort Nicholas a huge crowd of soldiers and civilians assembled to cross the floating bridge. The wounded and the sick, women with young children, the elderly with walking sticks, were all mixed up with soldiers, sailors, horses and artillery on carriages. The evening sky was illuminated by the flames of burning buildings, and the sound of the guns on the distant bastions was confused with explosions in Sevastopol, forts and ships, as the Russians blew up anything of use to the enemy that could not be removed. Expecting the British and the French to appear at any moment, people in the crowd began to panic, to push and shove each other to get closer to the bridge. ‘You could smell the fear,’ recalls Tatyana Tolycheva, who was waiting at the bridge with her husband and her son. ‘There was a terrific racket – people screaming, weeping, wailing, the wounded groaning, and shells flying in the sky.’ Bombs were dropping on the harbour all the time: one killed eight allied prisoners of war with a direct hit on the crowded quayside. The soldiers, horses and artillery were the first to cross, followed by the ox-drawn carts laden down with cannonballs, stacks of hay and wounded men. There was silence as they crossed the bridge – nobody was sure if they would make it to the other side. The sea was rough, the north-west wind still blowing strong, and the rain was coming down into their faces as they made their way across the sea harbour. The civilians formed a line to cross the bridge. They could take only what they carried in their arms. Among them was Tolycheva:
On the bridge there was a crush – nothing but confusion, panic, fear! The bridge almost gave way from the weight of all of us, and the water came up to our knees. Suddenly someone became scared and began to shout, ‘We’re drowning!’ People turned around and tried to make it back onto the shore. There was a struggle, with people stepping over each other. The horses became scared and began to rear … . I thought we were going to die and said a prayer.
By eight o’clock the next morning the crossing was complete. A signal was given to the last defenders to leave the bastions and set fire to the town. With the sole remaining pieces of artillery they sank the last ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in the sea harbour before crossing to the North Side.33
From the Star Fort, Tolstoy watched the downfall of Sevastopol. During the storming he had been placed in charge of a five-gun battery and had been one of the town’s last defenders to cross the pontoon bridge. It was his birthday, he was 27, but the sight before him now was enough to break his heart. ‘I wept when I saw the town in flames and the French flags on our bastions,’ he wrote to his aunt, ‘and generally, in many respects, it was a very sad day.’34
Looking back on the burning city that morning was Alexandra Stakhova, a nurse engaged in the removal of the wounded from Sevastopol. She described the scene in a letter to her family the following day:
The whole city was engulfed in flames – from everywhere the sound of explosions. It was a scene of terror and chaos! … Sevastopol was covered in black smoke, our own troops were setting fire to the town. The sight brought tears to my eyes (I seldom cry) and that eased the burden on my heart, for which I thank God … How hard it has been to experience and see all this, it would have been easier to die.35
The Great Fire of Sevastopol – a repeat of Moscow 1812 – continued for several days. Parts of the city were still burning when the allied armies entered it on 12 September. There they found some dreadful scenes. Not all the wounded had been taken from Sevastopol – there were too many of them to transport – and about 3,000 were abandoned without food or water in the town. Dr Giubbenet, who had been responsible for the evacuation of the hospitals, had left the wounded there on the assumption that they would soon be found by the allies. He had no idea it would be four days before the allies occupied the town. He was later mortified to read the Western press
