In Tolstoy’s ‘Sevastopol in August’, a story based on true events and characters, a soldier at the River Belbek asks another who has just arrived from the besieged town whether his room there is still in one piece. ‘My dear fellow,’ the other one replies, ‘the building was shelled to kingdom come ages ago. You won’t recognize Sevastopol now; there’s not a single woman left in the place, no taverns, no brass bands; the last pub closed down yesterday. It’s about as cheerful as a morgue.’
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It was not only civilians who were abandoning Sevastopol. Soldiers were deserting in growing numbers during the summer months. Those who ran away to the allies claimed that desertion was a mass phenomenon, and this is supported by the fragmentary figures and communications of the Russian military authorities. There was a report in August, for example, that the number of desertions had ‘dramatically increased’ since June, especially among those reserve troops who were called up to the Crimea: a hundred men had run away from the 15th Reserve Infantry Division, as had three out of every four reinforcements sent from the Warsaw Military District. From Sevastopol itself, around twenty soldiers went missing every day, mostly during sorties or bombardments, when they were not so closely watched by their commanding officers. According to the French, who received a steady flow of deserters in the summer months, the main reason the men gave for their desertion was that they had been given virtually no food, or only rotten meat, to eat. There were various rumours of a mutiny by some of the reservists in the Sevastopol garrison during the first week of August, though the uprising was brutally put down and all evidence of it suppressed by the Russians. ‘There has been a report that one hundred Russian soldiers have been shot by a sentence of Court Martial in the Town for Mutiny,’ Henry Clifford wrote to his father shortly afterwards. Several regiments were broken up and put in the reserve because they had become unreliable.
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Realizing that Sevastopol could not withstand the siege for much longer, the Tsar ordered Gorchakov to launch one last attempt to break the ring of allied troops. Gorchakov was doubtful that it could be done. An offensive ‘against an enemy superior in numbers and entrenched in such solid positions would be folly’, the commander-in-chief reasoned. But the Tsar insisted that
something
should be done: he was looking for a way to end the war on terms acceptable to Russia’s national honour and integrity, and needed a military success to begin peace talks with the British and the French from a stronger position. Sending three of his reserve divisions to the Crimea, Alexander bombarded Gorchakov with instructions to attack (though not suggesting where) before the allies sent more troops, as he believed they were about to do. ‘I am convinced that we must go on the offensive,’ he wrote to Gorchakov on 30 July; ‘otherwise all the reinforcements I have sent to you, as has happened in the past, will be sucked into Sevastopol, that bottomless pit.’
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The only line of action that Gorchakov believed had any chance of success was an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia river. By ‘capturing the enemy’s watering places, it might be possible to threaten his flank and limit his attacks on Sevastopol, maybe opening the way for further advantageous operations’, he wrote to the Tsar. ‘But we should not deceive ourselves, for there is little hope of success in such an initiative.’ Alexander would not listen to Gorchakov’s reservations. On 3 August he wrote to him again: ‘Your daily losses in Sevastopol underline what I have told you many times before in my letters –
the necessity to do something decisive to end this frightful massacre
[the Tsar’s italics].’ Alexander knew that Gorchakov was essentially a courtier, an acolyte of the cautious Paskevich, and suspected that he was reluctant to take the responsibility for an offensive. He concluded his letter with the words: ‘I want a battle, but if you as commander-in-chief fear the liability, then convene a military council to take it for you.’
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A council of war met on 9 August to discuss a possible attack. Many of the senior commanders were against an offensive. Osten-Sacken, who had been much affected by the death of Nakhimov and was now convinced that the loss of Sevastopol was unavoidable, argued that enough men had been sacrificed and that it was time to evacuate the naval base. Most of the other generals shared Osten-Sacken’s pessimistic view but no one else was brave enough to speak out in such terms. Instead they went along with the idea of an offensive to please the Tsar, though few had any confidence in any detailed plan. The most audacious proposal came from the gung-ho General Khrulev, who had led the failed attack on Evpatoria. Khrulev now favoured the complete destruction of Sevastopol (even bettering the example of Moscow 1812) followed by a mass assault on the enemy’s positions by every man available. When Osten-Sacken objected that the suicidal plan would end in tens of thousands of needless deaths, Khrulev answered: ‘Well, so what? Let everybody die! We will leave our mark upon the map!’ Cooler heads prevailed, and the meeting ended with a vote in favour of Gorchakov’s idea of an attack on the French and Sardinian positions on the Chernaia, though Gorchakov himself remained extremely doubtful that it could succeed. ‘I am marching on the enemy because if I don’t, Sevastopol will soon be lost,’ he wrote on the eve of the offensive to Prince Dolgoruky, the Minister of War. But if the attack did not succeed, ‘it would not be [his] fault’, and he would ‘try to evacuate Sevastopol with as little loss as possible’.
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The attack was scheduled for the early morning of 16 August. The evening before, the French troops had been celebrating the
fête de l’empereur
– also (not coincidentally) the Feast of the Assumption, a major holiday for the Italians, who, like the French, had been drinking late into the night. They had only just gone off to bed, when, at 4 a.m., they were woken by the sound of Russian cannon.
Using the cover of an early morning fog, the Russians advanced towards the Traktir Bridge with a combined force of 47,000 infantry, 10,000 cavalry and 270 field guns under the command of General Liprandi on the left (opposite the Sardinians) and General Read, the son of a Scottish engineer who had emigrated to Russia, on the Russian right (opposite the French). The two generals were under orders not to cross the river before receiving orders from Gorchakov, the commander-in-chief, who was not sure whether to deploy his reserve divisions against the French on the Fediukhin Heights or the Sardinians on Gasfort Hill. He was relying on the opening artillery bombardment to expose the enemy’s positions and help him make up his mind.
The Russians’ opening cannon shots failed to reach their targets, however. They merely served to raise the alarm for the 18,000 French troops and 9,000 Sardinians to prepare themselves for battle and for those in the forward position to move up to the Traktir Bridge. Frustrated with the lack of progress, Gorchakov sent his aide-de-camp, a Lieutenant Krasovsky, to hurry out to Read and Liprandi and tell them it was ‘time to start’. By the time the message got to Read, its meaning was far from clear. ‘Time to start what?’ Read asked Krasovsky, who did not know. Read decided that the message could not mean to begin the artillery fire, which had started already, but the start of an infantry attack. He ordered his men to cross the river and storm the Fediukhin Heights – even though the cavalry and infantry reserves that were supposed to support an attack had not arrived. Gorchakov, meanwhile, had decided to concentrate his reserve forces on the left, having been encouraged by the ease with which Liprandi’s skirmishers had driven off the Sardinian outposts from Telegraph Hill (known by the Italians as the
Roccia dei Piemontesi
). Hearing the sound of muskets firing from Read’s men in front of the Fediukhin, Gorchakov redirected some of his reserves to support them, but, as he acknowledged afterwards, he knew already that the battle had been lost: his troops were divided and attacking on two fronts when the whole point of the offensive had been to deal a single mighty blow.
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Read’s men crossed the river near the Traktir Bridge. Without cavalry or artillery support, they marched towards their almost certain destruction by the French artillery and riflemen firing down on them from the slopes of the Fediukhin Heights. Within twenty minutes 2,000 Russian infantry had been gunned down. Reserves arrived, in the form of the 5th Infantry Division. Its commander suggested that the whole division should be committed to the attack. Perhaps by weight of numbers, they might have broken through. But Read chose instead to commit them piecemeal to the battle, regiment by regiment, and each one, in turn, was shot down by the French, who by this time were entirely confident of their ability to defeat the Russian columns and held off their fire until they were at close hand. ‘Our artillery played havoc with the Russians,’ recalled Octave Cullet, a French infantry captain who was on the Fediukhin.
Our soldiers, confident and strong, fired at them from two lines with a calm and deadly volley that can only be achieved by battle-hardened troops. Each man that morning had been given eighty cartridges but few had been shot; no one paid attention to the firing from our flanks but concentrated only on the approaching Russian troops … . Only when they were right onto us and threatening to envelop us, did we start our firing – not one shot was lost on this vast semicircle of attackers. Our men displayed admirable composure (
sang-froid
) and no one thought of retreating.
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At last, Gorchakov put an end to Read’s bungling and ordered the entire division to join in the attack. For a while, they pushed the French back up the hill, but the deadly salvoes of the enemy’s rifles eventually forced them to retreat and cross over to the other side of the river. Read was killed by a shell splinter during the retreat, and Gorchakov took over his command, ordering eight battalions from Liprandi’s forces on the left to support him at the eastern end of the Fediukhin Heights. But these troops came under heavy rifle fire from the Sardinians, who had moved across from Gasfort Hill to protect the open flank, and were forced back towards Telegraph Hill. The situation was hopeless. Shortly after 10 a.m. Gorchakov ordered a general withdrawal, and with one last round from all their cannon, as if to sound a note of defiance in defeat, the Russians retreated to lick their wounds.
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The allies lost 1,800 casualties on the Chernaia river. The Russians counted 2,273 dead, almost 4,000 men wounded and 1,742 missing, most of them deserters who had used the morning mist and confusion of the battle to run away.
bb
It was several days before the dead and wounded were cleared away (the Russians did not even come to collect theirs) and in that time there were many visitors who saw the frightful scene, not just nurses who came to help the wounded, but war tourists, who took trophies from the bodies of the dead. At least two British army chaplains took part in the plundering for souvenirs. Mary Seacole describes the ground ‘thickly numbered with the wounded, some of them calm and resigned, others impatient and restless, a few filling the air with their cries of pain – all wanting water, and all grateful to those who administered it’. Thomas Buzzard, a British doctor with the Turkish army, was struck by how most of the dead ‘lay on their faces, literally, to use the Homeric phrase, “biting the dust”’, in contrast to the way they were usually depicted on their backs in classical paintings of battles (most of the Russians had been shot from the front while advancing up the hill and so had fallen forwards naturally).
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Somehow the Russians had contrived to lose against an enemy less than half their size. In his explanation to the Tsar, Gorchakov put the entire blame on the unfortunate General Read, arguing that he had failed to understand his order when he moved his men against the French on the Fediukhin Heights. ‘It is grievous to think that if Read had carried out my orders to the letter, we might have ended with something like success and that at least a third of those brave troops who have been killed might have been alive today,’ he wrote to the Tsar on 17 August. Alexander was not impressed by Gorchakov’s attempt to shift the blame onto the dead general. He had wanted a success to approach the allies with proposals for a peace on favourable terms, and this setback had ruined all his plans. ‘Our brave troops’, he replied to Gorchakov, ‘have suffered enormous losses
without any gain
[the Tsar’s italics].’ The truth was that both men were to blame for the needless slaughter: Alexander for insisting on an offensive when none was really possible; and Gorchakov for failing to withstand his pressure for attack.
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The defeat on the Chernaia was a catastrophe for the Russians. It was now only a question of time before Sevastopol would fall to the allies. ‘I am sure that this is the second-to-last bloody act of our operations in the Crimea,’ wrote Herbé to his parents on 25 August, after being wounded on the Chernaia; ‘the last will be the capture of Sevastopol.’ According to Nikolai Miloshevich, one of the defenders of the naval base, after the defeat ‘the Russian troops lost all their trust in their officers and generals’. Another soldier wrote: ‘The morning of 16 August was our last hope. By the evening it had disappeared. We began to say farewell to Sevastopol.’
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