The British Expedition to the Crimea

by Sir William Howard Russell

It was clear that the fire of our artillery was searching out every nook and corner in the town, and that it would have soon become utterly impossible for the Russians to keep any body of men to defend their long line of parapet and battery without such murderous loss as would speedily have annihilated an army. Their enormous bomb-proofs, large and numerous as they were, could not hold the requisite force to resist a general concerted attack made all along the line with rapidity and without previous warning. On the other hand, the strength of the works themselves was prodigious. One heard our engineers feebly saying, "They are badly traced," and that kind of thing; but it was quite evident that the Russian, who is no match for the Allies in the open field, had been enabled to sustain the most tremendous bombardments ever known, and a siege of eleven months; that he was rendered capable of repulsing one general assault, and that a subsequent attack upon him at four points was only successful at one, which fortunately happened to be the key of his position; and the inference is, that his engineers possessed consummate ability, and furnished him with artificial strength that made him equal to our best efforts.

It is sufficient to say that of the three or four points attacked—the Little Redan and the Malakoff on the right, and the Bastion Centrale and the re-entering angle of the Flagstaff Work on the left—but one was carried, and that was a closed work. The Great Redan, the Little Redan, and the line of defence on the left were not taken, although the attack was resolute, and the contest obstinate and bloody for both assailants and defenders. Whether we ought to have attacked the Great or Little Redan, or to have touched the left at all, was another question, which was ventilated by many, but which it is not for me to decide. It is certain that the enemy knew his weakness, and was too good a strategist to defend a position of which we held the key.

The surprise throughout the camp on the Sunday morning was beyond description when the news spread that Sebastopol was on fire, and that the enemy were retreating. The tremendous explosions, which shook the very ground like so many earthquakes, failed to disturb many of our wearied soldiers.

A YOUNG PRISONER OF WAR.

As the rush from camp became very great, and every one sought to visit the Malakoff and the Redan, which were filled with dead and dying men, a line of English cavalry was posted across the front from our extreme left to the French right. They were stationed in all the ravines and roads to the town and trenches, with orders to keep back all persons except the Generals and Staff, and officers and men on duty, and to stop all our men returning with plunder from the town, and to take it from them. As they did not stop the French, or Turks, or Sardinians, this order gave rise to a good deal of grumbling, particularly when a man, after lugging a heavy chair several miles, or a table, or some such article, was deprived of it by our sentries. The French complained that our Dragoons let English soldiers pass with Russian muskets, and would not permit the French to carry off these trophies; but there was not any foundation for the complaint. There was assuredly no jealousy on one side or the other. It so happened that as the remnants of the French regiments engaged on the left against the Malakoff and Little Redan marched to their tents in the morning, our Second Division was drawn up on the parade-ground in front of their camp, and the French had to pass their lines. The instant the leading regiment of Zouaves came up to the spot where our first regiment was placed, the men, with one spontaneous burst, rent the air with an English cheer. The French officers drew their swords, their men dressed up and marched past as if at a review, while regiment after regiment of the Second Division caught up the cry, and at last our men presented arms to their brave comrades of France, the officers on both sides saluted with their swords, and this continued till the last man had marched by.

Mingled with the plunderers from the front were many wounded men. The ambulances never ceased,—now moving heavily and slowly with their burdens, again rattling at a trot to the front for a fresh cargo,—and the ground between the trenches and the camp was studded with cacolets or mule litters. Already the funeral parties had commenced their labours. The Russians all this time were swarming on the north side, and evinced the liveliest interest in the progress of the explosions and conflagrations. They took up ground in their old camps, and spread all over the face of the hills behind the northern forts. Their steamers cast anchor, or were moored close to the shore among the creeks, on the north side, near Fort Catherine. By degrees the Generals, French and English, and the Staff officers, edged down upon the town, but Fort Paul had not yet gone up, and Fort Nicholas was burning, and our engineers declared the place would be unsafe for forty-eight hours. Moving down, however, on the right flank of our cavalry pickets, a small party of us managed to turn them cleverly, and to get out among the French works between the Mamelon and Malakoff. The ground was here literally paved with shot and shell, and the surface was deeply honeycombed by the explosions of the bombs at every square yard. The road was crowded by Frenchmen returning with paltry plunder from Sebastopol, and with files of Russian prisoners, many of them wounded, and all dejected, with the exception of a fine little boy, in a Cossack's cap and a tiny uniform greatcoat, who seemed rather pleased with his kind captors. There was also one stout Russian soldier, who had evidently been indulging in the popularly credited sources of Dutch courage, and who danced all the way into the camp with a Zouave.

There were ghastly sights on the way, too—Russians who had died, or were dying as they lay, brought so far towards the hospitals from the fatal Malakoff. Passing through a maze of trenches, of gabionades, and of zigzags and parallels, by which the French had worked their sure and deadly way close to the heart of the Russian defence, and treading gently among the heaps of dead, where the ground bore full tokens of the bloody fray, we came at last to the head of the French sap. It was barely ten yards from that to the base of the huge sloping mound of earth which rose full twenty feet in height above the level, and showed in every direction the grinning muzzles of its guns. The tricolour waved placidly from its highest point, and the French were busy constructing a semaphore on the top. There was a ditch at one's feet, some twenty or twenty-two feet deep, and ten feet broad. That was the place where the French crossed—there was their bridge of planks, and here they swarmed in upon the unsuspecting defenders of the Malakoff. They had not ten yards to go. We had two hundred, and the men were then out of breath. Were not planks better than scaling-ladders? This explains how easily the French crossed. On the right hand, as one issued from the head of the French trench, was a line of gabions on the ground running up to this bridge. That was a flying sap, which the French made the instant they got out of the trench into the Malakoff, so that they were enabled to pour a continuous stream of men into the works, with comparative safety from the flank fire of the enemy. In the same way they at once dug a trench across the work inside, to see if there were any galvanic wires to fire mines. Mount the parapet and descend—of what amazing thickness are these embrasures! From the level of the ground inside to the top of the parapet cannot be less than eighteen feet. There were eight rows of gabions piled one above the other, and as each row receded towards the top, it left in the ledge below an excellent banquette for the defenders.

SICKENING SIGHTS.

Inside the sight was too terrible to dwell upon. The French were carrying away their own and the Russian wounded, and four distinct piles of dead were formed to clear the way. The ground was marked by pools of blood, and the smell was noisome; swarms of flies settled on dead and dying; broken muskets, torn clothes, caps, shakos, swords, bayonets, bags of bread, canteens, and haversacks, were lying in indescribable confusion all over the place, mingled with heaps of shot, of grape, bits of shell, cartridges, case and canister, loose powder, official papers, and cooking tins. The traverses were so high and deep that it was almost impossible to get a view of the whole of the Malakoff from any one spot, and there was a high mound of earth in the middle of the work, either intended as a kind of shell proof, or the remains of the old White Tower. The guns, which to the number of sixty were found in the work, were all ships' guns, and mounted on ships' carriages, and worked in the same way as ships' guns. There were a few old-fashioned, oddly-shaped mortars. On looking around the work, one might see that the strength of the Russian was his weakness—he fell into his own bomb-proofs. In the parapet of the work might be observed several entrances—very narrow outside, but descending and enlarging downwards, and opening into rooms some four or five feet high, and eight or ten square. These were only lighted from the outside by day, and must have been pitch dark at night, unless the men were allowed lanterns. Here the garrison retired when exposed to a heavy bombardment. The odour of these narrow chambers was villanous, and the air reeked with blood and abominations unutterable. There were several of these places, and they might bid defiance to the heaviest mortars in the world: over the roof was a layer of ships' masts, cut into junks, and deposited carefully; then there was over them a solid layer of earth, and above that a layer of gabions, and above that a pile of earth again.

In one of these dungeons, excavated in the solid rock, and which was probably underneath the old White Tower, the officer commanding seems to have lived. It must have been a dreary residence. The floor and the entrance were littered a foot deep with reports, returns, and perhaps despatches assuring the Czar that the place had sustained no damage. The garrison were in these narrow chambers enjoying their siesta, which they invariably take at twelve o'clock, when the French burst in upon them like a torrent, and, as it were, drowned them in their holes. The Malakoff was a closed work, only open at the rear to the town; and the French having once got in, threw open a passage to their own rear, and closed up the front and the lateral communications with the curtains leading to the Great Redan and to the Little Redan. Thus they were enabled to pour in their supports, in order and without loss, in a continued stream, and to resist the efforts of the Russians, which were desperate and repeated, to retake the place. They brought up their field-guns at once, and swept the Russian reserves and supports, while Strange's batteries from the Quarries carried death through their ranks in every quarter of the Karabelnaïa. With the Malakoff the enemy lost Sebastopol. The ditch outside, towards the north, was full of French and Russians, piled over each other in horrid confusion. On the right, towards the Little Redan, the ground was literally strewn with bodies as thick as they could lie, and in the ditch they were piled over each other. Here the French, victorious in the Malakoff, met with a heavy loss and a series of severe repulses. The Russians lay inside the work in heaps, like carcases in a butcher's cart; and the wounds, the blood—the sight exceeded all I had hitherto witnessed.