The British Expedition to the Crimea

by Sir William Howard Russell

The Quarantine Fort was opposed to them on their extreme left. Then came a long, high, loopholed wall or curtain extending in front of the town from the back of the Quarantine Fort to the Flagstaff Battery. The Russians had thrown up a very deep and broad ditch in front of this wall, and the French artillery had made no impression on the stonework at the back. The Flagstaff Battery, however, and all the houses near it, were in ruin; but the earthworks in front of it, armed with at least twenty-six heavy guns, were untouched, and kept up a harassing fire on the French working parties, particularly at certain periods of the day, and at the interval between nine and eleven o'clock at night, when they thought the men were being relieved in the trenches. Inside the Road Battery we could see the Russians throwing up a new work, armed with six heavy ships' guns. They had also erected new batteries behind the Redan and behind the Round Tower. The latter was a mass of crumbled stone, but two guns kept obstinately blazing away at our 21-gun battery from the angle of the earthwork around it, and the Redan had not been silenced, though the embrasures and angles of the work were much damaged. The heavy frigate which had been "dodging" our batteries so cleverly again gave us a taste of her quality in the right attack. She escaped from the position in which she lay before where we had placed two 24-pounders for her, and came out again on the 29th in a great passion, firing regular broadsides at our battery and sweeping the hill up to it completely. Occasionally she varied this amusement with a round or two from 13-inch mortars. These shells did our works and guns much damage: but the sailors, who were principally treated to these agreeable missiles, got quite accustomed to them. "Bill," cries one fellow to another, "look out, here comes 'Whistling Dick!'" The 13-inch shell has been thus baptized by them in consequence of the noise it makes. They look up, and their keen, quick eyes discern the globe of iron as it describes its curve aloft. Long ere "Whistling Dick" has reached the ground the blue-jackets are snug in their various hiding-places; but all the power of man could not keep them from peeping out now and then to see if the fusee is still burning. One of them approached a shell which he thought had "gone out;" it burst just as he got close to it, and the concussion dashed him to the ground. He got up, and in his rage, shaking his fist at the spot where the shell had been, he exclaimed, "You —— deceitful beggar, there's a trick to play me!"

Sir De Lacy Evans met with an accident on the 29th, which compelled him to resign the command to Brigadier-General Pennefather. His horse fell with him as he was going at a sharp trot; and the shock so weakened him that he was obliged to go on board the Simoom.

The Turks, or, as they were called, the "Bono Johnnies," except by the sailors, who called them "No bono Johnnies," were employed in working in the trenches. The first night in Captain Chapman's attack they worked till ten o'clock at night, when a Russian shell came over. They ran away, carrying a portion of our working and covering parties; they were re-formed and worked till eleven o'clock, when they declared it was "the will of Heaven they should labour no more that night," and, as they had exerted themselves, it was considered advisable to let them go. They were decimated by dysentery and diarrhœa, and died in swarms. They had no medical officers, and our surgeons were not sufficient in number for our army. Nothing could exceed their kindness to their own sick. It was common to see strings of them on the road to Balaklava carrying men on their backs down to the miserable shed which served them as a hospital, or rather as a "dead-house."

A deserter from the Russian cavalry on the 30th said the Russians were without tents or cover; their fare was scanty and miserable, and their sufferings great.

The French batteries opened on the 1st of November. For an hour they fired with vivacity and effect; one battery which enfiladed them on the right was plied with energy, but the remainder, with the exception of the Flagstaff redoubt, were silent. The Russians had about 240 guns in their new works, reckoning those which had been subject to our fire. The French had 64 guns in position, most of them brass twenty-fours, the others thirty-twos and forty-eights, some ship's eighty-fours not mounted. The French might be seen like patches of moss on the rocks, and the incessant puffs of smoke with constant "pop!" rose along our front from morning to night.

The earthworks around the town of Balaklava began to assume a formidable aspect. Trenches ran across the plains and joined the mounds to each other, so as to afford lines of defence. On the right of the approach the Highlanders, in three camps, were placed close to the town, with a sailors' battery of two heavy guns above. Higher up, on a very elevated hill-side, the Marines and Riflemen were encamped. There were four batteries bearing on this approach. The battery on the extreme right, on the road leading over the hills from Yalta, contained two 32-pounder howitzers; the second battery on the right, facing the valley, contained five guns; and the fourth battery, nearest Balaklava, contained eight brass howitzers, four 12, two 32, and two 24-pounders. The left approach was commanded by the heights held by the French infantry over the valley, and by the Turkish works in front. A formidable redoubt, under the command of Captain Powell, R.N., overlooked the approaches, armed with heavy ship's guns.

The Turks had cut up the ground so that it almost resembled a chess-board when viewed from one of the hills. They constructed ditches over valleys which led nowhere, and fortified passes conducting to abstruse little culs-de-sac in the hill sides.

From the road to Balaklava on the 3rd, we could see the Russians engaged in "hutting" themselves for the winter, and on the 3rd of November I made a little reconnaissance of my own in their direction. Their advanced posts were just lighting bivouac fires for the night. A solitary English dragoon, with the last rays of the setting sun glittering on his helmet, was perched on the only redoubt in our possession, watching the motions of the enemy. Two Cossacks on similar duty on the second redoubt were leaning on their lances, while their horses browsed the scanty herbage at the distance of about 500 yards from our dragoon sentry. Two hundred yards in their rear were two Cossack pickets of twenty or thirty men each. A stronger body was stationed in loose order some four or five hundred yards further back. Six pelotons of cavalry came next, with field batteries in the intervals. Behind each peloton were six strong columns of cavalry in reserve, and behind the intervals six battalions of grey-coated Russian infantry lay on their arms. They maintained this attitude day and night, it was said, and occasionally gave us an alert by pushing up the valley. On looking more closely into their position through the glass, it could be seen that they had fortified the high table-land on their right with an earthwork of quadrilateral form, in which I counted sixteen embrasures.

COVERT ATTACK BY THE RUSSIANS.

In their rear was the gorge of the Black River, closed up by towering rocks and mountain precipices. On their left a succession of slabs (so to speak) of table-land, each higher than the other, and attaining an elevation of 1,200 feet. The little village of Kamara, perched on the side of one of these slabs, commanded a view of our position, and was no doubt the head-quarters of the army in the valley. The Russians were stationed along these heights, and had pushed their lines to the sea on the high-peaked mountain chain to the south-east of our Marines. As the valley was connected with Sebastopol by the Inkerman road, they had thus drawn a cordon militaire around our position on the land side, and we were besieged in our camp, having, however, our excellent friend, the sea, open on the west.