Hervey 11 - On His Majesty's Service (39 page)

In order, however, to complete the deception which was required to pass troops through this formidable barrier without further great loss, the General-in-chief instructed General Krassowski, with ten thousand men, to press closely upon Shumla, whilst the main force of about thirty thousand feigned a retreat towards Silistria. On reaching Yeni Bazar, a distance of about six leagues, General Diebitsch at once turned right and moved on Devna and Kupriquoi. Each soldier was issued with four days’ rations, and ten more were carried in light waggons attached to the regiments. The bridge over the Kamtchik was taken with élan, and from that point it was not possible for the Vizier, who even now had detected his error and managed to detach ten thousand to intercept the Army at the pass of Kamtchik – but too late – to interfere with the passage south, for by now the Army had passed the most difficult part of the country and were far on the road towards Eski Bashli. I must hasten to add, however, that the road leading to Aidos is the most difficult of all the eastern routes, crossing the same stream forty times in the Delidah Valley, and traversing a defile barely sixty yards wide, all of which I myself saw in company with General Rudiger’s corps
.

In the meantime, General Roth advanced along the coast to Misivri, which capitulated on his approach, and he was thence enabled to march on Bourgas and open a communication with the fleet. It was at this point that the alarm occasioned by the Bulgars worked its greatest favour, for they had, it is reported, likened the numbers of the Army to ‘the leaves of the forest’, and Aidos, with all its stores, was abandoned by the retreating Turks even before the arrival of General Rudiger
.

There was but one moment of supposed peril, when the posts occupied covered about eight hundred miles of country, which might be cut off, and this latter consideration, together with the reported junction of Hussein Pasha, the Seraskier, and the Grand Vizier himself, caused such uneasiness that General Diebitsch concentrated nearly the whole of his force and made a retrograde movement on Selimnia with twenty-five thousand men and a hundred pieces of artillery. But instead of encountering the expected army he only found a small force of cavalry posted near the town, which gave way, after a smart affair, and the place was occupied. The General left here a force to secure his line of communications, and resuming his advance forthwith, he arrived before Adrianople, in Ancient Thrace, this day week in three divisions, with the right of the army leaning on the river Tschenga. The Army has dubbed him ‘Count Za-Balkanski’, and every man is in the highest spirits
.

I conclude this, my second letter, in confident expectation of being able to write next from Constantinople itself, since ‘Za-Balkanski’ carries all before him
.

I remain Your Highness’s Humble Servant &c, &c
,

Matthew Hervey
,

Lieutenant Colonel
.

XVIII

TERMS OF SURRENDER

Before Adrianople

Cornet Agar had grown more animated with every mile, composing – and rehearsing – his book of travels as they rode through ancient Thrace in the footsteps of the legions. In particular he penned one arresting admonition: ‘None who know the history of these parts, neither Turk nor Russian, can approach Adrianople without wariness, respecting what happened here fifteen hundred years ago.’

Hervey did know. The events of 9 August 378, by the old Julian calendar, had stood in his mind since the schoolroom at Shrewsbury: the Emperor Flavius Julius Valens, whom some called ‘
Ultimus Romanorum
’, had met his death at the head of an army defending the Eastern Empire from the invading Goths. And one of the reasons he held the events in his mind (and much to his satisfaction, for Agar himself did not know this) was that Valens had been raised on his father Gratian’s estate near where he himself was raised, on the downs of Wiltshire. But in that battle – Hadrianopolis – there had been a most shameful affair, etched deep in his mind since first he had been made to translate the page of the
Historiae
in the classical remove: Valens had been deserted by his cavalry. Agar had brought with him a demy-size plan of the battle, copied in the Bodleian Library, and was sure they would be able to situate it accurately, declaring in his book of travels, and to his fellow travellers, that ‘The city is a hinge on which the fortunes of empires have hung.’

Fairbrother had been equally animated by the prospect. He was much taken by the notion of the ‘hinge of fortune’. Kulewtscha had been just such a battle, but Adrianople was honoured by the centuries. He had read a little of it himself, but Agar’s journal was true enlightenment:

Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, built the city at the confluence of the Tonsus and the Ardiscus with the Hebrus, which are rapid-flowing rivers over which magnificent stone bridges are now said to stretch. The emperor Hadrian, like Augustus in Rome, found the city brick and left it marble, whence its name of Orestias became Hadrianopolis. There, too, Licinius, Emperor in the East, was defeated by Constantine, Emperor of the West, before Valens’ defeat by the Goths, and a thousand years since then has not made Thrace peaceful: it is the most contested place on earth – Bulgars, Turks, Eastern Romans, and Crusaders all coveted its pleasantness (as do now the Russians). When the Ottomans finally captured the city from Byzantium, in 1365, they made it their capital until the fall of Constantinople ninety years later.

Adrianople still had the appearance of a seat of power. From their camp on one of the few pieces of elevated ground just beyond the range of cannon shot, Hervey could see the white minarets and the lead-roofed cupolas of the mosques, and the baths and caravanserais which stood proud of the endless flat roofs of the dwelling houses and the broad canopies of the plane trees, and the gilded crescents atop the domes and towers, which seemed to stand defiant against the blue sky. Without the walls were broad meadows and fields under crop stretching as far as the eye could see, broken only by groves of fruit trees and flourishing villages. A scene of pleasantness indeed – of peace and prosperity.

It was only on the rivers that the illusion of tranquillity was exposed. Hundreds of dazzling white sails – the feluccas which bore in and out the wealth of this second city of the Porte – strained to put distance between them and the threatened walls, or else (those which put confidence in walls) made for their safety. One way or the other, those making sail knew that if Adrianople fell, what could be otherwise than the same fate for Constantinople – ‘Stamboul’ to them – the very seat of the Porte? A hundred and fifty miles would be nothing to an army which had accomplished so much already, nor would the walls of the Golden Horn be too formidable to men who had crossed the Balkan, the bulwark of the empire. They had heard already the invader’s boast,
Za-Balkanski
(‘Through the Balkan’); and those who knew of the weakness of their city’s walls trembled.

When Hervey wrote to Princess Lieven of the army’s high spirits, it was to the honour of the general-in-chief. He was certain, both by study and his own experience, that no army could be in such spirits unless it possessed the greatest confidence in its general. But the material condition of the army was also a factor, and in the days of their closing on the city, the contemplation of its pleasantness had been enough to make the
rekrut
forget the danger, toil and deprivations he had suffered since the beginning of the campaign, and dream only of the comfortable quarters (even, perhaps, in the Sultan’s old seraglio), the abundant markets – and the other delights. The sick, of which there were yet growing numbers, hoped, too, for restoration within the city’s walls (though most were destined to find only a grave).

But despite his confident assertion that his next letter would be from Constantinople, there remained a doubt – as doubt there must be in the mind of any commander who was not to be found leading suddenly with the wrong foot: was the army coming to the end of the war, or the beginning of its own destruction? They stood before the walls of Adrianople twenty thousand strong. Their intelligence – not least by secret emissaries from the Orthodox clergy tolerated within – told them the city could raise at least that number in its own defence, and that the Sultan’s troops dispersed in the Balkan mountains were even now, in their scattered cohorts, marching towards them; and a fresh army was hastening from Sofia. There were reports (which General Diebitsch was inclined to believe) that Mustapha, the Pasha of Scodra in Albania, an old Janissary, was bringing forty thousand Arnauts to the fight. And even if the Turks had no mind to defend the city, willing to surrender its trophies and its stores, there was nothing to prevent the soldiers of the Mansure from marching south to Constantinople, ten or perhaps fifteen thousand strong, to join in the defence of that place. On the other hand, he, Diebitsch, could only spare two thousand cavalry to menace such a retreat. The strongest card he had to play, in truth, was the Turks’ incredulity that he could have marched so far with so few, that they were indeed ‘as the leaves of the forest’. His spies were already telling him that Halil Pasha, the commander of the garrison, believed the Russians stood before Adrianople with five times the number that in fact he possessed. But spies had a habit of bringing welcome news.

Since Silistria, Hervey had had almost free run of the headquarters, and after Kulewtscha, Diebitsch had spoken with him on terms of uncommon intimacy. Now, before this
mansio
, this way-station on the road to the fabled capital of emperors, the general-in-chief confided in him that their situation demanded the greatest prudence. It was the first Hervey had heard of the word in his headquarters, and he confessed to being disappointed – until Diebitsch revealed that their situation was so perilous that it begat a paradox: the greatest prudence required the greatest boldness.

Hervey grasped the paradox at once: Za-Balkanski’s course of victories was like a slope on which it was not possible to stand still. But it did not alter the material point, he would argue. ‘The final act of the campaign, if I may thus liken it to a play, General, is one which in truth requires an entirely new army. If you will permit me, it seems to me that no general, no matter how deserving, could count on the continuing good fortune of his enemy fighting in so irresolute and inexpert a manner as the Turk has so far. And we now cross the threshold of his home, so to speak.’

‘I know it, Hervey,’ Diebitsch had said. ‘But the bones of many fine men lie whitening on the hillsides of the Balkan. I cannot turn them from my mind and surrender all now. I shall give Halil Pasha an ultimatum. If he refuses, I shall attack the city. Yet I tremble to do so, for although we should take the walls, twenty thousand men in the labyrinth of a city of four times that number, whose circumference is ten miles, would cease being an army.’

Hervey commiserated: the storming of Badajoz was an object lesson still.

Diebitsch nodded. ‘The occupation of cities, without previous agreement, is a problem for the solution of which history offers few precedents.’

And so Za-Balkanski sent an ultimatum to Halil Pasha. In the afternoon of the 19th – and to his barely concealed astonishment – Turkish delegates came to the Russian headquarters to negotiate safe conduct to Constantinople. General Diebitsch expressed himself not unwilling to allow the exit of the Turkish corps – which he could hardly, in any case, prevent (not that the Turks had any inkling of the fact, evidently) – but he took a chance and imposed certain conditions, in effect a parole: they could leave the city and return to their homes, but not march to Constantinople. In return he promised protection of the inhabitants of the city, their property and religion. And he made this conditional – Hervey observed that here was the true genius – on receiving an answer to these terms by nine o’clock the following morning, a little over twelve hours. For the military, civil and religious leaders had plainly lost their heads; it would not do to give them time to collect their senses again. Moreover, if the city were not surrendered the following morning, he would be obliged to storm it, and he did not wish to risk discovery of his weakness by a longer delay.

And so what the Turk believed was a Russian army, but which did not muster more than would a corps on paper, passed that night under arms, wondering (with the
rekrut
’s simple faith in God, and his general) what the morning would bring. Their repose was not helped by the commotion within the walls, with torches and lanterns flitting this way and that all night, which gave the impression of a garrison readying for battle. An hour before daybreak, therefore, Diebitsch gave the order for what passed for – remained of – the 2nd and 4th Corps to form two columns of assault, while the equally depleted 7th Corps, with the greater part of the cavalry and horse artillery, made preparations to advance to Iskender, six miles to the south-east of the city, to cut off any retreat on Constantinople.