‘I’ll tell you something else, which military historians never realise: they call the Crimea a disaster, which it was, and a hideous botch-up by our staff and supply, which is also true, but what they don’t know is that even with all these things in the balance against you, the difference between hellish catastrophe and a brilliant success is sometimes no greater than the width of a sabre blade, but when all is over no one thinks about that. Win gloriously – and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans round the doors. Lose – and these are the only things they talk about’
George Macdonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge
‘We have an unfortunate mania for going right into the cannon’s mouth, instead of taking the side road’
Henry Layard
The port of Balaklava nestled behind a cordon of hills. To the west these hills merged into the plateau south of Sebastopol, while eastwards they shouldered their way along the Crimean coast. A track from the harbour led north past Kadikoi until, about 2 miles north, it joined the Woronzoff Road, a metalled highway which led north-west to Sebastopol, and in the other direction curved round and headed due east along a natural viaduct of high ground called the Causeway Heights. Beyond the Causeway Heights was the North Valley, bounded to the north by the Fedioukine Hills, and to the east by Mount Hasfort and an embanked aqueduct. From here the ground sloped down to the Tchernaya River. Below the Causeway Heights lay the South Valley, hemmed in to the east by the Kamara Hills, and to the west ending in a narrow ravine, the ‘Col’, which led to the Sapoune Ridge.
To guard the Woronzoff Road, Raglan had ordered the construction of six separate redoubts, each big enough to house 250–300 troops. They were widely spaced, some over a mile apart, and all of them more than a mile from Campbell’s headquarters at Kadikoi. The Turks had provided eight battalions (4,700 men) for their defence, commanded by Rustem Pasha and answerable to Campbell. Work on the redoubts had started on 7 October, but eighteen days later they were still half-finished. Redoubt No. 2 had benefited from just one day’s labour. ‘These works are not strong’, warned one officer. ‘I am sorry to say these Turks don’t seem worth very much; they are very idle, and there is the greatest difficulty in getting them to work, even though it is for their own security and comfort.’1 The most easterly, Redoubt No. 1, on what had been christened ‘Canrobert’s Hill’, was the strongest, but it remained vulnerable to artillery, overlooked as it was by the Kamara Hills to the south-east. Cavalry could jump both its ditch and walls. Nevertheless, Raglan was reluctant to denude the batteries bombarding Sebastopol, so Campbell received only nine light guns for all six redoubts.* Three were in Redoubt No. 1 and two each in the next three redoubts, leaving none at all in Redoubts 5 and 6.2
Most of the rest of Campbell’s artillery was positioned on the far side of the South Valley, guarding the approaches to Balaklava. On a rise slightly north of Kadikoi the 93rd had a battery of seven guns (Battery No. 4), and behind the village were a further five guns, manned by crewmen from HMS Niger and Vesuvius. In the hills to the east of the port lay more Royal Artillery and Royal Marine Artillery batteries, armed with some impressive 32-pounder howitzers.3 As for infantry, Campbell had the 93rd camped in front of Kadikoi and some mixed Turkish infantry plus Royal Marines to the north and east of the village. A further 1,200 Royal Marines under Colonel Hurdle guarded the heights east of Balaklava. Down in the harbour were HMS Wasp and Diamond, but the former had only one gunner and a skeleton crew, and the latter just a shipkeeper. On 26 September, Raglan had ordered ‘the least efficient soldiers of each regiment’4 to form an invalid battalion at Balaklava, but so far it numbered just a few dozen men. Meanwhile, the bulk of the army was camped 7 miles away, in front of Sebastopol. Back in Varna, the Guards had struggled to march 5 miles in a day. They had got no fitter, so if Campbell needed the rest of the 1st Division, it would not arrive for several hours.
Nevertheless, Campbell was uncharacteristically blasé. ‘I think we can hold our own against anything that may come against us in daylight’, he reported. ‘I am however, a little apprehensive about the redoubts if seriously attacked during the night.’ ‘I cannot say whether Sir Colin Campbell’s sense of security was in any degrees found upon the cavalry, or whether, for once, he went along with the herd in his estimate of what could be insured by a little upturn of soil with a few Turks standing behind it’, wrote Kinglake,5 but whatever its basis, such confidence from a general known for his caution was doubly reassuring.
Balaklava Harbour. Photograph by R. Fenton. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The cavalry Kinglake mentioned consisted of Lucan’s 1,500 sabres, deployed north-west of Kadikoi. Campbell had great confidence in Lucan, and the earl, in turn, frequently deferred to his more experienced, but junior, major-general. He wrote of Campbell, ‘a more gallant or useful soldier there is not in the army’,6 and his respect was reciprocated.** ‘Whilst others have been croaking, grumbling and dissatisfied, you have always laughed at every difficulty’, Campbell told Lucan.7 That said, Campbell’s regard for Lucan’s officers was more grudging. Having ‘been a good deal taunted with not having yet done anything’,8 their eagerness grated. Campbell complained to Lord George Paget*** that cavalry officers:
would fall out from their regiment and come to the front and give their opinion on matters they knew nothing about, instead of tending to their squadrons, as I would make them do. Why, my lord, one with a beard and moustaches, who ought to have known better, said to me to-day, ‘I should like to have a brush at them down there’, when I replied, ‘Are you aware, sir, that there is a river between us and them?’ These young gentlemen talk a great deal of nonsense … I am not here to fight a battle or gain a victory; my orders are to defend Balaklava, which is the key to our operations, my lord, and I am not going to be tempted out of it.9
Temptation, in the form of General Liprandi’s Russian army, had moved off at 5 a.m. on the 25th: 24,000 men and seventy-eight guns in three massive columns.10 By 6 a.m. the mist which had hidden their advance had lifted enough for Liprandi’s artillery to take aim. Lucan was out early with his staff. ‘We rode on at a walk across the plain, in the direction of the left of “Canrobert’s Hill” in happy ignorance of the day’s work in store for us’, recalled Paget:
By the time we had approached to within about three hundred yards of the Turkish redoubts in our front, the first faint streaks of daylight, showed us that from the flag-staff, which had, I believe, only the day before been erected on the redoubt, flew two flags, only just discernible in the grey twilight.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Lord William Paulet, Lucan’s assistant adjutant-general. ‘Why, that surely is the signal that the enemy is approaching’, replied Major McMahon. ‘Hardly were the words out of McMahon’s mouth when bang went a cannon from the redoubt in question.’11
At Kadikoi, Surgeon Munro of the 93rd was ‘startled by the boom of a gun away in the distance on our right, followed almost immediately by the nearer report of answering guns, and by wreaths of white smoke curling upwards from our No. 1 Redoubt’.12 Immediately, Campbell ordered out every soldier under his command. ‘The batteries were all manned, and the Royal Marines lined the parapets on the eastern heights of the town’, recalled Raglan’s nephew.13 Campbell then rode across the valley to confer with Lucan and get a closer look at the enemy. As the sun rose, dust clouds marking the Russian advance were visible. A column under General Gribbe had already swept up the Baidar Valley and taken the village of Kamara. From here he could pound Redoubt No. 1, assisted by ten guns under General Semiakin, who occupied the higher ground to the north. Heading for Redoubt No.2 were three more battalions and ten guns under General Levoutsky, while Colonel Scudery bore down on No. 3 with four battalions, a company of riflemen, three squadrons of Cossacks and a field battery.
The Turks at Redoubt No. 1 opened fire before the Russians could unlimber their guns, taking the head off one of the enemy drivers, but the Russians returned fire, hitting a powder magazine. At the same time, the Marine artillery east of Balaklava tried desperately to target the enemy, but the range was too great. Campbell despatched his one field battery under Captain Barker to Redoubt No. 3, but Barker found he could not hit the Russians assaulting Canrobert’s Hill, so instead aimed at those occupying the Fedioukine Heights. Lucan ordered Captain Maude’s 6-pounder battery to set up between Redoubts nos 2 and 3, but his guns were light, his ammunition scanty, and Maude himself was soon blown into the air by a Russian shell. Barker sent more guns under Lieutenant Dickson in support while Lucan led his Heavy Brigade in ‘demonstrations’ towards the Russians. His manoeuvres left the enemy unfazed.
It took the Russians an hour and a half to subdue Redoubt No. 1, by which time 170 Turks lay dead. Rustem Pasha’s men, mainly raw recruits from Tunisia, had been without food (or more accurately, food acceptable to Muslims) for days.14 Having seen their first redoubt fall, ‘some kind of panic and fear overcame the Turks,’ reported General Ryzhov, ‘so that they were unable to withstand the approach of our infantry’.15 ‘Directly the Turks found they were being fired into, they dispersed like a flock of sheep,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Calthorpe, ‘numbers throwing away their arms and accoutrements to facilitate their flight.’*16 As they fled, Russian cavalry and artillery pursued them without mercy. Finding themselves under fire, Lucan’s cavalry now pulled back westwards beyond Redoubt No. 4. ‘Our gradual retreat across that plain, “by alternate regiments”, was one of the most painful ordeals it is possible to conceive,’ wrote Paget, ‘seeing all the defences in our front successively abandoned as they were, and straining our eyes in vain all round the hills in our rear for indications of support.’17
It was now around 7.30 a.m. ‘Never did the painter’s eye rest on a more beautiful scene than I beheld from that ridge’, reported William Russell of The Times, from his position next to Raglan on the Sapoune Ridge. ‘The fleecy vapours still hung around the mountain tops, and mingled with the ascending volumes of smoke; the patch of sea sparkled freshly in the rays of the morning sun, but its light was eclipsed by the flashes which gleamed from the masses of armed men below.’18 Even from this distance General Canrobert could make out Campbell, Shadwell and Lieutenant-Colonel Ainslie of the 93rd outside Kadikoi. Canrobert had already ordered infantry brigades under Vinoy and Espinasse, plus eight squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique,** down to the valley below. Raglan had instructed the rest of Cambridge’s 1st Division to march for Balaklava, ordering the duke to put himself under Campbell’s orders. Sir George Cathcart’s 4th Division would follow in support. Meanwhile, worried that the attack might be a huge feint, Raglan warned Sir Richard England to be on his guard for a Russian sortie from Sebastopol. ‘Lord Raglan was by no means at ease’, wrote Russell.’There was no trace of the divine calm attributed to him by his admirers as his characteristic in moments of trial … Perhaps he alone, of all the group on the spot, fully understood the gravity of the situation.’19
Cambridge’s men set off at double quick time at 8 a.m. Cathcart, however, having read his orders, assured Raglan’s ADC (Captain Ewart of the 93rd) that it was quite impossible. Brigadier-General Goldie had been on a wild goose chase to Balaklava five days ago, and received no thanks from Campbell for his efforts, so Cathcart advised Ewart to sit down and have some breakfast instead. Ewart replied that he would not leave until the 4th Division was ready to move. Cathcart offered to confer with his staff and after a while Ewart heard the bugles sounding the order to turn out.
Until these reinforcements arrived, the only force in the valley available to Campbell was Lucan’s cavalry. Granted permission to live aboard his steam yacht Dryad in Balaklava harbour, Lord Cardigan had yet to emerge, so Lucan took direct command of the Light Brigade. Campbell and Lucan had agreed that if the redoubts fell, the cavalry would take up position to the north-west of Kadikoi, so that, should the Russians cross the South Valley, Lucan could bear down on their flank, while still leaving the 93rd a clear shot at the enemy. Raglan had other ideas and ordered eight squadrons of heavy cavalry to support the 93rd, while the rest of the cavalry redeployed beyond Redoubt No. 6.
While these dispositions proceeded, Campbell formed up the 93rd a little way down the north slope of the hill north of Kadikoi, with their left slightly forward and the light company in front. As the routed Turks piled past towards Balaklava, Lieutenant Sinclair of the 93rd, claymore in hand, tried unsuccessfully to stop them. Behind the rise was Mrs Smith, spouse of Sinclair’s batman, ‘a stalwart wife, large and massive, with brawny arms, and hands as hard as horn’, according to the regimental surgeon, but within whose ‘capacious bosom beat a tender, honest heart’. She had been laying laundry out to dry next to the small stream which snaked behind the hill. Flushed with rage at the sight of Turks trampling her washing, and spitting profanities, she laid into them with a stick, and, grasping one by the collar, dealt him a well-aimed kick.20 The Balaklava harbour master, Captain Tatham, benefiting from a light grasp of Turkish, managed to re-form some, but most bolted. One eyewitness saw them pour into the port, ‘laden with pots, kettles, arms and plunder of every description, chiefly old bottles, for which the Turks appear to have a great appreciation’.21
Back on the rise, the Highlanders now felt the force of the Russian guns unlimbered between Redoubts Nos. 2 and 3. ‘Round shot and shell began to cause some casualties among the 93rd Highlanders and the Turkish battalions on their right and left flanks’, reported Campbell, so ‘I made them retire a few paces behind the crest of the hill’.22 The barrage had cost Private McKay his leg, while Private Mackenzie suffered a shell splinter to his thigh. At the same time, ‘Tens of thousands of cavalry and infantry could be plainly seen pouring down from Kamara, up from the river and valley of the Tchernaya, and out of the recesses of the hills near Tchorgoun to challenge our grip on the Chersonese’,* reported Russell. ‘The morning light shone on acres of bayonets, forests of sword blades and lance-points, gloomy-looking blocks of man and horse.’23 Their first goal was to obliterate Campbell’s little force. General Scarlett’s orderly in the Heavy Brigade saw the Russian cavalry bearing down on them: ‘As they passed in front of us a few hundred yards the thought was in my mind, oh, the poor 93rd, they will all be cut up. There is more than fifty to one against them.’24
The 93rd at Kadikoi were under strength, two companies under Major Gordon having been despatched to the heights east of Balaklava to help the Marines with their entrenchments, so Campbell had sent Sterling to Balaklava to raise the alarm; Lieutenant-Colonel Daveney scrabbled together 100 invalids while two Guards officers, Verschoyle and Hamilton, appeared unprompted with another thirty to forty men. Lastly a Polish interpreter with the Royal Artillery secretly crept up and joined the rear rank of the 93rd, armed with an elderly shotgun. By now 400 Russian cavalrymen had broken away from the main corps under General Ryzhov, and were thundering towards the 93rd. Barker’s battery, on the left of the Highlanders, together with the guns on the Marine Heights, started plugging away as they came within range. Normal practice for infantry facing cavalry was to form square, as Colonel Browne had done forty-three years ago at Barrosa Hill, but it reduced potential firepower in front by three-quarters. Instead, Campbell ordered the men into line, two deep, ready to advance over the crest of the rise to meet the enemy. He was placing great trust in their mettle: the 93rd’s record for steadfastness was patchy. In 1831, at Merthyr, their bayonets had been batted aside by Welshmen armed only with staves.25
Campbell had seen the power of the Minié rifle at the Alma, and though tutored in the close action, cold steel school of warfare, he had grasped the new weapon’s potential to kill at long range. Even so, if the line broke or the Russians skirted round the end, the Highlanders would be slashed to pieces. It was a supreme gamble, an all-or-nothing tactic. Campbell knew it, and rode down the line shouting, ‘Remember, there is no retreat from here, men! You must die where you stand!’ ‘Ay, ay, Sir Colin, and needs be we’ll do that!’ replied Private John Scott in No. 6 company, his cry soon echoed by the rest.26
Just as the Scotsmen prepared to face their enemy, Major Gordon’s two missing companies appeared. When Gordon had seen the Turks abandoning the redoubts, he had marched his men as fast as possible the 2 miles to Kadikoi. Sadly his arrival was more than offset by the flight of the Turks on each flank, scared away by the rumble of the accelerating Russian cavalry, thus robbing Campbell of two-thirds of his men.** ‘The advancing Russians, seeing this cowardly behaviour on the part of our allies, gained fresh courage themselves’, explained Raglan’s nephew, ‘and came on with a rush, yelling in a very barbarous manner.’27 At the Light Brigade camp, one of the officer’s wives watched in dread as the enemy swept across the valley towards the 93rd: ‘Ah, what a moment! Charging and surging onward, what could that little wall of men do against such numbers and such speed?’28 ‘With breathless suspense’, wrote Russell, ‘every one awaits the bursting of the wave upon the line of Gaelic rock.’29
Campbell launched the first volley at the very limit of the Minié’s range. The order ‘Fire!’ echoed across the valley, immediately muffled by the crack of 600 rifles. ‘Being in the front rank, and giving a look along the line, it seemed a wall of fire in front of the muzzles’, wrote one private. In his excitement Campbell had ridden in front of the Highlanders, and had to wheel rapidly out of the way. Yet through the gunsmoke, he saw scarcely a single Russian unseated. The Highlanders fired a second volley, but it too seemed to have little effect on the wall of riders nearing the hill. Now the first Russian squadron started to swerve off to its left, to exploit the thin British line at its end, from where the Turks had fled. ‘Shadwell, that man understands his business’, said Campbell to his ADC.30
‘93rd! Damn all that eagerness!’ Campbell bellowed as some of the men in their enthusiasm brought their rifles up to the charge. To meet the new threat, he ordered the grenadier company under Captain Ross to wheel to the right and form a line at right angles. As the Russians closed in for the kill, they found themselves enfiladed at close range.*** ‘It shook them visibly’, wrote Surgeon Munro, ‘and caused them to bend away to their own right until they had completely wheeled, when they rode back to their own army, followed by a burst of wild cheering from the ranks of the 93rd.’31
‘Had the 93rd been broken,’ claimed Sterling, ‘there was literally nothing to hinder the cavalry which came down on the 93rd from galloping through the flying Turks, and destroying all the stores in Balaklava.’32 Aside from the two men wounded early on by enemy artillery, there had been no other casualties among the 93rd. From Russell’s viewpoint, the Russian charge seemed to have been repelled by little more than a ‘thin red streak topped with a line of steel’, or as in Kipling’s abbreviated version, a ‘Thin Red Line’* (see Plate 14).
But amid all the backslapping and hurray-ing, one uncomfortable fact intruded: the Russians now knew just how few men guarded the gorge to Balaklava. The 93rd had withstood 400 Russian cavalrymen, but the enemy could send five times that number next time.
Raglan, convinced that the enemy’s goal was Balaklava itself, warned Captain Tatham, ‘The Russians will be down upon us in half an hour; we will have to defend the head of the harbour; get steam up.’33 Cathcart’s division, still marching down the Col, received new orders to turn northwards and retake the Causeway Heights. On seeing the redoubts a shocked Cathcart exclaimed, ‘It is the most extraordinary thing I ever saw, for the position is more extensive than that occupied by the Duke of Wellington’s army at Waterloo.’34
Meanwhile, the rest of the Russian cavalry had been proceeding along the North Valley. Under fire from British guns on the Sapoune Ridge, they rode over the Causeway Heights and into the South Valley, but found themselves facing General Scarlett’s little brigade of heavy cavalry. From where Lord Euston stood, up on the ridge, the Russian cavalry next to the Heavy Brigade looked like ‘a large sheet to a small pocket handkerchief’.35 Heavy cavalry relied on shock tactics, on weight and momentum to blast through the enemy, but the Russian squadrons up the slope in front of Scarlett formed one huge, unwavering mass. In any case, charging uphill at superior enemy cavalry was most unwise, but this was Scarlett’s first battle, and unencumbered by cavalry precedent he ordered his men into formation.
Like Campbell at the Alma, Scarlett was determined to advance ceremoniously. The British had not finished dressing their ranks before the Russians began to descend, ‘advancing at a rapid pace over ground most favourable, and appearing as if they must annihilate and swallow up all before them’.36 As the enemy drew near, the British troopers continued their dispositions until they met with their commander’s approval, and then the portly, short-sighted Scarlett, furiously brandishing his sword, began his first and last charge (see Plate 15).
William Russell. Photograph by R. Fenton. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
The Russians were formed rather in the manner of the Zulu ‘horns of the buffalo’, with a broad rank in front spreading out in two wings to the sides, and cavalry in column behind the middle. They graciously halted, watching incredulously as the little band of gilded troopers in front of them gathered speed. ‘We followed with our eyes and our hearts as the Greys began to advance slowly, then to quicken their pace, until at a gallop the whole line rolled along like a great crested wave, and dashed against the solid mass of the enemy, disappearing from our sight entirely’, reported Surgeon Munro, watching from across the valley.37 First in were the Scots Greys beside the Inniskilling Dragoons, hacking at anything that moved, swiftly followed by the Royals and the 4th and 5th Dragoon Guards. Finding their sabres were bouncing off the thick Russian overcoats, they resorted to punching their enemy with their sword hilts. Scarlett received five wounds, but kept gamely slogging away. ‘We soon became a struggling mass of half-frenzied and desperate men,’ wrote Sergeant Major Franks of the 5th Dragoon Guards, ‘doing our level best to kill each other.’38
From Kadikoi, Campbell had watched with respect and disbelief as Scarlett ordered his brigade to charge. He had sent forward two of Barker’s guns, assisted by the Marine artillery, to rain down round shot over Scarlett’s head and into the centre and rear of the enemy cavalry. Campbell saw the light mounts of the 2nd Dragoons, the Scots Greys, as they galloped into the Russian throng, their bearskins visible above the multitude. Then, to the amazement of the British, the Russians began to falter. The staggered charge of the different regiments had had the effect of landing repeated hammer blows on the enemy. Some well-placed shots from the Marine batteries further unsettled the Cossacks at the rear. ‘Yet another moment and the enemy’s column was observed to waver, then break, and shortly the whole body turned and galloped to the rear in disorder’, reported Shadwell.39 As the Russians rode pell-mell back down the Woronzoff Road, the guns of the Royal Marines, of Captain Barker’s battery and C Troop the Royal Horse Artillery hounded them. But the one mounted corps which could have pursued them stayed rooted to the spot. Throughout Scarlett’s charge, Lord Cardigan, who had made it from his yacht to shore, stood with his Light Brigade not 500 yards away. He was not about to advance without specific orders, and he had received none.
Notwithstanding Cardigan’s inertia, the most madcap cavalry charge of the war (so far) had, against all the odds, beaten back the vastly superior Russian squadrons. ‘There never was an action in which English cavalry distinguished themselves more’, claimed Lucan.40 Scarlett’s men could hear the Highlanders’ cheers from across the valley. Campbell rode up to the Scots Greys to congratulate them. ‘Greys! Gallant Greys! I am sixty-one years old,* and if I were young again I should be proud to be in your ranks’, he declared.41 Now that Campbell’s repulse of the Russians had been so ably followed up by Scarlett’s charge, Raglan realised that what had started as an unstoppable enemy offensive was turning to his advantage. The Russian cavalry had retreated behind the safety of their guns at the east end of the North Valley, but their artillery still commanded the Causeway Heights. Raglan wanted them back. After conferring with Campbell, Rustem Pasha tried to occupy Redoubt No. 5 with 200 Turks, but was prevented by the Russian guns on the Fedioukine Heights. Nevertheless, Cambridge’s infantry and the French 1st Division were closing in, while the Chasseurs d’Afrique, were bearing down on the Fedioukine Heights, and so Raglan sent Lucan the following order: ‘Cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to recover the Heights. They will be supported by the infantry, which have been ordered advance on two fronts.’** Lucan assumed Raglan meant he should advance once the infantry arrived to support him, but when the troops showed up they sat down and piled arms.
Three-quarters of an hour slipped by. Raglan was sure he could make out Russian horse artillery removing British guns from the redoubts. ‘We must set the poor Turks right again, [and] get the redoubts back’, he muttered.42 He asked Airey, his quartermaster-general, to send Lucan another order: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate. Airey.’
Few man-made disasters are the result of one action, or one individual, but rather a terrible conflagration of errors. That Airey handed this convoluted but vague order to Captain Nolan to deliver was another fateful twist. Nolan was a renowned horseman, in no one’s estimation more than his own, and he seemed the obvious ADC to hurtle down the rough slope from the Sapoune Heights to Lucan in the plain below. ‘A brave cavalry officer, doubtless,’ wrote Paget, ‘but reckless, unconciliatory, and headstrong, and one who was known through this campaign to have disparaged his own branch of the service, and therefore one ill-suited for so grave a mission.’43
When Lucan received the scribbled note from Nolan, he was confused. From his position he could see neither enemy nor any guns being removed. As he reread the note, searching for some hidden meaning, Nolan became frustrated. He had risked his life and that of his horse in a mad dash to get the order to Lucan, and yet his Lordship was wasting valuable minutes.
Raglan’s instructions often read like an apologetic school chaplain asking for missing kneelers, so, having grown used to a less didactic tone, Lucan bridled at an order ‘more fitting for a subaltern than for a general to receive’. He turned to Nolan and ‘urged the uselessness of such an attack’.
‘Lord Raglan’s orders are that the cavalry should attack immediately’, Nolan replied peremptorily.
‘Attack sir! Attack what and where? What guns are we to recover?’ asked Lucan.
‘There, my Lord!’ shouted Nolan, accompanying his words with a sweep of his hand. ‘There, my Lord, are your guns and your enemy!’***
Without further explanation offered by Nolan, or requested by Lucan, Nolan rode off. Lucan could see the Russian cannon drawn up at the far end of the North Valley, but it was against all the principles of warfare for cavalry to charge artillery. Nevertheless, he rode over to Cardigan and gave him the new order. Cardigan asked whether Lucan was aware that his cavalry would be fired upon in front and in flank. Lucan replied he did, but Raglan was insistent. ‘Having decided, against my conviction, to make the movement, I did all in my power to render it as little perilous as possible’, Lucan later claimed, feebly.44
From the Sapoune Heights, Raglan could see Cardigan’s Light Brigade moving into position, with the Heavy Brigade behind. All seemed well. Cardigan would advance a short way down the North Valley before wheeling to the right to stop the enemy making off with the guns from the redoubts. The Russians were of the same mind. The Odessa battalions on the Causeway Heights pulled back and formed square.
Cardigan led the brigade, slowly at first, but gathering speed. ‘There was no one, I believe, who, when he started on this advance, was insensible to the desperate undertaking in which he was about to be engaged’, wrote Paget.45 ‘We had not advanced two hundred yards before the guns on the flanks opened fire with shell and round shot,’ remembered Lieutenant E. Phillips of the 8th Hussars, ‘and almost at the same time the guns at the bottom of the valley opened.’46 As the Russian artillery started booming, Captain Nolan, who had permission to accompany the charge, galloped forward ahead of the line, towards Cardigan, gesturing and shouting furiously, but amid the pounding crash of the guns, Cardigan could not make out what he was saying.* All of a sudden Nolan’s voice changed to a blood-curdling screech as a shell splinter struck him in the heart.
Private Lamb of the 13th Hussars recalled:
We still kept on down the valley at a gallop, and a cross-fire from a Russian battery on our right opened a deadly fusillade upon us with canister and grape, causing great havoc amongst our horses and men, and mowing them down in heaps. I myself was struck down and rendered insensible. When I recovered consciousness, the smoke was so thick that I was not able to see where I was, nor had I the faintest idea what had become of the Brigade.47
‘One was guiding one’s own horse so as to avoid trampling on the bleeding objects in one’s path,’ explained Paget, ‘sometimes a man, sometimes a horse … The smoke, the noise, the cheers, the groans, the ‘ping ping’ whizzing past one’s head; the ‘whirr’ of the fragments of shells … what a sublime confusion it was! The ‘din of battle’- how expressive the term, and how entirely insusceptible of description!48
As the Light Brigade drew level with the Russians on the Causeway Heights, yet still showed no sign of turning right to attack, the gradual realisation of Lucan’s intentions dawned upon Raglan, and the enormity of the error. ‘We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses!’ reported Russell. ‘Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an army in position?’49 The staff on the Sapoune Ridge watched, horrified, hoping Cardigan would turn back. Behind him, the Heavy Brigade had already suffered more casualties than in their earlier charge, so Lucan halted them and pulled back the forward regiments. The Light Brigade, meanwhile, rode on.
Up front and unscathed, Cardigan had by now ridden nearly the length of the valley, but as his horse covered the last few yards, twelve Russian guns ahead fired one mighty, earth-shaking volley. The earl, momentarily unnerved, recovered his composure and rode on through the battery. Beyond were ranged hundreds of Cossacks, who surrounded Cardigan. They were under orders to take him alive, but fighting common soldiers was beneath Cardigan’s dignity so, without raising his sword, he forced his way through and back down the valley.**
The rest of his brigade was not so circumspect. As the remnants of the Light Brigade reached the guns, they were seized by fury towards the men who had inflicted such a barbarous onslaught. So frenzied was the British assault, their rough sword hilts left sores on the troopers’ hands from all the hacking. Terrified Cossack artillerymen were reduced to defending themselves with whatever they could grasp, even the gun ramrods. It was anger borne of desperation. British prospects were grim: ‘We were a mile and a half from any support, our ranks broken (most, indeed, having fallen), with swarms of cavalry in front of us and round us’, explained Paget. ‘The case was now desperate. Of course, to retain the guns was out of the question.’50 In Cardigan’s absence, Paget decided that they had done all that honour required, but by now Russian lancers had swept in behind to cut off their retreat. ‘Helter-skelter then we went at these Lancers as fast as our poor tired horses could carry us’, he wrote:
A few of the men on the right flank of their leading squadrons, going farther than the rest of their line, came into momentary collision with the right flank of our fellows, but beyond this, strange as it may sound, they did nothing, and actually allowed us to shuffle, to edge away, by them, at a distance of hardly a horse’s length.51
‘From this moment the battle could be compared to a rabbit hunt’, observed General Ryzhov.’Those who managed to gallop away from the hussar sabres and slip past the lances of the Uhlans, were met with canister fire from our batteries and the bullets of our riflemen.’52 ‘I had not gone far when my mare began to flag,’ recalled Lieutenant Phillips. ‘I think she must have been hit in the leg by a second shot, as she suddenly dropped behind and fell over on her side. I extricated myself as quickly as possible and ran for my life, the firing being as hard as ever.’ ‘Sergeant Riley of the 8th was seen riding with eyes fixed and staring, his face as rigid and white as a flagstone, dead in the saddle’, wrote Phillips. ‘Sergeant Talbot of the 17th also carried on, his lance couched tightly under his arm, even though his head had been blown away.’53 ‘What a scene of havoc was this last mile,’ Paget lamented, ‘strewn with the dead and dying, and all friends! Some running, some limping, some crawling; horses in every position of agony, struggling to get up, then floundering again on their mutilated riders!’54
Amid the carnage were vignettes of bathos. A small terrier joined the charge and, though wounded twice, survived. Lieutenant Chamberlayne, his horse shot, and knowing the value of a good saddle, ran back down the valley with it perched on his head. The Russians assumed he was a looter from their side, and let him pass. The regimental butcher of the 17th Lancers, on a charge for drunkenness, heard the commotion in the valley below and, somewhat the worse for rum, ran down and grabbed a riderless Russian horse. Still dressed in his bloody overalls from slaughtering cattle the day before, and armed only with an axe, he joined the charge, killing six Russians in the main battery. On his return he was arrested for breaking out of a guard tent when confined thereto. Lucan let him off the court martial.
Though The Times claimed not only that ‘The blood which has been shed has not flowed in vain’, but that ‘Never was a more costly sacrifice made for a more worthy object’,55 Raglan’s nephew recognised the truth – that the Light Brigade had been ‘uselessly sacrificed’ and that ‘the results do not at all make up for our loss’.56 ‘It will be the cause of much ill-blood and accusation, I promise you’, Paget predicted. Sure enough, despite the ambiguity of his orders, Raglan blamed Lucan for not exercising his own judgement. Lucan in turn held Cardigan responsible for the same reason, while Paget was of the opinion that Nolan had been ‘the principal cause of this disaster’.57 Initially the scale of the blunder did not seem historic. ‘These sorts of things happen in war’, Airey told Lucan, ‘it is nothing to Chillianwala’. ‘I know nothing about Chillianwala’, replied Lucan, before assuring Airey, ‘I tell you that I do not intend to bear the smallest particle of responsibility.’58 Raglan made him the whipping boy anyway. ‘From some misconception of the instruction to advance, the Lieutenant-General [Lucan] considered that he was bound to attack at all hazards’, Raglan declared in his official despatch. Privately he told the Duke of Newcastle that ‘Lord Lucan had made a fatal mistake’.59 ‘Lord Lucan was to blame,’ agreed the queen, ‘but I fear he had been taunted by Captain Nolan.’60
Russell had witnessed all three actions: the Thin Red Line, the Charge of the Heavy Brigade and the Charge of the Light Brigade. As a narrative, the futility of Cardigan’s assault needed the balance of a palpable triumph. The Heavy Brigade had performed an extraordinary feat, but it was the bluff stoicism of the Highlanders that would play best with the public, the contrast of infantry and cavalry, of raw Celts and foppish troopers. In an age of steel-engraved illustrations, it was also a good deal easier to depict a line of immoveable Highlanders than the chaos of a cavalry charge. Russell knew his readers wanted something affirming the moral superiority of the British soldier. The Thin Red Line was ideal. It chimed with the British self-image: stoic, stalwart, stiff-upper-lipped. And so, again, Campbell was selected as protagonist.
Since he arrived in the Crimea, Campbell had shown a remarkably sophisticated understanding of the power of the press. As one officer writing in 1945 observed, ‘Sir Colin Campbell seems to have been several generations ahead of his time in his appreciation of the value of publicity as a stimulus to morale. From this point of view he might perhaps be described as the Montgomery of the Crimea.’61 Not just for morale, for personal advancement too. Campbell realised the importance of keeping correspondents like Russell on side, unlike Raglan. ‘A very small dose of civility from Lord Raglan would have tamed and made a friend of him; but they have, on the contrary, done all they could to insult him’, Sterling later wrote.62 Meanwhile, for Campbell, charming Russell now paid a bumper dividend. The rest of the press followed Russell’s lead. On 19 November, the day after Russell’s account appeared in The Times, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper dubbed Campbell ‘the real Scottish lion’. Once more he was cast as the brave clansman, dour, doughty and speaking in that ludicrous ‘Hoots, mon’ Scottish vernacular which only exists in the English imagination. Added to the reputation won at the Alma, Balaklava now elevated him to the status of national hero.
By the close of what remains one of the most dramatic days in British military history, Campbell had more important problems than his media profile. Cathcart had taken the two most westerly redoubts (nos 5 and 6) but, together with Campbell and Canrobert, felt the British position was overextended. All three urged Raglan to pull back and reinforce the inner ring of defences around Balaklava. Raglan agreed that the redoubts must be abandoned, although with the Russians in possession of the only proper metalled road to Sebastopol, all supplies would now have to be dragged up the rough track which led north-west from Balaklava to the Sapoune Ridge.
Campbell expected another Russian attack. ‘They may break through there this night’, he warned Sir Edward Colebrooke.63 He deployed the 93rd around No. 4 battery. The rest of his Highland Brigade, who had marched down with the Guards, stayed to strengthen Kadikoi, along with a French brigade under General Vinoy.* Those not on guard slept with loaded rifles. Campbell paced the battery until morning, impressing upon his men that, if need be, it was the duty of every soldier to die at his post. When day dawned, the Russians remained at a distance.
The battle so shook Raglan that two days later he ordered Campbell to evacuate the batteries on the Marine Heights and ship out the guns, but after appeals from Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, Colonel Gordon of the engineers and the Commissary-General, Raglan changed his mind. Balaklava was cleared of all but critical shipping, and on 27 October HMS Sans Pareil moored in the harbour to provide extra protection. Meanwhile, at Kadikoi Campbell strengthened his position still further. Trous de loup** and abatis*** proliferated, and every tree was cut to within 3ft of the ground to deny the enemy cover. In the dip between No. 4 battery and the Marine Heights, he built a dam to create a shallow pond concealing a deep underwater ditch, invisible to the enemy. His troops’ love of the Highland Charge prevented them from wholly entering into the spirit of these elaborate defences. When Campbell complained that trenches dug by the 42nd and 79th were too shallow, one of the men replied, ‘If we make it so deep, we shall not be able to get over it to attack the Russians.’64
Campbell’s tendency to worry increased with his grey hairs, and by now he was permanently tense. Up on the heights he demanded the Marines maintain a constant vigil through ships’ telescopes, sending regular reports by runner or semaphore. He might have been, as Colebrooke noted, ‘all life at the prospect of action’,65 but he barely slept, checking and rechecking every order, unceasingly inspecting the defences and improving them. Campbell preferred to keep his headquarters at the crux of the line, No. 4 battery, rather than set up house in Balaklava: ‘I have sufficient anxiety in my front without wishing to add to it by seeing what I have behind me.’****66 The shortage of reliable troops was a great concern. Though he still had Rustem Pasha’s Turkish battalions, his faith in them had been shattered. ‘They take me by the shoulders and put me into Balaklava and try to defend it without any means, with a lot of Turks who run at the first shot’,67 he complained. Sterling’s view of them had changed from ‘capital fellows’ to ‘worse than useless’. ‘We have put the Turks in the rear, feeling sure that if we did not so place them, their natural modesty would soon take them there’, he noted.68 This left the perimeter woefully undermanned. Speaking of these days, Campbell later admitted that he held the lines ‘by sheer impudence’.69
With winter drawing in, the Russians were eager to lift the siege. On 2 November, fire from Russian howitzers on the eastern end of Campbell’s line seemed to herald an attack, but the enemy stayed put. A rainy 4 November left the ground next morning shrouded in thick fog, allowing the Russians to take the British by surprise. Their goal was Mount Inkerman outside Sebastopol, high ground which offered a commanding line of fire on the allies. Campbell heard the crash of battle in the distance, but it was not until later that afternoon that he learned the British had won an arithmetic victory. Russian losses were estimated at between 10,000 and 20,000, compared with only 2,600 British casualties, but as Henry Layard observed, echoing Dalhousie after Chillianwala, ‘Another such victory would be almost fatal to us.’70 ‘It was a great pity we had not the 42nd, 79th and 93rd Highlanders with us,’ commented one soldier, ‘for we knew well they would have left their marks upon the enemy, under the guidance of their old commander, Sir Colin Campbell.’71 ‘It was a disgrace to all the staff concerned that we were caught napping by an enemy whom we allowed to assemble close to us during the previous night without our knowledge’, complained Wolseley. ‘Had any general who knew his business – Sir Colin Campbell for instance – been in command of the division upon our extreme right that Gunpowder Plot Day of 1854, we should not have been caught unawares.’72 Absent at Inkerman, Campbell’s reputation remained intact and, if anything, enhanced. Augustus Stafford, MP, visiting the Crimea that autumn, confirmed that the man ‘in whom the army seem to have the greatest confidence is Sir Colin Campbell’.73
Though costing the Russians dear in men, Inkerman was a crushing blow to British morale. Sterling gloomily summed up their position: ‘We are besieging an enemy equal to our own in numbers, with another superior one outside and threatening us continually … The matter looks graver every day; a duel à mort with despotism requires numbers as well as bravery.’74 Two days after Inkerman, Raglan held a council of war. He decided to dig in and wait for reinforcements. Shocked at the thought of over-wintering, 225 of the 1,540 British officers simply left, many of them forced to sell their commissions at a loss.75
By 12 November, Campbell had received an extra 500 Zouaves and a detachment from the 2nd Battalion, the Rifle Brigade, but conditions for the troops were deteriorating. They had been in the same kit for months and everyone was covered in lice, even the Duke of Cambridge. The government agreed to issue every soldier with an extra uniform, but not until 1 April 1855. In the interim, men paraded wearing trousers made of sacking. Others turned out in trousers and a kilt, with a blanket on top, then a greatcoat and a further blanket wrapped round the shoulders. ‘All pretensions to finery or even decency are gone’, explained Sterling. ‘We eat dirt, sleep in dirt, and live dirty.’76 ‘Even the ground within our tents was trodden into mud,’ recalled Surgeon Munro, ‘and there we sat and slept, and fortunate was he who could secure a bundle of damp straw of which to make a bed.’77
Their Crimean hell had barely started. Two days later a cataclysmic storm broke. ‘We had just got our morning dose of cocoa, and the soldiers their rum, when, about seven o’clock, the squall came down on us’, recalled Sterling. ‘All the tents fell in about three minutes.’ ‘The Marines and Rifles on the cliffs over Balaklava lost tents, clothes – everything’, reported Russell. ‘The storm tore them away over the face of the rock and hurled them across the bay, and the men had to cling to the earth with all their might to avoid the same fate.’78 Twenty-one ships were wrecked, taking with them 10 million rounds of ammunition, twenty days’ forage for the horses, and 40,000 winter uniforms. On his yacht in the harbour, Cardigan was mildly sick. Raglan called in Commissary-General Filder and demanded that he send out officers to secure supplies ‘at any price’, while requesting the Duke of Newcastle send replacement shipments with the utmost urgency.79
The losses wrought by the storm placed an intolerable strain on an army supply chain already saddled with incompetence. Only in late September did anyone realise the army had headed out without candles. It had oil lamps and wicks, but no oil. Iron beds were sent to Scutari while their legs ended up in Balaklava. Petty jealousies and an absence of common sense pervaded every arm of the services. Departmental demarcation was sacred: the commissaries insisted that rations for Campbell’s Marines were an Admiralty matter and refused them food. Vegetables, meanwhile, had to be paid for ‘as articles of extra diet’. These shortages fell hardest on the men. ‘The officers, of course, are not suffering actually quite so much,’ wrote Sterling, ‘though quite as much in proportion to their previous habits.’80
The fuel ration was pitiful* and firewood so scarce that soldiers dug up roots or stole gabions** and pickaxe handles from the engineers. One night, Surgeon Munro was summoned to see Captain Mansfield, Campbell’s extra ADC, at his headquarters. Munro had not eaten because his servant could find no firewood. Spying a pile of logs, the surgeon asked if he might take one but Mansfield refused, so Munro waited until Campbell’s staff were in conversation, chose a large log and stole off with it. As he struggled back through the mud he heard footsteps behind him getting closer, until eventually a hand clapped him on the shoulder. Turning round, he saw Campbell’s batman with another log. He told Munro that if he was desperate enough to steal one from under the chief’s nose, his need was great indeed.81
Aside from cold and hunger, the other major threat was disease. Despite a reinforcement of 1,400 Turks towards the end of November, Campbell’s garrison was being gradually consumed by sickness. It had reduced the effective strength of the 1,200 Marines outside Balaklava by 300 men. They had just two medical officers, who had to wade through 3 miles of mud to make their rounds, working from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. and then staying on duty throughout the night for emergencies. he only drug available was alum, supplied as a powder which the doctors had to make up into pills themselves. The church at Kadikoi was turned into a makeshift hospital for the men but ‘was always filled to overcrowding … the poor fellows lay packed as close as possible upon the floor, in their soiled and tattered uniform, and covered with their worn field blankets’ (see Plate 16). The spacious twenty-room home of a Russian lawyer was commandeered for sick officers and an old priest’s dwelling for the very worst cases. According to Munro, often all that was needed was warmth and food, but there was none available: ‘All that could be done was to lay them gently down and watch life ebb away.’82 There was scant incentive for prophylactic measures. As Munro explained, his ‘duties were to cure disease, not to make suggestions to prevent disease’.83 Then there were the ever-present financial constraints. ‘A more devoted set of men than the regimental surgeons, I never saw,’ wrote Sterling, ‘but they have been brought up all their lives under the tyranny of the Inspector-General, whose object it is to please the Government by keeping down the estimates.’84 The doctors were further hamstrung by their own bloody-minded supply office, the Purveyor. ‘If I had a knife and a piece of wood, it would be shorter and easier for me to make a splint than draw one from the Purveyor’, complained one surgeon.85
At least the agony of Balaklava forged a new bond between Campbell and the Highlanders, as Munro explained:
He was of their own warlike race, of their kith and kin, understood their character and feelings, and could rouse or quiet them at will with a few words … He spoke at times not only kindly, but familiarly to them, and often addressed individuals by their names … He was a frequent visitor at hospital, and took an interest in their ailments, and in all that concerned their comfort when they were ill. Such confidence in, and affection for him, had the men of his old Highland brigade, that they would have stood by or followed him through any danger. Yet there never was a commanding officer or general more exacting on all points of discipline than he.86
Within a few weeks the track from Balaklava had become a quagmire, and there wasn’t enough fodder for the pack animals. The solution was to corral Campbell’s men into fatigue parties, work despised by the Highlanders. Munro saw how:
So many loose shot or shell were placed in a field blanket, and two or four men, grasping the blanket by the corners, swung the load along between them. Many of the men preferred slinging the loads over their backs, and staggering along under the weight of two or more shot … The results of this duty were severe bowel complaints, fever, aggravated scorbutic symptoms and often cholera’,87
‘An army of this size in India would have with it 30,000 camels for transport’, protested Sterling. ‘I believe we have here in this place about 150 mules.’88 The situation reached such a crisis that when the 18th Foot landed it was decided the regiment would stay at Balaklava as porters.
‘How any man who had served under the Duke of Wellington, or who had even read his despatches, could ever have allowed such a state of affairs to arrive, is, to me, incomprehensible’, fumed one colonel.89 Raglan’s apologists excused his problems as an inevitable product of the system. The United Service Journal claimed that ‘From all we can learn, there appears to be no incompetency to individuals, the whole fault arises exclusively from the organisation.’90 Karl Marx, in the New York Times, claimed ‘the terrible evils, amid which the soldiers in the Crimea are perishing, are not his [Raglan’s] fault, but that of the system on which the British war establishment is administered’.91 But, as Ellenborough told the House of Lords on 14 May 1855, ‘To attribute everything to the defect of system is the subterfuge of convicted mediocrity.’92
There was nothing inevitable about the miseries of the Crimea. In China, Gough had encouraged his men to collect supplies as needed. His troops were always on the move, having to negotiate purchases in a language hardly anyone in the expedition understood, yet he succeeded. And while Gough was sourcing supplies locally, the Duke of Wellington was busy organising materiel from London, penning memos to the governor-general of India encouraging him to buy Chinese horses and hire carriage, or to employ junks as floating barracks and stables. In the Peninsula Wellington himself had slyly subverted the system by ordering far more corn than he needed and then selling the surplus, leaving him with cash to make up for deficiencies from Whitehall. Sadly, pre-empting the incompetence of his political masters was a measure alien to Raglan.
Fortunately for the Highlanders, Campbell did not wait for Raglan or the government to remedy the shortages. Wooden cabins had been promised for the men, but had yet to arrive, so Campbell set the men to digging a massive trench, roofed with planks, and overlaid with a layer of beaten clay, big enough to accommodate an entire regiment, near the crest of the hill outside Kadikoi. After only a few days, the soldiers inside were flooded out, and ‘Sir Colin’s Folly’ was abandoned.93 Unabashed, he next did what he knew had worked in the Peninsula: he ordered the men to build their own shelters, and to that end encouraged them to scavenge. Finding some soldiers building a hut and running short of wood, he suggested they take a mule and cart down to Balaklava to get more planks. When they asked where they might find a cart, Campbell replied, ‘Where would you get it? Why, man, off you go and seize the first mule and cart you can get hold of!’ Some while later the men returned with a wagon piled high with timber, pulled by an exhausted mule. On closer inspection, Campbell realised it was his own personal mule and cart.94
As Kinglake argued:
The capacity, the force of will, the personal ascendancy of officers commanding these several bodies of men, the zeal, judgment, the ability of the assistant commissary allowed to each division, the comparative number of men left in camp who might not be so prostrated by fatigue or sickness as to be incapable of hard bodily exertion – all these and perhaps many more were the varying conditions under which it resulted that deficiencies occurring in some parts of camp were from other parts of it wholly averted.*95
Campbell managed to alleviate many of those deficiencies and so his Highlanders had a better survival rate than most, but then as his brigade major wrote, he ‘has more experience in his little finger then the whole set up there [outside Sebastopol]’. Take food for example: officially, the British soldier was left to cook his unchanging rations himself. Campbell, however, realising the value in regimental kitchens, persuaded one of the Turkish commanders to send large copper cooking pots from Constantinople. It was a small advantage, but it was the sum of these little details which made the difference between a healthy regiment and a frail one. In any case, as a brigade commander he lacked the power to deal with anything beyond little details. As Sterling wrote on Campbell’s behalf in January 1855, ‘We, however, possess no power to remedy any radical error … we can only represent and lament.’96
Unlike some officers, Campbell resisted shaming the army into action. As in the Peninsular War, tales of failures relayed home by letter found their way into the newspapers, but he had no truck with such indiscretions. Campbell told Colonel Eyre:
The people of England have a right to expect a courage and endurance on the part of the officers of the army, which shall not yield to the discomfort unavoidable in a campaign carried on during the winter months, and that any little inconvenience they may be put to, shall be borne without the croaking and moaning they publish to the world. We have gone through some hardships, it is true, but nothing to justify the statements of officers that appear in the newspapers.97
Indeed, as Lord Stanmore pointed out, ‘Suffering was not greater, and the hospital accommodation, bad as it may have been, was far better than it had been in the forces engaged in the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular campaigns.’98 The difference was that back in 1808 there hadn’t been much of a middle-class audience to gasp. The revelation of military incompetence in 1854 was nothing new, but this time the public were listening, and because so many more of them were enfranchised, the government took notice of their concerns. The status quo ante was not that no one knew about the problems in the army; it was that no one cared. In the past, the British soldier was an expendable drunkard. Now the middle class saw him as the last bulwark against foreign despotism. And as the common soldier was celebrated, so the blueblood generals were condemned. The didacticism of the aristocracy was discredited and there was a feeling abroad that things could be improved by individual effort. What better time for a self-made general to emerge? Campbell confirmed what the Victorian middle classes wanted to believe about their new society.
As reports of conditions reached Britain, so private organisations and individuals decided to right matters themselves. On 13 October 1854, The Times created its own Crimea Fund. In November, Florence Nightingale descended on Scutari with a cohort of nurses. That winter, Mary Seacole arrived in Balaklava to set up her own provision store and ‘hotel’ (an institution Nightingale believed was no better than a brothel). Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed a prefabricated hospital. Joseph Paxton, gardener, architect and designer of the Crystal Palace, recruited navvies to take on much of the logistical work. Samuel Cunard offered ships sufficient to carry 14,000 men to the front. These efforts were not just helpful in themselves, but of enormous benefit in embarrassing the authorities into activity.
The most famous chef of his day, Alexis Soyer, set about reforming the soldiers’ diet by introducing camp kitchens for mass meals, and new recipes to make the unimaginative rations palatable. ‘Exceedingly egotistical’, but with ‘all the marks of a great man in his own line’,99 Soyer invented a new stove (in use until the 1990s) to replace the charcoal ones that had caused carbon monoxide poisoning. He had intended to test his stoves on the Guards, but having landed at Balaklava and reported to the authorities, Soyer returned to find Campbell’s Highlanders had unloaded them and were already cooking on them.
The general public did their bit by sending food and clothing. ‘Old England is at last roused to a sense of our misfortunes,’ proclaimed one officer, ‘and is determined to atone for her dilatoriness by her liberality.’100 The drought soon became a flood. Fellow Scots sent the Highlanders ‘oat cakes and currant buns and bottles of whisky’.101 ‘All this is very kind … if they would only send plenty of horses and carts, and fat beeves for the soldiers’ dinners, it would be more use than a forest of hashed venison’, wrote Sterling after a consignment of potted deer arrived from the Marquess of Breadalbane, a man who had spent the past twenty years systematically ridding his estate of Highlanders.102 ‘The underclothing was in such superabundance that we could afford to make frequent changes,’ recalled Munro, ‘to put on new and throw away what we had worn only for a week or so, which, though new and good, and only soiled, it was considered too great a trouble to wash’. The 93rd even received a shipment of buffalo pelts. ‘These robes must have been expensive and I fear that the purchase of them was money thrown away’, wrote Munro, after finding they harboured lice.103
Campbell had too many worries to take much joy in the public’s largesse. Wellington held, ‘My rule always was to do the business of the day, in the day.’ Campbell, in contrast, continued his work round the clock and was soon close to collapse. His brigade major was little better. ‘I have looked in a looking-glass today for the first time since landing in the Crimea; my beard is getting long and grizzled, my face brown and healthy, my body thin, and my expression reckless and cynical.’104 On 28 November, after much persuasion, Campbell moved to a small house 150 yards from battery No. 4, which he had previously rejected as too far from the line. Here he had the space to unpack his luggage, which had been lying in the harbour, but he still insisted on sleeping in a tent outside. ‘Such was his anxious temperament, that he could not rest tranquil for a moment in the house’, remembered Shadwell. ‘A man coughing, a dog barking, or a tent flapping in the wind, was sufficient to startle him.’
Between 1 and 4 December, the sight of enemy officers just beyond the range of British guns, with a telescope so big it had to be supported on piled muskets, made Campbell more nervous still. Then on 5 December he noticed fires on the Causeway Heights near Redoubt No. 3. The Russian infantry had pulled back, taking their artillery with them and burning their huts as they went. ‘For the first time, that night Sir Colin lay down with his clothes off in the house’, recalled Shadwell, but even now Campbell could not relax completely, leaping out of bed in the small hours, mid-dream, and shouting ‘Stand to your arms!’ The Russians had retired to Tchorgoun, but that was still too close for Campbell. Helped by Turkish fatigue parties, the Highlanders strengthened their entrenchments still further, while Campbell roamed the lines urging vigilance at all times. Far from dreading these inspections, the men ‘vie[d] with each other in their endeavours to gain his approbation’. His ‘watchful energy was very different from that restless fussiness which is so often mistaken for it’, wrote Shadwell.105
With the Russian threat diminishing, disease remained the most pressing menace throughout December. By 1 January 1855, boosted by reinforcements, the British army stood at 43,754 men, yet only 23,634 of these were fit for duty. Campbell’s old regiment, the 9th Foot, had ‘sickened so fast, that of men fit for duty after only a few days of campaigning, it had only a small remnant left’.106 War eroded the high command as much as the ranks. Cathcart had been shot dead at Inkerman. A wounded Bentinck had been invalided back home. Cardigan had left on 5 December, citing ill health, and in late January Lucan received an ultimatum, stating that it was ‘Her Majesty’s pleasure that he should resign the command of the Cavalry Division and return forthwith to England’. In addition, the Duke of Newcastle was eager for Raglan to weed out the old guard, in particular Airey, Estcourt, Filder and Burgoyne.
The Duke of Cambridge was also ready to leave. He had found a new reservoir of courage at Inkerman, holding his position until down to his last 100 men, but he was never the same again. The Guards’ continued enfeeblement from disease left him ‘very nearly crazy’, in the words of one colonel, and war was straining his marriage. While the duke was recuperating from dysentery and typhoid fever on HMS Retribution, a thunderbolt hit the ship during the storm of 14 November and nearly sank her. ‘This was without any exception the most fearful day of my life’, he confessed. ‘I cannot ask you to stay’, wrote Raglan, ‘after … your sufferings from illness, anxiety of mind, exposure to the weather and over fatigue.’107 On 25 November, Cambridge boarded the Trent, bound for Constantinople.
Raglan now offered Campbell the choice of the 4th Division or the 1st Division if, as suspected, the Duke of Cambridge was gone for good. Careful to underplay his ambitions, Campbell said he would be happy to command either but would leave the decision to Raglan. A medical board declared Cambridge unfit, and so Campbell took over the 1st Division. As a bonus he was appointed Colonel of the 67th Foot on Christmas Day. His delight was only blunted by Raglan’s appointment of a new commandant for Balaklava. ‘C. [Campbell] is not responsible for the state of Balaklava’, wrote Sterling that January. ‘He does not command here. He thought he did, and began knocking the Staff officers about, and the new Commandant, for various misdeeds, when an order came out to place the troops under the command of the Commandant. Private interest with someone.’108 A general order from Raglan on 3 March, confirming Campbell’s command of all troops in and around Balaklava (aside from the cavalry), but allowing the commandant of the port to make requisitions ‘for such Duties and fatigues as may be necessary’, did not settle the matter.
Raglan himself had been promoted field marshal after Inkerman, but at home his reputation had soured. On Saturday 23 December, in the last editorial before Christmas, The Times savaged him:
The noblest army England ever sent from these shores has been sacrificed to the grossest mismanagement. Incompetency, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness and stupidity reign, revel and riot in the camp before Sebastopol, in the harbour of Balaklava, in the hospitals of Scutari, and how much nearer to home we do not venture to say … Everybody can point out something which should be done, but there is no one there to order it to be done … The period for good nature is over in the Crimea, and sterner qualities must be invoked into action.
Raglan was ‘invisible’, his staff ‘devoid of experience, without much sympathy for the distresses of the rank and file and disposed to treat the gravest affairs with a dangerous nonchalance’.109 As Adjutant-General James Estcourt sat down on 25 December to a dinner of roast goose and plum pudding, you might be forgiven for thinking they had a point. The government in London shared the paper’s doubts. As the Home Secretary, Lord Palmerston, wrote on 4 January, ‘In many essential points Raglan is unequal to the task which has fallen to his lot but it is impossible to remove him, and we must make the best of it.’110 Although, according to Surgeon-Major Bostock of the Scots Fusilier Guards, ‘everyone blames Lord Raglan very much’,111 Campbell was his staunch ally. ‘Never was a public Man more unjustly censured by the public’, he wrote.112 ‘I am disgusted with the attacks that have been made upon dear Lord Raglan. God pity the army if anything were to occur to take him from us!’113
In London support for Raglan continued to decline. At the end of January 1855, a Commons motion from John Roebuck, demanding a select committee examine the state of Raglan’s army, acted as a lightning conductor for discontent over the direction of the war. And the more diatribes and speeches condemned the old school, aristocratic command, the brighter shone Campbell’s halo. ‘Did they put him in command of a division?’ asked Liberal Henry Layard in the ensuing debate, ‘No! But in the command of a brigade, under a general officer who had never seen a shot fired, and knew nothing about a campaign.’114 The government lost by an embarrassing 148 votes. Next day, Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen resigned, replaced by the old political pugilist, populist and Russophobe, Lord Palmerston. The queen had desperately tried to persuade Lords Derby, Lansdowne, Clarendon and John Russell to take the job, but to no avail. As Palmerston put it, ‘I am, for the moment, l’inévitable.’
One of his most urgent tasks was rationalising the army. Lord Panmure was appointed Secretary for War and given the additional responsibilities of the Secretary at War.* In March he took control of the militia and the yeomanry from the Home Office. Authority over the Army Medical Department followed and, in May, control of the Board of Ordnance, while the remit of the commander-in-chief (Lord Hardinge) was extended to the engineers and the artillery. At last, the administration of the army was on a sound footing. The most important change of all had in fact already happened, when in December 1854 control of the Commissariat had been wrested from the Treasury and handed to the obvious trustee, the War Office.
Palmerston also wanted personnel changes. Raglan’s adjutant-general and quartermaster-general both had to go. A new chief of staff, James Simpson, took over their duties. His promotion to the local rank of lieutenant-general was backdated to August 1854, making him senior to Sir Richard England and Campbell,* and therefore heir apparent in the event of Raglan’s death. This was the second time Horse Guards had pulled this trick. When Bentinck had been gazetted lieutenant-general, his promotion was also backdated, to one day before Campbell’s. ‘It is really too bad’, complained Sterling. ‘Court influence: Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.’**
Despite this circumvention of his seniority, Campbell was on top form – optimistic, energetic, sure of British victory and with no semblance of the morbidity which had so often beset him in the past. ‘I have never enjoyed better health or more pleasant sleep’, he told his friend Colonel Eyre.115 There seems no obvious explanation for Campbell’s sudden buoyancy. The cabins promised for the men still languished unissued on the quay at Balaklava. Disease persisted. By the end of January, 12,000 British soldiers were still on the sick list.116 The enemy continued to bate him: on 6 January, four Russian infantry columns plus Cossacks approached the Marine Heights, but kept out of range of the guns, and between 7 and 10 February, the enemy threatened the Causeway Heights, but once again thought better of it.
Then finally, after the long winter stalemate, the allies declared themselves ready to push forward once more. The offensive would begin in the small hours of 19 February. Twelve thousand men under General Bosquet would advance and seize the Traktir Bridge. As a first step, Campbell, with 1,800 men and twelve guns, would take the high ground overlooking Tchorgoun before daylight, and then wait for the French. Bosquet’s task was to overwhelm the enemy’s right ‘while I went by myself to assail their left if possible’, as Campbell explained, ‘at any rate to hold it in check while the French were performing their part in the intended plan of operations’.*** ‘We were to move from our respective camps towards the enemy after midnight and I was to be at the place assigned to me at half past five in the morning, threatening the left of the enemy’s position’, but, wrote Campbell:
One of the most desperate snow storms I ever witnessed or experienced came on before I started. My route was across country in which there were no roads. No counter orders having reached me I marched at the ordered hour. Before my people got to the place of assembly, before marching off, four guns and five wagons got upset. The snow drifted in our faces, and the ground being covered with snow and the night dark, it was scarcely possible to make out the features of the country. Nevertheless we moved forward. I was urged to return or to wait for daylight, but that I would not do. I succeeded in stumbling upon and surprising a picket of Cossacks, their flight gave me the true direction and I got to my ground at a quarter past five.
Campbell’s determination was in vain. Perturbed by the weather, Bosquet had cancelled the offensive. Major Foley, ADC to Major-General Hugh Rose, had ridden out with orders for Campbell to retire, but had spent most of the night wandering around in the dark, before eventually stumbling into Raglan’s headquarters at 5 a.m. Raglan sent him out again with one of his own ADCs to make sure he didn’t get lost a second time. By now, Campbell’s brigade had been sitting on the Causeway Heights for several hours, believing they had 12,000 Frenchmen in support nearby, when all that time they had been quite alone. Luckily, as Campbell told Seward:
General Vinoy, a fine fellow, who is encamped near to my position here, seeing in the morning my people on the heights about six and a half miles off, at once concluded I might find myself with too many on my hands, for he knew the French had not gone out, and he started with three regiments to come and join me.
The whole pointless adventure had achieved nothing, except to leave many men with frostbitten fingers. Nevertheless, according to Campbell, ‘a good deal was thought of this march by Lord Raglan and the people at Headquarters at the time’, and it prompted a personal testimonial from the queen.117
By March, things were definitely looking up. Wood, charcoal and candle rations had all been increased and the death of the tsar on 2 March gave morale a fortuitous boost. ‘To the allies his death is a certain gain, as it is impossible to believe that his son will have his abilities’, wrote Sterling.118 As winter retreated, Campbell seemed full of the joys of spring. Running into him on 3 March, Paget described how he spoke ‘cheerfully of our prospects’,119 while another officer remarked how he ‘amused us much by his extreme vivacity and humour’.120 ‘The aspect of every thing here is much less sombre than it was during the Winter’, Campbell told the Duke of Cambridge. ‘The men are generally healthy and they are nothing near so much worked as they were … All the soldiers are in capital spirits.’121 What’s more, having suffered ‘the worst cook in the world, a very dirty Glaswegian soldier’, Campbell now received from General Vinoy a Monsieur Pascal Poupon as his personal chef. ‘Before his advent, our dinner was always a piece of mutton, when we could get it, stewed with French vegetable tablets’, wrote Sterling. ‘Now we have six dishes at least.’122
Everywhere were signs that the allies were gaining the upper hand, on their environment at least. A new railway stretched from Balaklava to Kadikoi and by 26 March had reached as far as Raglan’s headquarters, taking the strain off Campbell’s troops. Meanwhile, Colonel McMurdo, an old ADC of Charles Napier’s who had been with Campbell in the Kohat Pass, had arrived in the Crimea to institute a new Land Transport Corps and put a bit of stick about as regards the commissaries. Campbell still had his division digging and entrenching, but by now this was largely to keep the men occupied (see Plate 17). Confident in his defences, on 18 March he gave the men their first rest day since arriving at Balaklava. He was still twitchy enough to call all the troops out one night after hearing strange noises in the dip between Kadikoi and the Marine Heights, but it turned out to be an army of libidinous frogs, which amused General Canrobert enormously.123
Now that the basics of civilised life had been restored, boatloads of sightseers and officers’ wives began landing at Balaklava to hold picnics in between the skeletons – horse and human – in the North Valley or to watch the shelling of Sebastopol as the great second bombardment* began on 9 April. Though this barrage flattened the Russian Flagstaff bastion, once again it was not followed up by an assault. As the offensive faltered, so press interest waned. The mobile campaign of summer 1854 had given way to a long, tiresome war of attrition reliant on artillery and trenches, and with the scandals and shortages of the winter addressed, there was less for the newsmen to rail against. Punch, the previous autumn chock-full of the tsar, was now more interested in the new model dinosaurs in Sydenham. ‘Everyone was sick of the war,’ recalled Count von Eckstaedt, ‘but neither Russia nor the Western Powers could think of peace without incurring humiliation’.124
The temptation, when an army gets bogged down, is to try a new theatre. With stalemate at Sebastopol, Raglan suggested sailing east to take the port of Kertch, commanding the straits between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and thus cut off Russia from her Circassian provinces while gaining access for the allies to this inland sea. The French provided 8,500 men, the majority of the expedition.125 The 42nd, 71st and 93rd Highlanders were mustered to go, but, to Campbell’s surprise, Raglan chose Sir George Brown to lead them instead. Swallowing his pride, Campbell offered to serve under Brown but Raglan refused. One officer wrote:
You will hardly believe they send Sir G. Brown to command, and give him the Highland Brigade, taking it away from Sir C. Campbell, who has commanded it since he left England. The Highlanders worship him and would have fought twice as well under him as under anyone else … He will make a mess of it – he has not a general’s head on his shoulders as Sir C. C. has.126
‘I never saw C. so much vexed’, recorded Sterling:
There is no general here who has not been truer to Lord Raglan than C. He has uniformly defended him, not only because he thought him usually in the right, but also from a feeling that the proper soldier has of defending his general; and this is the way he treats him.
Barely had the expedition weighed anchor on 3 May than it was summarily recalled by Napoleon III. ‘My reading of it’, wrote Sterling, ‘is that the Emperor of the French is coming here to command the whole, and that he will not let the army be frittered away in petty enterprises’. However, following the resignation of French commander-in-chief Canrobert on 19 May, his replacement, General Pelissier, reinstated the Kertch operation. Two days late, the allies raised steam and spread canvas once again. As before, Sir George Brown led the Highlanders. ‘I am giving you good troops,’ Campbell told Brown. ‘I would as soon have my own,’ was Brown’s reply.127
Despite these squabbles, the expedition was a resounding success. The Russians panicked and destroyed their shore batteries along with fourteen warships. Even so, the allies still captured 300 enemy guns and 500 supply vessels. By the 25th they were in possession of Kertch, having suffered minimal casualties. Only two men from the 42nd were wounded, shot by drunken French soldiers.**
Back at Balaklava a major new allied advance on 22 May pushed the lines well forward of Campbell’s old defences. At last, in Shadwell’s words, ‘all anxiety for its safety became a thing of the past’.128 A third barrage of Sebastopol followed on 6 June. The next day, the allies captured the fortified Mamelon and the Ouvrages Blancs, but hesitated after the French again demanded more shelling. A fourth great bombardment was scheduled for 18 June, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, as a prelude to a crushing new offensive. Two days before, the Guards marched up to Sebastopol in readiness while Campbell’s Highlanders, who had returned triumphant from Kertch the previous day, formed a reserve. Plagued with delays, poor planning and even worse execution, it proved a costly failure. Allied losses, killed and wounded, were 4,604. For the Russians the figure was 5,776. Campbell’s division was not engaged.
Raglan took the defeat to heart. ‘I fear that it has affected his health’, wrote his nephew. ‘He looks far from well, and has grown very much aged latterly.’129 With cholera spreading once again, there was a risk Raglan would succumb. It had already claimed Admiral Boxer and Adjutant-General Estcourt, and was gaining a grip in the Coldstream Guards. On 26 June Raglan collapsed. On the morning of the 28th he seemed to recover, but that afternoon relapsed. By 8.35 p.m. he was dead, the victim of disease, overwork, a broken will and a broken heart.*
‘Everyone here regrets his loss as a kind hearted man, but very few regret his loss as a general’, confessed one doctor.130 ‘I should think his death an equal gain to himself and us’, declared Florence Nightingale. ‘To himself, because a good man has been taken from the evil to come – to us, because few perhaps could have done worse for us than he has done.’131 With so many dead or departed, the stock of generals had shrunk significantly, and there was now a chance Campbell might inherit command. Tylden had died of cholera after the Alma. Inkerman had been the death of Strangways and Cathcart, and Goldie soon afterwards. Lucan, Cardigan, Burgoyne, Cambridge, de Lacy Evans, Scarlett and Buller had all left. Torrens was near to death. Brown was invalided home on the day Raglan died and Bentinck was still suffering from injuries. The Duke of Cambridge, having recovered his nerves in London, thought himself a promising candidate but Lord Panmure deemed him incapable. Airey was still in the Crimea, but his name was mud back home. Meanwhile, Campbell had widespread popular support. ‘He is very highly thought of and liked in the army,’ wrote Colonel Dallas. ‘Would to Heaven he were Commander-in-Chief.’132 Even Major Ewart of the 93rd, who had his run-ins with Campbell, admitted that he would make ‘an excellent selection’.133
It was a surprise then, on 1 July, when Panmure telegraphed to confirm Simpson, the chief of staff, as Raglan’s successor (see Plate 20). Simpson had all along held a secret dormant commission to take over in the event of Raglan’s death. A Guardsman, Scotsman and Peninsular War veteran, and reputedly the tallest man in the British army, his only battle since 1815 had been fought in Scinde under Napier. ‘They say he is a most gentlemanly person, but I do not think that he has much war experience’, declared Sterling:
He commanded a Brigade in India, which was never engaged. They say however, he is very amiable, as if that was any use for this job. The disciplinarian of the army’s distinguishing quality – very amiable! He ought to be the Devil, as they called old Cameron of the 9th in the Peninsular War.134
Simpson’s appointment was greeted with incredulity. Russell labelled him ‘as unfit to command a British army in such a crisis as any sergeant in the trenches’.135 Deputy Judge-Advocate Romaine wrote, ‘I have never looked so despondently on our prospects’, condemning Simpson as ‘the most unfit man for his position that could be found’.136 Colonel George Bell insisted that Campbell instead ‘should be commanding an army, not a brigade’, but having ‘not been considered high enough in the dress circle … was passed over’.137 In the Lords, Ellenborough declared:
It does appear to me to be contrary to all reason that, when we have at our disposal officers who have acquired distinction in command where war has been carried on a great scale, we should decline to avail ourselves of their services, and should employ in preference the services of officers who, whatever the claim to distinction they may hereafter acquire, have had no opportunity of showing their talents for war.138**
From the very start, Simpson was uncomfortable in command, and so the search began for a successor. The queen demanded ‘the appointment of a Commander of weight, both as a soldier and a gentleman of accepted position. Neither of which, the queen is grieved to admit, we have available’. Palmerston and Panmure, having rejected Lord Seaton (too old), Lord Hardinge (too unfit), the Duke of Cambridge (mentally inadequate) and Sir Harry Smith (too excitable), pared their shortlist down to Lieutenant-General Sir James Fergusson and Major-General Sir William Codrington. Fergusson, still tormented by Peninsular War wounds, had seen no active service since Waterloo, and had spent the last two years as commandant of Malta. His speed in relaying troops and medical equipment to the Crimea had won him a knighthood, but he had no other experience of command above regimental level. Codrington had not fought before 1854, but had been hailed as one of the heroes of Inkerman, earning him the thanks of parliament and a special award of £100 a year. However, at the outbreak of war Codrington had been a captain, and Campbell a brigadier-general. To promote Codrington over Campbell now would be problematic. Victoria, though happy for Codrington to leapfrog his seniors, conceded that ‘his elevation over their heads will be grievously felt, as his personal superiority is not so marked as to be generally admitted. But this is a difficulty which must give way to the necessities of the case.’ Having initially favoured Sir Richard England, Simpson now backed Codrington as well. Admiral Stewart concurred.
‘It is not without much reflection and well weighing of every circumstance that I have made up my mind to put him [Codrington] over the heads of England, Bentinck, Campbell and Rokeby’, Panmure told Simpson on 31 July. ‘The only man among them whom I have any hesitation in superseding is Campbell; but I have been told that, though an excellent Brigadier, he is unfit for undivided responsibility.’ Like Simpson’s before him, Codrington’s status as anointed successor was kept under wraps. ‘Codrington’s commission is safe in my desk’, Simpson assured Panmure on 14 August. ‘No human being shall ever see it, so long as I am alive and well.’
The choice of Codrington meant the Crimean top brass would continue to be dominated by one corps. By 13 August, three of the six infantry divisions in the Crimea were commanded by Guardsmen (Bentinck, Rokeby and Codrington) with another in overall charge (Simpson), and a fifth as his chief of staff (Barnard). Even Palmerston realised, ‘We cannot have all our Generals Guardsmen’,139 though he himself was not prepared to take measures to remedy it. ‘Is it any wonder we cry out?’ protested Major Sterling:
They have all risen to rank younger men than their neighbours, from the advantage of being in the Guards … Some people hint at the possibility of C. [Campbell] being appointed to command. I cannot believe it; the position is so high, and the aristocracy so strong. He is the only man here competent. Public opinion may have, by mistake, found this out, and may compel his appointment.140
Palmerston and Panmure now set to sweeping aside the last obstacles in Codrington’s way: the two generals senior to him in the Crimea. Palmerston wanted Sir Richard England moved to Malta. ‘If that was done’, he explained, ‘and if Colin Campbell were told that he would have a high command in India, matters would be prepared for the event of Simpson being forced by ill health to retire.’141 ‘I do not think that will be enough for so distinguished a man as Sir Colin’, warned the queen.142 Fortunately for Panmure, fate removed one of the obstacles that August when England fell ill and his doctor ordered him to return home. Now only Campbell remained in the way.
To occupy him, he was granted a special Highland Division of Scottish regiments. In celebration, Campbell raised the flag of St Andrew at his headquarters. This new division ‘is not done for his sake though’, claimed Sterling, ‘but to give a separate command to Lord Rokeby’. After some juggling of battalions, Rokeby ended up with the 1st Division, now bereft of Highlanders. Sterling was at least pleased to be rid of ‘the Guards, with whom we wish to have nothing to do: their privileges and pretensions are very inconvenient’.143
The Russians were preparing another offensive. Eager for a dignified exit from the war, the new tsar, Alexander II, demanded his troops wallop the allies one last time before suing for peace. Prince Gorchakoff, by now Russian commander-in-chief in the Crimea, thought it a vain hope but the tsar was insistent, so on 16 August he made an attempt on the Fedioukine Heights. Twenty-seven thousand Frenchmen and Sardinians easily foiled him. Of the 9,902 casualties, only 1,761 were allied. General Paskevich condemned it as a battle ‘without aim, without calculation, without necessity’ which ‘eliminated the possibility of attacking anything thereafter’.144
The next day the allies began their fifth great bombardment. Campbell’s men had been doing their share of duty in the trenches before Sebastopol since 16 July, their ranks chipped away by Russian shells and musket fire: the 93rd alone lost six men killed, fifty-seven men and one officer wounded. ‘I can imagine no duty more trying and harassing than that performed every day and night by our army in the trenches’, wrote one officer:
If a man gets a medal for going through a battle which lasts only a few hours, without turning away, what do they deserve who, night after night, and day after day, are exposed to be killed or wounded, lying in a ditch, and have to perform their duties without the stimulus and excitement of action?145
As the allied guns resumed firing on 17 August, the Highland Division was despatched to Kamara to strengthen the Sardinians. Campbell had expected his men to form the vanguard in the attempt on Sebastopol and had been finalising plans with Colonel Cameron. Campbell considered the move to Kamara an overreaction: ‘The position held by the French and Sardinians is naturally strong but the defences which have been constructed … have made it quite unassailable.’146 For the men, however, a change was as a good as a rest. ‘The Highlanders are camped in a delightful situation, on the slope of the hill, as if the object was to show themselves to the enemy’, reported Sir Edward Colebrooke:
They are not a little pleased to be out of the trenches, and are preparing for a stay of a few days. This favour to a division which was encamped at Balaklava the whole of the most trying season, and has scarcely had six weeks of trench work, is a subject of much, and I think just, animadversion.147
Like its predecessors, the August barrage failed to subdue Sebastopol. No encroachment on the Russian lines by infantry was even attempted. The allies’ position was dire. ‘We all felt it could not go on much longer’, lamented Wolseley:
for our losses in killed and wounded per week were then great, and our little army could not bear that strain much longer. No more battalions were to be had from home or the colonies, and the untrained boys sent out to us as drafts were only soldiers by courtesy.148
The failure only made Simpson more determined to storm Sebastopol, and on 7 September the Highlanders marched the 12 miles from Kamara, ready for yet another great assault the following morning. On the way they passed freshly dug pits and sacks of lime, ready for the corpses. ‘Many a one saw his own grave that morning’, recalled Colour-Sergeant Angus Cameron of the 79th.149
When Raglan first encamped outside Sebastopol, a siege train of ninety-four guns had been thought quite sufficient to overcome the town. By September 1855 the allies had 803 guns in 115 batteries (see Plate 18). In those final four days an estimated 33,000 bombs, shells and shot were fired into Sebastopol. By the morning of the 8th, the allied barrage had resulted in 4,000 Russian casualties. ‘It was no longer possible to repair our fortifications,’ complained Gorchakoff, ‘and we restricted ourselves, consequently, to embanking the powder-magazines and stockades. The falling parapets filled up the ditches, the merlons* crumbled to pieces; it was, every moment, necessary to repair the embrasures; the gunners perished in great numbers and it became exceedingly difficult to replace them.’150
Simpson had not sought Campbell’s advice and the allied plan of attack was broadly unchanged from that used in previous failures. It was to be a predominantly French affair, using 25,300 of their men. They would take the Malakoff bastion and the Little Redan, while the British stormed the Great Redan, an arrowhead-shaped salient jutting out from the Russian lines. The assault would be at noon, when the enemy changed the guard and left their defences unmanned for a few vital minutes. Usual French practice was to attack at dawn or dusk, so the timing would catch the Russians unawares.
Simpson believed that those corps that had borne the brunt of the fighting were due the honour of the final assault, so leading the charge would be the Light Division and the 2nd Division.** They had been ensconced on the plateau for months, half-starved and decimated by disease, their losses made up with raw recruits from England. Morale was at rock bottom. ‘I have seen men hold their hands above the parapet, hoping to have a shot through them so as to be invalided home rather than endure such wretchedness’, recalled one sergeant.151 A war that had started in Wellingtonian style now resembled the trenches of Flanders.
To reach the Great Redan, these exhausted British troops had 200 yards to cross, ground scoured by Russian artillery, making victory, in Campbell’s mind, ‘a most impossible event’.152 Spearheading the assault would be 320 men with 40 ladders, under the command of Lieutenant Ranken, RE. In Campbell’s opinion:
To suppose that such a work defended by Russian soldiers was to be carried out by forty men presenting themselves on the ramparts from forty ladders, supposing we had succeeded in bringing the whole forty to the scarp of the Work and placing them against it, [was] a most improbable event under the fire of artillery and musquetry.
Following Ranken’s forlorn hope would be a further 1,000 men, with a second wave of 1,500 behind. Another 3,000 troops huddled in the third parallel as additional support. Campbell’s division formed the second reserve, the 79th on the right with the 42nd behind them, and on the left the 72nd supported by the 93rd. A narrow trench led to the front, making it hard for the men to disgorge quickly, or to congregate in ‘one big honest lump’ – the critical omission Campbell had identified at San Sebastian.
‘The day was fine and bright, though somewhat chilly, for a keen north wind blew with considerable force’, recalled one officer. ‘We had had no rain for some time, and the heavy breeze raised the dust in clouds, and fairly blinded us at times.’153 As noon approached, the allies all but ceased firing, with just a few guns left battering the suburbs. The French had only 20 yards between their forward trenches and the Russians. ‘They had constructed a bridge which they had placed on wheels or slides by which it could be moved forward and be placed across the ditch, capable of admitting three men in front’, explained Campbell:
The signal of advance was made at Noon. In a moment the salient of the Work was covered with men. The French flew across the short space intervening between their Works and the ditch and got into the Malakoff in strength without a shot being fired. The bridge being placed across the ditch, they hurried over by that passage, as well as through the two galleries and in crowds over the glacis into the ditch, and there having been no resistance in getting in, though plenty afterwards in the attempt of the enemy to drive them out, they rapidly ascended the Malakoff at this salient.
Once inside, the French cut the wires of the mines rigged to explode the bastion. The Russians were taken by surprise. The Zouaves found the Malakoff’s commander in the middle of lunch. The attack had lasted no more than a few minutes.
At the Little Redan the French met a more resolute defence. ‘The attack on the Malakoff was a complete surprise; and as all the other attacks were to be contingent on the success of the one on that Work, the enemy in every other point of their defences were fully prepared and in readiness for resistance’, explained Campbell. ‘The obstacles prepared were many and difficult to be overcome, the ditch was deep and the scarp hardly injured, and the front of fire was extensive which the enemy could offer to the advance of the French.’154 Nevertheless, ‘Vinoy’s strength of character kept his men to their work’, reported Sterling. ‘He planted his sword in the ground, near the flag which was hoisted at the gorge of Malakoff, and, with revolver in hand, threatened to shoot anyone who retired beyond the sword.’
Now it was the turn of the British. First out of the trenches were the Rifles, followed by the ladder party. Against them were ranged 7,500 Russian troops. Unlike the French, the British were expected and found themselves raked by grapeshot. Enough of them made it to the Great Redan’s outer defences for the Vladimir troops inside to fall back, but their momentum was squandered. ‘They had got a habit of skulking behind gabions; “gabion dodging” is their own word’, complained Sterling. ‘Those that did go out, for the most part clung like a swarm of bees on the exterior slope of the parapet of the Redan.’155 Many of the men were convinced the bastion was mined, ready to blow once enough British troops were inside. The Russians, surprised by their enemy’s timidity, now launched a counter-attack, taking 150 British troops prisoner, and buying themselves enough time to reinforce the Redan with two more Russian battalions.
‘There was little of that dash and enthusiasm which might have been looked for from British soldiers in an assault’, declared Ranken. ‘In fact, it required all the efforts and example of their officers to get the men on, and these were rendered almost ineffective from the manner in which the various regiments soon got confused and jumbled together.’156 ‘Some forty men and officers actually got in and were killed inside,’ reported Campbell:
but these bolder men were not closely supported, and gave way. Those who followed … came forward well, filled the ditch and face of the work close on either side of the salient; but there they remained without moving forward over the crest of the work, from whence they were shot down unresistingly, giving way at last in confusion, and retiring in precipitation to the trenches.157
‘Each fresh arrival of troops upon the salient increased the terrible confusion which prevailed there, instead of coming as an effective reinforcement’, complained one soldier.158
Brigadier-Generals Shirley and Van Straubenzee, Colonels Unett and Handcock, and Major Welsford had been all killed or wounded, leaving Colonel Charles Windham as the senior officer. Windham had already sent three officers back to Codrington requesting reinforcements (one of them twice), but none of his requests had had any effect. Codrington had remained ‘in the advanced trench, with all his Staff, about 250 yards from the angle of the Redan, with his men clustered in its rampart, neither advancing nor retiring for three quarters of an hour’, according to Sterling.159 Windham decided to turn back and ask Codrington in person. It would prove a grave mistake. As another colonel observed, ‘If the majority of the men fighting, see their leader, unhurt, turn his back to the enemy, it is very certain the men will quickly follow his example.’160 Windham found Codrington vacillating. He questioned the prospects for another assault, and whether Windham could even reach the Redan again. Still trying to convince Codrington, Windham saw his troops fall back.
‘I heard, directly after I regained our trenches, that three officers of the 41st, after vainly striving to induce the men to advance, rushed forward together, and were all three shot down like one man by the cross-fire of the Russians behind their parados’, recalled Ranken. ‘That was the turning point, according to this account, of the men’s indecision; they wavered and fled.’161 ‘It was a most galling sight to see our men running like scattered sheep from that slaughterhouse across the ground between the Redan and our trenches, and the Russians blazing away at them’, wrote Colour-Sergeant Cameron. ‘I may say, that all ranks, from the Colonel down to the Pioneer, were disgusted.’162
Though the Great Redan stood unconquered, one more heave might carry the town. Windham pleaded with Codrington to throw the Highlanders forward,* but Codrington refused, so Windham set out for headquarters to persuade Simpson and Airey. Blaming the defeat on a ‘want of pluck and method’, Windham then asked Airey, within earshot of Simpson, to ‘Tell the General he ought to attack again at once with the Highland Division’. ‘Well, maybe you’re right,’ said Simpson, ‘but I must see Pelissier about it in the morning, first.’163
The assault had resulted in 7,551 French casualties (including 409 officers), 2,000 men and 154 officers killed or wounded among the British, and for the Russians, losses of around 13,000. So far kept in reserve, Campbell’s Highlanders had suffered sixty-three casualties, including Brigadier-General Cameron, who was mildly injured. ‘Had Sir Colin Campbell been given command of the whole business’, argued Wolseley, ‘and allowed to make his own arrangements and plans, and to employ the Highland Brigade, who had practically suffered no loss during the war, we should never have been beaten out of the Redan’.164
By 4 p.m. the forward trenches were filled with Highlanders, watching as an unceasing procession of dead and wounded was carried to the rear. It was too late in the day to think about another assault. ‘We made coffee for ourselves in our mess tins and then we laid down to rest, everything being quiet’, recalled Colour-Sergeant Cameron. A while later he overheard Campbell speaking to Colonel Douglas of the 79th. ‘Don’t let them be disturbed. They will require all the rest they can get, for by tomorrow at daybreak I must be in there’, said Campbell, pointing towards the Redan. Unfortunately for the men, the Russian sappers made sleep all but impossible. ‘Several explosions of gigantic character were made at short intervals, evidently the magazines of different batteries along the line of their defences’, explained Campbell:
At one moment an explosion of a formidable description would be made on the left – shortly after, one or two at different other places, and this was continued along the exterior line of their defences throughout the night at short intervals in different places, with an occasional explosion in the Town.
A little after midnight Campbell ordered the 42nd forward with 100 gabions to form a lodgement in front of the Redan, ready for another offensive. Meanwhile, Lieutenant McBean of the 93rd crept out to retrieve the wounded, but as he approached the Redan, he found it oddly silent,** apparently abandoned. He reported back immediately. Thinking it might be a trick to lure his Highlanders inside and then blow them sky high, Campbell ordered McBean to find twenty volunteers to investigate further. When Major Ewart announced to the 93rd’s light company that he wanted them to provide half this detachment, the men were open-mouthed. They were under the impression the Redan was still guarded by several thousand Russians.
McBean’s party confirmed the Redan was virtually empty, but Campbell was still suspicious:
I dared not occupy it, from the number of explosions taking place all round, before daylight, but while the enemy fired every Magazine along the line of their defences, they did not touch their Magazines in the Great Redan, an act of great humanity – for the whole of our wounded who remained in the ditch and face of the Work, and between the ditch and our trenches, would have been destroyed.
While Campbell hesitated, the Russians left Sebastopol to its fate, methodically evacuating their troops via a bridge of rafts across the harbour. In just a few hours 30,000–40,000 Russians escaped, leaving behind only 500 wounded men and a doctor. Gorchakoff ordered his troops to burn every building as they retired, ‘thus offering a barrier of fire to the advance of either French or English’, as Campbell put it. As he told Seward:
When the whole of the houses in Sebastopol were in full blaze, so strong as to be impossible to arrest the flames, they began to remove their bridge, evidently for fear of being prevented by artillery from taking it away, leaving their Steamers to take off the troops which had been left in town to effect its destruction by fire.
‘I cannot conceive anything more complete or more perfect in every detail than the mode and manner in which they accomplished their retreat and withdrawal from Sebastopol, and transport of their troops across the harbour’, wrote Campbell, little knowing that two years later he would be mounting a dangerous night-time evacuation of his own (see Plate 21). No further offensive was needed from the allies. ‘I for one was very thankful at the turn things had taken’, admitted Sergeant Cameron. ‘I don’t know what the old veteran thought about it, but I was glad he was disappointed in not being able to keep his appointment at daybreak.’165
For troops who had witnessed a year-long siege, the hush which now descended on Sebastopol was curiously alien. ‘The cessation of fire seems so odd to us’, wrote Paget. ‘It is like an old clock ceasing to tick.’166 After sunrise, Campbell ventured into the deserted Redan with his old Opium War colleague, Captain Keppel.*** They found the ground in front of the Malakoff so strewn with shell splinters it was ‘literally paved with iron’.167 ‘Horrors met us at every step’, recalled Keppel. ‘In a small hut, at a table, was a Russian officer, smart in his uniform but on speaking to him, I found he was dead. Faithful, half-starved dogs guarded bodies, from which no coaxing would draw them.’168 The French, as usual, were first in to loot,* swiftly followed by the Highlanders. ‘The 93rd behaved infamously’, complained one lieutenant. ‘I saw the men rifling the pockets of our dead Officers and didn’t I pitch into them? The brutes would not lend a hand in carrying the stretchers, so intent were they on plunder.’169 At 9 a.m. Campbell’s division tramped back to Kamara, out of harm’s way.
The Russians’ retreat from Sebastopol, from W.F. Williams’s England’s Battles by Sea and Land.
At last, Sebastopol had fallen, but the elation which greeted the news of victory soon faded when the public realised it meant neither an end to the war, nor the start of a new offensive to occupy the rest of the Crimea. ‘The nation should awake from the flattering dream that it is treading the path of victory,’ declared the United Service Magazine, ‘when in reality, it is, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, wandering in the valley of humiliation.’170 ‘The calamity was deeper, darker, more humiliating than the most despondent had feared’. lamented The Times, before going on to demand Simpson’s recall.171 The ‘feeble attack of the English on the Redan stamps their Crimean generals with the indelible mark of incapacity’, pronounced Karl Marx.172
Once again, it seemed there might be a chance for Campbell to take over, despite the government’s best efforts. The day before the assault on the Redan, Simpson, acting on Panmure’s instructions, had offered Campbell the post of commandant of Malta, the job Palmerston had tried to foist on Sir Richard England to get him out of the way. Sterling condemned it as ‘an insult at this moment to a man of his antecedents’.173 Panmure knew it was a slap in the face, but then if Campbell resigned in a huff, it would serve his purpose just as well. Campbell told Simpson ‘to thank his lordship for the offer, but that as long as we remained in the presence of the enemy, I would prefer to remain where I was – unless it was desired that I should leave this army’.174
The queen’s account of Campbell’s reaction was somewhat more dramatic. According to Her Majesty, Campbell had remarked to Bentinck:
They have offered me Malta. Have they offered it you?’ Sir H. B. answered no, & begged he would not put himself in a passion about it. He ground his teeth, clenched his fists & exclaimed ‘That d— Panmure has offered me Malta in the face of the enemy. I tell you what, Bentinck, if there was a King on the Throne, I would not remain here an hour longer, but for that dear queen, I’ll remain here to the last.175
It brought the prospect of retirement to the forefront of his mind once more. ‘My affairs in latter years have been so prosperous that I hope to be able to have a little home of my own in some pleasant and convenient quarter of London,’ he told Seward on 10 September, ‘where you will sometimes come and stay with me and my old sister, who will be my housekeeper and will help me to take care of you and make you comfortable.’ ‘If I outlive this Campaign or the service upon which we are at present employed, I shall bid adieu to soldiering and give place to younger men. I completed last month my 47th year of service, sufficiently long to justify my seeking for retirement.’176
Rumours now began to circulate of Simpson’s imminent resignation. Conscious of his ‘want of health and strength of mind for the labour and responsibility of his command’,177 the commander-in-chief had secretly informed the prime minister of his wish to return home. ‘Should his successor be Colin Campbell or Codrington. This we must consider’, mused Palmerston on 30 September. While back in July, Panmure, Palmerston and the queen had all been eager for Codrington to be Simpson’s heir, now they were having second thoughts. The Redan had destroyed his credibility. One surgeon likened Codrington’s conduct to ‘a fireman attempting to extinguish a fierce and wide-spreading conflagration with a garden syringe’. Windham had written a memo analysing the assault, which Simpson had forwarded to Panmure. Although Codrington was only mentioned once, his culpability was clearly implied. In Russell’s words, the Redan had ‘dammed the current which had set in so long and so quietly in his favour’.178
Not with the prime minister, it seemed. ‘We do not, on the whole think that any real blame attached to him for the failure on that day’, insisted Palmerston. ‘The thing attempted was scarcely possible.’179 ‘Sir C. Campbell will have his supporters, and Sir W. Codrington’s unsuccessful attempt on the 8th will somewhat strengthen their case’, Panmure informed the queen. Nevertheless, he was ‘still disposed that Your Majesty’s troops will be safer in Sir W. Codrington’s hands than those of any other officer’.180 The rest of the government was not so sure. ‘The Cabinet had a leaning towards Sir Wm. Codrington, on account of the unpractability [sic] of Sir C. Campbell’s temper, etc.,’ explained the queen, ‘but felt that, if there was a strong feeling in the Army as to the failure at the Redan being due to Sir Wm. Codrington’s bad management, & that Sir C. Campbell, it was believed, would have succeeded had he undertaken it, then it would not do to appoint Codrington.’181 Her Majesty agreed. ‘The Queen does not think that it will do to place Sir William Codrington over the heads of all his seniors upon a patent failure,’ she told her government:
Public opinion at home and in the Army would never support this, as, in fact, it would not be just. Under all the circumstances the Queen thinks Sir Colin Campbell (with his known good qualities and defects) the senior General after Sir H. Bentinck’s return, also the fittest to take the command and to inspire our army and our Allies with confidence.182
Unfortunately, the mood at Horse Guards was against him. ‘There was some desperate jealousy of Sir Colin among the military staff’, wrote the Duke of Argyll.183 Hardinge considered he had risen as far as his talents allowed. Months ago, Raglan had advised the Duke of Newcastle that Campbell was unfit for isolated command. He was also wrongly reported to be a poor linguist.* Admiral Lyons told the diarist Charles Greville that ‘he never had well understood why it was that Colin Campbell was always considered out of the question, and his own opinion seemed to be that he was the fittest man. The French thought so, and one of the alleged reasons against him, viz. that he could not speak French, was certainly not true.’184
The government wanted a conciliator. Raglan’s great strength had been his emollience, sometimes to a fault. The impression in Whitehall was that Campbell would infuriate Britain’s allies. ‘I have an idea that Sir C. is a fiery-tempered fellow’, declared Panmure,185 but as one officer pointed out:
So far from being likely to quarrel with the French, there is no officer here possessed with so high an opinion of their character … It is charming to see the way in which Sir Colin is greeted by all the officers of that French Division [Vinoy’s] when he goes down to visit them in the trenches.186
An aide of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, said that there was no better instance of cordial Anglo-French relations than between Campbell and Vinoy.187 But in saving his diplomacy for foreign allies, Campbell had developed a reputation as a curmudgeon among his own. ‘His energy – a disturbing, and not always popular quality – together with the singular enmity he used to bear towards the Guards, was enough to prevent him from being liked in proportion to the trust he inspired’, observed Kinglake.188 Annoying the Guards was tactically disastrous. Campbell was becoming a traitor to his adopted class, a grizzled enfant terrible, a most unsafe pair of hands. Simpson thought him ‘peppery’ and Campbell had already fallen out with the new chief of staff.189 ‘Sir Colin would never have got on as Commander-in-Chief’, wrote one officer. ‘His temper was very violent, he has no manners and would inevitably have been in hot water with all his superior officers in no time.’190 ‘Sir Colin Campbell, with all his great merits as an Officer, is the incarnation of what is called a “troublesome customer”’, maintained Colonel Pakenham.
After appointing Bernard Montgomery as General Auchinleck’s replacement in North Africa, Winston Churchill told his wife ‘If he is disagreeable to those around him, he is disagreeable to the enemy.’ Palmerston’s government was far less indulgent. ‘The official people are evidently afraid of giving the command to Sir Colin Campbell for fear of his temper’, wrote one officer. ‘He has too much of Sir C. Napier in him.’191 ‘He is also the man to make Lord Panmure afraid’, claimed Sterling. ‘If he were Commander-in-Chief, I am convinced he would not submit to manage his army under the dictation of the electric wires from the War Office.’192 Panmure was in complete agreement with that assessment: Campbell ‘had not shown that acquiescence in superior authority which he ought to have done’. In contrast, Codrington, as Panmure told the queen, was ‘a steady, good officer, attentive to his men, vigilant in position, calm in action, discreet in council’, a man whose ‘manner will secure courtesy’. In other words, a younger version of Raglan.
Revenge also played its part. Since May 1855, Panmure had borne a grudge against Campbell for supplying Ellenborough (a powerful critic of Palmerston’s government) with letters asserting that the Russian defences at MacKenzie’s Farm, east of Sebastopol, were ‘impregnable’. It had been monstrously hypocritical of Campbell, given his disapproval of officers’ contributions to the newspapers. ‘These letters do the army infinitely more harm than I can tell and it is provoking to hear them read’,193 Panmure had told Raglan. For Ellenborough though, Campbell still remained ‘one of the very first officers we have, an officer who had the entire confidence of the late Sir Charles Napier for more than ten years, who I believe had designated him on his deathbed for that command in the army which I trust he will hold’.194 In April 1855 his lordship had tabled a resolution condemning the government’s failure to remove useless Crimean commanders, while at the same time holding Campbell up as a model general. None of this had raised Campbell’s stock with Panmure or Palmerston.
Unvoiced was the suspicion that Campbell was something of a Scots Presbyterian counter-jumper, an idea given credence by his adoption of the Highland bonnet, the headgear of the rank and file, after the Battle of the Alma. It looked like an attempt to curry favour with the men, a dangerous stunt given the frenzied atmosphere of the times. Social unrest is doubly worrying for wartime governments, and by the autumn of 1855 they had suffered over a year’s critique of aristocratic rule by radicals who used Campbell as a poster boy, in particular from Henry Layard and his Administrative Reform Association. Practical, self-reliant and superficially self-made, Campbell was the darling of the aspirant middle class, but supporters such as Layard had an agenda stretching well beyond the army and encompassing the complete reform of the British elite, an agenda which they had been promoting to the masses. ‘[The people] are told that it is not this or that minister who can restore our affairs,’ Greville had written in November 1854, ‘but a change in the whole system of government, and the substitution of plebeians and new men for the leaders of parties and members of aristocratic families.’195 In such an atmosphere, those in government, either consciously or unconsciously, were fearful of opening the door to Campbell’s sort. If today they let a cabinetmaker’s son lead the army in the Crimea, tomorrow it could be barricades in Whitehall, and the day after, sans-culottes lounging on the Woolsack. After all, at base, the ancient justification for an aristocracy was that it provided military commanders. Once Glaswegians showed they could do the job just as well, people might start asking what exactly all those bluebloods were really for.
Then there was Campbell’s Highland aura. It might be popular with the mob, but to others it looked distinctly proletarian. Victoria and Albert, having taken over the lease on Balmoral in 1848 after the previous occupant choked on a fishbone, had repopularised Scottish style, but for aristocrats and intellectuals their obsession was a rather non-U foible. However much the queen and consort loved stag’s antler chandeliers and tartan bell pulls, they didn’t spread into the ballrooms of Mayfair. Highland trappings were merely a temporary affectation, even among aficionados, no more sincere an expression of cultural solidarity with the Scots than the mandarins on the wallpaper of an Oriental-style drawing room implied a love of Chinese imperialism. Though visiting the Highlands was just about acceptable, Highlanders themselves were often seen as demonstrably inferior. ‘A detestable race with some excellent exceptions’ was the verdict of Captain Hawley of the 89th. ‘It is a fact that morally and intellectually they are an inferior race to the Lowland Saxon,’ one Scottish journalist had insisted in 1847. This attitude was strongest in the Scottish lowlands.* In 1851 the Fifeshire Journal had stated categorically that:
Ethnologically the Celtic race is an inferior one, and, attempt to disguise it we may, there is naturally and rationally no getting rid of the great cosmical fact that it is destined to give way – slowly and painfully it may be, but still most certainly – before the higher capabilities of the Anglo-Saxon.196
By laying claim to a Highland persona, Campbell was labelling himself as an untermensch. It might charm the English petite bourgeoisie but many senior officers would no more have a Highlander command an army than a Donegal fishmonger or a Cherokee chief.
Campbell tried to have it both ways. While he enjoyed the guise of kilted paladin, he objected if the Scottishness imputed to him was too extreme. Well-born Scotsmen did not speak with Scottish accents. Campbell did. Glasgow, then as now, had one of the least penetrable dialects, far more pronounced than that of the Highlands. When the Morning Chronicle described Campbell thundering at Guardsmen in their tents, ‘Oot on you, ye lazy Guards! Nae wunder ye wur surprised and licked at Inkerman!’ it brought forth a hilariously tetchy rebuttal. Campbell denied adamantly that such words had passed his lips, but his real objection was the accent. ‘The sentence in broad Scotch, imputed to me, bears its own evidence of falsehood; for I do not know how to speak broad Scotch, and I am told I have not even a Scotch accent.’** This from a man who never objected to journalists at the Alma and Balaklava reporting his words in a thick Glaswegian patois. The curious thing about this letter was that Campbell sought to refute every minute detail of the newspaper’s story. ‘The Royal piper was not stationed behind my chair at dinner and her Majesty did not summon me to sit by her side on the sofa’, he insisted, labelling such suggestions ‘idle and impertinent stories’.197 He seemed unable to distinguish between inaccuracies that were damaging and inaccuracies that were irrelevant.
Far more damaging were the press disclosures in early 1855 that Campbell wasn’t his real name at all. Here was a skeleton he had kept buried for fifty years. The revelation that he had been born Colin MacLiver, and changed his name to Campbell upon joining the army, came as a shock to the public. The concern uppermost was, what did he have to hide? Faced with silence from Campbell, the press supplied its own fanciful explanations.*
To the rescue came Campbell’s cousin, Peter Stewart MacLiver. Here was a man with the answer. His very surname proved it. Peter explained that when Colin had been offered his commission as an ensign, he had been interviewed by the Duke of York in the presence of his uncle and patron, Major John Campbell. The duke assumed the boy was a Campbell, and so his name was entered as such. His uncle assured Colin it was a good military name and suggested he leave it uncorrected. This version of events has been repeated ever since.
It is a yarn riddled with problems. It was never corroborated by anyone, certainly not Colin Campbell, and never mentioned prior to the Crimean War. Peter MacLiver was a journalist and later an MP, which for most people would be enough to question his version of events. Practically speaking, it makes no sense. The Duke of York’s military secretary would have been informed of Campbell’s desire for a commission in advance and would have known full well what his name was. Neither the duke nor his secretaries noted down the names of new officers upon meeting them, because they already had them on file. Moreover, the Duke of York did not make a habit of greeting every new ensign, especially during the Napoleonic Wars when the turnover of officers was at its peak. We know Campbell, at the time of his commission, was on the Isle of Wight, from where he travelled straight to Kent and then to Portugal, leaving no opportunity for him to visit the duke at Horse Guards. There is also the little matter of Campbell’s sister, who dropped the name MacLiver in favour of Campbell as well. We can be sure this wasn’t the Duke of York’s mistake.
The final nail in the coffin of this myth is the letter from General Brownrigg, Colonel of the 9th Foot, to the Duke of York’s military secretary dated 19 May 1808, a week before Campbell was commissioned: ‘I have been applied to by Captain Campbell of the 9th Regt, who is a very deserving officer, to recommend his Relation, Mr Colin Campbell for an Ensigncy.’ No mention of a MacLiver. Clearly Colin adopted his nom de guerre before being gazetted.
That is not to say it wasn’t a brilliantly crafted myth. Placing the blame on the Duke of York absolved Campbell of any nefarious purpose, and gave him a royal association. The duke was dead so he couldn’t confirm or deny it. It was a clever ploy by a creative journalist to get Campbell out of a hole, and a good story is always more enduring than the truth.
Peter MacLiver did not stop there. He told all who would listen that Campbell’s grandfather had been a Scottish laird and owner of the estate of Ardnave, on the island of Islay, but had forfeited his lands following his support for the anti-British Young Pretender in 1745. This was solid, Sir Walter Scott stuff. The Victorian public lapped it up: Colin Campbell, the descendant of Scottish gentry, cruelly robbed of his birthright by his grandfather’s ill-advised but romantic support for Bonnie Prince Charlie. Would that it were true. The whole of Islay had been purchased by Daniel Campbell, a wealthy Glasgow merchant, in 1726 for £12,000.
So why did Colin change his name? That he was illegitimate has been suggested as an explanation, although there is no evidence for it.** There may have been an element of snobbery in choosing Campbell (a lowland name) over MacLiver (a Highland name), and it certainly associated him with a powerful clan, including many senior officers and politicians. It would have made matters easier for Colin’s guardian, his maternal uncle, Major John Campbell. There is no record of the major having children, so perhaps he wanted Colin to adopt his name out of dynastic conceit, but then it seems odd that Colin’s father did not object. Also, it was the Campbell, rather than the MacLiver, side of the family which bore a stigma in so far as Colin’s mother had been the product of a bigamous marriage. Even so, ingratiating himself with his uncle seems the most plausible explanation. As the Bombay Times reported in 1858, ‘the name of Campbell was adopted by Sir Colin to gratify an uncle by the mother’s side, who bore that name and had some influence in the army. That influence procured a commission for Sir Colin and for his brother John.’***
On 3 October, the cabinet met to consider the question of Simpson’s successor.**** While sharing Victoria’s misgivings, it decided that Codrington was nevertheless the best choice. At the same time, it seconded Prince Albert’s suggestion to split the army into two corps d’armée and give Campbell one of them.198 To soften the blow, Panmure recommended that Campbell’s agreement to serve under Codrington be sought by letter before the new commander was imposed. ‘Sir C. Campbell, an officer of high reputation and merit, who, though not judged fit to command the Army, must have every respect showed to his feelings, and ought not to be passed over by a telegraphic appointment’, Panmure advised the queen.199
The very next day a leader article in The Times plunged in the knife:
A single year of warfare has disposed of the whole of those veterans, with the exception of Sir Colin Campbell, who has been laid up in lavender all the winter with his Highlanders, and whose military talents, if we may judge of them by his exploits in the Punjaub, do not entitle him to aspire to a great command. We have seen the result of sending a young army into the field almost entirely led by old chiefs, who owed their rank to seniority and brevet promotion; the best of them have either fallen in battle or sunk under disease, and those who remain are mere obstructions to the real strength of the army.
In response, Campbell released his bulldog. In a letter to the editor, Sterling pilloried a polemic ‘which does not do justice to the good services and well-won claims of one of the most distinguished and deserving officers in Her Majesty’s army’. ‘I trust that even the back of an anonymous scribbler can feel the smart of Colonel Sterling’s merited castigation’, wrote one observer.200 The Times realised it had overstepped the mark in condemning a public hero, and apologised. ‘On the whole I don’t think that Sterling’s letter is thought much of here’, remarked one officer in Sebastopol. ‘Sir Colin’s reputation as a soldier is much too high to require his Adjutant-General’s writing about it.’201
Sterling’s protestations were futile and the newspaper debate academic. The issue of command had already been settled. On 22 October, Panmure told Simpson, ‘You may send for Codrington and consult as to when you will give him over the command, but don’t tell him or any one else that you held a commission appointing him to command in event of your removal suddenly. Send me that commission in the next bag.’ But before Codrington had a chance to gather up the reins, Campbell requested permission to hand the Highland Division over to Brigadier-General Cameron, and return home. ‘The old Highlander has smelt a rat and determined to be off before any change takes place’, Panmure warned Simpson. Having by now let his goatee grow into a considerable grey beard, giving him a hint of Lear on the heath, Campbell boarded the steamer Calcutta on 3 November. Three days later, the despatch announcing Codrington’s promotion arrived, accompanied by the letter from Panmure requesting Campbell stay and serve under the new commander-in-chief. It was too late. Campbell had already left. Codrington seemed pleased with the turn of events. As he told Panmure, ‘Sir Colin Campbell having left the Army removes what I think would have been an impossibility on his part – serving under me.’202
Codrington’s appointment proved just as controversial as Simpson’s. For Russell he was ‘the last to arise out of the debris of old-fogeyism, red-tapery, staffery, Horse Guardism, etc’.203 Sir George Brown complained that he ‘had no claim whatever to such a preference and distinction, either on the score of previous service or of professional acquirement’.204 ‘So Codrington is appointed Commander-in-Chief!’ declared Paget. ‘What an ill-used man is old Colin Campbell! If you were to canvass the whole army, I believe it would be unanimous for him.’205 ‘It seems rather absurd to have passed him over for the Chief Command and then to make him the hero of the war’, added Colonel Pakenham.206
The official story was that Campbell was returning on ‘urgent private affairs’. By leaving before Codrington’s promotion was made public, he sidestepped accusations that his departure was due to professional jealousy. ‘The gallant general could not have given up his command in consequence of dissatisfaction with an arrangement of which he could have had no knowledge’, asserted the York Herald,207 in blissful ignorance. The Morning Post confirmed that his leave was just that, leave, and he would return soon.208 Not everyone was taken in. ‘We know that when Sir Colin Campbell returned to England, he had not the remotest intention of going back to the Crimea’,209 claimed Reynolds’s Newspaper. One colonel asserted that Campbell ‘has gone home in consequence of his having lost his temper and used violent language at a Council of War’.210 A letter to the Daily News, dated 9 November, was unequivocal that foul play lay behind it:
The public understand the whole matter. There is a low-minded jealousy of our one man, which is at this crisis of our history and our danger a crime … Go into any cottage, and ask ‘Who, think you, had earned most credit in the war, so far as the English are concerned? The ready reply will be the same. But sir, Sir Colin had a fault: a grievous one … He is one of those poor, crotchety, simple-hearted people who are fools enough to think that duty is the star which should guide a soldier in his career and that it is a dishonour to a noble and generous profession to compromise with abuses and to pander to a corrupt and effete aristocracy.
After the rest of the press scrambled to mourn his departure, even The Times, having previously condemned him as deadweight, praised his ‘gallant conduct in action, his vigilance, his carelessness of fatigue and exposure’ as ‘an example we can ill afford to miss’.211 ‘It is a pity they did not find that out sooner’, wrote Sterling.212
Campbell arrived in London on 17 November. One of his first acts was to visit Panmure, who showed him a copy of the letter sent to Balaklava asking him to serve under Codrington.213 ‘He seemed then to be in very good tone, and though I asked him no questions, he appeared to me to be not indisposed to resume his duties as commander of one of your Corps d’armée’, Panmure advised Codrington two days later.214 Campbell’s recollection was rather different. Unmoved by the ‘utter want of value, in my eyes, of the flummery contained in the letter of the Minister of War’, and still riled that Panmure had ‘proposed me to go from duty with a division in the field to become a schoolmaster to the recruits in Malta’, he had not deigned to answer, and instead headed over to Lord Hardinge to explain that he had returned in order to offer his resignation in person. ‘I do not return in pique at being passed over,’ he told Hardinge, ‘for had the Queen appointed a corporal to command the Army and intimated to me her desire that my services should be continued, I would never have come away.’ Those words were to become a hostage to fortune.
Hardinge tried his best to persuade Campbell to reconsider serving under Codrington, citing as precedent the Battle of Ferozeshah during the First Sikh War, when Hardinge, though governor-general, had served under his own commander-in-chief, Hugh Gough. ‘I looked him straight in the face’, recalled Campbell, ‘and said to him “My lord, the army in India knew, and every officer and soldier in the whole army knew, that your lordship took that step to save the army, and that your lordship did save the army in consequence. The cases are not parallel.”’215 Campbell was immoveable, but Hardinge was sufficiently sensitive to his social ambitions to realise where a solution might lie.
The next day Campbell travelled to Windsor for an audience with the queen and Consort. Panmure had advised Victoria that should ‘Your Majesty, in conversation with Sir Colin Campbell, be graciously pleased to intimate that it would afford satisfaction to Your Majesty were he to return to assume command of the 1st Corps d’Armée, your Majesty would establish the authority of your Royal Warrant and save a fine old soldier from lapsing into a retired grumbler’.216 Aged 36, Victoria was that odd mixture of autarchy and girlish silliness, half Boudicea, half Violet Elizabeth. ‘War is indeed awful … I never regretted more than I have done these last few months that I was a poor woman and not a man!’217 she had told the Duke of Cambridge after the Battle of Inkerman, bosom presumably heaving with emotion under imaginary Elizabethan armour. Whether it was because Campbell found it difficult to refuse such a woman, or because he still held that a soldier’s first loyalty was to the monarch rather than government, or because like all renegades, he wanted acceptance from those who had rejected him on his own terms, when the queen pressed him to return to the Crimea, he assured her that he would serve ‘under a corporal’ if she so desired. ‘Conduct like this is very gratifying and will add to Sir Colin Campbell’s high name’, Her Majesty told Hardinge.218 ‘We were much pleased with Sir Colin, & struck by his strong sense of duty, & discipline, still regretting that he is not the Commander-in-Chief out there; his hasty temper, coupled, as it is with the warmest kindest heart, would be very essential’, she wrote. ‘Our misfortune hitherto has been that all our Commanders-in-Chief have been too soft & easy tempered.’219 ‘They first put the Court favourites at the top, and then employ the queen to make the good officers serve under them; it is a shame of the first water’, protested Sterling.220 ‘I doubt the expediency of having asked the queen to request Campbell to go back,’ observed Palmerston. ‘Sovereigns are best kept out of such matters.’221
Sulk over, in late January Campbell set off again for the Crimea, arriving on St Valentine’s Day ‘looking very fresh’.222 His men had come through the winter in good heart. As so often in British wars, the high watermark of supplies came after the conflict had been decided. By late 1855 rations were plentiful and varied, and the Highlanders had enough huts to make an officers’ mess and a theatre.* Balaklava harbour stood as ‘a monument of British power, energy, and wealth’223 with a proper road connecting it to Sebastopol. Food, shelter and medical aid were in abundance and the troops had benefited from a much milder winter than the previous year. ‘We have remained close to our resources of every kind during the winter,’ Campbell told Colonel Henry Eyre, ‘and the result has been that our men have improved in discipline while their health has been admirable during the whole period.’224 While the army had lost 15,013 men to disease between September 1854 and June 1855, only 1,863 fell victim between July 1855 and June 1856.225 ‘No one would have taken the smart, healthy, clean troops on the plateau of Sebastopol in January 1856, to have been the same race and nation as the careworn, overworked, and sickly soldiers guarding the trenches in January 1855,’ wrote Raglan’s nephew.226
Panmure had instructed Codrington to split the 127,000 men at his command into two corps (one for Campbell and one for Sir William Eyre) but on landing, Campbell found this was still just an organisational theory.** ‘I was rather surprised to find on my arrival here that not only no arrangements had been made for forming a Corps, but that you were disposed to let me remain present without any ostensible position’, he complained to Codrington.227 Sterling suspected deliberate inertia.228 Codrington knew that peace talks were well advanced, and in a few days the very notion of a corps d’armée would become an irrelevance. For the time being, Campbell would have to settle for his old division. ‘He met with a hearty welcome from his old Highland brigade,’ recalled Munro, ‘and it was pleasant to see how the veteran chief’s face brightened up at the enthusiastic reception given him.’229
On 29 February 1856, fifteen days after Campbell’s return, an armistice was agreed.* Though a technical victory for the allies, there were no winners. ‘The war’, wrote Ellenborough, ‘affords a sad retrospect of neglected opportunities and disappointed hopes. It commenced in ministerial braggadocio and it ends in national mortification.’230 To lighten the mood, Campbell held a special divisional Highland Games at Kamara on 26–27 March; a mixture of the usual caber and hammer throwing, plus more frivolous fare such as sack and wheelbarrow races, and competitive bagpiping. News of the formal peace was announced in General Orders on 2 April. Every allied battery joined in a 101-gun salute.
There was nothing further for Campbell to do, so he prepared to return home. On 9 May, the night before he embarked, the Highlanders honoured him with a grand farewell banquet in a hut hung with tartan, pine branches and regimental colours. Massed pipers played him in with ‘The Campbells are Coming’, while Alexis Soyer served haggis and sheep’s head broth. In return, Campbell gave his audience a heartfelt address. ‘I am now old, and shall not be called to serve any more’, he told the men:
and nothing will remain to me but the memory of my campaigns, and of the enduring, hardy, generous soldiers with whom I have been associated, whose name and glory will long be kept alive in the hearts of our countrymen. When you go home … each to his family and his cottage, you will tell the story of your immortal advance in that victorious echelon up the heights of the Alma, and of the old brigadier who led and loved you so well. Your children and your children’s children will repeat the tale to other generations, when only a few lines of history will remain to record all the enthusiasm and discipline which have borne you so stoutly to the end of this war … Though I shall be gone, the thought of you will go with me wherever I may be, and cheer my old age with a glorious recollection of dangers confronted and hardships endured. A pipe will never sound near me without carrying me back to those bright days when I was at your head, and wore the bonnet which you gained for me, and the honourable decorations on my breast, many of which I owe to your conduct. Brave soldiers, kind comrades, farewell.231
Once more, Campbell landed in England, sure that his career had finished. He returned as major-general, just one substantive rank up from the colonel he had been when he left in 1854. Prince Albert recommended he be pushed up a rung, and so, in June, Campbell was promoted to lieutenant-general, along with Codrington.232 He had already been made Knight Grand Cross of the Bath (for which he was charged £164 13s 4d). From the Sultan he received the Order of Mejidie (1st Class), from the King of Sardinia the Grand Cross of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus, and from Napoleon III the Légion d’Honneur. Glasgow feted him with dinners, granted him the freedom of the city and presented him with a grand ceremonial sword.** A year later, Oxford University flattered him with an honorary doctorate alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Dr David Livingstone.
Hardinge’s death in September 1856 left the post of commander-in-chief vacant. ‘We then went through the whole Army List’, recorded the queen, ‘and with the exception of Lord Seaton, who would be quite the right man were it not for his great age, we could find no one worth considering’,233 so the Duke of Cambridge was appointed. The office of commander-in-chief, previously answerable to the sovereign, had been subject to ministerial control since July 1855, so it was convenient for Victoria that her cousin fill the post (one which he was to retain until 1895).*** It was an even greater boon for Campbell. Since the Battle of the Alma, Cambridge had regarded Campbell as a mentor, and now the pupil was at the very top of the tree, eager to provide him with new challenges. In July 1856, Campbell accepted command of the South-Eastern District, and then (following the duke’s recommendation) took up Cambridge’s former post of Inspector-General of Infantry.234
Meanwhile, the chance of a new foreign command increased by the day. Tensions had been rising in the East. Having formed his own religious sect/rebel army, Hung Hsiu-Chuan, Chinese fantasist and self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ, had conquered much of southern China. This left the British government in a quandary. Should they stand aside so that nominally Christian insurgents could overthrow the heathen emperor, or was the devil you knew preferable to an egomaniac Bible thumper?
Crisis point came in October 1856 with the arrest by the Chinese of the crew of the Hong Kong-registered boat Arrow. The Governor of Hong Kong, John Bowring, bombarded Canton in protest. The Chinese retaliated by ransacking the British factories. When an attempt was made to poison the European population of Hong Kong by lacing their bread with arsenic, it was clear matters were getting out of hand.235 The Commons voted through a resolution condemning Bowring’s actions, but Palmerston, more attuned to the nation’s gut instincts, complained that ‘an insolent barbarian wielding authority at Canton had violated the British flag’.236 For Palmerston, war offered another chance to browbeat the Celestial Empire, renegotiate the Treaty of Nankin and extort further concessions, so he dissolved parliament and called an election. The public, craving the uncomplicated victory denied them in the Crimea, gave Palmerston a majority and an express mandate to go to war.
The government wanted to send a Plenipotentiary Extraordinary to take a firm grasp of matters. Cambridge thought Campbell the best man for the job. ‘His very name would carry weight with it, both at home and abroad,’ the Duke told Panmure, ‘and people would know that we were in earnest’,237 but despite being asked several times, Campbell turned it down. The element of zealotry would mean bitter fighting, and attract the kind of British soldier who saw war as a crusade. Campbell had seen where that led in the Punjab. In any case, his old Walcheren fever still troubled him. ‘I am certain that at my age a fresh exposure to the tropical sun will bring on fresh attacks’, he told the duke. ‘I should be contented with a repose in my own country after an active service of nearly half a century.’238 General Ashburnham was selected instead.
It suited the queen. She had Campbell earmarked for her own pet project: the Victoria Cross. The first presentation of the medal was to be held in Hyde Park on 26 June 1857, and she wanted her favourite Highland general to officiate. However, like many of his colleagues, Campbell thought gallantry awards superfluous. ‘The older officers did not smile upon it’, explained Fortescue. ‘They remembered the days when Englishmen were content to do their duty without hope of outward adornment to their garments.’239 The Times labelled the medal ‘a dull, heavy, tasteless affair … Valour must, and doubtless will be, still its own reward in this country, for the Victoria Cross is the shabbiest of all prizes.’240 Campbell shared that sentiment: no one from the Highland Brigade received the decoration. Even so, he managed to conquer his misgivings and, a little bowed but with eyes still bright and teeth still sound,241 took charge on the day. At the Marble Arch corner of the park, a gallery a third of a mile long, accommodating 8,000 spectators, had been constructed for the event. Lord Cardigan had the gall to attend riding his Balaklava charger, Ronald. Whatever reservations the press had about the medal, the ceremony was reported with due deference, as a blemishless celebration of British valour. Cambridge recorded that ‘all went off to perfection and entirely without accident. The queen distributed the Crosses with her own hand, and the troops marched past in excellent order.’242
Some of the recipients’ recollections were at odds with the official version. ‘There were thousands and tens of thousands of spectators,’ remembered Lord Wantage, ‘but except a lucky few, among whom we were, everyone had to stand on the most uncomfortable sloping platforms, their toes lower than their heels, under a burning sun.’243 According to Colonel Percy, the event only narrowly avoided descending into farce. ‘Paircy, you are the senior’, Campbell allegedly told him. ‘Take charge of the recipients. I leave all to you. I don’t know anything about parades, and you do.’ Matters went from bad to worse after one drunk Royal Engineer insisted he would ‘rather be damned than have the VC and keep out in the sun’. Two soldiers had to be detailed to keep an eye on him. When it was all over, there was a stampede to the palace led by ‘the jealous, prejudiced, indignant old Scotchman Sir Colin Campbell, who did not want to leave a chance of his luncheon with royalty’, claimed Percy. Then again, Colonel Percy was rude about nearly everyone.244
Victoria Cross Ceremony, Hyde Park, from the Illustrated London News.
If Campbell’s thoughts were elsewhere, he had good cause. The sepoys in India had been restless for months but ‘suddenly, as a clap of thunder out of the blue’ had come ‘the news of the mutiny of Bengal regiments at Meerut, of the massacre of the officers, and of the escape of the mutinous throng up the Ganges to Delhi’,245 as the Duke of Argyll wrote. ‘The mutinies amongst the Native troops are spreading and several corps are in open revolt in Delhi’, Cambridge confirmed. While Campbell sweated in Hyde Park, the Commons held an emergency debate to consider the crisis.
The trigger had been the introduction of the new Enfield rifle into sepoy regiments. Its cartridges were coated with fat to keep them dry. To load, the soldier had to rip the end off the cartridge with his teeth before ramming the contents down the barrel. Muslims believed the grease was pig fat, Hindus that it was beef.* If it touched their lips, they were defiled. A handful of old hands like Sir William Gomm had warned against issuing the cartridges until the fat was proved to be inoffensive, but he was ignored.246 On 26 February, the 19th Bengal Native Infantry refused the cartridges and seized their officers. Fortunately, the men were first placated and then disbanded.
By the summer of 1857 the government thought it had overcome the sepoys’ suspicion by allowing them to grease cartridges with their own tallow or ghee, but their distrust rankled. When on 9 May eighty-five sepoys in Meerut were sentenced to hard labour and publicly clapped in irons after refusing the greased cartridges, it was the match to the tinder. ‘The anger which the news of this punishment created in the minds of the Sepoys was intense’, wrote contemporary historian Syed Ahmad Khan. ‘The prisoners on seeing their hands and feet manacled, looked at their medals and wept.’247 The next day the native cavalry stormed the gaol and released every sepoy and badmash (ruffian) in the building, unleashing a tumult of arson and murder. By the time Brigadier Archdale Wilson had roused his British troops, the mutineers had fled to Delhi, 36 miles away. The sepoys detailed to retake Delhi then also mutinied, killing most of their British officers.
To the self-confident British officer class in India, this seemed like the tantrum of a few natives who would be quickly brought to heel, but for those with an eye for it, this was a symptom of a much deeper malaise. India was fatally divided. ‘There was no real communication between the Governors and the governed’, explained Syed Khan.248 The racial and cultural separation identified as a festering danger by Charles Napier had become ever more entrenched, as the British segregated themselves in leafy cantonments. ‘Belgravia is not so much removed from Houndsditch in feeling, modes of life, and thought, as our Eastern station from our native bazaar’, reported William Russell. ‘There is no bond of union between the two, in language, or faith or nationality.’249 Absenteeism among British officers distanced them from their sepoys still further.250 That year, 1,237 officers of the East India Company’s armies were on ‘civil employment’ or ‘detached duty’. In the Bengal Infantry, for example, of 1,404 officers, 420 were absent.251 The gulf between white and native officers was now unbridgeable. ‘I was shouted at by the Adjutant as if I had been a bullock,’ complained one 65-year-old subedar, ‘sworn at by the comanieer [commanding officer], called a fool, a donkey, a booriah [old woman].’
Lord Ellenborough blamed aggressive Anglicanism for creating a siege mentality among the sepoys252 and encouraging the fear that the Company’s grand plan was to Christianise the entire native population. ‘I had observed the increase of late years of Padree [sic] Sahibs, who stood up in the streets of cities and told the people their cherished religion was false, entreating them to be Christians’, wrote one native officer. ‘They always said they were not employed by the Sirkar, and that they received no money from it, but could they say what they did without its permission? Everybody believed they were secretly employed by it. Why should they take such trouble if they were not ordered?’253 ‘All men, whether ignorant or well-informed, whether high or low, felt a firm conviction that the English Government was bent on interfering with their religion and with their old established customs’, confirmed Syed Khan.254
At the very moment when the sepoys’ loyalty was being taxed as never before, the Company’s reliance on them was at its height, so short was it of British troops. ‘The Empire had nearly doubled itself within the last twenty years, and the queen’s troops have been kept at the old establishment’, Victoria warned Panmure that June, and yet they were ‘the body on whom the maintenance of that Empire depends’.255 There were just 24,263 of Her Majesty’s troops in India, plus a further 21,259 of the Company’s own European soldiers (including medical staff and veterans) as against 232,224 sepoys.256 Because the Company’s greatest fear was external threats, most white troops were stationed near the frontiers. The Punjab had the biggest concentration, 10,326.257 Meanwhile, in Bengal (the presidency including Delhi and Meerut) the number had declined worryingly, yet it was here that 135,767 sepoys were stationed, more than half the Company’s native soldiers.
Overseas campaigns had reduced the white garrison still further. Two cavalry regiments sent to the Crimea had not been replaced, while four infantry regiments were off fighting in Persia. A single British battalion at Dinapore, a small detachment at Cawnpore and a weak battalion at Agra was all that guarded the 900-mile Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta up the Ganges Valley. Delhi had no British regiments at all. The sepoys had been trained by the British and armed with modern weapons, so if rebellion spread and the native regiments mutinied en masse, the colonists could not hope to stop them.
Giving heart to the sepoys was Britain’s indifferent martial record over the past twenty years. ‘Ever since the reverses at Caubul first taught the natives of India that an English army might be annihilated,’ explained one Indian civil servant, ‘it has only been a question of time with the Sepoys when they should make Bengal, as was Caubul, the grave of the white man.’258 The inconclusive Crimean War had further tarnished the British reputation, while the need to withdraw troops from India to fight the Russians had destroyed the myth that Victoria’s battalions were infinite.
The government in India and London preferred to take a rose-tinted view of the matter. Mutiny at Meerut, though disturbing, did not appear to sound the death knell of British India. Isolated mutinies had been erupting for years. Campbell had experienced one himself. Such outbreaks had been limited and were rarely violent. When Panmure asked his cousin Dalhousie for his opinion, the ex-governor-general dismissed the native regiments as incapable of combined action, and declared the whole affair exaggerated.259 London society was equally sanguine. ‘We should as soon have thought of losing Manchester as India’, remarked Lady Carrington.260 The initially optimistic reports from the new governor-general, Charles Canning, seemed to validate that confidence, but Canning had a perverse motive to underplay the crisis. The cost of sending British troops to India to suppress a mutiny would be met by the East India Company, encouraging its governor-general ‘to be careful of the Company’s pockets, and to keep his requirements as low as possible’, as Lord Clarendon observed.261 Canning did not want to panic London into dispatching a dozen battalions only to find when they arrived that the crisis had passed, but he still got the bill.
A cartoon marking Campbell’s acceptance of command in India. (Punch, 25 July 1857)
In any case, the impression in Britain was that this was a purely military mutiny. The idea that disquiet stretched beyond the native army was barely contemplated, despite the evidence to the contrary. India’s independent nawabs and rajahs were every bit as resentful as the sepoys and increasingly fearful of the British appetite for territory. The Company had always honoured the convention that a rajah could adopt an heir if he lacked male issue, but while governor-general, Dalhousie had refused to respect the practice, and had started annexing their intestate kingdoms, arguing that the Company alone could fill the power vacuum. This left a growing band of disgruntled and dispossessed rajahs with nothing more to lose. The Nana Sahib, the adopted son of the Peishwah of the Maratha Confederacy, was typical. Though the Peishwah had been exiled to Bithoor and deprived of his lands after the Third Maratha War of 1817–18, he had retained a sizeable pension from the British. Upon his death, his heir, the Nana Sahib, was told the pension and title of Peishwah were forfeit. The aggrieved Nana petitioned the East India Company for restitution, and sent courtiers to London to lobby on his behalf, but all were rebuffed. Dalhousie pulled the same trick in Jhansi. Following the death of the rajah in 1853, the governor-general refused to recognise his adopted son, preferring instead to confiscate the whole province. The ranee, like Jind Kaur in Lahore, was pensioned off, left with little to do but contemplate revenge.
Dalhousie’s most contentious land grab was Oudh. Here the governor-general did not bother to wait for the Nawab to die. He simply argued maladministration and in 1856 snatched the kingdom. Oudh’s landowners and gentry, though not the losers by annexation, were still furious. ‘The minds of all the Talookdars [landowners] and head men were excited against the Sirkar, who they considered had acted without honour and had been very hard on the Nawab’, explained one native officer. ‘There were plenty of interested people to keep alive this feeling.’262 The Nawab was exiled and his army of 60,000 men disbanded. Only about half were recruited into company regiments or local police, leaving 30,000 disaffected and unemployed ex-soldiers.263 Ill feeling in Oudh was especially corrosive. Almost three-quarters of Bengal’s sepoys hailed from there, and through them resentment seeped out across the presidency.
A union of smarting rajahs and irate sepoys would be deadly, and even before the mutiny broke out there had been signs of co-operation between them. The speed with which mutineers rallied to the old Mughal emperor, Bahadoor Shah (who still sat on the Peacock Throne in Delhi though his lands had been confiscated) was suspicious. Together with the curious proliferation of chappatis, or ‘migration of cakes’,* preceding the revolt, it implied insurrection had been brewing for some time in palace, bazaar and barracks, uniting all creeds and classes.264 ‘Gentoos and Moslems, zemindars and ryots, sultans and slaves, Brahmins and Pariahs, have for a time sunk their reciprocal hatreds of race, religion and caste, in the superior and overpowering hatred which they all feel for the proud, perfidious, remorseless and rapacious foreigners who plundered and oppressed them all’, declared Reynolds’s Newspaper. Indians would ‘unite in one holy crusade against the ruthless and impious race who had robbed and desecrated the hearths and altars of the people whom they professed to civilise and protect’.265
As rebellion took hold, Canning’s despatches soon lost their nonchalance but while the ominous cables piled up, Palmerston, normally such a keen judge of the public mood, maintained an air of breezy optimism. For him India was a semi-detached problem. If it went badly, he could blame the East India Company. If it went well, he could claim the credit. Either way, there was a limit to what he could achieve from 5,000 miles away. Nevertheless, he saw the value in responding to the public mood with precipitate action.
On Saturday 11 July 1857 a cable reached Horse Guards announcing the death from cholera of General Anson, commander-in-chief in India, on 27 May. It also reported that revolt had spread across northern India, and that the murder of British civilians, women and children among them, was becoming a commonplace. The prime minister remained unflappable. ‘The news is distressing by reason of the individual sufferings and deaths, but it is not really alarming as to our hold upon India’, Palmerston assured Panmure. To be on the safe side, he ordered 14,000 men east.266 His understanding was that the native troops had not so much rebelled, as disappeared. ‘The desertion of the 30,000 sepoys is better than their mutiny would have been’, Palmerston assured the editor of The Times. ‘It will save all trouble, difficulty and expense as to disbanding them; and as one European regiment is worth at least two native regiments, the 14,000 men going from hence according to arrangements already in progress will fully make up for this deficiency.’267 It would take those 14,000 men months to reach India, but as far as Whitehall was concerned, this crisis was nothing more than mischievous sepoys daring to bite the hand that fed them. A cool display of British stoicism would show them the error of their ways.
Having heard the news from a contact at the Admiralty, Campbell set off at about 3 p.m. for Horse Guards. There he ran into General Storks, Secretary for Military Correspondence at Horse Guards, who told him Lord Panmure wanted to see him. Panmure asked Campbell to sail to India, take over as commander-in-chief, and win back the empire’s brightest jewel. ‘I at once accepted the offer, and expressed my readiness to start the same night, if necessary.’268 Commending him on his zeal, Panmure said the following morning would be just fine. ‘Never did a man proceed on a mission of duty with a lighter heart and a feeling of greater humility,’ wrote Campbell, ‘yet with a juster sense of the compliment that had been paid to a mere soldier of fortune like myself, in being named to the highest command in the gift of the Crown.’269*
* Campbell, Elphinstone and Raglan all said seven guns. Jocelyn, Lucan, Fraser and Carr-Laughton, and Loy Smith say nine. Robins argues ten (see TWC January 2005, 22). Shadwell (I, 330) said definitely nine: ‘This statement is made on the authority of the staff officer to whose lot it fell to superintend the disembarkation and placing of these guns in position [i.e. Shadwell himself].’
** In later years Campbell ‘stopped people’s mouths in London’ when he heard Lucan abused (Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 392).
*** Lieutenant-colonel in the 4th Light Dragoons.
* Lucan said the Turks mounted a ‘very respectable resistance … they got less credit than they deserved’ (Hansard, 19 March 1855). Nevertheless, one Russian artilleryman put the ease of taking the redoubts down ‘to the fact that the fortifications were defended not by the French or English, but by Turks, who were of course much easier to deal with’ (Kozhuzkov, 15).
** French Light Cavalry.
* Another name for the plateau in front of Sebastopol.
** Calthorpe claimed there were only around 300 Turks (Calthorpe, 71). Jocelyn maintains that the Turks were positioned behind the Highlanders and all bar one officer and thirty men fled at the first Russian round shot (Jocelyn, History of the Royal Artillery, 203). Some accounts assert that the Turks were only formed on the right (Russell, General Todleben’s History, 138). Colebrooke states it was ‘one battalion alone’, while Kinglake suggests Campbell had one battalion on each flank, but both fled. Shadwell writes that to start with there were Turks on both flanks (Shadwell, I, 333). Hargreave Mawson claims one battalion of Turks remained on the left flank (TWC, 1/04). Campbell wrote of Turks on both flanks, and that the Russian cavalry ‘made an attempt to turn the right flank of the 93rd on observing the flight of the Turks who had been posted there’. It is quite possible those on the left fled as well, although Campbell does not state this specifically (Shadwell, I, 333).
*** In an idiosyncratic interpretation of these events, Hugh Small claims that Campbell, ‘who at the Alma had absurdly urged his troops not to fire their Minié rifles until they were within a yard of the enemy’, tried to prevent the 93rd from firing, but the Highlanders, in his words, ‘ignored him and the front rank let fly with their rifles’. It is one of those ‘lively and controversial’ accounts.
* Russell changed it to ‘tipped with steel’ and then shortened it to ‘thin red line’ (Russell, The Great War with Russia, 147), so ‘thin red line’ is not to misquote Russell. It was already being referred to as ‘the famous thin red line’ in a letter to the Daily News of 10 November 1855.
* Actually he was 62 by a few days. He may have been having a senior moment.
** This is how the order that Lucan received was written. Raglan said that in the original there was a full stop after ‘ordered’ and advance had a capital ‘A’, giving a rather different sense (Kinglake, IV, 224).
*** Lucan later stated that Nolan was ‘pointing to the further end of the valley’ (Lucan, 9), though others claim his flourish was rather vaguer. Lucan also said that the ‘spot pointed at by Captain Nolan was in the direction they [the guns] would have been taken’, suggesting that Lucan thought he was to head off the Russians removing the guns, rather than attack the redoubts (Lucan, 18). Yet in his report to Raglan two days later Lucan stated that he realised the intention was to retake the guns being removed by the Russians, making his decision to advance down the valley past the guns even more peculiar (David, The Homicidal Earl, 299).
* Sergeant-Major Nunnerley thought Nolan had been shouting ‘threes right’ and saw Nolan’s horse wheel to the right as its rider was in his death throes. Part of the squadron began to follow, towards the causeway, but Nunnerley ordered them to ‘Front Forward’ (Allwood, 102).
** Cardigan claimed that he rode straight back because ‘on retiring thro’ the battery from whence I came, none of our troops were to be seen’ (Letter to Kinglake, TWC October 2000).
* A general for whom Campbell developed great respect: ‘worth a brigade in himself’ (Shadwell, I, 370).
** Literally ‘wolf holes’: conical pits with a big stake in the middle to deter cavalry.
*** Lines of branches sharpened at the tips, laid to deter infantry.
**** Adding to his woes, a rumour circulated in London on 27 October that he had died of cholera. It was a Captain Colin Campbell who had succumbed (Belfast News-Letter, 1 November 1854).
* The daily ration set in May 1854 for the rank and file was 3lb of wood. On 16 December it was increased by 50 per cent. At the same time, a major-general like Campbell had his allowance reduced from 110 times the standard ration to only forty times.
** Large cylindrical wicker containers filled with earth, used to provide cover from enemy fire.
* The Naval Brigade, with a strong emphasis on keeping the men dry and clean, and dispensing quinine, limes and oranges to counter scurvy, was one of the healthiest. Their latrines were placed well away from camp, while they dug their own wells to provide clean water (Eggleton, 90). They had a ship anchored in Balaklava, to act as a depot, giving them far more latitude in their rations (Heath, 181). After an engagement, the cry of ‘Boots, lads, boots!’ would ring out and the sailors would collect shoes from the Russian dead. When they found insufficient timber to complete their huts in the early winter, they stole into the suburbs of Sebastopol and came back with joists, rafters, and even some window frames. They only suffered a quarter the mortality rate of the infantry (Brooks, R., 16–17, 26).
* While the Secretary for War was responsible for military policy in the wider sense, the Secretary at War oversaw the army’s administration and organisation.
* While it was impossible to backdate substantive rank, it was possible to backdate local rank (McGuigan, 85). Campbell had been given the local rank of lieutenant-general in January.
** ‘Those whom God would destroy, he first makes mad.’
*** Over winter Campbell had been reinforced by the 14th and 39th Foot. On 20 December he was given the reserve battalion of the 71st Highlanders, and on 4 February the 1/71st (see Plate 19). These last two were amalgamated into one battalion on 13 February (Oatts, 186; Anon., Regimental Records, 121; Cavendish, 107).
* Organised by the new chief engineer Sir Harry Jones, who, as a young lieutenant, Campbell had seen wounded at the breach at San Sebastian.
** One account claimed that a Frenchman was knocking on a door with the butt of his musket and it went off, the bullet passing through the neck of one Highlander and hitting the man behind (USJ, August 1855, 536).
* Two officers living in the same house died shortly afterwards of cholera, suggesting that was the cause (Pakenham, IV, 32). Florence Nightingale insisted that a ‘medical man in camp’ told her ‘The diarrhoea was slight – but he was so depressed by our defeat of Waterloo Day … that he sank rapidly without sufficient physical reason. It was not Cholera’ (Nightingale, 132).
** In late January 1855, when Lord Derby was approached by the queen to form a government, Ellenborough had advised him to recall Raglan immediately, to make him commander-in-chief in London, and then to place Campbell in charge of the army in the Crimea. Derby approved of Raglan’s recall but thought it impossible to get rid of Hardinge as commander-in-chief in London (Vincent, 128; Bilcliffe, 34).
* Part of a crenellated parapet between two embrasures.
** Campbell told the Duke of Argyll that ‘a serious mistake had been made in not employing fresher troops than the Light Division’ (Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 601).
* According to Windham, Campbell was sent a verbal order to attack, but refused to do so unless it was reiterated in writing. Windham himself said in retrospect that he was being rather gung-ho (Windham, Crimean Diary, 210–12).
** Jocelyn (History of the Royal Artillery, 434) states that it was Corporal J. Ross of the Royal Sappers and Miners who discovered the Redan abandoned, and told Campbell after 3 a.m.
*** Campbell became godfather to Keppel’s son in late 1862 (Stuart, 201).
* Lieutenant Tryon saw one Frenchman ‘with a Russian helmet on, a woman’s yellow petticoat with a coloured body, and cross belted all over, with high boots and spurs and swords and bayonets stuck in the gown to such an extent that made you fancy you had met a female war hedgehog’ (Brooks, R., 25). Colonel Robertson found six Frenchmen making off with a grand piano (Robertson, J., 187).
* Campbell later surprised Palmerston by chatting to the French ambassador’s wife in her native tongue. ‘Why Sir Colin, they told me you could not speak French’, the prime minister exclaimed (Shadwell, I, 395; see also Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 586).
* It was not all one-sided. Papers such as the Inverness Advertiser and Northern Ensign criticised the Lowland landlords and their extermination of Highland life.
** Many sources refer to Campbell talking with a pronounced Scottish accent (e.g. Paget, 64; Percy, 203; Robson, 288; Wynter, 73). Campbell was so incensed by the letter that he asked the Duke of Cambridge to contradict it publicly (RA/VIC/ADDE/1/438).
* One version claimed that, soon after Colin’s birth, his father had lost all his money, both parents had subsequently died and Colin had been brought up by two maiden aunts who procured his first commission (Low, II, 373). This myth was repeated in a very ragged obituary in the Standard (15 August 1863). In fact, Colin’s father died on 28 December 1858 at Granton on the Isle of Mull, aged 91 (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 August 1863; Glasgow Herald, 17 August 1863).
** This stems from an article in the Inverness Courier that claimed Colonel John Campbell was Colin’s real father, that he had had a ‘Scotch marriage’ with Colin’s mother, and that Colin took the name MacLiver because the colonel was on foreign service at the time of his birth. Colin then changed his surname to Campbell on the colonel’s return. The Illustrated London News (22 January 1859) called this tale ‘inconsistent’ and so it is.
*** Bombay Times, 18 December 1858. This was also the version repeated to the Duke of Argyll during a visit to Mull (Campbell, G., Autobiography, II, 84).
**** Its fourteen members included one duke, one marquess, three earls, one viscount, three barons and four knights. There was only one man without a title.
* There was so much wood about that the French used it to make a ballroom (Stephenson, 154).
** Hardinge had suggested postponing the creation of the two corps pending the incorporation of the German and Swiss troops expected in the spring (RA/VIC/MAIN/E6/68).
* Campbell had been expecting peace before he returned to the Crimea, and in a letter to Colonel Eyre dated 25 January talked of setting off on a tour of southern Germany or Italy once the fighting was over (Shadwell, I, 396).
** It was the sort of sword Liberace would have taken to a Rob Roy pageant. When Campbell was home during the winter of 1855/56, Glaswegians had wanted to present him with a gold-mounted snuff horn and a gold quaich. Campbell narrowly avoided having to accept the sort of object best kept in a cupboard and used occasionally to scare small children.
*** She was very proactive in suggesting changes in the army. In February 1857 she recommended the introduction of compulsory moustaches (Sheppard, I, 182).
* Their fears were magnified by the sheer quantity of fat used. ‘After ramming down the ball, the muzzle of the musket is covered with it’ (Thompson, 33).
* A form of culinary chain letter. Indians would cook batches, distribute them, and the recipients would cook more, distribute them and so on, giving rise to a wave of chapattis across India. Even those who cooked them did not seem to be aware of their significance, which is still unclear, but the British suspected it was a sign of organised dissent.
* Campbell later told Hope Grant, ‘I should as soon have thought to be made Archbishop of Canterbury’ (Grant, 177). This sounds like false modesty from a man who had been hanging round Horse Guards that afternoon. He wrote that he accepted ‘not for money’s sake’, because his investments gave him an income of £1,900 per year, but ‘simply as a duty which I could not as a soldier decline’ (NLS/MS.2257, Haythorne). Leaving for India that same day, from a nineteenth-century perspective, would be like someone today offering to leave in five minutes – witness the shock in the Reform Club when Phileas Fogg offers to leave that same evening on his trip round the world, in the Jules Verne novel published sixteen years later.
1 Spilsbury, 138.
2 Shadwell, I, 330.
3 Munro, 29; Shadwell, I, 328; Calthorpe, 69.
4 PP/General Orders, 55.
5 Kinglake, V, 40.
6 Hansard/HL/Deb.19/3/55. Vol. 137. cc. 730–73.
7 Lucan, 23.
8 Heath, 92–3.
9 Paget, 64.
10 Hargreave Mawson, 10; Shadwell, I, 332.
11 Paget, 161.
12 Munro, 33.
13 Calthorpe, 70.
14 Figes, 243.
15 Ryzhov, 28.
16 Calthorpe, 71.
17 Paget, 166.
18 Russell, The War, 224.
19 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 145.
20 Munro, 41–3.
21 Tisdall, 95.
22 Munro, 34; Shadwell, I, 333.
23 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 142.
24 Patterson, 43.
25 Strachan, From Waterloo to Balaklava, 29.
26 Cavendish, 100.
27 Calthorpe, 73.
28 Tisdall, 96.
29 Russell, The War, 227.
30 Burgoyne, 122.
31 Munro, 36.
32 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 93.
33 Wilson, 35.
34 Ewart, I, 267.
35 Euston, 28.
36 Paget, 175.
37 Munro, 44.
38 Franks, 70.
39 Shadwell, I, 334.
40 Lucan, 8.
41 Spilsbury, 152.
42 Austin, 21.
43 Paget, 202.
44 Lucan, 9–30.
45 Paget, 180.
46 Phillips, 96.
47 Lamb, 348.
48 Paget, 180.
49 Russell, The War, 231.
50 Paget, 69.
51 Paget, 190.
52 Ryzhov, 30.
53 Phillips, 96.
54 Paget, 192.
55 The Times, 11 November 1854.
56 Calthorpe, 69.
57 Paget, 72.
58 Lucan, 11.
59 Woodham-Smith, 259.
60 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).12/11/54.
61 Anon., Letters from the Crimea, II, 131.
62 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 284.
63 Colebrooke, 58.
64 Shadwell, I, 344.
65 Colebrooke, 70.
66 Shadwell, I, 342.
67 Austin, 23.
68 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 95.
69 Shadwell, I, 368.
70 Waterfield, G., 253.
71 Clark, F., 45.
72 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 143.
73 Greville, VII, 82.
74 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 116.
75 Figes, 273; Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 119.
76 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 120.
77 Munro, 46.
78 Russell, The War, 266.
79 Calthorpe, 115; Munsell, 182.
80 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 151.
81 Munro, 48–9.
82 Cameron, 79; Munro, 52, 66.
83 Munro, 58.
84 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 125.
85 Campbell, C.F., Letters, 97.
86 Munro, 37.
87 Munro, 61–2.
88 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 132.
89 Windham, Crimean Diary, 85.
90 USM, February 1855, 268.
91 Marx, 506.
92 Hansard/HL/Deb. 14/5/55. Vol.138 cc. 466–556.
93 Munro, 63.
94 Martin, W., 86.
95 Kinglake, VII, 167.
96 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 132, 162.
97 Shadwell, I, 365.
98 Stanmore, I, 237.
99 Heath, 205.
100 Marsh, 152.
101 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 185.
102 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 169; Robertson, A., 21; Martin, W., 94.
103 Munro, 55.
104 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 129.
105 Shadwell, I, 350–2.
106 Kinglake, VII, 178.
107 RA/VIC/ADDE/1/203a.
108 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 156.
109 The Times, 23 December 1854.
110 Munsell, 201.
111 Maurice, II, 104.
112 NLS/MS.2257.
113 Shadwell, I, 366.
114 Hansard/HC/Deb.26/1/55. Vol.136 cc. 979–1063.
115 Shadwell, I, 366.
116 Fortescue, XIII, 157.
117 RNRM/44.2.4.
118 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 196.
119 Paget, 87.
120 Romaine, 129.
121 RA/VIC/ADDE/1/280.
122 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 124, 217.
123 Shadwell, I, 368.
124 Eckstaedt, I, 148.
125 Calthorpe, 165.
126 Romaine, 134, 132.
127 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 247, 261.
128 Shadwell, I, 373.
129 Calthorpe, 213.
130 Greig, 102.
131 Nightingale, 132.
132 Dallas, 50.
133 Ewart, I, 359.
134 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 194, 203.
135 Russell, The Great War with Russia, 292.
136 Romaine, 182, 199.
137 Bell, G., 263.
138 Hansard/HL/3/5/55. Vol.138 cc. 1–9.
139 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 287, 321, 349, 294.
140 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 286.
141 Douglas, I, 309.
142 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).19/7/55.
143 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 290, 168.
144 Seaton, A., 208.
145 Ranken, Six Months at Sebastopol, 32.
146 RNRM/44.2.4.
147 Colebrooke, 92.
148 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, 176.
149 Murray, D., III, 45.
150 Bazancourt, II, 450.
151 Milton Small, 185.
152 RNRM/44.2.3.
153 Vieth, 32.
154 RNRM/44.2.3.
155 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 337, 334.
156 Ranken, Canada and the Crimea, 208.
157 Shadwell, I, 382.
158 Steevens, 277.
159 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 339.
160 Pack, 208.
161 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 331.
162 Murray, D., III, 44.
163 Windham, Crimean Diary, 211.
164 Wolseley, Story of a Soldier’s Life, I, 197.
165 Murray, D., III, 44; Shadwell, I, 383–4; RNRM/44.2.3.
166 Paget, 114.
167 Ross-of-Bladensburg, 256.
168 Stuart, 161.
169 Spilsbury, 316.
170 USM, December 1855, 540.
171 The Times, 29 September 1855.
172 Marx, 584.
173 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 336.
174 Shadwell, I, 378; RNRM/44.2.3.
175 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ/(W).6/11/55.
176 RNRM/44.2.4.
177 Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 585.
178 Reid, 129.
179 Campbell, G., Autobiography, 1, 585.
180 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 413.
181 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).5/10/55.
182 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 418.
183 Campbell, G., Autobiography, I, 586.
184 Greville, VII, 222.
185 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 261.
186 Romaine, 199.
187 Skene, 104.
188 Kinglake, IV, 234.
189 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).28/11/55.
190 Hodge, 137.
191 Romaine, 230.
192 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 354.
193 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 423, 194.
194 Hansard/HL/23/1/55. Vol.136 cc. 899–910.
195 Wood, E., The Crimea, 83.
196 Fenyo, 60, 85.
197 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 374.
198 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).16/10/55.
199 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 421.
200 Kennaway, 73.
201 Dallas, 209.
202 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 454, 477, 483; RA/VIC/MAIN/G/39/114.
203 Reid, 129.
204 Brown, 88.
205 Paget, 142.
206 Pakenham, VI, 20.
207 York Herald, 17 November 1855.
208 Morning Post, 26 November 1855.
209 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 2 December 1855.
210 Hodge, 135.
211 The Times, 9 November 1855.
212 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 267.
213 RA/VIC/MAIN/G/39/114.
214 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 494.
215 Shadwell, I, 393.
216 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 497.
217 Sheppard, I, 140–1.
218 Victoria, III, 194.
219 RA/VIC/MAIN/QVJ(W).21/11/55.
220 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 369.
221 Douglas and Dalhousie, I, 503.
222 Barnston, 148.
223 Blackwood, 250.
224 Shadwell, I, 398.
225 Longmore, 8.
226 Calthorpe, 266.
227 NAM/1968-07-379 (16 February 1856).
228 Sterling, Story of the Highland Brigade, 370.
229 Munro, 72.
230 Imlah, 244.
231 Shadwell, I, 400.
232 RA/VIC/MAIN/E/7/24.
233 St Aubyn, 103.
234 RA/VIC/MAIN/E/8/11; PRO/WO/3/577/192.
235 Bartle, 304.
236 Ridley, 631.
237 Douglas and Dalhousie, II, 363.
238 RA/VIC/ADDE/1/591.
239 Fortescue, XIII, 232.
240 The Times, 27 May 1857.
241 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 August 1863.
242 Sheppard, I, 188.
243 Wantage, 139.
244 Percy, 203.
245 Campbell, G., Autobiography, II, 80.
246 David, The Indian Mutiny, 53.
247 Khan, 102.
248 Khan, 83.
249 Russell, My Diary in India, I, 180.
250 Calcutta Review, Vol. XXIX, 404.
251 PP.H/C.East India 1857–58, Vol. XLII, 102–5.
252 Calcutta Review, Vol. XXIX, 393.
253 Pandey, 117.
254 Khan, 67.
255 Victoria, III, 299, 29 June 1857.
256 PP.H/C.East India 1857–58, Vol. XLII, 105.
257 PP.H/C.Papers relating to mutiny in Punjab, Vol. XVIII, 307.
258 Raikes, 151.
259 Douglas and Dalhousie, II, 391.
260 Malmesbury, II, 75.
261 Douglas and dalhousie, II, 423.
262 Pandey, 112.
263 Llewellyn-Jones, 102.
264 Hare, II, 157.
265 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 2 August 1857, 1.
266 Douglas and Dalhousie, II, 399.
267 Dasent, I, 263.
268 NLS/MS.2257, Haythorne.
269 Shadwell, I, 406.