W. & A.K. Johnston Limited, Edinburgh & London.
In recognition of their services Majors F. Wigston and C. A. Edwards were awarded brevet-lieutenant-colonelcies, and Captains A. N. Campbell and W. T. Bruce brevet majorities. A medal and clasp was issued to all ranks, and the word “Pegu” was added to the battle honours of the regiment. The losses of the Royal Irish in this campaign were enormous. When they returned to India their roll had been reduced by three hundred and sixty-five officers and men, of whom but few had been killed in action or died of wounds; the remainder had fallen victims to the diseases which rendered the swamps and jungles of Burma fatal to Europeans.[158] The names of the officers who perished in Burma are recorded on the memorial at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
[CHAPTER VII.]
1854-1856.
THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA.
When the Royal Irish reached England in June, 1854, after a six months’ voyage from Calcutta, they were greeted by the news that for the first time since Waterloo Britain had become embroiled in a European war, and in alliance with France had sent troops to protect Turkey against the Russians, who had invaded the part of the Sultan’s dominions then known as the Danubian principalities. The Czar had long cast covetous eyes on Turkey, whose European provinces on the Ægean and the Sea of Marmora prevented the expansion of Russia towards the Mediterranean, and thus limited her seaboard to the Baltic and the Black Sea. In the middle of the nineteenth century Turkey appeared to be so decadent a country that its ruler was commonly described as “the sick man”; the Czar actually threw out suggestions to England that she should divide with him “the sick man’s heritage,” and on her indignant refusal he determined to bide his time and pick a quarrel with the Sultan on the first opportunity. A pretext soon presented itself in a dispute between the Greek and Latin branches of the Christian faith concerning their respective rights in the Holy Places of Jerusalem: the Czar hotly espoused the cause of the Greek Church, while the Emperor Napoleon III., reviving the historic claim of France to represent the Latin Church in Palestine, vigorously supported the views of the Roman Catholics. The Sultan, profoundly indifferent to the rivalries of those whom his religion taught him to regard as infidel dogs, attempted to propitiate both sides, but with such conspicuous ill-success that the Czar declared war against him in October, 1853, and invaded the Turkish provinces on the Danube. To defend Turkey against this wanton and unprovoked attack, England and France in the spring of 1854 landed a considerable number of troops at Varna, a Bulgarian port on the Black Sea. It was from no love of the Turks that England thus plunged into war with Russia: she took up arms in pursuance of the foreign policy which for centuries she has followed on the Continent, and sided with the weaker state—not on altruistic grounds but solely to preserve the balance of power in Europe, and to prevent the Czar from possessing himself of Constantinople, and thus obtaining direct access to the Mediterranean Sea.
The Anglo-French troops were still at Varna when, in the interests of peace, Austria brought such pressure upon the Czar that he recalled his armies from Turkish soil. But though the immediate danger to Constantinople was averted by this intervention, the governments of England and France agreed that there would be no safety for Turkey, and therefore no tranquillity in European politics, until the Russian fleet in the Black Sea had been captured or destroyed, and its base at Sebastopol levelled to the ground. When the demolition of this great naval station was thus determined on, the allies knew little of Sebastopol,[159] except that it was a fortress in the south of the Crimea, a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea from the mainland of Russia: and no soldier in western Europe had any conception of the difficulties awaiting the Anglo-French Expedition when it put to sea from Varna on September 7, 1854. Exclusive of the crews of the great fleet of warships by which the transports were escorted, the fighting men numbered about 63,000, of whom 28,000 were French, 7000 Turks, and 28,000 British. The French were under Marshal St Arnaud; Lord Raglan, who had served on Wellington’s staff in the Peninsular war, commanded the British troops. Neither of these officers lived to see the end of the campaign: St Arnaud died in September, 1854, and was succeeded by General Canrobert who, after a few months, resigned his post to General Pélissier: Lord Raglan fell a victim to cholera at the end of June, 1855, and was replaced by General Simpson. The Turks were commanded by Omar Pasha.
The effort to collect and equip for war the comparatively small body of men forming the British quota of the combined forces had greatly taxed the military resources of England. After the fall of the great Napoleon had restored peace to Europe, enormous reductions had been made in our military expenditure;[160] not only was the personnel of the army cut down, but the matériel was allowed to fall into decay. For more than thirty years every arm and every department of the service was systematically starved, with results well summed up by Lord Palmerston, who in 1846 bluntly informed his colleagues in the Cabinet that our military weakness was such that England existed “only by sufferance and by the forbearance of other Powers.” This opinion was endorsed by the highest authority in the British army, for Wellington himself acknowledged that our supply of guns, arms, ammunition, and all kinds of stores was inadequate. Nor were these grievous shortcomings atoned for by any high standard of efficiency amongst the troops, for though the drill and discipline of the army were alike excellent, neither the soldiers nor the departments vital to their existence in the field were trained in the slightest degree for active service; indeed, until 1853, when a few thousand men spent some weeks under canvas, no camp of exercise had been formed in England since the end of the Great War with France. Marksmanship was almost a lost art; and although the deadly volleys of the British infantry in the Peninsula had won for our troops the reputation of the best shots in Europe, musketry was so entirely neglected during the dead period after Waterloo, that the injunction “Fire low, and hit ’em in the legs, boys,” was the only instruction given to recruits. Even in the Foot Guards the men were considered to be masters of their weapon if, once in every three years, they fired thirty rounds of ball cartridge. The military education of the officers was no better than that of the rank and file; there was no attempt to teach them anything beyond barrack-square drill; the vast majority grew up ignorant of every detail of their profession, and as the Staff College at Camberley was not then in existence, the officers selected for employment on the staff proved in the majority of cases to be blind leaders of the blind. The few veterans of the Peninsula who were still to be found among the Generals had seen war on a grand scale; the officers who had served in eastern and colonial campaigns had acquired much useful knowledge in these distant operations, but with these exceptions the Staff and regimental officers were as untrained in the practice, as they were unversed in the theory of war.
When the Royal Irish reached England they were quartered at Chatham and Canterbury. At first there seemed no likelihood of their being actively employed, for when the regiment had left India many men had volunteered into other corps, and the climate of Burma had told so heavily on those who still remained with the Colours that a large number of them were unfit for active service. Fortune, however, befriended the XVIIIth; in October the flank companies under Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Edwards were ordered to Windsor, to strengthen the militia battalion which had replaced the regiment of Foot Guards at the Royal Castle. Her Majesty, Queen Victoria was much impressed by the bronzed and soldierly appearance of the detachment, and learning from Colonel Edwards that the regiment was most anxious to serve in the war, she was pleased to direct that the XVIIIth should proceed forthwith to the Crimea, where reinforcements were urgently required. As the result of the medical examination proved that less than four hundred men were fit for the campaign, volunteers were invited from other regiments: four hundred joined from the 94th, a hundred and fifty from the 51st, and smaller contingents from other corps. On December 8, 1854, the regiment, eight hundred and forty-eight strong,[161] embarked at Portsmouth in the s.s. Magdalene, and reached the Crimea at the end of the year, about three months and a half after the Allies had made good their footing on Russian soil.
To enable the reader to understand the condition of the British Expeditionary Force when the Magdalene steamed into the harbour of Balaclava, it is necessary to give a very short account of the main events of the war up to the end of 1854. Between the 14th and 18th of September the Allies[162] were engaged in landing at Kalamita Bay, about thirty miles north of Sebastopol; two days after their disembarkation was completed they forced the passage of the river Alma, defeating the Russians so completely that they were allowed to march southward without molestation, and to form bases on the coast within a few miles of Sebastopol, the British establishing themselves at Balaclava, a little port eight miles to the south, the French at Kamiesch Bay, six miles to the south-west of the fortress. The Russian stronghold lies on the shores of a harbour, in shape not unlike a T: the top of the letter is represented by an arm of the sea running eastward from the Euxine for about four miles, and varying in width from a thousand to twelve hundred yards, while the leg is formed by a narrow creek which from the south runs into the main inlet, about two miles from the entrance to the open sea. On these deep and sheltered waters the whole of the Russian fleet could ride in safety, protected by a ring of forts from attack by land or sea, and the labours of successive generations of engineers had converted the western shore of the creek, or inner harbour, into a vast arsenal and dockyard, round which a thriving and populous city had sprung up. The Generals of the Anglo-French forces soon ascertained by reconnaissance that they had not nearly men enough to invest the whole perimeter of the fortress, and at the same time to repel the attacks to be expected from the enemy’s field troops. All they could hope to accomplish was to pour upon one portion of the defences a fire so heavy as to become insupportable; and as the real power of the defence was obviously concentrated in the arsenals, stores, and barracks round the inner harbour, the Allies selected the southern works, those protecting the heart of the fortress, as the object of their first attack, and took up positions on the plateau between Balaclava and Sebastopol. Bounded on the north by the harbour, on the west and south by the sea, and on the east by the valley of the Tchernaya, the surface of this plateau, or “Upland” as the British termed it, was seamed by ravines which, beginning as mere depressions in the ground, grew deeper as they approached the fortress, finally becoming precipitous gorges, difficult for troops to cross. Close to the harbour the ground between these gorges rose into gentle elevations, crowned by works which, as soon as the Russians realised that the southern side of the fortress was threatened, were heavily armed and greatly strengthened. The largest of these ravines, dividing the plain from south to north, descended to the head of the inner harbour, and served as the boundary between the British on the right, and the French on the left of the besiegers’ line.