The signal for the French assault was given: thirty thousand men, weary of long inactivity, and burning to add new lustre to the bright record of their country's military glory,—drums and trumpets meanwhile sounding the charge, and the air resounding with shouts of "Vive l'Empereur,"—darted from their trenches, swarmed up the embankments, dashed over the parapet, swept the enemy like chaff before them; and the Malakhoff was won. Hours of the fiercest fighting found the French still masters of the situation; at nightfall the Russian general sullenly drew off his defeated forces, and the victory was complete.
It is painful to turn from this brilliant picture to the sombre coloring and the dreary details of the attack on the Redan. To three thousand doomed men was assigned the perilous undertaking. Incredible as it may appear, in view of previous failure, there seems to have been no adequate preparation, no intelligible plan, no competent leader. It was simply brute force assailing brute force. The few men who actually entered the Redan neglected to spike the guns; no reinforcements came to their aid; everything was blind excitement, and headlong, undisciplined haste. "The men of the different regiments became mingled together in inextricable confusion. The Nineteenth men did not care for the officers of the Eighty-Eighth, nor did the soldiers of the Twenty-Third heed the command of an officer who did not belong to their regiment. The officers could not find their men,—the men lost sight of their officers." But why dwell on what soon became mere butchery? The loss of the storming party, in killed, wounded, and missing, was 2447.
Considered as a military movement, it would seem to be conceded that no grosser blunder could have been made than the selection of so small a force for so desperate an undertaking. There was no chance of success but by attacking simultaneously both flanks and the salient of the Redan. The storming party was barely large enough for the assault of the salient, thus exposing the handful of men to a murderous and fatally destructive fire from the flanks. This was bad enough, certainly, but worse remains behind. English critics have most severely censured our generals for sometimes placing new recruits in posts of danger, requiring cool heads, steady nerves, and the habit of discipline. Perhaps they have forgotten the following incident. Among the picked men selected out of the entire British forces as this very storming party were raw recruits from the Ninety-Seventh Regiment, who were designated for this perilous service as a punishment for their cowardice in a recent skirmish!—and to make this punishment still more severe, they were ordered to lead off in the assault! An historian of the war says,—"The inexperience of some of these recruits seems almost incredible. One young fellow, who came to the field-hospital with a broken arm and a bullet in his shoulder, carried his firelock with him, but confessed that he had never fired it off, as he was unable to do so. The piece, upon being examined, was found to be in perfect order. Such poor undisciplined lads, fresh from the plough, ought never on any occasion to have been pitted against the well-drilled soldiers of Russia; but it was something worse than blundering to lead them on to the assault of a formidable work like the Redan. Such generalship recalls to our mind the remark of the Russian officer with regard to the military force of England, that 'it was an army of lions led by donkeys.'" Mr. Russell states that many of these recruits "had only been enlisted a few days, and had never fired a rifle in their lives."
Now will it be believed that General Codrington, to whom was committed the planning and directing of this ill-starred and disastrous enterprise, succeeded Sir James Simpson as Commander-in-Chief of Her Majesty's forces in the Crimea? How must the shade of Admiral Byng have haunted Her Majesty's Government, unless it was a most forgiving ghost! If General Codrington's promotion could have been delayed a little more than eighteen months, it might have occurred appropriately on the centennial anniversary of the death of that ill-fated naval commander, convicted by court-martial and shot for "not doing his utmost"!
On the evening of the 8th of September, the Russians blew up their magazines, fired the buildings, and evacuated the town. So fell Sebastopol, after a siege of three hundred and forty-five days. It has been considered by the English a bit of very choice pleasantry to allude to our oft-recurring statement, that "the decisive blow had been struck," and that "the backbone of the Rebellion was broken." It may not be impertinent to remind them, that the report, first circulated in France and England in the latter part of September, 1854, and fortified by minute details, that Sebastopol—the backbone of Russian resistance to the allied arms—had fallen, was repeated and reiterated from time to time during the war, until the phrase, "Sebastopol est pris," passed into a by-word, and did good service in relieving the cruelly overworked Greek Kalends.
And now we come naturally to the consideration of another and an important inquiry. Did the beginning of the war find, or did its progress develop or create, a single English general of commanding military capacity, competent to handle in the field even so small an army as the British contingent in the Crimea? Of Lord Raglan Mr. Russell says, and without doubt says truly,—"That he was a great chief, or even a moderately able general, I have every reason to doubt, and I look in vain for any proof of it, whilst he commanded the English army in the Crimea." Another authority says,—"The conviction that he was not a great general is universal and uncontradicted. He could perform the ordinary duties of a general satisfactorily, but he was lamentably deficient in those qualities which constitute military genius. He possessed considerable professional experience, great application, and remarkable powers of endurance; but he lacked the energy, vehemence, and decision of character which are essential to the constitution of a successful military chieftain." To his hesitation in council, and his want of energy and promptness in action, have always been attributed, in large measure, the ruinous delays and the fearful suffering in the army which he commanded. Lord Raglan died in June, 1855, in his sixty-seventh year. General Simpson succeeded him. "It was believed at the time," writes Mr. Russell, "and now is almost notorious, that he opposed his own appointment, and bore testimony to his own incapacity." "He was slow and cautious in council, and it is no wonder that where Lord Raglan failed, General Simpson did not meet with success." The English press and people demanded his recall. His incompetency was everywhere acknowledged, and indeed he himself would have been the last man to deny it. In about three months from the date of General Simpson's appointment, "the Queen was graciously pleased to permit him to resign the command of the army." As we have already seen, his place was filled by General Codrington. This officer was as signally rewarded, because he had failed, as he could have been, if he had succeeded. Mr. Russell quotes approvingly the comment of a French officer upon this appointment:—"If General Codrington had taken the Redan, what more could you have done for him than to make him General, and to give him command of the army? But he did not take it, and he is made General and Commander-in-Chief." With equal discrimination, Sir James Simpson was created Field-Marshal! The remainder of the campaign gave General Codrington no further opportunity of displaying his qualities for command. No other important action occurred before the termination of hostilities.
Great credit is certainly due to Mr. Russell for fearlessly exposing the errors and incompetency of the three officers successively at the head of the English army, in spite of "much obloquy, vituperation, and injustice," and for bearing his invariable and eloquent testimony to the bravery, endurance, and patience of the British private soldier.
In this brief recital of English blunders during the Crimean War, we have made no mention of the desperate and disastrous "charge of the Light Brigade," the gross and culpable inefficiency of the Baltic fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Napier, and other instances of military incapacity no less monstrous. Enough, however, has been told to more than justify the very mild summing-up of Mr. Russell, that the "war had exposed the weakness of our military organization in the grave emergencies of a winter campaign, and the canker of a long peace was unmistakably manifested in our desolated camps and decimated battalions."
Why should we add to this dismal recital the appalling sufferings of the soldiers,—helpless victims to bad management at home and shameful neglect in the field,—the long, freezing nights of trench-work under a driving rain, "without warm or water-proof clothing,—the trenches two and three feet deep with mud, snow, and half-frozen slush, so that many, when they took off their shoes, were unable to get their swollen feet into them again, and might be seen barefooted about the camp, the snow half a foot deep on the ground,"—creeping for shelter into "miserable tents pitched as it were at the bottom of a marsh, where twelve or fourteen unhappy creatures lay soaking without change of clothing" until they were called out again to their worse than slave-labor,—disease, brought on by exhaustion, exposure, overwork, and deficient food, sweeping the men off by thousands, and yet no sufficient supply of medical stores and no adequate number of medical attendants, not a soul seeming to care for their comfort or even for their lives,—so neglected and ill-treated that "the wretched beggar who wandered about the streets of London led the life of a prince compared with the British soldiers who were fighting for their country, and who were complacently assured by the home authorities that they were the best-appointed army in Europe." The world knows the whole sad story by heart. And is it not written in the volumes of evidence sworn to before the Commission appointed by Parliament to inquire into the condition of the army?
Nor is it necessary to dwell upon the extent to which the home administration was responsible for the general mismanagement of the war, in its main features and its minute details,—nor the thoroughly English stolidity with which all complaints were received by every member of the Government, from the cabinet minister who dictated pompous and unmeaning despatches, down to the meanest official who measured red tape,—nor the intense and universal popular indignation which, after a year "full of horrors," compelled the resignation of the Aberdeen Ministry. Lord Derby did not, perhaps, overstate the verdict of the nation, when he said in the House of Lords,—"From the very first to the very last, there has been apparent in the course pursued by Her Majesty's Government a want of previous preparation,—a total want of prescience; and they have appeared to live from day to day providing for each successive exigency after it arose, and not before it arose. TOO LATE have been the fatal words applicable to the whole conduct of Her Majesty's Government in the course of the war." The change in the Ministry, however, by no means cured all the evils which had existed; for, although the sufferings of the soldiers—thanks in large part to the providential appearance and heroic conduct of Florence Nightingale—were greatly diminished, still, as we have seen, the military blunders continued to the close of the war.