3
‘THEM ROOSHANS’
3 A.M. TO 6 A.M.
SEVASTOPOL NIGHT
3 A.M. TO 4.30 A.M.
Inside Sevastopol, where 30,000 to 35,000 Russian soldiers and sailors were pinned, the streets came alive at night. ‘During the day scarcely anybody could be seen,’ Captain Robert Adolf Hodasevich observed, ‘but now the whole town was alive.’ His Taroutine Regiment company held the wall between the central and flagstaff bastions. Directly opposite were the main French batteries on Mount Rodolph, and below the deep ravine that separated the 3rd French Division from the 3rd British Division siege lines. While the town’s citizens took the opportunity to forage for food and visit friends and hospitals, vital repair work on the battered defences feverishly went ahead. ‘The people were as busy as ants,’ Hodasevich recalled, working alongside the sailors and soldiers on the damaged fortifications. ‘The streets of the town were crowded with guns, gun carriages, shot, timber etc. that were being continually conveyed to the batteries.’ There was very little time. ‘No lights were allowed in the town, or in the batteries,’ because that immediately attracted fire. ‘All the works at the batteries were carried on with as little noise as possible.’ Allied round shot was fired at the gun embrasures all day long, seeking to disable the artillery pieces inside, while shells were lobbed overhead to kill the crews. ‘Much of the breastwork had suffered,’ Hodasevich observed, ‘while the embrasures looked liked great holes’ where the shot had steadily chipped away the edges. During work groups of civilians, soldiers, sailors and officers ‘formed motley groups about the streets in the darkness, where they discussed the events of the day past with anxious and gloomy anticipations of the one to follow.’
Following initial panic at the commencement of the Allied bombardment, ‘our days began to be very monotonous’. Hodasevich remembered: ‘We were obliged to remain in one place from daybreak till the evening, and the nights were spent in repairing the batteries, constructing new ones, or in improving cover for the men.’
This was the ninth day of the siege and the hard manual labour to shore up the siege lines was as exhausting as it was unremitting. ‘During the time I was in the town,’ Hodasevich recalled, ‘I made with my company three batteries and four powder magazines.’ The bugles and drum beats waking up the Allied lines were due to sound within two hours, the precursor to bombardments they would endure all day.
The cloud cover over Sevastopol thinned in the early morning hours and pinpricks of starlight shone through. Firing at this stage was intermittent. ‘Our men on the lookout,’ Hodasevich recalled, ‘had become accustomed to the duty, so that we heard continually that the shells were going to the right, left or beyond us.’ Eyes flickered skyward after the thud of a distant mortar to pick out the whispering incandescent trail of its burning fuse arcing through the night sky. It made a ‘peculiar shou-shouing’ sound, he remembered. Only after it reached the vertical plane and began to fall was there any chance of working out where it might strike. When the sentries shouted ‘they were upon us, it was all helter-skelter to find some place of safety’. Vertical shot was the most dangerous, especially the virtually invisible round shot. ‘Those,’ Hodasevich emphasised, ‘we could not see or hear till they were too near to avoid them’ and ‘they did a great deal of damage during the night’ because ‘people ventured more out of their cover’.1
A young 25-year-old sub lieutenant, Leo Tolstoy, was to venture out to these parapets the following month. His vivid Sebastopol Sketches published the following year gave some indication of his emerging literary talent, encapsulating the Sevastopol siege experience. Sentries manning the parapet would shout ‘Ca-a-nnon! and then a cannon ball shrieks past you, slaps into the earth and showers everything around with mud and stones, forming a crater,’ he recalled. A Russian gun would thunder out in response through the embrasure and then:
Once again the sentry will shout ‘Cannon!’ and you will hear the same shrieking sound, followed by the same slap and showering of earth; or he will shout ‘Mortar!’ and you will hear the even whistle of a mortar shell, a sound that is quite pleasant and not at all easy to associate with anything dreadful.
After a ‘ringing explosion’, ‘shell splinters will fly whistling and whining in all directions, stones will rustle through the air, and you will be splattered with mud.’ ‘We lost very few men at this time,’ Captain Hodasevich remembered, ‘not more than three men per company a day,’ an uncertain lottery of death based on chance: ‘Some days a company never lost a man.’ Tolstoy remarked that the element of uncertainty stimulated ‘a sensation that is a strange blend of fear and enjoyment’: ‘At the moment you know the shell is heading in your direction, you are bound to think it is going to kill you; but a feeling of self-respect will sustain you, and no one will observe the knife that is lacerating your heart.’
During the night preceding 25 October the Moscow Regiment lost two officers – Ensign Schwerin and Staff Captain Istenyev – with nine privates wounded. Casualties fell when it was realised the Allied infantry were not about to attack, so reserve troops could wait under cover until they were called forward. ‘Officers were seldom killed,’ Hodasevich remembered, ‘as they were better able to take care of themselves’; soldiers manning gun embrasures and parapets, however, were forbidden to move.
Surviving a near miss was like an emotional born-again experience, ‘if only for a moment’ Tolstoy recalled, creating ‘a sense of relief that is unutterably pleasant’. Tolstoy found himself actually willing shells and cannonballs to land closer; ‘a peculiar fascination’ that initiated a psychological high ‘in this dangerous game of life and death’. Reality impinged when he saw a sailor ‘covered in blood and dirt’, blasted by a mortar to ‘a strangely inhuman appearance’, with a section of his chest blown away. ‘During these first moments his face can register nothing but terror and the feigned, anticipatory look of suffering,’ he remembered. The victim gasped out ‘Sorry lads!’ to the rest of the gun crew as he was stretchered away. They took it in their stride. A naval officer inside the embrasure lit up a cigarette and yawned. On noticing the look of horror on Tolstoy’s face he casually remarked, ‘we get seven or eight cases like that every day.’2
Hodasevich remembered that ‘in a confined space, a shell is perhaps the most destructive thing that could be employed’ and that ‘frequently one would put from 10 to 25 men hors de combat’. Soldiers occasionally fell upon near misses pulling out spluttering fuses with a courage born of desperation, for which they might be awarded the Cross of St George. This was not simply lifesaving; the medal came with increased pay and exemption from corporal punishment. Sailor Grigori Pavliuk, serving with the 43rd Ekipazh, accepted the huge risk when a spluttering shell landed in his crowded casement inside the 5th Bastion. Pavliuk calmly approached it with a forage cap full of water to douse the fuse, but it exploded. Miraculously he was unscathed, ‘a hero blessed by God’ as his comrades proclaimed.3
Surgeons treating the wounded were grossly inexperienced, primarily university students who had ‘not finished their term of studies by about a year and a half’, Hodasevich explained. Tsar Nicholas took them on ‘and there they were’. ‘In our regiment,’ Hodasevich remembered, ‘we had one of these youngsters, who had no idea how he was to set about an operation of any kind.’ Tolstoy recalled that ‘if you have strong nerves’ you might visit the wounded and watch the ‘pale and gloomy’ surgeons with arms soaked to the elbows with blood, examining chloroformed, delirious patients ‘uttering meaningless words which are occasionally simple and affecting’. He remembered ‘fearsome sights that will shake you to the roots of your being’:
You will see the sharp, curved knife enter the white healthy body; you will see the wounded man suddenly regain consciousness with a terrible, harrowing shrieked cursing; you will see the apothecary assistant fling the severed arm into a corner; you will see another wounded man who is lying on a stretcher in the same room and watching the operation on his companion, writhing and groaning less with physical pain than with the psychological agony of apprehension.
Hodasevich suspected the students’ knives were not even sharp enough for vegetables, never mind amputation. Even the shovels issued to soldiers to repair walls were inferior to British tools. Many watching the British soldiers at work ‘were astonished at the quantity thrown up at each shovelful, saying the enemy was digging his trenches by means of machines’. Some would be captured from Turkish redoubts before the end of this day. Russian shovels simply received an annual coat of paint. Any repair money was pocketed by unscrupulous officers so that ‘when they came to be used, they are good for nothing’. ‘In my company the men broke all their tools after three days’ work,’ Hodasevich complained, ‘and we in consequence were obliged to get new ones, which were little better.’4
Siege work was exhausting, monotonous yet tactically vital. Repairs had to be finished before the bugles and drums on the other side heralded another day. Russian batteries often found themselves poorly sited after Allied siege lines shifted or were adjusted during the night, so gun embrasures had to be re-sited to bear on a new direction. Masses of sandbags and soil-filled wicker-basket gabions had to be firmly revetted to face such new threats. Colonel Franz Totleben, a gifted Russian military engineer, was responsible for developing a series of flexibly sited counter-gun emplacement measures, based upon what his lookouts, sited at strategic points overlooking the siege lines, had spotted. Casemates, which were bunkers dug into the earth and revetted with ships’ timber, were constructed alongside as troop shelters. The psychological impact of these night-time measures had the effect of belittling the apparently successful damage inflicted by Allied guns by day.
Casualties and dysentery steadily thinned out the Taroutine Regiment. Soup used to be boiled for the soldiers in the streets beneath the parapet and house walls, but night-time bombardments had effectively precluded this, six days before. Food now had to be prepared in Fort Nicholas, on the Black Sea side of the city and transported to the other side in large tubs. What came forward was almost inedible and ‘quite cold’, Hodasevich described, ‘with fat swimming in large cakes on top of the soup’. Diarrhoea was rampant. ‘Many of the men calculated that they would soon be killed, so it was useless to eat, and lived almost entirely on their brandy.’
They received a double vodka ration morning and evening, which kept morale intact. Hodasevich had by this time survived two very near mortar bomb misses, which had not exploded. His men began to suspect he had supernatural powers: ‘Burst not!’ he allegedly commanded shells. ‘They were convinced that I had the power of witchcraft,’ he recalled, ‘the way,’ he rationalised, ‘a Russian soldier always explains what he cannot understand.’ Men placed their faith in the Tsar, God and Holy Russia.5
DAYBREAK NORTH VALLEY
5 A.M. TO 6 A.M.
Major General Nikolai Karlovich Gribbe’s column was the first to leave the Chorgan village assembly area. They waded across the Chernya River ford in total darkness, moving through the Baider Valley towards the village of Kamara, known to be occupied by outlying British pickets. Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich paused in columns of six men across, to let them pass by. Gribbe’s column was the vanguard of General Pavel Liprandi’s ‘Detachment of Chorgun’ spoiling attack on Balaclava. Seventeen battalions of infantry, thirty squadrons of cavalry supported by seventy-eight guns marched off in three columns snaking out of the Chorgun area. ‘There was now not the slightest doubt,’ Kubitovich reflected, that they ‘were being concentrated for an attack on the enemy’. ‘There would be a battle!’
Kubitovich watched four battalions of Dnieper Regiment infantry, preceded by a Cossack screen, pass by at the head of the column. Behind came squadrons of Uhlan cavalry, Cossacks and ten creaking horse artillery pieces. Yeropkin’s lancers tagged onto the back. Grey-coated Russian infantry were barely visible in the early morning twilight. It was shortly after 5 a.m. and a blanket of mist hung around the peaks of high ground all around. ‘The columns walked in deep silence,’ Kubitovich remembered. ‘Even the horses did not neigh as if they were afraid to attract the enemy’s attention.’ The sound of the approach was muffled by the dark mass of the surrounding valley walls. Nobody said a word. Gribbe’s mission was to capture the village of Kamara at the head of the southern valley, unlimber his artillery and bring fire to bear on the easternmost Allied redoubt at Canrobert’s Hill, opening the first phase of the Russian attack.
Major General Konstantin Semyakin’s central column entered the valley north of the Causeway Heights. He was also to attack redoubt number 1, with four battalions of the Azov Regiment and another from the Dnieper, supported by ten guns. Before reaching the Woronsov road, Major General Levutsky would branch off to his right with three battalions from the Ukraine Regiment and eight guns to assault redoubt number 2, next in line to the west on the Heights. Colonel Aleksandr Skyuderi’s column crossed the Tractir bridge over the River Chernya and began moving along a south-westerly track that traversed the Fedioukine Heights, where he would cross the North Valley and fall upon redoubts 3 and 4 with 300 Cossacks, four battalions of the Odessa Regiment and eight guns. Coming up behind were sixteen squadrons of Major General Ryhzov’s Kiev, Ingermanland and Ural Cossack regiments to provide immediate support for this second phase. They would charge down upon the Allied siege and artillery parks outside Balaclava. On their right, Major General Zhabokritsky’s eight battalions of 4,500 infantry were to establish themselves on the Fedioukine Heights as flank protection. He also had two squadrons of Hussars, another of Cossacks and fourteen guns. The screen would be in position once the redoubts were taken.
Within half an hour the heads of these menacing columns were approaching the Woronsov road, which snaked along the Causeway Heights. It was still dark. ‘We understood,’ recalled an optimistic Lieutenant Kubitovich, ‘that the allied situation in the Crimea then, was far from good.’ Sluggish developments after their victory at the Alma suggested ‘they had changed from an offensive to a defensive attitude’. They knew the British faced two directions, Sevastopol under siege to their front while vulnerable to Russian attack from the flank and rear. ‘We considered their situation to be not only difficult, but fatal,’ he assessed.6
Ingermanland Hussar, Lieutenant Yevgenii Arbuzov, was at the rear of Semyakin’s column. ‘In front marched the infantry, in the middle the artillery and the cavalry came behind,’ he recalled. At 5.30 a.m. the cavalry paused at the Chernya River while the infantry and artillery crossed over, wading the ford and using the narrow Tractir bridge. Off to the right the shadowy outline of Major General Zhabokritsky’s division was already climbing the Fedioukine Heights. All this made heavy going for the horse artillery. Colonel Obolensky’s Cossack Don Battery number 3 had joined Semyakin’s central column the night before having to wend its way laboriously down from the MacKenzie Heights to the north. Heavy caissons and gun wheels had to be gripped by crews to brake the precipitous descent. One ‘caisson drawn by excitable horses ran away downhill’, one of the officers recalled, ‘and flew full into the rocks where all fell down’. Miraculously, there was no damage and the driver and horses were ‘all unhurt’.7
As they moved forward, Lieutenant Kubitovich’s lancers were acutely aware of being observed by ‘small enemy cavalry pickets on the elevated points’. Frustratingly, they could not get at them. ‘The eyes see, but the teeth do not bite,’ he recalled. ‘Everyone has a special desire to fight the English cavalry, so famous for its furious attacks.’ They would soon get the opportunity. As they approached, the squat outlines of four earth redoubts became distinguishable on the Heights, silhouetted against a lightening sky behind. ‘These fortifications were out in front of the general line of enemy defences,’ Kubitovich observed, and were more vulnerable. They did not cover each other and were only manned by Turks with some cannon crewed by the English. ‘It was here that General Liprandi prepared to strike.’
Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov’s 8th Artillery Battery, designated a reserve at the last moment, momentarily halted on the north side of the Causeway Heights. Shortly after 5 a.m. he noticed it was getting light and then ‘we heard a distant shot’. ‘Thick fog hanging in the air did not promise a clear day,’ he recalled. It remained quiet until ‘about ten minutes later another shot rang out, a third after that, and the business began.’8
With Major General Gribbe’s force in place in front of Kamara village, Lieutenant Kubitovich watched as a squadron and a half of Cossacks and lancers ‘threw themselves on an enemy picket located at the St John Monastery and forced it to hurriedly retreat’. Gribbe’s artillery was now securely ensconced on the ridgeline at the head of the South Valley. Major General Semyakin’s column was deployed just across the Woronsov road, ready to attack redoubt 1 on Canrobert’s Hill. Colonel Obolensky’s Don battery was unlimbering, and one of its officers remembered, ‘the battery made a prayer to God and moved under the cover of a light mist towards the redoubt, which could clearly be seen against the heights.’ Yeropkin’s lancers, which included Kubitovich’s squadron, were detached from Gribbe to screen Semyakin’s right flank. All had gone like clockwork; at about 6 a.m. the attack was set to go.
Lord Lucan, the British cavalry commander, was trotting along the base of the Causeway Heights with his staff, conducting his normal early morning round of inspection. The British cavalry were already awake and standing by their horses, half asleep, hungry and tired. ‘The brigade turned out as usual,’ remembered Private Albert Mitchell with the 13th Light Dragoons. ‘Anyone who may have been similarly situated can form some idea of the pleasure we felt.’ The nights were cold: ‘For several days nothing particular occurred, except for an occasional “Turn Out” after a few Cossacks who made their appearance for the purpose of harassing us.’
Early morning ‘stand-to’ alerts were resented, and Lucan, the instigator, was regarded as an irritant by many of his officers. ‘He would send any officer home under arrest who left his post,’ complained Lieutenant Colonel John Yorke with the 1st Dragoons, ‘as well as the Commanding Officer who permitted it.’ Despite this, Lord Cardigan, nicknamed the ‘noble yachtsman’, was allowed to languish aboard his luxurious steam yacht. ‘When there is the least appearance of alarm,’ Yorke commented, Lucan ‘being excited to madness, abuses everybody and in the most uncourteous manner.’ Such excitable behaviour promoted unease. ‘We are constantly fearing his want of temper and judgement should anything serious occur,’ Yorke had confided to his sister three days before. Just such a moment had arrived.
Captain Alexander Low was the 4th Light Dragoons Field Officer checking on the Kamara picket when he spotted a group of Cossacks stealthily approaching the village. His thirty-strong picket was likely dozing and had not detected them. Two squadrons of Cossacks and Uhlans were coming up and they entered the village as the British hurriedly departed. The evacuation was so hasty that some of the Heavy Brigade officers ‘lost their cloaks, a serious loss here’ according to Lieutenant Richard Temple Godman with the 5th Dragoons, with winter approaching. Outlying pickets desperately tried to signal the approach of a substantial enemy force. Private Farquharson with the 4th Light Dragoons saw that ‘Vedettes were circling to right and also to left, some of them being at a trot,’ which indicated advancing infantry and cavalry. Sergeant Major George Smith with the 11th Hussars had also spotted his regiment’s vedettes ‘rapidly’ circling, which meant a strong force. Meanwhile, Lucan’s staff group continued its routine progress, completely oblivious to the mounting activity going on around it.9
As the staff group trotted up the Causeway Heights towards Canrobert’s Hill, they saw what appeared to be signal flags flying over the redoubt. Lord George Paget, commanding the 4th Light Dragoons, was acting for Cardigan with Lucan’s group, and drew rein within 300 yards of the Turkish-occupied redoubt: ‘The first streaks of daylight showed us that from the flag-staff which had, I believe, only the day before been erected on the redoubt, flew two flags, only just discernible in the grey twilight.’
Nobody really knew what that meant. ‘Holloa,’ said the assistant Adjutant General, Lord William Paulet, ‘there are two flags flying; what does that mean?’ ‘Why, that [surely] is the signal that the enemy is approaching,’ Major McMahon on the staff ventured. ‘Are you quite sure?’ he was asked. ‘We were not kept long in doubt!’ Paget remembered. ‘Hardly were the words out of McMahon’s mouth, when bang went a cannon from the redoubt.’10
The crash reverberated around the valley sides and was quickly followed by more as Russian artillery, as was its practice, commenced firing in salvos. Staff officer Captain Charteris was immediately dispatched to British headquarters to tell Raglan the redoubts were under attack. Campbell, commanding the Balaclava defence force, was also alerted, but already knew, like everyone else, because the tempo of the cannon fire had perceptibly increased. All Lucan could do was order his two brigades of cavalry forward, there was nothing else available to support them. Charteris would not cover the 5 miles back to Raglan’s headquarters much before 7.30 a.m. and the early morning relief of infantry divisions in the siege lines was going on, which would further complicate their response. Even in the event of a predetermined plan, the infantry could not arrive before 10 a.m., and there was no agreed plan. Cannon fire had at least disturbed the commander of the Light Brigade aboard his yacht Dryad, berthed in Balaclava harbour. It would take Cardigan more than two hours to arrive at the scene.
On 25 October 1854 four Russian columns unexpectedly emerged from a misty dawn to the north-east of the besieged city of Sevastopol. They swiftly occupied the key Allied redoubts along the spine of the ridgeline separating the North and South Valleys, capturing the outer defences of the port of Balaclava. By 9.30 a.m. the 93rd Highlanders’ ‘thin red line’ and a remarkable cavalry action by the Heavy Brigade had checked the Russian advance and regained the Allied initiative. Before the belated arrival of two divisions of British infantry, Cardigan’s Light Brigade recklessly charged a Russian battery at the end of North Valley, as a consequence of mistaken orders, and was badly mauled running a gauntlet of fire from three directions. The ensuing stalemate bedevilled British resupply to their siege lines for the whole of the following winter.