THE WAR WITH RUSSIA.
Early in the year, events transpired which ultimately led to a war on the part of the United Kingdom, France, and Turkey against Russia. Designs against the integrity of the Turkish empire had long been entertained by Russia, and there was reason to believe that Austria was an abettor of those schemes, in the hope of being a partaker of the spoil. Sir Hamilton Seymour, the British Ambassador at St. Petersburg, came to the conclusion that those two great powers were in secret league against the Turkish empire. They dared not, however, proceed in their plans in opposition to the will of England and France, and the ambassadors of both countries were sounded by the czar, to ascertain with what part of the territorial plunder contemplated they would be satisfied. Both powers indignantly refused to participate in any aggression against the sultan, and made known their reasons in terms calculated to deter his imperial majesty from the like. Austria had fomented disputes on the Turkish frontier, and threatened armed interference when the sultan made military preparation to restore the peace of his provinces. Russia ostensibly opposed Austria in these proceedings, but, as was afterwards proved, secretly abetted her. The attitude of the czar towards Turkey was one of vigilance and preparation, as an armed robber watches the wayfaring man. The czar was encouraged to hope that events would arise from the policy of France favourable to his own designs. This expectation arose from the ostentatious interference of France in the disputes between the Latin and Greek Christians. French agents were spread over Syria; and a tone at once insolent to the authorities, defiant to the Greeks, and unworthy the dignity of the representatives of a great power, was adopted by these men. The French ministers and consuls in the Turkish empire were rather religious partizans, than political agents acting in harmony with the authorities of the country to which they had been accredited. Frequent disputes arose in Jerusalem, in connection with Greek and Latin rites in celebration of certain anniversaries at the Holy Places. Disturbances of a fierce nature at last rendered the interference of the Turkish authorities necessary, who acted with impartiality. The French ambassador resorted to menace and intrigue on behalf of the protégés of France—the professors of the Latin rite; and the sultan, intimidated, yielded everything which French violence demanded. The English ambassador in vain advised moderation on the one hand, and firmness on the other; the French minister seemed to disdain all temperate counsels, and the Porte was too much awed by his threats to adopt an attitude of resolution, or even dignity. The concessions wrung from the sultan by the French furnished the Russian government with the occasion it had long sought. An especial envoy was sent to demand the restitution of all the privileges of which the Greeks had been deprived. The vacillating sultan yielded to his new tormentor. Negotiations were set on foot by the ministers who represented the great powers; and France was induced by the influence of England to adopt a concessive tone, and to withdraw from the insolent and hostile position she had assumed. The Russian minister, Prince Menschikoff, and his master, were elated by their success, and increased their demands. An ultimatum was put forth on the 21st of May, that contained stipulations which virtually made the czar protector of the Greek Christians throughout the Turkish empire. It was at the same time notified by the envoy, that if the ultimatum were not complied with, he would leave Constantinople in eight days. The events connected with these transactions, and the results, are described by the author of this History, in his History of the War against Russia, in the following terms, which are here transcribed. The account is the result of careful and painstaking researches, and of confidential intercourse with official persons well acquainted with the diplomacy and events of the period.
This ultimatum was declined by the Porte, and Prince Menschikoff withdrew from Constantinople. During these negotiations the Russian armies were concentrated upon the Bessarabian frontiers, and at the same time the Emperor Nicholas was sounding Sir H. Seymour at St. Petersburg. These conversations were accompanied by despatches and protestations that the emperor would not, in the quarrel then pending, attempt any territorial occupation. But Odessa and Sebastopol were filled with naval and military preparation, and the Russian army was massing upon the Pruth, ready at a moment’s notice to invade the principalities. The moment at last came. Prince Metternich, and Count Nesselrode (the Russian minister for foreign affairs), baffled in their intrigues by the resolution of the sultan, gave place to other and more decisive performers. Prince Gortschakoff crossed the Pruth on the 25th June, at the head of a numerous army, organized to the highest efficiency on the Russian principle, and attended by a most powerful artillery and matériel of war. Contemporaneous with the advance of his armies, the autocrat published a manifesto, which left his motives and objects no longer in disguise, and which no persons could misapprehend, except those whom the disclosures of Sir H. Seymour had failed to enlighten. Means were taken to reassure the Western governments that no conquest was intended. Count Nesselrode wrote diplomatic circulars to the Russian ambassadors and consuls at the various courts and capitals; M. Druhyn de L’Huys, the French minister of foreign affairs, and our own foreign minister, wrote countercirculars; and time was bootlessly expended by the Western governments that ought to have been given to the preparation of armaments. The Russians lost no time. Having advanced upon Wallachia by way of Leova, and upon Moldavia by way of Skouliany, they rapidly penetrated to the capitals of the provinces, where the clergy of the Greek Church, and the leading officials also of that communion, gave them public welcome. Te Deum was sung in the churches, and the Russian armies acted as if on conquered territory. It was on the 3rd of July that the Pruth was crossed; on the 8th Prince Gortschakoff assisted in the ceremonies of the Church of St. Spiridion, at Jassy; on the 29th he received the compliments of the assembled bishops of the Greek Church of the provinces at Bucharest, 150 miles nearer to the Danube. By this date the Russian army had greatly increased; Gortschakoff, Dannenberg, and Luders had at their disposal nearly 20,000 cavalry, 144 pieces of cannon, of a larger calibre than had ever before been brought into the field by any army, and a force of infantry not so large in proportion to these arms of the service, but the precise number of which it is impossible, amidst so many conflicting statements, to verify. General Osten-Sacken remained within the Russian frontier with powerful reserves, and reinforcements were pouring along in unbroken streams from the great centres of Russian military power. The fierce Cossack from the Don and the Dneister, the Tartar from the Ukraine, the beetle-browed and predatory Baschkir, with all their variety of wild uniform, and “helm and blade” glancing in the summer’s sun, crowded on the great military thoroughfares, while fresh supplies of well-appointed and formidable artillery were carefully transmitted. The foundries of Russia were blazing in the manufacture of warlike weapons; and the workshops of Belgium were ransacked for the musket and rifle. The shores of the Sea of Azoff and of the Black Sea were alive with craft of every size, bearing military resources to the points destined to receive them. By shore and river in the occupied cities of the provinces, and far off in the cities of imperial Russia, the din of ceaseless preparation was heard; and it was evident to all men—still only excepting our government and the diplomatists—that Russia was preparing for a struggle against whatever forces might be brought against her, and was resolved to peril her empire upon one desperate effort to humble Europe, and grasp from Turkey some of her richest provinces, or compel the formal admission of her vassalage.
The Russian armies crowded down to the sweeps of the Danube, occupying every strategical position, and fortifying themselves by entrenchments and other defences as occasion seemed to require; the Russian leaders the while consolidating their hold upon the provinces thus occupied by deposing the hospodars, levying taxes and rations for the troops, taking the direction of the militia and municipalities, and when payments were made for anything giving only Russian paper, which it was never intended to redeem. Vast quantities of corn were accumulating upon the Danube and at Odessa, which could not be exported. The Russian armies must be fed; and it was a part of the policy of the occupation to detain these stores for any emergency that might arise. With all these evils pressing down the unfortunate Wallachians and Moldavians, forced enlistment was resorted to; and the boyards who refused complicity with the treasonable hospodars were placed in the Russian ranks. To crown all the horrors which filled with fear these wasted and tortured lands, cholera, which broke out in the corps of General Luders, communicated itself to the people of the country, and every town and many districts, from the windings of the Danube to the confines of Podolia, were swept by the cold hand of the unseen messenger of woe. As statements of all these calamities reached Western Europe, the people of England were indignant; and although the desire for peace was intense, the increasing indignation of the British people was loudly expressed. None of these things moved their government—their faith was in protocols and protests, both very gentle and harmless; and the Western powers literally did nothing effective during the summer and autumn until the 10th of September, when the French ambassador, as if in sudden alarm, and without any orders from his government or concert with his colleague of the British embassy, ordered three frigates to ascend the Sea of Marmora and anchor in the Bosphorus. The English minister, after much importunity, adopted a similar measure; but pains were taken to make the Czar and the world believe that this measure was intended to protect the Porte from its own subjects, and not from him. Indeed, the allies seemed to name Russia with “’bated breath;” while Russia was filling the world with boasting, fabricating reports of successes over the tribes of Central Asia, pushing a force even to Bokhara, and menacing and wheedling Persia by turns. The Petersburg Gazette threatened that if England went to war, peace should be dictated to her from Calcutta; she was treated by the emperor and his subjects with utter disdain.
The Turkish government took example from Russia rather than from the allies; she made prodigious efforts to meet the exigency. Her first care was wisely not in the direction of the Danube. She knew that, numerous as were the Russian legions, they could not force the passage of the Balkan, and meet her in defence of her capital upon the plains of Roumelia, before the allied fleets and allied troops would secure it. She had another and more urgent danger; that pointed out by Lord Aberdeen in his despatch upon the treaty of Adrianople.
Russia might penetrate through Armenia into Asia Minor; she might, from the southern shores of the Black Sea, rundown new hosts, overrun provinces comparatively unprotected, and by another route reach the Dardanelles, and menace not only Constantinople, but the allied fleets within its waters. The divan accordingly organized an army of Asia, and with it occupied Anatolia. Selim Pasha was appointed as commander-in-chief and seraskier of the province. Had he possessed the genius of Omar Pasha, to whom the army of the Danube was committed, he might, as events have since proved, have driven the Russians from Georgia and Circassia, and freed the Caucasus from their presence. He was wholly unfit to command a division, much less an army. The Asiatic danger provided against, Omar was sent to collect and organize an army in Bulgaria, and strong reinforcements were promised to be held ready at Adrianople. Two conscriptions, of 80,000 men each, were made before the end of September; and Russia replied to these demonstrations by two enormous levies.
Thus the note of preparation sounded through all the vast empire of the sultan, from Hindostan to the Bosphorus, and thence to the Danube.*
* Nolan’s “History of the War against Russia.”
The allies made attempts to open negotiations at Vienna, in which the Russian, Austrian, and Turkish diplomatists proved themselves superior to those of Western Europe. The only result was to prove that the dispute could be settled only by the arbitrament of war. This the sultan declared on the 4th of October, the new year’s day of the Turks. Fifteen days were given by the sultan for the czar to withdraw his armies before any attack was made upon them.
The events which followed will best and most briefly be depicted by a quotation from the author’s work already referred to.
Four days after the declaration of war, the sultan made a formal demand for the allied fleets to enter the Dardanelles. The demand was complied with, and the ministers of the Western powers presented the admirals with great “pomp and circumstance” to the sultan. The further request of the sultan that the fleets or a portion of them should pass also the straits of the Bosphorus was refused by the ambassadors, on the ground that the Western powers were not at war with Russia. In vain the foreign minister of the sultan urged the danger to which his ships and coasts were exposed in the Black Sea. The answer was, that Prince Gortschakoff had promised to make the war on the part of Russia strictly defensive; and that Count Nesselrode, in his circular despatch (above referred to), had repeated that promise. There was, in the opinion of the ambassadors, no reason for doubting the good faith of the Russian government; and they would not, by a demonstration so hostile as that of sending the fleets into the Enxine, provoke Russia to change the character of the war, and make it one of offensive operation. The reply of the Turkish minister was, that Russia could not make the war offensive upon the shores of the Black Sea if the fleets were to cruise there and that the only chance of her being able to convert the war upon the Danube into one of active offensive operations, was her having command of the Black Sea for the easy transport of stores of all kinds to the vicinity of the armies. This reasoning, irrefutable although it obviously was, and most important as it soon and fatally proved itself to be, was met by the reply that the ambassadors had no instructions for any demonstration more active than the assemblage of the fleets for the protection of Stamboul. Again the Turkish minister pressed upon the ambassadors and admirals the exposed situation of the coast of the Black Sea and the Turkish squadron within its waters; and showed that, for the present, there was no necessity for the allied fleets in the Sea of Marmora; that the sultan, in calling them through the Dardanelles, contemplated their further progress through the other straits; that the Russians could not endanger the capital until they had forced the Danube, captured Shumla and Sophia, forced the passes of the Balkan, and were victors at Adrianople; or, from the eastern frontier, had pushed a victorious campaign from the Caucasus, through Asia Minor. It was, however, in vain that the enlightened men then in the Turkish foreign-office demonstrated that if the fleets were sent to defend Turkey, the Black Sea was their appropriate sphere of action: the admirals had no orders, and the ambassadors would give them none, and pleaded the absence of any discretionary power.
While the fleets spread the tricolor and the union-jack upon the gentle breezes of the Bosphorus, Omar Pasha, with frame of iron and intellect of light, seemed to do everything, as well as direct everything, upon the northern frontier of Bulgaria; and only just allowed the fifteen days’ “notice to quit” to expire, before he showed Russia and the world that the Turks had a general, and that with a general they were still soldiers, as when the blazing scimitar of Orchan first flashed upon Europe, or Byzantium shook before the thunder of the artillery of Mohammed II. They were still worthy of their father, Osman, the “Bone-breaker;” and, in hand-to-hand combat, an overmatch for the boors of Russia, both in courage and strength. It must be said, to their disadvantage, that they were not very precise concerning the declaration of war; for on the very day it was declared, and without the knowledge of their chief, a semi-brigade hurried over the river, fell upon a Russian detachment, routed it, seized a considerable booty, and, like true Bashi-bazouks, were away again upon their own side before the foray could be chastised.
With the end of October, the time granted to Prince Gortschakoff by Omar Pasha expired; by whom strong detachments were immediately expedited to the Russian side of the disputed river. Crossing at once in several places, they were soon established in some force upon the frontier of Wallachia, and pushing forward a strong advance-guard upon the Russians, the latter skirmished, refused battle, and slowly and sullenly retreated upon Slatina. The Turks fought and gained several sanguinary battles on the Danube during the month of November, which was followed by various contests, less important, but scarcely less sanguinary.
The month of November, however glorious to the Turkish armies, was disastrous to its navy. The fleet lay in the harbour of Sinope, upon the Black Sea. The Russians, contrary to the official declaration made to the allies, to confine the war to defensive operations, resolved to attack the Turkish fleet by a surprise. The enterprise of the Russian admiral was successful. The unsuspecting Turks were surprised; no opportunity of surrender was given; the attack led, not to a battle, but to a massacre. The whole fleet was destroyed, with an unsparing barbarity and a vindictive bloodthirstiness that must leave a stain for ever upon the pages of Russian history.
War continued to roll along the Bulgarian and Wallachian frontiers to the close of the year; the Turks displaying undaunted heroism, and surpassing the Russians in nearly every soldierly quality, so that the Russian armies lost by battles and marches 35,000 men, exclusive of the sick and wounded.
Prodigious efforts were made by the Russian emperor and the nation. The people contributed voluntarily 150 millions of silver rubles for the expenses of the war between the date of Omar Pasha’s crossing the Danube to the end of the year. Of this vast sum the clergy contributed nearly one-half. All Russia was wrought up to a pitch of fanatical enthusiasm for the war, and every heart burned with ambition to see the Greek cross upon the dome of St. Sophia.
Tidings of the massacre of Sinope flew through Europe, and every man out of Russia, Austria, and the countries inhabited by Greeks, perused the harrowing story with indignation and disgust. In England and France the popular feeling against the tardiness of their governments rose high. The English ministry never regained the confidence of the public. The Earl of Aberdeen, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Sidney Herbert, and the Duke of Newcastle, were known to be the members of the cabinet chiefly accountable for the policy of respect and timidity towards Russia, which had caused the British nation to take so tame and unworthy a part. The diplomatists continued to lose time by tedious and worthless negotiations, giving Russia the advantage of calling forth and organizing her resources, and fomenting by her agents sedition and insurrection among the Greek subjects of the Porte.
Little was effected by the hostile powers upon the theatre of Asia after the declaration of war during that year, but the clangour of arms resounded on the shores of the Black Sea, and along the confines of the two great empires.