Crimean texts
It is, perhaps, now necessary to observe that in the remarks which we have conceived it right to make on Mr Kinglake’s “History” we have dealt with Lord Raglan’s military acts and character, not as we believe them to have been, but as Mr Kinglake states they were. When Mr Kinglake first insisted that great advantages resulted to the Allies because of Lord Raglan’s sole guidance of the Flank March, and then went into details to show how much the Allies were broken up during that march, it was our duty to point out that no proof of the advantages was afforded by the narrative. Again, when Mr Kinglake, always praising Lord Raglan for prudence, sagacity, and the doing of the right thing in the right way, went on to place his lordship before his readers as a very reckless commander, leaving his troops at critical moments in battle, tumbling plump on the Russians in a wood, coming under the fire of old Monto’s mortars at Balaclava, and the like, it was reasonable to indicate the injury done to Lord Raglan by trying to make a merit out of a mistake, just as it would be proper to show how it was wrong to give credit for a lucky accident as if the fortunate result were due to deliberate preparation. The extracts given so copiously in the course of our review will have enabled our readers to determine how far our analysis of Mr Kinglake’s facts is justified, and to decide whether we have had grounds for our strong distrust of him as a historian. His prejudices, passions, and crotchets detract much from the many great advantages and singular powers he possesses; but just in proportion as they render Mr Kinglake an unsafe guide to the historical student do they invest his writings with a wonderful life and fire, and set his pages at times all aglow with animation. His prolixity is so excessive, however, that we grow weary and confused in the midst even of his battles. His defects of style, especially a certain affectation of odd words and phrases and of strange English, “vex” the reader by frequent recurrence. We do not care to count how often Lord Raglan has been “angered,” or how often there was “great havoc” in the course of these volumes, or how many times Mr Kinglake uses a stilted expression or a grotesque word when he could have found ordinary language quite as full of meaning. It is much to say for the charm of his style that neither excessive lengthiness of description, nor wandering digressions, nor elaborate biographies of small people breaking up the course of the narrative, nor involved story, nor perplexed sentences, can cause the book to be unreadable.
We have now followed the story down to the eventful day when Lord Raglan (advised by Sir E Lyons, says Mr Kinglake) surrendered his claim to the bays between St George and the entrance to Sebastopol, and took exclusive possession of Balaclava for the English. The French had hitherto marched on the right and the English, who had cavalry, on the left. When the Flank March began the English, being on the left, necessarily led, and had the Allies preserved their order in front of Sebastopol the English and French would have been in a different relative situation from that which they occupied. The English coming first to Balaclava, however, remained there, but, as it was necessary to give the French a port, they moved round to our left. There they took up ground between the English and the sea, having two harbours comparatively close at hand. Their right was covered by the English, and they had the sea on their left. The English had their left in connexion with the French, but their right, resting on the heights over against the Inkerman quarries, was almost in the air. Their rear was exposed. Their hold of Balaclava was insecure. The distance of the harbour from the camp was — alas! we all know too well what that was. They, the weaker force, had two vulnerable points in their position as they went on with their share of the siege works. We do not think Lord Raglan was to blame for the concession, and Mr Kinglake states the case very fairly:—
“The French acted, however, with great forbearance, and nothing, indeed, could be fairer than the course which Canrobert took. He justly represented that the French had hitherto had the right side of the Allied line, and that, of necessity (on account of the position of the place), the army which was to be on the right must have Balaclava as the port of supply, which would be in its immediate rear; but seeing the English already installed in the port and the town, and inferring that to call upon them to move out and make way for the French would be likely to create ill blood, he generously and wisely proposed to give Lord Raglan his choice. Either Lord Raglan might continue, as before, to take the left place in the allied line, with an understanding that, in that case, he would have to give up Balaclava to the French, or else he might keep Balaclava, but, as the consequence of doing so, must take his place on the right of the Allied line. To take the right was to add to the toils of the siege the duty of withstanding any enterprises which might be undertaken by the enemy’s field army; to take the left was to be sheltered from molestation on all sides except that of the town. But, on the other hand, the privilege of occupying Balaclava seemed, at the time, to be one of great value, because the fitness and the ample advantages of the bays of Kamiesh and Kazatch had not then been recognized. Before he made his choice Lord Raglan consulted Lyons, and Lyons urged with a great earnestness that Balaclava should be retained by the English. There, and there only, as he thought, could there be a sufficiently sure communication between the fleet and the land forces. As experience proved, he was wrong; but upon a naval question — and such this question was — his opinion, of course, had great weight. It prevailed. For the sake of retaining Balaclava, Lord Raglan elected to take the right in the allied line, with all its burdens and perils. It seems probable that, if Lord Raglan had chanced to prefer the other alternative, the subsequent course of events would have borne but little resemblance to that which in fact took place.”
Canrobert now appears on the scene at the head of the French army. St Arnaud was dying, and his end is thus given by our author:—
“Covered by a tricolor flag, the Marshal, on the 29th of September, was carried on board ship by the seamen of the Berthollet, and placed in the cabin prepared for him. There the Abbé Paratère, who had been summoned to do the part of the Church to a dying Catholic, was left alone with the sufferer; but, ‘after some instants,’ — so runs the account — ‘the Abbé came out and said, "The Marshal is ready to die a Christian."’ This was in the morning. The Berthollet put to sea. Marshal St Arnaud no longer suffered from acute pain, but between noon and sunset he died. In earlier volumes I recounted some of his actions.”
Canrobert, now Marshal of France, has written a letter which was incorporated in the remarkable statement of Sir John Burgoyne, lately printed in our columns, and we suppose that Mr Kinglake will, tenacious as he is, abandon his favourite doctrine respecting Lord Raglan’s desire to assault at once, and the rejection of his proposals by the French General and Sir John Burgoyne. Todleben says that an assault must have succeeded, but he was on the wrong side for judging, and it is his obvious tendency to make the most of his own great work. But what would have been said in England if, after the slaughter at the Alma, news came that another sanguinary battle had been fought at Sebastopol; that the Allies, having a powerful siege train, would not wait to land it, but went straight at lines strongly armed and defended, attacked regular masonry casemated forts, rushed at a town swept by the broadside of a fleet and covered by tremendous stone forts across the water — and lost 5,000 or 6,000 men? Now, perhaps, the cost will appear small; but in 1854 we were not ripe for the sacrifice. At all events, steps were taken to begin the siege because it seemed the prudent course, and it was verily believed that a few hours’ fire would sweep all the works bare and lay the place open to an assault at comparatively small loss. According to Mr Kinglake, however, Lord Raglan disapproved all that was going on. Lord Lyons was for an immediate assault:—
“Lord Raglan was of the same mind; but he found himself met by the counter-opinion of Sir John Burgoyne, who remonstrated against the notion of an assault without first getting down the fire of the place by means of heavy artillery. It is the lot of mankind to be blind to the future; and, unless Lyons errs, Burgoyne supported his opinion by arguing that an immediate assault would cost the Allies a loss of 500 men. Another of the arguments used was founded upon a suggestion that the assaulting forces should be exposed to slaughter from the fire of the enemy’s men-of-war lying moored in the harbour beneath. To that Lyons replied by proposing to seize the position of the Malakoff — the knoll was then like an ant-hill, all creeping with busy labour — and there establishing a battery which must soon drive off all the ships. Lord Raglan agreed with Lyons in approving the plan of an immediate assault; and, notwithstanding the objections of Sir John Burgoyne, he submitted it for consideration to the French. General Canrobert, however, refused to adopt the measure.”
These statements are contradicted by Sir J Burgoyne and Marshal Canrobert. Lord Raglan left us no means of getting at his opinions, and the far-fetched inferences and hypotheses of Mr Kinglake only reveal a very curious condition of mind on his lordship’s part. The author says:—
“To prevent all constraint in the expression of men’s thoughts, but also, I imagine, in furtherance of his desire to ward off the semblance of antagonism between Canrobert and himself, Lord Raglan, soon after the completion of the flank march, had negatived a proposal made to him for recording in manuscript the purport of the conferences then about to take place between the French and the English. Far from wishing to record, he sought to obliterate all trace of the differences elicited by interchange of opinion. Evidently, this determination was a wholesome one; but it tended, of course, after even a small lapse of time, to throw some obscurity over what passed in conference between the French and the English head-quarters; and the information I have does not enable me to give — not to give even ever so slightly — the tenor of the few words in which Lord Raglan elicited the opinion of his French colleague.”
And again:—
“I include the whole period from the battle of the Alma to the time now reached by my narrative, when I say that, with a refined and thoughtful loyalty, which was characteristic of his nature, Lord Raglan withheld from the Home Government all such disclosures of opinion as might show him to be more enterprising and more in favour of summary methods than the men who ruled at the French head-quarters.”
The language on which Mr Kinglake relies to dispel the appearance of a neutral state in Lord Raglan’s views at this time may be quoted as a very good specimen of the way in which our author uses his materials. He says:—
“Although it is true that in his despatches and private letters he omitted — nay, studiously omitted — to disclose his opinion, he nevertheless often wrote in language which could hardly have come from him unless he had been one of those few who perceived the peril of delay, and lamented the irresistible concurrence of opinion which was inducing the Allies to forego the prompt seizure of their prize. Thus on the first day after the completion of the flank march he showed how clearly he perceived the advantage which the Allies gained by surprising the enemy on the south side, for he wrote:— ‘We have taken the enemy quite aback by a manœuvre for which they were not by any means prepared.’ And five days later he showed himself keenly alive to the advantage which the enemy was gaining from delay, for he wrote:— ‘The garrison is actively and incessantly employed in adding to the defences, and forming a continuous line of works along the south front, which had previously, to all appearance, been much less protected, and they have likewise been busily occupied in bringing in large stores of supplies of different kinds.’ Again, five days later, he wrote:— ‘The enemy, however, are in great force within the place, and have been busily engaged, since they discovered the design of making the south side the object of attack, in strengthening the whole front, and arming the works which they have established with the heaviest artillery.’ And yet again, on the same day:— ‘The enemy have taken advantage of the time that has elapsed since they discovered our intention of attacking the south side of Sebastopol to strengthen the whole front;’ and then, after describing the nature of the defences which the enemy had thus been preparing under the eyes of their invaders, he goes on to say:— ‘These formidable preparations make the approach to the place extremely difficult, and without cover an advance upon it is next to impossible.’ ”
These “proofs” having been adduced, Mr Kinglake adds:—
“Now a mere disputer, no doubt, may well enough fence and say that these despatches and letters yield no actual proof of the opinion Lord Raglan had formed upon the question of giving the enemy time instead of assaulting at once; but those who have an eye for the truth will incline, perhaps, to believe that he who could thus be insisting and insisting again on the strength which the enemy had gained from the respite accorded him must needs have been one who, having perceived the peril of delay while yet there was time to avoid it, had formed, from the first, an opinion that the place should be promptly assaulted.”
We had nearly forgotten a circumstance which will have greater value when Mr Kinglake comes to the description of the winter. “Airey” was Quartermaster-General of the Army, and was responsible for stores and for the supply of means to enable the army to keep the field in the winter. The winter did not come on our Quartermaster-General by surprise at any rate. Mr Kinglake says:—
“He did not presume to question the wisdom of the counsels which the Allies had been following, but he gave to the chief of the army at home what he judged to be the probable consequences of the decision just taken. ‘My own opinion,’ he wrote, ‘my own opinion is that we are here for the winter, maintaining only a strong position until we can be reinforced.’†”
†“Private letter from General Airey to Lord Hardinge, 3d October 1854. I never heard General Airey insist, or even, I think, mention, that he had been able to take this clear-sighted view at so early a day; but after the death of the late Lord Hardinge a quantity of papers which had been in his possession came into my hands, and among them I found the note above cited.”
It is by such straining of the stuff of which some of his heroes are made that Mr Kinglake lets the light into them and tears up their reputation. Whatever the foresight was — far or near in its scope — it did but little in the way of warning or preparation. In considering the chances of success against Sebastopol on the first reconnaissance of the place by the Allies, Mr Kinglake observes that the “united fleets of France and England are of less account for attack than the fleet of one acting singly:”—
“But, whatever be the cause, the lessons of history have hitherto gone to show that one of the ways in which England may carry on war without gaining naval renown is by yoking herself with France. In the days when a base Stuart King was hired to engage his people in alliance with France, the English navy was strong, and so was the navy of France; yet the battles of Solebay and Schonveldt gave proof that, acting together, the French and English fleets might be hardly a match for the Dutch. So, whatever may be the reasons for believing Sebastopol to be impregnable by sea, they did not receive decisive confirmation from the fact that an Anglo-French fleet was lying outside for a year and a half without making any attempt to force its way into the roadstead.”
This passage alone would be an index to the spirit of much of this book. When Mr Kinglake insinuates that but for the French our naval officers would have tried to force the way of the fleet into Sebastopol, he has not a shadow of foundation to rest upon, and “the many who were somewhat loth to believe that the heart’s desire of a people who had made smooth their way through mountains and beds of rivers could be baffled by the inert resistance of six or seven drowned ships,” must mean that numbers of our officers believed they could sail into the harbour although they might not like to navigate mountain tops and river beds. The fact is that the fleets were in a position in which Nelson or Cochrane would have been as powerless as Dundas or Hamelin.
When the siege operations commenced, the French being more numerous, and being covered on the right by the English, were enabled to divide their army, so that one corps was charged with the duties of the siege, the other was available as a reserve, and also as a corps of observation on the edge of the plateau overlooking the Valley of Balaclava from the rear of our right towards the Col. This ridge, indeed, was strongly occupied and protected by a trench. Well would it have been if the assailable ground in the valley of Balaclava had been defended or prepared for defence with equal care! There passing over the ridges south of the Tchernaya ran the Woronzow road right up to the plateau and through the English camp — a first-class road accessible from Balaclava, and admirably adapted for the supply of our wants. Now, of all important points on the portion of the Crimea thus occupied by the Allies, to us, at least, there was none comparable in vital necessity of tenure with Balaclava. The port was the sole basis of our operations and supply. The English cavalry were placed in the valley, so as to cover the approach to the Col, and to command the line to the Woronzow road. But it was obvious that cavalry could not be relied upon exclusively for the defence of the position, and accordingly a series of knolls, by which the Woronzow road ran in their front, was occupied by a body of Turkish militia attached to Lord Raglan’s command; and under direction principally of a Prussian engineer named Wagmann, an earthwork, miscalled a redoubt, was thrown up upon each. Now, as this was the weak portion of our position, so did it happen to be the most loosely defended. The redoubts were far in advance of the inner line of Balaclava. They were so placed that an enemy occupying that which lay nearest to him could command the next, and so of the others from right to left. The Turks in these redoubts were an isolated force, and exposed at any moment to utter ruin unless promptly supported.
It was evident that if these redoubts should be occupied by an enemy, our cavalry would be exposed to serious danger, while the command of the road would be surrendered to the enemy. The mere appointment of Sir Colin Campbell to command the post, though it made, as Mr Kinglake says, people “cease to imagine that the post could now be the seat of danger, was not enough to make Balaclava safe.” And were there no signs of danger there? Yes, indeed. Let Mr Kinglake speak:—
“Before they had yet got in readiness to open their first trench, the enemy’s field army began to show signs of intending to change the attitude to which its chief had condemned it since the day of the Alma. . . . By the 7th of October the Russians had begun to appreciate the fact that, after all, they were once more the masters — the undisturbed masters — of the Mackenzie range, including every road, every pathway which connected it with the valley of the Tchernaya. . . . It was a patrol under Cornet Fisher which first felt the presence of the enemy in the country of the Tchernaya. The Cornet was surprised in the early morning by finding himself in contact with part of a powerful force which had come down into the valley; and three of his men were made prisoners.”
While the enemy were thus giving notice of their proximity to the roads leading to Balaclava and the line of our communications in the rear, the force defending the town in our front, growing bolder, pushed out troops to prevent our establishing batteries at moderate distances (Kinglake, p.301). Sir John Burgoyne pressed on Lord Raglan the necessity of pushing our infantry nearer to the place. Let Mr Kinglake recount what followed:—
“In order to give effect to that part of the measure which was to devolve upon the English army, Lord Raglan, on the 7th of October assembled the Generals of his Infantry Divisions, and announced to them what he wished to have done; but they, some of them, spoke a good deal, and they were unanimous in their opinion that, without cover, they could not maintain an advanced position but at a cost beyond what it would be right to risk. In declaring against the idea of putting his division in a more advanced position, Sir George Brown suffered himself to become vehement. I do not suppose — indeed I know it could not have been — that his vehemence arose from any spirit of antagonism to Lord Raglan; for he was a man of a good and warm heart, much attached to his chief, and intending to walk loyally according to such lights as he had. The consulted Generals were, no doubt, aware that the desire to place our besieging forces on ground more close to Sebastopol had been submitted for adoption by Sir John Burgoyne; and it was rather, perhaps, in resistance to him, than with any notion of opposing Lord Raglan, that Sir George Brown spoke as he did. His mind was of the quality of those which are liable to be much impressed by the distinctions which separate one branch of the service from another; and I believe that he probably disliked the sensation of being directed and propelled by an officer of Engineers.”
It would seem from this that the English Commander-in-Chief yielded up his views — “what he wished to have done” — because his Generals, or Sir George Brown, did not approve them. The Engineers holds that his Lordship’s want of will on that occasion proved of most serious consequence to the English besieging force. While the Russians were toiling with incessant vigour the Allies were working at their trenches and getting ready the means to arm them with energy. But although the Russians were despondent even if the work grew as if by magic under their eyes and hands, the Allies were full of confidence. Before the bombardment began an officer of artillery, in company with a French engineer, beheld the swarming multitude on the slopes of the Malakhoff hill, and was struck by the suggestion of his companion that they ought not to be let go on undisturbed. A shot or shell from a field gun now and then would much impede their labours, in the day time at all events. Well, he repeated the suggestion at Head Quarters, and was rather laughed at by the Staff for his pains, and “chaffed” for such an exhibition of uneasiness, and an Engineer officer who was present said, “Pooh! let them work away; we’ll soon knock it all about their ears!” That was the army sentiment at the time. We were, indeed, in a state of intense security. The weather was fine, supplies such as the army needed were plentiful, and all were in high spirits, the more so as the news came back how the victory of the Alma had been appreciated at home. Mr Kinglake describes with much vivacity the condition of affairs inside Sebastopol from the time of the landing of the Allies till the opening of the bombardment on the 17th of October, and as he has no particular theory to sustain and has taken great pains with the subject the result is exceedingly interesting. Here is a little bit not apropos of the siege, which is worth recommending to “authorities” at home:—
“In the capital of many a State there sits an industrious clerk — a Sovereign he may be or a Minister — working hard at the task of giving a base uniformity to bodies of armed men, and never remitting his toil till at last he is taught by disaster that the mind and the soul he has laboured so hard to keep down are among the main needs of an army in time of war. If he sees a body of troops having some distinctive accoutrement which helps to sustain its individuality in the midst of an army, and connects itself, in the minds of the men, with the pride they take in their regiment, he hastens to tear off the mark which makes the corps differ from others; and when there is a regiment which glories in its ancient name, connecting it vaguely with great traditions, and founding upon the cherished syllables that consciousness of power which is a main condition of ascendancy in war, then the army clerk suffers such pain from the want of that sequence which he has long observed in an orderly series of numerals running on like ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘three,’ that he takes from the regiment its proud historic name, and orders that for the future it shall be called by a number in the way that is used by convicts. But of all the clerks who thus laboured at the business of making armies by extinguishing men, none had been more ruthless than the one who toiled at St Petersburg; for, devoting himself to the merely military as distinguished from warlike pursuits, and being little short of a madman in his love of things uniform, the Emperor Nicholas for years had been lowering and lowering the Russian soldiery in the scale of humanity, with the intent of bringing his army to a base mechanic perfection; and this policy had been carried to such baneful extremes that the most illustrious of Russia’s living generals has assigned it as one of the causes which exposed the Czar’s troops to defeat. But in the fleets of the empire the perverse energy of Nicholas had failed to complete the mischief it tended to work; and although more or less he tormented his seamen with drill, and marched them, and wheeled them, and put them in barracks, and divided them into bodies of the size of battalions, with a number belonging to each, he could not altogether extirpate from the sailors the true sailor’s spirit. There was a strength in the nature of things which withstood him; for happily — and this is a main source of the glory attaching to the sea-service — the ever-changeful exigencies which the winds and the waves create must be met by the individual energies of the very men who encounter them, and not by mere codes of regulation sent down from an office.”
Mr Kinglake has a poor opinion of Menschikoff, which the acts of that officer do not justify. He it was who invented the true Palladium of Sebastopol — the sinking of the ships. He it was who conceived the Flank March which saved his army; and it must be confessed that he had the sagacity to divine what the Allies would do before they did it. Before we were in motion from the Alma he formed his plan, and to Korniloff, who objected to it, he said, as we learn from Mr Kinglake, “The enemy can not undertake an energetic attack on the northern works, having an army on the flank and rear.” And so he set out on his Flank March. The Allies were on the same work:—
“Now, the English army, it will be remembered, began the Flank March this same day, at half-past 8 in the morning; and supposing that Prince Menschikoff — who was master of the intervening country, and of ample cavalry forces — had been taking only those common means for ascertaining his adversary’s movements which, even in days not regarded as specially critical, the customs of warfare prescribe, he would have learnt, by the time we are speaking of, that Lord Raglan was moving in force towards Mackenzie’s Farm; and only a little later, if not indeed some time before, he must have come to know that the whole Allied army was following the flank movement of the English General. The orders which the Prince might have issued, after making this discovery, would have enabled him to stay the march of his army towards Baktchi Seräi, to face it about, and to dispose it in such way as he might think fit in the woodland and broken ground lying east of the paths by which the Allies had to cross the mountain. He then would have had at his back the country traversed by the great road to Baktchi Serai, and opening to him his communications with the interior of Russia; while, before him, he would have seen the Allies moving painfully across his front in all the helplessness of an army broken up into a trailing column, with a depth so great as to make it a day’s march from the rear to the van, and a front so narrow as to consist of one gun and one horseman — and all this defiling through forest or steep mountain paths.”
This passage has some bearing on a letter recently addressed to us by a gallant officer. And so has this:—
“Moving down from the summit of these heights to their base by a steep mountain-road, the English army descended into the valley of the Tchernaya. Still pushing forward, but by a painful effort (for this day’s was a long and forced march), the bulk of the army at last descended upon the Tchernaya, at the point where its waters were crossed by the Tractir bridge; but darkness had long set in before the bulk of the troops gained their bivouac on the banks of the stream, and some did not reach it that night. Lord Raglan’s quarters were established in the little post-house which stood near the bridge. While the main body of the English army thus lay on the Tchernaya, the road by which they had come was still crowded, miles back, by their trains; and the obstruction thus caused prevented the French from pushing their march for that night beyond Mackenzie’s Farm; indeed, their rear-guard was not able to reach its bivouac there until about 3 o’clock in the morning. The scanty supply of water remaining in the wells was exhausted by the first comers, and the troops suffered thirst. Cathcart, meanwhile, with his division was still on the Belbec, where he had been intrusted with the duty of covering the march, and sending back the sick to the Katcha. His position would have been one of some peril if there had been in the field an enemy watchful and enterprising. From the Belbec to the Katcha, where lay the fleets, there was a tract of hill country unoccupied by the Allies, and the trains sent thither with the sick were at the mercy of the enemy. One of the trains came upon a strong Russian picket, and Surgeon Inlong — himself a sick man — was only able to save the convoy by causing the strongest of the patients to get out of the waggons and feign the appearance of a baggage escort.”
It will, no doubt, have been observed that Lord Raglan was as ignorant of the enemy’s movements as Menschikoff was of those of the Allies, but there is this difference in the situation. There would have been no reason for the Russian to have abandoned his project had he been aware of the Allies’ march. Had Lord Raglan known where the Russians were he dared not have undertaken the operation of crossing them. Therefore it was far more important for us to know what the enemy were about. We were in a country which was friendly, and in which the Russians were to the natives very much like the French to the people in Spain during the Peninsular war. But if Mr Kinglake does not quite do justice to Menschikoff, he certainly does not lack in fitting admiration for the great Admiral his subordinate:—
“Without holding supreme command, but acting as chief of Staff, Vice-Admiral Korniloff, for a period of some five years, had had the main direction of affairs in the Black Sea fleet; and it was during that time that he had been able to engender the seal, the trustful affection, which now, in the hour of a great disaster, brought round him a band of undaunted seamen resolved to stand by his side in the void which the army had left. He was destined to be cut off when the period of his sway over events had lasted scarce 26 days; but this space included a time when the failing of the organized forces which people had hitherto trusted made room once more in the world — nay, made room in so straitened a place as a Russian garrison town — for a man having strength of his own. The wars undertaken by Russia having always been waged against nations of other creeds or other churches, the religion and the patriotism of the people had been blended, as we saw, into one sentiment, giving force and steadiness to the nation; but there were few, I imagine, who lived more absolutely under the governance of this kind of religious patriotism than did this brave Admiral. Indeed, it would seem that a main source of his strength was his faith in that Divine Power which he humbly believed to be taking part with ‘Holy Russia’ in her struggle for a cause which seemed to him to be a righteous one. ‘May the Lord,’ he writes — ‘may the Lord bless our cause! To the best of our understanding it is a just one.’ ‘Of course, all depends on God. God will not forsake those who are righteous. Therefore await the issue calmly and patiently.’ So, against all the cares which were worldly, and therefore subject to limits, he ever could bring that strong faith, which — having its source in the Infinite — was not an exhaustible power; and as often as the trials he was facing grew heavier and heavier, he only clung so much the more to the aid of Heaven. Thus, although he was too loyal to suffer himself, even, perhaps, in thought, to cast doubt upon the capacity which directed affairs at head-quarters, it still can be seen that, whenever he strove to look cheerfully upon the prospect of what might be achieved under Menschikoff’s personal direction, he was careful to base his structure of hope upon strictly religious grounds. From the traces we have of this chief it can hardly be shown that he was gifted with original genius, still less with a piercing intellect; and the soundness of his judgment in the business of war may well be denied, or, at all events, brought into question; but it is not from the mere tenor of his words, nor even, indeed, altogether from his acts, that the quality of his soul is to be gathered, but rather from the visible effect of its impact upon the souls of other men. As one man to whom many look may be passing through a distant assemblage unseen and unheard himself by those who gaze from afar, and yet his course can be tracked by the movement and the cries of devotion which his presence arouses, so, in part, our knowledge of Korniloff must rest upon the perception of what people did when they felt the impulsion he gave.”
To this we must add not a less vigorous sketch of another and a greater man:—
“Colonel de Todleben was born in one of the Baltic provinces lying within the dominion of Russia, and to Russia accordingly he has ever devoted himself; but by race, name, and feature, and warlike quality, he is the fellow-countryman of Count Bismark and of some of the most formidable of the troops which conquered at Sadowa. While the empire he serves is the empire of the Czars, the power he represents and almost seems to embody is the power of North Germany. The honour of placing this gifted man upon the scene in which he was destined to achieve his renown must be given to Prince Michael Gortschakoff. . . . His devotion to the study of his profession had been unstinted; and indeed there was a period when his practice of the business of mining had kept him mainly underground during a third part of each year; but although his craft had been learnt at all this vast cost of toil, he was saved from the mistake of over-valuing it by his strong common sense, but also, perhaps, by his wholesome experience of the trenches before Silistria, and the rough tasks of war in the Caucasus. Therefore, whenever his art was not really applicable, it did not seem so in his eyes. How and when to apply it to the business of war he exactly knew. For although, as might be expected from his race and his Courland birthplace, he had that Northern, that North German conformation of head and countenance which denote a man fitted for violent bodily conflict lasting out to the death, and although he even seemed to be one to whom the very labours of fighting, and of exterminating the weaker breeds of men, must be an easy and delightful exertion of natural strength, he had joyous, kind-looking eyes, almost ready to melt with good-humour, and a bearing and speech so frank and genial that people were instantly inclined to like, and, very soon after, to trust in him. From his looks and demeanour it could not at all be inferred that he was a man who had devoted his mind to a science; and, for this very reason perhaps, he had the less difficulty in making people yield to his judgment. No one who had so much as seen him could imagine that his power of doing the right thing at the right time had been at all warped by long study of the engineering art. No one who had once conversed with him could doubt that, body and soul, he was a man of action; nothing more, nothing less. A race corrupted by luxury and the arts of peace knows instinctively that it must succumb to a nature of this kind. I imagine that few men of great intellect have ever attained so closely as he did to that which the English describe when they speak of a man as being ‘practical.’ ”
It would be hazardous to say, knowing how very erroneous are some of his vivid descriptions of persons with whom we are acquainted, how far these bright bits of colouring are true to nature, but we can all admire the finish of the workmanship and the spirited handling of the brush.
The 17th of October came at last. The result of the first day’s fire is well known. No assault could be ventured upon. The batteries of the French, on which the Russians concentrated a far heavier fire than could be returned were much nearer than ours, because of the nature of the ground and the refusal of our Generals to advance their infantry. The Russians brought 64 guns to bear on the French works, which were armed with only 59 pieces, some of them inferior in calibre. They directed 54 guns on our works, which were armed with 73 pieces, many of them considerably heavier than those of the enemy. Our artillery generally was superior to the French. The French fire was soon "snuffed out" and the batteries reduced to silence. The English, however, remained masters of the enemy’s fire. As a specimen of Mr Kinglake’s style, not needed to make men familiar with it, but fine in its way, let us take an “ideal” of what the Russians had to go through in addition to the rapid demolition of their batteries by our guns:—
“But the Russians — and that every minute — had to hold themselves in readiness for a yet harder trial. Expecting an assault, they ever kept steadfastly in sight that last appeal to ‘mitrail’ which their great engineer had designed; and often, very often, they imagined that the appointed moment had come. From the irrepressible tendency of the seamen to deliver their fire in broadsides, it resulted — for no breath of wind was stirring — that the men, by these rapid discharges, piled up above and around them huge, steadfast, opaque banks of smoke, which so narrowed the field of every man’s sight that he hardly could see the outline of a comrade’s figure at a distance of two or three paces. Now a dim bank of smoke, admitting distorted and deadened rays, yet confining within straitened limits the scope of a man’s real vision — this, we know, is a lens which gives infinite favour to the creatures of an imagination already excited by battle. The grey, floating wreaths, though their movement can scarce be descried, are all the while slowly changing in place, as well as in form; and from that cause, or that cause in part, it seems to result that, when once the thick cloud which obscures a man’s vision has been peopled and armed by his fancy, the shapes which appear before him do not long continue at rest. They grow larger; they move; and the unreal creature of the brain which at first seemed like infantry halted is perfectly a column advancing. With the Russians — a firm, robust people — the imagination, though straying beyond the bounds of reality, was still guided in part by sound knowledge; for the images men saw in the smoke were the images of what might well be. As in a quarter of the field at the Alma (where the onset of the English horse might fairly enough have been looked for), the mist had seemed to reveal a host of cavalry charging, so now when, as people believed, the Allies would storm the defences, men easily fancied they saw — that they saw indeed many times over — the enemy’s columns of infantry coming on to deliver the assault. The quality of the Russian soldier being what I have said, these pictures of his imagination did not drive him at all into panic, but still they much governed his actions. Again and again those who manned guns so planted as to be of no service, except against assailing infantry, worked so hard at their loading and firing as though the assault had begun, and many a blast of mitrail was sent tearing through phantom battalions.”
We cannot quote the whole of the long letter which Lord Raglan wrote to the Admiral soliciting an “active co-operation” of the fleet in the attack on the 17th of October, but there is a passage in it which indicates the existence of a strange sort of feeling:—
“The Royal navy has already done so much for the Army that the latter has no claim upon its further exertions, perhaps (writes Lord Raglan); but then it must be recollected that the former aspires to share in the renown which those of the sister service hope to gain in bringing the present enterprise to a happy conclusion, and their presence would go far to make all feel that victory would be nearly a matter of certainty.”
In his relations with Admiral Dundas there was an unhappy coldness, which prevented Lord Raglan coming to a sympathetic understanding, and it was not lessened by the entente cordiale which his Lordship cultivated with the second in command of the fleet. Admiral Dundas thought a demonstration at the moment of assault and a feint on the north side would tend to make the Russians withdraw troops from the south. But the Generals of both armies desired an active, direct, and close encounter with the forts on both sides.
Putting the Admiral’s thoughts in words, Mr Kinglake supposes him to say:—
“Only let us suffer our fleets to be disabled by a ruinous encounter with the forts, and then the Sebastopol fleet — for, after all, it is only a portion of it which has been sunk — will be able at last to come out and find us for once in a state ill-fitted for a naval encounter. Certainly we shall not choose to prepare such a disaster for our fleets. Neither we nor any successor of ours will ever engage the batteries in a way that might be ventured by a commander who is able to risk, and risk frankly, the actual destruction of his squadron in an attack upon stone forts;‡ and if we are persuaded to assail these sea-forts at all, we shall not engage in the business with that desperate purpose of running all hazards which alone could open out to us any even faint prospect of success.”
‡ Mr Kinglake’s note is this:—
“Dundas soon had a successor. No living man, I imagine, could desire more passionately than Lyons did to bring the power of the Navy to bear upon the great enterprise, but from the moment when he attained the command of the fleet until the close of the war he never struck a blow at Sebastopol.”
The state of things in the fleets is well described:—
“The French Admiral was under the orders of General Canrobert; and although Lord Raglan had no actual authority over the English fleet, he could speak to its Admiral in the form of request, and that, too, with no little cogency. By character and temperament, no man then living, I think, could have been less inclined than Lord Raglan to press with advice or exhortation upon a colleague of the sister service holding equal command with himself; and the terms of his intercourse with Admiral Dundas were not of such a kind as to lessen his reluctance. It would have been well if the communication needed for this purpose had been oral, and, indeed, it must be acknowledged that, at this conjuncture, the feelings which prevented a cordial and personal intercourse between Lord Raglan and Admiral Dundas did harm to the public service. The differences existing between them had been closed, it is true, in a measure, by the reconciliation effected in the previous month, and thenceforth the written correspondence of the two chiefs with each other was conducted in the way that is usual with men who are personally acquainted; but still Dundas never used to come to head-quarters; and Lord Raglan, as might be supposed, did not quit his duties on shore to go on board the flag-ship.”
To increase the difficulties of the situation we are told:—
“Lyons was the second in command. He, however, by this time had certainly placed himself in a state of determined antagonism to his chief. Devoting his energies, with all that fiery zeal of which we have spoken, to the business of the invasion, he seems to have lost his power of appreciating the less stirring duties which devolved upon Dundas; and (apparently) by contrasting his own ceaseless activity with the seeming quietude of the Vice-Admiral, he wrought himself into a state of mind and feeling which was hardly compatible with loyalty towards his chief. Lyons himself, I think, would not have said that he was loyal to Dundas, but rather would have insisted that, because of the luke-warmness and obstructive tendency which he imputed to his chief, disloyalty had become a duty; and, indeed, at the time we speak of this spirit of resistance to the naval Commander-in-Chief had won a strange sanction from home.”
Lest we should be accused any more of misrepresenting people or things, when we are only giving a summary of Mr Kinglake’s statements, we must quote his words as to a further complication due to the late Duke of Newcastle:—
“Conceiving that to thwart or obstruct the zeal of Sir Edmund Lyons was to involve the expedition in imminent danger, yet fearing, apparently, that his design, if communicated to the Cabinet, would be baffled by the scruples of more timid men, the Duke went to the length of intimating — and this without the knowledge of his colleagues — that he would support Lord Raglan and Sir Edmund Lyons, if Sir Edmund, in concert with Lord Raglan, should take upon himself to act independently of his chief. In other words, the Duke carried his burning eagerness for the public service to the extent of inviting Lyons to enter upon a course of mutinous resistance to the will of Dundas.”
Against his will and judgment, Admiral Dundas resolved to co-operate. The English captains were of opinion that the fleet should attack as soon as the troops were ready to assault. The French and English Admirals, however, left the time to be decided by the Generals. The latter thought the fleets should open fire simultaneously with the land batteries at 6.30 am, and there can be little question that the Admirals were wrong in leaving such a question to be decided by the Generals on shore.
The reason assigned by the French for the tardy arrival of their fleet is that the calm which prevailed prevented their vessels coming round from the Katcha, as they were deficient in steam power. The same cause would not operate so powerfully against our fleet, but it is obvious the ships could not have joined in the fire on the works at 6.30 am, as they were not under way from the Katcha at that hour. At 7 o’clock Admiral Hamelin came on board the Brittania to propose that the fleets, instead of keeping in motion, should cast anchor off the forts:—
“ . . . By this new plan it was laid down that, instead of an operation effected by ships kept in motion, the two fleets, while engaging the forts, should be anchored in line; that the array of the French fleet should begin at Chersonese Bay, proceeding thence in a north-north-easterly direction to a point opposite the centre of the Harbour; and that from thence, but in a line taking a north-easterly direction, the English fleet should be ranged. By examining this plan with the aid of a chart, and assuming that the French line would commence at that part of the bay which the Charlemagne actually took, it results that the French fleet was to be at distances of from 1,600 to 2,000 yards from the Quarantine Sea-fort (the nearest of the forts which it proposed to assail), and that the English fleet would have to engage Fort Constantine at ranges equally long.”
If they did not consent to join in that form of attack the French were resolved to act alone. Admiral Dundas yielded to Admiral Hamelin, and those whom Mr Kinglake calls his “tormentors.” The result of the engagement was that a change in maritime warfare at once began. The cry arose, “For God’s sake, keep out the shells,” and before that war was over the ironclad floating batteries of France were anchored unhurt within less than 800 yards of the guns of Kimbura.
Mr Kinglake states the results of the action — the “deducibles” — as follows:—
“1. At ranges of from 1,600 to 1,800 yards, a whole French fleet failed to make any useful impression upon a fort at the water’s edge, though its guns were all ranged in open-air batteries and firing from over the parapet.
2. An earthen battery mounting only five guns, but placed on the cliff at an elevation of 100 ft, inflicted grievous losses and injury on four powerful English men-of-war, and actually disabled two of them, without itself having a gun dismounted, and without losing even one man.
3. At ranges from 800 to 1,200 yards, and with the aid of steam frigates throwing shells at a range of 1,600 yards, three English ships in ten minutes brought to ruin and cleared of their gunners the whole of the open-air batteries (containing 27 guns) which were on the top of a great stone fort at the water’s edge.
4. The whole Allied fleet, operating in one part of it at a range from 1,600 to 1,800 yards, and in another part of it at ranges from 800 to 1,200 yards, failed to make any useful impression on casemated batteries protected by a good stone wall from five to six feet thick.
5. Under the guns of a great fort by the water’s edge, which, although it had lost the use of its topmost pieces of artillery, still had all its casemates entire, and the batteries within them uninjured, a great English ship, at a distance of only 800 yards, lay at anchor and fighting for hours without sustaining any ruinous harm.§
§Of course, the value of the experience thus acquired by the Agamemnon must depend now upon a question still somewhat obscure — i.e. the number of guns in the casemates of Fort Constantine which could really be brought to bear upon her. The impunity of the Rodney would be even more instructive than the experience of the Agamemnon, if it were not for the surmise referred to, ante, p.445.”
The third volume ends with some reflections on the determination not to assault at the close of the first cannonade of the 17th of October, and Mr Kinglake infers that the opportunity of success was not so great then as it had been. The 487 pages the book contains relate, therefore, to the period between the 21st of September and the 17th of October, 1854.
*The Invasion of the Crimea. By A W Kinglake.