The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

People lived as if there was no tomorrow in the weeks prior to the invasion. There was non-stop revelry, heavy drinking and gambling,

while the city’s many prostitutes worked overtime.

His uncertainty was increased when the sailors discovered a large supply of vodka on the wharf and went on a drunken rampage for three days. It was left to Kornilov to destroy the supplies of liquor and sober up his sailors for battle.

The whole population of Sevastopol – sailors, soldiers, prisoners of war, working men and women (including prostitutes) – was involved in digging trenches, carting earth to the defences, building walls and barricades, and constructing batteries with earth, fascines and gabions,ag while teams of sailors hauled up the heavy guns they had taken from their ships. Every means of carrying the earth was commandeered, and when there were no baskets, bags or buckets, the diggers carried it in their folded clothes. The expectation of an imminent attack added greater urgency to their work. Inspecting these defences a year later, the allies were amazed by the skill and ingenuity of the Russians.

Ignoring the advice of his staff, who said it was too dangerous to go on, Kornilov continued his tour at the Third Bastion, the Redan, which was then being pounded by the heavy British guns with a deadly concentration of power. When Kornilov arrived, the bastion was under the command of Captain Popandul, but he was soon killed, as were the five other commanders who succeeded him that day.

During the night Raglan had been warned of the imminent attack by a deserter from the Russian camp, but, having sent 1,000 men to Balaklava in response to a false alarm only three days previously, he decided not to act (yet another blunder to put against his name), though he did reach the Sapoune Heights in time to get a grandstand view of the fighting in the valley below him after messages were sent to his headquarters at the start of the attack.

As they ran through the settlement of Kadikoi, the Turkish soldiers were jeered at by a group of British army wives, including one, a massive washerwoman with brawny arms and ‘hands as hard as horn’, who seized hold of a Turk and gave him a good kicking for trampling on the washing she had laid out in the sun to dry.

The Turks tried to placate her, and some called her ‘Kokana’,ah prompting her to become even more enraged. ‘Kokana, indeed! I’ll Kokana ye!’ she cried, and, brandishing a stick, chased them down the hill.

The British accused the Turkish troops of cowardice, but this was unfair. According to John Blunt, Lord Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, most of the troops were Tunisians without proper training or experience of war. They had only just arrived in the Crimea and were in a famished state: none of them had received any rations they could eat as Muslims since they had left Varna several days before and on their arrival they had disgraced themselves by attacking civilians. Blunt rode after the retreating troops and relayed to an officer Lucan’s command for them to regroup behind the 93rd, but he was accosted by the soldiers ‘who appeared parched with thirst and exhausted’. They asked him why no British troops had come to their support, complained that they had been left in the redoubts for several days without food or water, and declared that the ammunition they were supplied with did not fit the guns in the redoubts. One of the soldiers, his head in a bandage and smoking a long pipe, said to Blunt in Turkish: ‘What can we do sir? It is God’s will.’

To Russell of The Times, watching from the heights, they looked like ‘a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel’ (later and forever misquoted as a ‘thin red line’).

As the Russians cut their losses and moved back to their base, Raglan and his staff on the Sapoune Heights noticed them removing the British guns from the redoubts. The Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, or so it was believed by the keepers of his cult in the British military establishment. The prospect of these guns being paraded as trophies in Sevastopol was unbearable for Raglan, who at once sent an order to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, to recover the Causeway Heights, assuring him of the support of the infantry that had just arrived. Lucan could not see the infantry, and could not believe that he was meant to act alone, with just the cavalry, against infantry and artillery, so for three-quarters of an hour he did nothing, while Raglan on the hill became more alarmed about the fate of the captured British guns. Eventually he dictated a second order to Lucan: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’ The order was not just unclear, it was absurd, and Lucan was completely at a loss as to what to make of it. From where he was standing, at the western end of the Causeway Heights, he could see, to his right, the British guns in the redoubts captured by the Russians from the Turks; to his left, at the end of the North Valley, where he knew the bulk of the Russian forces were l...

But there is also evidence that Lucan was afraid to disobey an order that was in fact welcomed by the men of the Light Brigade, eager for action against the Russian cavalry and in danger of losing discipline if they were prevented from attacking them. Lucan himself later wrote to Raglan that he had obeyed the order because not to do so would have ‘exposed me and the cavalry to aspersions against which we might have difficulty in defending ourselves’ – by which he surely meant aspersions from his men and the rest of the army.

Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press. The Times reported that 800 cavalry had been engaged of whom only 200 had returned; the Illustrated London News that only 163 had returned safely from the charge. From such reports the story quickly spread of a tragic ‘blunder’ redeemed by heroic sacrifice – the myth set in stone by Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, published only two months after the event.

But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.

The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt.

they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.34

The army that came out of Sevastopol to attack the other day … were all drunk. The hospitals smelt so bad with them that you could not remain more than a minute in the place and we were told by an officer who they took prisoner that they had been giving them wine till they had got them to the proper pitch and asked who would go out and drive the English Dogs into the sea, instead of which we drove them back into the town with the loss of about 700 in a very short time. The same officer told us that we might have got into the town when we first came here easily, but now we should have some difficulty.37

In truth, the attack by the Russians was really a reconnaissance in force for a major new assault against the British forces on the heights of Inkerman. The initiative for the assault came from the Tsar, who had learned of Napoleon’s intention to send more troops to the Crimea and believed that Menshikov should use his numerical superiority to break the siege as soon as possible, before the French reinforcements arrived, or at least to impose a delay on the allies until winter came to the rescue of the Russians (‘I have two generals who will not fail me: Generals January and February,’ Nicholas said, adopting the old cliché of 1812).

For all the Russians’ losses, their sortie of 26 October had revealed the weakness of the British defences on Mount Inkerman. Raglan had been warned on a number of occasions by de Lacy Evans and Burgoyne that these crucial heights were vulnerable and needed to be occupied in strength and fortified;

It was not just negligence that lay behind Raglan’s failure but a calculated risk: the British were too few in number to protect all their positions, they were seriously overstretched, and would have been incapable of repulsing a general attack if one had been launched at several points along their line. By the first week of November, the British infantry were exhausted. They had scarcely had a rest since their landing in the Crimea, as Private Henry Smith recalled in a letter to his parents in February 1855:

Within minutes Soimonov himself was killed by a British rifleman. The command was taken up by Colonel Pristovoitov, who was shot a few minutes later; and then by Colonel Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, who was also killed. After that, it was not clear who would take up the command, nobody was keen to step up to the mark, and Captain Andrianov was sent off on his horse to consult with various generals on the matter, which wasted valuable time.

They charged and counter-charged, yelling and screaming, firing their guns, slashing out in all directions with their swords, and when they had no ammunition left they began throwing rocks at one another, striking out with their rifle butts, even kicking and biting.

Stunned by the arrival of the French, the Russians withdrew to Shell Hill and attempted to consolidate. But the morale of their troops had dropped, they did not fancy their chances against the British and the French, and many of them now began to run away, using the cover of the fog to escape the attentions of their officers.

‘it was no longer a battle but a massacre.’ The Russians were mowed down in their hundreds, others trampled underfoot, as they ran down the hill towards the bridge and struggled to cross it, or swam across the river to the other side.

The Duke of Cambridge proposed withdrawing the troops to Balaklava, where they could be more easily supplied and sheltered from the cold than on the heights above Sevastopol. Raglan rejected their proposals, and resolved to keep the army on the heights throughout the winter months, a criminal decision prompting the resignation of Evans and Cambridge, who returned to England, sick and disillusioned, before winter came. Their departure began a steady homeward trail of British officers. In the two months after Inkerman, 225 of the 1,540 officers in the Crimea departed for warmer climes; only 60 of them would return.

etc.’ To finance the ‘Gazette’, which was to be cheap enough for the troops themselves to buy, Tolstoy

publication was rejected by the Tsar, who did not want an unofficial soldiers’ paper to challenge Russian Invalid, the government’s own army newspaper.

Tolstoy wanted to see and write about the war: to reveal to the public the whole truth – both the patriotic sacrifice of the ordinary people and the failures of the military leadership – and thereby start the process of political and social reform to which he believed the war must lead.

‘Several English officers, who went through that rigorous winter, have since told me with a smile that they first learned of the [army’s] suffering from the newspapers’.

Unlike the French, the British could not seem to work out a system for collecting firewood. They allowed the men a ration of charcoal for burning in their fires but, because of the shortage of forage for the draught animals, it proved too difficult to haul the charcoal up from Balaklava to the heights, so the soldiers went without, though officers of course could send their servants down on their own horses to collect the fuel for them. The men suffered terribly from the freezing temperatures of December and January, with thousands of reported cases of frostbite, especially among the new recruits, who were not acclimatized to the Crimean winter. Cholera and other diseases also took their toll among the weakened men.

Every French regiment had a corps of people responsible for the basic needs of the troops – food supply and preparation, the treatment of the wounded and so on. There was a baker and a team of cooks in every regiment, which also had its own vivandières and cantinières, female sutlers, dressed in a modified version of the regimental uniform, who sold respectively food and drink from their mobile field canteens. Food was prepared collectively – every regiment having its own kitchen and appointed chefs – whereas in the British camp each man received his individual ration and was left to cook it on his own.

Large warehouses, slaughterhouses, private shops and trading stalls soon sprang up around the broad horseshoe bay, where three hundred ships could unload their wares from around the world. There were bars and brothels, hotels and restaurants, including one where soldiers paid a fixed price for a three-day orgy of food, wine and women, all brought in from France.

Unable to look after themselves, the British troops depended heavily on their regimental wives to procure and cook their food and do their laundry and any number of other menial chores that the French did for themselves – a factor that accounts for the relatively large number of women in the British army compared to the French (where there were no army wives but only cantinières).

By mid-December there was no fruit or vegetable in any form – only sometimes lemon or lime juice, which the men added to their tea and rum to prevent scurvy – although officers with private means could purchase cheese and hams, chocolates and cigars, wines, champagnes, in fact almost anything, including hampers by Fortnum & Mason, from the shops of Balaklava and Kadikoi. Thousands of soldiers became sick and died from illnesses, including cholera, which resurfaced with a vengeance. By January the British army could muster only 11,000 able-bodied men, less than half the number it had under arms two months before.

French death rates from wounds and diseases were considerably lower than British rates during the first winter of the war (but not the second, when French losses from disease were horrendous). Apart from the cleanliness of the French hospitals, the key factor was having treatment centres near the front and medical auxiliaries in every regiment, soldiers with first-aid training (soldats panseurs) who could help their wounded comrades in the field.

The death toll on these ships was appalling: on the Kangaroo and Arthur the Great, there were forty-five deaths on board on each ship; on the Caduceus, one-third of the passengers died before they reached the hospitals of Scutari.

Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered the system of field surgery

he pioneered the use of ether, becoming the first surgeon to employ anaesthesia in a field operation.

giving ether to the wounded on arrival at the hospital kept them calm and stopped them from collapsing so that the surgeon could make a better choice in selecting between those cases requiring urgent operation and those that could wait. It was this system of triage pioneered by Pirogov during the Crimean War that marked his greatest achievement.

There were chronic shortages of medical supplies, not least because of corruption. Doctors sold off medicines and gave their patients cheaper surrogates, exacting bribes for proper treatment.

At the time of the allied landings, the Russians had hospital places for 2,000 soldiers in the Crimea, but after Alma they were overwhelmed by 6,000 wounded men, and twice that number after Inkerman.

His solution was a simple form of triage which he first put into practice during the bombardment of Sevastopol on 20 January. Brought into the Great Hall of the Assembly, the wounded were first sorted into groups to determine the order and priority of emergency treatment. There were three main groups: the seriously wounded who needed help and could be saved were operated on in a separate room as soon as possible; the lightly wounded were given a number and told to wait in the nearby barracks until the surgeons could treat them; and those who could not be saved were taken to a resting home, where they were cared for by medical attendants, nurses and priests until they died.

you will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation, with music and beaten drums, streaming banners and generals on prancing horses, but war in its authentic expression – as blood, suffering and death.

Above all, Pirogov was aware of the dangers of infection (which he thought came from contaminated vapours) and made a point of separating post-operative patients with clean wounds from those whose wounds were discharging pus and showing signs of developing gangrene.

The British were much less enthusiastic about the use of anaesthetic than the Russians or the French.

British medical opinion was divided on the new science of anaesthesia. Some feared the use of chloroform would weaken the patient’s ability to rally, and others thought it was impractical to use it in battlefield surgery because of the shortage of qualified doctors to administer it. Such attitudes were closely linked to ideas about withstanding pain that were perhaps peculiar to the British sense of manliness (keeping ‘a stiff upper lip’).

The men were dying at a rate of fifty to sixty every day: as soon as one man breathed his last he was sewn into his blanket and buried in a mass grave by the hospital while another patient took his bed. The nurses worked around the clock to feed and wash the men, give them medicines, and bring them comfort as they died. Many of the nurses were unable to cope with the strain and began drinking heavily, some of them complaining about the bossy manner of Miss Nightingale and about their menial work. They were sent home by Nightingale.

In the month of January, 10 per cent of the entire British army in the East died from disease. In February, the death rate of patients at Scutari was 52 per cent, having risen from 8 per cent when Nightingale arrived in November. In all, that winter, in the four months following the hurricane, 4,000 soldiers died in the hospitals of Scutari, the vast majority of them unwounded.

the main Barrack Hospital was built on top of a cesspool, that the sewers were leaking, with sewage spilling into the drinking water.

Through daily reports in the newspapers, photographs and drawings in periodicals, people had immediate access to the latest news about the war, and a clearer grasp of its realities, than during any previous conflict. Their reactions to the news became a major factor in the calculations of the military authorities, which were exposed to a degree of public criticism never seen before during wartime.