The British Expedition to the Crimea

by Sir William Howard Russell

VARNA.

It was five o'clock ere the last steamer which had to wait for the transports got under weigh again, and night had set in before they reached the entrance of the Black Sea. As they passed the forts (which are pretty frequent towards the Euxine), the sentries yelled out strange challenges and burned blue lights, and blue lights answered from our vessels in return; so that at times the whole of the scene put one in mind of a grand fairy spectacle; and it did not require any great stretch of the imagination to believe that the trees were the work of Grieve—that Stanfield had dashed in the waters and ships—that the forts were of pasteboard, and the clouds of gauze lighted up by a property man—while those moustachioed soldiers, with red fez caps or tarbouches, eccentric blue coats and breeches, and white belts, might fairly pass for Surrey supernumeraries. Out went the blue lights!—we were all left as blind as owls at noontide; but our eyes recovered, the stars at last began to twinkle, two lights shone, or rather bleared hazily on either bow—they marked the opening of the Bosphorus into the Euxine. We shot past them, and a farewell challenge and another blue halo showed the sentries were wide-awake. We were in the Black Sea, and, lo! sea and sky and land were at once shut out from us! A fog, a drifting, clammy, nasty mist, bluish-white, and cold and raw, fell down upon us like a shroud, obscured the stars and all the lights of heaven, and stole with a slug-like pace down yard and mast and stays, stuck to the face and beard, rendered the deck dark as a graveyard, and forced us all down to a rubber and coffee. This was genuine Black Sea weather.

Later in the night we passed through a fleet which we took to be Turkish men-of-war, but it was impossible to make them out, and but for the blockade of their ports these vessels might have been Russians.[6] In the morning the same haze continued drifting about and hugging the land; but once it rose and disclosed a steamer in shore, with a transport cast off hovering about it, just as a hen watches a chicken. The Vesuvius fired a gun, and after some time the steamer managed to take the transport in tow again, and proceeded to rejoin the squadron. We subsequently found it was the Megæra. The line of land was marked by a bank of white clouds, and the edge of the sea horizon was equally obscured.

The bulk of the convoy arrived and cast anchor in Varna Bay before the evening, and the disembarkation of the troops was conducted with such admirable celerity, that they were landed as fast as the vessels came in. Large boats had been provided for the purpose, and the French and English men-of-war lent their launches and cutters to tow and carry, in addition to those furnished by the merchantmen. The Rifles marched off to their temporary camp under canvas, about a mile away. The 88th Connaught Rangers followed, and on our arrival, the bay was alive with boats full of red-coats. The various regiments cheered tremendously as vessel after vessel arrived, but they met with no response from the Turkish troops.

With difficulty I succeeded in getting a very poor lodging in the house of an Armenian dragoman, who forces himself on the staff of the English consulate, and, in company with several officers, remained there for several days, living and eating after the Armenian fashion by day, and "pigging" in some very lively "divans" at night, till my horses and servants arrived, when I proceeded to Aladyn. In consequence of instructions from home, Mr. Filder gave orders for the issue of rations for self, servants, and horses.

BULGARIAN CART-DRIVERS.

Varna is such a town as only could have been devised by a nomadic race aping the habits of civilized nations. If the lanes are not so ill-paved, so rugged, and so painful to the pedestrian as those of Gallipoli; if they are not so crooked and jagged and tortuous; if they are not so complicated and fantastically devious, it is only because nature has set the efforts of man at defiance, and has forbidden the Turk to render a town built upon a surface nearly level as unpleasant to perambulate as one founded on a hill-side. After a course of 100 miles,—by shores which remind you, when they can be seen through fogs and vapours, of the coast of Devonshire, and which stretch away on the western side of the Black Sea in undulating folds of greensward rising one above the other, or swell into hilly peaks, all covered with fine verdure, and natural plantations of the densest foliage, so that the scenery has a park-like and cultivated air, which is only belied by the search of the telescope,—the vessel bound to Varna rounds a promontory of moderate height on the left, and passing by an earthen fort perched on the summit, anchors in a semicircular bay about a mile and a half in length and two miles across, on the northern side of which is situated the town, so well known by its important relations with the history of the struggles between Russia and the Porte, and by its siege in 1829. The bay shoals up to the beach, at the apex of the semicircle formed by its shores, and the land is so low at that point that the fresh waters from the neighbouring hills form a large lake, which extends for many miles through the marsh lands and plains which run westward towards Shumla. Varna is built on a slightly elevated bank of sand on the verge of the sea, of such varying height that in some places the base of the wall around it is on a level with the water, and at others stand twenty or thirty feet above it. Below this bank are a series of plains inland, which spread all round the town till they are lost in the hills, which, dipping into the sea in an abrupt promontory on the north-east side, rise in terraces to the height of 700 or 800 feet at the distance of three miles from the town, and stretch away to the westward to meet the corresponding chain of hills on the southern extremities of the bay, thus enclosing the lake and plains between in a sort of natural wall, which is like all the rest of the country, covered with brushwood and small trees. A stone wall of ten feet high, painted white, and loopholed, is built all round the place; and some detached batteries, well provided with heavy guns, but not of much pretension as works of defence, have been erected in advance of the walls on the land side. On the sea-face four batteries are erected provided with heavy guns also—two of them of earthwork and gabions, the other two built with stone parapets and embrasures. Peering above these walls, in an irregular jungle of red-tiled roofs, are the houses of the place, with a few minarets towering from the mosques above them. The angles of the work are irregular, but in most instances the walls are so constructed as to admit of a fair amount of flanking fire on an assaulting force. Nevertheless, a portion of the inner side of the bay, and other parts are equally accessible to the fire of batteries on the trifling hillocks around the town. The houses of the town are built of wood; it contains about 12,000 or 14,000 inhabitants, but there is more bustle, and animation, and life in the smallest hamlet in Dorsetshire, than here, unless one goes down to the landing place, or visits the bazaar, where the inhabitants flock for pleasure or business.

General Canrobert and staff reached Varna on the morning of the 2nd of June. He landed about mid-day, and after an extempore levee of the French officers on the beach, proceeded to call on Sir George Brown. The first thing they did when their Sappers arrived at Varna, before the English came up, was to break a gateway through the town wall, on its sea-face, to allow troops and provisions to be landed and sent off without a long detour. This proceeding drove the Pasha of the place almost deranged, and he died soon afterwards.

The cavalry sent by Omar Pasha was of infinite service in transporting provisions, horses, and cattle. The latter were wretchedly small and lean. A strong man could lift one of the beasts, and there was not so much meat on one of them as on a good English sheep. Food was good enough, and plentiful; a fowl could be had for seven piastres—1s. 2d.; bread and meat were about the same price as in London; a turkey could be procured for half-a-crown; wine was dear, and not good; spirits as cheap as they were bad. Omar Pasha prohibited the export of grain from all the ports of Roumelia.

Owing to the exertions of Omar Pasha, and the activity of the commissariat, the quantity of open and covered arabas, or bullock and buffalo carts, which had been collected, was nearly sufficient for the wants of the First Division. There was a small army of hairy, wild-looking drivers stalking about the place, admiring the beauties of Varna, spear or buffalo goad in hand.