British cavalry soldiers bivouacked on the undulating plain beneath the Sapoune Heights, west of the village of Kadikoi, were wet and cold. They had been exposed to the elements for five weeks. Tents offloaded at Balaclava harbour nearby had arrived only the week before. ‘Rain continued at intervals during the night,’ reported one Royal Artillery captain, ‘but towards morning the clouds broke, and it became starlight.’ Autumn was upon them, the third successive day of cloud, showers and rain, another miserable night, the precursor to another monotonous siege day.
Fitfully sleeping soldiers managed only four hours sleep before being roused to continue the punishing routine of saddling up for ‘stand-to’ one hour before daybreak. Pickets and vedettes had to be relieved followed by interminable stable parades, four times a day. ‘The nights were awfully cold and the heavy dews would almost drench us, till the blood felt like ice,’ remembered 23-year-old Robert Farquharson with the 4th Light Dragoons. He was an experienced soldier, who had enlisted at 15. ‘What with “outlying” and “inlying” pickets, almost always in the saddle, and never undressed, sickness, want of food – and I’ve gone an entire three days without food,’ he complained, ‘we were very queer indeed.’ Lieutenant Richard Temple Godman with the 5th Dragoon Guards was 22, and considered himself lucky enough to share a small tent with three others, who were all ‘obliged to sleep on the ground’. ‘There is no room for beds,’ he remembered, ‘but beyond it being rather hard and cold it does not matter,’ because they were always dog-tired. Some of the men had resorted to sleeping inside the large barrels from a nearby wine house and press to achieve some shelter. Sleep was sporadic and intermittent, ‘the dews are very heavy at night and we occasionally have a smart shower,’ Temple Godman recalled.
The cavalry, unlike their infantry counterparts, manning the more secure siege lines on the Sapoune Heights above them, had pickets facing the rear, covering the eastern avenues of approach to the army siege lines. ‘Every day now the Russians loitering or moving in great mass about the Chernya [River nearby] keep us on the alert morning, noon and night,’ Farquharson remembered. Duties and alerts were unremitting. ‘If we come in from picket fagged, cold and hungry, we might hear the trumpet sound “boots and saddle” at any moment.’ ‘There are very few things more trying to the dragoon’s temper than these sudden turn outs,’ complained Private Albert Mitchell with the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘often just as he is about to get his meals’, which invariably meant ‘never seeing it again’. The 24-year-old Mitchell was in the fourth year of his service.1
Vedettes consisted of two outriders posted separately ahead of pickets, leaving a dismounted sentry in between, whose task was to warn the pickets about any vedette sightings. The daylight hours were generally quiet. ‘After dark we were withdrawn from the top of the hill down into the plain in our rear,’ Mitchell explained, ‘it being easier at night to discern anyone approaching’ because ‘you see them the moment they are [silhouetted] at the top.’ Cossacks, Mitchell complained, ‘manage to turn you out at meal times or at night when you are thinking of getting a little rest’. These rear area security-standing patrols were relentless.
Lieutenant Colonel Lord George Paget, commanding the 4th Light Dragoons, echoed Mitchell’s exasperation at the constant and cumulative interruptions of their much-needed rest. ‘We are now regularly turned out about midnight, and I shall soon wake at the regular time, but we always turn in again in half an hour,’ he remembered. Darkness fell by 7 p.m. and soldiers generally managed to rest by 9 p.m., but had to be in the saddle again an hour before the 5 a.m. daylight alert. ‘Every fool at the outposts, who fancies he hears something, has only to make a row, and there we all are, generals and all,’ Paget lamented. Twenty-nine-year-old Captain Michael Stocks with the 1st Dragoons called the interruptions ‘the poorest fun I know of,’ describing ‘lots of Cossacks who retired when we approached and approached when we retired’. ‘They remind you of rabbits,’ he observed, ‘but not quite so harmless.’
Four nights before, on the 21st, a report that 20,000 Russian foot and 5,000 horse were marching on them resulted in both cavalry brigades being called out, and the 4th Infantry Division was marched down to the plain from the Sapoune Heights. This was the third call-out in four days. Paget’s light dragoons were the only troops engaged in a light brush with the enemy before the Russians withdrew. He phlegmatically remarked, ‘Well, I suppose 500 false alarms are better than one surprise, so there is no help for it.’ Paget was a reluctant participant. Four months before departing England he had married his beautiful cousin, against the express wishes of his father. The intention had been to sell his commission to raise the money, but the advent of war meant it would be dishonourable to resign.
There was yet another alarm the following afternoon on the 22nd, which kept the cavalry saddled the entire cold night. ‘If a heavy dragoon or any other thick-headed individual sees a Cossack,’ wrote 22-year-old Cornet Wombwell with the 17th Lancers to his father, ‘he comes galloping into camp and instantly magnifies the Cossack to 500. So of course out we all go and by the time we get there, not a soul is to be seen.’
Every alert resulted in the encampment being packed up, in expectation of a move, another punishing routine on top of prevailing tensions accruing from the stand-off. The British Heavy and Light Brigades screened the logistics hub at Balaclava as well as the approaches to the rear of besieged Sevastopol. Essentially, they were encamped on the front line. On return to camp after one such alert, Albert Mitchell saw ‘sure enough everything was packed … Our kettle had been emptied in a ditch, and looking there we found our dinner. We picked out the best of it and after all made a tolerable meal, only it was cold, dirty and late.’
‘We are now in rather a ticklish position,’ explained Cornet Fiennes Wykeham Martin to his stepmother, ‘having Sevastopol before us, and a large army behind us.’ Everyone was becoming increasingly exasperated at the involuntary stalemate. ‘Them Rooshans is too ugly to show their faces by day,’ remarked a Highland soldier with the 93rd; ‘I wish the brutes would come on and take their licking without too much bother.’2
Not everyone was cold and uncomfortable this night. Private ‘Butcher Jack’ Vahey was blind drunk and under close arrest in the 17th Lancers guard tent, on the hillside near Kadikoi village. He was a typical ‘jack the lad’ character: married, 5ft 9in tall, and in the 17th ‘Deaths Head and Cross Bones’, as the regiment was called. His nickname stemmed from his resourceful ability to pass himself off as a butcher, for which he received payment, as well as extra money digging graves.
I never was backward [in] coming forward when there was any work to do, and when some fellows were moping helplessly in the tents, or going sick to the hospital, every morning I was knocking about as jolly as a sand boy, doing a job here and one there.
Vahey’s commendable enthusiasm for odd jobs was about ‘contriving to get more or less tipsy before nightfall’. This resulted in his arrest on the evening of 24 October, ‘on slaughtering day’. His butchering had been required ‘and there was a lot of rum knocking about’. ‘The Commissary guard knew how to get at the grog, and were free enough with it among the butchers, for the sake of a nice tender steak.’
Working with Private Paddy Heffernan from the Royals, they were ‘as drunk as lords’ when it came to wash-up time. One of the Commissary officers stumbled across them ‘while in this state and clapped us in the guard tent before you could say knife’. Fortunately for him, Vahey was a popular ‘rough and tumble’ type with officers and men alike. ‘Indeed, had it not been for my inordinate fondness for the drink, I might have got promotion over and over again,’ he claimed. He was still a private soldier at 31, after sixteen years’ service. ‘I used to find my way shoulder high into the guard tent pretty regularly once a week, and more than once I only saved the skin of my back by being known as a willing, useful fellow when sober.’
‘One place was as good as another to us,’ the incorrigible Vahey recalled. At least they were not outside freezing with a vedette, or enduring the cold showers that intermittently drummed down on their guard tent. ‘We lay there contented enough all night, taking an occasional tot out of a bottle which Paddy managed to smuggle into the tent where we were confined.’ They caroused until ‘it was getting on for morning before we dropped off into a heavy, drunken sleep, out of which the Commander-in-Chief himself would have had a tough job to have roused us.’ Retribution would come with the morning.3
Lieutenant Temple Godman as adjutant with the 5th Dragoon Guards had to stand at arm’s length and count the strokes at the last flogging he oversaw, en route to the Crimea. ‘I have the full benefit,’ he recalled, overseeing fifty lashes: ‘It is a very disgusting sight; a few strokes properly administered makes a man’s back the colour of a half ripe plum, blue and red, and towards fifty every stroke draws blood.’ It was his duty to ensure ‘the farriers lay it in as hard as they can’.
The other ranks found such punishments equally unsettling. Albert Mitchell saw four young men in the 13th Light Dragoons faint as ‘the flesh changed colour, and the blood began to flow’ when Private William Doyle received fifty lashes. He agreed with their French allies, who employed the guilty at the most degrading and laborious work to ‘make the defaulters useful to their well-behaved comrades’. Flogging victims were rarely the same men afterwards. ‘They have lost all self respect,’ Mitchell commented, ‘and very naturally think they have lost the respect of their comrades also.’ This was sometimes the case, he accepted, ‘but as a rule, I believe they came in for a certain amount of pity and sympathy.’
Vahey would be at the mercy of this system the following morning. Drunkenness was hardly a unique occurrence. When the invasion fleet arrived at Scutari, Constantinople in late April, 2,400 of 14,000 men were declared drunk at watch-setting, the end of the day, according to Lord Raglan’s nephew and ADC, Lieutenant Colonel Calthorpe. Desertion of a post merited a flogging and Vahey’s fate would depend upon Captain Morris, his newly joined Commanding Officer. It was at the regiment’s whim.4
Vahey belonged to an army essentially unchanged since Waterloo. It dressed similarly and its discipline was the same. A private soldier could only be punished by hanging or flogging, there was nothing in between, so Vahey was playing a dangerous game. ‘Honour’ and ‘grit’ differentiated officers from soldiers. Officers were not paternal with their men, in the same way as they are in today’s army, many lavished more or the same affection on their horses. They cared for their men, but only up to a point. Officers were judged more on their ability to endure rather than inflict wounds. Soldiers expected bravery and technical skills from their officers, who were expected to stand firm under pressure. Lieutenant Thomas Lewis wrote to his father that their major had fled the 5th Dragoon Guards for fear of contracting cholera. ‘If a man would run away, when the men were dying all round him, what would we do in action?’ he condemned. ‘We do not want to see his face again.’ Officers were instead motivated by an abstract sense of ‘honour’, which was as tough a bond as ‘mate-ship’ was to the other ranks. They punctiliously obeyed orders, even if it should result in certain injury or death.
Commissions and advancement through promotion were by purchase and rarely by ability. An officer’s commission was a financial investment, akin to owning a house by twenty-first-century standards, and it was a tradable commodity. His peers at home would comment upon conduct on the battlefield, therefore reputation was paramount. Officers expected total obedience from their men and the army’s code of discipline exacted it, if all else failed. Peer pressure and the outward appearance of ‘grit’ also motivated soldiers. Death or mutilation would be risked before any doubts regarding courage might arise. Enlisted men existed in the smaller, harsher and every bit as demanding society of the regiment. Expectations from both groups underlaid the fighting power of the British army in 1854. No major war had been fought since 1815 and the ‘Iron Duke’ of Wellington had only passed away two years before. His complacent influence had had a stultifying effect upon the army. Very little had changed in nearly forty years and was reflected in the motivation and attitudes that were to influence some bizarre actions this day.5
War was seen as an aristocratic trade and bravery therefore as an essential military quality, exclusive to the wealthy. Commissions by purchase ensured that the wealthy with a stake in social order retained unchallenged social power. Incomes increased enormously during the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the untaxed aristocracy reigned supreme over tenants who did not possess a political vote. Soldiers, like the working classes, anticipated being told what to do by their ‘betters’. ‘I believe our steadiness under fire was mainly due to the splendid example of coolness set us by our officers,’ Private Albert Mitchell explained, and they ‘to a man were brave, both young and old’:
It was very encouraging to the men in the ranks, when a shot or shell crashed through, thereby causing some confusion, to hear the voice of the Troop or Squadron leader saying ‘steady men’, ‘close in’ or some such words spoken quite coolly.
Mitchell did not, however, enjoy constantly striking and pitching his colonel’s tent two or three times a week, when ‘we the men at this time were without tents.’6
Shared harsh experience might soften the rigidity of the soldier/officer interface, but only occasionally, while unconditional obedience was expected and exacted at all times. Officer behaviour could indeed be exasperating. Albert Mitchell and his companions coming off vedette duty on one occasion decided on a good breakfast of fried salt pork with biscuits soaked in fat. ‘It was a breakfast that would have tempted anyone,’ he remembered, ‘who had lived (as we had) in the open air for three weeks, night and day.’ Captain ‘Jenks’ Jenyns, his picket commander, rode by with Lieutenant Jervis sniffing the air and asking what ‘smelt so nice’. They both indulged themselves with a taste, ‘the Captain remarking that it was damn good’ – so good, in fact, that ‘we ourselves did not make so good a meal as we had anticipated’. Foreign commentators in the nineteenth century were intrigued by the extraordinary and eager deference the English appeared to show to their aristocracy. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray labelled it ‘lordidolitry’. After the breakfast incident Mitchell commented, ‘It is remarkable how little pride there is in some officers at such times,’ but there was stoic acceptance, and once ‘in quarters such little incidents as this are soon forgotten.’ Soldiers did what they were told, but they were not so obsequious that they did not recognise bad behaviour when it occurred. Nevertheless, they kept their thoughts to themselves until memoirs in later years.
Nineteen-year-old Private James Wightman, in his second year of service with the 17th Lancers, was bewildered by the succession of Commanding Officers they had experienced in the past few weeks. First to go had been Colonel Lawrenson, ‘doubled up, as we thought, with cholera’ at the Battle of Alma the month before. He was not generally liked, being ‘a little too extra-dainty for the rough and ready business of warfare’. The no-nonsense Wightman had felled a Russian officer with his lance butt, after he fired a pistol at point-blank range, shooting off a ring from his horse’s bit. Lawrenson told him off, calling the act cowardly, because he was taking the Russian prisoner; Wightman thought this petulant. His successor, Major Willet, ‘was a good soldier, but a tyrant’. He had insisted his men should not wear cloaks during a night-long saddled alert when other regiments were comfortably cloaked, throughout an exceedingly cold night. ‘This needless and wanton exposure’ resulted in the sickly but obstinate Willet succumbing to hypothermia. ‘He was a corpse before sundown the following day,’ Wightman remembered. Now at daybreak this morning another CO had appeared, a total stranger dressed ‘in blue frock coat and forage cap with a gold-edged peak’. This was 34-year-old Captain William Morris, or ‘Slacks’ as he was popularly called, the senior surviving 17th Lancer officer, fresh from the staff. The men did not know, but ‘Slacks’, or ‘the pocket Hercules’ as he was nicknamed by his officer peers, was the veteran of four cavalry charges and three campaigns in India. He was the consummate professional. Soldiers were generally trained by their NCOs, while officers supervised at a distance. On campaign the physical intimacy of the field brought them closer.7
The gulf between officers and men reflected the existing social divide and was more pronounced than it had been at Waterloo. Long years of Napoleonic campaigning had softened distinctions then, both sides being more familiar. Characterised by a slight stature, ‘Little Hodge’ or Colonel Edward Hodge commanding the 4th Dragoon Guards was, unlike many of his officer peers, a modest and humble man, but still could not easily identify with his men. His father had been killed at Genappe, the day before Waterloo, almost forty years before. ‘We have had sad drunkenness amongst our men,’ he confided in his diary en route to the Crimea in August. Hodge, being a devout Christian and generally humane, found his soldiers exasperating. ‘The fools drink raw spirits, get horribly drunk and then wonder that they are ill. They do not give themselves a chance,’ he wrote irritably. Hodge had no particular issue with Lord Cardigan, the unpopular Light Brigade commander, languishing every night aboard his luxury steam-driven three-mast yacht Dryad in Balaclava harbour. ‘He seems very comfortable,’ he wrote in his diary, the night Major Willet expired with exposure. ‘This is the way to make war,’ he commented, adding, ‘I hope he will take compassion on me sometimes.’
Cardigan’s yacht Dryad had arrived in the congested harbour two weeks before. Afflicted by diarrhoea, like most ranks sleeping rough on the Sapoune Heights, Raglan gave him permission to sleep aboard. He made constant use of his French chef; arriving late morning for duty, well after the normal dawn stand-to. At the opposite end of the spectrum were highly professional officers like Captain Louis Nolan, a 15th Hussars Aide-de-Camp (ADC) on Lord Raglan’s staff. Nolan had served in Hungary with the Austrian cavalry for eight years and another eight in India, although had yet to see action. Sergeant Robert Henderson, a 15th Hussar depot instructor at Maidstone, remembered that like most officers who had served on the Continent or India, ‘[Nolan’s] manner to those in the ranks, while it forbade the slightest approach by presumption, was so kind and winning that he was beloved by everyone.’ Nolan was recognised for the intensely committed and professional soldier that he was. Sergeant Franks with the 5th Dragoon Guards recalled his easy and ‘unpretending’ attitude to the ranks. ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’ might often be the case, he recalled, but in Nolan’s case ‘it bred a very deep and lasting feeling of esteem.’ Officers like Morris and Nolan were the forebeares of more compassionate and forward-thinking professional officers to come. In 1854 they were at the kinder spectrum of the essentially Napoleonic style of command: honour and courage for the officers and grit and obedience from the men.8
The British cavalry regarded itself as the army’s senior service. Purchase of cavalry rank was the most expensive and the best investment. The seemingly unassailable aristocratic pinnacle of ‘plungers’ and ‘tremendous swells’, as they called themselves at home, was characterised by an air of elegant boredom. They drawled with affected jargon, pronouncing ‘r’s as ‘w’s, saying ‘vewwy’ (very), ‘howwid’ (horrid) and ‘sowwy’ (sorry), interspersed with pointless ass-like ‘haw-haws’. Horses were their passion and dash the tactic of the day. The aim, not unlike foxhunting, was to ride like the devil at the enemy and run him over. Infantry were disdainfully regarded as a superfluous arm, better left at home, a drag on their arrogant belief that the cavalry could defeat any enemy single-handed. One pre-embarkation Punch cartoon summed up the horseman’s sartorial attitude to war, with an affected cavalry officer complaining to a lady: ‘Of course it’s a bore just at the beginning of the season, and I shall miss the Derby! Wish they could have the Russians over here, because then we could have thrashed them in Hyde Park, and dined at Greenwich afterwards you know.’9
Generations of peace since 1815 had obscured the more visceral aspects of warfare. The large numbers of limbless ex-servicemen beggars that had roamed the streets during the Napoleonic era were largely gone.
The reality of warfare in the Crimea had already reduced the cavalry’s stock among the infantry, artillery and engineers. Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief, had sought to carefully husband his small mounted force of just two brigades, and the rest of the army had sensed it. When Russian cavalry was first encountered in strength at the Bulganek River before the Battle of the Alma, Raglan, fearing a trap, insisted the British cavalry retire. The infantry were much amused when the ‘swells’ were ordered back, amid much jeering and shouting, faced with an apparently small body of Russians. Lord Lucan, the cavalry commander, was labelled ‘Lord Look-On’ because of alleged timidity. British infantry then stormed the seemingly impregnable Russian position defended by 35,000 Russians on the Heights of Alma, in the face of fearsome casualties, and pushed them off. Raglan forbade the cavalry to pursue, despite raring to attack. Captain Louis Nolan on his staff echoed their frustration. ‘When a routed army was in full retreat,’ he indignantly wrote in his journal.‘What excuse can anyone find for those horse whose chief replied to an order to advance that the Russians were very numerous!’ Captain Robert Portal with the 4th Light Dragoons complained they were commanded by ‘old women’ who ‘would have been better in their drawing rooms’. ‘Having no share in so glorious a victory was most galling,’ Nolan concluded. The infantry, with its 2,000 casualties, typically joked that Raglan’s dispatch likely had a cavalry section that only reported ‘one horse wounded’.10
Cavalry were disdained as a ‘showy’ rather than ‘a useful branch of the service’. Gentle fun poked at the absurdly gorgeous uniforms of the 11th Hussars by the Times newspaper before the war came home to roost: ‘The brevity of their jackets, the irrationality of their headgear, the incredible tightness of their cherry coloured pants, altogether defy description; they must be seen to be appreciated.’
Lord Cardigan was rumoured to have spent £10,000 a year (multiplied by five for a modern estimate) for their uniforms in 1840. The only concession for the rigours of active service on going to war in 1854 was that the 11th were to sew leather patches on the seat of their cherry-coloured trousers. Prior to departure, the Times commented again that the constricted uniforms were ‘as utterly unfit for war service as the garb of the female hussars in the ballet of Gustavus, which they so nearly resemble.’
Conditions around Sevastopol already resembled those that were to recur in Flanders in 1915. ‘We have too much frippery – too much toggery – too much weight in things worse than useless,’ Captain Nolan advised in his book on Cavalry: Its History and Tactics, shortly before the war. ‘To a cavalry soldier every ounce is of consequence!’ Nolan pointed out that cavalry duties involved riding and sleeping rough over all sorts of terrain. It required tough warm clothing on the lower half of the body, but needed to be loose on the upper half to enable unrestricted arm movement. Ornate and tightly fitting garb, designed with style in mind rather than wartime requirements, was prone to damage and offered little protection against the elements. Captain L.G. Heath, a naval officer assigned to shore duty in Balaclava, had already observed the deterioration of uniforms that had been little changed since Wellington. ‘You have no idea of a campaign soldier,’ he recalled, ‘if you have only seen them in St James’s Park or in a garrison ball room.’ In the siege lines around Sevastopol ‘they live in their full dress coats’: ‘The scarlet has turned to port wine colour and the gold lace and epaulettes to a dark coppery colour; the coat is generally full of holes and the individual wears no shirt.’
Ornate traditional uniforms were totally unsuited to trench warfare. ‘The change of life to them must be very great,’ Heath observed, noting their increasingly dilapidated state, ‘and some of them feel it a good deal.’ The weather and the rigours of campaigning were having a jaded effect; cavalry uniforms were coming apart. ‘Our red coats are crimson and black stains all over them,’ 23-year-old Lieutenant Robert Scott Hunter with the Scots Greys wrote home. ‘Epaulettes no one wears, they are done away with, and we have to carry telescopes and haversacks, and pistols, so that with our brown faces and patched clothes, we look queer figures I assure you.’11
The physical condition of the British cavalry reflected its threadbare appearance, having bled men and horses since leaving England in March. Horses confined inside cramped stalls in ships’ holds, roughly hoisted aboard by cranes, could not lie down and had to stand for six weeks. The Light Brigade alone lost fifty-seven mounts between England and Constantinople, twenty-six of these belonged to the 17th Lancers. They lost four more at Varna and then about 100 during Cardigan’s so called ‘sore-back recce’ to Silistra. Cornet Fiennes Wykeham Martin remembers it being ‘fearfully hot’ aboard the steamship Simla with the 4th Light Dragoons ship ‘going a great pace, 15 miles an hour’ beyond Gibraltar. ‘I cannot lay on the deck in a flannel suit without perspiring,’ he recalled, whereas down below, ‘there are about 20 horses on each side of the boiler, their noses about a foot from it; one is already dead from the heat, no air can get to them perfectly foaming with sweat.’
In late July they neared Malta beneath a searing Mediterranean sun, ‘two horses gone mad from heat and being crammed up in the hold,’ he wrote to his brother. Heavy Brigade transports tossed in a violent storm lost over 220 horses, the survivors being slung ashore in a wretched condition. ‘On the 26th September the regiment lost more horses than at Waterloo,’ remembered Lieutenant Colonel John Yorke, commanding the 1st Dragoons. Fearful transport conditions, heat, insufficient fodder and now a sudden dip in temperature with heavy dews and no shelter sapped the numbers and condition of the surviving cavalry horses.12
The health of the troopers was as jaded as their uniform and mounts. Three months before, cholera had surfaced at Varna in Bulgaria and 600 men died in two weeks; the French lost thousands. ‘It is a thousand pities,’ declared staff officer Lieutenant Henry Clifford with the Rifles, ‘that our army did not go at Sevastopol on first leaving England when in rude health and full of spirits and enthusiasm.’ ‘All these have vanished,’ he wrote in his diary. Cholera was frightening. Clifford recalled one young officer from the 77th fresh from England: ‘he came up here on Tuesday, was taken ill on the Wednesday morning and buried that evening.’ The intimidating aspect was complete helplessness in the face of an enemy one could not see or fight. It generally began with a day of painless diarrhoea with no vomiting. Victims often surmised it was a dose of dysentery, which would pass. Violent diarrhoea followed, with large purges of mucous membrane and vomiting with similar content, accompanied by intense thirst and pain with dehydration agues. After a day the skin became cold and took on a bluish-purple hue, familiar comrades’ faces became pinched with sunken eyes, and an almost imperceptible pulse. Pain came from abdominal cramps with severe cramp in the legs and feet. There was nothing anyone could do. Horrified onlookers were surrounded by the stench of effluent coming from scores of friends or compatriots, struck down and rendered completely immobile by the disease.
‘Men and officers are dying off like rotten sheep,’ Lieutenant Robert Scott Hunter with the Scots Greys wrote home to his sister Molly. Cavalry camps were moved around at Varna to escape the insidious menace. ‘Billy’ Russell, the Times correspondent, reported the Guards and Light Division lost around 100 to 120 men each and the cavalry a similar amount, with 600 sick. The 5th Dragoon Guards lost three officers and forty other ranks at Varna, a loss rate appropriate to battle casualties. Squadrons had to be amalgamated before even meeting the enemy. Experienced NCOs and officers were replaced with whatever nominated replacements were available. Russell reported in early October that ‘since we landed in the Crimea, as many have died of cholera as perished on the Alma,’ where 380 of 2,000 casualties were killed. Only one in four, or 3,754 of 19,584 total soldiers who perished in the Crimea, were to fall in battle.
The cumulative impact was not just fewer experienced soldiers within a diminished chain of command; it also had an insidious impact upon morale. ‘The depression of the army is increased by this event,’ Russell observed at Varna prior to the Crimean invasion. ‘It is doubtful’ if they would exhibit ‘the same pluck now that they were so full of a month ago’. Even before swords were crossed, men ‘sup full of horrors and listen greedily to tales of death which serve but to weaken and terrify them.’ Victorian soldiers were actually more phlegmatic than Russell and his readers gave credit. ‘A private soldier does not care a bit about anything,’ was Lieutenant Henry Clifford’s more sanguine view, ‘as long as he himself is not actually the victim,’ a characteristic of soldiery throughout warfare. Danger needed to be visible before it became intimidating. Clifford observed: ‘Tho’ hundreds are falling about him he lives on, in the same thoughtless way and would not march 10 miles [to avoid cholera] to save himself from the fate of his companions.’13
Petty bickering between the Earl of Cardigan and Lord Lucan further undermined the parlous condition of the British cavalry. Cardigan, commanding the Light Brigade, had departed for Varna to take over the leading cavalry elements without the permission of his overall commander Lucan. Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief, compounded the issue by not consulting with his cavalry commander, encouraging Cardigan’s erroneous belief that his brigade had some sort of pseudo-independent status. His insubordinate behaviour remained unchecked until Raglan, tiring of the stream of official complaints from Lucan and the Adjutant General, put the errant Cardigan in his place. The damage, however, had already been done; there was neither mutual regard nor trust between the two cavalry commanders. Mrs Fanny Duberly, accompanying the expedition, observed, they ‘fight like cat and dog’ and are the ‘most pitiable old women you ever heard of’. Neither was their behaviour discreet: ‘the very privates scoff at them and they drive the officers wild,’ Mrs Duberly commented.
Lucan at Varna reverted to pre-war parade ground hype. Long field training days were conducted in the oppressive Bulgarian summer heat, weakening men and horses still further while he nagged at them with obsessive administrative trivia. His unsympathetic and unpredictable manner alienated officers and men alike. Meanwhile, Cardigan’s 300-mile so-called ‘sore back’ reconnaissance from Varna to the Danube River at Silistra revealed just what an inept field soldier he was. Two squadrons of several hundred men were driven along at a ‘cracking pace’ for seventeen days on a mission, conducted in searing heat, which could have been likewise achieved by a few score men. Food and forage was not provided for in an area bereft of water. One aide dispatched by Raglan found the recce by following the dead horses that lined the route. Fanny Duberly witnessed the ‘piteous sight’ of the returning column, with ‘men on foot driving and goading the wretched, wretched horses, three or four of which could hardly stir.’ One hundred horses perished and cholera-prone cavalrymen weakened even further. ‘Lord Lucan is a very sharp fellow,’ acknowledged Major William Forrest with the 4th Dragoon Guards, ‘but he has been so long on the shelf he does not even know the words of command.’ Taken together, the bickering between the two commanders had negative implications for the future tactical efficiency of cavalry operations. Lord George Paget, commanding the 4th Dragoons, observed they were ‘like a pair of scissors who go snip and snip and snip without doing each other any harm, but God help the poor devil who gets between them’.14
Captain Louis Nolan on Raglan’s staff was disheartened by the contrast between British and French cavalry reconnaissance skills his practised eye detected:
Our French neighbours when called upon to reconnoitre to the front, to the right, to the left, dash off like a flight of swallows and spread far and wide, clustering around their leader again like bees bringing in the fruits of their expedition and that in a few minutes.
British light dragoons, he irritably observed, ‘Trot off, keeping their dressing and looking to the rear instead of the front and if you move in another direction they stand there till they are sent for.’
These were parade ground tactics. Looking to their rear was perhaps advisable, because their rigid tactics were under the microscope of commanders focused more on unquestioning obedience than with the Russians. Lucan was constrained by Raglan’s obsessive insistence on carefully husbanding his diminishing cavalry. He had ordered no forays across the River Chernya to the north-east, behind which it was known the Russians were gathering. When one of Captain Oldham’s patrols from the 13th Light Dragoons lost a sergeant, taken prisoner across the river, Lucan had Oldham arrested for disobeying orders. Albert Mitchell witnessed Oldham’s unsympathetic response to ‘our mistake’, the capture of the NCO by four Russian hussars. ‘Serve him right too,’ Oldham had said. ‘Why did he not ride at them and bowl them over?’ Now he was in trouble. Instructions were not to cross the river, but how else could they determine whether there were Russians in the village beyond? Lucan got the information but still insisted. Mitchell remembered, ‘our captain was relieved and placed under arrest’.
The cavalry were the eyes and ears covering the open rear behind the Sevastopol siege lines as well as any approach to the vital British logistics hub at Balaclava. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Sterling on Major General Sir Colin Campbell’s staff, responsible for the inner defence of Balaclava, like much of the army, was singularly unimpressed with the cavalry. They had yet to be blooded. ‘Cossacks are constantly roaming about,’ he complained, ‘and our cavalry are not very clever at outpost duty.’15
Lord Raglan had taken over the Bracker farmhouse on the Sapoune Heights for his headquarters ten days before. The one-storey deep-roofed red-tiled house was north-west of the prominent col, where the road from Balaclava crested the Heights, 600ft above sea level. One of Raglan’s staff described it as ‘a sort of country villa, with large farm buildings’. It was close to the British siege lines and within a few minutes’ ride to the Sapoune escarpment, offering a magnificent view of the approaches to Balaclava. Cottages and sheds joined by a low wall completed the square-shaped complex. All was quiet during the bleak, cold morning hours of 25 October. Raglan was asleep, as were most of the staff in tents located nearby. Staff watch in the warm flickering candlelight of the headquarters was far preferable to cavalry picket duty, enduring intermittent rain on the undulating plain below. Only the odd bang and iridescent trail of mortar shells occasionally disturbed the peace. Most officers and soldiers slept, if they were able, as soon as early darkness descended.
The 66-year-old Raglan modelled himself on the ‘Iron Duke’, having served him faithfully throughout his career up to Military Secretary. Raglan lost his right arm at Waterloo during the last hour of the battle and had been desk-bound for nearly forty years. He had never commanded even a company in battle. Like his master, who rested on his considerable laurels after 1815, Raglan was resistant to change in the British Army. He even affected Wellington’s mannerisms: the habit of understatement, the dislike of military splendour or of being cheered by the men and cultivating favourites. Raglan was considerably out of his depth as army commander. He shared the Duke’s impassive cool nobility, but not his drive or quick-thinking judgement. Four decades of paperwork and administration had sapped his initiative.
Unlike the Duke’s practice, Raglan’s key subordinates were bad choices, selected by virtue of their pleasant disposition rather than innate ability or drive. Lord de Ros, his quartermaster general noted for his good humour and eccentricities, was quickly taken ill. Although not without experience, he showed little inclination to acquire more. Raglan’s primary subordinate commanders were all theoretically competent, but forty years of peace had given him little recent talent to choose from. All the infantry generals had Napoleonic war experience apart from the youthful Duke of Cambridge commanding the 1st Division, who was Queen Victoria’s cousin. One of the youngest was his 54-year-old cavalry commander Lord Lucan, who had retired from service in 1838. This was in essence an army commanded by the spirit if not the substance of Wellington, out of touch with changing military technology and tactics. ‘There is an old commander-in-chief, an old engineer, old brigadiers – in fact everything old at the top,’ complained artillery Captain George Woronsov, which ‘makes everything sluggish’.16
James Thomas Brudenell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan and Light Brigade commander, was, at 57, well past his prime and suffering from a chronic bronchial condition. He had purchased his way to lieutenant colonel and command of the 15th Hussars in 1830 after only six years. He was harsh and domineering towards his social inferiors and subjected his regiment, known to be a cheerful and efficient organisation before his arrival, to obsessive discipline and drills, antagonising every officer. Cardigan would flog for minor misdemeanours and insisted his regiment buy new expensive uniforms. After four years he was removed from command after a much-publicised petty altercation with a Waterloo veteran that diminished him. Despite public vitriol he managed to buy himself back into command of the 11th Hussars for an alleged £40,000, shamelessly exploiting family influence to persuade an ageing King William IV to reinstate him. Further regimental scandals and salacious court cases followed over the next sixteen years. Cardigan was catcalled at the theatre and booed in the street. The Times referred to him as ‘the plague spot of the British Army’, yet his wealth, good looks and louche charm exuded total indifference to criticism.
Raglan’s overall cavalry commander George Charles Bingham, the third Earl of Lucan, detested him, hardly a positive auger for operations dependent upon mutual respect and trust. Lucan, like Cardigan, had judiciously purchased his way through five different regiments to gain a lieutenant colonelcy of the 17th Lancers by 1826. ‘Bingham’s Dandies’ cost him £25,000, and like Cardigan he subjected his regiment to a heavy workload of drills, parades and inspections conducted with excessive zeal and discipline. Unlike Cardigan, who was lazy, Lucan was a martinet and workaholic, seemingly unable to distinguish what was important amid the minutia of administration. He was ambitious and brave and determined to experience campaign life, and served on the staff of Prince Vorontsov during the Russian invasion of the Balkans in 1828. Not only was he younger than Cardigan at 54, he was physically fitter and robust, and probably knew more about the Russian army than any other senior officer in Raglan’s army. Bored with peacetime soldiering, Lucan had retired on half pay in 1837 to attend to his neglected family estates at Castlebar in County Mayo, Ireland. During the catastrophic Irish potato famine blight, his ‘crowbar brigades’ evicted thousands of peasant tenants from low yield smallholdings to create more productive farms. Detested and misunderstood for his ruthless actions, he exhibited the steel and energy that was sought to manage Raglan’s cavalry. Lucan derided Cardigan as the ‘feather-bed soldier’, and when he divorced Lady Lucan, who was Cardigan’s youngest sister, personal future enmity was assured. Given the degree of dislike between the two, most regarded the announcement by Horse Guards of their appointments as a ghastly practical joke. ‘He and Cardigan,’ Major William Forrest with the 4th Dragoon Guards recalled, ‘would be certain to have a row immediately’.17
The Bracker farmhouse headquarters was not populated with a wealth of talent. Raglan’s aides included five nephews, pleasant young men, well known in society, but not necessarily competent. Nolan, who was the ‘galloper’ ADC to the more effective Quartermaster General Richard Airey, was professional enough, but background to the formation of this staff was the fact that there were only six students at the Sandhurst staff college in 1854. The later Field Marshal Lord Wolseley claimed he would not have trusted the staff with a subaltern’s picket, because like the fountain in Trafalgar Square, they ‘only played from eleven to five o’clock’. Only fifteen of Raglan’s 221 staff officers were formally staff trained.18
Raglan, like the British government, had been largely bewildered by developments in this surprising war. The ostensible reason for its outbreak was the dispute over access to the holy sites in Turkish-controlled Jerusalem, pitting Russian Orthodoxy, French Catholicism and Moslem Turkish fundamental religious beliefs against each other. The complete destruction of a Turkish naval squadron at Sinope, by the Russian Black Sea fleet based at Sevastopol, alerted the British to its strategic situation in the eastern Mediterranean. The British press simplified the issue by describing ‘poor little Turkey’, the crumbling Ottoman Empire being menaced by the ‘Russian Bear’. Likewise, France, after the recent coup by Napoleon III, saw the Mediterranean as key to the future restoration and expansion of influence abroad. Russia, seeking to profit from the power vacuum being created by Turkey’s ailing ‘sick man of Europe’, miscalculated a series of arrogant moves that led to war first with Turkey and then Britain and France.
It was assumed the teetering Ottoman Empire would be no match for the Russians, so it came as a considerable surprise to all sides when Turkish forces stubbornly blocked Russian Danube offensives at Silistra, Varna and Schumla. Russian failure, coincidental with the arrival of an Anglo-French expeditionary force at Varna, and the possibility of Austrian involvement, transformed the strategic situation. Turkish military success negated the need for an Anglo-French presence at Varna in present-day Bulgaria and resulted in a proposed invasion of the Crimea to nullify the impact of the Russian Black Sea fleet and teach her a lesson.
British landings at aptly named Kalimita Bay, north of Sevastopol, had been a shambles. Fortunately unopposed, it took five days for the British army to disembark. The invasion decision was taken with no real intelligence. The British, delighted to move on from disease-riddled Varna, saw it as ‘the Isle of Wight of Russia’. Raglan was still never really in control of events. Victory at the Alma had been a triumph of sheer bravery by exhausted and cholera-stricken troops, not generalship. Raglan, supposedly in overall command, isolated himself and rode about the battlefield as Wellington had done at Waterloo, but did not influence the outcome. ‘There was a great want of generalship,’ Captain Patullo with the 30th Regiment concluded after the victory. Raglan had a kindly disposition, and unlike Wellington, rarely admonished subordinates, being too courteous to make his own wishes clear and too diffident to force anyone against their will. All decisions were agonised on the basis of what the Duke might have done. Orders were expressed as his lordship’s wishes rather than unambiguous direction. ‘Never trouble Lord Raglan more than is absolutely necessary with details,’ Captain John Adye was told on joining his staff. ‘Listen carefully to his remarks, try to anticipate his wishes and at all times make as light as possible of difficulties!’ Desk-bound for decades, Raglan at 66 was not going to fundamentally change now.19
Spying was not acknowledged as ‘gentlemanly’ conduct. Just before Raglan had departed for bed, a galloper had arrived at the Bracker farmstead with an urgent letter from Lord Lucan. A Turkish spy sent out to locate the position of the Russian army had identified enemy forces massed on the far side of the Chernya River, which would reportedly attack in the morning. ‘Very well,’ Raglan is alleged to have responded on reading the dispatch, but did nothing.
Charles Cattley was a civilian Russian interpreter attached to Raglan’s staff. Few knew of the existence of the Secret Intelligence Department (SID) that had been headed by Colonel Lloyd. When he died of cholera shortly after the Alma, Cattley took over. His encyclopedic knowledge of Russian regiments enabled him to interpret the sightings of uniforms and cap badges and offer Raglan likely deductions of what their strength and purpose might be. Cattley had worked in St Petersburg and was the British vice-consul at Kertch in the Crimea when war was declared, and expelled alongside the other British diplomats. Few of Cattley’s intelligence summaries have actually survived, but those held in the National Army Museum in London suggest he was reporting directly to Lord Raglan. Raglan forbade intelligence-gathering patrols across the Chernya River, once it was appreciated the enemy was there in force, so Cattley had to rely on Turkish or locals of Greek descent to provide information.
The credibility of these foreign spies inevitably became an issue. Four days before, a spy reported 20,000 Russian infantry and 5,000 cavalry advancing on Balaclava from the direction of the Chernya River. Lucan ordered out the two cavalry brigades and Raglan directed that an infantry division march down from the siege lines to reinforce the Balaclava defences. They were out all night, the coldest yet of the campaign, and saw nothing. Another alert developed on the afternoon of 22 October, resulting in another exhausting and ultimately fruitless night. False alarms were exhausting the troops and Raglan was unimpressed. On the same day, Charles Cattley advised Raglan that according to an interrogation of two Polish deserters from Sevastopol, Prince Menshikov had received substantial numbers of fresh troops and planned ‘with great force to attack us in the rear and deliver the town’. This too had not happened.20
Raglan went to bed early and was sound asleep during the early morning hours of 25 October. Analysis and thinking around the reports of the previous three days were giving separate but confirmatory indications that an attack on the 25th was increasingly likely. Royal Engineers to the right of the Sevastopol siege lines near the Chernya River had reported Russian bands playing at night in the outlying villages. ‘I was told that “the Russkies” were very strong all over the place,’ war correspondent William Russell heard in the cavalry camp, and ‘that reports had been sent to headquarters that an attack was imminent, and that Sir Colin Campbell was uneasy about Balaclava’. He walked back to his tent area with Captain Louis Nolan, who loaned him his cavalry cloak because ‘the evening was chilly’. Nolan ‘let out’ at the cavalry generals ‘and did not spare those in high places’. Nolan had some credibility having written two books: The Training of Cavalry Remount Horses and Cavalry: Its History and Tactics. Russell respected his opinion and always had a nose for a good story. He listened as his companion vented his frustration. The British cavalry were the best in the world: properly led they could break infantry squares and ride over artillery. At the moment they were feeling vulnerable. There had been a succession of false alarms and all the indications were that the expanding Russian presence across the Chernya was becoming increasingly menacing.
An attack was considered likely to the rear of Sevastopol, but there appeared to be no plan apart from an infantry march down from the Sevastopol siege lines, and then only when the enemy was seen in force. The march to the plain from the Heights took an average of at least three hours. Successive Russian reconnaissance probes would likely have monitored this. So what was the plan if that happened?
‘We are in a very bad way I can tell you,’ was Nolan’s parting remark.21
The stench emanating from Balaclava harbour – ‘little London’ or the ‘Liverpool suburb’ as it was often called – permeated the deep narrow and seemingly landlocked narrow inlet. The harbour area was a tangle of masts, rigging and dark wooden hulls, dotted here and there by dim lamp lights. There were over fifty or sixty sailing ships and sail-rigged steamships moored, often two abreast, in the congested waterway. The muddy quayside, alive by day with curious Tatars, harassed commissaries, busy sailors and sick soldiers picking their way between piles of stores overflowing from requisitioned sheds, had died down. Some activity continued here and there, stores were kept on board ship, where they could not readily be got at or found. Troops often went on board to try and locate items carelessly secreted in the holds of vessels alongside the harbour. Merchant steamers haphazardly loaded with miscellaneous much-needed stores had trouble getting cargoes ashore. The shadowy forest of masts delineating the harbour area, encased in a spider’s web of tangled rigging lines, seemed to encapsulate the ramshackle nature of the harbour’s organisation.
The surrounding buildings looked Mediterranean rather than Russian, with pan-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls. Picturesque poplars and vines in well-kept gardens had once flourished amid the houses, but had been trashed by the occupation. Private Albert Mitchell remembered breakfasts were still on the table when the 13th Light Dragoons had arrived. Within hours sofas, pianos and elegant furniture were scattered everywhere. ‘Many of these articles were ruthlessly destroyed, drawers and boxes ransacked, female attire held up and made the subject of ribald jest and laughter,’ he recalled. Balaclava village had been a former favourite of Sevastopol day-trippers. Now gardens were trampled into mud, fences smashed, vines dragged down and doors and window frames broken up for firewood.
The harbour resembled a Scandinavian fjord, a narrow sea loch about half a mile long and not more than 300 yards wide. ‘Balaclava is the queerest place in the world,’ wrote the assistant surgeon with the 8th Hussars. ‘Fancy a creek quite invisible from the sea, in which we found several line-of-battle ships, lying ten yards off the land, one of the great “Agamemnon”.’
‘He was a bold mariner who first ventured in here,’ remembered war correspondent William Russell. He was ‘astonished’ to look down from one of the craggy hills surrounding the area to see ‘under my feet a little pond, closely compressed by the side of high rocky mountains’. Nestled along the rocky sides were scores of ships, ‘for which exit seemed quite hopeless’. The sealed aspect of the inlet intrigued Mrs Fanny Duberly, who first saw ships’ masts through a fissure in the cliffs. ‘How they got in, or will get out, appears a mystery,’ she observed: ‘They have the appearance of having been hoisted over the cliffs, and dropped into a lake on the other side.’
The still waters of the rocky inlet, not flushed by tides, had been transformed into a stinking midden. ‘The town is in a revolting state,’ Russell reported twenty days before. ‘Lord Raglan has ordered it to be cleansed, but there is no one to obey the order, and no one attends it.’ Offal from cattle slaughtered for the army was tipped into the harbour or left in fly-blown piles. Bales of unloaded rotting hay floated inside, unavailable to feed starving cavalry mounts. Unburied carcasses of worn-out pack ponies, bullocks and camels, worked and starved to death, lay around houses and streets. The human dead, harvested by cholera, had been buried in shallow graves and were smelling rank. One eyewitness described the harbour as a ‘cesspool and the beach a bottomless pit full of liquid abominations – a putrid sea of black foetid mire, exhaling a poisonous stench even at this cold season.’22
Nobody was in overall control of this chaos. The army was in charge on shore, while shipping and the harbour were under two naval officers. Royal Navy Captain Heath maintained the harbour and allocated ships’ berths; Captain John Christie oversaw men and supplies as the senior, but had no authority over merchant transports. They either ignored him or grudgingly accepted direction. On shore there were virtually no army supporting services. No preparations for living, hospital or supply accommodation had been made at Balaclava. The wagon trains of the Napoleonic era were disbanded after Waterloo and had not since been resurrected. Whereas the French army operating alongside had a properly organised supply corps, the train des équipages, operating from a bigger and more efficient harbour at Kamiesch Bay 9 miles away, the British did not. Individual British units were obliged to conduct their own piecemeal hand-to-mouth resupply by whatever means lay at hand, after finding their stores on whatever ship they be, amid the myriad of vessels in the confusingly managed harbour.
The ‘little London’ nickname was appropriate to the pseudo-commercial bustling activity that resulted. The harbour area was like a gigantic market place. Sergeant Timothy Gowing in the Sevastopol siege lines was waiting for first light on the morning of the 25th, when he would set off with a fatigue party on the 7- to 8-mile journey to the port, to bring up blankets for the sick and wounded. ‘We got from the ship here some hams at two shillings a pound and some cheese, chocolate, paste etc., so we are doing well just now,’ Lieutenant Richard Temple Godman with the 5th Dragoon Guards wrote to his father. ‘Things are very dear, and the ships are stripped by crowds of hungry officers as soon as they come into harbour,’ he recalled. Henry Clifford with the Rifles ‘bought 12 candles for 6 shillings, a bottle of brandy for 8 shillings, 2 bottles of sherry for £1, a loaf of bread for 1 shilling’ and tobacco and champagne for friends on board the Sydney. Troop Sergeant Major Richard Sturtevant with the Scots Greys remembered ‘provision ships come to the harbour of Balaclava, but everything is too dear for the soldier.’ ‘Only fancy,’ he complained, ‘bottled porter 3s 6d per bottle; sugar 1 shilling a 1lb; salt and flour the same; a box of lucifers [matches] 3 pence; potatoes 21 shillings per hundredweight and other things equally dear.’ His porter at today’s prices would cost about £25, the potatoes £77 and the sugar £35.23
Part of the attraction of the bustling harbour area was the colourful and exotic activity around the evil-smelling venue, a contrast to the dour camps and siege lines. A motley throng of merchants and sutlers assailed visitors: Maltese, Greek, Armenian and every conceivable Levant race, lodging in every available nook and cranny of the dilapidated area. The authorities tolerated them because they were peddling food, clothing and drink – the latter especially sought after – but they charged the troops extortionate prices. Mrs Fanny Duberly relished the bustle and excitement of the place, which she passed through every day to visit her husband:
Either you are impaled on the horns of a couple of bullocks in an araba [cart], with which the streets are crammed, locked and blocked or bitten by a vicious camel – so that to save myself being crushed by a gun wheel I had yesterday to jump the pony over a bullock which was lying down in the shafts of an araba right across the road.
Surgeon George Lawson recalled the density of traffic serving the siege lines and port area:
The road is covered with conveyances of all sorts – Crimean bullocks or camel wagons, Turkish bullock wagons brought from Varna, Maltese mule carts … Then comes an occasional aide-de-camp at a gallop, or an infantry officer, dusty and weary looking, returning from Balaclava laden with whatever he has been able to buy – some preserved meats or a bottle of brandy, perhaps three or four ducks, or a pound of candles. He looks quite triumphant as he passes you with his prize.24
The lively and chaotic ‘Liverpool suburb’ was, however, vulnerable. The main siege and artillery park was located a mile to the north at the little village of Kadikoi. Two miles beyond to the north lay the Fedioukine Heights, on the south bank of the Chernya River. Two valleys stretched off to the north-east, bisected by the Causeway Heights, along which the Woronsov road ran, linking Sevastopol to Baider and Yalta beyond. Hills to the east, the foothills of the Yayla mountain chain, enclosed the open ground that approached Balaclava. Somewhere out there were the Russians. A swiftly moving enemy force could conceivably suddenly emerge from the Fedioukine Heights to the north or the wide valleys to the east and crest the Causeway Heights, 2 miles above Balaclava, without being seen from the port. These approaches to the rear of the Sevastopol siege lines had therefore to be defended.
As the entrance to the Balaclava gorge was beyond the range of Allied guns on the Sapoune Heights, it was decided to establish an outer defensive line. Six redoubts, little more than rough earthworks, were quickly thrown up, impelled by the recent disturbing reconnaissance and intelligence reports. The furthest outpost to the east – number 1 redoubt – was set up on Canrobert’s Hill, 2 miles east of Kadikoi. The remaining five were built, each about half a mile apart, along the Causeway Heights, with the westernmost, redoubt 6, a mile and a quarter from the foot of the Sapoune Heights, the plateau where the siege lines were established. Turkish soldiers manned this outer line of redoubts. The biggest contingent, a battalion and three 12-pounder guns, was housed in redoubt number 1, furthest east. Half-battalion contingents with a couple of cannon supervised by English artillery NCOs garrisoned the remainder.
The inner defence line protecting Balaclava was manned by 1,200 sailors and Royal Marines, who had twenty-six guns emplaced on redoubts covering the eastern end of Balaclava gorge. The core contingent covering this final approach to the harbour area was a battalion of the 93rd Highlanders supported by a six-gun horse artillery battery. To their left was the cavalry encampment, with the Heavy Brigade under Brigadier General James Scarlett and the Light commanded by Cardigan, tactically located to threaten the flank of any Russian incursion aimed at Balaclava.
Sixty-two-year-old Sir Colin Campbell was temporarily detached from the Highland Brigade to coordinate the rather ad hoc emergence of rearward inner and outer defence lines. He was probably Raglan’s most capable and experienced formation commander, having served as a regimental commander under Wellington in the Peninsular War, a brigade command in the First China War and division command in the Sikh War. He took some 2,800 men under command, of which 1,000 were Turkish-Tunisian irregulars. Campbell was a canny and resourceful commander, unimpressed with the defence scheme he inherited, which his staff officer Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Sterling claimed ‘he never liked’. One of the redoubts was literally thrown up in a day, and its walls so shallow they could be ridden over with ease. Forty-eight hours before, Sterling had reported ‘we of the Balaclava party are threatened continually with an attack from a very large force’. Like the cavalry, there had been many false alarms and ‘the men lie down with their belts on at night ready to start up and fight at any moment’.
Lieutenant Colonel Sterling did not approve of war correspondents like ‘Billy’ Russell and was frustrated that he had to provide them with rations. ‘No army can succeed,’ he observed, ‘with such spies in its camp.’ Newspaper correspondents were an unwelcome emerging characteristic of warfare in the age of steam and telegraph communications. He had just drawn up a plan of their new defensive dispositions:
And can quite imagine that if it got into the correspondent’s hands, it would go straight to the Illustrated London News and from thence by Russian agents back direct to the enemy, who is watching every opportunity to force the position and burn our ships and stores in the harbour of Balaclava.
Campbell knew he would be dependent on Lucan’s cavalry in the event of a crisis and made the effort to cultivate good relations. Lucan would normally have been slighted by Campbell’s appointment, because he was his inferior, socially and by seniority. But Lucan’s relationship with Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief, was noticeably cool, so he made no comment. Questions, however, did need to be asked, because there was no agreed contingency plan for the defence of the army’s rear. It was based on the assumption that Campbell’s force, only numbering 650 regular British infantry, would be enough to hold in place until British infantry divisions could descend the Sapoune Heights. Raglan, of course, was focusing on the front of Sevastopol, not its rear. ‘I hear that Lord Raglan and his entourage are in high spirits about the progress [of the siege],’ Sterling wrote three days before. This surprised him, so he assumed ‘he knows more than I do.’ Indications from false Russian alarms thus far had shown it would take an average of three hours for British infantry to emerge on the plain at the foot of the Sapoune Heights in front of Balaclava in the event of a crisis.
The Russian outposts had worked it out too.25