The English soldiers believed they had come to Turkey, not to save it, but to conquer it. At Gallipoli they would often have their fun by accosting a Turkish gentleman along the beach; they would draw a circle around him and tell him that this circle was Turkey; then they would make him leave the circle and cut it into two, naming one half ‘England’ and the other ‘France’, before pushing the Turk away into something which they called ‘Asia’.
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Colonial prejudice limited the use the Western powers were prepared to make of the Turkish troops. Napoleon III thought the Turks were lazy and corrupt while Lord Cowley, the British ambassador in Paris, advised Raglan that ‘no Turk was to be trusted’ with any military responsibility essential to national security. The Anglo-French commanders thought the Turks were only good at fighting behind fortifications. They were ready to use them for auxiliary tasks such as digging trenches, but assumed they lacked the discipline or courage to fight alongside European troops on the open battlefield.
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The success of the Turks in holding off the Russians at Silistria (which was largely put down to the British officers) did not change these racist attitudes, which would become even more pronounced when the campaign shifted to the Crimea.
As it was, the Turks were doing more than hold their own against the Russians, who launched one last assault against Silistria on 22 June. On the morning of the 21st, Gorchakov went with his staff to inspect the trenches before the Arab Tabia, where the attack would begin. Tolstoy was impressed by Gorchakov (he would later draw on him for his portrait of General Kutuzov in
War and Peace
). ‘I saw him under fire for the first time that morning,’ he wrote to his brother Nikolai. ‘You can see he’s so engrossed in the general course of events that he simply doesn’t notice the bullets and cannon-balls.’ Throughout that day, to weaken the resistance of the Turks, 500 Russian guns bombarded their fortifications; the firing continued late into the night. The assault was set for three in the morning. ‘There we all were,’ Tolstoy wrote, and, ‘as always on the eve of a battle, we were all pretending not to think of the following day as anything more than an ordinary day, while all of us, I’m quite sure, at the bottom of our hearts felt a slight pang (and not even slight, but pronounced) at the thought of the assault’.
As you know, Nikolai, the period that precedes an engagement is the most unpleasant – it’s the only period when you have the time to be afraid, and fear is one of the most unpleasant feelings. Towards morning, the nearer the moment came, the more this feeling diminished, and towards 3 o’clock, when we were all waiting to see the shower of rockets let off as the signal for the attack, I was in such a good humour that I would have been very upset if someone had come to tell me that the assault wouldn’t take place.
What he feared most happened. At two o’clock in the morning, an aide-de-camp brought Gorchakov a message, ordering him to raise the siege. ‘I can say without fear of error’, Tolstoy told his brother,
that this news was received by all – soldiers, officers and generals – as a real misfortune, all the more so since we knew through spies who came to us very often from Silistria, and with whom I very often had occasion to talk myself, that once this fort was taken – something of which nobody had any doubt – Silistria couldn’t hold out for more than two or three days.
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What Tolstoy did not know, or refused to take into account, was that by this stage there were 30,000 French, 20,000 British and 20,000 Turkish troops ready to reinforce the defence of Silistria, and that Austria, which had massed 100,000 troops along the Serbian frontier, had served an ultimatum to the Tsar to withdraw from the Danubian principalities. Austria had effectively adopted a policy of armed neutrality in favour of the allies, mobilizing Habsburg troops to force the Russians to withdraw from the Danube. Fearful of uprisings among their own Slavs, the Austrians were worried by the Russian presence in the principalities, which looked more like annexation every day. If the Austrians attacked the Russians from the west, there was a real possibility that they would cut them off from their lines of supply on the Danube and block their main path of retreat, leaving them exposed to the allied armies attacking from the south. The Tsar had no choice but to retreat before his army was destroyed.
Nicholas felt a deep sense of betrayal by the Austrians, whose empire he had saved from the Hungarians in 1849. He had developed a paternal affection for the Emperor Franz Joseph, more than thirty years his junior, and felt that he deserved his gratitude. Visibly saddened and shaken by the news of the ultimatum, he turned Franz Joseph’s portrait to the wall and wrote on the back of it in his own hand: ‘Du Undankbarer!’ (You ungrateful man!) He told the Austrian envoy Count Esterhazy in July that Franz Joseph had completely forgotten what he had done for him and that ‘because the confidence which had existed until now between the two sovereigns for the happiness of their empires was destroyed, the same intimate relations could not exist between them any more’.
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The Tsar wrote to Gorchakov to explain his reasons for calling off the siege. It was an unusually personal letter that revealed a lot about his thinking:
How sad and painful it is for me, my dear Gorchakov, to be forced into agreement with the persistent arguments of Prince Ivan Fedorovich [Paskevich] … and to retreat from the Danube after having made so many efforts and having lost so many brave souls without gain – I do not need to tell you what that means to me. Judge that for yourself!!! But how can I disagree with him when I look at the map. Now the danger is not so much, for you are in a position to exact a severe punishment on the impudent Austrians. I am fearful only that the retreat may damage the morale of our troops. You must raise their spirits, make it clear to every one of them that it is better to retreat in time so that we can attack later on, as it was in 1812.
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The Russians retreated from the Danube, fighting off the Turks, who pursued them, smelling blood. The Russian troops were tired and demoralized, many of the soldiers had not eaten for days, and there were so many sick and wounded that they could not all be taken back by cart. Thousands were abandoned to the Turks. At the fortress town of Giurgevo, on 7 July, the Russians lost 3,000 men in a battle with the Turkish forces (some of them commanded by British officers) who crossed the river from Rusçuk and attacked the Russians with the support of a British gunboat. Gorchakov arrived with reinforcements from the abandoned siege of Silistria, but was soon forced to order a retreat. The Union Jack was planted on the fortress of Giurgevo, where the Turks then took savage revenge on the Russians, killing more than 1,400 wounded men, cutting off their heads and mutilating their bodies, while Omer Pasha and the British officers looked on.
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The Turkish reprisals had a clear religious character. As soon as the town was cleared of Russians troops, the Turkish troops (Bashi Bazouks and Albanians) ransacked the homes and churches of its Christian population, most of them Bulgarians. The entire Christian population left Giurgevo with the Russian infantry, hurriedly packing their belongings onto carts and heading north with their columns. A French officer described the scene he found in Giurgevo a few weeks after its abandonment:
The Russians, in departing, left only 25 inhabitants out of a population of 12,000 people! Only a handful of houses were intact … The looters were not content to pillage only houses. Several churches were ransacked. I saw with my own eyes a Greek church which I found in a dreadful state. An old Bulgarian sacristan was clearing up the broken icons and church windows, the sculptures, lamps and other sacred objects piled up in the sanctuary. I asked him in sign language who had committed these atrocities, the Russians or the Turks. ‘Turkos’ he replied in a single word, his teeth clenched and in a tone that promised no redemption for the first Bashi Bazouk who fell into his hands.
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In every town and village the Russian troops passed through, they were joined by other refugees afraid of Turkish reprisals. There were scenes of chaos and panic on the roads, as thousands of Bulgarian peasants left their villages with their livestock and joined the ever-growing columns of humanity in flight. The roads became so badly blocked with peasant carts that the Russian retreat was slowed down, and Gorchakov considered using troops to hold back the refugees. But he was talked out it by his senior officers, and in the end some 7,000 Bulgarian families were evacuated to Russia. Tolstoy described the scene in one village in a letter to his aunt which he wrote on reaching Bucharest on 19 July:
There was one village that I went into from the camp to fetch milk and fruit that had been destroyed [by the Turks]. As soon as the Prince [Gorchakov] had let the Bulgarians know that those who wanted to could cross the Danube with the army and become Russian subjects, the whole country rose up, and all of them, with their wives, children, horses and cattle, came down to the bridge, but as it was impossible to take them all, the Prince was obliged to refuse those who came last, and you should have seen how much that grieved him; he received all the deputations coming from these poor people, he chatted with each of them, tried to explain to them the impossibility of the thing, proposed to them that they cross without their carts and cattle, and, taking upon himself their means of subsistence until they should reach Russia, paid out of his own purse for private vessels to transport them.
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In Bucharest, there were similar scenes of confusion. Many of the disaffected Russian troops took the opportunity to desert from their units and went into hiding in the city, prompting the military authorities to issue dire threats to the population to give up any deserters or risk punishment. The Wallachian volunteers, who had joined the Russian troops on their occupation of the principality, now melted away, many of them fleeing south to join the allies. Evacuating the city, the Russians issued a dark warning to the ‘treacherous Wallachians’ in a manifesto from the Tsar:
His Majesty the Tsar does not believe that those who profess the same religion as the Orthodox Emperor can submit to a government that is not Christian. If the Wallachians cannot understand that, because they are too much influenced by Europe, and given over to false beliefs, the Tsar nonetheless cannot renounce the mission that God has given him as the leader of the Orthodox, to remove for ever from the sovereignty of the Ottomans those who profess the true Christian faith, that is to say the Greek. That thought has preoccupied the Tsar since the beginning of his glorious reign, and the moment has arrived when His Majesty will carry out the project he has planned for many years, whatever may be the intentions of the powerless European states in the hold of false beliefs. The time will come when the rebellious Wallachians, who have incurred the wrath of His Majesty, will pay dearly for their disloyalty.
On 26 July the proclamation was read out to the assembled boyars in Bucharest by Gorchakov, who added his own parting words: ‘Gentlemen, we are leaving Bucharest for the moment, but I hope to return soon – remember 1812.’
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News of the withdrawal was a huge shock to the Slavophiles in Moscow and St Petersburg who had seen the Russian advance into the Balkans as a war of liberation for the Slavs. They now became despondent at what they saw as the abandonment of their ideals. Konstantin Aksakov had dreamed of a Slavic federation under Russian leadership. He thought the war would end with the planting of a cross on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. But the retreat from the Danube filled him ‘with feelings of disgust and shame’, as he wrote to his brother Ivan to explain:
It feels as if we are retreating from our Orthodox belief. If this is because we distrust, or because we are withdrawing from a holy war, then since the foundation of Russia there has never been such a shameful moment in our history – we have defeated enemies but not our own fear. And now what! … We are retreating from Bulgaria, but what will happen to the poor Bulgarians, to the crosses on the churches of Bulgaria? … Russia! If you leave God then God will leave you! You have renounced the holy mission with which He entrusted you to defend the holy faith and deliver your suffering brothers, and now God’s wrath will come to you, Russia!
Like many Slavophiles, the Aksakovs blamed the decision to retreat on Nesselrode, the ‘German’ Foreign Minister, who was now denounced in nationalist circles as a traitor to Russia and an ‘Austrian agent’. With the pan-Slav leader Pogodin, they mounted a campaign in the salons of St Petersburg and Moscow to persuade the Tsar to reverse the retreat and fight alone against the Austrians and the Western powers. They rejoiced in the fact that Russia would be fighting on its own against Europe, believing that a holy war for the Slavs’ liberation from Western influence would be the fulfilment of Russia’s messianic role.
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