It was a cold, bleak morning on the ninth day of the siege, 25 October 1854. Cannon fire was intermittent. From time to time a flash followed by a sinister thump sent a mortar shell in an iridescent fiery trail across the night sky. Clouds momentarily flickered when the bomb went off, accompanied seconds later by the grumble of an explosion. Further light trails whooshed out of the dark mass of indistinguishable siege lines or spat back from the shadowy silhouette of the city beyond. Occasionally a complete cannonade blasted out; cascading sparkling light reflected across surrounding buildings before dying down again. When such lightning flared, it produced warning cries in the darkness, drowned by the sound of approaching humming projectiles. These climaxed with a howling crescendo into flickering detonations that spewed out showers of earth and stone from the rocky ground.
‘It is getting very cold,’ Sergeant Timothy Gowing with the Royal Fusiliers recalled in his journal, ‘and the sooner we get at the town and take it the better.’ Lacking manpower, the Anglo-French Allied army could not completely invest the city of Sevastopol. Russian reinforcements and supplies could still get in from the north. Unable to starve them out, the Allies resolved to batter the defences into submission with artillery. The first land assault had yet to happen. ‘It is immensely strong, and looks an ugly place to take,’ Gowing admitted, ‘but we will manage it some day.’ Tonight was Lieutenant General Cathcart’s 4th Division’s turn of duty in the siege lines, and Gowing ‘found the endless trench work very trying, often having to stand up to our ankles and sometimes knees in muddy water, with the enemy pounding at us all the time with heavy ordinance.’
Sergeant Gowing was immensely strong, with a physique to match, and had adapted to the harsh life in the trenches. His party trick was being able to tear a pack of cards in half with his bare hands. Unlike many around him, who sought solace through alcohol, he was abstemious and drank only tea and coffee. Assistant Surgeon Arthur Taylor was also physically worn down. ‘I am on duty in the trenches with the siege train every 24 hours,’ he complained, ‘so that I have one night in bed and the other on the ground.’ He had to lie in the open on a regulation blanket, an upgrade from his thin regulation greatcoat that sufficed before. Cholera was rife, an affliction that had accompanied them even after leaving Turkey. ‘It was piteous to see poor fellows struck down in two or three hours and carried off to their last abode,’ Gowing recalled. Body resistance was reduced by poor diet, overwork and extremes of weather. ‘Nearly all of us were suffering more or less from ague, fever or colds, but it was no use complaining – the doctors had little or no medicine to give.’ Gowing drew strength from his Christian Evangelist faith, but bleakly observed, ‘our poor fellows were dropping off fast with dysentery or diarrhoea; but stuck to it manfully.’ Bodies were weaker than spirits, and those fond of the bottled variety had enfeebled themselves through excess.1
Sir George Cathcart was irritated by the impasse before Sevastopol, his division needlessly bleeding away in the siege lines each night. Only five weeks before, the Allies had landed 60,000 strong in the Crimea, north of the city. A Russian army of 35,000 was soundly defeated at the River Alma on 20 September and then Sevastopol was outflanked by an unexpected march that enabled the Allies to emerge in front of its undefended south. Partially invested, the city seemed completely at their mercy. Cathcart, the designated successor to Commander-in-Chief Lord Raglan, urged him to attack immediately; they faced only 15,000 Russian defenders, two-thirds of which were sailors. When the French prevaricated, so did Raglan.
General Cathcart could look straight down on the Russian defences from the dominating Sapoune Heights. ‘20,000 Russians could not disturb me,’ he insisted, from this ‘strongest and most perfect position’ he occupied. The Russians he observed were working on only two or three redoubts at this early stage and ‘the place is only enclosed by a thing like a low park wall, not in good repair’. They had surprised the Russians on the landward side of the port city and Cathcart was convinced that he ‘could walk into it with scarcely the loss of a man at night or an hour before daybreak’; but Raglan demurred. The ailing French commander St Arnaud, stricken with cholera, was about to be replaced by General Canrobert, and he did not wish to take the risk. Cathcart was incensed and when advised that the siege trains had first to be landed to take on the city walls, he asked, ‘but my dear Lord Raglan, what the devil is there to knock down?’ Within a few days of indecision, 28,000 Russian soldiers entered the city through the partially invested north. No longer vulnerable to a coup de main assault, it could now only be taken by a deliberate coordinated attack.
Sergeant Gowing continued to ‘dodge their whistling dicks’, huge Russian shells that pitched from the skies, or spat out from the fortress embrasures, standing ‘up to our knees in mud and water like a lot of drowned rats, nearly all night’. They longed for the arrival of dawn, which at least brought a rise in temperature. ‘We have not one ounce too much to eat,’ he recalled, and ‘the tents we have to sleep in are full of holes, and there is nothing but mud to lie down in, or scrape it away with our hands the best we can.’
Surgeon Arthur Taylor saw the men were suffering ‘and take it in good part’. ‘They say they have nothing to do but “eat and fight”.’ There was little evidence of both but they were under constant fire. ‘The ground about,’ he recalled, ‘and in the rear of our batteries is completely covered with 68 pound shot, shell, and grape, [but] still we have lost few men.’ Conditions were bad, ‘they seldom seem to wash; soap is hard to get and very dear; no one shaves, they are all too tired to take the trouble.’2
At about 3 a.m. observers in the trenches reported that part of the city was on fire. ‘The town was on fire with our red-hot shot in three places, and is burning now.’ One optimist wrote home: ‘They expect in a day or two, if they do not give in, we shall take it at the point of the bayonet, which I hope they will do, for it is pretty near time it was over.’
Lieutenant Henry Clifford, the 28-year-old Rifles Regiment Aide-de-Camp (ADC) to Major General Butler commanding the Light Division, watched hopefully as the fire took hold. But ‘the Russians pulled down the houses round it and only about three houses were burnt.’ ‘The town has been set on fire several times,’ he observed, ‘and the inhabitants must suffer dreadfully.’ Arthur Taylor concurred that the besieging forces were steadily tightening their grip. ‘The brave French have pushed their approaches to within 500 yards of the city,’ he reported, ‘and we are nearly as close.’ Despite the hardships, there was fierce resolve to succeed. ‘The assault will be made it is hoped,’ Taylor recalled, ‘as all our men are getting worn out, in three or four days.’ Sergeant Gowing had witnessed ‘wholesale desertions by Poles from the enemy’. ‘We are almost longing to go at the town,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘[to] take it or die in the attempt to hoist our glorious old flag on its walls.’ Men instinctively appreciated the attack must happen soon. ‘We knew well that the enemy was almost daily receiving reinforcements; we had, as yet, received none.’3
Contemporary eyewitness accounts often dwelt on the sheer volume of noise the Sevastopol bombardment generated. ‘The air is alive with the boom, the hiss, the whiz of projectiles,’ recalled Lieutenant Townsend Wilson in the trenches with the Coldstream Guards. When the British fleet closed in to bombard the harbour and redoubts, ‘the noise of the cannonade deafening before, is absolutely stunning now that the ships’ broadsides are pelting away at the granite.’ Wilson, positioned near a land battery, saw ‘a little beyond, or a little short of our works, the earth is ploughed with bounding shot, or indented with deep holes dug by the bursting of shells.’ Sevastopol was shrouded in ‘dense clouds of smoke’ through which he saw ‘a round shot, striking the angle of an embrasure, rips out gabions, kills a gunner or two, perhaps dismounts a gun.’ Mrs Fanny Duberly, the 25-year-old wife of Captain Henry Duberly, the paymaster of the 8th Hussars, accompanied her husband on campaign. She remained on board a ship in Balaclava harbour. ‘I am sick of the siege and the noise of the guns,’ she wrote in her journal. William Howard Russell, the perceptive Times newspaper correspondent, had written four days before, ‘we are all getting tired of this continual “pound-pounding” which makes a great deal of noise,’ and more significantly ‘wastes much powder and does very little damage’.4
Correspondent ‘Billy’ Russell wore quasi-military clothes and armed himself, but did not fight. He was not originally welcome in the Crimea because Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief, mirrored Wellington’s rule of having no truck with journalists. ‘Lord Raglan,’ Russell later admitted, ‘never spoke to me in his life.’ He was riding on the back of the Times’ prestigious newsprint and in the new steamboat and telegraph era could get his dispatches back to England inside three weeks. An experienced correspondent, a droll Irish humour and his cigar-smoking readiness to drink anybody’s brandy while able to converse easily with anyone across the social divide paid dividends. He was the civilian eyewitness on the spot. Lieutenant Henry Clifford was quick to spot his shrewd awareness of people, which he recognised as ‘a gift’. ‘More than one “nob”,’ he observed, ‘had thought it best to give him a shake of the hand rather than a cold shoulder.’
With no censorship, his reportage was as accurate as what he could see and hear, which made uncomfortable reading for Raglan and his staff. ‘It is very hard to batter down earthworks,’ Russell observed, the only option when only partial investment prevented the ability to starve the enemy out. Russell was picking up what the soldiers in the trenches already appreciated. Nine days before, Lieutenant John Image, out with his first working party with the 21st Fusiliers, wrote in his diary that he was ‘surprised to see what little damage was done’. ‘The Russians have plenty of labourers,’ Russell commented.‘They easily repair at night what we destroy and damage during the day.’5
Russell had developed an astute ‘feel’ for what was going on, based upon his personable conversations with officers and soldiers. ‘Our men are worn out with fatigue,’ he perceptively reported. ‘The daily service exhausts them, and the artillerymen cannot have more than five hours rest in the twenty four,’ and conditions were steadily getting worse. ‘We found great difficulty in keeping warm with only our regimental greatcoats for covering,’ complained Lieutenant John Hume with the 55th Regiment. ‘Fleas abounded’ and ‘all began to find the ground very hard and our bones ached when we got up every morning.’ Their only recourse was to chip out hollows to shape hip bones to the rocky ground. Russell wrote:
Rome was not built in a day nor will Sevastopol be taken in a week. In fact, we have run away with the notion that it was a kind of pasteboard city, which would tumble down at the sound of our cannon as the walls of Jericho fell at the blast of Joshua’s trumpet.
The siege was developing features of static warfare that would characterise the experience of British infantry in Flanders sixty years later. Trenches were mud and water channels, and it was cold. ‘Our clothing was getting very thin, with as many patches as Joseph’s coat,’ recalled Sergeant Gowing.
More than one smart Fusilier’s back or shoulders was indebted to a piece of black blanket, with hay bound round his legs to cover his rags and keep the biting wind out a little; and boots were nearly worn out, with none to replace them.
Their appearance encapsulated threadbare trench warfare. ‘There was nothing about our outward appearance lady killing,’ the sergeant recalled. ‘We were looking stern duty in the face.’ Stoic acceptance of their lot kept morale intact, ‘there was no murmuring,’ Gowing insisted. ‘All went jogging along, cracking all kinds of jokes.’ Snipers dominated sectors of the line. One officer on Raglan’s staff remembered a Rifle Brigade sharp shooter dropping a Cossack officer from his white horse from 1,300 yards. The new Minié rifle was proving its worth.6
The British Army was neither tactically aware nor psychologically prepared for this type of positional warfare. Two days before, Captain Lord Dunkellin with the Coldstream Guards was captured while out at night in the trenches with a work party. The incident verged on Vaudeville comedy, a parody of the philosophy held by many of their lordships that they knew best because of birthright alone. One of Dunkellin’s guardsmen had detected the approach of likely enemy in the half-light of dawn. ‘There are the Russians!’ he warned. ‘Nonsense, they’re our fellows,’ replied his lordship, going toward them peremptorily and demanding, ‘Who is in charge of this party?’ Sure enough, it was the Russians, who surrounded and spirited him away. ‘They are afraid that Dunkellin may have been bayonetted, and have sent in a flag of truce to find out about him,’ recalled Lord George Paget with the 4th Dragoons. ‘It appears to have been his own fault, or rather his blindness,’ he commented on the notoriously short-sighted officer. ‘The men told him it was a Russian picket in front of him, and he would not believe them.’ Trench work could be hazardous.7
The spade was mightier than the sword or rifle in this form of warfare and British soldiers did not find digging trenches congenial work. The Industrial Revolution had transformed British society since 1815 and the average physique of new recruits was hardly the same robust stock as their rustic Napoleonic forbearers. Guards Captain Wilson explained:
Strange as it may appear to many, English soldiers (with the exception of the Guards, who are almost entirely village born, with an infusion of that most magnificent of physical elements – the navvy) are, to a certain extent, poor hands with the pick and shovel, simply because one half of the men composing our line regiments are town bred – lads of loom and spinning jenny - who possibly never set eyes on a ploughed field before they ‘listed’.8
By contrast, Wilson saw that the French appeared to regard building earthworks almost as important as musket training. They actually trained their young soldiers to use a pick and shovel. Long hours working in unsanitary conditions with a poor diet had transformed the health and physiques of the British urban working classes. The post-industrial British recruit was shorter, slight, and less physically imposing than the men who had manned Wellington’s squares at Waterloo. Many cavalry recruits came from the towns, even though officers said they preferred rural youths. The average Heavy Brigade trooper in the 4th Dragoon Guards was about 5ft 8in tall, weighing just over 11 stone, and had served about five years. Private Albert Mitchell with the 13th Light Dragoons remembered the difficulties ‘townies’ encountered cutting forage for horses on campaign. ‘Some poor fellows had hardly seen a field of corn before they enlisted,’ and as a consequence ‘these made poor work of it, some cutting themselves badly, and were quite unable to cut the portion allotted to them.’9
British soldiers laying siege to Sevastopol may have been less physically imposing than before, but they remained cunningly resourceful. The previous day, Private Maguire with the 33rd Regiment was sniping in the front trenches when he was captured by three Russians. On being marched away he snatched a loaded musket from one of his careless captors and shot him, he then swung the butt and floored the second and the third before beating a hasty retreat. The canny Maguire had realised one of the two men at his side was armed with his own Minié rifle, which he knew to have been discharged. He therefore tackled his companion, hoping the Russian’s musket was loaded. All of this was witnessed from the British lines, only about 100 yards away. Maguire escaped and was rewarded by the impressed Lord Raglan with a gratuity of £5, which was immediately spent on grog at one of the many stalls that had mushroomed around Balaclava harbour.
The British expected an all-out infantry assault on Sevastopol at any moment, which would come, they suspected, at no small cost. ‘Those Russians must be chained to their cannon,’ reasoned Captain Townsend, ‘for with them there is no relenting.’ The Russians had earned grudging respect. ‘The Muscovite never flinches,’ Wilson admitted. ‘He stands like a man to his guns, both landward and seaward.’ Moreover, he seemed to ‘be liberally supplied with cannon’. No matter what the damage, the fortifications were swiftly repaired. ‘Its embrasures are silent only for a few minutes, and then blaze away hotly as ever.’ Nevertheless, optimism remained that the city would soon fall. Lord Raglan had rejected a Russian truce overture the day before to bury the dead in no man’s land, suspecting the Russians would simply improve their defences during such a lull. ‘He had no dead to bury,’ he responded, but the siege was developing an uncanny aura of permanence.10
‘I rode about three miles up to look at Sevastopol the other day,’ Richard Temple Godman with the 5th Dragoon Guards wrote home to his father. ‘From the hill above, you can see at about a mile off right into the town and harbour.’ Inside the city they could see the inhabitants ‘walking up and down’ and Russians out busy repairing damage and extending fortifications. It provided an exciting distraction from normal picket routine. Great black fort guns were clearly visible ‘looking through the embrasures, and if you show yourself too much, a puff of smoke curls from the walls, and a shell hisses over your head’. Temple Godman had reappeared at the ‘splendid view’ two days before. The site ‘was always crowded with officers off duty, who sit there and smoke and talk all day’, he recalled.‘The place is properly called “Gossip Hill”.’ Insufficient activity had occurred to merit any meaningful discussion. Russian watchfires had been seen only 2,000 yards from the cavalry vedettes at the rear of Sevastopol. Correspondent ‘Billy’ Russell had reported travellers along the Balaclava road hearing Russian bands playing somewhere in the outlying villages. Nobody felt this was especially ominous. Mrs Fanny Duberly, accommodated in the stern cabin on the Star of the South moored in Balaclava harbour, which at least had a window, had gone to bed early; she was not feeling well. ‘Well we knew that they [the Russians] had been busy hanging about among the hills for some days,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘but we fancied in our folly that they would not attack us.’ She decided she would allow herself to sleep in the following morning, 25 October.11
Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich, a squadron commander with Colonel Vasilii Yeropkin’s composite reserve lancer regiment, recalled the atmospheric flickering campfires that spread along the valley of the north bank of the Chernya River near the village of Chorgun. ‘Loud sounds of laughter drifted far out in all directions,’ he remembered. This was the main Russian assembly area for Lieutenant General Liprandi’s 12th Infantry Division, 6 miles east of Sevastopol. Kubitovich was a young squadron leader in Colonel Yeropkin’s composite reserve lancer regiment. His men were young recruits, who had barely served a year. ‘Some who were less carefree,’ he observed, ‘conversed quietly among themselves.’ They were preparing for battle. ‘They burned letters which they did not want to see in strangers’ hands should they die, and wrote last wills and testaments.’ A huge social divide existed between officers and the conscripted men and Kubitovich was wryly amused at the earnest way penniless men obsessed about disposing of possessions that were essentially worthless. ‘What do you think of a will,’ he was asked by a soldier, ‘who has nothing except a shabraque [decorated saddle covering], two uniform coats, and a samovar [cooking pot], but who still earnestly wrote out his bequests?’
Other groups sought solitude near a small patch of woods nearby, while some ‘deep in ardent conversation among friends, with memories of the past’ were too excited to sleep and talked about their likely prospects in the coming fighting. The fortunate unconcerned or unimaginative were already sleeping in burka cloaks or greatcoats ‘with no care for tomorrow’s business’. Younger men tended to gravitate to the older veterans, who attracted small audiences amid the glow of scattered campfires near the horse lines. They were transfixed ‘with animated interest’ by war stories describing ‘the first impressions when hearing a bullet whistle past, and of much else that each one would come to experience in a few hours’. Russia was at war.
‘How unjust it is of the English and French to interfere in this war!’ recalled Captain Robert Adolf Hodasevich with the Taroutine Regiment, echoing the prevalent view. ‘All of this business is because those Christians stand up for the dog of a Turk, who impales and boils our brethren.’ Soldiers were unanimous in their conviction that ‘we must all fight for Holy Russia’. Tsar Nicholas I fervently believed it was his holy mission to extend his Orthodox empire as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem. Driven by the inflated pride and arrogance that came with twenty-seven years of unquestioned divine rule, the Tsar sought to profit from Turkey’s ailing Ottoman Empire and extend Russian influence into the Eastern Mediterranean. War, as a consequence, had reached the Crimea.
These soldiers had marched a long way to get there. Yeropkin’s lancer regiment had ridden from Moldavia west of the Ukraine. Starting initially with alternating march and rest days, they upped the tempo to 30-mile daily forced marches once they reached the Crimea. At first, they were based in the Baider Valley nearby, ‘keeping watch over the Tatars and keeping them from driving their herds over to the enemy,’ Kubitovich explained, ‘and delivering much needed forage to them.’ General Pavel Petrovich Liprandi’s long-awaited 12th Infantry Division had marched in four days before. ‘All of us were sure that offensive operations would begin when they arrived,’ Kubitovich remembered. ‘Everyone burned with the desire to be in action!’ Liprandi’s infantry had come from Kishinev west of the Ukraine and had marched for over a month. With no rail links south of Moscow, all movement had been by foot and wagon. ‘For a Russian soldier, being on the march is nothing,’ Kubitovich grandly declared, because ‘the Russian peasant is used to long marches from childhood.’ These epic expeditions were exciting. At first, they were cheered through strange towns and villages, and given plentiful supplies of food and drink. Carts were impressed from villages en route, but only within regional boundaries, because Muzhik drivers could not be obliged to drive beyond their borders. Quartermasters then had to round up more in the next region.
Russian soldiers were invariably serfs and because the state rather than private landlords owned most villages, he was a state serf. As such he drew the short straw in life when it came to conscription; 80,000 were selected from age 20 each year to serve twenty-five years in the line or twenty-two in the Guard. Village ‘troublemakers’ were invariably the first to be selected. Departure was an especially riotous carnival occasion, because once the recruit left his village he rarely came back and if he did, it would be as a stranger. Conscription was exile for life and young recruits were mourned on leaving as if they were already dead. Soldiers surviving service invariably re-enlisted or drifted as vagabonds.
Recruits from the same region were not permitted to serve in the same regiments or near their home area. The first thing that went was his long hair, which indicated serf status; this was immediately cropped to a close haircut. On arrival he was coached by a couple of ‘diadkas’ or ‘uncles’, who were trained soldiers. They were then mercilessly drilled and intimidated in a harsh, unimaginative system that extolled a precision parade-ground posture – carrying arms and goose-stepping – as the guarantee of success in war. Virtually no serving soldier accounts have survived because serfs did not write. ‘Stick and fist’ imposed total obedience alongside their stoic acceptance of whatever life might bring. Mistakes were rewarded with a ‘toothpick’, a brutal blow to the face with a cane, drumstick or fist. They could be flogged or made to run the gauntlet, a beating administered during a forced run between regimental lines. Despite forced separation from loved ones and uncompromising discipline and squalor, Russian soldiers were hardy and unquestionably brave. Captain Hodasevich with the Taroutine Regiment remembered. ‘The poor fellows suffer in silence their hard fate.’ Scores against overzealous officers could always be settled on the anonymous battlefield ‘in the heat of the action’ Hodasevich maintained. They revered their Father Tsar, the Holy Church and Russia, and did whatever they were told. The active strength of the Russian Army with its reserves was just short of a million men.12
As the marching columns moved further south towards the Crimea the vast countryside became thinly populated, desolate and gloomy. There were no carts and less to eat. Native Tatars were paid far more by the foreign invaders and had little regard for the Muscovite Tsar. Artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov found the creaking, lurching journey with the 8th Battery of the 12th Artillery Brigade tiresome. ‘The north-west corner of the Crimea was not a happy place,’ he remembered, ‘where ever you look is flat steppe, level, dusty. Nothing to catch your eye.’ Something like 75 per cent of the 10,000-square-mile Crimean Peninsula is dry steppe land. ‘Even the Kurgan burial mounds which vary the landscape of the New Russia steppe, if only a little,’ he explained, ‘were only rarely encountered here.’ The south-east part of the peninsula is blanketed with the Yayla mountain zone, which soon appeared in silhouette before them.
Kozhukhov noticed the Tatar villages they passed were largely abandoned, their sympathy with the invading allies. ‘In the villages of Russian settlers, we only found old women and children, and even they met us with uneasy intimidated eyes,’ he recalled. The Crimea was a depressing place. ‘Continuously appearing detachments of Cossacks lent an even greater feeling of alienation,’ he observed, ‘as they gave the country a hostile and unfriendly character.’ Tatars were neither liked nor trusted, Captain Hodasevich had disdain for their villages, which were ‘neither very clean nor very regular’. His regiment had passed through en route to Sevastopol marching from Novgorod six months earlier and found ‘they appeared to look upon us with anything but friendly eyes.’ Russians were seen as interlopers. Normally while transiting Russia, ‘soldiers were invariably fed by generosity, forced or voluntary’ by the locals, ‘but in the Crimea we were obliged to depend on our rations,’ Hodasevich recalled, ‘the same as in an enemy’s country.’
Kozhukhov saw an increase in military activity as they approached Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea. ‘Tents and smoking campfires scattered in disorder in these bivouacs made the whole region like a vast military encampment,’ he remembered. The final approach marches were long and hard. ‘We were not led along roads but rather all sorts of paths and tracks.’ It was heavy going for the artillery and caissons. As they neared the 5- to 7.5-mile ‘Riviera’ coastal strip along the Black Sea, where most of the population lived in a synthetic Mediterranean climate, Kozhukhov realised a large military operation was pending. ‘Everyone knew that troops were concentrating around Chorgun [village] to begin offensive actions from our side, but no one knew exactly when these would begin.’ General Liprandi ‘answered our guesses’ on arrival: it was to be tomorrow.
Before it got dark ‘crowds of the curious went to the nearby heights to observe the enemy positions with spyglasses,’ Kozhukhov remembered. They were able to pick out ‘four rather large redoubts built on the highest points commanding the surrounding area’. They could see that ‘small bushes covered the whole area’ – useful perhaps for infantry skirmishers, but not for them – ‘since they hindered the free movement of artillery’. They learned the fortifications were not defended by English or French ‘but by Turks, who were of course much easier to deal with’. This promoted animated discussion over their likely prospects; ‘everyone spoke of difficulties, but no one mentioned failure.’ ‘Before a battle,’ Kozhukhov explained, ‘it was somehow not only uncomfortable to speak of defeat, but even to think of it.’13
The weather was changing, clouds rolled down off the hills and there was some light rain. Desiring more rest than the fitful sleep they had the night before, the young artillery officer set up a layer of ammunition boxes to make an improvised shelter and spread some straw over the wet ground. He spread his Moldavian horse blanket over the structure and tried to get some sleep.
Lieutenant Yevgenii Arbuzov, serving with the Saxe-Weimar Ingermanland Hussars cavalry regiment, had marched down from Kharkov. Like lancer Kubitovich, he had been preoccupied patrolling the local hostile Tatar villages. They had been encamped 10 miles from Sevastopol when the Allied siege bombardment started nine days before. ‘The bombardment was so heavy,’ he remembered, ‘it was impossible to make out individual cannons firing or even the salvos from whole batteries.’ It was that loud ‘they could have been thundering from our own position’. That morning they were told ‘it was proposed to take four redoubts from the Turks built on the Balaclava heights and drive them out of the village of Kamara.’ The objective was to strike a blow at the main British logistics base at Balaclava. Once the redoubts were taken, the cavalry, including Arbuzov’s regiment, would sweep down from the occupied Heights and destroy the enemy artillery and siege park at Kadikoi village, near the Woronsov road, just north of Balaclava harbour. ‘Once the hussars had put the park’s wagons out of order, they were to withdraw,’ Arbuzov was briefed. Russian horse artillery would then shell the park to destruction, ‘the enemy having been deprived of the means to move it away’. Official Russian reports of the events of this day often contradict Allied accounts and make no mention of what Liprandi’s precise objectives were. Detailed planning was not a characteristic of nineteenth-century warfare. Whatever the mission, Russian soldiers were at least aware there was to be an attack and that there would be a battle.14
Initiative in the Russian army came secondary to unquestioning obedience. The main training theatre was the drill square and battle tactics were in a sense performed as parade movements. General Liprandi was not supported by a general staff blessed with a particularly high education or focused intellectual development. Staff officers were little more than ADC messengers with no training or experience of operations, reconnaissance or even an awareness of how topography might influence military courses of action. In 1851 only ten officers had graduated from a staff college tainted by association with the 1825 Decembrist plot against the Tsar. Staff were often held in contempt or seen as a threat; promotion was slower than elsewhere in the army; and the pay was poor, one third poorer than the Prussian army by comparison. Most officers, except in the guard, grenadier corps or prestigious cavalry regiments, were without independent means. Like Allied officers, hardiness and courage were not lacking and despite frugal incomes – Russian colonels were paid only twice that of a lieutenant – honour remained all-important.
Lieutenant Kubitovich’s young lancers talked late into the night with the ‘old soldiers’ by the subdued light of campfires next to the horse lines. Veterans, he acknowledged, ‘have a special kind of sense’ and were able to ‘talk among themselves of a march or battle before the commanders know anything about it’. Men said goodbye to each other. Arbuzov watched when, after prayer services, ‘each officer gave his men instructions in case of his death and all his money.’ Captain Khitrivo, the 8th Squadron Commander, insisted on paying his 1,600 rouble debt to the regimental fund, because his father would have to pay if he fell in battle. Khitrivo had been gradually repaying since as a young junker (officer candidate) he had been on guard when the regimental cash box was stolen. He would have barely twelve hours to live.
Presently the bivouacs settled down as more men snatched some rest. ‘Here or there was only a small candle glowing under a bush, where some officer, lying on a rug, was finishing his letter.’ Kubitiovich remarked on how superstitious his men were:
If the horses neigh and lie down in the daytime it means a long march. If a horse does not eat and stands with its head lowered – it will be killed. If on the eve of battle it keeps nuzzling its owner, then that man will be killed.
He noticed an old respected soldier weeping bitterly over his horse, Yunoa, ‘the wildest horse in the whole regiment’. Nobody else could even approach her, apart from him, whom the horse loved and obeyed. ‘Truly tomorrow Yunoa will be killed,’ the old soldier declared. ‘She doesn’t eat out of her feed bag and stands here sadly.’ They had served eight years together, and nobody else could even groom the horse. ‘Tomorrow I’ll be left an orphan, with no one to love!’ the soldier lamented. The encampment eventually quietened, and ‘a profound silence reigned, broken only by horses neighing, the rattle of the sentries’ weapons, and the quiet murmur of men asleep.’ Yunoa would be dead before the end of the day.15
Lieutenant Kozhukhov eventually gave up trying to sleep when rain ‘drummed down on my Moldavian horse blanket’. He had been kept awake by his demons in any case. ‘Thoughts crowded into my head, each one more unwelcome and malevolent than the one before.’ ‘What if we fail?’ was uppermost in his mind. The Sevastopol army had lost confidence after its beating on the Alma and was relying upon these new reinforcements to get them out of trouble. ‘All eyes are upon us; everyone expects us to perform great deeds – but what if we do not fulfil these expectations? … It was said,’ Kozhukhov remembered, from ‘rumours around the army that General Liprandi had advised Prince Menshikov,’ the Commander-in-Chief, ‘against initiating the attack’ and that they should ‘wait for the arrival of the whole of the 4th Corps’. But they were going to attack with what they had. Menshikov was hardly popular after the setback on the Alma. ‘He never showed the slightest interest as to the manner in which the men were fed,’ complained Captain Hodasevich with the Taroutine Regiment.
Kozhukhov, chilled by the rain, moved to the warmth of the nearest campfire. Two Englishmen were already there, likely civilian sutlers, captured by Cossacks in the Baider Valley. They were unimpressive, speaking no Russian and barely any French and ‘were in the most pitiable state’. Soaked through, they plaintively asked for Russian vodka. How did they know the prisoners were English and not French? Kozhukhov asked the sentry. ‘In this way, your honour,’ replied the soldier, going on to explain: ‘With a Frenchman you can converse right away; they are a quick-witted race. But here with these fellows, you wrestle with them for almost an hour and are nowhere close to finding out what in fact they want with all their heart.’ They had therefore, he assumed, to be English.
When at 2 a.m. the rain at last eased off, Kozhukhov ‘fell into sweet dreams’. But not for long; within an hour the bivouac was stirring: ‘Kasha porridge was ready and the soldiers were summoned for their ration of spirits.’ His battery commander told him they were in reserve and to start getting ready. By the time they began to harness the horses a mist had descended. Arbuzov’s Hussar column was also assembling, ‘strung out in the narrow ways between the hills’. Lieutenant Kubitovich’s lancers stirred and ‘old veterans put on clean underclothes which they always kept in reserve as men ready for death at any moment.’ The prevailing wisdom was it reduced wound infections. Commanders busied themselves with the organisation as men prayed, ‘and they did so,’ Kubitovich observed, ‘with all their soul’. Between 4 and 5 a.m. the columns started to march out of the Chorgun bivouac. They were rested, well clothed and fed. Only the odd flicker of light momentarily lighting up the western horizon and the distant crump of heavy mortars showed the direction of Sevastopol.
Their comrades in the city had no idea they were coming.16