The Banner of Battle Read online

  The three men left London on 20 January and reached St Petersburg at seven at night on 2 February, a thirteen-day journey which, on their way hack, they cut to an astonishingly rapid nine days. Trains took them from Calais to Berlin and on to Königsberg (now Kaliningrad); and they then continued by carriage to Riga, where the frost was so severe that the vehicle was placed on a sledge for the last four hundred miles of the outward journey.

  To their surprise, Joseph Sturge and his companions were treated as distinguished emissaries by the Russians, although they emphasized that they had come on a religious mission rather than with any political purpose. Nesselrode received them on Monday, 6 February, with much civility and on the following Friday afternoon they were allowed to present their petition to the Tsar. Henry Pease wrote to his nephew while his impressions of the Winter Palace were still fresh in his mind:

  Upstairs, upstairs, along galleries through rooms, here soldiers of one province, there attendants of another sort, arrived at the top. Enter the anteroom a little before time, chat with Baron N. at the window looking down upon the Neva, talk about sledge races and the burning of the Palace a few years since, try to appear at ease when in reality it was not just so...Enter the Emperor, coldly inclines towards us, a fine powerful tall frame with an unmistakable countenance which one thinks quite capable of saying ‘Siberia’ although by no means incapable of genuine kindly relaxation.[99]

  Nicholas listened graciously while the petition was read to him. He then explained his views, in a reply which was later handed to the deputation as a statement countersigned by Nesselrode. Once more Nicholas emphasized his regard for Queen Victoria and his original intention of seeking a settlement in the East in anticipation of a later crisis: ‘What on my part was prudent foresight, has been unfairly construed in your country into a designing policy, and an ambitious desire of conquest,’ he complained. Joseph Sturge explained that, as they were not on a political mission, the Quakers could not discuss details of the dispute: they held, however, that although the followers of Mahomet might believe in an appeal to arms, a Christian should seek peace: and they therefore hoped that international disputes could be settled by arbitration. The Tsar ‘shook hands with us all very cordially,’ said ‘my wife also wishes to see you’ and ‘with eyes moistened with emotion, turned hastily away’. The Quakers then spent ten minutes with the Tsarina and, they assumed, one of her daughters, both of whom spoke good English. Four days later, on the eve of their departure, they were received by Nicholas’s eldest daughter, the widowed Duchess of Leuchtenberg, who treated them with no more than formal politeness, probably because by then diplomatic relations had been severed between Russia and Britain.[100]

  The British press gave the peace mission considerable attention. The Quakers were gently satirized in Punch as ‘The Doves of St Petersburg’, but their efforts so caught the imagination of The Illustrated London News that on 11 March it produced an engraving which showed the Tsar listening to Sturge as he read the petition to him. Some provincial newspapers grudgingly conceded that their intentions were ‘benevolent’, even though they might be ‘misguided’ and ‘deluded individuals’. incapable of resisting Russian blandishment. The Times was more outspoken: ‘Nothing could be more ludicrous than an attempt upon the part of 3 Quaker gentlemen to stop the aggressive career of a half-mad Emperor by cool speeches and ethical points,’ Sturge and his companions could read in a leading article on the day they landed at Dover. But five days later the paper printed the text of their Address to the Tsar and of his reply; and on 19 March it gave considerable space to reporting an account of the deputation’s experiences which was given by Henry Pease to an audience of some two thousand men and women at the Central Hall in Darlington and at which ‘Mr Pease was heartily cheered’. Not everyone looked on the approach of war with ‘impulsive enthusiasm’.[101]

  Official London treated the deputation with a similar courtesy to official St Petersburg but the three peacemakers left no mark on policy. The Prime Minister received them on Saturday, 25 February, and made clear to them his detestation of any resort to arms. Yet Lord Aberdeen seems by now to have become an inert slave of events. He held out little hope for Buol’s protracted conference in Vienna. Instinct inclined him to retire into private life: a sense of service to the Queen made him cling to office so as to keep out Palmerston, Russell and ‘the War Party’. On the Monday after Aberdeen’s conversation with the Quakers, the Foreign Secretary sent a demand to the Russians for the evacuation of the Danubian Principalities before the end of April. A similar message was by then on its way from Paris to St Petersburg, and the Russians were left in no doubt that the joint demands constituted an Anglo-French ultimatum.[102] There was, perhaps, one concession to the Quaker pleas for quiet diplomacy. Rather than risk humiliating a proud autocrat, these latest Anglo-French demands were not made public. Aberdeen hoped that, with stalemate on the Danubian front, the Tsar might even now pull his armies back. But, to the Prime Minister’s fury, the demands were leaked to the press and carried in full in Tuesday’s Times. It seemed likely that Russian newspapers would print details of the ultimatum before the British consul in St Petersburg could deliver Clarendon’s message in person. There was thus no longer any chance of reaching a private, face-saving compromise which could reduce tension in the East. The diplomats in Vienna had certainly read their Times before Buol reconvened the conference on 5 March; their meeting achieved nothing.[103]

  Already there had been one other traditional leave-taking in London. In 1793 king George in had ridden down the Mall one February morning at seven o’clock and taken the salute on the Horse Guards as the Duke of York’s expeditionary force marched off to the Low Countries at the start of the longest war in the history of a unified Britain. Now, on the last day of the month sixty-one years later, the Scots Guards, with York’s nephew, the Duke of Cambridge, as their divisional commander, were about to set out from their barracks in Birdcage Walk for a war as yet undeclared. Thousands of onlookers waited expectantly through two hours of a cold, dark morning, before ‘precisely at seven o’clock the barrack gates were thrown open’ and George III’s granddaughter and her husband came out on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. ‘We stood on the balcony to see them — the morning fine, the sun rising over the tower of old Westminster Abbey — and an immense crowd collected to see these fine men,’ Victoria wrote to her uncle in Brussels later in the day. ‘They formed line, presented arms, and then cheered us very heartily and went off cheering. It was a touching and beautiful sight.’[104] Earlier that month, when first she heard that the Guards would be sent to the East, the Queen had confessed that ‘my heart is not in this unsatisfactory war’.[105] But the sound of regimental bands, the deafening cheers as her Guardsmen tossed their bearskin caps ‘high into the air’ in a salute no drill manual recognized, left her exultant, like so many (Asher subjects that February. As in 1914 — and even in the spring of 1982 — a generation of Britons whose imagination remained insensitive to war’s reality welcomed its approach as an escape from the boredom of a protracted peace. ‘Hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d,’ wrote Tennyson, down on the Isle of Wight, as ships of the line, frigates and black-hulled, buff-uppered troopships passed across his horizon at Farringford bound for Malta and the East.[106]

  But there were dissentient voices, too. At Westminster John Bright, meeting Lord Granville in the street, reproached him for holding office in a government which was making ready to fight for the despotism of the Turk over European Christians. And in Cheyne Row Thomas Carlyle heard of ‘soldiers marching off’ to the ‘Russian War’ and thought he had hardly known ‘a madder business’. ‘Never such enthusiasm seen among the population. Cold I am as a very stone to all that,’ he noted in his journal; and he added, ‘It is the idle population of editors &c., that have done all this in England.’[107]

  Chapter Five – Strange Allies

  No conflict in modern times gestated for so long as the Crimean War. A clash of a
rms with Russia had seemed inevitable as early as the middle of December 1853; but the ultimatums were not despatched from London and Paris until the last days of February 1854 and war was not declared until 31 March. Even then four more weeks elapsed before Lord Aberdeen read the Queen’s Message announcing the outbreak of hostilities to the House of Lords. The first British shots were fired on 22 April, by warships bombarding the port of Odessa; and British soldiers were not engaged in serious fighting for another five months, when an expeditionary force at last landed on the shores of the Crimea.

  There were four main reasons for these successive delays. Chief among them were the folly of embarking on a war with Russia before a spring thaw opened up the Baltic and the slowness with which notes between governments crossed the Continent at a time when the electric telegraph still reached no farther east than Berlin and Vienna. Thirdly, a war between the fringe empires of Europe posed unfamiliar logistical problems. It was relatively easy to order infantry regiments or battalions intended for service in Malta or India or Algeria to sail instead to the Dardanelles; but it was far harder for the military administration to improvise a service of troopships, convey field guns and munitions 3,000 miles from British shores, and find, not only cavalry horses, but suitable vessels in which the animals might be transported so great a distance.

  A diplomatic problem also delayed the opening of hostilities. Lord Aberdeen (and his sovereign) believed that the war would be shortened — perhaps, even at this late hour, avoided — if Austria joined Britain and France in putting pressure on the Tsar. This was a matter of deep concern to the Prime Minister. He was convinced that, in a cabinet of specialists on foreign affairs, he alone possessed the experience to handle the vacillations of Vienna; for had he not been ambassador to Austria in those crucial months of the great coalition against Napoleon? But here, as in his belief that he ‘knew’ Constantinople and the Turks, Lord Aberdeen was mistaken. He was right to emphasize the key importance of Austria’s role, but wrong in thinking that he could make sense of what was happening in Vienna. Uncertainty over Austrian policy continued to hamper military decisions in London and Paris throughout the first six months of the year.

  On 10 April Great Britain and France concluded a military alliance, the Convention of London, which pledged the two governments ‘to do all that shall depend upon them for the purpose of bringing about the re-establishment of peace between Russia and the Sublime Porte on solid and durable bases’. Article Five of the Convention invited ‘the other Powers of Europe’ to join the allied ‘naval and military forces’ in imposing a settlement. Primarily this Article was intended to coax Austria into the war; and in the third week of March the Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Buol, had indeed recommended intervention to Emperor Francis Joseph.[108] But there was a difference between the war aims of the allies and of the Austrians. ‘We enter upon the war for a definite object. It is to check and repel the unjust aggression of Russia,’ the Foreign Secretary told the House of Lords on 31 March; but in the same speech he made it clear that Britain sought security against Russia’s ‘mighty armaments’ in the Baltic and the Mediterranean and, above all, to deny the Tsar possession of Constantinople. And Napoleon III had already told his Senate and Legislative Assembly that Russian ‘sovereignty over Constantinople means sovereignty over the Mediterranean’, a concept which would have denied France her ‘rightful influence’.[109] The Mediterranean bogey did not worry the Austrians. They had narrower objectives: Buol wanted the Russians out of Moldavia and Wallachia, ideally with Austrian troops standing guard along the lower Danube and creating a neutral buffer between the armies of the Tsar and the Sultan. In Vienna it was suspected that, however conservative Aberdeen’s outlook on European affairs might be, the Whigs in his cabinet wished for radical changes in the map of the Continent which no Austrian or Prussian could accept. Emperor Francis Joseph was not prepared to collaborate with governments who offered sanctuary to Kossuth or showed sympathy with Poland’s exiles. Nor, indeed, was King Frederick William IV in Berlin.

  Austria’s eldest statesman saw clearly what should be done. From retirement in his suburban villa, Metternich recommended Buol to follow in 1854 the policy he had pursued in 1813: to stay out of the war and avoid entanglement in any coalition until Austrian intervention could be decisive. For the moment, Austria stood aside; but Francis Joseph reinforced his armies along the border with Wallachia, and, within ten days of the Convention ofiondoil, signed a treaty of alliance with Prussia. The German Powers would work together to make Russia evacuate the Danubian Principalities. Buol did not, however, cut off his contacts with London and Paris. He was willing to keep peace talks going in Vienna while the allies decided where and how the war should be fought.[110]

  *

  The Convention of London posed more problems than it solved: ‘the description, number and destination’ of the forces required to wage war against Russia would, it stipulated, ‘be determined by subsequent arrangements’. But the new allies were suspicious of each other. It was almost two centuries since French and British soldiers had fought side by side, back in the days of Mazarin and Cromwell; and old enmities were slow to die. Only fifteen months previously Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston had exchanged letters on the probability of going to war against the French yet again, for they feared French designs on the independence of Belgium.[111] Both men had been active in political life during the campaigns which defeated the great Napoleon; they could not easily accept his nephew as ‘our great friend and ally’. Lord Raglan, the commander-in-chief of the British expedition to Turkey, had spent over forty years in the shadow of Wellington, whose niece he married. He was a courteous man, more patient and less caustic than the great Duke, delighting in good food and affable society, pleased by the attention lavished on him and on the Duke of Cambridge as they passed through Paris at Easter on their way to Turkey. But he could not shake off his doubts about the French: had they not, after all, been ‘the enemy’ for the seven most formative years of his army career?

  Others, too, found adjustment difficult. Lord Cowley, who was Wellington’s nephew and who served as Britain’s ambassador to France from 1852 to 1867, remained suspicious of Napoleon III. He failed to realize that, for the Emperor, the ‘English Alliance’ was as prestigious as a military victory; and he listened too readily to Orleanist critics of neo-Bonapartism who belittled Napoleon III and his military commanders. No one doubted that there was a need for genuine collaboration between such strange allies as the British and the French, although there was a more marked inclination for partnership in Paris than in London. Napoleon told Cowley, at the end of February 1854, that he thought the expedition to Turkey should be under the command of a French soldier, while the joint naval squadrons should be entrusted to a British admiral.[112] But the British insisted on separate national commanders who would, it was hoped, work amicably together through liaison officers. Vice-Admiral Dundas was already at Constantinople and collaborating closely with the senior French naval officer, Vice-Admiral Hamelin. It remained to be seen whether the soldiers, too, would work together.

  On 11 March Napoleon chose as commander-in-chief the 55-year-old Marshal Le Roy de Saint-Arnaud, Minister of War for the past three years. As a young mercenary Saint-Arnaud fought for the Greeks against their Turkish overlords, until he was outwitted by the sharp practice of patriot pirates and returned home in disgust. But, like most of his contemporaries in the French army, Saint-Arnaud’s military reputation was made in Algeria, originally as a colonel in the early 1840s and more recently for stamping out the first serious native revolt against the Second French Republic. He became known to the people of Paris as stage-manager of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état in December 1851, an episode which led foreign observers to overemphasize Saint-Arnaud’s political opportunism and to discount his courage, his initiative in the field, and his skill as an organizer. It was this ‘Marshal of December’ who restored imperial panache to an army so recently republican at heart. In Sain
t-Arnaud’s favour was his energy and his ability to speak fluent English. Against Saint-Arnaud were murky tales of a rakish youth and of privileged information used to speculate on the Paris Bourse. Prince Albert, whose brother Ernest reported back to him on a visit made to Paris that spring, feared that the Marshal’s moral standards were so low that he might accept money from the Russians; and Parisian gossip invented a duel in which Saint-Arnaud was said to have shot a senior officer of the Army of Paris who accused him of peculation. More serious than these slanders were doubts about the Marshal’s health. He suffered from intestinal troubles which were so grave that for five weeks in the spring of 1853 he was unable to carry out the deskbound duties of a minister of war, let alone sit in the saddle on the parade ground.[113]

  During Wellington’s premiership, in 1828-9, Saint-Arnaud lived in poverty among the pimps and trollops east of Drury Lane and gave lessons in fencing and dancing to earn a few shillings. These months of London low-life made him welcome France’s new ally with a worldly cynicism. The Emperor hoped that he would learn to trust the British and that they would come to trust him. But, on this score, Napoleon was uneasy. Although he had found Burgoyne excellent company, his generals questioned the strategic thinking of Raglan and Cambridge after meeting them in conference in Paris on the eve of Easter. ‘I beg you not to let yourself be influenced by first impressions, for that might be fatal,’ Napoleon wrote to Saint-Arnaud, who was about to set out from Marseilles. ‘Today the English government is cooperating fully with us; it shows complete confidence in me; I shall do the same...Leave me with the responsibility of safeguarding the country’s interests; we will be nobody’s dupes.’[114] Saint-Arnaud duly met Raglan at Marseilles, found him full of goodwill and was impressed by the fittings of HMS Caradoc, the steam frigate which was to serve Raglan as a headquarters ship. ‘I went aboard his Caradoc; that is certainly not a typical English set-up [installation anglaise]’ , the Marshal wrote to his brother.[115] He watched Raglan’s steamer sail out into a heavy swell on 22 April. By then three senior French generals — Canrobert, Bosquet and Martimprey — had already been at Gallipoli for three weeks intimidating local pashas so that they would provide huts and firewood for the French expeditionary force; and the Emperor’s cousin. Prince Napoleon, was due at Constantinople on 1 May, to take command of France’s 3rd Division. But Saint-Arnaud was in no hurry. He was unwell again in that fourth week of April: there were strong gales along the French coast; and vessels arriving at Toulon brought news of snowstorms in the Dardanelles. Better to remain in the Hôtel d’Orient until he could leave Marseilles in grand style.