Crimean Blunder: The Story of War with Russia a Hundred Years Ago

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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CRIMEAN BLUNDER:

THE STORY OF WAR WITH RUSSIA A HUNDRED YEARS AGO

BY

PETER GIBBS

You cannot have a little war.

—The Duke of Wellington

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ILLUSTRATIONS 5

MAPS 6

FOREWORD 10

INTRODUCTION 12

1 32

2 38

3 50

4 56

5 65

6 77

7 86

8 96

9 114

10 130

11 142

12 159

13 182

14 196

15 206

BIBLIOGRAPHY 227

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 228

DEDICATION

To my brother-in-law

Brigadier Cyril Collier Duchesne, O.B.E., M.C., who likes to call himself

a simple soldier

ILLUSTRATIONS

Field-Marshal Lord Raglan

General Pélissier with Lord Raglan and Omar Pasha

A wharf at Balaclava

Balaclava harbour in 1855

Lieutenant-General Sir George Brown and his staff

General Bosquet and his staff

A quiet day in a French mortar battery

The interior of the Redan

Looking down on Balaclava plain

A private in full marching order

A group of the 47th Regiment in winter dress

Officers and men of the 8th Hussars

MAPS

Turkey and the Black Sea 100 years ago

Crim Tartary: The Crimean Peninsula

Marshal St. Arnaud’s plan for the Battle of the Alma

The Battle of the Alma

South-West Crimea

The Battle of Balaclava

Mount Inkerman

The Sebastopol Defences

FOREWORD

ALTHOUGH the Crimean War was fought over a hundred years ago it was nearer in time to my parents when they were teenagers than the World War of 1914-18 is to the teenagers of today; and I have a friend—admittedly he is in his eighties—who complains that when he was a boy his father was always talking about his experiences in the Crimea at breakfast.

People probably talked about their wars more in those days, but they certainly wrote less. Apart from Kinglake’s Invasion of the Crimea in eight substantial volumes—which describes the war, virtually shot by shot, with a delightful garrulity and with a flowery sentimentalism that irritates at first and then, after a few volumes, grows positively endearing—the only complete story as a historical narrative, in English, that I have found has been General Sir Edward Hamley’s The War in the Crimea. All the other books I have come across deal with particular phases, or with particular persons or military units. Hamley served throughout the war as a comparatively junior artillery officer; his book is straightforward and attractively written with none of the stiltedness common to so many of the writers of the last century. But although it was not published until thirty-five years after the war, in 1891, that was still a long time ago and our perspectives have changed considerably since then. That is my justification for writing the story over again, looking on the events as the ordinary person, claiming to be neither a historian nor an authority on military affairs, would be more likely to look on them today.

Professor Trevelyan, in his English Social History, has said, We were not engaged in any great war for a hundred years after Waterloo. The Crimean War was no exception. It was merely a foolish expedition to the Black Sea, made for no sufficient reason, because the English people were bored by peace. That is clear enough to us today, and is another reason why the story can now be written again because the writers of the nineteenth century saw it quite differently. What Professor Trevelyan would class as a great war he himself would perhaps find it difficult to define with any exactness. Certainly it would not be one that, although it went on for more than a year, was concerned solely with the capture of one town. But if the Crimean War deserves no label of greatness it cannot be dismissed as altogether negligible as wars go, if only because it cost nearly three hundred thousand lives.

The story which I have told is of events in Turkey and the Crimea and on the shores of the Black Sea, and so that this story may have continuity I have purposely omitted any mention of an excursion to the Baltic which the allies made early in 1854. As soon as Britain and France had declared war on Russia they sent a British naval expedition under Sir Charles Napier, together with a French landing force, to confound the Russians by attacking Kronstadt and Helsingfors. But nobody had taken into any account the strength of these fortresses and although the French made a landing the expedition was signally unsuccessful and had no effect on the main current of the war at all; so I have disregarded it.

I have not attempted to document the narrative because my purpose has been to tell a plain story rather than to pretend a formal history. My sources are contained in the bibliography at the end of the book.

Once again I owe a debt, gratefully incurred, to Brigadier John Deedes, my indispensable mentor on military subjects, for reading the manuscript of this book and advising me on it so patiently. My thanks are due also to Mr. and Mrs. Gernsheim for kind permission to use a number of Roger Fenton’s photographs taken in the Crimea during the war—fine specimens of early photography.

PETER GIBBS

Bulawayo,

Southern Rhodesia.

April, 1959

INTRODUCTION

THE chain of events which by 1854 had induced Britain and France to embark, with no small degree of enthusiasm, on a full-scale war with Russia had started with a dispute between a handful of monks in Jerusalem about the keys to certain doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It seems that three keys were involved; the key of the main church door and one for each of the two doors leading to the sacred manger. There was also some dissension over the powers of the main doorkeeper to exercise a right of admission to the church.

The argument arose in the course of what Lord Clarendon, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, described as rival Churches contending for mastery in the very place where Christ died for mankind. At the time when the dispute came to a head it was the Greek monks who were enjoying access to the church although rivalry over rights in the Holy Places between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches had been going on for centuries. To add insult to the injury complained of by the Latins, the porter who sat at the main doorway of the church was a Mohammedan, an infidel, and they accused him of showing an unworthy favouritism by restraining Christians of their denomination from entering the church except at certain hours, and allowing the Greeks right of access at any time of the day. That was one of the reasons why they wanted a key for themselves.

The Mohammedan porter was quite entitled to his authority. He was appointed by the Governor of Jerusalem, who was a loyal pasha of the Sultan of Turkey. Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1516—and was to remain so until General Allenby entered it four hundred and one years later—and the Turkish sultans, dedicated Mohammedans as they were, had embraced so much of the old empire of Greece that they even numbered among their subjects many Christians of the Greek Church. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the time of the trouble about the keys in Jerusalem, there were fifteen million Orthodox Christians in the Turkish Empire.

Compared with this formidable influence the number of Roman Catholics in Palestine was almost negligible. But there had ever been a stream of pilgrims, of both Churches, to the Holy Places—a practice that was such a rewarding source of income to Turkey that she would have been foolish to discourage it. In fact, a hundred years before, the then Sultan had entered into an agreement with Louis XIV’s government that Catholic pilgrims to the Holy Places, whether French or of other nationalities, should enjoy in Palestine the protection of the French flag. The agreement was involved in one of those capitulations, as they were called, into which Turkey made a habit of entering with various foreign countries, and which over the years were to cause her so much embarrassment. The principle of a capitulation was based on the theory that the sovereignty of a state could only apply to its own subjects, and that foreigners, visiting or even living in the country, should still be governed and protected by the laws of their own country whence they came. The Turks saw nothing humiliating in the idea—no suggestion that their visitors might be behaving patronizingly towards them; in fact, far from resisting the arrangement they welcomed it because in their view the privilege of Turkish citizenship was much too good to be extended to foreigners.

The first capitulation had been given to France in 1536, and she had appointed consuls in Constantinople who exercised their authority over the French people there. In 1583 England had also been given a capitulation by Turkey but hers was a more remote control and in theory Englishmen in Constantinople were answerable to Queen Elizabeth in far-off London. The result was that England had made little real use of the privilege and when, fifty years later, France claimed to be the official protector of all Catholic foreigners in Turkey, no matter what their nationality, she raised no objection.

The subsequent agreement with Louis XV, made over a hundred and fifty years later in 1740, had been a renewal of the capitulation to France, and it particularly mentioned that French protection would be available to all Catholic visitors to the Holy Land. But, by the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution had tended to divert that country’s attention from Holy Places, and by the time it was over any rights granted by the capitulation of 1740 might well have been regarded as surrendered by default.

For in France, after the Revolution, the Directory had followed the Commune; Napoleon Bonaparte had risen and fallen; the monarchy had been restored. The Second Republic had come and gone, and in its place the Second Empire had arisen with someone who called himself the third Napoleon at its head.

Prince Louis Napoleon had found that something more than a family name, and a few spasmodic cries of Vive l’Empereur, were necessary to consolidate an imperial position which had not been attained too scrupulously. The people of France, having acquired a new Emperor a little unexpectedly, now needed an Empire, and their notion of empire had been prescribed for them by their first Emperor on an ambitious plane. The prescription required a successful war. So Louis Napoleon set about kindling one, and as a first spark in the conflagration that in the end was to involve Paris, London and St. Petersburg he fanned the almost extinguished embers of dissension between the Greek and Latin monks in Jerusalem. He knew that, remote as the Holy Places were, any interference there would annoy Russia, and there was nothing that would make him more acceptable to his at present unconvinced subjects than if he were to stage a revenge for 1812.

So Louis Napoleon’s ambassador at Constantinople was instructed to present to the Turkish government at the Sublime Porte a formal demand for the restitution to the Catholics of all their rights in the Holy Places. The ambassador did so, requesting that in earnest of their good intentions the Turks should hand over duplicates of the three keys that were causing all the trouble, and instruct their porter to spread his favours more equitably among Christians of both denominations. The authorities in Constantinople, who were a little uncertain of what the trouble was all about, suggested appointing a commission of enquiry. The suggestion had the added merit of avoiding an immediate decision, which was always an attraction to the Eastern mind. On instructions from Paris the French ambassador agreed to an enquiry, but only on the understanding that no documents that were dated later than the capitulation of 1740—that is to say, over a hundred years before—would be admissible as evidence to the commissioners.

Nicholas the First, the Tsar of Russia, was equally interested in the Holy Places, although so far everything had been working there to the benefit of the Orthodox Christians and he had not up to now been concerned with the little storm in the Jerusalem tea-cup. Besides holding the office of Emperor of All the Russias, he was the acknowledged champion throughout the world of the Greek Orthodox Church, whose practice of Christianity had been upheld many times during the last centuries by the might of Russian arms. Through his own ambassador at Constantinople he heard of the attempt by the French to upset the happy state of affairs that had prevailed at Jerusalem for some time, and how it was proposed to beguile the commission of enquiry by confining the evidence before it to information that was a hundred years out of date. Of course, Louis Napoleon had never wanted the Tsar to acquiesce in this, and he was not to be disappointed.

So the Turkish government at the Porte was treated to successive notes from Paris and St. Petersburg, one demanding a supply of keys, and the other hotly protesting that these should not be handed over. It may be that the French demands were more insistent, or more telling; or it may be that Turkey’s age-long antagonism to Russia prevailed. Whatever the reason, the Porte at last announced, in a formal note to the two powers, that the Catholic claims to equal rights in the Holy Places were valid. In effect, the note laid down a pious expression of principle about which it deftly avoided undertaking to do anything.

The note drew a heated remonstrance from the Tsar, whose Christian principles balked at any toleration of a sister Church. The Sultan, who was having trouble with his army organization and could not afford at the time to disregard Russian remonstrances altogether, hurriedly drew up a proclamation, known as a firman, ratifying the old exclusive privileges enjoyed by the Greeks and thereby virtually revoking his acknowledgement of their claims which he had so recently given to the Latins. When it came round inevitably to the French turn to remonstrate the Turks got over this new difficulty in truly oriental fashion by promising not to read the firman in Jerusalem, so that in effect the people whose privileges it feigned to ratify need know nothing about it. However, the Turks were impartial enough to make a concurrent promise to the Russians to instruct the Governor of Jerusalem not to give any keys to the Latins. In the Sultan’s view the wishes of both sides had been acceded to, so everybody ought to be satisfied.

The duty of giving effect to these involved undertakings fell to one Afif Bey, a calm Mohammedan who had little concern for the squabbles of Christianity. He was sent by the Sultan to Jerusalem where he first paid friendly visits to the Greek and Latin patriarchs, avoiding any dangerous discussion with them about keys and porters. He subsequently invited them to meet him under the great dome of the Church of the Resurrection, in front of the Holy Sepulchre itself. Here they assembled expectantly with their followers, the representatives of each Church savouring the prospect of the discomfort to be administered to their respective rivals. Afif Bey began by impressing on them at some length the desire of the Sultan to gratify all his subjects no matter what their religion. This sounded ominous to the Greeks and hopeful to the Latins. Then he abruptly terminated the proceedings and strode away, inviting them to meet him later in the Church of the Virgin, near Gethsemane.

After these artless delaying tactics he felt it at last incumbent on him to produce and read a proclamation by the Sultan. But it was not the firman the Greeks had been waiting for and expecting. It was an inspired document intended to gratify both sides while still avoiding the subject of keys and porters. In it, the Sultan proclaimed that the Latins would be permitted to celebrate mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre once a year, but that on those infrequent occasions the Greek altar and ornaments must remain undisturbed. It was not an arrangement that held much appeal to either side. The Catholics, in the view of the Greeks, would desecrate the Orthodox altar, and for themselves they would be expected to celebrate mass, as Kinglake the historian has described it, on a schismatic marble slab with silk and gold covering, instead of plain linen, among schismatic vases, and before a crucifix with feet separated instead of one nailed over the other. Having read the proclamation, Afif Bey wisely withdrew under cover of the clamour he had caused. He was subsequently visited in his lodgings by an angry Russian consul-general who demanded that the Sultan’s promised firman be read officially to the Latin monks—that proclamation that was to put the Latins in their place by impressing on them that the long-established monopolies of the practice of formal Christianity in the Holy City were to remain a privilege of the Greeks. Afif Bey at first protested an affected ignorance of the existence of any such firman; then blandly informed the consul-general that he had not brought a copy of it with him. Finally, having calmly produced the original firman itself, he lamented his inability to read it publicly as he had received no formal instructions from the Sultan to do so. In fact, throughout his mission, Afif Bey faithfully honoured his master’s equivocal undertakings to both France and Russia.

The effect on the Tsar could not have been more promising for Louis Napoleon. Moved presumably by the highest motives of Christianity, Nicholas sent two army corps to the Turkish frontier and a special envoy, with instructions to adopt a bullying attitude, to Constantinople. Antagonism between Russia and Turkey had flourished for nearly three hundred years. In fact, the history of the two empires was a series of mutual wars, patched-up truces and wars again. Once, in 1833, the Turks had shown an unusual amity towards Russia by calling for help when an army of Egyptian rebels—Egypt, of course, was then part of the Ottoman Empire—had reached the very gates of Constantinople. The Russians had been only too happy to answer the call, welcoming such a heaven-sent chance to march their own troops into the city. England and France had hurriedly intervened, as they had no intention of permitting Russian expansion southward across their vital line of communication with India and the East. And it was the happy presence of Turkey, lying athwart the narrow channel of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, that kept Russia safely locked up in the Black Sea and out of the Mediterranean—a lucky geographical accident that won for the Sultan such fond and influential friends in western Europe.

Mohammed Ah, the rebel Egyptian governor who at the time had driven his Turkish overlords through Palestine and Syria right back to the very outskirts of their capital, had been bought off with a profusion of hereditary governorships of minor Turkish provinces on Mediterranean shores, and Russia had consented to withdraw her armies from Constantinople—after having forced a secret treaty on Turkey which allowed the Tsar to send warships through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean and to land troops on any Turkish shore he might choose. This had been the discredited treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, which, when its secrets came to light, had caused no little consternation in Europe, for it left Turkey virtually at Russia’s mercy and perpetuated the Russian threat to their communications with the East which it had been the whole concern of the western European powers to avoid. By 1840, Britain had felt constrained to take some steps to upset this ominous arrangement and she had called a conference in London. By what proved to be a happy chance, France had then been in the doldrums of the Restoration and had not taken any part in the proceedings. Thus it had been virtually left to Britain to come to a settlement with Russia.

The Tsar had gone to London, and while there he had advanced the imaginative proposal that the two countries should carve up the Ottoman Empire between them. Britain could take Crete and Egypt, Constantinople would be a free city—whatever that was intended to imply—and Russia would have the rest. This easy solution having been rejected a shade arbitrarily by Britain, the Tsar showed a remarkable docility by accepting a British counter-proposal that the Dardanelles should be closed, during times of peace, to warships of all nations. He also agreed that the shameful treaty of Unkiar Skelessi was to be regarded as a dead letter.

Thus there existed an uneasy truce between Russia and Turkey at the time when, in 1853, Tsar Nicholas, driven to extremes by what he regarded as un-Christian agitations in the Holy Places, sent his special envoy to Constantinople and moved two army corps to the Turkish frontier. Of course he had not abandoned altogether his hope of one day sharing out the Turkish Empire with England—that is, if he were unable to take it entirely for himself. At a court reception in St. Petersburg early in 1853, when his envoy must have already left for Constantinople, he had taken the British ambassador, Sir Hamilton Seymour, to one side, and had spoken to him a little wistfully about the prospect of the Turkish Empire breaking up altogether. We have on our hands a sick man, he said, a very sick man. Then, like an affectionate nephew distressed at the thought of his beloved rich uncle dying intestate, he added with troubled concern, It will be a great misfortune if one of these days he should slip away from us, especially before all the necessary arrangements have been made.

The Tsar’s choice of envoy to Constantinople fell on Prince Alexander Menshikov, great-grandson of a certain favourite of Peter the Great who had once wielded tremendous influence in Russia. The younger Menshikov was now nearly seventy himself. He had been brought up as a soldier, had fought against Napoleon, and had retired nearly thirty years before, although he was yet to command a Russian army in the Crimea. Now he was a Serene Prince, a High Admiral, and a one-time Governor of Finland, and he came to Constantinople with a full awareness of the awe in which the Turks should hold him. He himself held the Turks in even greater contempt than he held the French, and the Tsar could rely on him to browbeat the Sublime Porte into a sensible acquiescence of Russian demands to keep the Latins out of the Holy Places. The Tsar relied on him also to take this opportunity, afforded so encouragingly by the presence of the two army corps on the frontier, to demand of Turkey a more effective protectorate by Russia of all the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. In theory the Tsar was already the nominal protector of these people by virtue of the old capitulations, but he was really hoping for something more rewarding—something more on the lines of the protectorate over Poland which the Empress Catherine had achieved in the previous century, and which she had so adroitly turned into complete Russian domination of that unhappy country.

Prince Menshikov came to Constantinople on the last day of February 1853, accompanied by an entourage whose military complexion tended to belie its ostensible purpose of settling a monastic dispute in Jerusalem. It included the commander-in-chief of the Russian fleet and the chief-of-staff of the Russian Army, and arrived in two men-of-war. The warships, coming from the Black Sea port of Odessa, had had no need to defy the prohibition of passage of the Dardanelles to which the Tsar had agreed in London, and to revoke which Menshikov had every intention of prevailing on the Sultan. When the Prince with his warlike staff landed at Constantinople and drove in state to his headquarters in the fashionable suburb of Pera, Greeks lining the streets hailed him as their liberator—a demonstration which inclined to confirm the lurking suspicions held by some of the other ambassadors in the city that Russia was aiming a little higher than mere protection of her privileges in the Holy Places.

At the time this formidable mission was sailing into the Bosporus from the Black Sea, the British ambassador was away from Constantinople, on leave in London. He had been away for two years. His name was Stratford Canning, he was a cousin of the statesman, and he had recently attained a peerage as Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe. He had been in and out of Constantinople for the last fifty years and could claim to know something about the Turks and their troubles. As early as 1808 he had been first secretary to the then ambassador, and in 1824 he had become the ambassador himself. After that he had tried politics in England—he was elected to Parliament by one of the rotten boroughs—but he had not achieved much success there. Even so, he was still acknowledged the prime authority on Turkish affairs and was sent repeatedly to and from Constantinople. In 1833 the then Prime Minister, Lord Grey, had chosen him as ambassador to the court of St. Petersburg, but as he had been mainly instrumental in Britain’s sharp reaction to Russia only a few months before, at the time when the armies of both Russia and Egypt had threatened Constantinople, it was not very surprising that the Tsar refused to have him. So far as it is reasonable to pretend to trace historical cause and effect, the refusal was probably one of the contributory causes of the Crimean War twenty years later. For through the closer intimacy of the embassy, Canning, as he then was, might well have made some more receptive contact with Tsar Nicholas. As it was he went back to the embassy at Constantinople, and the two men glared at each other across Europe in mutual antagonism for nearly a quarter of a century—an antagonism that had much to do with the uncompromising stand taken in 1853 by both Menshikov, at the Tsar’s prompting, and the newly-created Viscount de Redcliffe.

When the British government heard of Menshikov’s intention to descend on Constantinople with some apparently aggressive intent they hurriedly packed de Redcliffe off, back to his post. He actually left England on February 25th, but he was not in Constantinople until April 4th, having called at Paris and Vienna on the way that he might have some idea how the other European powers were reacting to Russia’s behaviour. He found Louis Napoleon more than satisfied; in fact it was with some difficulty that the Emperor was restrained from ordering the French fleet forthwith through the Dardanelles. In Vienna he found the young Austrian emperor, Francis Joseph, in something of a dilemma, because, not five years before, the Tsar had come to his help by suppressing a revolt against him in Hungary—not the last time that Hungarians, rising to recapture their ancient liberties, were to be crushed by the intervention of Russian bullets. But the possibility of Russian domination of the Bosporus was an ever-present nightmare to Austria, to whom any such outcome spelt dangerous encirclement, and the instinct of national preservation was unlikely to give ground to the demands of mere gratitude. However, for the time being at any rate, Francis Joseph was groping cautiously.

De Redcliffe arrived at last at Constantinople to find that Menshikov had made a considerable impression, if by ways that were a shade unconventional in oriental diplomatic circles. Menshikov, having staged his arrival with some effect, stayed in his quarters in baffling seclusion for three days. Then, having proposed himself for a formal reception by the Grand Vizier he turned out in a plain, informal frock coat without any decorations. As a representative of a foreign power, etiquette demanded of him that he should first present himself to the Foreign Minister who was waiting for him expectantly in the next apartment to the Grand Vizier with ceremonial pipes and sherbet. Menshikov disdainfully rejected these attractions and chose to go direct to the Grand Vizier with whom, however, he did condescend to smoke a calumet. Stung by such an outrageous affront the Foreign Minister offered his resignation. He was confident that the Porte would be in honour bound to refuse it and to demand from Prince Menshikov a suitable apology. But the Porte, impressed by Menshikov’s obvious aggressiveness, accepted their own minister’s resignation with an unflattering alacrity.

By the time that de Redcliffe arrived from England, Menshikov had impressed his demands on the Porte to the stage of insistence. The demands were clear enough now and showed the real purpose of Russia’s display of latent force; for not only did they include the maintenance of the Orthodox Church’s privileges in the Holy Places, which was really what the dispute had started about, but they also insisted on an effective Russian protectorate over all the Christians throughout the Turkish Empire. In return, Russia had graciously proposed to renew the treaty of Unkiar Skelessi, by which, if only the Turks would appreciate it, the Tsar undertook to come to Turkey’s help if ever she needed it. Of course, according to Russia, effective help could only be offered if Russian ships could pass through the Dardanelles, and Russian troops could land on Turkish shores, even out in the Aegean Sea. From Western Europe’s point of view de Redcliffe had arrived back in Constantinople none too soon.

Despite the long and frequent interruptions of his embassy, de Redcliffe had enjoyed the confidence of the Sultan and his ministers for a long time. His influence at Constantinople was not due solely to the happy accident that he represented one of the strong European powers; he was a man of imperious bearing, and to whomever he happened to be talking he gave the frightening impression that while he was disposed to be perfectly friendly and polite he was only just managing to keep his temper under control. The Turks had for long looked on him as a stern father who might perhaps have their happiness at heart but was never one to be ready to romp with them. When he arrived back among them, the Grand Vizier hesitated for some days before confessing to him what demands of Menshikov he had been listening to. The Grand Vizier’s reticence is unlikely to have been prompted by any delicacy about disclosing to the British ambassador what a Russian envoy had told him, no matter how confidentially; that would have been of little concern in