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  The Banner of Battle

  The Story of the Crimean War

  Alan Palmer

  Copyright © Alan Palmer 1987

  The right of Alan Palmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1987 by George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One – ‘This Greatest of All Earthly Potentates’

  Chapter Two – From Friendship to War

  Chapter Three – Sinope

  Chapter Four – Unrolling the Banner

  Chapter Five – Strange Allies

  Chapter Six – ‘When’s the Fighting Going to Begin?’

  Chapter Seven – The Allied Armada

  Chapter Eight – To the Alma and Beyond

  Chapter Nine – The Decisive Weeks

  Chapter Ten – The Day of Four Cavalry Charges

  Chapter Eleven – Sisters of Charity and Mercy

  Chapter Twelve – A Victory and a Disaster

  Chapter Thirteen – Hard Times

  Chapter Fourteen – New Management

  Chapter Fifteen – Into Sebastopol

  Chapter Sixteen – The Second Winter

  Chapter Seventeen – The Coming of Peace

  Chapter Eighteen – Into History

  Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes

  Select Bibliography

  Extract from The Kaiser by Alan Palmer

  ...So I wake to the higher aims

  Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

  And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,

  Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

  And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!

  Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

  For those that are crush’d in the clashing of jarring claims,

  Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;

  And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

  And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

  And noble thought be freer under the sun,

  And the heart of a people beat with one desire:

  For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,

  And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

  And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

  The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

  from Alfred Tennyson, Maud (written in the spring of 1854)

  Preface

  During the hundred years which separate the first abdication of Napoleon from the battles of Tannenberg and the Marne there were, in all, fifteen wars between the nations of Europe, great or small. Their average length, however, was no more than eight months. One contest alone dragged on so long that its memorials record dates from four calendar years: this was the struggle which began when Turkish troops attacked Russian outposts in October 1853 and continued until the Great Powers signed a general treaty of peace at Paris in March 1856, twenty-nine months later. As most of the fighting took place on the western littoral of a peninsula remote from familiar battle zones, the conflict soon became known in Britain, France and Italy as the Crimean War. So, too, it has been remembered in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s day. But in Tsarist times Russian writers, conscious always of the risk of invasion from the West, called it the ‘Eastern War’ (Vostochnaia Voina). This difference of nomenclature throws an interesting light on strategic geographical thought both in St Petersburg and in the Western European capitals at the height of the nineteenth century.

  The Crimean War has a general interest today on three counts. It remains the only occasion in history when British troops fought against the regular organized army of a Russian state, Tsarist or Soviet. It was the first war fully covered by the Press, with graphic reporting and illustrated magazines bringing to the public at home a horrible awareness of active campaigning and exposing the ineptitudes of an archaic military system. And, while participants on both sides were drawing on muddled recollections from a Napoleonic past, it became a war that anticipated the future: warships were damaged by a minefield; battle orders settled at great distance before being flashed thousands of miles by electric telegraph; and there were plans for threatening Russia’s capital city with chemical warfare, for aerial reconnaissance by balloon, for a submarine, even for a ‘locomotive land battery’, a proto-tank. Historically, the Crimean War poses questions of wider interest still. Old friendships between veteran diplomats made a conflict seem improbable when, at Christmas in 1852, Lord Aberdeen became prime minister: why, then, did war follow within fifteen months? Once the fighting began it was assumed, both in London and in Paris, that Russia would be threatened on a northern front as well as around the Black Sea: why, then, was the clash of armies contained within so small an arena of battle?

  The key to both answers lies in the inner politics and diplomacy of the Great Powers of Europe at mid-century. It might indeed be argued that the Crimean War has its greatest significance as a turning point in international relations. The Banner of Battle therefore seeks to place the conflict of 1853-6 in the general context of nineteenth-century history. The war is seen, not simply as a dramatic moment in the Eastern Question, but as a decisive campaign which lowered the stature of both defeated Russia and non-belligerent Austria as Great Powers, thereby changing the European balance between nations in the second half of the century. The title, chosen from some of the best-known stanzas of Tennyson’s Maud, has a double purpose. It recalls the last occasion upon which British troops marched into battle against a Great Power with colours flying and regimental bands playing; but it also emphasizes the strange mood of imperceptive patriotic pride with which the Poet Laureate, like so many of his countrymen, welcomed the passing of forty years of peace. It is perhaps as an essay in the dangers of a fickle public opinion that this book has its principal contemporary relevance.

  My debt to earlier authors will be clear to anyone glancing at the bibliography. I have found some different sources from the ones cited in those two invaluable books, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why and Christopher Hibbert’s The Destruction of Lord Raglan, but there must inevitably be some overlapping of material. Among papers deposited in the British Library I found the diary of Sir Hamilton Seymour informative on his ‘sick man of Europe’ conversations with Tsar Nicholas I, while the journals and letters of Sir Hugh Rose (Lord Strathnairn) threw an interesting light both on British diplomacy in the spring of 1853 and on the Crimean campaign itself, for, after serving in the embassy at Constantinople, General Rose became Britain’s commissioner attached to the French army at Varna and in front of Sebastopol. Brief extracts from the letters sent by Colonel Alexander Gordon to his father have been quoted in biographies of Lord Aberdeen by Lucille Iremonger and Meriel Chamberlain but, so far as I am aware, they have not appeared in any narrative of the Crimean War; I have made rather more use of them, for it is clear that they were the most important direct link between the Prime Minister and a serving officer during the critical months of the Crimean campaign. The publication of Mrs Duberly’s edited journal before Christmas in 1855 was welcomed as an opportunity for readers to ‘canter’ through the campaign while the war was still in progress and, more than twenty years ago, Mr E. E. P. Tisdall made use of her letters in his Mrs Duberly’s Campaigns before they were catalogued by what was then the British Museum Library. I was pleased, however, to find additional material in the letters of both Fanny Duberly and her husband. Professor John Curtiss’s Russia’s Crimean
War and Colonel Seaton’s The Crimean War: A Russian Chronicle have been valuable, not only in themselves, but as guides to printed Russian sources, all of which I was able to locate either in the Bodleian or British Libraries; and I would especially like to acknowledge that Dr Brison Gooch’s The New Bonapartist Generals in the Crimean War suggested French printed material which I had not hitherto encountered.

  The Earl of Clarendon kindly gave me permission to quote from the papers of his ancestor, the fourth Earl. I am grateful to him and, for their help, to the staffs of the British Library, the Public Record Office at Kew, the London Library and the Bodleian. I also acknowledge Griselda Fox Mason for permission to quote from Sleigh Ride to Russia (published by Sessions of York in 1985) and John Murray Ltd. for permission to quote from The Fields of War by R. Temple Godman which they published in 1977. I would like also to thank Miss Candida Brazil for her patience in preparing the book for publication and in finding the illustrations. My wife, Veronica who once again assisted me at every stage and completed the index; I deeply appreciate her encouragement and consistent support.

  Alan Palmer

  Woodstock, Oxford

  September 1986

  Chapter One – ‘This Greatest of All Earthly Potentates’

  On the last evening of May in 1844 Baron Philip Brunnow, the Tsar’s envoy in London, set out by carriage from the Russian Legation at Ashburnham House and travelled down to Woolwich to await the arrival of the packet-boat from the Scheldt. Brunnow, a much respected diplomat in his late forties, was worried on that Friday night. He knew that aboard the steamer Cyclops was an important dignitary, who had left St Petersburg eight days before and who was coming to London to talk high politics with the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, and his Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Aberdeen. He could not, however, be sure of the traveller’s identity. It was perhaps his old colleague, Count Orlov, whom Brunnow had accompanied to London in 1837 when the Count brought their Emperor’s congratulations to Queen Victoria on her accession. But it might even be Tsar Nicholas I himself. Ten years before, Nicholas had arrived in Berlin unexpectedly and unannounced; and Brunnow was taking no chances. His carriages were at Woolwich before dusk on Friday, even though the steamer was not expected to come upriver until after daybreak on Saturday.[1]

  There had been casual talk of an imperial visit to London on several occasions over the last five months. Twice in conversation with Brunnow the Prime Minister had indicated that the Tsar would be a welcome guest; and, at a court ball in St Petersburg shortly before Christmas, Nicholas was heard to say that he would like to go to England again, as he had enjoyed the four months which he spent there when he was a twenty-year-old bachelor grand duke. The Prince Regent, who offered Nicholas the choice of a hundred dishes for his nine-course dinner at the Royal Pavilion in that January of 1817, was long since dead; but the British host who had most impressed the young grand duke was still at Apsley House, serving both as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and as a member of Peel’s cabinet. Tsar Nicholas, an autocrat who felt diminished in sovereignty when out of uniform, held the Duke of Wellington in great respect. He had welcomed the victor of Waterloo to St Petersburg in 1826 and he would be glad to meet him again. But there was more behind Nicholas’s projected visit than an agreeable renewal of old acquaintance. The Tsar believed in the efficacy of personal diplomacy, ruler to ruler. If he came to London, he might charm the young Queen by his social grace and persuade her husband of the need for continuous Anglo-Russian co-operation to ease the tensions of the Eastern Question. To win the backing of so shrewd a judge of Europe’s politics as Prince Albert was in itself almost worth the long journey from St Petersburg.

  The Queen, however, hoped that she would not have to entertain Tsar Nicholas: early in August she was expecting her fourth child, and Albert had already induced her to invite ‘the dear good King of Saxony’ for June. Moreover, the court was about to move to Windsor for Ascot races, a week in which the Queen’s burden of official duties was habitually lightened. But the uncertainty remained. ‘His Majesty travels with such rapidity and maintains so much mystery about his movements that one can never be prepared for him,’ reported Lord Bloomfield, the British minister in St Petersburg, on 18 May; the Tsar’s ‘journey really appears no longer feasible,’ he added. As a precaution, a suite was hustled into readiness for a Russian visitor at Buckingham Palace, but on Wednesday, 29 May, the Queen told her Foreign Secretary she was convinced that Nicholas would not come this summer. Next day two messages from St Petersburg suggested that the Tsar might already be on his way.[2]

  Throughout Saturday Baron Brunnow’s carriages waited at Woolwich. The summer evening was darkening into a moonlit night before the Cyclops was sighted steaming slowly up the Thames, and it was nearly ten o’clock when the passengers disembarked. Among them, according to the ship’s papers, was ‘Count Orlov’; but when the distinguished Russian traveller appeared on deck, with a light grey travelling cloak protecting his shoulders from the breeze, Brunnow at once recognized the stiff parade-ground silhouette of his imperial master. Only the commandant of the Woolwich dockyard and the superintendent of the Royal Arsenal were present to greet the first ruler of Russia to land in Britain for thirty years.

  Nicholas did not reach the Legation until nearly midnight. By then it was too late to travel on to Buckingham Palace, and he spent the rest of the night at Ashburnham House, sleeping on the military camp-bed which he insisted on taking with him on his travels. Next morning, having in the small hours notified Prince Albert of his arrival, Nicholas was conducted in state to the Palace. The Times records a surprise encounter in the Mall, as the Tsar’s carriage and escort passed the King of Saxony’s carriage and escort, travelling in the opposite direction, and ‘the two rulers recognized each other’.[3]

  The Tsar’s arrival in London ran true to form; for his reign was a mock-heroic tragedy sweetened by farce. In part, the characteristic confusion sprang from concern with personal security, a double conviction that his Polish subjects were out to kill him and that any military commander of courage and stature should thwart the knavery of an assassin. But it was caused, too, by a muddled autocratic possessiveness which left Nicholas reluctant to devolve authority. Even the Tsar’s most trusted advisers, Nesselrode, his Foreign Minister, and Paskevich, the commander of the army in the field, could never be certain that their imperial master was not improvising policies of his own. In particular, on more than one occasion Nesselrode found the complexities of the Eastern Question intensified, rather than diminished, by Nicholas’s initiatives of personal diplomacy.

  The ‘Eastern Question’ was the name given to the problems caused by the weakness of the Ottoman Empire and the rivalry between its potential successors. At its zenith in the early seventeenth century, the Sultan’s Empire included not only modern Turkey, but the whole of the Balkan peninsula, the central Hungarian plain, the Ukraine, the shores of the Black Sea (ruled either directly or through subject princes), the Arab lands of the Middle East — called collectively ‘the Levant’ — and most of the African shore of the Mediterranean. In the eighteenth century Ottoman power receded: Austria freed Hungary from Turkish rule; and the Russians swept southwards around both sides of the Black Sea, reaching the Danube delta in the west and penetrating the mountains of the Caucasus in the east. Although the Levant remained under Turkish administration, successive Sultans had little control over outlying provinces in the Balkans and North Africa. Serbia and Egypt enjoyed effective autonomy; and an embryonic Greek state was recognized by the Sultan in 1829, four years after Nicholas I’s accession.

  In Britain and France a romantic philhellenism won sympathy for Greek independence among a governing class educated in the classics, but effective support for the Greeks was always curbed by suspicion of Russian territorial ambitions in south-eastern Europe. By the middle of the nineteenth century there were more than thirteen million Orthodox believers (Greek Christians) within the Ottoman Empire, spiritually led by the Pat
riarch of Constantinople, a dignitary elected by a church synod but ceremonially enthroned by officials of the Sultan’s Government. The Patriarch possessed some secular authority throughout the Empire, provided he retained the Sultan’s confidence. More significantly, he could count on the backing of the Tsar, whose role as Protector of the Orthodox Church ensured Russia a privileged position at the ‘Sublime Porte’, as the Sultan’s court and administration was called. In order to enforce his protective rights Nicholas I was at war with Turkey in 1828-9, glorying in the victories of an army which penetrated the Balkan mountains and threatened Constantinople itself, the capital of the Sultans for four centuries. Nesselrode, however, consistently maintained that Russia could best maintain influence at the Porte by sympathetic support for the Sultan, not by intimidation. This policy was triumphant in July 1833 when the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi established a Russo-Turkish military alliance and, for the eight years of its duration, ensured Russia political primacy at Constantinople.

  When Unkiar Skelessi expired, Nesselrode gave yet another twist to Russian policy. There was already a tradition of Anglo-Russian hostility over the Eastern Question, caused partly by fear that Britain’s trade would suffer if ‘the Black Sea became a Russian lake’ and partly by a conviction that the Tsar’s Empire could become an overbearing weight in Europe’s affairs. Nevertheless Anglo-French rivalry predated Anglo-Russian, and in 1840 Nesselrode, with Brunnow’s active support, completed a minor diplomatic revolution. The Russians worked in partnership with the Whig Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, against French attempts to turn the Levant into a commercial satrapy. This Palmerston-Nesselrode combination produced the Straits Convention of July 1841 which closed the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus to all foreign warships so long as Turkey was at peace. When, two months later, the Tories returned to office, Nesselrode and Brunnow found it even easier to collaborate with Peel and Aberdeen. The two countries worked together over problems in Persia and in 1843 concluded a trade treaty. British radicals, on the other hand, were implacably hostile: in 1831 Nicholas’s troops had suppressed the revolutionary movement for an independent Poland and, until 1852, the House of Commons continued to vote Poland’s exiles a grant of £10,000 a year. But the noisy Russophobia of the 1830s was muted by now. Nesselrode and the leading executants of his policy were satisfied with the embryonic Anglo-Russian entente.