Winfried Baumgart - The Crimean War 1853-1856 (2020)

The Crimean War:
1853–1856
i
MODERN WARS
Series editor: Hew Strachan, Chichele Professor of the History of War, All
Souls College, University of Oxford (UK)
Advisory editor: Michael Howard, Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College,
University of Oxford (UK)
Covering the period from 1792 to the present day, the Modern Wars series
explores the global development of modern war. Military history is
increasingly an integrated part of ‘total history’, and yet this is not always
reflected in the literature. Modern Wars addresses this need, offering well-
rounded and balanced synoptic accounts of the major conflicts of the
modern period. Each volume recognizes not only the military but also the
diplomatic, political, social, economic and ideological contexts of these
wars. The result is a series that ensures a genuine integration of the military
history with history as a whole.
Published:
The South African War, Bill Nasson (1999)
The Crimean War, Winfried Baumgart (1999)
Thunder in the East, Evan Mawdsley (2005)
Allies in War, Mark A. Stoler (2005)
The First World War (Second Edition), Holger Herwig (2014)
The Wars of German Unification (Second Edition), Dennis
Showalter (2015)
Thunder in the East (Second Edition), Evan Mawdsley (2015)
New Order Diplomacy, Martin Folly (2015)
The Crimean War (Second Edition), Winfried Baumgart (2020)
Forthcoming:
The British Raj at War, Douglas Peers (2021)
ii
The Crimean War:
1853–1856
2nd Edition
Winfried Baumgart
iii
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First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Winfried Baumgart, 2020
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Cover image: Consultation about the state of Turkey
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iv
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations vii

List of Maps viii
General Editor’s Preface ix
Preface to the First Edition xii
Preface to the Second Edition xiv
Part One Origins and Diplomacy of the War
1 The real cause of the war – the Eastern Question 3
2 Diplomacy during the war, 1853–6 11
Part Two The Belligerents and the Non-Belligerents
3 The war aims of the belligerents 29
4 The non-belligerent German powers: Austria and

Prussia 39
5 The neutral powers 49
Part Three The Armies of the Belligerents
6 Russia 67
7 France 73
8 Great Britain 81
v
vi CONTENTS
9 Turkey 93
10 Sardinia 97
Part Four The War
11 The Danube front, 1853–4 103
12 The Black Sea theatre 125
13 The campaigns in the Baltic, 1854 and 1855 179
14 The Caucasian battlefield, 1853–5 189
15 The minor theatres of war: the White Sea and the

Pacific 197
16 Allied war preparations for 1856 and the war council in

Paris, January 1856 205
Part Five The End of the War
17 The Paris peace congress, February–April 1856 215
18 The consequences of the war for international

relations 223
19 The medical services 229
Epilogue 253
Appendix: Chronology 255

Notes 259
Bibliography 271
General Index 285
ILLUSTRATIONS
1 ‘Consultation about the State of Turkey’. Napoleon III and an

English Minister brooding over the fate of ‘the sick man’. 5
2 A French soldier explaining Constantinople to a Cossack. 16
3 ‘Right against wrong’. 18
4 ‘The Four Points’. Britain, Turkey, Austria and France trying
to goad the Prussian King Frederick William IV into adopting
their war aims against Russia. 20
5 Russia – the ‘Colossus of the North’. 30
6 The Prussian King Frederick William IV declaring his
neutrality. He is shown as a tipsy man with a bottle of
champagne in his hand. 42
7 The Prussian King trying to get into the Vienna conference,
1855. 45
8 La Vivandière: a French canteen-keeper in full dress. 74
9 Recruitment of German soldiers on the island of Heligoland
in the North Sea. 85
10 Victory of the Alma. 131
11 Lord Raglan’s order to the Light Brigade in his own
handwriting. 139
12 The winter of 1854–5: the funny aspect. 151
13 The winter of 1854–5: the tragedy. 154
14 The Valley of the Shadow of Death. 160
15 Admiral Lord Napier returning home from the Baltic,
November 1854. 184
16 First page of a letter from Queen Victoria to Lord Clarendon. 207
17 The first page of the Treaty of Paris of 30 March 1856. 220
18 The General Hospital at Skutari on the Asian side of the
Bosphorus. 245
19 The Dragon (of war) devouring the soldiers. 249
vii
MAPS
1 European Russia, 1853–6. 13

2 The Danube front, 1853–4. 105
3 The Crimean campaign, 14 September 1854–8
September 1855. 126
4 The Battle of the Alma, 20 September 1854. 130
5 The Battle of Balaklava, 25 October 1854. 141
6 The Battle of Inkerman, 5 November 1854. 146
7 Sevastopol in the summer of 1855. 162
8 The war in the Baltic, 1854–5. 182
9 The war in the Caucasus, 1853–5. 191
10 The theatre of war in the Far East, 1854–5. 202
11 Russian losses under the Treaty of Paris, 1856. 225
viii
GENERAL EDITOR’S
PREFACE
The Crimean War is poorly named. The possession of the Black Sea peninsula
was never at issue, nor was the war fought exclusively within it. Russia’s bid
for suzerainty over Turkey, which precipitated the conflict, was at first
fought out on the Danube and later extended to the Caucasus. It was the
French and British who decided to focus their land operations on the Crimea.
The legacy to the English language – in William Howard Russell’s despatches
to The Times and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry – is at least one reason
why subsequent British perspectives have remained so narrowly focused.
But the navy, not the army, was Britain’s primary striking force in European
warfare in 1854, and not least as a result of these maritime capabilities the
war was extended into the Baltic, the White Sea and even the Pacific.
Winfried Baumgart’s title cannot avoid the geographical confines, but the
book’s contents range over all the war’s theatres. The wider implications
lead him to conclude that, if the fighting had carried on during 1856, ‘The
First World War would then have taken place 60 years earlier.’ Although
Britain began the war with comparatively limited objectives, when
Palmerston became Prime Minister in 1855 he saw ‘the real object of the
war’ as being ‘to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia’. He tried to create
an alliance which would constitute ‘a long line of circumvallation’ so as to
curb the westward expansion of the Tsarist Empire. In France, Napoleon III
was anxious to exploit the opportunity to reshuffle most of the major issues
of European politics, from Poland to Italy, and from Switzerland to Sweden.
In doing so he introduced the vocabulary of nationalism to international
relations, and gave voice to the secondary as well as the great powers of
Europe. Moreover, London’s discomfiture threatened to become Washington’s
opportunity. The great war which did not happen in the nineteenth century,
that between Britain and the United States for control of North America and
the Western hemisphere, could have merged with that between Britain and
Russia for mastery in the Mediterranean and Asia.
All these factors strained the Concert of Europe to breaking point, but in
the event the war was not fought on a broad European front; it remained
confined to theatres on the peripheries only of two continents, Europe and
Asia; and ultimately in 1856 the great powers sat down in congress to
broker a peace that – even if short of the ambition of Vienna – still paid
obeisance to the ideas of 1815. Thus diplomacy never lost its control over
the use of war as an instrument in power politics. It was for this reason
ix
x GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
above all that the conflict remained limited, that the fighting never assumed
(in the vocabulary of Clausewitz) its own logic as well as its own grammar.
Professor Baumgart is a master of the diplomatic correspondence which the
war generated. He shows above all how the power that stood to lose most
from the breakdown of the Concert of Europe, Austria, proved particularly
adroit in her pursuit of peace and in her resistance to revolution as an
instrument of war. She mobilized her army not as a preliminary to war but
as an adjunct to her foreign policy, and in the process levered Russia out of
the Danubian Principalities.
These were the actions of a conservative, not a revisionist, power.
Nonetheless, Professor Baumgart’s study points forward more than it points
backwards. If the Crimean War was in some respects a cabinet war, the
cabinets were not always in control. In Britain in particular, opinion, especially
as articulated by The Times, had a vital role in shaping and determining
policy. In France, Napoleon’s espousal of both nationalism and revolution
had similarly populist undertones. Even states with more backward economies
and less literate populations proved not insensitive to the pressures of street
politics: the Ottoman Empire itself responded to the call for a Holy War.
The pointers to 1914 are not simply political, they are also military. The
armies of 1854 saw the fighting on land as the tactical test of the rifle, newly
issued in place of the smooth-bore musket, and possessed of a range and
power of penetration which in due course would require infantry to use
cover and to disperse into looser formations. Even in the Crimea itself,
static, trench warfare prevailed. This was more a response to the siege of
Sevastopol than to the rifle, but it meant that artillery dominated the conduct
of the land war. The techniques of long, destructive bombardments, the
reactions of the Russians in defence, and the counters of the allies in attack
all prefigure the experiences of 1916.
In one very important respect, however, the fighting in the Crimea did not
anticipate that of the First World War. It did not institutionalize the mass
army. Professor Baumgart computes that Russia had 1.1 million men under
arms in 1853, and by 1856 had called up a total of over two million. Britain
and France put a maximum of only 400,000 soldiers into the field, and yet
they won the war. Moreover, even on the battlefield itself, most notably at
Inkerman, the big battalions did not always prevail. Russia failed, as Miliutin
realized at the time, in part because her army had to be equipped with the
latest weaponry and that in turn depended on industrialization. For the time
being the already industrialized powers concluded that new technology
could be a supplement to professional standards of training and (in the
British case) antiquated methods of recruiting, rather than a force multiplier
for a conscript army based on a large reserve. Moreover, the mass army
required the conquest of cholera and typhus to ensure its health, and the
advent of the railway to sustain its logistical support. In the Crimea, disease
remained the biggest killer and maritime communications still prevailed
over land routes.
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE xi
Yet the diminishing utility of navies in affecting the course of continental

warfare was only too evident. Maritime operations in the Baltic and elsewhere
achieved little in military terms. In the Crimea itself, Russian coastal batteries
prevailed over warships. Here too technology provided some solutions. Both
steam and screw came of age in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. As
significant was their potential marriage to armour: at Kinburn in the Black
Sea and at Sveaborg in the Baltic, ironclad floating batteries shattered shore
defences. Ideas also played their part. The notion of blockade as an instrument
of economic warfare between industrialized powers was enshrined in
international law in 1856 in the Treaty of Paris. Much of its thrust presumed
British neutrality, and was designed to preserve Britain’s trading position in
the event of a European war between other parties. However, the Royal
Navy’s actual conduct of coastal operations showed it was as willing to
engage civilian targets as the ultimate logic of a blockading strategy implied.
To suggest a straight line from 1854 to 1914 would be grotesque in its
oversimplification and use of hindsight, yet it remains remarkable that
military historians, particularly in the English language, have been reluctant
to look at the Crimean War in terms of modernity, preferring instead to refer
to the American Civil War. The battlefield technologies of the latter were
first deployed in the former. Not only for that reason but also for many
others, as Professor Baumgart shows, it is inappropriate to approach the
Crimean War with preconceptions derived from those of the Napoleonic
Wars and thus of half a century earlier.
Hew Strachan
PREFACE TO THE FIRST
EDITION
The Crimean War is the only general war of European dimensions in the 100
years between the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. Not only were
the five great European powers directly or indirectly (Austria, Prussia)
involved in it; but all the secondary states of Europe that had stayed neutral
– from Sweden to Greece and Sicily, from the German Confederation to
Portugal – had to face the issue of joining in or sitting precariously on the
fence. The war that was seemingly confined to the Crimea contained numerous
germs of a worldwide conflict: from the point of view of military strategy, it
was the first trench war of modern history; on the level of arms technology, it
pushed on the development of new instruments of war: the Minié rifle, mines,
armoured ships; in terms of war economy, it prefigured numerous methods of
economic warfare of the wars of the twentieth century; geographically
speaking, there were secondary theatres of war not only in northern Europe,
in the Baltic and in the White Sea, but also in the Pacific; the political
ramifications even extended to the American continent since it led to sharp
altercations between Britain and the United States; it even reached the
Australian continent which suffered for months from an invasion scare.
The most important question emanating from such a tour d’horizon is
why did the Crimean War not evolve into a world war? Why was world
peace maintained? In this respect the Crimean War must be regarded as an
unfinished or unfought world war and as a stepping stone leading indirectly
and directly to the First World War. Viewed in this light the most important
question about the history of international relations between 1856 and
1914 is how was the outbreak of a world war prevented in those decades?
In looking for an answer to this question, attention is naturally drawn to the
way the European Concert of the great powers was able to maintain peace,
to its crisis management by way of international congresses and conferences
and to the many war-in-sight crises after 1856. The investigation of the
devious road leading to the First World War can receive a fresh impulse not
by putting the question of why did the First World War break out in 1914,
but by asking why did it not break out sooner?
The intention of this small book is, first of all, to give a comprehensive
and succinct picture of the more important aspects of the Crimean War, and,
secondly, to strike the balance of 160 years of research on it. Although the
series in which this book is published is primarily devoted to the history of
warfare, the Crimean War is not only seen as a military contest between two
xii
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xiii
warring factions, but is also set in its political context. In this respect, the
author has the advantage of drawing from his experience of editing a multi-
volume documentation of the Crimean War. The war is set in the framework
of the most complicated international issue of the nineteenth century: the
Eastern question. As it was not only fought on the battlefield, but also around
the green table where representatives of the belligerents and non-belligerents
were meeting throughout the war, a chapter is devoted to the diplomatic
battle. All the belligerents had specific war aims. These are investigated, as
are the attitudes of the two German great powers, Austria and Prussia, which
were pressed hard by each war camp to join its side. Austria exerted great
military pains to mobilize her army and to keep the two camps away from
the Balkans. Austria’s military efforts forced the two sides to meet each other
on the periphery of Europe, on the Crimean peninsula.
Although all the secondary powers of Europe had, sooner or later, to make
up their minds as to which of the two camps to join, limitations of space
forbid an investigation of the situation of each of them. Therefore a selection
is made of those nearest geographically to the actual theatres of war – Sweden,
Greece, the minor German states – and of those which had a special military
and political potential – Spain and the United States. Finally attention is paid
to the military arsenal, the armies and navies, of the five belligerent powers,
Russia on one side, France, Great Britain, Turkey and Sardinia on the other.
The major part of the book is devoted to the theatres of the war: the
Danube front, the Crimea, the Baltic, the Caucasus and finally the White Sea
and the Pacific – areas which clearly indicate the dimensions of the conflict
and the aspects it would have assumed, if the Tsar had not made up his mind
in January 1856 to give up the war for lost.
It is typical of many books on the military history of the Crimean War
that they devote most or all of their attention to the Crimea only. It was
certainly the most important theatre of war where the military decision was
to be enforced. This book attempts to devote adequate space to all the other
secondary and minor theatres which actually existed.
Another characteristic typical of virtually all books on the military history
of the war is that they base their accounts primarily on the viewpoint of one
of the major belligerents – Russia, France or Great Britain. It seems that
authors drew their knowledge almost exclusively from one national source
only – Totleben and Bogdanovič in the case of Russia, Bazancourt in the case
of France, and Kinglake in that of Britain. Even modern accounts of one of
the major battles and of the siege of Sevastopol create the impression that
the authors must have described wholly different battles and subjects. The
author of this book therefore attempts to give a bird’s-eye view of the
warfare, and to draw a balance sheet of more than one century and a half of
historical research on the Crimean War.
PREFACE TO THE
SECOND EDITION
The second edition has been revised in manifold ways: although the core of
the book was retained, all chapters were brought up to date, especially in the
footnotes and the annotated bibliography, in view of the stupendous amount
of books and articles (more than fifty were used) that were published in the
twenty years that have elapsed since the first edition. A completely new
chapter (no. 19) was added about the medical services on both sides of the
war fronts, Allied and Russian, in conformity with the multifaceted and
multinational approach of the book. The final chapter (20), also new, offers
a bird’s-eye view of Crimean history from 1856 to the present. As the
structure of the book was not changed, a chronological table was added that
epitomizes the most important aspects of the diplomatic and military events
month by month from 1853 to 1856. Another new addition to the book are
the twenty-one cartoons and photographs which liven up the text in a
condensed form. Two more geographical maps were added to the existing
nine. The footnotes are numbered consecutively and placed at the end of the
text. The bibliography (monographs, published documents, articles) has
been completely revamped and made more user-friendly by being placed at
the end of the book in strict alphabetical order.
The second edition now mirrors more than 160 years of unabated
research about that most curious historical event – the Crimean War.
xiv
PART ONE
Origins and
Diplomacy of
the War
1
2
1
The real cause of the war –
the Eastern Question
The Crimean War is a direct outgrowth of the so-called Eastern Question.

This international issue preoccupied the chancelleries of the European great
powers for fully a century – from the Greek struggle for independence in the
1820s until the aftermath of the First World War. Although, as far as Turkey
is concerned, it could be regarded as formally closed after that war, it survives
until the present day in a number of related international problems in the
Near East, for example in the struggle about Palestine and in today’s Arab–
Israeli and Syrian conflicts; in the tensions between Greece and Turkey about
territorial waters and offshore islands; in the related conflict about Cyprus; in
the various tensions in the Balkans, amongst them the break-up of Yugoslavia;
in the Kurdish problem; and in the manifold disputes in the Caucasus. No
other diplomatic question occupied international relations in the nineteenth
century with such constancy and with so much inextricable tension as the
Eastern Question. In terms of statistics it produced a Russo-Turkish war every
twenty or twenty-five years in the period between Peter the Great and the
Eastern crisis of 1875–8. In the nineteenth century there were such wars in
1806, 1828, 1853 and 1877. Almost twenty years later a war did not break
out, in spite of the Armenian massacres of 1895–6, because Russia’s attention
was at that time focused on the Far East. Twenty years after that the two
Balkan wars which led directly to the First World War broke out, pointing
once more to the highly explosive character of the Eastern Question.
Each of these Russo-Turkish wars ended, with the exception of the
Crimean War, with victory for Russia and a corresponding loss of territory
by Turkey. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Black Sea was a
Turkish inland sea surrounded on all sides by Turkish-held territory. Turkey
had to give up this area bit by bit until 200 years later she only retained the
southern shores of the Black Sea, including, however, the strategic Straits –
Russia’s old dream.
What does the Eastern Question mean? Put in a nutshell, it is the aggregate
of all the problems connected with the withdrawal and the rollback of the
Ottoman Empire from the areas which it had conquered since 1354 in
3
4 THE CRIMEAN WAR: 1853–1856
Europe, Africa and Asia. In terms of geography it was a huge and imposing
empire that the Ottoman sultans had hammered together on these three
continents through war and conquest. The climax of their external power
was reached in the seventeenth century. Their gradual retreat began with the
defeat in 1683 at the siege of Vienna and with the Peace of Karlowitz in 1699,
which for the first time forced the Turks to give up territory (Hungary and
Transylvania) which they had conquered. During the course of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries and as a consequence of the First World War the
Ottoman Empire gave up the whole Balkan peninsula except a small stretch
round Adrianople, the territories on the northern shore of the Black Sea with
the Crimea in the centre, the Caucasus region, North Africa from Algeria to
Egypt, the whole Arab peninsula and Mesopotamia up to the Persian Gulf.
The Eastern Question only became an international problem in the 1820s
when all of the five European great powers became interested in it. In the
preceding decades only the two neighbouring powers, Russia and Austria,
profited from the withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire.
Looking into the causes of the Eastern Question, three main layers can be
discerned: the internal decay of the Ottoman Empire; its weakening through
the explosive nationalism which the Balkan peoples developed in the
nineteenth century – followed by the peoples in the Near East and North
Africa in the twentieth century – all of whom struggled to free themselves
from Turkish dominion; and finally the intervention of the European great
powers in this process of disintegration.
For the first two causes a few remarks must suffice. There is first of all the
geographical overstraining which resulted from the Ottoman conquests: in
the end it became more and more difficult to control the periphery from the
centre. Next there is the heterogeneous ethnic and religious composition of
the conquered peoples. Eventually the Turks as the master race made up
only a third of the whole population. The economic structure of the empire
was weak, the administration became more and more inefficient and venality
and corruption were widespread at all levels. The system of collecting taxes
was harsh and arbitrary and constantly led to unrest. At the top of the
empire’s administration the system of succession degenerated when the
eldest member of the Sultan’s family succeeded to the throne having waded
through a welter of blood and murder. The army became increasingly unruly
and unwieldy. The crack unit of janissaries developed as a state within the
state. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Sultan and his
government started reforms. In 1826 the rebellious janissaries, amounting
to several thousands, were literally wiped out in one night. British and
Prussian officers were engaged to reform the army. In 1839 the Sultan issued
a firman decreeing legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims (rayahs), but
in practice this important edict existed only on paper and the other reforms
did not go beneath the surface of the problems.
In addition to these symptoms of internal decay there was the disrupting
force of nationalism, which permeated the Balkan peoples from the beginning
THE REAL CAUSE OF THE WAR – THE EASTERN QUESTION 5
of the nineteenth century. The Serbs were the first to wrest one piece of
autonomy after another from the Turks until in 1878 they obtained their
independence under the guarantee of Europe. The Greeks followed suit, and,
after a prolonged war in which the European powers intervened, became
independent in 1830 under the protection of Russia, France and Britain. The
Rumanians, first with the help of the Russians, then after the Crimean War
aided by France and exploiting dissension among the great powers, obtained
self-government step by step until they, too, became independent in 1878.
The third main cause of the disruption of the Ottoman Empire, probably
the decisive one, was the intervention of the European great powers. As
already mentioned, the destiny of the Ottoman Empire, which was spread
over three continents and held, along with the Turkish Straits, the strategic
routes to Asia, possessing the isthmus of Suez, Mesopotamia and the Persian
Gulf, became an object of general European interest in the 1820s. In those
years the term ‘Eastern Question’ was coined, as was the phrase ‘the sick
man on the Bosphorus’ who would not survive long and for whose death all
should take precautions, in view of his huge inheritance.
FIGURE 1 ‘Consultation about the State of Turkey’. Napoleon III and an English
Minister brooding over the fate of ‘the sick man’. Punch 25 (1853), p. 118. University
Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
The interests of Russia as Turkey’s direct neighbour consisted of a mixture

of territorial, strategic, economic and religious motives. The Russians had
tried to gain access to the ‘warm seas’ (the Sea of Azov, the Black Sea and the
Mediterranean) since the time of Peter the Great. After each war with the
Turks they made progress, until in 1783 they obtained the Crimea as a
springboard to Constantinople and founded Sevastopol as the finest harbour
in the world; in 1829, by virtue of the Peace of Adrianople, they occupied the
mouths of the Danube and various positions on the eastern shores of the
Black Sea. Odessa was founded as a commercial harbour for the exportation
of grain from southern Russia and the Russian government became interested
in untrammelled transit through the Straits. In the 1830s, during Mehemet
Ali’s struggle with the Sultan, the Holy Places in Palestine were opened up to
Christians for the first time for centuries. Russia, her Orthodox Church and
the Tsar as its head developed a special interest in the Holy Places, beginning
with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. From the 1830s onward,
Russian Orthodox pilgrims were foremost among the Europeans to visit
Jerusalem and Bethlehem. A rivalry of all Christian churches developed in
Palestine. This religious fervour caused the respective governments of the
European powers to gain a political foothold in this area. Great Britain
especially grew suspicious of Russia’s religious activities, since they were
harbingers of future political influence in an area that lay across one of the
lifelines to Britain’s Indian Empire.
Since the eighteenth century, Austria had watched Russia’s forward push
south into the Balkans with mounting apprehension. Under Metternich she
pursued a policy of preserving the weak Ottoman Empire since it granted as
much security as a sea, whereas the rising power of Russia would dwarf her
own position in the area. Territorial gains in the Balkans would benefit
Russia but not Austria, and nationalism spreading among the Turkish-held
Balkan peoples might endanger peace and tranquillity in Austria’s own
multinational empire. Metternich’s maxim of upholding the integrity of the
Ottoman Empire was maintained by his successors in Vienna.
Great Britain had developed a massive interest in the destiny of the
Ottoman Empire during the Greeks’ struggle for independence in the 1820s.
In the 1830s – since 1833, to be more precise, that is, after the Treaty of
Unkiar Skelessi which gave Russia a protectorate over Turkey, then
threatened by Mehemet Ali – Britain proclaimed the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire to be of vital interest to her. This became a fundamental principle of
British foreign policy for the rest of the century. The main reasons for this
were strategic, political and commercial.
With the advent of steam shipping and railways, from the 1820s the old
routes through the Levant to the Far East, and to India especially, which had
fallen into disuse, were rediscovered because they saved time and money
compared with the route around the Cape of Good Hope. In the 1830s,
land-surveying companies bustled in Syria and Mesopotamia and bandied
about proposals for building railways. Russia’s forward thrust south to the
Turkish Straits was felt to be dangerous to the security of these lines of

communication. In these years British public opinion, whipped up by the
rabidly Russophobe David Urquhart, developed strong anti-Russian feelings.
Finally, the Ottoman Empire became important by leaps and bounds as a
market for British industrial products, especially textiles, and also as a
source of raw materials and foodstuffs, foremost among them grain from
the Danubian Principalities. Freedom of passage on the lower Danube, the
mouths of which – the arm of St Kilia – the Russians deliberately failed to
dredge in order to favour the development of their own harbour of Odessa,
became a capital British interest. Through the commercial Treaty of Balta
Liman of 1838, the Turkish market was thrown open to British commercial
enterprise. It has been calculated that British exports to Turkey rose by 800
per cent between 1825 and 1852, and British imports from Turkey rose
almost twofold. Thus from the 1830s a deep-seated antagonism developed
between Britain and Russia in the Levant and in the Balkans and lasted until
the First World War. Further to the east it became simultaneously intertwined
with the ‘Great Game for Asia’.
France’s interest in the Ottoman Empire is the oldest among the European
great powers. It dates back to the sixteenth century when Francis I, ‘the most
Christian king’, allied himself with the head of Islam against the Catholic
Habsburgs. The Franco-Turkish treaty of 1535, renewed in 1740, formed the
basis of close relations. It granted consular jurisdiction (extraterritoriality) to
France over her nationals in the Ottoman Empire – a privilege which was
eventually extended to other European countries. During Napoleon I’s
expedition to Egypt in 1798, which was directed against Britain’s position in
India, French interest in the Ottoman Empire was upgraded politically and
strategically. After Nelson’s victory at Abukir a strong rivalry developed in
the Levant between France and Britain, but it was not as deep-seated as the
corresponding Anglo-Russian competition and was interrupted by periods
of cooperation. Still, it remained alive below the surface throughout the
nineteenth century. After Napoleon III came to power, France’s interest in the
Ottoman Empire was once more outspoken. In his domestic policy the Prince
President and Emperor chose to lean on the Catholic Church and therefore
turned his attention to the Holy Places in Palestine which had, since the
eighteenth century, fallen more and more under the influence of the Orthodox
Church, the protector and head of which was the Russian Tsar.
The interest that Prussia took in the fate of the Ottoman Empire was
marginal, but by no means negligible. In 1829 she mediated the Russo-
Turkish Peace of Adrianople. In the 1840s the romantic and flamboyant King
Frederick William IV took a personal interest in the Holy Places and even
managed, by a remarkable cooperation with the British government and the
Church of England, to establish a common Anglo-Prussian bishopric in
Jerusalem in order to proselytize among the Muslim and Jewish population
there. The fate of the Ottoman Empire, however, was a matter of indifference
to him. During the Crimean War he, his government and court circles in
Berlin tried to exploit Austria’s predicament in order to make gains on

German territory, that is, to strengthen Prussia’s standing in Germany and
correspondingly weaken Austria’s position. This was a maxim which
Bismarck later took up under changed circumstances: he used and manipulated
the strong interests of the other four powers in the Eastern Question to
further Germany’s interest in Central Europe. This was a very cunning and
remunerative game until at the end of the century, Germany, to her eventual
detriment, became directly involved in Balkan and Near Eastern affairs.
Annotated bibliography
The Eastern Question has been a favourite subject for historians of
international relations for decades. Among older books, two classics should
be mentioned: John A. R. Marriott, The Eastern Question: An Historical
Study in European Diplomacy (Oxford, 1917, 4th edn 1940, repr. 1968),
and Jacques Ancel, Manuel historique de la question d’Orient, 1792–1923
(Paris, 1923, 3rd edn 1927). A superb modern handbook is Matthew S.
Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International
Relations (London, 1966, repr. Basingstoke, 1987). For the Balkan area the
best guide is Leften S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (New York,
1958). It has a good bibliography, was long out of print and has fortunately
been reprinted in 2000 and 2005.
For Turkey, a modern textbook is Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw,
History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge,
1977). A masterful, compact paperback is Roderic H. Davison, Turkey
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1968); all following editions have the title Turkey: A
Short History (Walkington and Beverley, 1981; an updated 3rd edn
Huntingdon, 1998). For the period of Turkey’s Westernization, a pioneering
study is Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961,
3rd edn 2002). The reform period in the second half of the nineteenth
century is discussed by Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire,
1856–1876 (Princeton, NJ, 1963, repr. New York, 1973).
There is no English language book on Russia’s interest in the Eastern
Question. One has to turn to a Russian study: Vostočnyj vopros vo vnešnej
politike Rossii konec XVIII – načalo XX v., ed. Nina S. Kinjapina et al.
(Moscow, 1978). Russia’s policy in the Balkans is dealt with by Barbara
Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan Entanglements, 1806–1914 (Cambridge, 1991,
repr. 1993). Europe’s newly awakened interest in the Holy Land (Palestine
and Syria) in the 1830s and 1840s is well covered: Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, The
Rediscovery of the Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century (Jerusalem, 1979,
3rd edn 1983); Derek Hopwood, The Russian Presence in Syria and Palestine
1843–1914: Church and Politics in the Near East (London, 1969); Abdul
Latif Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800–1901: A Study of Religious
and Educational Enterprise (London, 1961); Alex Carmel, Christen als
Pioniere im Heiligen Land. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pilgermission

und des Wiederaufbaus Palästinas im 19. Jahrhundert (Basel, 1981); Abdel-
Raouf Sinno, Deutsche Interessen in Syrien und Palästina 1841–1898.
Aktivitäten religiöser Institutionen, wirtschaftliche und politische Einflüsse
(Berlin, 1982). A revisonist article on the importance of the Holy Land for
Russia is Jack Fairey, ‘Russia’s Quest for the Holy Grail: Relics, Liturgies,
and Great Power Politics in the Ottoman Empire’, in Russian-Ottoman
Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered, ed. in Lucien J. Frary and
Mara Kozelsky, 131–64 (Madison, WI, and London, 2014). See also the
same author’s well-documented study: Jack Fairey, The Great Powers and
Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of
the Crimean War (Basingstoke, 2015).
On Austria’s interest in the Eastern Question there is only the antiquated
study by Adolf Beer, Die orientalische Politik Österreichs seit 1774 (Prague
and Leipzig, 1883).
Britain’s policy is much better covered: Gerald D. Clayton, Britain and the
Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli (London, 1971); Frank E. Bailey,
British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement: A Study in Anglo-Turkish
Relations, 1826–1853 (Cambridge, MA, 1942, repr. New York 1970);
Harold Temperley, England and the Near East: The Crimea (London and
Toronto, 1925, repr. Hamden, CT, 1964). The latter book does not go beyond
the outbreak of the Crimean War. The importance of the Turkish Empire as
a link in Britain’s lines of communication with India is well covered by
Halford L. Hoskins, British Routes to India (London, 1928, repr. 1966).
There are at least two good studies on the importance of public opinion in
Britain with regard to Russia’s bid for Constantinople: John H. Gleason, The
Genesis of Russophobia in Great Britain: A Study of the Interaction of Policy
and Opinion (Cambridge, MA, 1950); Hans-Jobst Krautheim, Öffentliche
Meinung und imperiale Politik. Das britische Rußlandbild 1815–1854
(Berlin, 1977). Britain’s economic penetration of the Ottoman Empire after
the introduction of free trade in 1838 is analysed by Vernon J. Puryear,
International Economics and Diplomacy in the Near East: A Study of British
Commercial Policy in the Levant, 1834–1853 (Stanford, CA, 1935, repr.
Hamden, CT, 1968). A collection of relevant essays is J. A. Petrosjan (ed.),
Vnešneėkonomičeskie svjazi Osmanskoj imperii v novoe vremja (konec
XVIII–načalo XX v.) (Moscow, 1989). Puryear also stresses Anglo-Russian
policy and commercial rivalry to explain the Crimean War in his book
England, Russia, and the Straits Question, 1844–1856 (Berkeley, CA, 1931,
repr. Hamden, CT, 1965). A broader European approach is furnished by
Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913:
Trade, Investment, and Production (Cambridge, 1987).
France’s role in the Eastern Question in the nineteenth century is dealt
with in the book by Ancel mentioned above and by Alyce Edith Mange, The
Near Eastern Policy of the Emperor Napoleon III (Urbana, IL, 1940, repr.
Westport, CT, 1975).
10
2
Diplomacy during the war,
1853–6
Given these preliminary remarks on the Eastern Question, it is not difficult

to fathom the real causes of the Crimean War – although they are complex
enough. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a résumé of the diplomacy of
the war from its outbreak until the beginning of the Paris peace congress.
The Crimean War took a long time to get started. The preliminary phase
lasted from 1850 to the early months of 1853, and the hot phase of fragile
peace took fully a year from the spring of 1853 to March 1854 to develop
into an outright European war. In contrast to the great wars of the twentieth
century, but in common with most European wars in modern history up to
the nineteenth century, the outbreak of the Crimean War did not stop the
frantic and continuous diplomatic activities of the belligerent powers.
Although diplomatic relations were severed in February 1854, the three
great belligerent powers – Russia on the one side, Great Britain and France
on the other – kept up a close, though indirect, diplomatic contact through
the two German powers, Austria and Prussia. In different ways the latter
managed to stay out of the war, although at various moments they seemed to
be or actually were on the brink of joining the fray. At one time, during the
Vienna peace conference of March–June 1855, the three belligerents even
unwillingly sat together round the peace table which was arranged for them
by Austria. During these conferences there was no cessation of hostilities; the
guns kept on roaring on the southernmost tip of the Crimean peninsula.
Another curious trait of the war is that it was mainly fought in a faraway
peripheral theatre, the Crimea, where it could hardly be hoped that a final
and decisive military solution would be brought about. The war thus never
developed into a frontal war between the two sides, with the one side caving
in militarily and the other then dictating peace terms. At the beginning of the
war, that is during the preliminary Russo-Turkish war, there was the classical
broad front, the lower Danube. When the Western armies eventually
approached that front, the Russians evacuated it, not through the impending
pressure of the Allied armies, but because a non-belligerent, Austria, had
contrived to force the Russian troops out of the Danubian Principalities
through diplomatic pressure backed by an army on the frontier intent on
11
marching in if diplomacy did eventually fail. For a short time, everybody in

Europe expected Austria to become involved in hostilities. The spectacle of
a victorious army retreating before the weight of an army not officially at
war but assembling on its flank was almost unbelievable.
Another curious fact about the Crimean War is the relative military
strength of the two parties. In terms of numbers only, Russia, at the height
of the war, had an army of two million on her soil whereas the Western
Allies, at the peak of their military involvement (February 1856), mustered
only a tenth of that strength, that is, roughly 200,000. The main reason
Russia eventually gave in after the loss of part of the fortress of Sevastopol
was the painful prospect of other European countries becoming involved on
the opposite side: Austria first of all; then, against her will, Prussia; finally
Sweden, who, after playing a long waiting game, finally made up her mind
to enter the fray.
Thus at the turn of 1855–6 the Crimean War, fought on the tip of a
peripheral peninsula, was on the verge of escalating into a full-scale European
war with the prospect of becoming worldwide: in the Western hemisphere
the United States was at loggerheads with Great Britain, severed her
diplomatic relations with that country in the spring of 1856 and would very
probably have entered the war on Russia’s side in order to gobble up Britain’s
and Spain’s possessions in North America (Canada), the Caribbean (Cuba)
and Central America (Honduras).
Thus the Crimean War bore the germs of a world war. It would have
become a struggle between the great powers for the redistribution of power
in Europe and North America. The interesting question is therefore, why did
it not evolve into a world war? Why did it end at the threshold of becoming
universal? The answer is the force of diplomacy or, in other words, the
functioning of the European Concert, though it had been badly shaken by
the revolutions of 1848–9 and almost collapsed through Russia’s bid for
hegemony in the Near East in 1853.
To turn back to the Ottoman Empire, the prelude to the Crimean War
was the so-called ‘monks’ dispute’ in the Holy Places of Palestine. In itself
this was a petty and absurd affair of only local relevance. However, because
the claims of the Catholics there were now supported by France, and to a
lesser degree also by Austria, and since the Orthodox claims were backed by
Russia, the dispute quickly assumed international dimensions. It was about
such questions as who was to be in possession of the keys to the Church and
Grotto of Nativity in Bethlehem, who had the right to restore the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and so on. After two years of pressure from
the French government, the Sultan in Constantinople granted wide-ranging
rights to the Catholics in the Holy Land which were embodied in a firman
of 9 February 1852. As they collided with concessions which he had
simultaneously made to the Greek Orthodox monks, the local dispute was
transported to Constantinople as well as to Paris and St Petersburg, and
thus evolved into an international affair.
DIPLOMACY DURING THE WAR, 1853–6 13
MAP 1 European Russia, 1853–6.
Although there was no such thing as public opinion in Russia in the

Western European sense, a religious dispute of this sort was sure to whip up
resentment and passions among the Russian people. Capping everything,
there was a personal pique which the Russian Tsar harboured towards
Napoleon III. Since the advent of the July Monarchy in 1830, Nicholas I
had regarded France as the hotbed of revolution. When Louis Napoleon
came to power through popular election in 1848 and usurped the title
of emperor in December 1852, Nicholas’s disgust knew no bounds. When all

the other great powers of Europe, starting with Britain and ending with
conservative Austria and Prussia, recognized the new form of government
in France, the Tsar deliberately slighted Napoleon by addressing him as
‘Cher ami’ instead of ‘Mon frère’, the usual salutation among European
sovereigns. The crisis soon died down, but it pushed the French emperor into
an anti-Russian mood.
There were two other affairs originating on the Russian side which
complicated the political situation in Europe during the first months of
1853 without their being founded on deliberate warmongering. At the
end of December 1852 a new coalition government was formed in Britain.
It consisted of Whigs and Peelites with the peaceful Aberdeen as Prime
Minister. Nicholas had met Aberdeen in 1844 during a state visit to Britain
and had come to a gentleman’s agreement with him on the need to consult
each other about the fate of Turkey. Seizing the opportunity of the new
Aberdeen government, Nicholas had a number of conversations with the
British envoy to his court, Sir George Hamilton Seymour, during January
and February 1853. The gist of these perhaps somewhat unguarded
comments was that the Tsar stated his belief that the ‘sick man’ was on the
verge of dying and should be properly interred. His utterances culminated
in the proposal to create the Danubian Principalities and Bulgaria as
independent states under Russian protection, to give Serbia and the
Herzegovina as a sop to Austria, and to offer Egypt and Crete to Britain.
His offer to Austria was addressed a little later in a personal letter to the
Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph. The Tsar’s offer amounted to a grandiose
plan for the partition of the Ottoman Empire, leaving Constantinople
outside of the bargain by setting it up as a ‘free city’. As for Austria, the Tsar
trusted to the gratitude which he thought he was owed for Russia’s aid in
suppressing the Hungarian revolution of 1849.
Although Britain’s reply was evasive, it held out, in the spirit of the
agreement of 1844, the prospect of mutual consultations in case the Turkish
Empire collapsed. Nicholas was, for the time being, quite happy with this
general promise from London. The turn which events took, however, made
him feel disappointed when he saw the promise was not being kept. One
year later he felt personally cheated when the British government, in March
1854, published his intimate confessions in a blue book, which led to a
public outcry in Britain. It was a gross error on the side of the Tsar to believe
that foreign policy decisions in Britain were taken by the monarch and his
government. He simply did not know how government worked in Britain:
what the parliamentary system meant, that in matters of foreign policy there
was a complicated system of checks and balances between Crown, Cabinet
and Parliament, and that far-reaching promises for the future could never be
made by a British government. The Tsar’s ignorance had fateful consequences.
Seymour’s verdict on the Tsar in one of his reports published a year later, that
he was a scheming hypocrite, did not do the Tsar justice, but hurt him deeply.
Nicholas made another foolish mistake at the same time that his
conversations with Seymour took place: the famous Menshikov mission
to Constantinople. It was induced by a similar action on Austria’s side, the
so-called Leiningen mission. At the beginning of February 1853 the latter
resulted, after the delivery of an ultimatum, in a speedy removal of grievances
which Austria complained of in Montenegro, among them the cessation of
frontier disputes between Turks and Montenegrins. The Tsar thereupon sent
Admiral Alexander S. Menshikov to Constantinople at the end of February.
Ostensibly Menshikov was directed to conclude a convention with Turkey
in which the privileges of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Places were to
be renewed and guaranteed. In this way another scene in the protracted tug-
of-war about the status of the Christian denominations was enacted in the
Holy Land.
In reality the Menshikov mission inaugurated the first hot phase leading
to the Crimean War. It lasted from Menshikov’s arrival at Constantinople at
the end of February until the beginning of July when Russia, after the failure
of the mission, occupied the Danubian Principalities in order to enforce her
demands upon Turkey. The next phase witnessed repeated attempts at
mediation by the other four great powers of Europe and was ended by
Turkey declaring war on Russia on 4 October 1853. A third phase followed
in which still more attempts at solving the Russo-Turkish dispute were made
in various conferences in Vienna, a phase in which both Russia and the two
Western powers tried hard to win the two German powers over to their side.
It ended with both powers declaring war on Russia: Britain on 27 March
and France on 28 March 1854.
What were Menshikov’s demands, which set in motion the chain of
events which led to the outbreak of war?
Besides the open demand to re-establish the privileged status of the
Orthodox religion, there was a far-reaching political instruction of which
Menshikov was the bearer and which he was to put forward in strict
secrecy: the demand to conclude a protective treaty along the lines of the
Treaty of Unkiar Skelessi. This was a demand which was certain to leak
out sooner or later and which the other great powers, Britain primarily,
simply could not and would not accept. The Tsar’s worst miscalculation
was that he believed Britain would acquiesce in Russia’s ascendancy in the
Levant. When Menshikov realized that this political demand was refused –
although the religious one was accepted – he departed from Constantinople.
After another ultimatum from St Petersburg which the Turkish court and
government (the Porte), by now sure of French and British support,
disregarded, Russian troops crossed the Pruth on 2 July 1853 and occupied
the Turkish Danubian Principalities as a gage to enforce the demands of
the Tsar.
After Menshikov’s spectacular departure from Constantinople, the British
Cabinet made up its mind to send the Mediterranean fleet to Besika Bay at
the entrance of the Dardanelles. Napoleon III had preceded Britain’s step
FIGURE 2 A French soldier explaining Constantinople to a Cossack. Cartoon by

E. Bich. Courtesy of Archives du Ministère des Affaires étrangères, collection
iconographique.
and sent his fleet from Toulon to the island of Salamis in Greece to await
further orders. Both fleets assembled in Besika Bay on 13 and 14 June. Thus
the screws were further tightened towards war. During the rest of the year,
eleven peace proposals were hammered out in Vienna, but were obstinately
refused by either Turkey or Russia. The most important one was the Vienna
note of 31 July 1853 in which the Ottoman government was to promise
Russia that it would abide by the religious articles of the treaties of Kutchuk-
Kainardji of 1774 and of Adrianople of 1829, and that it would not alter the
religious status quo in Palestine without the previous understanding of both
France and Russia.
In Constantinople, a war-like spirit arose among religious leaders,
students of theology and the general population, who called for a ‘holy war’
against Russia. It was heightened when the Egyptian fleet arrived in the
Bosphorus. In the end it was this outbreak of Turkish public opinion which
led to the Turkish declaration of war on Russia on 4 October 1853. It was
not, as many contemporaries, foremost among them the Tsar, and many
historians to the present day maintain, the secret doings and the alleged
warmongering of the British ambassador, Stratford de Redcliffe.
The local war on the Danube and in the Caucasus had now broken
out, but it did not automatically lead to the European war, which took
another six months to come about. The decisive turn of events in this phase
was the so-called ‘massacre of Sinope’ of 30 November 1853. This is a
misnomer for a ‘normal’ act of war. On that day a number of Turkish
warships conveying supplies from Constantinople to the Caucasus front had
taken refuge in the harbour of Sinope on the north-eastern coast of Turkey.
They were attacked by superior Russian forces under Admiral Pavel S.
Nakhimov and sunk within a few hours. The only remaining ship brought
the news of the disaster to Constantinople whence it was forwarded to the
European capitals, part of the distance by way of the telegraph. It reached
London on 11 December and caused a storm of public indignation which
swept away what resistance remained in the British Cabinet against military
intervention on the side of Turkey. That a large part of the Turkish navy was
annihilated by the Russians while the Royal Navy was riding at anchor in
Besika Bay, within easy reach of Sinope, seemed almost unbearable. At the
end of December 1853 the British and French squadrons were ordered to
pass through the Straits and enter the Black Sea to force any Russian man-
of-war to return to Sevastopol.
Again public opinion, rather than a political decision or non-decision,
played a key role in the progression towards war. Since the 1830s and the
days of Unkiar Skelessi, a strong Russophobia had built up in Britain,
kindled by Russia’s southward expansion towards the Turkish Straits and
Persia, and fuelled by the Russian army steamrollering the struggle for
freedom of the Poles (1831) and the Hungarians (1849). A crusading spirit
was whipped up in Britain and among liberal public opinion elsewhere in
Central and Western Europe against Russia as the seat of autocracy and
tyranny. The Sultan, no less an autocrat in his empire than the Tsar, was
eulogized as the paragon of tolerance and freedom and as the victim of the
Russian bear.
The leading vehicle of this rabid Russophobia in Britain was the press,
especially The Times. As Kingsley Martin has shown, this paper literally
forced the Cabinet to close ranks and help Turkey, which was lying prostrate
in front of the Russian bear. The official history of The Times may appear
arrogant when it says, ‘The paper might claim to have made the war … it
had been largely responsible for the Crimean campaign that had brought
victory in the end; it had “saved the remnant of an army”; it had destroyed
one Ministry and forced important changes in another; and it had caused
the removal of a Commander-in-Chief.’1 These assertions refer to the
decision to enter the war; the transfer of the theatre of war from the Danube
to the Crimea; the exposure of the utter breakdown of the supply and
sanitary systems during the ‘Crimean winter’ of 1854–5; the collapse of the
Aberdeen government in January 1855, and the replacement of the
Commander-in-Chief Sir James Simpson by General Sir William Codrington
in October 1855. But The Times’ historian is not far off the mark:
FIGURE 3 ‘Right against wrong’. Punch 26 (1854), p. 143. University Library of

Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Russophobia in Britain and the demands of public opinion are two major
reasons for Britain’s entry into and conduct in the war. To sum up, the
outbreak of the Crimean War is a chain of many links: of mistakes,
miscalculations, misunderstandings, of false charges and irrational phobias
and passions, less of cool calculations and ill will. The British Foreign
Secretary, Lord Clarendon, was right when he said ‘that we [were] drifting
towards war’.2
Sinope and the Franco-British decision to send warships into the Black Sea
made war almost inevitable, yet it took another three months for the two
maritime powers to declare war on Russia, on 27 and 28 March 1854. As is
customary among partners fighting together in a war, the two Western powers
and Turkey concluded a treaty of alliance on 10 April 1854. Besides the usual
stipulations of restoring peace by common efforts and consultations, Britain

and France proclaimed themselves to be fighting for the integrity of Turkey
and the European balance of power. These two general war aims, harmless in
themselves, point to the intention of the Western powers to oust Russia from
the Principalities and to help Turkey oppose any further Russian advance
southwards to Constantinople. It was therefore obvious that any Western
armies sent to the east would assemble near the Turkish capital or at a port
to the north. Another important aspect of the treaty is that the principle of
the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was considered as part and parcel of the
general balance of power in Europe. A third point is that other European
powers not yet at war were invited to join Britain and France (art. 5).
This article was mainly directed towards the two German great powers,
which, if they remained neutral, would shield Russia from any direct attack
from the west. The early months of 1854 witnessed a frantic struggle
between Russia and the maritime powers to win Prussia and Austria to their
respective sides. Russia could justifiably hope for active sympathy and
support from her two conservative allies, members of the Holy Alliance. The
Tsar was mistaken in his expectation that Austria would be grateful for the
decisive aid he had rendered her in 1849 in crushing the Hungarian
revolution. Both German powers were, as we will see in a later chapter,
averse to joining the fray on Nicholas’s side because they regarded his
occupation of the Danubian Principalities as a rash and ruthless act
productive of revolutionary uprisings in the Balkans, in Poland and
elsewhere. Thus there was some chance of the Western powers’ invitation to
join them being accepted by Prussia and Austria. The Prussian King, however,
decided against the willingness of his government to close ranks with Britain
and France, and on 27 February 1854 proclaimed his ‘sovereign neutrality’
and turned down the Western proposal.3
Austria, on the other hand, as the power more closely interested in the
maintenance of the status quo in the Balkans, was all for joining the Western
powers. The simple calculation was that the Tsar, confronted with the united
resistance of four of the five great powers of Europe, would think twice
before crossing the Danube and would even yield to the demand to evacuate
the Principalities and restore the status quo ante in the East. With Prussia
backing out, the Tsar’s attitude stiffened, thus making a great-power struggle
almost inevitable. As Frederick William felt that he was in a false and
isolated position – only certain circles at court leaned towards Russia while
public opinion was more or less in favour of the Western powers – he agreed
on a treaty with Austria promising to defend her if she were attacked by
Russia while the latter was being forced out of the Principalities. This
‘defensive and offensive treaty’ of 20 April 1854 between the two German
powers was, however, a dead letter as soon as the ink was dry.
Austria decided to go it alone and on 3 June summoned the Russians to
evacuate the Principalities or be compelled to do so by force of arms jointly
with the Western powers. After many tergiversations the Russians gave in,
FIGURE 4 ‘The Four Points’. Britain, Turkey, Austria and France trying to goad
the Prussian King Frederick William IV into adopting their war aims against Russia.
Punch 28 (1855), p. 25. University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
and on 7 August 1854 declared that they would evacuate the Principalities
for strategic reasons.
Only one day later, on 8 August, the two Western powers and Austria
exchanged notes which contained their general war aims in the famous
‘Four Points’ in Vienna. Austria, which had mobilized her army and massed
it on the frontiers of Galicia and Transylvania, in the flank of the Russian
army of occupation, seemed to be on the brink of entering the war. Prussia
had partly excluded herself from the talks in Vienna leading to the Four
Points; in part she was excluded by the other three powers because of her
constant hesitation and her only lukewarm support. The Four Points were
the public war aims of France, Britain and Austria. By signing them, Austria,
not yet at war with Russia, showed Europe unequivocally which side she
was on. She made it clear to Russia that their political ties had been severed
and that if the Four Points were not accepted by Russia, Austria would
finally enter the war.
The first point stated that Russia should give up her protectorate over
Wallachia, Moldavia and Serbia and that they should henceforth be placed
under the guarantee of all the great powers. The second point stipulated that
the mouths of the Danube should be free from all obstructions. The third point
was of the utmost importance; it would later be the greatest obstacle on the
road to peace. It was, as it were, the pivotal point of the Crimean War and was,
in its vague wording, open to much interpretation: the treaty of 13 July 1841,
which all the five great powers and Turkey had signed and which stipulated the
closure of the Turkish Straits to warships in times of peace, should be revised
‘in the interest of the European balance of power’. The fourth point related to
the immediate cause of war: Russia was to relinquish her claim to protect the
Orthodox population of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians of the Empire
were to be placed under the protection of the great powers.4
It is obvious that points one and two were of primary importance to
Austria. Point two was also of special interest to Great Britain because of
her desire for free access to the Principalities as a grain-exporting region.
Point three was of almost exclusive interest to Britain. France, apart from
point four which was of instrumental relevance to Napoleon’s internal
policy, was thus the power with the least interest in the Four Points as such.
In order to step up her pressure on Russia, Austria had concluded a
convention with the Turkish government on 14 June 1854 (at Boyadji-Köi),
in which she obtained the right to drive the Russians out of the Principalities
and to occupy them temporarily by force of arms. The exchange of notes of
8 August 1854 was originally meant to be a convention or even a treaty of
alliance between the three powers. Such a treaty was in fact concluded after
much diplomatic haggling on 2 December 1854. Russia had tried, although
belatedly, to prevent Austria from closing ranks with the Western powers by
proclaiming, on 28 November, that she would accept the Four Points as a
basis for peace negotiations. The tripartite negotiations were conducted in
strict secrecy. Russia’s acceptance of the Four Points did not stop the treaty’s
conclusion, which burst on Europe like a bombshell. It marked the climax of
Austrian cooperation with the Western powers and included a statement to
the effect that more could be added to the four war aims, without explaining
what this might mean in detail. Austria engaged to protect the Principalities
against a return of Russian troops. If Austria found itself at war with Russia
as a result of this engagement, the three powers promised to conclude a
military alliance. The stipulation which proved to be the most controversial
and the most illusory was article V, which said that unless peace was secure
by the end of the year – that is, within four weeks! – the three powers would
consult each other on new measures to obtain their common aims.
Count Buol, the Austrian Foreign Minister, managed to persuade the
Russian government on 28 December 1854 to express its desire to begin
peace talks on the basis of the Four Points. Thus the representatives of the
three powers at war in the Crimea assembled round the green table in Vienna
while their armies were entrenched at Sevastopol, the soldiers on both sides
dying from cold and deprivation and wounds, with what fighting there was
proving inconclusive, Austria trying hard to get general peace talks started.
From documents published recently5 it emerges that France and Britain
frantically attempted to give more precision to the new fifth point in order
to let the peace talks miscarry. Both governments congratulated themselves
on making the fifth point so unacceptable to Russia that, in view of the

stalemate in the Crimea, the armies would have the decisive word, not the
negotiators round the peace table.
The fifth point, which was secretly arranged between Paris and London
and which was really to specify the third point, said that Russia would have
to give up her ‘preponderance’ (‘faire cesser la prépotence’) in the Black Sea
by reducing her navy there to four ships of war, by demolishing Sevastopol
and not re-establishing it as a great naval arsenal. The official peace talks
which were soon to open thus seemed to be doomed to failure. They were
given the knock-out blow by another secret arrangement, hitherto unknown
to contemporaries and historians alike. In a private audience which the
Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph granted to Prince Alexander M. Gorchakov,
the Russian envoy to Vienna, at the beginning of January 1855, the former
gave his word that Austria would not accept the third point, which impaired
the honour and sovereignty of Russia in the Crimea and on her Black Sea
coast. Thus any arrangement which would unilaterally be to the detriment
of Russia would not have Austria’s support.
This word of honour, given by the Austrian Emperor to Russia’s
representative, is the real reason why the Vienna peace conferences ended in
failure. Their opening on 15 March 1855 was, however, a grand and
promising affair. The British side was represented by Lord John Russell,
former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary. France’s interests were, two
weeks after the start of the conferences, in the hands of Foreign Minister
Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys. Turkey sent her Grand Vizir, Ali Pasha, to Vienna,
and Buol was president of the conferences.
The remarkable thing was that once the first two points had been speedily
solved, after considerable haggling a formula was found for the third point
and accepted both by Russell and Drouyn de Lhuys. This, in fact, ran counter
to the determination of both the British and French governments to let the
conferences fail. The formula was a complicated compromise between the
far-reaching Western demands and Russia’s resistance to any unilateral
disarmament in the Black Sea. It stipulated that Russia should agree to limit
her naval forces to the status of 1854 while Turkey and the Western powers
were allowed to step up their maritime presence there to Russia’s level. This
was Buol’s pet idea of ‘equipoise’, which was really an expression of Francis
Joseph’s word of honour given to Gorchakov. Both Russell and Drouyn de
Lhuys were convinced of the viability of this solution.
At home both ministers were disavowed by their governments at the
beginning of May. The final decision was made in Paris. The documents now
published show that Napoleon was harassed by the British ambassador,
Lord Cowley, to disavow his Foreign Minister.6 Had Napoleon remained
staunch, the British government would have backed down, although
grudgingly. The newly found formula would have to be presented to the
Russian government as an Austrian ultimatum. In case of rejection, Austria
had promised to enter the war on the side of the Western powers. It is tragic
to see from the newly published documents that Austria made up her mind
seriously, for the first and only time, to join her allies and that at the same
time the two Western governments broke up the bridge by which Austria
would have crossed the Rubicon, that is, the River Pruth.
Drouyn resigned at once, Russell a few weeks later. The Austrian army
was demobilized because the government could no longer bear the financial
strain of mobilization. Russia, witnessing the disunion of her opponents,
exulted at the spectacle played out in front of her. There were months of
diplomatic estrangement between Austria and her December allies. It is
almost certain that Russia would have had to accept the Austrian ultimatum
had the three powers shown unity. The war would have ended in the summer
of 1855. Buol managed to organize a closing session of the Vienna
conferences on 4 June 1855, but the scission among the three powers was
open to the world. The arms at Sevastopol had to speak the final word. After
much bloodletting they did so on 8 September 1855, when the Allies at last
occupied the south side of the city.
After the Russians had partly compensated for their defeat at Sevastopol
by storming the Turkish fortress of Kars on 26 November 1855, the time was
ripe for a fresh attempt at peace efforts. Buol, with French aid, formulated a
new ultimatum to be presented to Russia. The third point was now no longer
based on the principle of equipoise of naval forces in the Black Sea but on the
principle of neutralization of the Black Sea, that is, of its demilitarization.
Russia was to renounce, except for some vessels for police purposes, all her
naval potential, men-of-war and naval installations in the Black Sea. The
ultimatum, delivered on 28 December 1855, was accepted by the Russian
government, after some heart-searching, on 16 January 1856. The door was
now open for serious peace talks.
The documents on the diplomacy of the Crimean War were published by the
author of this book in four series and twelve volumes: Winfried Baumgart
(ed.), Akten zur Geschichte des Krimkriegs [AGKK], Serie I, Österreichische
Akten …, 3 vols (Munich and Vienna, 1979–80); Serie II, Preußische
Akten …, 2 vols (Munich, 1990–1); Serie III, Englische Akten …, 4 vols
(Munich, 1988–2006); Serie IV, Französische Akten …, 3 vols (Munich,
1999–2003). Because of the difficulties in using the Russian documents, a
Russian series is not projected. Official documents (such as treaties, protocols
of conferences, open diplomatic despatches) published by the governments
during the war in their official organs, in blue books or in the newspapers,
are accessible in two useful collections, among others: Julius von Jasmund
(ed.), Aktenstücke zur orientalischen Frage. Nebst chronologischer
Uebersicht, 2 vols (Berlin, 1855–6); British and Foreign State Papers, vols 44
(1853–4), 45 (1854–5), 46 (1855–6) (London, 1865).
There are three useful research articles on the Crimean War with much
bibliographical material included: Brison D. Gooch, ‘A Century of
Historiography on the Origins of the Crimean War’, American Historical
Review 62 (1956/7): 33–58; Edgar Hösch, ‘Neuere Literatur (1940–1960)
über den Krimkrieg’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 9 (1961): 399–
434; Winfried Baumgart, ‘Probleme der Krimkriegsforschung. Eine Studie
über die Literatur des letzten Jahrzehnts (1961–1970)’, Jahrbücher für
Geschichte Osteuropas 19 (1971): 49–109, 243–64, 371–400.
For general treatments of the diplomacy of the war, three of the older
studies are still of some use: F. Heinrich Geffcken, Zur Geschichte des
Orientalischen Krieges 1853–1856 (Berlin, 1881); Alexandre Jomini, Étude
sur la guerre de Crimée (1852 à 1856), 2 vols (St Petersburg, 1878) (Jomini
writes from a Russian angle); Eugène vicomte de Guichen, La guerre de
Crimée (1854–1856) et l’attitude des puissances européennes (Paris, 1936)
(uses documents from the French Foreign Ministry archives).
The diplomatic background of the outbreak of the Crimean War has
intrigued a host of historians. Long chapters in Temperley, England, more
recently in Figes, Crimea, are devoted to that phase. A treatment from the
Russian side, with an important, though unsystematic, collection of Russian
documents (partly in the French original), which have been neglected by
historians probably because they were published immediately before the
outbreak of the First World War, is Andrej M. Zaiončkovskij, Vostočnaja
vojna 1853–1856 gg. v svjazi s sovremennoj ej političeskoj obstanovkoj, 2
vols text, 2 vols Priloženija (Enclosures) (St Petersburg, 1908–13). For the
personal relations between Napoleon III and Nicholas I, see Luc Monnier,
Étude sur les origines de la guerre de Crimée (Geneva, 1977). For the role of
Turkey and using Turkish documents, see Ann Pottinger Saab, The Origins
of the Crimean Alliance (Charlottesville, VA, 1977). A new, though at times
complicated, treatment is David Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean
War (London and New York, 1994). From the French side there is Alain
Gouttman, La guerre de Crimée 1853–1856 (Paris, 1995, 2nd edn 2006).
There are quite a number of recent comprehensive studies: Andrew D.
Lambert, The Crimean War: British Grand Strategy against Russia, 1853–
1856 (Manchester, 1990, 2nd edn Farnham, 2011); Trevor Royle, Crimea:
The Great Crimean War, 1854–1856 (London 1999, repr. 2010); Clive
Ponting, The Crimean War: The Truth behind the Myth (London, 2004);
Orlando Figes, Crimea: The Last Crusade (London, 2010). All four rely on
archival sources. Lambert stresses the fragile cooperation of British and
French strategies and Britain’s focus on maritime warfare. However, his
claim that Russia gave in at the beginning of 1856 due to British plans in the
Baltic overestimates the point (it was rather Austria’s and Sweden’s menace
to join the fray and the knowledge in St Petersburg that Russia’s internal
resources would not stand another campaign in 1856). Figes stresses the
religious, social and cultural aspects of the war. There is also a lengthy study
of the Crimean War by two authors, one English and one Russian: Ian
Fletcher and Natilia Ishchenko, The Crimean War: A Clash of Empires

(Staplehurst, 2004). Its geographical focus is on the Crimea only. A shorter
new book, concentrating on the Crimea only, but lavishly illustrated is Hugh
Small, The Crimean War: Queen Victoria’s War with the Russian Tsars
(Stroud, 2007, 2nd edn Stroud, 2018). A succinct new history of the war,
with emphasis on the media side of the war (war correspondents, war artists,
photographs): Trudi Tate, Crimean War (London/New York, 2019).
The special importance of The Times is well brought out by Kingsley
Martin, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston: A Study of Public Opinion in
England before the Crimean War (London, 1924, 2nd edn 1963).
26
PART TWO
The Belligerents
and the
Non-Belligerents
27
28
3
The war aims of the belligerents
Russia’s war aims against Turkey in their most naked form are to be found
in documents relating to the first half of 1853. This is when Tsar Nicholas
had his intimate talks with Sir George Hamilton Seymour in St Petersburg
and when he sent Prince Menshikov to Constantinople. He was at the height
of his expectations with regard to a solution of the Eastern Question. His
relations with France were strained because of French claims in the Holy
Places question, he was angry about the Sultan’s recalcitrance and thought
that his relations with Britain were excellent. He was sure his two
conservative allies, Prussia and Austria, would subscribe to anything he
arranged with regard to the Eastern Question.
We have already seen how he opened his heart to Seymour and advocated
the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. In his conversations he specified which
parts of the Empire would accrue to Britain (and also to France). In a
memorandum which he jotted down in his own hand in January 18531 he
unfolded a large-scale plan for partitioning the Ottoman Empire after Russia
had waged a successful war against it. This plan was even more specific than
his utterances to Seymour. Russia, he wrote, would obtain the Danubian
Principalities and the northern portion of Bulgaria down to Kustendje.
Serbia and the rest of Bulgaria were to be granted independence. ‘The coast
of the Archipelago’ – meaning probably the coastal areas of Epirus and the
Gulf of Salonica – and ‘the coast of the Adriatic’ would fall to Austria.
Britain should take Egypt, and ‘perhaps Cyprus and Rhodes’ as well. France
would be granted Candia (Crete) and ‘the islands of the Archipelago’ (that
is, in the Aegean). Constantinople should be made a free city; the Bosphorus
should have a Russian garrison (thus rendering the neutral status of
Constantinople a fiction) and the Dardanelles an Austrian one. Turkey
proper should be relegated to Asia Minor.
Apart from a few vague references at the beginning of his memorandum,
nothing is said about the religious issue. It therefore becomes obvious that
the Tsar’s harping on that question in his public and diplomatic declarations
is a pure masquerade. Most books on the origin of the Crimean War fail to
make that point clear enough and dwell on the religious question, which
was a mere camouflage for Nicholas.
29
FIGURE 5 Russia – the ‘Colossus of the North’. Courtesy of the Archives du

ministère des Affaires étrangères, collection iconographique.
Another Russian document, again from January 1853 in Nicholas’s own

hand2 and also hardly ever mentioned in the historiography, deals with the
Tsar’s plan of waging war on Turkey: a two-pronged lightning attack,
starting from Sevastopol and Odessa with 16,000 troops, would aim at
occupying the Bosphorus and Constantinople. The Dardanelles would also
be occupied in case a French fleet approached.
This Blitzkrieg strategy remained valid when the Tsar sent Menshikov to
Constantinople at the end of February 1853. Again it must be stressed that
apart from the ostensible instructions dealing with the religious question,
Menshikov had a secret instruction3 which directed him to conclude a
defensive alliance with the Sultan. Such an alliance would have been a
second edition of Unkiar Skelessi of 1833. Besides trying to clarify his
relations with Britain through Seymour, Nicholas also attempted to make
THE WAR AIMS OF THE BELLIGERENTS 31
Austria the accomplice of his grand design. When Menshikov’s mission

failed, Nicholas was resolved to pounce upon Turkey and he offered Austria
the occupation (and eventual acquisition) of Serbia and Herzegovina. If
both powers would act in common, the Balkan populations would rise
against the Turkish yoke and the ‘the last hour’ of the empire would sound.4
Francis Joseph was horrified at this idea and warned Nicholas not to go
ahead with his plans.5 They would mean revolution in the Balkans and
elsewhere, and also war with the Western powers. Although the Tsar was
not much impressed with such pleadings, they resulted in his being more
careful in crossing the Danube after his troops had occupied the Principalities
(2 July 1853) for fear of antagonizing Austria. The reticence and stubborn
resistance of Austria created a strong impression on Field Marshal Paskevich,
the Commander-in-Chief of the occupation forces, and it was he, eventually,
who damped the Tsar’s offensive spirit.
Paskevich, though, was mainly responsible for instilling in Nicholas the
idea that the Balkan Christians would rise as a man against their oppressor
once war had broken out between Russia and Turkey. He even expected to
be able to form auxiliary troops from among them, consisting of 40,000–
50,000 men who could be used to shake the foundations of the Ottoman
Empire.6 Nicholas became more cautious when his Foreign Minister, Karl
Nesselrode, warned him not to use such revolutionary means because they
would militate against the conservative doctrines of Russian policy. The Tsar
therefore played a waiting game, and only harked back to his revolutionary
plans when the first Russian troops crossed the Danube in March 1854 to
lay siege to the fortress of Silistria. But the Christians did not budge, and it
was Paskevich who now became pessimistic and told Nicholas that the
Bulgarians would not rise and that the Serbians would send no more than
2,000–3,000 volunteers.7 In the end it was only the Greeks who used the
strained relations between Russia and Turkey to provoke insurrections in
Thessaly and in Epirus, which were, however, easily put down by Turkey.
In January 1854, Nicholas made a final attempt to lure Austria into
cooperating with him in revolutionizing the Balkans. He sent Count Aleksej
F. Orlov, one of his intimate counsellors, to Vienna to ask for a promise of
armed neutrality in the coming war with the Western powers. Prussia, too,
was invited to join in. Orlov was quite frank in telling the Austrians that
Russia might cross the Danube and that she would then support the Balkan
Christians to rise against Turkey and would recognize their ‘complete
political emancipation’, that is, independence under Russian tutelage.8 He
invited Austria to take a share in dividing up the Balkans, suggesting she
might put Serbia under her protection.
Nicholas was being naive. The effect of his proposal in Vienna was
disastrous. Francis Joseph and his government for the first time learnt for
certain that Nicholas’s scheming would mean revolution – a dangerous
prospect for the Habsburg Empire. The proposal for armed neutrality was
turned down flatly (as it was in Berlin). In a conference with his ministers,
the Emperor decided to concentrate troops on the border with Serbia and in
the last resort to invade the province, not to annex it ultimately, as Nicholas
had offered, but in order to put down any anti-Turkish risings. Orlov’s
mission to Vienna was the turning-point in Austria’s relations with Russia:
she now made up her mind to join hands with the Western powers and force
Russia to desist from her revolution-mongering policy in the Balkans. The
Orlov mission also had the effect of making Nicholas, and even more
Paskevich, think twice about crossing the Danube to precipitate the
breakdown of the Ottoman Empire.
Although Nicholas continued to make further attempts to win over
Austria and Prussia to his side, the negative reaction of both countries to his
sweeping proposals of January 1854 was really the end of his plans for the
downfall of Turkey. The immediate result of Orlov’s mission was not a closer
anti-Russian diplomatic union of the other four great powers, as Britain and
France had proposed and as Austria had wished, but the defensive and
offensive treaty of 20 April 1854 between Austria and Prussia, a treaty
which for the time being brought about Russia’s isolation in her dispute
with Turkey. From that time onwards there is, understandably, no trace of
any more wild Russian schemes against Turkey. Russia now had to prepare
a defensive stand along the Danube and anywhere else on her frontiers. The
siege of Silistria south of the Danube (March–June 1854) was more like
beating a retreat than preparing an advance towards Constantinople.
Britain’s aims during the Crimean War were merely the reflection of
Russia’s objectives at the beginning of the war. In the context of the Eastern
Question, their essential ingredient is the maintenance of the integrity and
viability of the Ottoman Empire, which was endangered by Russian
encroachments. In the wider context of Britain’s standing as a world power,
they relate to Russia’s tendency to grow in almost all directions to the
detriment of her neighbours. Britain was, after the Napoleonic Wars, the
real and only world power. Russia was on the road to becoming her rival.
Based on her huge land mass she had the urge to be master of the adjacent
seas: the Baltic, the White Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Persian Gulf.
As has been said earlier, British public opinion became aware of Russia’s
growing expansionism in the 1820s and 1830s. Palmerston was the
spokesman and symbol of that anti-Russian feeling. By the time of the
Crimean War, all his colleagues, Whigs and Peelites, shared his general
feeling of the growing danger from Russia’s dynamic policy. Even a man like
Gladstone recognized the justice of Britain’s going to war in order to halt
Russia’s aggressiveness. He did not, however, share either the wide scope or
certain details of Palmerston’s war aims.
The more general war aims of Britain are, of course, embedded in the
Four Points, of which the third was Britain’s essential point: the revision of
the Straits settlement of 1841 ‘in the interest of the European balance of
power’ or, in less diplomatic language, the reduction of Russia’s power in
the Black Sea. Palmerston’s intentions, however, transcended this maritime
objective. He wanted to curb Russia’s expansionism on her European and

Asian frontiers, by detaching from her tracts of land which she had acquired
from north to south since the time of Peter the Great. In a memorandum
that Palmerston circulated among his Cabinet colleagues on 19 March
1854, a few days before Britain’s declaration of war, he drew up a plan of
partitioning Russia which would have resulted in a Napoleonic ‘remaniement
de la carte de l’Europe’.9 Finland and the Åland Islands were to be restored
to Sweden; the Baltic provinces would be ceded to Prussia; Poland would be
transformed into an independent ‘substantive kingdom’; Austria would give
up her possessions in northern Italy and be compensated for their loss by the
acquisition of the Danubian Principalities; the Crimea and Georgia would
return to Turkey. Lansdowne and Russell, two of Palmerston’s Cabinet
colleagues, dismissed these schemes as daydreams.
Although Palmerston himself at that time described his plan as his ‘beau
idéal’, he kept harking back to it, with some variations, during the course of
the war. He was naturally aware that its realization presupposed Russia’s
thorough military defeat, but he also discovered that there was a general
congruity between his war aims and those of Napoleon III of France.
When, after the fall of Sevastopol on 8 September 1855, the Western
powers tried to win over Sweden to their alliance, Palmerston once more put
the Crimean War into the wider perspective of future Anglo-Russian
relations. He wrote to Clarendon:
The main and real object of the War is to curb the aggressive ambition of
Russia. We went to war, not so much to keep the Sultan and his Musselmen
in Turkey, as to keep the Russians out of Turkey; but we have a strong
interest also in keeping the Russians out of Norway and Sweden … The
Treaty we propose would be a part of a long line of circumvallation to
confine the future extension of Russia.10
If the Crimean War had continued in a third campaign in 1856 and been
successful for the Allied powers, there is no reason to doubt that Russia
would have had to pay the price Palmerston demanded. The documents
show that in 1856 Palmerston would have used the same revolutionary
means to undermine Russian power as Nicholas had planned with regard to
Turkey in 1853–4. He would have tried to wage ‘a war of nationalities’
against Russia by staging insurrections among the non-Russian peoples of
the Russian Empire, from Finland down to the Caucasus. Preparations were
already advanced in 1855: there was a Finnish legion awaiting action in
Sweden; an Anglo-Polish and an Anglo-Turkish legion were formed to be
used in the Caucasus.11
Since the Crimean War ended, in Palmerston’s eyes, prematurely, his ‘beau
idéal’ shrank to minor proportions. They consisted of the Four Points plus a
fifth point added at the instigation of the British government at the end of
1855. In addition to the demilitarization of the Åland Islands and some
specifications of the third point, it referred to the Caucasus region. Britain

had tried hard during the war to use the potential of the various tribes there,
with Shamil as their most important leader, against Russia, to goad them
into insurrection and to put at the disposal of the Allies cavalry troops for
use in the Crimea. Clarendon dreamt of 10,000 such troops and was resolved
to win over the Circassians, who inhabited the eastern shores of the Black
Sea, by dangling before them recognition of their independence from Russia.
Several missions to the Caucasus by consul Longworth, and the former
Secretary of War, the Duke of Newcastle, in 1855 produced only meagre
prospects of obtaining the expected aid from the Caucasian tribes. Britain’s
interest in that area was of course due to fear of Russia’s advance south to
Persia and east to the shores of the Caspian Sea and thence into Central
Asia, thus threatening the Indian Empire.
Despite faint prospects, Clarendon had the cheek to propose the
independence of Circassia during the Paris peace congress in March 1856. It
was an embarrassing scene. The Russian delegate was angry about
Clarendon’s unilateral action, and the Turkish delegate was helpless to
express his support since the question of right was obviously on Russia’s
side.12 The only result of this British proposal was Russia’s promise not to
rebuild the forts on the coast and the decision of the congress to form a
commission to draw more precisely the line of demarcation between Russia
and Turkey in the Caucasus, which had been left vague after the treaties of
Adrianople of 1829 and of St Petersburg of 1834.
Thus Britain’s war aims did not really materialize. Although Russia was
beaten militarily, her real and potential power remained unimpaired. She
ceded a slice of Bessarabian territory to Moldavia and agreed to the
demilitarization of the Black Sea – concessions which were humiliating
but did not add up to any substantial curtailment of her power. This
humiliation on Russia’s side and disappointment on Britain’s had important
consequences. Russia strove hard, in the coming years, to undo these clauses
and succeeded within less than 20 years (in 1871 and 1878). Britain’s
political interest in the Levant in general and in the integrity of the Ottoman
Empire in particular cooled down markedly. The two world powers
developed frictions in other areas – in Central Asia, in Afghanistan and in
the Far East. Public interest in Britain in the fate of the Turkish Empire
received a substantial blow.
France’s war aims, which are to all intents and purposes Napoleon’s aims,
have little to do with the Eastern Question and appear to be complicated,
but are in reality quite simple. Napoleon III wanted to use the crisis in the
Near East for ulterior motives. First, he was interested in gaining the support
of the Catholic Church in his country in order to prop up his uncertain
domestic position; thus his attempt to gain as many privileges as possible in
the Holy Places in favour of the Catholics is easily explained. Since Napoleon
could expect Britain to follow his lead in the Levant because of her vital
interests in that area, he curried favour with Britain in order to overcome
France’s isolated international position in the wake of his revolutionary

assumption of power in France. This aim was quickly achieved.
A more general war aim was to use the Eastern crisis of 1853 and the
Crimean War as a means to revise the European order of 1815, which had
been created to the detriment of France. Napoleon tried to realize this
objective throughout his reign. His entry into the war and especially his
alignment with Austria, which was also a favourite idea of his Foreign
Minister, Drouyn de Lhuys, was to drive a wedge into the Holy Alliance – or
what was left of it after 1848–49 – and finally to crush it, thus destroying
the guardian of the order of 1815. This objective was achieved through the
treaty of 2 December 1854 with Austria.
Turning to more specific and immediate war aims evolving from the
general ones, Napoleon wanted to bring about the restoration of Poland
and change on the Apennine peninsula in favour of Sardinia. These aims
presupposed, of course, an extension of the theatre of war in the Crimea to
Central Europe. The fall of Sevastopol on 8 September 1855 seemed to be a
propitious moment to convince Britain to change the character of the war.
When Britain turned down the Polish proposal, Napoleon hastened to finish
the war altogether.
The restoration of Poland would have entailed a new order of things in
Central Europe, the Balkans and Italy. There are sufficient documents to
show how Napoleon proposed to bring about such a ‘remaniement de la
carte de l’Europe’.13 It would have been similar to Palmerston’s ‘beau idéal’.
In fact, both knew of each other’s secret plans. Prussia, according to
Napoleon, would be compensated for the loss of her Polish provinces by
acquisitions in northern Germany. The German Confederation would, in the
process, have to disappear. Austria would give up her hold over northern
Italy and receive compensation in the Danubian Principalities (thus
Napoleon made light of the officially proclaimed war aim of the integrity of
the Ottoman Empire). Sardinia in Italy would be enlarged by the Austrian
provinces of Lombardy and Venetia and perhaps also by Parma and Modena.
Through this redrawing of the map of Europe, Napoleon could pose as the
man favouring the wishes of the peoples, who would formally confirm these
changes in plebiscites. He would thus be the champion of the principles of
popular sovereignty and nationalities. Use of these principles was an
important component of Napoleon’s ideology.
What profits would Napoleon reap from this regrouping of the
map of Europe? He gave the answer in a conversation with the German
Count Ernest of Saxe-Coburg: ‘By God, as to France I don’t mind if
I get compensations on the Rhine or in Italy.’14 Thus the various objectives
which Napoleon tried to pursue in the following decade and a half can
already be traced back to the Crimean War. As with Palmerston’s
‘beau idéal’, their realization would have meant a continuation of the war
with Russia into 1856 or beyond. A world war might well have been the
result.
The war aims of the other two belligerent powers, Turkey and Sardinia,
are of minor importance. Turkey, in fact, almost played the role of a cipher.
Turkish reactions towards Russian demands during 1853 were the result of
developments on the spot in Constantinople to a greater extent than is
evident from most books on that period. Ann Pottinger Saab has shown that
there was a strong ‘war-party’ which was not only anti-Russian, but anti-
European. It consisted of men at the top and of members of religious circles:
the Minister of War, Mehmet Ali; the Minister of the Guards, Mehmet Rüştü
Pasha; the Sheikh ul Islam, the religious leader and the softas, students of
religious schools. They staged riots in the capital during the summer and
autumn of 1853 that were directed against the government’s and the Sultan’s
policy of improving the lot of the Christians in the empire. Saab has shown
that the Allied fleets were called up to the Bosphorus not for fear of a Russian
offensive, but for fear of further riots in Constantinople.15
Characteristically, the Turkish government during the war took no part in
formulating the Four Points of 8 August 1854 or the Austrian ultimatum of
16 December 1855, which included the fifth point (Circassia, etc.). Turkish
war ideas can, however, be deduced from some of the Western documents.
Any arrangement on the lot of the Christians (the fourth point), whether of
Russian or Western origin, was anathema to the Turks. With regard to the
Principalities, the Turkish government did not wish Austria, or Europe as a
whole, to become their protector in lieu of Russia. They wanted the
strengthening of Turkey’s hold on the provinces. Further to the east they
dreamt of the independence of the Crimea and of Circassia and Georgia
under the suzerainty of the Sultan. But their opinion was of no relevance at
any time.
Almost the same can be said of Sardinia’s war aims. When the country
joined the Western Alliance in January 1855, there were of course high
hopes of bringing the Italian Question, especially Austria’s presence in
northern Italy, and the Roman Question before the peace conference. Austria
had already made it clear that she would not conclude the December treaty
of 1854 unless she was assured of the strict observance of the status quo in
Italy. As Austrian cooperation was more important to the Western powers
than Sardinia’s, the Turin government joined the alliance – after sharp
internal dissensions – unconditionally. Cavour, however, was invited to take
part in the final peace congress. After the Eastern Question had been settled,
the Italian Question was put on the table, with angry discussions ensuing
between Austria on the one side, the Western powers and Sardinia on the
other. No result was reached. Cavour left Paris an utterly disappointed man,
but imbued with the notion that only the cannon would solve the Italian
Question, that is, quench his thirst for Sardinia’s expansion. In a general
sense, however, Sardinia’s participation in the war and in the peace talks
pointed to the fact that the situation in Italy was of common concern for the
great powers: the Italian Question was Europeanized or, as Di Nolfo has put
it, was ‘diplomatized’.16
Of great importance for describing Russia’s war aims is the documentary
evidence published for 1853 and 1854 by Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija (quoted
in the preceding chapter). The most important study of Russia’s position in
the Crimean War, both for the political and for the military side, is Evgenij
V. Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, 2 vols (Moscow and Leningrad, 1941–3, 4th edn
in Tarle’s collected works, Moscow, 1959; all quotations from the 4th edn.
Written during the Second World War, it has a nationalistic slant; Tarle
quotes lavishly from published and unpublished documents. A more recent
treatment of both the political and military aspects is John Shelton Curtiss,
Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, NC, 1979). Cf. also Igor V. Bestužev,
Krymskaja vojna 1853–1856 gg (Moscow, 1956) (succinct, but also with a
nationalistic bias).
Britain’s war aims may be culled from a number of studies: James B.
Conacher, The Aberdeen Coalition, 1852–1855: A Study in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century Party Politics (Cambridge, 1968); James B. Conacher, Britain and
the Crimea, 1855–56: Problems of War and Peace (Basingstoke and London,
1972) (Conacher’s first book is rich in details on domestic policy and
parliamentary affairs); Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the
Crimean War: The Destruction of the European Concert (Ithaca, NY, and
London, 1972) (sometimes unfairly critical of Britain’s role, but with many
sensible suggestions on Austrian policy); Hermann Wentker, Zerstörung der
Großmacht Rußland? Die britischen Kriegsziele im Krimkrieg (Göttingen
and Zürich, 1993) (focuses on the role of the Cabinet, the Crown and a few
of the more important ambassadors).
For France’s war aims, see the book by Mange, Near Eastern Policy
(mentioned above in Chapter 1); Martin Stauch, Im Schatten der Heiligen
Allianz. Frankreichs Preußenpolitik von 1848 bis 1857 (Frankfurt, 1996).
At long last there is a well-researched general book on Turkey during the
Crimean War: Candan Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War (1853–1856)
(Leiden and Boston, 2010); Saab’s book (cf. Chapter 2) is relevant for the
years 1853–4 until the outbreak of the European war. Lengthy portions on
the military structure of the Ottoman Empire and also a long chapter on the
Crimean War are in James J. Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to
Collapse 1839–1878 (Stuttgart, 2000).
Sardinia’s role is well documented and well treated. The more important
documentary collections are Federico Curato (ed.), Le relazioni diplomatiche
fra la Gran Bretagna e il Regno di Sardegna, III serie: 1848–60, vols 4–5
(Rome, 1968–9); Federico Curato (ed.), Le relazioni diplomatiche tra la
Gran Bretagna e il Regno di Sardegna dal 1852 al 1856. Il carteggio
diplomatico di Sir James Hudson, vol. 2 (Turin, 1956); Franco Valsecchi
(ed.), Le relazioni diplomatiche fra l’Austria e il Regno di Sardegna, III serie:
1848–60, vol. 4 (Rome, 1963); Carlo Pischedda (ed.), Camillo Cavour,
Epistolario, vols 10–13 (1853–6) (Florence, 1985–92); Camillo Cavour,
Carteggi, vol. 7, Cavour e l’Inghilterra. Carteggio con V.E. d’Azeglio, vol. 1,

Il Congresso di Parigi (Bologna, 1961). Monographic studies include Franco
Valsecchi, L’Europa e il Risorgimento. L’alleanza di Crimea (Florence,
1968); Ennio Di Nolfo, Europa e Italia nel 1855–56 (Rome, 1967); Peter
Klemensberger, Die Westmächte und Sardinien während des Krimkrieges.
Der Beitritt des Königreichs Sardinien zur britisch-französischen Allianz im
Rahmen der europäischen Politik (Zurich, 1972).
4
The non-belligerent German
powers: Austria and Prussia
Austria’s policy and attitude during 1853 and 1854 are responsible for the
theatre of the Russo-Turkish war being moved from the Danube to the
Crimean peninsula. When the two Western powers declared war on Russia
on 27 and 28 March 1854, they assembled their troops along the Turkish
Straits in order to protect Constantinople from a Russian onslaught from
the Danube. When it became obvious that the Turkish troops were holding
out in the fortress of Silistria just south of the Danube, the Commanders-in-
Chief of the Western troops decided to move their men to Varna to assist the
Turks at Silistria and to warn the Russians not to move further south.
However, this was not the main reason for the Russian evacuation of the
Principalities in August 1854; this was due to the threatening attitude
adopted by Austria. She had mobilized her troops and massed them on the
right flank of the Russian occupation forces, in the Banat, in Transylvania
and in Galicia. On 3 June 1854 the Vienna government summoned St
Petersburg to demand evacuation of the Principalities; otherwise, Austrian
troops would move in and evict the Russians by force of arms. With this
unexpected prospect of four enemies fighting Russia in that corner of
Europe, the Tsar, pressed by Paskevich, his Commander-in-Chief, did the
only sensible thing and after some hesitation, feigning strategic reasons,
evacuated the Principalities. Austrian troops moved in to the same extent as
the Russians had moved out; troops from the two countries never came into
contact with each other. The Austrians stayed there during the rest of the
war and until March 1857.
What was the aim of this remarkable Austrian action which did not mean
open war, but was at the least an open threat towards a power with which
Austria had been in a close conservative alliance and which had helped her
out of dire straits during the Hungarian revolution of 1849? The answer is
not easily found. Contemporaries and historians have made numerous
misleading statements and written many half-truths about this issue. Only
recently have newly published Austrian documents allowed us to get nearer
to the truth.1
39
Austrian policy, although threatening military intervention and leading

to the occupation of the Principalities by Austrian (and Turkish) troops, was
never of an offensive or expansionist character; it was strictly defensive.
There were, it is true, voices in Austria among the military leaders and
among diplomats that wanted to seize the opportunity to make gains for
Austria in the Balkans: in the Danubian Principalities, in Bosnia and
Herzegovina. At times even the Tsar or the French Emperor urged Austria to
be the accomplice of their expansionist or revisionist policy. But Austria
acted on the maxim Si vis pacem, bellum para. Austria was the only one of
the five great powers that needed peace in order to survive. Buol, the Foreign
Minister, and the young Emperor Francis Joseph acted according to
Metternich’s defensive and conservative principles.
It was Austria that attempted, during the whole of 1853 and the first
months of 1854, to get together great-power conferences in Vienna in order
to preserve peace. After the war had broken out, she kept on trying to bring
the belligerents back to the conference table. Each war party tried hard to
win Austria over to its side, sometimes luring her, sometimes threatening her.
She steadfastly resisted offers to annex adjacent territories, whereupon she
was told that other means could be applied to bring her to reason. Tsar
Nicholas threatened the Vienna government: he would revolutionize the
Balkan peoples; Napoleon warned ‘J’insurgerai l’Italie.’2
The feeling of being threatened by revolution is the key to understanding
Austria’s attitude during the years 1853–6. The revolution of 1848–9 had
almost resulted in the ruin of the Habsburg monarchy. The Emperor and his
counsellors were deeply aware of the danger of revolution raising its head
again. Martial law, proclaimed during the revolution, was still in force in
many regions of the empire during 1853–4. The war that broke out between
Turkey and Russia on Austria’s frontier in October 1853 conjured up the
threat of new insurrections within the empire. If Austria – and Prussia – had
joined the war on either side, such a European war would have kindled new
revolutions in Hungary, northern Italy and Bohemia, and would have dealt
the final death-blow to the Habsburg monarchy.
At the beginning of the crisis, Austria tried to sit on the fence and on 10
November 1853 declared her armed neutrality, an attitude which could not
be maintained for long because the torch of revolution could as easily be
hurled into the empire from without. Therefore, Austrian policy moved step
by step to the side of the Western powers in order to be safe from revolutionary
plans from their side. The most important stages of this policy were the
attempt in the spring of 1854 to conclude a four-power convention with
France, Britain and Prussia (it failed because of Prussian resistance); the
formulation of the Four Points on 8 August 1854 together with France and
Britain; the alliance of 2 December 1854 with the Western powers which
held out the prospect of Austria’s entering the war in case the peace talks
that were to be convened before the end of the year failed; and finally the
Austrian ultimatum of 16 December 1855 in which Russia was told either
THE NON-BELLIGERENT GERMAN POWERS 41
to accept the war aims of the three powers (the Four Points plus the new
fifth point) or see Austria enter the war on the side of the Western powers.
These steps seem to point to an offensive, warlike policy. Contemporaries
saw them in this light; historians have misunderstood them in this way.
Austria’s preparedness for war was, however, mere pretence. Buol cunningly
and wittingly built up this smokescreen in order to effect two things: on the
one hand to coerce Russia, in the face of a three-power or four-power
coalition (since Prussia could not stand aside in the long run), to give in; on
the other hand to delude the Western powers with the false hope that Austria
would enter the war and thus to make them desist from stoking the fire of
revolution, prevailing upon them to formulate war aims that were not too
exorbitant. This explanation also holds good with regard to the Austrian
occupation of the Danubian Principalities in August 1854. It was an act of
war only in outward appearance; in truth, it was an act of peace aimed at
removing the dangerous theatre of war on her own flank and making the
question of the Danubian Principalities, which was hitherto shaped by
Russia alone, a European concern. Moreover, the occupation of the
Principalities was not intended (this is another common misinterpretation)
to be the first step towards their annexation by Austria.
Thus Austria’s behaviour during the Crimean War shows a warlike policy
on the surface only; at the root of the matter it was a defensive calculation,
forced upon her leaders because they had to fight for the very existence of
the empire, which needed law and order inside and peace outside. Buol’s
policy was dangerous brinkmanship, but everybody was deceived: the
Western powers in believing that Austria would soon enter the war on their
side; Russia in being frightened that Austria would soon be entrenched on
the opposite side. Francis Joseph once said that the sword of Damocles must
hover over the Russian leaders; and Buol at the end of the war asked friend
and foe alike, ‘Did you really believe that Austria could have risked joining
the war without risking universal war and revolution and thus the final ruin
of her Empire?’3 Decades later, it was to be the World War and revolution at
its end that sounded the last hour of the Habsburg monarchy.
The same yardstick must also be applied to Austria’s relations with
Prussia and her policy at the Federal Diet at Frankfurt. Austria tried over
and over again to line up Prussia and the states of the German Confederation
behind her; these attempts were supposed to increase her own political and
military weight, thus enabling her to work, with greater emphasis, for peace
east and west. It is wrong to blame Austria for having followed a seesaw
policy between the two camps, for having forfeited the sympathies of all the
other powers, for being responsible for her isolation in Europe after 1856
and for having had to pay for this in 1859. According to the laws of her
fragile existence, Austria could not have helped acting as she did during the
Crimean War unless she was willing to invite her own ruin.
Prussia, too, was subject to the fear of revolution almost to the same
extent as Austria. But there are additional factors to explain her policy. To
begin with, the structure of foreign policy in Berlin at that time did not
permit of any homogeneous action. Prussian foreign policy was managed by
King Frederick William IV, by the Foreign Ministry under Otto von
Manteuffel, by the pro-Russian camarilla at court, and at times by Prince
William and the Party of the Wochenblatt (a liberal weekly leaning towards
the West).
Viewed from the outside, all these influences negated each other, with the
result that Prussian foreign policy seemed to be a non-policy. The documents4
show that there was a hidden guiding hand in this inactivity and chaos: that
of the King, who managed to build up for himself the image of a romantic,
theatrical, volatile and incompetent sovereign. At the end of 1853 and in the
spring of 1854 the pro-Western tendencies in Berlin, favoured by Manteuffel
and Prince William, seemed to have gained the upper hand in the tug of war
with the Russophile party.
Prince William’s political ideas were simple and straightforward. He once
wrote to his brother, the King, ‘A great power cannot look on, it must act
FIGURE 6 The Prussian King Frederick William IV declaring his neutrality. He is

shown as a tipsy man with a bottle of champagne in his hand. Punch 26 (1854),
p. 182. University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
unless it wants to abdicate from this status and wants to retreat to the
position of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, the opinions of which do
not matter in questions of high policy and which therefore are not asked to
express any.’5 William reasoned that the Tsar, by ordering his troops to
occupy the Danubian Principalities, had committed a blatant injustice and
violated the rules of the Concert of Europe. He must be coerced to return to
this European Areopagus by being made to realize his injustice and repent.
The safest way to bring this about was to align Prussia with the Western
powers and Austrian policy, to take part in their diplomatic offensive and by
common threats to force the Tsar to give up his false position in the
Principalities. The simple reasoning behind such demands was that the Tsar
would, in view of the imposing union of the four great powers, give in and
not dare begin a great war.
His brother, the King, sharply dissented. After much hesitation he refused
to subscribe to a convention which the other three powers had proposed to
him in February 1854. On 27 February he made up his mind by stating in a
memorandum:
Prussia must remain in a status of neutrality; not in a vacillating and

indecisive neutrality, but in a sovereign neutrality … She must lean to
neither side … On both sides the war that is on the point of breaking out
is unjust. And I do not permit of an unjust war being forced upon Prussia.6
The real cause for this decision was the reasoning that Prussia could never
profit from this war and that her vital interests, at least until the end of
1855, were in no way endangered. Lining up with Russia was out of the
question, for the simple reason that the main theatre of war would then be
transferred from the Danube (later on from the Crimea) to the Rhine, where
Prussia would serve as Russia’s battering ram and experience a second Jena
and Auerstedt. Although the Tsar, at the turn of 1853–4, offered Prussia
Russian auxiliary troops, her unfavourable strategical situation would not
have changed. Most of the German secondary states would, by an instinct
of self-preservation, have allied themselves with France as they had done
fifty years before. Revolution, barely suppressed, would have resurfaced, at
least in the western half of the kingdom, and the Rhenish provinces would
thus have been lost. The British Navy would have effectively blockaded
Prussia’s Baltic coast, thus cutting off her overseas trade. Austria, in the
event of her joining the West, would have taken back Silesia, which she had
lost to Frederick the Great.
In the opposite case of Prussia joining the Western powers (in which case
Austria would certainly have been on the same side), the main theatre of
war would have been moved from the Danube to the Vistula. A victory of
the four allied powers over Russia would then have been a matter of course.
But for Prussia it would have been a Pyrrhic victory: she would have been
under the thumb of France which would have taken the Rhenish provinces
from her as a trophy; Poland would have been restored and Silesia lost;
Prussia would have been compensated for this loss by territories in northern
Germany, probably in Saxony. The most dangerous prospect besides this
territorial reshuffling would have been the proximity of an overwhelming
France on her western frontier and a revengeful Russia on her eastern
frontier.
The Prussian King, having made up his mind to remain neutral, at once
felt the acute danger of his isolation. In order to soften it he offered an
offensive and defensive alliance to Austria. No sooner was it concluded, on
20 April 1854, than the King, goaded by the camarilla under Leopold von
Gerlach, tried to extricate himself from the far-reaching obligations to which
he had subscribed. These demanded he support Austria, if need be by force
of arms, in her impending summons to Russia to evacuate the Principalities.
This conduct was henceforth typical of the Prussian King: as soon as he
had taken a step in favour of one side of the Crimean War protagonists (in
this case in favour of Austria and indirectly of the Western powers), he
retracted in part or in full in order to appease the other side. Thus, at the end
of July 1854 he ordered his representative at the Vienna Conference not to
sign the Four Points. From this time onwards he was regarded by the Western
powers and by Austria as having excluded himself from the Concert of
Europe. Feeling the pinch of his isolation he offered Austria, after the
Russians had evacuated the Principalities, an additional article to the April
treaty, promising Prussia’s aid in case of a future Russian attack on the
Danubian Principalities. This again was a pro-Western initiative. It became
a dead letter at once when Austria concluded her December alliance with
Britain and France behind Prussia’s back. The Prussian King then reverted to
a pro-Russian attitude.
During 1855, Prussia and her King were no longer taken seriously by the
other great powers. Russia was at least content that she remained neutral.
Prussia was not admitted to the Vienna peace conference early in 1855, and
after the fall of Sevastopol the King again became acutely aware of the
danger of his isolation. When Austria delivered her ultimatum to Russia at
the end of December and Prussia was invited to endorse it, the King hesitated
again. He received threats from Paris and London: when the French guards,
having left the Crimea, were received in Paris on 31 December 1855, the
Emperor asked them ‘to be prepared for new and greater tasks’.7 On 1
January 1856 an article in the London Morning Post warned Prussia of the
consequences of staying out of the war.
A week later Clarendon drafted a despatch to Bloomfield, the British
envoy in Berlin, in which he warned the Prussian government ‘that the
neutrality which Prussia for a time maintained is now considered by Her
Majesty’s Government to be at an end’.8 Although the despatch was delivered
in a mitigated form, the language of the Western powers was well understood
in Berlin. The King was aware that the new campaign in 1856 would be
waged in the Baltic and that Prussia’s neutrality would then be terminated
FIGURE 7 The Prussian King trying to get into the Vienna conference, 1855.
Punch 28 (1855), p. 125. University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
by force. He thereupon sent letters and telegrams to St Petersburg imploring

the Tsar to accept the Austrian ultimatum. In case of refusal he let it be
known that there was ‘the possibility’ of Prussia ‘drawing nearer to the
attitude of Austria’, in other words, of breaking off relations with St
Petersburg.9
Relations between Prussia and the Western powers had become especially
strained because of the continued passage of arms, ammunition and war
matériel across Prussian territory to Russia. The problem is to be seen in the
wider context of Russia’s foreign trade during the war years.10 In 1852, a
normal peace year, the value of Russia’s exports amounted to 100.1 million
rubles, of which roughly half (48.1 million rubles) passed through the Baltic,
and a large amount (35.1 million rubles) through the Black Sea, while just
over 11 per cent (11.3 million rubles) took the land route and the smallest
fraction arrived through the White Sea (5.6 million rubles). In 1855, a full-
length war year, Russian exports sank to just over a quarter (27.5 million
rubles) of the figure of 1852, of which the bulk (23.7 million rubles) was
transported overland. Russia’s imports in 1852 amounted to goods worth
83.1 million rubles, of which the bulk (59.5 million rubles) passed through
the Baltic, and 14.4 via the land route. In 1855 the Allied blockade of
Russia’s coast was quite effective, so that goods amounting to the value of
only 3.7 million rubles used the sea route whereas goods worth 52.5 million
rubles were transported overland. Russian imports in 1855, therefore, did
not shrink to the same proportion (56.2 million rubles as compared to 83.1
million rubles in 1852) as her exports.
Prussia was the transit country for this overland trade. The ports of
Danzig, Königsberg and Memel were much busier during the war than in
times of peace. Prussia’s economy (and also that of the Hanse towns) thus
profited markedly from the war. The interesting thing about Prussia’s transit
monopoly (only a very small fraction seems to have passed through Austria)
is that through it British goods found their way to Russia and vice versa.
Russia’s imports of war matériel were not interrupted altogether in spite
of the Allied coastal blockade and Prussia’s interdiction of their transit.
Russia’s war industry in the 1850s was underdeveloped compared to that of
France or Britain. To carry on a war with the foremost industrialized powers
of the world for any length of time (more than two years), Russia was
dependent on imports for her war machinery. The Prussian King issued a
decree under pressure from the Western powers on 18 March 1854, that is,
ten days before the outbreak of the war, prohibiting the transit of arms
through his territory. In the eyes of the Allies this was supposed to stop the
arms trade between Belgium and Russia.
On 1 June 1854 another royal decree prohibited the transit of all kinds
of ammunition, including raw materials like lead, sulphur and saltpetre. But
the effect of these decrees was evaded because arms and war matériel were
legally imported into Prussia – the traders paid considerable import duties
for them – and the goods then found their way into free circulation, and
from there across the Prussian border into Russia. In view of fresh Allied
protests and pressure – the threat of blockading the Prussian coast was most
effective – a third decree, issued by the King on 8 March 1855, forbade the
export of the aforementioned goods unless they originated from members of
the German Customs Union. Allied protests still continued after this because
the British and French consuls were aware of the uninterrupted clandestine
exports of non-German arms to Russia. This caused much irritation until
the very end of the war.
Neither Russian nor Prussian statistics are available to calculate the
volume of this trade with Russia. The Prussian Foreign Ministry set up a
special file on this matter, consisting of four volumes; but they were seized
by the Red Army in 1945, have not yet been returned and thus remain
inaccessible to historians. From other Prussian sources it becomes obvious

that the British government acted hypocritically because the Prussian decrees
were to the detriment of Russia only, not the Allied powers.11 They were still
able to procure foreign arms from other countries, especially Belgium,
whereas Russia could not. Furthermore, large quantities of the contraband
of war which reached Prussia, such as sulphur and saltpetre, originated in
Britain, and the British government took no effective measures to stop this
trade.
The literature on Austria’s role during the Crimean War is ample, but
controversial. The first serious treatment is Heinrich Friedjung, Der
Krimkrieg und die österreichische Politik (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1907, 2nd
edn 1911). Friedjung is of the opinion that Austria, or at least Foreign
Minister Buol, wanted to join the war on the side of the Western powers and
that Austria’s occupation of the Danubian Principalities was meant to be a
preliminary step on the road to their annexation. A revision was begun, but
not pushed very far, by Bernhard Unckel, Österreich und der Krimkrieg.
Studien zur Politik der Donaumonarchie in den Jahren 1852–1856 (Lübeck
and Hamburg, 1969). With Schroeder, Austria (cf. Chapter 3), the wheel
finally swung round. Through a fresh interpretation he was able to state that
Austria’s policy was peaceful from beginning to end, that Buol and the
Emperor Francis Joseph never had the idea of annexing the Principalities.
This view is also held by the author of this book. Besides the articles cited in
note 25, see Winfried Baumgart, The Peace of Paris 1856: Studies in War,
Diplomacy, and Peacemaking (Santa Barbara and Oxford, 1981).
Prussia’s role during the war is covered by Kurt Borries, Preußen im
Krimkrieg (1853–1856) (Stuttgart, 1930). Both Prussian and Austrian
diplomacy is now copiously documented in the relevant series AGKK I and
II (over 4,300 pages).
48
5
The neutral powers
Sweden
Next in strategic and military importance to the Allied war effort against
Russia after Austria and Prussia was Sweden, Russia’s neighbour in the
north. In view of the Allied war aim to reduce Russian power in European
affairs, not just to solve the Eastern Question in the south-east, Sweden’s
role in the war obviously seemed essential to Allied war-planners.
Since the Napoleonic Wars, Sweden had pursued a friendly policy towards
her powerful neighbour, but the Crimean War marked a change of front in
favour of the Allied powers. In 1854 the first alliance feelers were thrown
out by France and Britain and the political alliance of 21 November 1855
was, on both sides, meant to open the door to Sweden’s entry into the war
if it continued in 1856.
At the beginning of the Eastern crisis, on 20 December 1853, Sweden,
together with Denmark, declared her neutrality. At the outbreak of the
European war at the end of March 1854 it was Napoleon III who took
the initiative to invite Sweden’s cooperation on the side of the Allies. The
Swedish King Oscar I was aware of the strategic importance of his country
and therefore set his demands at a very high level. Britain put the brakes on
the negotiations with Sweden in this phase because, being the junior partner
militarily in the alliance with France, she felt that Sweden would lower her
weight even more by joining as a French satellite. In 1855 the roles were
reversed. The new vigorous Palmerston government reopened the initiative
to entice Sweden into an alliance, with Napoleon, particularly after the fall
of Sevastopol on 8 September 1855, acting as the brakeman.
Here then are the more important details. On 25 March 1854, just before
the declaration of war on Russia and when the Allied squadrons were sailing
and steaming towards the Baltic, the French Foreign Minister instructed his
envoy in Stockholm, Charles-Victor Lobstein, to begin overtures to the King
of Sweden. During the ensuing months the King realized that he was in a
position to raise his demands, in order to receive as much military aid as
possible from the Allies during the war and as many gains and guarantees
for the future as possible, to guard against Russian revenge in peacetime. He
49
saw that the Allies could not muster powerful navies in the Baltic, and would
only deliver pinpricks on Russia’s coast. The 10,000 French troops that
were transported to the Baltic were simply not enough to venture a landing
on Russian soil; when they destroyed and occupied the fortress of Bomarsund
on the Åland Islands on 16 August 1854, this was not enough to goad the
Swedish King into either lowering his demands or entering the war.
What were the King’s demands and what did he offer in return? During
the months of May to August 1854 it became clear what he wanted: the
return of Finland, which Sweden had lost in 1807; the guarantee of this
retrocession and of the whole Kingdom of Sweden-Norway; subsidies for
the duration of the war amounting to 5 million francs per month; 60,000
auxiliary troops from France to fight alongside the Swedish troops against
Russia; Swedish participation in the peace negotiations; and the guarantee
of Austria’s entry into the war and of her sanction of the Swedish war gains.
In return, Sweden promised to put at the disposal of the Allies 60,000
ground troops and 10,000 naval troops, including four ships of the line, two
frigates, a dozen other vessels and 192 gunboats. The latter were especially
valuable for manoeuvring in the shallow coastal waters of the Baltic.1
It is remarkable that the French government was in favour of negotiating
on this basis, but the Aberdeen government poured water into the French
wine. It did not want to have Finland in the programme and did not expect
Austria – and the rest of Germany – to subscribe to such a drastic weakening
of Russian power. From the documents it also appears that Clarendon felt
some pique at the French going it alone in Stockholm, sending special
emissaries there without properly coordinating their diplomacy with the
British government. In any case, by August 1854, even after the conquest of
the Åland Islands, it was much too late to hope for Sweden’s entry in the
campaign for that year.
The negotiations slumbered for almost ten months and the attention of
the Allies was fixed on the Crimean theatre of war. With the advent of the
Palmerston government, British policy towards Sweden changed radically.
Palmerston’s interest in the northern theatre of war increased substantially
when he read a long despatch which the British consul at Christiania, John
Crowe, had sent to London on 23 May 1855.2 In it he dealt with Russia’s
interest in and claims to Finmark, the northernmost province of Norway.
Although Russia demanded rights of pasturage for the reindeer herds of the
Lapps of northern Finland, Crowe wrote that it was access to an ice-free
harbour that Russia really wanted. Crowe linked Russia’s wish to seize
Finmark with her simultaneous attempts to gain a foothold on the mouth of
the Amur river in China.
Such a global viewpoint was much to Palmerston’s liking. He had
Clarendon draft a despatch to Stockholm asking the King of Sweden to
grant Russia no concession in Finmark, and promising British naval support
in ‘repelling any aggressive act on the part of Russia’. King Oscar concurred
with the British demand, but asked for a guarantee of the whole territory of
THE NEUTRAL POWERS 51
the monarchy, not only of northern Norway. By 30 August 1855 both

London and Paris had accepted the extended guarantee and the Swedish
King had stepped down his demands by no longer insisting on the retrocession
of Finland. At this point, too, there was no longer any discussion of Sweden’s
immediate entry into the war, the siege of Sevastopol dragging on, Austria
having distanced herself from the Western powers, and the Baltic campaign
of the Allies of 1855 having effected nothing tangible.
After the fall of Sevastopol it was now Napoleon III who became sceptical
of the extension of the war to northern Europe, especially after Britain had
rebuffed him in his wish to broach the Polish question and thus to open a
land front in Central Europe. This is the origin of Palmerston’s emphatic
‘circumvallation’ letter of 25 September 1855, mentioned above, in which
he argued passionately for a treaty of guarantee with Sweden.3 There were
further delays, but finally a treaty was concluded between the Western
powers and Sweden on 21 November 1855. In it Sweden promised not to
grant any rights of pasturage, fishery or territory to Russia. The Western
powers in return promised Sweden that they would repel any such Russian
demands by the use of force. The treaty, which was made known to Russia
on 17 December 1855, looked innocuous, but it was meant to be the first
step towards Sweden’s entry into the war. Its greatest effect was, however,
psychological. The prospect of multiplying her enemies induced Russia to
accept the Austrian ultimatum in January 1856 and thus open the door
to peace. Both Britain and King Oscar regretted the Russian decision,
and on 12 January he proposed an offensive alliance to the Western powers.
He toned down his war aims substantially: besides a subsidy for his army,
he was content with the cession of the Åland Islands.4 But by now it was too
late.
Spain
The participation of Spain in the Crimean War was never so imminent as
that of Sweden. The situation of the two countries is not really comparable,
but that of Spain and Sardinia is. Both countries had no vital interest in the
Eastern Question, but both had ulterior motives in joining the fray. Sardinia
wanted to further her expansionism in Italy; Spain was on the lookout for a
great-power guarantee for her overseas possessions, especially for Cuba,
which the United States coveted.
On 12 April 1854 Spain declared her neutrality. It was benevolent
towards the Western powers since Spain was, at least on paper, a constitutional
monarchy favouring the crusading spirit of the West against autocratic
Russia and, of course, the Catholic cause in the Holy Places issue. Diplomatic
relations with Russia had been broken since the death of Ferdinand VII in
1833; in other words, since the beginning of the Carlist Wars. The
international standing of Spain was low, and the internal political situation
was more unstable than that of any other country in Europe. Since the defeat
of the conservative Carlists in 1839, government power had shifted to and
fro between the two liberal factions of the Moderados and Progresistas. The
danger of either a revolution or a military dictatorship was always hanging
in the air. There was such a revolution on 28 June 1854, which brought the
Progresistas to power, but produced a rift within the army.
In the Progresista government there were sympathies for the cause of the
Western allies that led to the first feelers promising Spanish intervention
being thrown out to Paris and London. At the beginning of 1855 British
commissioners bought up horses for the Crimea at Algeciras and San Roque.
On 30 January the Spanish steamer Trento left Alicante with 200 mules –
much more serviceable than horses in the Crimea – for Balaklava. On the
same day the Spanish chargé d’affaires in Paris had a conversation with the
French Foreign Minister in which the latter asked whether Spain would not
follow Sardinia’s example in joining the Western alliance. He even hinted at
guaranteeing Spain’s overseas possessions.5
Meanwhile, on the battlefield, there were concrete signs of Spanish interest
in the war. After the outbreak of war on the Danube, a Spanish military
mission under Field Marshal Juan Prim was sent to join the Turkish army. It
produced a lengthy report on the war on the Danube which was published
in Madrid in 1855. After the revolution of 28 June 1854 it was replaced by
another mission, headed by Colonel Tomás O’Ryan, who was with the Allied
siege army at Sevastopol. Another sign of Spanish presence was a number of
Spaniards serving in the French Foreign Legion – O’Ryan estimated them at
900 – but they were mostly refugees of Carlist background.
After the accession of Sardinia to the Western alliance in January 1855
and the despatch of Sardinian troops to the Crimea, the Spanish government
earnestly considered the idea of following suit. On the Allies’ side it was the
French government and Napoleon who tried to persuade the Spanish
government to accede to the treaty of 10 April 1854; the British were more
reticent. When General Juan de Zabala became Foreign Minister in June
1855, he took matters in hand energetically. On 22 June the British minister
at Madrid reported Zabala’s offer to send a contingent of up to 20,000 men
to the Crimea. The reaction in London was unenthusiastic because it was
obvious that all the cost for its transport and upkeep would fall on Britain,
and that Parliament would be unlikely to grant the money. The Spaniards
were told to declare war on their own account against Russia and send an
army as a separate body to the seat of war.6
The Spanish offer was renewed a month later and Napoleon left the
decision to the British, knowing that they would have to defray the cost in
the end. Eventually the Spanish government enumerated the conditions
under which they were ready to take part in the war, one of which was the
guarantee of the Spanish overseas possessions. Spanish historians are not
correct in saying that the fall of Sevastopol on 8 September 1855 made all
further discussions superfluous.7 On 17 September, Clarendon wrote in a
letter to his minister at Madrid that the Spanish offer should be unconditional,
that is, not be mixed up with territorial or financial guarantees. Three weeks
later most of the conditions were scrapped by the Spanish government,
except the demand that the Allies find means to transport a Spanish force,
which had now been increased to 30,000 men.
By now, however, relations between Britain and Spain had become so
soured over the affair of Mr Boylan, an Irish iron-manufacturer at Santiago
de Cuba who was at loggerheads with the Spanish local authorities there,
that the British government took no further note of the Spanish offer.
Spanish pride and the nationalist spirit in Britain at that time could not, it
seems, meet halfway.
The United States

The United States played a much more decisive role in the conduct of the
Crimean War than did Spain. Anglo-American relations were severely
strained after the American War of Independence and during the first half of
the nineteenth century. Areas of friction during the 1850s were widespread
and all had a common root: rivalry in the Western hemisphere, in the Pacific
and in the Far East. Britain, on the whole, was already on the defensive at
that time, whereas the United States was in the throes of expansion. The
Pierce administration (1853–7) was in the tight grip of ‘manifest destiny’
and ‘spread-eagleism’.
On the other hand, relations between the United States and Russia had
traditionally been friendly and reached a high pitch during the Crimean
War. The astonishing fact that the most democratic and freedom-loving
nation and the most autocratic and repressive great power in the world were
holding each other in high esteem and acting cordially together in
international affairs is to be explained by their having Great Britain as their
common enemy. During the war there were growing signs of cooperation,
which were regarded on both sides of the Atlantic as a prelude to America’s
entry into the war. Thus, Secretary of State William Marcy confided to
Eduard von Stoeckl, the Russian minister to Washington, on 20 April 1854,
that the United States wanted to remain neutral, ‘but God knows if this is
possible’, and that Britain’s attitude ‘has considerably Russified us’.8 On the
other hand, British Cabinet ministers feared the prospect of the United
States using the golden opportunity of Britain being hamstrung by the war
in Europe to undermine Britain’s position in Central America, the Caribbean
and the Pacific. Thus the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham,
commented in October 1854, ‘We are fast “drifting” into war with the
United States.’9
Common antagonism towards Britain brought the United States and
Russia together in many respects. At the beginning of July 1854, when the
belligerents were not yet facing each other in the Crimea, President Pierce
voiced the idea of offering his mediation to both camps. Both sides replied
negatively to the idea, and the plan failed. On 22 July 1854 in Washington
Marcy and Stoeckl signed a convention on the rights of neutrals at sea,
which contained the principle of ‘free ships make free goods’ and was clearly
directed at Britain’s traditional practice of privateering. At the beginning of
the war, furthermore, the Russian government let it be known in Washington
that it would not oppose the United States seizing the Sandwich Islands
(Hawaii). The calculation behind this was that such an act would raise
tension between Britain and the United States. In fact, the American agent in
Honolulu, David L. Gregg, was given full power to arrange for the transfer
of the islands to the United States as quickly as possible. Vigorous protests
in Washington were the result, and it was only King Kamehameha’s staunch
resolution to remain independent that made the Americans more discreet.10
The same object, to sow the seeds of dissension between Britain and Russia,
lay at the bottom of the attempt to send a ship ordered by Russia and built
at New York round Cape Horn into the Pacific, to launch privateering raids
on British ships there.
Public opinion in the United States was definitely in favour of the Russian
cause. One of the more bizarre expressions of this was that 300 riflemen
from Kentucky volunteered to fight on Russia’s side in the Crimea. However,
they were never shipped to Europe. On the other hand, about thirty-five
American doctors came to Russia of whom about two dozen nursed
wounded Russian soldiers and performed surgery in the Crimea. Eleven of
them died of various causes, mostly typhoid fever. There was also an
American military delegation in Russia in the spring of 1855 headed by
Majors Richard Delafield and Alfred Mordecai and Captain George B.
McLellan (afterwards a general in the Civil War). In June they were received
by Nesselrode and Tsar Alexander II, but were unable to proceed to the
Russian front in the Crimea. On their return journey via Berlin, Vienna and
Trieste they managed to visit the British camps at Sevastopol. Like the two
Spaniards Prim and O’Ryan, Delafield wrote an interesting Report on the
Art of War in Europe in 1854, 1855, and 1856, published by the US Congress
in Washington in 1860.
Two problems in Anglo-American relations, the origins of which had
nothing to do with the war in the East, but the dimensions of which were
clearly enlarged by it, were the questions of the Mosquito Coast in Central
America and of Cuba. During the 1840s, rivalry between Britain and the
United States was building up because plans to construct an interoceanic
canal, either through the Isthmus of Panama or through Nicaragua, were
under discussion. The United States acquired rights of transit through
Panama, and Britain renewed claims to the eastern part of Nicaragua, the
so-called Mosquito Coast. The Clayton–Bulwer Treaty of 19 April 1850
marked a temporary easing of tensions between the two sides, both parties
pledging themselves to recognize the neutralization of the potential canal
areas (Panama, Nicaragua, Tehuantepec). Many of the articles were
deliberately ambiguous in their wording, and bickering about the strategic

areas continued in the following years.
The American government seems to have tried to force the issue during
the Crimean War. With its tacit connivance, or at least without trying to stop
them, several American freebooters made their appearance at Greytown
(formerly San Juan), the most important harbour of the Mosquito Coast,
and in the interior. On 13 July 1854 Captain George Hollins bombarded
Greytown; in June 1855 Captain William Walker landed on the coast and
occupied Granada, the capital of the area; at the same time Colonel Henry
Kinney installed himself at Greytown proclaiming himself governor. In
reaction the British government publicly announced the reinforcement of its
West Indian squadron. This news created alarm about an impending war,
but also had a calming effect on the language of the American government.
Cuba, ‘the pearl of the Antilles’, had attracted the covetous eyes of many
adherents of ‘manifest destiny’. American presidents kept trying to purchase
it from Spain, and American freebooters endeavoured to provoke Spain into
war by various incidents. During the Crimean War the diplomatic offensive
for the acquisition of Cuba was stepped up considerably. On 16 August
1854, Marcy directed his representative at Madrid, Pierre Soulé, to meet his
colleagues from Paris and London, John Y. Mason and James Buchanan, to
consult on the Cuban question and submit proposals to Washington. The
trio met at Ostend in October. Their meeting attracted much public attention,
whereupon they withdrew to the quiet resort of Aix-la-Chapelle. In a
memorandum, the so-called ‘Ostend manifesto’ of 18 October 1854, they
recommended immediate action to their government.11 Spain should be
offered up to US$120 million for Cuba. If Madrid refused, ‘then, by every
law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we
possess the power’. The costs of a war and diplomatic entanglements with
the other European powers would not matter. The Ostend manifesto was
stillborn because public opinion in the United States was against a war with
Spain. Marcy did not take up the suggestions of his agents. Nonetheless the
whole affair shows the inclination of the American government to exploit
the distraction of Britain and France in the East.
Much more serious, in terms of the danger of involving the United States
in the Crimean War, was the so-called recruitment controversy which was
directly connected with the war.
After the debacle of the Battle of Inkerman in November 1854, the British
government was frantically struggling to get reinforcements into the Crimea.
On 23 December 1854 Parliament passed the Foreign Enlistment Act, which
was the basis for recruiting mercenaries abroad, a time-honoured practice in
British history. As early as December, the British envoy in Washington, John
F. Crampton, and various consuls in the United States responded positively
to Clarendon’s enquiry whether sufficient recruits might be found in the
United States. On 16 February 1855, Crampton was officially instructed to
begin recruiting, but to take care not to infringe the neutrality laws of the
United States. He engaged a number of agents who began their business in

various American cities.
The main difficulty lay in conducting the activity in secrecy. Would-be
mercenaries had to be given money with which to be ferried to the central
recruiting depot at Halifax in Nova Scotia. By the middle of May only 135
mercenaries had found their way to that location, although the promises
made by the recruiting agents had given the fantastic figure of 30,000 to be
recruited in a matter of months, principally Germans, among them officers
of the Schleswig-Holstein army of 1848–50. Because of the watchful eye of
the American authorities, the ineptitude of the recruiting agents, among
whom there were some adventurers, and the anti-British feeling among the
American public, the whole campaign was doomed to failure. On 22 June
1855 Clarendon therefore directed Crampton to abandon the project. To
make matters worse, some of the recruiting agents were arrested and put on
trial and on 7 July the British consul in Cincinnati was arrested. On 16 July
Clarendon told the American minister in London in an official note that all
recruiting measures had been stopped. In fact none of the few recruits that
had found their way to Halifax ever boarded a ship bound for Europe and
the Crimea.
But by now enough china had been smashed. Feelings ran high on both
sides of the Atlantic and, prompted by public indignation, Marcy demanded
the recall of Crampton. As this proved ineffective, the British envoy was
finally dismissed by the American government on 28 May 1856.
At the turn of 1855–6, tensions between Britain and the United States
had risen so high that they might well have ended in war, with the United
States fighting side by side with Russia against the other European powers,
had the Crimean War continued into 1856.
Greece
The position of Greece was of special strategic importance during the
mounting Eastern crisis throughout the year of 1853 and during the first five
months of 1854. In Russia’s plans a pro-Russian Greece was of use in order
to create trouble for the Ottoman Empire on its western flank. When the
two Western powers made up their minds to grant military support to
Turkey after Sinope, the assembly of French and British troops along the
banks of the Straits necessitated a quiet Greece on their left flank. To the
Greek government and the Greek nation, the Eastern crisis of 1853 was a
golden opportunity to improve the unfavourable territorial situation of the
new state as it had been formed under the aegis of the three European
powers – Russia, Britain and France – in 1830, the year of birth of modern
Greece. Her northern frontier had been drawn from the Gulf of Arta in the
west to the Gulf of Volos in the east. All the areas north of that line remained
Turkish provinces, although in Epirus and Thessaly the population was
Greek and in Thrace and Macedonia it was predominantly Greek. Thus, the
new state was bedevilled by the problem of irredentism and developed the
Megale Idea – the Great Idea – the restoration of such areas as had, in
former times, belonged to Greece.
The first opportunity to realize this nationalist idea was the tension
between Russia and the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of 1853. A
member of Menshikov’s mission, Admiral Vladimir A. Kornilov, later the
hero of Sevastopol, visited Athens, creating a sensation and generating
considerable speculation. Although his ostensible object was mediation
about two villages on the Graeco-Turkish frontier, it was generally believed
that he stiffened the opposition of Greece and held out hopes of Russian
assistance. However, under pressure from the French and British
representatives, to whom Menshikov himself gave a helping hand, the
villages were finally awarded to the Ottoman Empire.
The tension between Greece and Constantinople did not die down and
was fanned by the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war in October 1853. In
January 1854, open revolts broke out first in Epirus, then in Thessaly, and
both attracted a great deal of assistance, in men and money, from Greece.
King Otho and his government did not conceal their efforts to encourage the
Greeks beyond the frontiers. Officers and soldiers left the army and went as
volunteers to the areas in revolt. Soon Yanina, the administrative centre in
Epirus, was in danger of being taken by the rebels. The Turks despatched
reinforcements and launched a counteroffensive. This development was
obviously what the rebel leaders and the government in Athens expected:
that Russian troops would soon cross the Danube and the Balkan Mountains
and would finally join hands with the Greeks for the final onslaught on
Constantinople. In this, however, they were mistaken.
What was the extent of Russian support for the Greek cause and what
was the reaction of the Western powers and of Austria?
Although Russian propaganda throughout 1853 and during the first
months of 1854 emphasized Russian support for the oppressed Christian
brethren in the Sultan’s Empire and encouraged revolts among the Balkan
peoples, and although, in the case of Greece, the insurgents received Russian
money, the attitude of the Tsar and his government was ambivalent. In one
of his conversations with Seymour in which he developed his ideas for
partitioning Turkey (on 22 February 1853), Nicholas I made it clear that he
would never allow the reconstruction of the Byzantine Empire nor of ‘such
an extension of Greece as would render her a powerful State’,12 but that he
favoured the addition of Epirus and Thessaly to Greece. As late as March
1854, Nesselrode let it be known in Athens that this was Russia’s official
policy. The Greek government would have acted against the interests of the
country had it not taken this promise at face value. Yet events in the Aegean
and the Adriatic in the crucial months of January–April 1854 worked
against Greek expectations; the Russian government had always been
careful not to give pledges to Athens, and at the beginning of May the Tsar
had written off Greece. Public opinion in Athens, furthermore, was provoked
by the publication in London at the end of March of the Seymour
conversations, which contained unflattering remarks about Greece.
On the opposite side it was France that acted with promptitude against
the threat emanating from the Greek insurrection to the strategic plans of
the Western Allies. Early in April in Vienna, Buol suggested the idea of
forming a cordon sanitaire along Greece’s northern frontier. As Austria was
doing the same on Serbia’s northern frontier in order to force Belgrade to
remain quiet while the Russians were on the point of crossing the Danube,
Drouyn eagerly took up this idea and invited Austria to send troops to
northern Greece. In fact the Austrians sent a warship into the Gulf of Arta
and on 4 May 1854 Francis Joseph ordered his governor of Dalmatia,
General Lazarus von Mamula, to be ready to send a brigade in order to
occupy the district of Scutari in Albania.13 This plan did not materialize,
however, not so much because of Russian warnings – as Monika Ritter
suggests – but because Mamula advised against such a step and because
the Ottoman government were not happy about this sort of Austrian
support.
One day before the Austrian Emperor’s order, Napoleon III had made
up his mind in a ministerial council in Paris to force the hand of the
Greek government and occupy Piraeus with French troops. The British
government followed suit on 4 May. The military occupation was preceded
by political demands: on 10 May King Otho was confronted with an
ultimatum to declare his neutrality and recall his volunteers from the border
regions. Ten days later, when French troops were already disembarking in
Piraeus, he yielded unconditionally. His pro-Russian Cabinet was replaced
by a pro-Western one, which in fact was mainly pro-British. The King, in
consequence, lost much prestige among his Greek subjects. In June the
insurrection in Epirus and Thessaly, deprived of support from Greece, was
quashed.
The French troops that disembarked in Piraeus on 25 May were the
division of General Élie Frédéric Forey, which was originally scheduled for
the Turkish Straits. On 11 June they were replaced by troops (2,000 men)
under General Joseph Mayran, having been joined two days earlier by a
British contingent of 1,000 men. The Allied troops remained at Piraeus
throughout the war and were not stationed in Athens proper. Their presence
ensured that the Allies could feel safe along their vital line of communication
from the western Mediterranean to the Turkish Straits. The troops remained
on Greek soil well after peace was concluded on 30 March 1856. Britain
and France used their presence to force a commission which was to control
Greece’s state finances on the Greek government, since the government was
in arrears in paying back the credit which the two powers, together with
Russia, had granted in 1832. When the commission was finally set up in
February 1857, the troops were ordered to leave – the Megale Idea had to
wait for another opportunity to be partially fulfilled.
The minor German powers (the German

Confederation)
One of the German kingdoms, Bavaria, had a direct stake in the Eastern
Question because King Otho was of Bavarian origin and brother to the
Bavarian King, Maximilian II. Otherwise the German states of the second
and third order had no direct interests in the Crimean War. Their indirect
interests were, however, of considerable magnitude and weight.
Geographically, these states formed, together with the two German great
powers, the huge land barrier which kept the two belligerent camps apart
and forced them to meet in peripheral areas like the Black Sea and the Baltic.
From the point of view of military potential, the minor German states
were by no means of negligible importance: Bavaria, for example, had, in
1855, a standing army of 71,500 men, and Saxony had 26,600 men under
arms. The army of the German Confederation, to which the member states
had to contribute contingents, had a strength of 300,000 active men,
including about 175,000 that came from Austria and Prussia. Politically
speaking, the minor German states could assume importance if they spoke
with one voice and if they were capable of acting in unison. There lies the
problem which explains the utter impotence of the third Germany. A
complementary explanation is the fact that the two leading powers of the
German Confederation, Austria and Prussia, fought a bitter duel during the
Crimean War, each trying to marshal the potential of the minor states for its
own purposes: Prussia for her pro-Russian policy and Austria for her pro-
Western policy.
Beneath this tug of war was the struggle for hegemony in Germany, the
so-called German Question or German dualism, which had its origin in the
wars between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa in the eighteenth
century. The issue lay dormant in the Metternichian era, but had surfaced in
the revolution of 1848–50 and was taken up with fierce resolution from
1854 to 1856, by Buol as Austria’s Foreign Minister and by Bismarck as the
Prussian representative at the German Confederation at Frankfurt.
The German Confederation was a remarkable creation of Metternich’s
fertile mind, as a means to balance the disparate and centrifugal forces in
Germany after the Napoleonic Wars. It was a confederation of thirty-five
sovereign princes and four free cities. The two great powers, Prussia
and Austria, also belonged to it, although not with their whole territory.
Its only organ was the Federal Diet at Frankfurt, to which each member
state sent a representative who wielded, depending on the importance
of his state, between one and five votes. The Diet had the right to receive
diplomatic representatives from abroad, but not to send one abroad.
According to article 35 of its act of constitution of 1820, the
Confederation could not wage an offensive war, but was only allowed to
defend itself.
It is principally this idea of the innate defensive character of the

Confederation that attracted the attention of those German historians who
after 1945 were in search of the ‘real’ and harmless Germany of the past, to
which they could point as a model after two terrible world wars of which
the united German Reich of 1871 was the main instigator. In the process, the
‘good old’ German Confederation became mythologized and had to justify
the division of Germany after 1945. In fact, there was no such model
Germany in the past; the Confederation was rather a motley collection of
egotistical states – some of operetta-like status – incapable of even the most
basic unified policy and action, and incapable of reforming its complicated
static constitution. The Crimean War is, in fact, the best illustration of its
impotence and of the political danger emanating from the Confederation.
It must suffice to sketch in a few words the policy of the more important
member states of the Confederation outside Austria and Prussia during the
Crimean War; that is, of Bavaria, Saxony, Württemberg and Hanover.
The Bavarian Prime Minister Ludwig von der Pfordten was, in October
1854, in utter despair at the Confederation being unable to do anything to
solve the crisis created by Russia’s actions. As he saw no chance of Austria
and Prussia uniting their efforts, he regarded the Confederation as being on
the point of dissolution. He did not regret its destruction because
… it had produced nothing but trouble and restrictions to Bavaria’s

power. A state like Bavaria could as well exist as an independent state like
Portugal, Belgium and Sardinia which, to be true, are not consulted in
European questions, but which, at a given moment, are not asked to
provide money and men and the neutrality of which remains unimpaired.14
Without the shackles of the Confederation’s constitution, von der Pfordten

expected to be able to lean more freely on one or two of the great powers,
Austria and France for example, and to reap some tangible fruits in such an
alliance, such as a territorial link between Bavaria and her enclave in the
west of Germany, the Palatinate.
In contrast to von der Pfordten, his Saxon counterpart, Friedrich von
Beust, was a staunch supporter of the Russian cause throughout the Eastern
crisis. He thought that the Holy Alliance under Russian leadership provided
the best security for Saxony against the powerful Prussian neighbour (who
in 1814–15 had wished to swallow all of Saxony). Another reason for his
support for Russia was that Beust believed in the possibility of creating a
union of the German states of the second order which would constitute a
third political force (the so-called ‘trias’) alongside the two German great
powers. This was, of course, an impracticable idea in view of the petty
jealousy of the princes and governments concerned, and also in view of
Beust’s reputation as a notorious troublemaker. Beust maintained his
unconditional Russophile sympathies well into 1855, pleading incessantly
for a restoration of the Holy Alliance and for Germany as a whole – the two
great powers and the German Confederation – to enter the war on Russia’s
side. Beust may have speculated on territorial gains in the adjacent Saxon
duchies after a Russian victory to compensate for Saxony’s losses at the
Congress of Vienna. Only after the fall of Sevastopol did Beust try a
reorientation towards the Western powers.
In Württemberg, foreign policy was in the hands of King William.
Uppermost in his mind was the wish to maintain absolute quietude in
domestic and foreign policy. Dynastic ties with Russia were numerous. Like
Beust, he believed Russia to be the best guarantor of the sovereignty of the
middle-sized German states, and maintained that they were completely
uninterested in the Eastern Question: ‘Whether Russia or Britain is master
of Constantinople is completely indifferent to us.’15 In the event of the
German states having to take part in the war against their will, he was ready
to ally himself with the victorious coalition, hoping for territorial gains in
Hohenzollern and Baden. All of the territorial aspirations of the German
princes clearly show that the German Confederation was, in the last resort,
completely irrelevant to them.
Hanover’s policy during the Crimean War is of a different complexion.
There were still numerous ties with Britain dating back to the personal
union before 1837. In the army there were a number of officers who had
served in the British army under Wellington (in the ‘King’s German Legion’).
Colonel Harry Leonhart, for example, set up the German Legion in British
service at the beginning of 1855. Another is the Hanoverian Minister of War,
Lieutenant-General Bernhard von Brandis, who had served in the British
army in Portugal. In April 1854 he told the French envoy at Hanover:
We shall go with Austria through thick and thin, come what may, even
if a Prussian detachment will again occupy the province of Hildesheim.
The King will return to England, if need be, and we will set up a new
Anglo-German legion on the Danube.16
Just as Saxony leaned towards Russia, Hanover leaned with equal

absoluteness towards Austria and Britain. She, as much as Saxony, feared
the heavy weight of her mighty Prussian neighbour.
During the Crimean War there was only one attempt by the German
Confederation, or by its most important members, to intervene in a united
fashion in the Eastern affair. The attempt was a complete failure.
After Austria and Prussia had concluded their alliance of 20 April 1854,
they invited the Confederation to accede to it. As had been usual in the past,
they expected it to join immediately and unconditionally – but they were
mistaken. King Maximilian of Bavaria, in view of his dynastic ties with the
Greek throne, took the initiative for a meeting of representatives of the
German minor states where conditions that should be attached to their
accession to the April alliance were to be worked out. This meeting took
place at Bamberg between 25 and 30 May 1854. The leading politicians of
eight German secondary states (Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Württemberg,

Baden, the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the Electorate of Hesse and the Duchy of
Nassau) were present. The outcome was an identical note, dated 3 June,
which was to be delivered collectively to the two German great powers.
Several conditions for the accession of the Confederation were listed, among
them the demand that the belligerents should simultaneously stop hostilities
by sea and land (this was favourable to Russia as it went against the Austrian
demand that Russia evacuate the Principalities unconditionally); the demand
that the Confederation be represented in the future peace negotiations; and
a guarantee of the integrity of Greece. (The latter was clearly of Bavarian
origin.)
The reaction of the great powers dashed all hopes of the secondary
German states having any say in international affairs. Austria and Prussia
voiced their indignation at the claim that a European question of such
magnitude be subject to the paralyzing vagaries of the Confederation’s
cumbersome machinery. Buol, in his reply, made an interesting remark about
the role which the Confederation was to play in his policy: ‘Let us hope that
a speedy accession to a treaty, which is to serve us as long as possible as a
weapon of peace … will terminate the miserable role which Germany plays
at this moment in the eyes of Europe.’17 Thus the April treaty was to put
pressure on Russia to get off her high horse and accept the conditions of the
other great European powers in the Eastern Question.
In Paris, Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys reacted with hilarity, accusing
the German ministers of an ‘absence d’esprit politique’ and calling them
Russian barnstormers. In London, Clarendon described the Bamberg
demands as ‘ill-advised interference’.
After this excursion into high politics, the Bambergers gave in and
acceded to the April treaty on 24 July without any strings attached. Buol,
tired of these German delays, had by then made up his mind to go it alone,
and on 8 August he signed the Four Points with the two Western powers.
But like Sisyphus he tried again a few months later and knocked at the door
of the Diet. After the treaty with the Western powers of 2 December 1854,
he hoped once more to be able to add Germany’s (and Prussia’s) weight to
the scales of Austrian policy. His representative at Frankfurt tabled the
motion to mobilize half of the federal army. After weeks of haggling, this
anti-Russian move was transformed into a motion to prepare mobilization
(the technical term was to introduce ‘war-preparedness’ or Kriegsbereitschaft)
‘in all directions’, that is, towards east and west, so that the anti-Russian
sting was completely taken out of the resolution.
Without going into further details, the Federal Assembly at Frankfurt was
the scene of various attempts by Austria to combine the power of the rest of
Germany and attach it to her own political and military weight, not in order
to create more favourable conditions to enter the war against Russia, but to
bring Russia to her senses and force her to the peace table, and at the same
time to demonstrate to the Western powers the weight of Central Europe
and thus force them not to overstrain their peace demands on Russia. These
attempts, however, failed completely. A French observer was right in saying
that the policy of the German secondary states ‘never had any other motives
than the fear of feebleness and the instincts of egotism’.18 It may well be
argued that the Crimean War would not have broken out if Germany – and
Prussia – had stood as a man behind Austria. The Tsar would then have had
second thoughts and evacuated the Principalities without any further ado.
As it was, Central Europe had paralyzed itself and had thus encouraged
Russia to pounce on Turkey and destroy the European balance of power.
A general study on neutrality in the nineteenth century is Maartje M.
Abbenhuis, An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914
(Cambridge, 2014).
The attitude of each of the secondary powers of Europe during the
Crimean War, from Sweden to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, from Finland
and Poland to Portugal, is investigated either in monographs or in articles.
The sole exception is Holland.
Sweden’s role is well covered, on the basis of the Swedish documents, by
Albin Cullberg, La politique du Roi Oscar I pendant la Guerre de Crimée.
Études diplomatiques sur les négociations secrètes entre les cabinets de
Stockholm, Paris, St. Pétersbourg et Londres les années 1853–1856, 2 vols
(Stockholm, 1912–26); Carl Hallendorff, Oscar I, Napoleon och Nikolaus.
Ur diplomaternas privatbrev under Krimkriget (Stockholm, 1918). There
are two useful articles: Edgar Anderson, ‘The Role of the Crimean War in
Northern Europe’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 20 (1972): 42–
59; Axel E. Jonasson, ‘The Crimean War, the Beginning of Strict Swedish
Neutrality, and the Myth of Swedish Intervention in the Baltic’, Journal of
Baltic Studies 4 (1973): 244–53.
For Spain there is only one relevant article, based on newspaper material:
Luis Mariñas Otero, ‘España ante la guerra di Crimea’, Hispania. Revista
española de historia 26 (1966): 410–46.
United States policy is covered by Alan Dowty, The Limits of American
Isolation: the United States and the Crimean War (New York, 1971). Dowty
deals with all the major issues: Cuba, Central America, the recruitment
controversy. On the latter, cf. the relevant documents in AGKK III/3–4. The
British government published several blue books on the issue (cf. the
bibliographical references, p. 1039, also in AGKK III/3, 890–1). For Cuba,
cf. Amos A. Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé 1853–1856: A
Study in the Cuban Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven, CT, 1932).
Greek policy during the Crimean War is analysed in three studies: Eugenia
Voyiatzis Nomikos, The International Position of Greece during the Crimean
War (Stanford, CA, 1962); Monika Ritter, Frankreichs Griechenland-Politik
während des Krimkrieges. (Im Spiegel der französischen und bayerischen

Gesandtschaftsberichte 1853–1857) (Munich, 1966); Jon F. Kofas,
International and Domestic Politics in Greece during the Crimean War
(New York, 1980). On the Greek legion which fought on Russia’s side, see
Maria N. Todorova, ‘The Greek Volunteers in the Crimean War’, Balkan
Studies 25 (1984): 539–63.
For Serbia’s neutrality during the war, based on reports from the British
consul general to London, see Č edomir Antic´, Neutrality as Independence:
Great Britain, Serbia and the Crimean War (Belgrade, 2007).
There are numerous books on the German secondary states during the
Crimean War. For a general treatment, including Austria and Prussia and
based on archival material from Vienna and Berlin, see Franz Eckhart, Die
deutsche Frage und der Krimkrieg (Berlin and Königsberg, 1931). A fresh
look in the light of new material is provided by Winfried Baumgart, ‘Die
deutschen Mittelstaaten und der Krimkrieg 1853–1856’, in Landesgeschichte
und Reichsgeschichte. Festschrift für Alois Gerlich zum 70. Geburtstag, ed.
Winfried Dotzauer, 357–89 (Stuttgart, 1995). For each of the secondary
German states there exists at least one monograph. This clearly points to the
significance which the war on the periphery of Europe had for the German
Question (rivalry between Austria and Prussia and the standing of the ‘third
Germany’). Here is a selection confined to the important secondary states:
Siegmund Meiboom, Studien zur deutschen Politik Bayerns in den Jahren
1851–1859 (Munich, 1931); Peter Hoffmann, Die diplomatischen
Beziehungen zwischen Württemberg und Bayern im Krimkrieg und bis zum
Beginn der Italienischen Krise (1853–1858) (Stuttgart, 1963); Götz
Krusemarck, Württemberg und der Krimkrieg (Halle (Saale), 1932); Harald
Straube, Sachsens Rolle im Krimkrieg, PhD thesis, unpublished (Erlangen,
1952); Werner Husen, Hannovers Politik während des Krimkrieges
(Emsdetten, 1936). The military organization of the German Confederation
for the years 1853–6 is investigated in Jürgen Angelow, Von Wien nach
Königgrätz. Die Sicherheitspolitik des Deutschen Bundes im europäischen
Gleichgewicht (1815–1866), pp. 165–90 (Munich, 1996). The article by
John R. Davis, ‘The Bamberg Conference of 1854: A Re-Evaluation’,
European History Quarterly 28 (1998): 81–107, is useful, but lacks a new
hypothesis in spite of its subtitle.
PART THREE
The Armies of the

Belligerents
65
66
6
Russia
The Russian army in the nineteenth century was by far the largest in the
world. Before and after the Crimean War its peace strength was 800,000 to
900,000 men. This formidable number is directly related to Russia’s
antiquated social structure which was, up to 1860, dominated by serfdom.
Landlords had to send between three and six men from every thousand serfs
to enrol in the army. This meant an annual levy of 60,000 to 80,000 men.
When the next levy was due, the recruits from the preceding year were
incorporated in the standing army and had to serve for 25 years. After that
they were free men, that is, they were not required to return to serfdom. Very
few, however, were pleased by the exchange. The result of this military
system was that no reserve army which could fill up the peace army in time
of war existed.
From 1853 to 1855 there were five levies which together added 878,000
men to the Russian army, a formidable figure which almost doubled the
military force, but the new men were raw recruits of poor fighting quality.
The three levies of 1854 meant a quota of 31 serfs per 1,000, a drain of
labourers which the Russian social system could not endure for any length
of time. Indeed, the frequent levies inspired rumours that the recruits would
be free men and would not have to return to their landlords after the war, so
creating unforeseen problems of internal security. There was mounting
unrest among the serfs eager to be registered. In many parts of the country
there were even open revolts that had to be put down by the regular army,
with the loss of many lives. There was a special section of the peace army,
called the ‘corps of interior fighting’, whose task was to deal with such
events.
It is difficult to give a reliable number for the strength of the Russian
army at the beginning of the Crimean War. According to official figures the
regular army amounted to 971,000 men, including officers, at the beginning
of 1853. There was a small reserve force of 160,000 men, plus an irregular
army (of Cossacks) of 246,000, so that the total strength would make up an
army of almost one and a half million men.1 However, the actual force that
could be used against an external enemy was only half that figure; the
interior forces had to be increased to more than half a million men and
67
150,000 troops were earmarked for fighting in the Caucasus against the
mountaineers under their leader Shamil.
Russia, with her vast landmass, is almost impossible to attack, as
Napoleon had learned in 1812. The reverse of this is that due to the uncertain
political outlook in Europe during the Crimean War, Russia had to deploy
her army along her frontier from the Gulf of Bothnia down to the Black Sea.
As the most vital area, St Petersburg had to be defended against Allied
landing troops and also against a Swedish attack, and therefore had an army
of 270,000 men during the war. The army of Poland, too, was of vital
importance as it was to put down a possible Polish uprising and oppose an
army from any European country. In April 1854 its strength was 200,000.
The rest of the regular army was deployed in the south-west and the south.
In the Crimean peninsula at the beginning of the war there were only
50,000–60,000 troops.
Besides the internal security aspect and the uncertainty as to which of
the powers of Northern or Central Europe might join the Western allies, the
mobility of the Russian army was hamstrung by the huge expanse of
the Russian country and the complete lack of modern means of transport.
The only railway line that existed at the time of the war in Russia was that
between Moscow and St Petersburg. Draught animals needed months in
order to overcome the long distances and in winter had to carry their forage
with them, which in itself was next to impossible. Thus they reached their
destination very late or not at all. In contrast, the troops of the Western
powers, using a good system of rail transport in Britain and France and with
efficient navies, could reach the Crimea much more quickly than Russian
troops could move south from Moscow.
In their equipment the Russian army was in many respects inferior to its
Western counterparts. The infantry had smooth-bore muzzle-loading
muskets with bullets that could rarely range beyond 200 to 250 metres.
They had a maximum rate of fire of two rounds per minute. The infantry
therefore had to rely more on the use of the bayonet. Only a tiny fraction
had the modern Minié rifle. Russian artillery, on the other hand, was hardly
inferior to its Western counterparts and used heavy guns that could cover a
distance of 3–4 kilometres.
The Russian foot soldiers marched and attacked in the old-fashioned
oblong column, which was awe-inspiring and easy to control but offered an
easy target to the enemy. Only the first two ranks were able to engage their
counterparts. The whole army was well drilled and functioned admirably on
the parade ground, but in the field it acted like a machine incapable of
adapting itself to circumstances. The same applied to the officer corps, which
completely lacked initiative. Each subaltern officer waited for orders from
his superior and was punished if he acted otherwise. In the last resort it was
the Tsar in whom absolute command was vested. Thus the Russian army
was like an automaton which only moved and acted according to the
commands inserted into it. It also had no general staff comparable to that
RUSSIA 69
possessed by the Prussian army: in other words, there was little or no

systematic training in war planning, command structure, topography,
history of war and the like.
None of the commanding generals of the Crimean War were of outstanding
quality, although in this respect the Russian army very much resembled the
Western armies. The Commander-in-Chief of the Russian army in Europe
was Field Marshal Ivan Fedorovich Paskevich. In 1854 he was seventy-two
years old. He was a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars and had earned his
laurels in wars against inferior enemies: in 1826–7 against the Persians, in
1828 against the Turks, in 1831 against the Poles and in 1849 against the
Hungarians. Probably because of these successes he had a curious relationship
with Tsar Nicholas, who revered his old Field Marshal and addressed him as
‘father-commander’. At the beginning of the Crimean War, however,
Paskevich developed qualities which exasperated the Tsar, although in the
end he always heeded his advice. The Commander-in-Chief was slow to
reach a decision. Although he had advised that the Danubian Principalities
be occupied, he feared a confrontation with the German powers as much as
with the Western allies. The Danubian campaign, especially the months of
January to June 1854, was characterized by hesitation and indecision, the
Tsar in St Petersburg constantly goading his ‘father-commander’ into action
with innumerable letters, Paskevich in return always expressing doubts and
especially fear of Austrian intervention, more or less openly sabotaging the
commands or rather the pleas of Nicholas. It may safely be said that the
Russian army would, without Paskevich, have crossed the Danube more
quickly, besieged the Turkish fortresses south of the river, swept down the
Balkans towards Constantinople and there dictated peace terms. As it was,
he was responsible for raising the siege of Silistria and, probably pretending
to have received a wound, left his army and returned to Warsaw.2
When the theatre of war shifted from the Danube to the Crimea, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian troops there was Prince Alexander
Sergeevich Menshikov, the same man who had led the ill-starred special
mission to Constantinople in the spring of 1853. He was a careerist who
was distrustful of those around him, tried to do everything himself and
rarely discussed his plans and manoeuvres with his subordinates. His
leadership in the Crimean campaign, during the battles of the Alma and of
Inkerman and during the siege of Sevastopol, proved very poor. In February
1855 he was replaced by Prince Michael Dimitrievich Gorchakov, who had
commanded the Russian troops on the Danube, after Paskevich had quitted
the scene. Gorchakov was an even worse choice than Menshikov. He was
irresolute and pessimistic, and wanted to give up the defence of Sevastopol
after the second bombardment in March 1855.
The two Commanders-in-Chief of the Crimean army usually stayed
outside the fortress of Sevastopol. The troops inside were commanded by an
exceptionally able leader: Admiral Vladimir Alekseevich Kornilov. He was
energetic and full of genuine patriotism which he was able to transmit to all
around him. The rank and file revered him. In an extraordinarily short time
Kornilov was able to put up the lines of defence around Sevastopol,
strengthening them with the guns and crews of the ships of the Black Sea
fleet. On 17 October 1854 he died during the first bombardment of the
town. His successor was his close collaborator, Admiral Pavel Stepanovich
Nakhimov, who wielded the same authority with the defenders of the fortress
and organized its defence with the same energy and ability. Like Kornilov, he
received a fatal wound on the Malakhov hill and died on 7 July 1855.
Both Kornilov and Nakhimov were navy men. The Russian navy was, at
the beginning of the war, of considerable strength. There were two large
fleets, one in the Baltic and one in the Black Sea, consisting of thirty-one and
sixteen ships of the line and twenty and fifteen frigates respectively, with a
host of smaller men-of-war and auxiliary ships. The total number for the
Baltic fleet was 218 ships and 181 for the Black Sea fleet. A small proportion
of the ships were screw-driven. Together with the flotillas of the White Sea,
the Caspian Sea and Kamchatka, the Russian fleet was manned by 90,000
men and officers. The Baltic fleet was of poor quality, although Sir Charles
Napier regarded it highly when he set out with his squadron for the Baltic
in March 1854. The Black Sea fleet, by contrast, was better, and its fighting
spirit was high.3
However, this big fleet played no role whatsoever during the war. The
only battle was in the Bay of Sinope on 30 November 1853 against a Turkish
squadron. When the Allied armies marched towards Sevastopol after the
Battle of the Alma, some of the Russian ships were scuttled at the entrance
of the Bay of Sevastopol in order to obstruct the incursion of Allied ships.
The rest were used for the defence of the town towards the land side. In the
Baltic the fleet took shelter behind the formidable fortress of Kronstadt and
never dared to engage the Allied fleets.
Russian war plans and plans of operations varied, naturally, according to
circumstances. However, two phases can be clearly distinguished. As long as
Turkey was Russia’s potential enemy, that is, during 1853, the war plans
were offensive. From the turn of the year 1853–4, when Russia had to
reckon with the intervention of France and Britain, they were clearly
defensive. There is a revealing document in the Tsar’s own handwriting
dated 19 January 1853.4 This was the time when Nicholas began his
conversations with Seymour. His diplomatic offensive was accompanied by
plans to bring about the downfall of Turkey by waging war on that country.
Nicholas planned a lightning attack on Constantinople and the Straits: he
earmarked the 13th Division at Sevastopol and the 14th Division at Odessa,
altogether 16,000 men, for a descent on the Bosphorus and on Constantinople.
Unless Turkey surrendered unconditionally, the capital would have to be
bombarded. Nicholas did not rule out the intervention of France, in which
case the Dardanelles would also have to be occupied. As the Tsar was at that
time discussing plans for partitioning Turkey with Britain, clearly he did not
expect intervention from that side.
RUSSIA 71
The existence of this document clearly shows the aggressive nature of

Nicholas’s thoughts and plans. This is underlined by the fact that Menshikov’s
presence at Constantinople from March to May 1853 was also a mission of
military reconnaissance. On 28 March, Menshikov sent a report to Grand
Duke Constantine Nikolaevich in which he described the weakness of the
Turkish fleet and of the fortifications of the Straits, and also named two points
(Buyukdere and Kilios) as the most suitable places for landing Russian troops.5
After the occupation of the Danubian Principalities, Nicholas became
more cautious because of the anti-Russian reaction of the two Western
powers, particularly that of Austria. However, he still planned to cross the
Danube and take the Turkish fortresses of Vidin and Silistria. He hoped that
during that phase the Balkan Christians would rise; Russia would promise
them liberation from the Turkish yoke. On the Asiatic side, in the Caucasus,
Russian troops would begin the offensive, take the fortresses of Batum,
Kars, Ardahan and Bayezid and encourage Persia to wage war on Turkey.6
After Britain’s and France’s entry into the war, Nicholas finally gave up
all offensive plans in the European theatre of war. Instead he drafted a plan
for the defence of the Russian Empire in which he divided Russia’s defence
into three sections. The first comprised Finland, St Petersburg and the Baltic
provinces. The second, which consisted of Poland, was the most vulnerable
one in his view because it protruded far into Central Europe and was
exposed to attacks from Prussia and particularly from Austria. The southern
section consisted of Volhynia, Podolia, Bessarabia and the Black Sea coast.
It had to be defended against an Austrian attack and against landings by the
Western allies.
Details about Russia’s army are to be culled from L. G. Beskrovny, The
Russian Army and Fleet in the Nineteenth Century: Handbook of
Armaments, Personnel and Policy (Gulf Breeze, FL, 1996), pp. 300–1. Cf.
also John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Army under Nicholas I, 1825–1855
(Durham, NC, 1965). His use of Russian material is invaluable, but it is
often presented unsystematically, which is also true of his book mentioned
in Chapter 3. Useful remarks are also made by Albert Seaton, The Crimean
War: A Russian Chronicle (London, 1977), pp. 21–34.
Recent books on the Crimean campaign in Russian include Nikolaj
Vladimirovič Skrickij, Krymskaja vojna 1853–1856 gg (Moscow, 2006);
Sergej Viktorovič Č ennyk, Krymskaja kampanija 1854–1856 gg. vostoč noj
vojnyj 1853–1856 gg. Voenno-istorič eskij očerk, Č . 1–5 (Sevastopol, 2010–
14). The latter book is a very detailed account (about 1,600 pages) of the
Crimean campaign starting with the Danube front, going on to the battles
of the Alma (pt. 2), Balaklava and Inkerman (pt. 4) and the last bombardment
(pt. 5).
72
7
France
In the nineteenth century (after the Napoleonic Wars) the French army was
the second largest army in Europe. In 1850 its official strength was 439,000
men and officers.1 At the height of the Crimean War in 1855 it was brought
up to 645,000. Although conscription existed on paper, under the laws of
1818 and 1832, it was basically a professional army. In contrast to Prussia,
where military service was regarded as a civic right, conscription in France
was felt to be an irksome burden which should be evaded if possible. On the
other hand, the Chamber of Deputies had wrested the right to fix the annual
intake of recruits, whose term of service was up to six years, from King
Louis Philippe. It remained in force after 1848, but those liable to military
service could legally buy themselves off by sending a proxy (a remplaçant)
in their stead and there were specialized agencies which looked after such
remplaçants. Thus young men who could afford it were exempt from
military service and only the poor were drafted into the army. This was a
fundamental weakness of the French army system and the situation was not
improved by the way the officer corps was recruited. At least half the officers
were taken from the other ranks; the complaint that many could not properly
speak their mother tongue and could not write was well justified. In addition,
theoretical training – the use of maps, topography, strategy and so on – was
as much scorned as in the Russian army.
Against all these drawbacks, which did not militate in favour of the
professionalism and efficiency of the French army, there was one great
advantage: a high proportion of the men and officers had seen service in
Algeria, where the ordinary rules of military exercises and any formalism in
waging war were not applicable. Those who returned were battle-tested and
seasoned. Most of the French generals in the Crimea had served in Algeria,
including Bourbaki, Canrobert, MacMahon and Pélissier. There were even
special units that were proud of their Algerian service, the Zouaves.
Originally, in 1830, the Zouaves were soldiers taken from local tribes and
serving under French officers. In January 1852, Napoleon III created three
Zouave regiments; their members were now mostly of French origin. With
their picturesque uniform they were clearly distinguishable from the rest of
73
FIGURE 8 La Vivandière: a French canteen-keeper in full dress. Photo by Roger

Fenton.
the army. They established their international fame during the Crimean War.
During the Battle of the Alma, the 2nd Regiment took Telegraph Hill, where
General Menshikov had his headquarters. They were also among the troops
that stormed the Malakhov on 8 September 1855. By decree of the Emperor,
a fourth regiment of Zouaves, which belonged to the Imperial Guard, was
formed in December 1854.
The equipment of the French army in the Crimean War was on the whole
better than that of the Russian army. Many of the units, though, were still
armed with old muzzle-loading percussion rifles, although one-third were
equipped with modern rifles of the Minié type. French artillery was basically
of the same type and quality as that of the Russian army. The administration
of the French army proved to be far superior to that of the Russian or British
FRANCE 75
army, with supply arrangements and the medical service functioning

superbly compared with the chaos in the British army.
As with the Russian army, only part of the French army was used in the
Crimea. Other units remained stationed in France: in the north, where they
were kept ready for expeditions to the Baltic (in the summer of 1854, 18,000
men were actually used to occupy the Åland Islands); in eastern France,
whence they might be moved through Germany to join with Austrian troops
on Austria’s north-eastern and eastern borders; and in the south, in order to
replenish the losses in the Crimea and to strengthen the army there
numerically.
The French expeditionary force, which was first shipped to the Turkish
Straits from March 1854 onwards, thence to Varna and in August 1854 to
the Crimea, was called the Armée d’Orient. Originally, when it was planned
by a joint Anglo-French commission in January 1854, it was to be of modest
dimensions, only 6,000 men. Month after month, however, its strength was
raised by leaps and bounds until it reached its peak of 120,000 in the
summer of 1855. When war was declared on Russia at the end of March
1854, 34,700 men were on their way to the East. In December of that year,
official figures put its strength at 70,000. Through a rotating system, some
of the troops in the Crimea were relieved by fresh units so that the grand
total of those having seen action in the Crimea (and on the minor fronts
elsewhere) was just over 309,000. This figure shows, on the one hand, the
great effort that France carried out and, on the other hand, the advantage
the Allies possessed in being able to concentrate their war effort on one
point of Russia’s territory, whereas the Tsar had to deploy his army on a
long frontier line, not knowing where his opponents might strike next.
The three generals commanding the Armée d’Orient were not much
better than their Russian counterparts. Two of them were daring and
energetic, one timorous and lacking in self-confidence. All three were close
followers of Emperor Napoleon and had in one way or another helped to
bring the latter to power; he was not slow in repaying them for their
allegiance. The first was Marshal Achille Le Roy de Saint-Arnaud, a
flamboyant and adventurous man. In the 1820s he joined the Greek
insurgents as a volunteer in their war of independence, and after his return
home spent some time in a French prison because he was involved in a case
concerning debt. From 1837 onwards he served for many years in Algeria,
took part in Napoleon’s coup d’état of 1851, and was made Minister of War.
He left this post on 11 March 1854 in order to take over the command of
the Armée d’Orient. Already an ailing man, Saint-Arnaud won the Battle of
the Alma together with the British. Nine days later, on 29 September 1854,
he died of cholera.
Saint-Arnaud was replaced by François Certain Canrobert, another
veteran of the army in Algeria and participant in the coup d’état of 2
December 1851. He sailed to the East as commander of the 1st Infantry
Division and became Saint-Arnaud’s successor two days before the latter’s
death. He was thus Commander-in-Chief during the Crimean winter, when

the siege of Sevastopol made no progress, depleting the French as well as the
British forces. He did not dare develop ideas of his own for changing Allied
strategy and was soon at odds with his English colleague, Lord Raglan, and
with General Niel, who had been sent to the Crimea by Napoleon in January
1855 in order to goad him into greater activity. On 16 May 1855, weary of
his burdensome task, Canrobert handed in his resignation.
He was replaced by General Aimable Pélissier, who had ended his service
in Algeria at the beginning of 1855 and been placed at the head of the 1st
Army Corps in the Crimea. He at once instilled a different spirit into the
French officer corps in the Crimea, being ruthless with critics and even
flouting the telegraphic commands of the Emperor from Paris, who wanted
to bring more mobility into the war in the Crimea by launching diversionary
attacks on Simferopol, the Russian supply base in the centre of the peninsula.
Pélissier took it into his head to put more and more men against the Russian
defenders of Sevastopol in a Verdun-like war of attrition. The result was
appalling loss at first, but a resounding success in the end, when the crucial
Malakhov bastion was stormed by French troops on 8 September 1855.
After this success, Pélissier sat still and ignored Napoleon’s advice to follow
up his success by marching into the interior.
The real Commander-in-Chief of the French forces was of course
Napoleon himself, just as Tsar Nicholas was the head of the Russian army.
Napoleon’s ideas for beginning and waging the war against Russia were
quite simple and straightforward. Besides a diversionary attack against
Russia in the Baltic in the spring of 1854, the main effort of the Western
Allies should be concentrated against the Russian army marching southwards
across the Balkans. On 12 April 1854, a fortnight after the declaration of
war against Russia, he wrote to Marshal Saint-Arnaud, ‘Either march and
meet the Russians on the Balkans, or take possession of the Crimea or, again,
disembark at Odessa or at any other point on the Russian coast of the Black
Sea.’2 This outline left much freedom of action to the commander on the
spot; it also shows that the idea of landing in the Crimea goes back to the
very outbreak of the war.
There were two moments during the siege of Sevastopol when Napoleon
tried to change the course of the war. The first followed on the prospect of
Austria joining the war on the side of the Western Allies after the conclusion
of their alliance of 2 December 1854, and the second was his visit to London
and Windsor in April 1855, when a common war plan was hammered out
by the two governments.
The December treaty had provided for consultations between the three
allied partners. For this purpose, the Austrian government sent a military
commissioner, General Franz Count Crenneville, to Paris. In several
interviews with Emperor Napoleon in February and March 1855, Crenneville
delivered two memoranda drawn up by the Austrian Commander-in-Chief,
General Heinrich von Hess. They did not contain a plan of campaign against
FRANCE 77
Russia, but rather statistical tables of the Russian, Austrian and Western
armed forces. Hess gave a precise figure for the Russian forces: 848,271 men.
For an offensive war against them, he deemed an Allied army of 1,230,000
men necessary. Of these, Austria could furnish an army of 300,000 men
within thirty to forty days, with a reserve army of 150,000. The other two-
thirds of the proposed force had to be provided by Prussia (200,000) and the
rest of Germany (100,000), by France (375,000), Britain (30,000), Turkey
(80,000) and Sardinia (15,000). These fantastic figures, with which
Crenneville had to operate in Paris, make it obvious that Austria was not in
earnest. Crenneville’s mission seems to tally with Buol’s diplomatic tactics.3
Oddly enough, Napoleon took up the Austrian ball, reacting with figures
and a virtual plan of campaign of his own. He accepted that the total number
of Russian forces might well be 848,000, but that they were lined up on the
long frontier from Finland to the Caucasus. His own plan to deal with them
was not to invade Russia and march to Moscow, but to deliver additional
blows to Russia in the same manner as the Crimean campaign: to attack her
in the north with a Swedish army and an Anglo-French fleet, and in the
centre with an Austrian army of only 200,000 (and a reserve army of
100,000). One wing of the latter would have to seize the fortress of Brest-
Litovsk, thus obliging the Russian army to evacuate Poland, and the other
wing would march on to Kiev, thus cutting the Russian forces in two.
France’s contribution would be to keep Prussia in check with 200,000 men
on the Rhine. When Napoleon later pressed Crenneville to conclude a
military alliance on the basis of Hess’s second statistical table, which deemed
an Allied central army of 500,000 (plus a reserve army of 400,000) necessary,
the Austrian general evaded any obligation by pointing out that such a
treaty would have to wait until the Vienna peace conference was terminated.
The failure of the peace talks at the beginning of May made all further
military consultations illusory. Crenneville therefore left Paris for Vienna by
mid-July.
The military talks with Austria having proved a soap bubble, Napoleon
tried to close the ranks more tightly with his British ally. He paid a state visit
to Britain in mid-April 1855 in connection with the pressure the British
government put on him to give up his planned visit to the Crimea (which
will be dealt with in a later chapter). One of the results of his consultations
was a plan of campaign signed by both sides on 20 April. It was designed to
bring mobility into the deadlocked siege warfare round Sevastopol. The gist
of the plan, which was essentially Napoleon’s long-cherished personal idea,
was to maintain the siege with 60,000 troops at the most; to act offensively
with the rest of the Allied armies against the Russian army outside Sevastopol,
beat it and thus cut the supply route with the beleaguered army in Sevastopol,
and then turn against the latter in full force. The offensive army was to
consist of three parts: a Turkish army of 30,000 men would occupy Eupatoria
to threaten the Russian right flank; an Allied army of 55,000 men, mostly
British under Lord Raglan, would turn north and take the Mackenzie
heights, a Russian strongpoint on the route to Simferopol; and a second

army, consisting of French troops drawn partly from the army of Sevastopol
and partly from the reserve at Constantinople, would move by sea to
Alushta on the eastern shore of the Crimea, land there and move on to
Simferopol in order to meet the Russians there in a pincer movement with
Raglan’s army.4
It was one thing, however, to hammer out such a plan at the green table
at Windsor, quite another to put it into execution on the spot. When the plan
was in Canrobert’s hands on 8 May, the French general discussed it with his
English colleague. They differed sharply on the merits of the plan, and the
choice which confronted Canrobert, either to carry out the plan without the
concurrence of the British or to disobey his Emperor, made the French
general hand in his resignation on 16 May. His successor, Pélissier, was
strong willed enough to ignore the orders received from Paris and try his
luck with increased vigour in the trenches round Sevastopol.
The contribution of the French navy to the war effort was second only to
that of the British. In some respects the French navy was even better than the
Royal Navy. In terms of numbers of ships and men it was, of course, inferior
to its British counterpart. According to the Navy List of 1854, Britain
possessed 385 armed ships with over 13,000 guns and another 100 unarmed
brigs. The French navy at the same time disposed of 300 warships, of which
one-third were steam-powered, the same proportion as in the British navy.
Since his advent to power, Napoleon III had devoted much attention to
modernizing the French navy. A symbol of the progressive spirit and of the
high technological standard was the Napoléon, the first modern screw-
driven ship of the line, built in 1852 by the gifted naval engineer Stanislas
Dupuy de Lôme.
The French navy was also ahead of the British: in the construction of the
first ironclad ships, which were at that time called ‘floating batteries’. Under
the personal supervision of the Emperor, five of these ships were built in
France within a matter of months. The ships were made of two casings; a
wooden structure 42 cm thick covered with an additional iron layer of 11
cm which was impenetrable by all cannon shot of the time. Originally built
for taking part in the siege of Sevastopol, three of them arrived just after the
fall of the fortress, but saw action in mid-October during the bombardment
of Kinburn. They decided the fate of this Russian fortress. The British
followed suit in constructing ironclads of their own; two of them were
actually towed to the Crimea but arrived too late to take part in any
operations. Although the engineering feat of the floating batteries should
not be exaggerated, it paved the way for the construction of the armoured
ships of later days.
The quality of the crews of the French navy was high, and the
reinforcements that were necessary during the war were of higher quality
than the British equivalent in the Royal Navy, as most of them were taken
from the merchant marine and fishing vessels, often by force.
FRANCE 79
On the French army, especially on its leadership, cf. Brison D. Gooch, The
New Bonapartist Generals in the Crimean War (The Hague, 1959). On
Marshal Saint-Arnaud, see Maurice Quatrelles L’Épine, Le Maréchal de
Saint-Arnaud, vol. 2, 1850–1854 (Paris, 1929), pp. 289–455. There is a
voluminous biography of Canrobert based on interviews with him in his
later life: Germain Bapst, Le Maréchal Canrobert. Souvenirs d’un siècle, vols
2–3 (Paris, 1902–4). On Pélissier, see Victor B. Derrécagaix, Le Maréchal
Pélissier, Duc de Malakoff (Paris, 1911). On the French navy during the
Crimean War, see Michèle Battesti, La marine de Napoléon III. Une politique
navale, vols 1–2. (Houilles, 1997); Claude Farrère, Histoire de la marine
française (Paris, 1934).
80
8
Great Britain
The British army system was the most antiquated, the most complicated and
the most curious in comparison with the corresponding organizations of the
continental great powers in the nineteenth century. To begin with, there was
no compulsory service in Britain. Soldiers were hired mercenaries, as soldiers
on the continent had been in former centuries. Their status was the lowest
in the social scale. Their term of service was twenty-one years, that is,
practically for life. The body of officers was organized, again compared to
continental standards, along feudalistic lines. Service in the cavalry and
guards was a comfortable sinecure for the younger sons of the aristocracy
and formal standards of professional education were low. Commissions
could still be acquired by purchase. In 1856 the commission of a lieutenant
colonel was fixed at £7,000; for the ranks of a lieutenant in the line infantry
and a major in the guards it ranged between £1,000 and £6,000.
Another characteristic of the British army in the nineteenth century is
that it was a ‘parliamentary’, not a ‘royal army’. This meant that Parliament
fixed army estimates annually and discussed all sorts of questions from the
overall strength of the army to minute details of armament and equipment.
One result of the army being dependent on Parliament was its bewildering
lack of organization at the highest levels. As the Prince Consort wrote in a
memorandum on army reform on 14 January 1855, at the height of the
Crimean winter:
We have … no general staff or staff corps; – No field commissariat, no

field army department; no ambulance corps, no baggage train, no corps
of drivers, no corps of artisans; no practice, or possibility of acquiring it,
in the combined use of the three arms, cavalry, infantry, and artillery; –
No general qualified to handle more than one of these arms, and the
artillery kept as distinct from the army as if it were a separate profession.1
This description is by no means exaggerated. Without going into excessive

detail, it can be said that there was not one minister responsible for the army
as a whole – as in the countries on the continent – but several. There was a
Secretary of State for ‘War and the Colonies’, indicating that the empire and
its military control belonged together. The Home Secretary was responsible
81
for the reserve forces and the regular forces within the British Isles. Military
finance was the domain of both the Secretary of War and the Treasury. The
responsibility for supplies rested with two institutions: the Commissariat
and the Ordnance Department. There was a Commander-in-Chief at the
Horse Guards who was responsible for the preparedness of the army within
the United Kingdom, but once an expeditionary force operated overseas he
was almost powerless.
Due to the chaos which this system produced in the British army in the
Crimea, some minor reforms were introduced. The post of Secretary of State
for War and the Colonies was separated into two departments in June 1854;
the Secretary of War was given a wider range of responsibilities; the post of
Secretary at War was scrapped altogether under the Palmerston government.
On the spot in the Crimea the Land Transport Corps was formed (later
called the Military Train) – thus relieving the Commissariat of responsibility
for provision of land transport – but it was raised too late to have any great
effect.
The commanding general of the British expeditionary force sent to the
Crimea was Lord Fitzroy Somerset, first Lord Raglan. He was a typical
office general who had become Master-General of the Ordnance in 1852.
Britain had not been involved in any major European war since the time of
Napoleon, and colonial warfare was the only experience a British general
could look back on. Raglan himself was conscious of this when he described
his expeditionary force as capable of waging a colonial war, but not a war
against a European power. In contrast to his French counterparts, Raglan
was cultivated and gentle, and an able administrator who was devoid of
strategic ideas and any sense of initiative. He scrupulously executed the
commands he received from the Cabinet in London, in constant fear of
being reprimanded or called before a parliamentary committee of
investigation. True to his Whitehall experience as a desk warrior, he was
content to be immersed in minute administrative details.
Cabinet ministers in London, themselves dreading unpalatable questions
in Parliament, despaired of Raglan’s lack of ideas for solving the deadlock
before Sevastopol. Thus the Foreign Secretary, Lord Clarendon, sighed in a
letter which he sent to Stratford de Redcliffe in Constantinople on 15
January 1855, ‘Ld Raglan writes about individuals & regimental changes &
Morning States just as if he was again Mil. Secy at the H Gds but with
respect to what he is doing or meditating nil, nil, nil.’2 Raglan died of cholera
on 28 June 1855. He was succeeded by General Sir James Simpson who
laboured hard under his new burden, was recalled after only four months
and replaced by General Sir William Codrington.
Thus, with the possible exception of Pélissier, none of the commanding
generals in the Crimea – Russian, French or English – was of outstanding
quality.
The numerical strength which the British army contributed to the Allied
war effort was clearly subordinate to the French army. The aggregate total
GREAT BRITAIN 83
of the British army in 1854 was, according to the parliamentary Army

Estimates for that year, 153,000. To this can be added 30,000 troops
stationed in India who were paid by the East India Company. Most of the
troops were scattered throughout the colonies and could not be spared for a
war on the Continent. In the summer of 1854 the British army of the East
numbered 21,500 men; the French army was about treble that size. This
proportion did not vary much in the ensuing months; if it did change, it was
to the detriment of the British.
In spite of reinforcements, the British army dwindled during the coming
months, mostly due to deaths from sickness. In December 1854, Sidney
Herbert estimated British strength at 20,000, and at the end of January the
effective strength had fallen to 13,000 due to the extraordinary rigours of
the winter. In May 1855, after great efforts had been made to replenish the
troops, the British could muster 32,000, the French 120,000 troops.
According to unpublished official figures, almost 98,000 British soldiers had
landed in the Crimea during the whole war. To solve the problems of
manpower, the militia in Britain was tapped, which provided 33,000 men
altogether.3
The numerical inferiority of the British army is the main reason that the
two Allied armies were never put under one single command, although
Napoleon III tried hard to bring about this sensible solution. On 22 January
1855 he addressed a private letter to the British ambassador in Paris, Lord
Cowley, in which he urged that each should concentrate on its proper task,
that is, Britain should provide four-fifths of the sea power and France four-
fifths of the ground troops; Paris should be in command of the two armies
and London of the two navies. But there was too much sensitivity on both
sides, which had of course its historical background. At one point the British
even stopped sending their troops by rail through France because they were
manhandled by inhabitants in southern France. Palmerston’s reaction to the
Emperor’s idea was negative: his reply was suum cuique.4
Almost the same sensitiveness reigned at the front round Sevastopol.
Both armies had their separate supply bases, the British at Balaklava and the
French at Kamiesh; each had its section of the besieging front, the British the
right hand side, the French the centre and the left. Only when the British
wing was on the point of breaking down, because of the length and difficulty
of the supply route from Balaklava harbour, did they accept French
reinforcements for their supply system and for their siege troops.
In terms of equipment the British army was up to the standard of Britain’s
industrial power, and thus on a par with the French and superior to the
Russians as far as the infantry was concerned. The Enfield rifle, an improved
version of the Minié rifle, had been introduced in the British army in 1853.
The pride of the artillery was the Lancaster gun, which could fire a 68-pound
shell over a distance of up to 2.2 kilometres, that is, double the range of
other guns of the same calibre. It was much feared by the Russian defenders
of Sevastopol, but the British did not have enough pieces available. A
peculiar aspect of the British army was the use of linear tactics in its infantry,
which appeared outdated by the middle of the nineteenth century. As the
Battle of the Alma showed, it took a long time to prepare the ‘thin red line’
in rugged and hilly country and it was tantalizingly difficult to manoeuvre
with the long line. Despite this, the firing power of the line was devastating,
as the Russians at the Alma and at Inkerman experienced.
After the inconclusive Battle of Inkerman and the November storm of
1854, which played havoc with the British supply base at Balaklava, the
British government was acutely aware of the need for reinforcements. The
troops dispersed in the colonies could not be called upon; a reserve army
was not available because there was no conscription. The thriving economy
of the early 1850s produced a high demand for labour, which meant that
young men saw no attraction in enlisting in the army. Thus the government
fell back on the ancient practice of hiring mercenaries abroad. It was the last
time in British military history that this practice was revived; indeed it was
thought to have disappeared with the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The
Aberdeen government tabled a Foreign Enlistment Bill in early December
1854 which passed both Houses by an unimpressive majority. The greatest
difficulty in implementing the Act was that international law by then
regarded official toleration of recruiting activities in foreign countries as a
breach of neutrality, quite apart from the fact that the nationalism of the
time was averse to such an outmoded practice.
After Clarendon had sounded out his representatives in Europe and in
the United States, it soon emerged that success was only to be expected in
the United States, the German states, Switzerland and Sardinia. Apart from
Sardinia, recruiting activities had to be conducted clandestinely, and were
conducive to diplomatic friction. This was especially true in the case of the
United States and Prussia, as already noted in earlier chapters. The efforts
had to be ignominiously abandoned in the United States – no recruit ever
leaving the American continent for Europe – with several British consuls
detained and charged with breaching American neutrality laws, and
diplomatic relations broken off as a result in May 1856. Recruitment in
Prussia ended almost as badly. The British consul at Cologne, John Robert
Curtis, was condemned to imprisonment, but subsequently pardoned by the
Prussian King.
Young Germans from Prussia and from other German states were,
however, recruited in their thousands. They found their way clandestinely in
fishing vessels and by night to the British island of Heligoland, and thence to
Britain. This success was mainly due to the efficient work of Baron Richard
von Stutterheim, a man of Prussian origin who had served in the British
Legion in Spain in the 1830s and in the Schleswig-Holstein army against
Denmark in 1848. On British soil a ‘British-German Legion’ was formed
consisting of three regiments, which, having been trained and equipped at
Aldershot and Shorncliffe, were transported to Scutari and Constantinople
between November 1855 and January 1856. The war being almost at its
GREAT BRITAIN 85
FIGURE 9 Recruitment of German soldiers on the island of Heligoland in the

North Sea. Kladderadatsch 32, 8 July 1855, p. 128.
end, the Legion was soon disbanded. The men, having transgressed the law
of their country of origin, could not return and were offered emigration to
various British colonies; most of them went to South Africa. The strength of
the German Legion was almost 10,000 men.
Recruitment in Switzerland, a traditional foreign recruiting ground
throughout modern history, was another successful venture, although the
Swiss Constitution of 1848 forbade such activities. The authorities, however,
turned a blind eye to the practice, which was also carried out by French
officers for their Seconde légion étrangère. This produced competition
between the two countries. The main British recruiting depot was at
Schlettstadt in Alsace. Colonel Charles Sheffield Dickson, a British soldier,
was the main organizer and the eventual commander of the ‘British–Swiss
Legion’. Its strength was brought to just over 3,000 men and its first regiment
was transported to Smyrna early in December 1855. The disbandment of
the Swiss Legion was less difficult than that of the German Legion as most
of the men were able to return to Switzerland.
The third foreign legion to be successfully formed was recruited in
Sardinia. Many of its members were political exiles or deserters from the
nearby Austrian vice-kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, a fact which produced
some diplomatic friction with the government in Vienna, so much the more
as the main recruiting depot was at Novara near the Austrian border. The
‘British–Italian Legion’ had an eventual strength of 3,500 men. It was an
unruly band which left Sardinian soil as late as April 1856 for Malta. After
disbandment the majority returned to Sardinia, but about 1,200 were
allowed to emigrate to the Argentine Confederation to settle there as military
colonists.
Distinct from these foreign legions, the British took in pay two peculiar
military organizations: the so-called ‘Turkish Contingent’ and the ‘Polish
Legion’.
The ‘Turkish Contingent’ was the hobby horse of the British ambassador
at Constantinople, Stratford de Redcliffe. On 3 February 1855 he signed a
convention with the Turkish government which provided for the employment
of a body of Turkish troops in the British service. Parliament passed the
convention, which meant that money had to be raised for a contingent of
20,000 Turks. The officers were to be British, on the lines of the army in
India. Besides the idea of strengthening the British effort during the war, de
Redcliffe had the ulterior motive of opening the Contingent to Christian
subjects of the Sultan (the corps was originally to consist of Muslims only)
and thus of contributing to the realization of his notion of equality among
all subjects of the Sultan. The Turkish Contingent was set up in the ensuing
months and was commanded by the British general, Robert John Vivian. A
year later, by February 1856, it seems to have reached its nominal strength
of at least 20,000.
When the common plan of campaign for 1856 was drafted between
London and Paris, the British had the satisfaction of contributing slightly
GREAT BRITAIN 87
more than half the 200,000 troops earmarked for the campaign in the East.
For the first time during the war, the British were equal to the French: their
army was to consist of 104,000 troops, leaving the French to bring only
96,000 into the field. The British contribution was made up of 61,000
British troops, 10,000 of the Foreign Legion (German and Swiss), 18,000 of
the Anglo-Turkish Legion (of which 15,000 were from the Turkish
Contingent and 3,000 ‘Osmanli Cavalry’, that is, irregulars) and 15,000
Sardinians. On paper the British army was about two-fifths non-British.5
An integral part of the Turkish Contingent was the ‘Turkish Cossacks’ or
‘Polish Legion’. This body already existed before the formation of the
Turkish Contingent and originally served in the Turkish army under Omer
Pasha. It consisted of two regiments, one being commanded by Michael
Czajkowski, the other by Władisław Zamoyski. Both commanders were of
Polish origin. The former served in the Turkish army during the war as a
general (his Turkish name was Sadik Pasha). When the Turks occupied
Wallachia together with the Austrians in the summer of 1854, Czajkowski
became governor of Bucharest and his Legion was stationed in the city.
Some of the soldiers under his command were deserters from the Austrian
army, which created endless friction between the two occupation forces
until the Turkish authorities withdrew the Legion from the town. It took
part in the Battle of Tulchea on 7 January 1855 against the Russians, but
after repeated remonstrances from the Austrian government it was removed,
in the summer of 1855, to the Caucasian front.
In September 1855 the ‘Turkish Cossacks’ were reorganized. The second
regiment under Major General Zamoyski was placed under British control.
Whereas the first regiment consisted of a hotchpotch of Polish and Hungarian
emigrés and of various other Slavs (among them Zaporogian Cossacks
whose forebears had fled from the Ukraine to Turkey in 1775), the members
of the second regiment were of Polish origin only. Besides emigrés and
deserters, it was augmented by Polish prisoners of war from the Russian
army in the Crimea. During the winter of 1855–6 it had its headquarters at
Baltchik, north of Varna and a depot of organization at Scutari. At the end
of the war it reached a strength of 1,500 men and officers and was returned
to the Turkish army.
The formation of these various foreign legions clearly demonstrates
Britain’s frantic efforts to make up for the deficiencies of her army and to
draw even numerically with the French army in the East.
British war planning at the beginning of the war was either non-existent
or hazy. After Russia’s evacuation of the Danubian Principalities, it
concentrated on the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula and remained
fixed on Sevastopol until the latter’s fall in September 1855; it then moved
to the Caucasian front in order to avoid the trammels of the sterile
cooperation with the French army, but was brought back to reality when a
war council in Paris in January 1856 clearly showed that the whole Crimean
peninsula had first to be cleared of Russian troops before opening up other
theatres of war. Efforts in the Baltic with the final aim of attacking the
formidable fortress of Kronstadt, which protected the capital St Petersburg,
were in fact restricted to naval raids on the Baltic and Finnish coasts and the
Åland Islands. Because of the lack of troops, an invasion on that front on
any large scale was never seriously entertained.
The first phase of Britain’s war planning was dominated by the navy and
its First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, and was also subservient
to the war plans of France, which provided the stronger land army. At the
beginning of 1854 the greatest problem was how to protect Turkey from a
recurrence of Sinope, and the Straits and Constantinople from a Russian
march from the Principalities through the Balkans. The idea of invading the
Crimea was already present at that early stage in strategic thinking, as it was
understood that Austria would hold back the Russian army from crossing
the Danube. On 1 March 1854, Graham explained his strategy in a letter to
Clarendon. He took it for granted that the Dardanelles had to be secured
and a position in front of Constantinople fortified:
But the operation which will be ever memorable and decisive, is the
capture and destruction of Sevastopol. On this my Heart is set: the Eye
Tooth of the Bear must be drawn: and ’til his Fleet and Naval Arsenal in
the Black Sea are destroyed there is no safety for Constantinople, no
Security for the Peace of Europe.6
This was the plan that was finally carried out when the Allied troops assembled
at Varna and found that the Russians had raised the siege of Silistria and
evacuated the Principalities. The invasion of the Crimea in September 1854
boiled down to an unexpectedly long siege of Sevastopol. Both the British and
the French governments became worried about the stalemate which developed
in front of Sevastopol. Napoleon wanted to cut the Gordian knot by going to
the Crimea in person, thus instilling more mobility into the Allied troops there
and enforcing a military solution. His own ministers and also the British and
Austrian governments left no stone unturned to dissuade him from this
dangerous plan. A way out was found when Queen Victoria invited the
Emperor to come to London and Windsor in April 1855. Both governments
decided on a pincer movement, already mentioned, that was supposed to
wrest Simferopol, in the centre of the Crimea, from the Russians and thereby
cut the vital supply line to the beleaguered fortress. An army under Canrobert
was to be left in the trenches round Sevastopol; a second under Raglan was to
turn north, cross the Tchernaya and occupy the Mackenzie heights on the
Russian supply line between Simferopol and Sevastopol; a third under Omer
Pasha was to march east from Eupatoria; a fourth on the east coast of the
Crimea was to march west into the interior. Thus, it was hoped, the Russians
would seek a battle in the open field.
The Allied generals on the spot cared not a jot for this plan and tried one
assault after another on the Russian fortress of Sevastopol. When it finally
GREAT BRITAIN 89
fell on 8 September 1855, Napoleon became weary of the dreadful drain of

men and money and withdrew part of his troops to France either to end the
war or open up new fronts elsewhere in Europe, preferably on the Rhine.
Palmerston’s plan of campaign for 1856 was to hold the positions in the
Crimea that were in Allied hands (Sevastopol, Eupatoria, Kertch); send an
Anglo-Turkish army with a French contingent to drive the Russians out of
Georgia and Circassia; despatch a French army with a British contingent to
conquer Kherson and Nikolaev; and launch a combined fleet with 10,000
ground troops to attack and destroy Kronstadt.
These divergent views were the reason for the convocation of an Anglo-
French council of war in Paris which discussed various plans between 10
and 20 January 1856. As the Russians had decided on 16 January to accept
the Austrian ultimatum and end the war, the decisions of the council almost
became a dead letter, but from a military point of view it was expedient to
have a plan for 1856 for all contingencies. The British gave up their plan for
a simultaneous campaign in Asia Minor. Instead, both governments fell back
on the basic idea of their original plan of 20 April 1855. The Crimea was to
be cleared of Russian troops by concentrating an Allied army of 120,000 at
Eupatoria under French command; another army of 65,000 under a British
general was to move northwards from Sevastopol, and the Turkish
Contingent of 15,000 was to occupy Kertch and Yenikaleh. As mentioned
above, the British army, including all non-British parts (foreign legions,
Turkish Contingent, etc.), numbered 104,000 and was thus slightly superior
to the French army.7
The impending peace conferences in Paris ensured that this plan of
campaign for 1856, the first and only one during the war hammered out
conjointly and sanctioned by both governments, remained confined to paper.
The backbone of the British war effort during the Crimean War was the
Royal Navy. As the huge but obsolete Russian navy withdrew to its harbours,
the Royal Navy never had a chance to meet its enemy in an open battle. It
was thus reduced to an inconspicuous role, but this was by no means
unimportant. It provided mobility to the British army without which the
latter could not have been used in the East. The new screwdriven ships were
especially invaluable. These vessels could ply the Mediterranean – from
Marseilles to the Straits – within twelve to sixteen days, whereas sailing
ships needed fifty, sixty or seventy days. The fleet was the lifeline of the army
before Sevastopol and was in command of the entire Black Sea.
In the Baltic its main task was to ensure the blockade of the Russian
coast. This was difficult because it lacked flat-bottomed coastal vessels, thus
the Russian coastal trade could never be stopped completely. The situation
in this respect improved somewhat in 1855. In 1854 the main feat of the
Allies in the Baltic was the occupation and destruction of Bomarsund on the
Åland Islands in August 1854, but this was mainly due to a French
expeditionary corps of 18,000 men. Public opinion in Britain was therefore
impatient of the relative impotence of the British fleet in the Baltic. In 1855
it did not fare much better. The main action was the bombardment of
Sveaborg on the Finnish coast in August 1855, which was, however, of
minimal strategic importance. Plans for 1856 were therefore stepped up on
a grand scale, the main object being the destruction of Kronstadt.
Whereas in 1854 the Royal Navy, according to the Navy list, consisted of
385 armed vessels with slightly over 13,000 guns, the majority of which
(301) were in European waters, the squadron earmarked for the Baltic
campaign of 1856 alone consisted of a total of 336 vessels. Besides twenty-
five ships of the line it numbered 164 gunboats and 100 mortar vessels and
floats which were vital for operations in the Bay of Kronstadt. It also
included eight floating batteries which had proved their worth in the
bombardment of the fortress of Kinburn in October 1855. This force,
together with a smaller French squadron, would have sealed the fate of
Kronstadt in 1856. Although a large expeditionary force was not to be sent
to the Baltic, it was to be expected that Sweden would enter the war
according to her treaty with the Western powers of 21 November 1855,
which was to be widened to an offensive treaty in January 1856. According
to a secret memorandum drawn up by King Oscar at that time, Sweden was
to provide an army of 165,000 men to drive the Russians out of Finland.
Russia’s suing for peace in January 1856 stopped all these plans.
For general remarks on the British army (and also on those of the other
European great powers), see the various studies by Hew Strachan, European
Armies and the Conduct of War (London and New York, 1983, repr. 2004
and 2010); Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–54
(Manchester, 1984); From Waterloo to Balaclava: Tactics, Technology, and
the British Army, 1815–1854 (Cambridge, 1985). On the organization of
the British army, cf. also John Sweetman, War and Administration: The
Significance of the Crimean War for the British Army (Edinburgh, 1984).
Much material on numerous aspects of the British army during the Crimean
War is in the life-and-letters biography of Sidney Herbert, Secretary at War
from 1852 to February 1855: A. H. Gordon, Baron Stanmore, Sidney
Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea, 2 vols (London, 1906). Also of importance is
Sir George Douglas and Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay (eds), The Panmure
Papers: Being a Selection from the Correspondence of Fox Maule, Second
Baron Panmure, afterwards, Earl of Dalhousie, 2 vols (London 1908). There
are two studies on Lord Raglan: Christopher Hibbert, The Destruction of
Lord Raglan (London, 1961); John Sweetman, Raglan: From the Peninsula
to the Crimea (London, 1993, 2nd edn Barnsley, 2010). The latter tries to
rehabilitate Raglan. On the introduction of modern firearms, see C. H.
Roads, The British Soldier’s Firearm 1850–1864 (London, 1964). The best
monograph on the foreign legions is C. C. Bayley, Mercenaries for the
GREAT BRITAIN 91
Crimea: The German, Swiss, and Italian Legions in British Service, 1854–
1856 (Montreal and London, 1977). On the Swiss legion, cf. also Peter
Gugolz, Die Schweiz und der Krimkrieg 1853–1856 (Basel and Stuttgart,
1965). There is no study on the Turkish Contingent. Cf. the relevant
documents (also on the Polish legion) in AGKK III/3–4. On the Polish
Legion, see Marja Pawlicowa, ‘O formacjach Kozackich w czasie wojny
krymskiej’, Kwartalnik Historyczny 60 (1936): 3–50, 622–55; Ion I. Nistor,
‘Die Polenlegion im Krimkriege’, Codrul Cosminului 9 (1935): 69–102. On
British war planning, see Hew Strachan, ‘Soldiers, Strategy and Sebastopol’,
Historical Journal 21 (1978): 303–25; Andrew D. Lambert, The Crimean
War: British Grand Strategy, 1853–56 (Manchester and New York, 1990,
2nd edn Farnham, 2011). General questions concerning the Royal Navy are
discussed by Wilhelm Treue, Der Krimkrieg und seine Bedeutung für die
Entstehung der modernen Flotten (Herford, 1980), pp. 26–31. British naval
campaigns in all theatres of the war are discussed by Peter Deckers, The
Crimean War at Sea: The Naval Campaigns against Russia, 1854–1856
(Barnsley, 2011); Andrew Rath, The Crimean War in Imperial Context,
1854–1856 (New York, 2015).
92
9
Turkey
Very little research has been done until recently on the Turkish army during
the Crimean War. But a few basic facts can be given here.
Since the 1830s the Turkish army had been reorganized on European
lines. Soldiers had to serve for five years, which meant that there were
enough trained soldiers to fall back on in times of war. The strength of the
army could then be doubled. It is difficult, however, to give any approximate
idea of its actual strength during the Crimean War. Figures vary between just
over 200,000 and 400,000. Turkish authorities themselves would probably
not have known how many heads its army counted at any given time. A
figure provided by the Turkish Minister of Finance at the turn of 1855–6
puts the army of the line, the nizam, at 105,325 men, including 2,259 in
British service, and the reserve army, the redif, at 103,827 men, including
7,741 men of the Turkish Contingent.1
Added to these must be the troops of the vassal provinces, such as Tunisia
and Egypt. They were of poor quality and were raised like indentured labour.
Thus the Egyptian contingent which arrived at Constantinople in August
1853 was a motley of 14,000 men, mostly veterans who had been seized and
brought in chains to Alexandria where they were shipped off to
Constantinople. According to contemporary sources, 60,000 of these troops
were sent to the Danubian front and another 30,000 to the Caucasian front.
In action, as in the Caucasus, they would desert in their hundreds and
thousands.
A further addition to the Turkish Army were three special units, the
largest – at least on paper – of which was the so-called ‘Turkish Contingent’.
The idea for its formation came from the British government and from its
ambassador at Constantinople, Stratford de Redcliffe. They were desperately
looking for troops that would prop up their own army which was so much
inferior to the French Armée d’Orient. On 3 February 1855, a convention
was signed at Constantinople ‘for the Employment of a Body of Turkish
Troops in the British Service’. The Contingent was to consist of 20,000
soldiers, whom the Porte had to supply, and who were to be led by British
officers. The commander was Lieutenant-General Robert Vivian. As the
Turkish government was unable to furnish the recruits, the British
93
government hit upon the idea to induce the Porte to recruit Christians from
the empire who were normally exempt from militäry service. But the idea
soon fell to the ground. Anyhow, the build-up of the Contingent was a
novelty in Ottoman history since the higher-ranking British officers were
Christians and the ranks were Muslims.
Another special unit was the ‘Turkish Cossacks’ (‘Corps des Cosaques
Ottomans’). It was founded at the instigation of Count Adam Czartoryski,
leader of the Poles in exile in Paris. It consisted of Polish prisoners of war
and deserters from the Russian army. At the end of 1855 it was earmarkd to
form part of the ‘Turkish Contingent’ and serve as an occupation unit at
Kertch; it was to be brought to a strength of 4,000 men, but never reached
that number.2
Finally, there were the Bashi-Bazouks, irregular troops that were mostly
recruited in Albania and Asia Minor. They received arms and ammunition
from the Turkish army, but no pay and no uniforms. They fought on their
own, their main concern being booty and the killing or mutilating of the
enemy.3
The Turkish regular army was well drilled, well armed and good on the
defensive. About a quarter was equipped with modern percussion rifles
bought in Britain. The Turkish artillery was as good as any at the time, the
guns being of French and British origin.
The most able leader of the Turkish army was Omer Pasha. He was a
Croatian by birth, who had deserted from the Austrian army and held
various posts in the Turkish army and administration. In 1853 he commanded
the Turkish army on the Danubian front. He was fêted in the European
press for his successes against the Russians at Kalafat and Oltenitsa and for
the stubborn resistance of his troops at Silistria. After much friction with the
Austrian occupation army in the Principalities, Omer left with part of his
army for the Crimea in January 1855 and entrenched himself at Eupatoria
to threaten the Russian right flank there. As he did not like cooperating with
the Allied commanders there and at Sevastopol, he took his troops to the
Caucasus in September 1855 in order to relieve the beleaguered fortress of
Kars, but arrived there too late.
In all, the Turkish army cut a fairly decent figure on the Danube, but in
order to win the war Turkey was wholly dependent on the Allied war effort.
Until recently no research had been done on the Turkish army during the
Crimean War. Some useful information could be gained from Adolphus
Slade, Turkey and the Crimean War (London, 1867). But now, at long last,
two recent books shed light on the matter: James J. Reid, Crisis of the
Ottoman Empire: Prelude to the Collapse, 1839–1878 (Stuttgart, 2000);
Candan Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War (1853–1856) (Leiden, 2010).
TURKEY 95
Not surprisingly, Badem devotes more space to the Danubian and Caucasian
fronts than to the Crimea. Note also his remarks on Turkish military history,
pp. 19–22, and on the special units of the army, pp. 257–68. See also
M. E. S. Laws, ‘Beatson’s Bashi Bazooks’, Army Quarterly and Defense
Journal 71 (1955): 80–5.
96
10
Sardinia
The fifth army which served in the Crimea was that of Sardinia. It participated
in the war at the instigation of the British, not of the French government.
Initially, however, it was the Sardinian government itself that wanted to join
the Western powers against Russia for political and ideological reasons.
There was a strong current within the government and in public opinion in
Sardinia that the war was a crusade of the liberal and progressive West
against the conservative and reactionary Russia. It was even hoped that the
war in the East might develop into a general war of liberation of oppressed
nationalities in Europe.
For the British and French governments the participation of Austria was
of far greater importance than that of Sardinia, so the hopes of the latter
were damped down for the time being. They were certainly not raised by the
treaty of 2 December 1854 between Austria and the Western powers, which
opened up the prospect of French troops marching through southern
Germany and northern Italy to bolster up the Austrian army, once the
Viennese government had declared war on Russia. Might not the Western
powers treat Sardinia as they had treated Greece in May 1854, and force her
to remain quiet and not provoke Austria in her rear? There was much
discussion about how to deal with this untoward situation. King Victor
Emanuel and Prime Minister Cavour were both in favour of taking the bull
by the horns and offering assistance to the Allies, whereas the Foreign
Minister, Dabormida, was strongly against any unconditional participation.
On the other hand the British government was searching Europe for
troops after the inconclusive Battle of Inkerman and the terrible hurricane
of 14 November 1854, particularly in view of its numerical inferiority in
relation to the French. As early as 15 November, Palmerston had asked
Russell, ‘Might we not get six thousand men from Portugal, ten thousand
from Spain, and ten thousand from Piedmont?’1 On 29 November, Clarendon
asked Hudson to sound out Turin about providing 10,000 troops. The
Sardinian government responded positively, promising as many as 15,000
men, but with strings attached. Sardinia was to take part in the future peace
negotiations on an equal status and the Allies were to pledge themselves to
put the question of Italy on the agenda of the peace conference and were to
ask Vienna to raise the sequestration of the property of emigrants from
97
Lombardy and Venetia. London and Paris were adamant in rejecting these
conditions. On 7 January 1855 the British and French ministers at Turin
presented a virtual ultimatum to the Sardinian government: either adhere to
the Allied treaty of 10 April 1854 unconditionally or give up any idea of an
alliance. Cavour accepted the ultimatum, whereupon Dabormida, the
Foreign Minister, resigned. Cavour took the risk of the new alliance
becoming a conservative one.
On 10 January 1855 a treaty of accession was signed between Sardinia
and the two Western powers. It was completed by a tripartite military
convention on 26 January by which Sardinia pledged herself to furnish
15,000 men. On the same day a financial convention was signed between
Sardinia and Britain only, by which the latter pledged herself to grant a
loan (not a subsidy, which the Sardinians regarded as dishonourable) of
£2 million.
When the Sardinian troops under their commanding general Alfonso La
Marmora prepared to embark for the East in March and April, an altercation
developed between Paris and London about how to employ them and who
should do so. Napoleon planned to use them as a portion of his army of
reserve at Constantinople, whereupon the British government maintained
its right to use them at Sevastopol because it bore the financial burden of
their upkeep. When Napoleon was on his state visit to London, he gave in
to the British demand.
When the Sardinians eventually landed at Balaklava on 8 May 1855, they
were in fact placed under joint Allied command and stationed well outside
the siege perimeter, with Gasfort Hill (near the Valley of Death) as their
centre. They were at once afflicted by cholera: 3,000 fell ill and 1,300 died.
On 16 August they became involved in the battle on the Tchernaya and lost
fourteen dead and 170 wounded.
Did Sardinia reap any fruits from her participation in the war in the East?
Cavour and his King managed to ingratiate themselves with Napoleon,
Queen Victoria and the British government on their state visits to Paris and
London in December 1855. Cavour was allowed to take part in the Paris
peace congress, thus fulfilling one of the three conditions he had originally
raised for Sardinia’s accession to the Western alliance. In the official sessions
the Italian Question was not broached at all because of the stiff resistance of
the Austrian delegation. Backstage, Cavour tried hard to further the cause of
Italy, but to no avail. In the end he was highly disappointed: ‘Peace is signed.
The drama is finished and the curtain has fallen without having brought
about a solution which would have been materially favourable to us. This is
a sad result.’2
Even so, there were intangible results. After the congress had ended its
meetings on the war results, it discussed, without coming to a decision,
various questions of European interest, among them the Roman Question
and the situation in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Thus the Italian
Question, in two of its particular aspects, was brought before the European
SARDINIA 99
Areopagus. Cavour had managed, as an Italian historian has put it, to

‘diplomatize’ the Italian Question.3 He himself drew the conclusion from his
vain efforts at the congress that the only efficient solution to that question
would be ‘the cannon’. And it was Napoleon who three years later helped
him to load the cannon.
For Sardinia’s intervention in the war, see the titles listed above in Chapter
3. See also Harry Hearder, ‘Clarendon, Cavour, and the Intervention of
Sardinia in the Crimean War, 1853–1855’, International History Review 18
(1996): 819–36. The military side is treated in Cristoforo Manfredi, La
spedizione sarda in Crimea nel 1855–5 (Rome, 1896).
100
PART FOUR
The War
101
102
11
The Danube front, 1853–4
The Allied fleets in the Levant and the

Russian occupation of the Danubian
Principalities
The first open act of hostility leading to war was Napoleon III’s decision of
19 March 1853 to send a squadron from Toulon to the island of Salamis off
the eastern coast of Greece near Athens. The decision was published in the
Moniteur on the following day, and the squadron, under Admiral Aaron L. F.
Regnault de La Susse, reached its destination on 23 April. The dispatch of the
fleet in the midst of the Menshikov mission was meant to be a political
demonstration in the tug of war between France and Russia in their fight for a
dominant influence at Constantinople. It was also aimed at forcing the hand of
Britain, which at that time was still sitting on the fence, in the Holy Places
dispute.
Napoleon’s calculation was correct. After some hesitation the British
followed suit and on 2 June 1853 Admiral Sir James Dundas at Malta was
ordered to sail to Besika Bay, 12 kilometres south of the entrance to the
Dardanelles. He was there to wait for orders from Stratford de Redcliffe at
Constantinople; de Redcliffe was given full powers to call up the fleet in case
of danger. The British fleet arrived at Besika Bay on 13 June, to be followed
a day later by the French squadron from Salamis. The junction of the two
fleets underlined the resolution of the two governments to help the Sultan in
resisting any further exorbitant demands from Russia.
Menshikov had just ended his mission to Constantinople unsuccessfully.
Russia’s final ultimatum, delivered from St Petersburg on 31 May 1853, was
to be propped up by a military threat: the invasion of the Danubian
Principalities. It must be stressed that this action was a concomitant of
the Menshikov mission, and not a response to France’s and Britain’s sending
of their Mediterranean fleets to the Levant. Nicholas had already made
up his mind, as is evidenced by a letter of 28 May 1853 which he sent
to Paskevich: after Menshikov’s failure he would occupy the Danubian
Principalities and wait for the Sultan’s response. If the latter proved
103
obstinate, he would block the Bosphorus, clear the Black Sea of Turkish
ships and propose that the Austrians occupy Herzegovina and Serbia. If that
was to no avail, their independence and that of the Principalities should be
proclaimed.1
The date on which Nicholas resolved to occupy the Principalities was
28 May 1854. On 7 June, Prince Michael Dimitrievich Gorchakov was
nominated commander of the occupation forces. They were to consist of the
4th Corps and of part of the 5th Corps stationed in south-west Russia. They
began concentrating along the border of the Principalities from 5 June
onwards. On 3 July the first Russian troops crossed the Pruth. Bucharest,
where Gorchakov set up his headquarters, was reached on 15 July. He was
ordered not to cross the Danube and not to occupy Little Wallachia on the
border with Serbia, in order to placate the Austrians. The total number of
the occupation forces was just over 80,000 men.
Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister, stressed in public that the
occupation of the Principalities was not an act of war, but a political
demonstration, ‘a gage’ to bring the Sultan to his senses.2 Oddly enough, the
governments of the other great powers accepted this interpretation and did
not regard Russia’s occupation as an act of war. Diplomacy was still in full
swing in order to bring about a peaceful solution, but in September 1853
feelings at Constantinople were running high. A grand council was convened
by the Sultan and unanimously resolved to declare war on Russia. The
official declaration of war was issued on 4 October in the form of a manifesto
which Omer Pasha sent to Gorchakov two days later, demanding that he
evacuate the Principalities; in the case of non-compliance, hostilities would
commence a fortnight later.
The local Turkish–Russian war was now declared. Nicholas was still in
high spirits, although he expected the Allied fleet to enter the Bosphorus
soon and even the Black Sea. On 21 October 1853 he wrote to Menshikov,
now commander of Russia’s naval forces, that the Russian troops would not
cross the Danube in order to pursue the Turks, but that in the Caucasus
Prince Michael S. Voroncov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian troops
there, should begin the offensive and try to occupy the Turkish fortresses of
Kars and Ardahan and possibly Bayezid. On the Black Sea, Kustendje and
Varna should be bombarded to sever the Turkish lines of communication on
the western coast, and the Turkish fleet should be annihilated if it ventured
out of the Bosphorus (‘give them another Chesmé’, as he put it, alluding to
Russia’s burning of the Turkish fleet in 1770). The French and British ships
should be ignored, but if they acted in conjunction with the Turkish ships,
they should be treated as enemy vessels.3
Almost simultaneously the British Cabinet reached a momentous decision,
thereby giving the lie to Nicholas’s exuberant optimism. On 7 and 8 October
1853 the Cabinet decided to allow the British fleet to enter the Turkish
Straits and even the Black Sea, if the protection of Turkey warranted its
appearance there. As a result, the fleet, together with the French squadron,
THE DANUBE FRONT, 1853–4 105
MAP 2 The Danube front, 1853–4.
began its movement through the Dardanelles on 22 October, the advance

ships reaching the Bosphorus on 1 November.4
On the Danube, Omer Pasha sensed the importance of his westernmost
fortress, Vidin, which the Russians might target to bring them as near as
possible to the Serbian frontier. Between 28 and 30 October, 10,000 Turkish
troops crossed the Danube from Vidin to the opposite bank, occupied
the small town of Kalafat and fortified it as their first bridgehead on the
left bank.
In the centre of the long front along the Danube, Omer Pasha planned
another crossing of the river, and, in case of success, a march on to nearby
Bucharest. On 2 November he despatched 10,000 troops across the river
and occupied the quarantine house at Oltenitsa. Two days later the Russians
decided on a counter-attack to throw the Turks back. They came under
heavy fire, whereupon General Pëtr A. Dannenberg, their commanding
general, gave the signal to retreat. According to official sources, the Russians
lost 236 dead and 734 wounded. Although the Turkish detachment had
stood the test, Omer Pasha decided to give up Oltenitsa and recross the
Danube – this was achieved on 15 November. He may have feared Russian
reinforcements and a long winter campaign. In fact, the occupation of
Bucharest without advancing from the Danube on a broader front would

have left him in an exposed position that would have soon become untenable.
Although from a military point of view Oltenitsa was but a skirmish, its
importance was inflated by the European press as a Turkish success, and it
certainly damaged the pride of the Russians.
There were a few more minor skirmishes along the Danube throughout the
rest of 1853. A more important one occurred on 6 January 1854 and closed
the winter campaign of 1853–4 on that front. The Turkish bridgehead at
Kalafat was fortified and the troops there were augmented. The local Turkish
commander, Ahmed Pasha, therefore left Kalafat on 31 December 1853 with
a few thousand horsemen and some infantry and attacked the village to the
north – Cetate – which was held by a Russian detachment under Colonel
Alexander K. Baumgarten. The attack was repulsed, but renewed with
superior forces (about 18,000 men) on 6 January 1854, the orthodox
Christmas Day. Baumgarten’s detachment, several times inferior in number,
gave up the village with heavy losses, but during the day reinforcements came
in from two directions, whereupon the Turks preferred to break off the battle
and retreat to Kalafat. Cetate was the most bloody encounter on the Danube
front: official Russian sources put the losses at 831 dead and 1,190 wounded.
From the strategic point of view it was indecisive, but the Turks firmly held
their bridgehead at Kalafat, thus protecting their fortress of Vidin and
preventing the Russians from reaching the Serbian frontier.
The naval engagement at Sinope, 30

November 1853
Six weeks before the bloody encounter at Cetate, the general aspect of the
war had changed dramatically with the opening of the door to a general
European war. This was due to the naval engagement at Sinope on 30
November 1853.
During October and November the Turks were endeavouring to send
supplies and men to Batum, on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, destined
for the mountaineers of the Caucasus in their struggle against the Russians
and for their own troops on that front. A flotilla of seven frigates, three
corvettes, one steam frigate, one small steamer and four transports had
sought shelter from bad weather in the harbour of Sinope on the Anatolian
coast. This was a dangerous move as Sinope was little more than 300
kilometres away from Sevastopol, but almost double that distance from
Constantinople. The Russian Admiral Nakhimov, who had been
reconnoitring the Black Sea in spite of the inclement weather, had spotted
the Turkish ships.
The Tsar’s order of 21 October 1853, quoted above, to sink Turkish ships
wherever they were found, was clear enough. Nakhimov asked for
reinforcements from Sevastopol. When they arrived, he had at his disposal
six ships of the line and two frigates. Although the Turks had no counterpart
to the Russian ships of the line, they had more guns (about 500 as against
359 Russian guns) because there were a number of batteries on the shore.
The commander of the Turkish flotilla, Osman Pasha, and his English
adviser, Captain Adolphus Slade, felt relatively safe because of their
superiority in firepower.
However, on 30 November, Nakhimov’s ships entered the harbour,
opened fire and within two hours the Turkish flotilla was annihilated. Only
Slade’s ship, the small steamer Taif, was ordered to leave; it slipped through
the Russian lines and steamed to Constantinople to deliver the news of the
disaster. The Turkish losses were heavy; the number of dead and drowned
and of those who died at the batteries is estimated at about 3,000. Russian
losses, in contrast, were light: the damage done to their ships was insignificant
and they lost thirty-eight men dead and 235 wounded.
The Taif arrived at Constantinople on 2 December. From there the news
was relayed to Europe, partly by telegraph: in Paris it was known on 10
December, in London a day later. Napoleon reacted with fury. He let it be
known in London that if the British government kept refusing to send its
fleet into the Black Sea, he would go in alone. The Cabinet was in the midst
of a crisis: Palmerston, the Home Secretary, left it in protest because of an
issue of domestic policy. Public opinion was in uproar. Newspapers
clamoured for revenge for the ‘massacre of Sinope’, as this legitimate act of
war now came to be called. National humiliation was deep because the navy
had stood idly by while a Turkish fleet which the British ships had been sent
to protect was reduced to nothing. Any qualms which still existed among
Cabinet members were simply swept away by the public outcry. Vacillation
in the government would have meant its downfall after the Christmas recess.
On 20 December 1853, Stratford de Redcliffe was authorized to send the
British fleet into the Black Sea in order to obtain complete control of it and
to inform the Russian admiral at Sevastopol of the British intention.
Palmerston, the symbol of the anti-Russian spirit in Britain, returned to the
Cabinet on 24 December. On 4 January 1854 the combined Anglo-French
fleet entered the Black Sea. War between the two Western powers and Russia,
though still formally undeclared, was now almost inevitable. Sinope,
unexpected by the Russian leaders who felt elated by their triumph, had
brought this about. It had also produced almost complete harmony between
France and Britain.
The siege of Silistria, March–June 1854

The two winter months of January and February 1854 brought about no
change on the Danube front. Diplomatic activity, on the other hand, reached
a high pitch during that period when both Russia (through the Orlov
mission) and the Western powers (through a four-power convention) tried
to win the two German powers over to their side. The outcome was that
Austria took on a more anti-Russian stance after the Tsar had invited Francis
Joseph to make common cause with him against Turkey and to liberate the
Balkan peoples from Turkish yoke, thus revealing the revolutionary character
of his designs on Turkey.
Nicholas, however, went ahead with his plans to destroy Turkey even
without Austria as his accomplice. He knew that France and Britain would
soon declare war and that they were fitting out expeditionary corps. He
obviously thought, given his vastly superior military forces and the
favourable geographic position of Russia, that his country was impregnable
and that he could still deal with Turkey as he liked. He continued to harbour
the illusion that the Balkan peoples, especially the Serbians and the
Bulgarians, would rise as one against the Turkish yoke. The anti-Turkish
risings in Thessaly and Epirus fortified this illusion, and Nicholas hoped that
they would spread into Herzegovina so that the whole Balkan peninsula
would be in flames.
The military plans for the opening of the spring campaign were laid down
by the Tsar in a letter, which he sent to Gorchakov on 13 February, and in
an undated memorandum, which he obviously drafted a few weeks later.5
He ordered the crossing of the Danube on the whole length between Vidin
in the west and Silistria in the east, the siege of these Turkish fortresses and
also of those of Rustchuk in between and of Galatz and Braila on the
northern section. Taking Silistria was necessary in order to have a stronghold
from which to attack the Allied expeditionary force, which the Tsar expected
to land at Varna. He thus either sensed the Allied plans correctly or had
received intelligence from his ambassadors in Paris and London. The
conquest of Vidin was important in his eyes in order to cooperate with the
Serbs and Bulgarians. By the time of his memorandum he had second
thoughts about the prospects of a Serbian rising, since Austria was already
concentrating troops on the Serbian frontier. In considering Austria’s
political attitude he estimated – quite correctly as it turned out – that by July
she would have made up her mind either to stay neutral or be hostile towards
Russia.
In accordance with the Tsar’s orders, Russian troops started crossing the
Danube on the north-eastern section around Galatz and Ismaila on 23
March 1854 and occupied strongholds in the Dobrudja. Tulchea and
Isacchea were reached almost without fighting on 24 March, Matchin on
the 25th, and Hirsova on the 26th. Babadagh was in Russian hands on the
29th. At the beginning of April the whole length of Trajan’s wall between
Rasova and Kustendje was occupied. The Russian army across the Danube
numbered 45,000 men under General Alexander N. Lüders and the entire
operation had cost them 201 dead and 510 wounded men.
It is characteristic of the attitude of the Russian army on the Danube that
during the following three months it did not exploit its position in the
Dobrudja and did not concentrate all its efforts on the conquest of Silistria
and Rustchuk, but went about this task at a leisurely pace. The reason was
that Field Marshal Paskevich in Warsaw had meanwhile ordered Gorchakov
not to cross the Danube, or, if he had already done so, not to go beyond
Matchin. The order was received by Gorchakov on the evening of 24 March
in the midst of the troop movements. What made Paskevich, who had
goaded his master into occupying the Principalities and awaiting the
uprisings of the Balkan peoples, think of retreat? The main explanation is
not the arrival of the Allied troops at Gallipoli but the concentration of
Austrian troops on the frontiers of Moldavia and Wallachia. He had received
news that the Austrian army had reached a strength of 280,000 men.
They posed a real threat in the flank and rear of the occupying army, so
much the more as the Vienna government had several times warned St
Petersburg not to cross the Danube and had even urged Russia to evacuate
the Principalities.6
In order to be nearer the centre of events, Paskevich went to the
Principalities in person and took command of the troops there. He arrived
at Bucharest on 22 April. It was obviously due to his anxiety and vacillation
that the siege of Silistria was undertaken without energy. One of his letters
to the Tsar at this time is especially revealing of his despondency and
pessimism, and of his desire to evacuate the Principalities. He said he could
not pin his hopes on the Bulgarians; they had no desire for emancipation.
As to the Serbs, nothing could be expected from them under their present
Prince. At the most 2,000 or 3,000 volunteers could be recruited, but their
use by Russia would only provoke Austria. He bluntly told the Tsar that
Austria’s wrath could only be placated by a voluntary evacuation of the
Principalities. Russia would thus gain time, and by the autumn the Allied
fleets would be paralysed by bad weather. Meanwhile the army in southern
Russia could be brought up to 200,000 men and that of Poland to 250,000
men. ‘In the course of the year we can expect: risings in Italy, risings in
France or a downfall of the ministry in England.’7 Paskevich’s pleadings
with the Tsar were to no avail. The siege of Silistria had to be continued and
there was no question of the Russian troops quitting the Principalities.
Silistria, on the right bank of the Danube, was an important Turkish
fortress. In the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–9 it had taken six months for
the Russians to capture it. It had by now been fortified by a number of
outer forts, ten altogether. The Russian siege works were begun on 5 April
by General Karl A. Schilder, a talented engineer whose closest aide was
Lieutentant-Colonel Eduard I. Totleben, who was to acquire fame during
the siege of Sevastopol. After reinforcements had begun to arrive from
the army of General Lüders from the Dobrudja, the bombardment was
started on 10 May. The Turks had a force of 12,000 men in the fortress
and were able to bring in supplies and reinforcements since Paskevich
thought it impossible to encircle it completely. On 28 May the Russians
launched an assault on the strategic outwork of Arab Tabia, but were
repulsed, losing 317 men dead and 623 wounded. According to Russian
sources, on average eight out of ten wounded later died.8 On 9 June,

Paskevich believed he had been injured after a projectile had exploded near
him. He complained of pain in his shoulder and left the area of operations.
There was much speculation at the time, and there still is in Russian
historiography, as to whether he had actually suffered a contusion or not. In
any event, it was typical of his wariness and anxiety that he left the field for
good and returned to Warsaw. Gorchakov took command of the siege
operations in his stead. On 13 June, General Schilder was severely wounded
and died shortly afterwards. Seven days later, Arab Tabia was taken by
the Russians, so that the storming of the main fortress was fixed for 4 am on
21 June. At 2 am, Gorchakov received an order from Paskevich to raise the
siege and recross the Danube. The order was obeyed instantly and on 24
June the last Russian soldiers left the right bank and destroyed the bridge
across the Danube. The fruitless siege of Silistria had cost the Russians 419
dead and 1,783 wounded.
What made Paskevich give this remarkable order? On 3 June, Austria
had summoned Russia to evacuate the Principalities – a summons that had
been announced weeks ahead and was now delivered. A few days later, the
Austrian Emperor met the King of Prussia at Tetschen in Bohemia. In
Russian eyes this must have seemed to be a strengthening of the ties which
the two German powers had made in their treaty of 20 April. On 14 June,
Austria and the Porte signed the convention of Boyadji-Köi in which the
Sultan granted Austria the right to occupy the Principalities. All these
political developments seemed highly dangerous to Paskevich in Warsaw,
and also to Nicholas in St Petersburg. The military situation further to the
south was equally menacing. On 19 May there was a war council between
Omer Pasha and the Allied commanders at which the French and British
agreed to rush troops as quickly as possible from the Straits to Varna. Saint-
Arnaud promised to concentrate 55,000 Allied troops there to reinforce the
Turkish troops south of the Danube. They numbered 104,000 men, of whom
45,000 were massed at Shumla and 20,000 at Vidin and Kalafat; 20,000
troops had been sent to Silistria and the Allies particularly wanted to relieve
them.9
Confronted with so much threatening news, Paskevich was fully justified
in countermanding the siege of Silistria. Continuing it would have meant
sending the Russian troops into a trap set by the Austrians and the Allied
armies. There is no foundation, therefore, for laying all of the responsibility
for the Russians’ retreat at Paskevich’s door. The Tsar himself was highly
alarmed at the sombre military prospects. On 13 June he wrote to the Field
Marshal, ‘The siege of Silistria must be raised if it [the fortress] is not
yet taken at the receipt of this letter.’10 Six days later he reiterated his
opinion. The only difference between the two was that Paskevich was
pessimistic about the siege from the outset, whereas the Tsar had always
entertained false hopes and wavered for a long time; but by 13 June he was
resigned to retreat. On 1 July he even praised his Field Marshal for having
done what to both had seemed inevitable: ‘I’m afraid I must agree with
Paskevich if I take a look at the map in order to be convinced of the
impending danger.’11
The lifting of the siege of Silistria was the signal for the general retreat of
the Russians from the Principalities. This, too, was mainly due to the
threatening military and political attitude of Austria. On 29 June, Nesselrode
gave an affirmative, although conditional, reply to Austria’s summons of
3 June. After leaving Silistria, the Russians began to evacuate the Dobrudja.
At Giurgevo, between 5 and 7 July, there were major clashes between
them and the Turks, with heavy losses on both sides. Apart from this the
Russians retreated in orderly fashion without being molested by the Turks.
On 24 July the Tsar’s order for the total evacuation reached Gorchakov’s
headquarters. The retreat was called a strategic withdrawal in order that it
would not appear a defeat in the eyes of the Russian soldier or be perceived
as such in European public opinion. On 1 August the Russians evacuated
Bucharest. Six weeks later, on 7 September, the whole Russian occupying
army had retreated beyond the Pruth, that is, to the starting point of their
invasion of 3 July 1853. Only a few regiments remained in the northernmost
part of the Dobrudja on the right bank of the Danube, occupying the
strategic fortresses of Tulchea, Isacchea and Matchin. They stayed there
until the end of October 1854.
Russian military policy now took on a purely defensive attitude and
Russia now regarded herself a vast beleaguered fortress.
The Austrian occupation of the

Danubian Principalities
As we have seen, the Russian retreat from the Danubian Principalities was
mainly due to the hostile attitude of Austria and to the massing of her troops
in Galicia, the Bukovina and Transylvania in the Russian rear and right
flank. It is thus appropriate at this point to look at Austria’s military
dispositions during the Crimean War.
At the beginning of the war, in 1854, Austria’s military behaviour
appeared to be offensive towards Russia, but was in reality defensive. The
government in Vienna took great pains to leave the Russians in the dark in
order to make them yield by a show of force. This was a tricky game, but it
worked and served its purpose, especially in ousting the Russians from the
Principalities.
As discussed in an earlier chapter, Buol’s main concern was to keep
Austria’s border regions and the neighbouring countries quiet for fear of a
new outbreak of the revolution. As soon as he learned of Nicholas’s plans to
revolutionize the Balkan peoples, he and his Emperor took precautionary
measures. When the Russians occupied the Principalities in July 1853,
Francis Joseph ordered troop concentrations at Peterwardein in Slavonia,

not in order to occupy Serbia as the Tsar had suggested to him in the Russian
effort to involve Austria in the attempt to overthrow Turkey, but to keep
Serbia quiet and prevent her from rising in favour of Russia.
The commander of the troops, Johann Count Coronini, was ordered to
march into Belgrade as soon as the Turkish troops in the fortress there were
threatened by a Serbian coup de main or if Prince Alexander Karageorgevich,
who was leaning towards Austria, were overthrown. When in January 1854
pro-Russian riots broke out in Thessaly and Epirus, Coronini was ordered
to move a brigade to Semlin just opposite Belgrade. In this way the Russians
were persuaded not to change the status quo in Serbia and the latter was
forced to remain neutral. It was due to this concentration of Austrian troops
near Belgrade that the Russians delayed crossing the Danube until March
1854.12
The same reasons which caused the Austrians to be on tenterhooks on
the Serbian frontier put them on the lookout on the border with Wallachia.
When the Orlov mission to Vienna had finally opened the Emperor’s eyes to
Nicholas’s real intentions, Francis Joseph also ordered troop concentrations
in other parts of southern Hungary. On 31 January 1854, General Hess,
the Commander-in-Chief, told a ministerial conference in Vienna that
15,000 troops would suffice for a local occupation of Serbia, but that a
special army corps of 50,000 was necessary for other purposes; it would
have to be brought up to a strength of 150,000 in case the Russians crossed
the Danube. Accordingly, on 2 February the Emperor ordered the build-up
of a mobile army corps in southern Hungary (this came to be called the
Serbian-Banat corps) under Fieldmarshal-Lieutenant Coronini, the governor
of the Banat.13
Orlov’s mission was thus the turning point in Austrian military planning.
On 28 March the Emperor put all troops in Hungary on a war footing. This
applied to the 3rd Army. As the Russians reinforced their troops in Poland
and Volhynia with their reserve divisions, Francis Joseph ordered, on 15
May, the full mobilization of the 4th Army in Galicia. Also in May, when
unrest in Thessaly and Epirus reached its highest pitch, Austria made
preparations to occupy the port of Scutari on the Montenegrin coast with a
brigade of 4,000 men, in order to warn the Montenegrins and Albanians not
to rise against the Sultan or join hands with the rebellious Greeks. On 29
May a ministerial conference in Vienna adopted the plan of summoning the
Russians to evacuate the Principalities unconditionally. This summons went
out to St Petersburg on 3 June. When the Russian government hesitated to
reply, but raised the siege of Silistria, Buol advised the Western governments
and Berlin of the Austrian intention to occupy the Principalities, if need be
by force of arms.14
Hess, who had been nominated Commander-in-Chief of the 3rd and
4th armies on 21 June, drafted a plan of campaign which envisaged a
greater concentration of troops in Galicia and the transfer of Coronini’s
army corps to the north to occupy the passes through the Carpathians.
This is clearly the moment when Austria, for the first and only time during
the war, was resolved to use force against Russia, and in the last resort
also to invade the country. A plan of campaign drafted by Hess’s deputy
in the summer of 1854 testifies to the same spirit: a smaller army was to
invade Podolia, but the main force was to be directed to Poland where
it was to advance between the Vistula and the Bug with Bialystok as its first
target.15
Such an offensive of course was not envisaged as an isolated move, but
presupposed the cooperation of the Western Allies and the Turks moving
northwards from the western Balkans, and of the Prussian army keeping
itself ready on the eastern border of Poland. For both purposes liaison
officers were sent to the relevant headquarters: Lieutenant-Colonel Anton
Kalik to Varna and Major-General Ferdinand Mayerhofer to Berlin. Both
missions proved, however, completely abortive. When Kalik met Marshal
Saint-Arnaud and Lord Raglan, he found them actively preparing to transfer
their troops to the Crimea. Mayerhofer, who was to remind the Prussians of
their promise to mobilize 200,000 troops in the east (the promise, the
Austrians thought, was to be derived from the treaty of 20 April 1854), was
not only talking to the winds in Berlin, but also, to the utter dismay of Buol
and the Emperor, developed strong pro-Prussian (which also meant pro-
Russian) sentiments when in the Prussian capital. This led to his speedy
recall in September 1854.16
In any event, Austria’s military build-up on her borders with Russia in the
summer of 1854 was formidable enough. On 22 August, Hess could write
to his Emperor that the troops under his command in the east amounted to
205,000 men, to whom another 125,000 men were to be added as non-
combatant troops. In February 1855 the corresponding figures were
327,000, plus 80,000 to 100,000 men.17
Despite this massive build-up of troops – or because of it – the Austrians
never met their Russian counterparts in action. When the Russian troops left
Bucharest, it was the Turks who, because of the location of their troops,
moved in first, not the Austrians. On 8 August a Turkish detachment of
2,000 men under Halim Pasha arrived at Bucharest, and on 22 August Omer
Pasha himself celebrated the arrival of a whole division.
Francis Joseph’s order to occupy Wallachia had already been issued on
5 July, but was cancelled on 8 July because of the slow retrograde movement
of the Russians. The definitive order was given on 17 August, and five days
later the first column of Austrian troops crossed the frontier into Wallachia.
The Austrians were careful not to meet the retreating Russians, as they now
knew that the Western Allies were leaving the Balkans for good. On 6
September they entered Bucharest, its population watching for the second
time within a few days the entry of a foreign army.18
Considerable friction developed during the following weeks between the
two occupying forces for both political and military reasons. Coronini, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian forces, issued a proclamation calling

on the inhabitants to obey the orders of the Austrian military administration.
A corresponding order was promulgated by the Turkish authorities. On the
military level each army tried to occupy as much of Wallachia as possible in
order to get ahead of its rival. At Ibraila and Galatz on the left bank of the
Danube a veritable scramble developed. The Turks were the first to occupy
Ibraila (on 17 September). On 22 and 23 September, small Austrian cavalry
detachments arrived at Ibraila and Galatz. This unworthy competition was
ended by a fiat from Vienna. Buol pressed his Emperor on 3 October to issue
an order to Hess that the military movements of the Allies (including the
Turks) must not be impeded as this would be contrary to the pro-Western
policy of Austria and also to the Austro-Turkish convention of 14 June.19
The occupation of Moldavia was mainly effected by Austrian troops
moving in, in the wake of the retreating Russians, from Transylvania and
Bukovina. On 2 October, Iaşi, the capital, was occupied, but at the beginning
of November Omer Pasha took measures to assemble two armies, one at
Fokşani and the other at Ibraila, each 18,000 men strong, in order to cross
the Pruth and invade Bessarabia. The object of this move was to prevent
Russian reinforcements from this area marching to the Crimea. These
Turkish preparations jeopardized Austria’s position, given her determination
not to become involved in military clashes with Russia now that the
Allies had left the Balkans and the Prussians were showing themselves
intractable. But they proved harmless. On 7 December, Omer Pasha received
an order from Constantinople to move 35,000 of his best troops to the
Crimea in order to reinforce the Allied troops there, who were by now in
dire straits.20
The peaceful occupation of the Danubian Principalities and the transfer
of the Anglo-French troops to the Crimea removed the danger of war in
south-eastern Europe and between Austria and Russia. Thus Francis Joseph’s
order for total mobilization, issued on 22 October, was retracted on 21
November. Besides the clarification of the military situation in the
Principalities, this was mainly due to the mounting cost of military
preparations. In fact, Austria’s financial situation was becoming more and
more desperate. The Minister of Finance, Baron Andreas Baumgartner,
resigned in January 1855 because his warnings about the hopeless state of
Austria’s indebtedness were not heeded. On 11 June 1855, after the failure
of the Vienna peace conference, which also led to a cooling off of Austria’s
relations with the Western powers, a ministerial conference in Vienna
decided to reduce the standing army by 62,500 troops.21
The sanitary state of the Austrian army in the east also made a reduction
imperative. The army in Galicia had spent most of its time strengthening the
fortresses there and building railways between Cracow and Lemberg and
other places. As was usual in the armies of the time, epidemics played havoc,
especially with the troops in Galicia. Between August 1854 and the end of
May 1855 over 7,200 men died in the 4th Army.
The occupation troops in the Principalities amounted to almost 57,000

men, half of whom were billeted in Wallachia and half in Moldavia. In
Moldavia, all Turkish troops had left by December 1854, and in Wallachia
only a symbolic force remained quartered in Bucharest. To the south,
however, in Bulgaria, the strength of the Turkish troops in April still
amounted to 40,000 men, of whom about half were concentrated in the
fortress of Shumla.22
The Austrian occupation forces managed to make themselves singularly
unpopular in the Principalities. In May 1855, Coronini introduced martial
law, mainly to check refugees from Poland and Hungary in their attempts to
persuade Austrian soldiers to desert. This produced friction, as has already
been noted, with the Turkish authorities, the Western consuls in Bucharest
and Iaşi and with the British government. A case in point is the arrest in
Bucharest of the deserter Stephan Türr on 1 November 1855.
On the political level the Austrian generals, Coronini in the forefront,
behaved as if the Principalities belonged to Austria for good. This was
diametrically opposed to Buol’s policy in Vienna. When peace was concluded
in Paris on 30 March 1856, Buol complained bitterly to his Emperor about
the constant meddling of the generals in political matters in the Principalities.
He therefore pleaded with Francis Joseph to evacuate the Principalities as
quickly as possible. The belief, which is expressed in many older books on
Austria’s role in the Principalities, that Buol worked with the military for a
future satellite status for the Principalities is utterly wrong. When the last
Austrian troops evacuated the Principalities in March 1857, the army left
behind 1,780 men who had died during the occupation.23
It may safely be said from an overall point of view that Austria’s pressure
on Russia to evacuate the Principalities and their subsequent occupation by
Austrian troops not only removed the danger of war in south-eastern
Europe, but also of an Austro-Russian war, which would almost automatically
have entailed the entry of Prussia and the rest of Germany into the conflict,
and probably that of other countries in Europe like Sweden. Thus Austria’s
stand prevented the Crimean War from developing into a European and
even a world war.
The Allied military build-up at

Constantinople and Varna
Also present on the Danube front in the summer of 1854, but at some
distance from the Russian lines, were the first Allied armies to arrive in the
East. They first assembled at Gallipoli and Scutari on the Turkish Straits,
then Varna on the western coast of the Black Sea.
After Sinope (30 November 1853) and the entry of the first Allied ships
into the Black Sea in the early days of January of 1854, war between
Russia and the Western powers was almost certain, although still undeclared.
The official object of the war being to protect the integrity of Turkey,
the military plans of France and Britain were obvious: besides mastery
of the Black Sea, the Turkish capital had to be protected from a Russian
coup de main launched simultaneously from the stronghold of Sevastopol
and from the Danubian Principalities occupied by Russian troops.
Thus, in the beginning, Allied military planning was by necessity defensive
on this front. On the second front in the north, in the Baltic, it assumed an
offensive character, the aim being in the last resort a descent on Russia’s
fortified places like Helsingfors, Reval, Kronstadt and Bomarsund. The
naval expedition to the Baltic which set out on 11 March was also aimed at
blockading the Russian coasts and preventing the Baltic fleet from entering
the open seas and threatening the British coast. Whereas in 1853 it was
Napoleon III who was practising a forward policy by sending his fleet to
Salamis and urging, after Sinope, entry to the Black Sea, now, in the first
months of the new year, it was the British who urged quick military action
in order to satisfy public opinion at home, which was enraged by the
‘massacre of Sinope’.
As Andrew Lambert has shown, it was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir
James Graham, who had the most coherent ideas in London for dealing with
the military threat posed by Russia. He urged the defence of Constantinople
by fortifying Adrianople in order to cover the Turkish capital, or landing a
force at Varna to be ready to attack the flank of the Russians if they crossed
the Danube. Conjointly he was in favour of attacking and destroying
Sevastopol to prevent a Russian amphibious assault on Constantinople.24
On 29 January 1854, the English Inspector-General of Fortifications, Sir
John Burgoyne, arrived in Paris, en route for an inspection of the Turkish
Straits, and had several discussions with the Emperor about Graham’s plans
which had by then been adopted by his Cabinet colleagues and also by
Napoleon himself. Initially, it had been suggested in Paris that 6,000 French
and 3,000 British troops be sent to help the Turks in covering Constantinople.
After the fact-finding mission of Burgoyne and two French colonels, Charles-
Prosper Dieu and Paul-Joseph Ardant, had yielded its first results, the Anglo-
French expeditionary force was gradually increased to 30,000 French and
18,000 British troops in early March, and to 60,000 and 30,000 respectively
a month later.
At the beginning of April the first French troops arrived at Gallipoli. The
British followed suit from Malta and established their main rallying point at
Scutari. By 20 May more than 30,000 French and 20,000 British soldiers
had arrived on both shores of the Straits. On 9 May, Napoleon briefly
outlined his plan to his Commander-in-Chief of the Armée d’Orient,
Marshal Saint-Arnaud: ‘1. If the Russians advance, let them do so until an
advantageous point is found and chosen to give battle. 2. If they don’t
advance, take the Crimea.’25 These ideas dovetailed well with those of
Graham in London.
The first military engagement with Russia, after the official declarations
of war on 27 and 28 March by Britain and France, did not take place on
land but at sea, off Odessa.
The details about the encounter are conflicting, as the accounts of the two
sides differ widely.26 But certain facts are clear. On 9 April the British frigate
Furious arrived at Odessa with the instruction to take the British consul
there on board. A sloop was dispatched from the Furious with a white flag
to contact the port authorities. The officer of the sloop was told – according
to Russian sources – that the consul had already left, whereupon the sloop
returned to the frigate. On its way back the Russian port battery fired some
rounds of shot – it was not clear whether they were aimed at the sloop or at
the frigate, which was in any case out of reach of the batteries. No damage
was done, but Admirals Dundas and Hamelin decided that the attack on the
sloop, flying a flag of truce, was a breach of international law.
The Admirals sent a division of war steamers back to Odessa to demand
the extradition of all British, French and Russian ships at anchor in the port
as an act of reparation. The governor, of course, refused the demand. On the
following morning, 22 April, the Allied ships opened fire on the harbour
and its facilities trying, according to Allied sources, to avoid damage to
civilian buildings. The bombardment lasted all day long and did considerable
damage to the harbour, the storehouses and the batteries. On both
sides there were a few dead and wounded, and some of the Allied ships were
also hit.
Apart from the occasion that gave rise to the bombardment, the Allied
ships made an impression on the Russians who now feared a repetition of
such cannonades on other points of their coast. The Allied navies made their
presence felt on the eastern shores of the Black Sea immediately afterwards,
thus forcing the Russians to be on their guard against a probable Allied
descent there, or even to abandon one or the other stronghold.
When the first French and British troops arrived at Gallipoli, it was
already known that the Russians were crossing the Danube and that their
first target was Silistria, where the siege works had begun on 5 April. When
the two Allied Commanders-in-Chief arrived on the scene, at Gallipoli and
Constantinople, they had to react to the Russian danger brewing north of
the Balkans. On 19 May, Saint-Arnaud, Lord Raglan and the Turkish
Minister of War, Riza Pasha, held a conference at Varna with Omer Pasha,
who had come over from his nearby headquarters at Shumla. Omer painted
a grim picture of the situation along the Danube. Silistria, he said, might
hold six weeks or it might be taken within a fortnight. The Russians would
then advance to Shumla, where he had concentrated 45,000 of his Turkish
troops.
Saint-Arnaud and Raglan at once decided to send one division each of
the troops which had just disembarked at Gallipoli. When two days later the
two commanders went in person to Shumla, they heard the latest news from
Silistria – that 70,000 Russians were pressing the attack on the fortress and
that the bombardment continued without interruption. They decided on the

spot to send all available forces from Gallipoli and Scutari to Shumla. The
plan was to be ready in force at Varna on the left flank of the Russians
should they advance south after the fall of Silistria.27
By the beginning of June the first Allied troops were arriving at Varna.
Most were transported by sea, and two incomplete French divisions marched
overland via Adrianople because of lack of sea transport. On 11 June, Saint-
Arnaud officially transferred his headquarters from Gallipoli to Varna.
Gallipoli, Scutari and later on Constantinople itself remained transit
depots for incoming reinforcements and for all kinds of matériel and
supplies. At the beginning of July the operation had practically ended. On
the 10th the Allies could muster 50,000 French, 20,000 British and 60,000
Turks in or around Varna. On the coast, the Allied fleets were concentrated
at Baltchik, north of Varna, unless some of the ships were on duty in other
parts of the Black Sea. It was a formidable force which the Russians would
have to meet if they decided to sweep down south. There was no plan among
the Allies to march into the interior, to come to the relief of Silistria, to meet
the Russians at other points along the Danube or to march into the
Principalities and thence into Bessarabia. It was expected that the Austrians
would do their part of the common job by ousting the Russians from the
Principalities.
Great was the astonishment when news reached the Allies at Varna that
the Russians had unexpectedly lifted their siege of Silistria during the night
of 22 to 23 June. The Allied troops were now condemned to utter inaction.
On the surface, the war with Russia could have ended at that moment. The
main object of the Western Allies and of Austria was on the point of being
fulfilled: the evacuation of the Danubian Principalities. The three powers
were now brooding over the broader war aims which they had solemnly
sanctioned on 8 August 1854 in the Four Points: replacement of the Russian
protectorate over the Principalities by a European one; free navigation on
the Danube; revision of the Straits Treaty of 1841 in the interest of the
European balance of power; and renunciation by Russia of her protectorate
over the Christians in Turkey. Russia was not yet ready to subscribe to such
demands. The war therefore had to continue.
The French expedition to the Dobrudja,

August 1854
On 23 June, Napoleon ordered Saint-Arnaud ‘to do something’ and vaguely
hinted at two objectives: Anapa on the eastern shores of the Black Sea,
and the Crimea. In London, Graham had persuaded his colleagues
that the destruction of Sevastopol was a British as well as a European
necessity. On 28 June the Cabinet met and decided to press upon Lord
Raglan ‘the necessity of a prompt attack upon Sebastopol and the Russian
Fleet’.28
Raglan received these orders from London on 17 July at Varna. On the
following day the Allies convened a council of war. The two Commanders-
in-Chief took part as well as the admirals of the fleets and their deputies,
Ferdinand A. Hamelin, Armand J. Bruat, Dundas and Sir Edmund Lyons.
Saint-Arnaud was optimistic, and relieved to have a definite aim before him.
Raglan, too, was in favour of an expedition to the Crimea as were Bruat and
Lyons. Hamelin and Dundas, who had seen the formidable fortifications of
Sevastopol at close quarters during an earlier inspection tour, were against
an attack, fearing the loss of their ships. The majority being in favour, the
decision was taken to send the armies to the Crimea, but before embarking,
a reconnaissance was to be undertaken for the most suitable landing place.
This mission, which was headed by General Canrobert, Brigadier-General
Louis-Jules Trochu, General Sir George Brown and Lyons, weighed anchor
early on 20 July for the Crimean coast.29
One of the reasons why Saint-Arnaud was pressing for action in July
1854 was that his army was hit by an enemy almost beyond human control
– cholera. The disease was fairly new in Europe at the time. It had its origin
in the Ganges region in India, and was brought to Europe during the 1820s
via Central Asia and Russia. The first wave of cholera swept across Europe
between 1830 and 1837; a second wave started in 1847 and only died down
ten years later. Its causes were unknown at the time, thus the measures taken
against it proved useless. But it was striking that it infested densely populated
port and city areas, whereas the thinly populated rural regions remained
almost unscathed. There was an outbreak of cholera in London during the
summer months of 1854 with a loss of 11,777 lives. It was also in 1854 that
the English doctor, John Snow, detected a connection between the outbreak
of cholera of that year and the use of the water pump in London’s Soho – the
drinking water had been contaminated by sewage water. As is usual in such
cases, his discovery was not yet accepted and effective countermeasures
were not taken.30
In the French Army of the Orient at Varna the first cases of cholera were
reported at the beginning of July 1854. A short time later, the British camp
was affected as well. The disease spread quickly in highly favourable
conditions – an overcrowded place with bad hygiene and sanitation. By the
end of July, 100 cases per day were being reported in the French army.
Gallipoli was affected too, 234 fatal cases being counted in seventeen days.
At Piraeus the French brigade of occupation suffered 105 dead in ten days.
On 20 August the French army lost 5,000 victims. The British fared better,
and lost only 350 men. The origin of the epidemic could be traced to
southern France at Avignon, Arles and Marseilles, places where the troops
were assembled for embarkation to the east.
In order to rid himself of the scourge, Saint-Arnaud hit upon the not
unreasonable idea of dispersing his troops. Even military reasons could be
adduced for this measure. Why not chase the rearguard of the retreating
Russians north of Varna in the Dobrudja? Why not let the Russians
surmise that this was a prelude to a massive military action and to a
more substantive cooperation with the Austrian army? His army, having
been shuffled across half of Europe, never having seen the enemy and now
being plagued by a worse than human enemy, was certainly thirsting for
action.
On 20 July, Saint-Arnaud decided to launch an expedition to the
Dobrudja. Most of his troops were to take part in it. The spearhead was to
be formed by a new special cavalry unit, the spahis d’Orient, under the
legendary General Yussuf. The spahis consisted of Bashi-Bazouks – bands of
irregular Ottoman soldiers – 2,500 of whom had by now been taken into
the corps. Yussuf was given a fortnight to stage his raid into the Dobrudja
and then to return in order to be embarked to the Crimea; 700 regular
Ottoman cavalry were to accompany him. He was to be followed by the 1st
Division under Canrobert (temporarily replaced by General Esprit C. M.
Espinasse), ready to help him in case of need. The 2nd (General Pierre F. J.
Bosquet) and the 3rd Division (Prince Napoleon) were to march in echelons
behind them. The British took no part in the expedition.31
The troops had hardly left Varna on 21, 22 and 23 July when cholera
made its first appearance among the Bashis. The unhealthy climate of the
Dobrudja in summertime favoured an explosion of the disease which played
havoc first among the spahis and then among the 1st Division. During the
night of 30 July, 150 men died. The rate of deaths increased until only 300
of the 2,500 spahis returned to Varna; the unit was practically annihilated.
The 2nd and 3rd Divisions returned on 4 and 9 August respectively, with
389 cholera victims. The 1st Division, which returned on 18 August, lost
1,886 men. The expedition thus ended in complete failure.
Saint-Arnaud had sent his troops on a death march. The question is, had
not worse been avoided by sending 30,000 men away from the overcrowded
camps at Varna? True, French and British troops who remained were not
spared. The crews on board suffered too. It was after the first troops had
moved away from Varna that the cholera in the camp began to die down. So,
from a military point of view the Dobrudja expedition was a disaster, but in
the fight against cholera it was not an unreasonable undertaking.
To make matters worse a fire broke out in the evening of 10 August in the
bazaars of Varna, threatening the powder magazines, ammunition stocks
and supply depots of the Allied camps. Luckily, the wind changed during the
night and did not come near the powder kegs, but the supply stocks were
completely lost. After all these disasters, the armies, from the commanders
down to the privates, were eager to leave such a pestilential and overcrowded
place. Luckily, the reconnaissance mission had already returned on 28 July
with the news that a suitable landing place on the western coast of the
Crimea had been found, at the mouth of the River Katcha, some five to six
kilometres north of Sevastopol. Feverish preparations for departure were

now in hand.
On 22 and 26 August the military and naval commanders met for two
final councils. Admirals Dundas and Hamelin were still sceptical about the
expedition. They were all for meeting the Russian fleet in open battle, but
not for cruising along the coast, let alone appearing in front of the strongly
fortified coast off Sevastopol, for fear of being routed by the impregnable
land forts. Among divisional commanders there were warnings about the
lateness of the season, the lack of information about the Russian forces,
about the terrain, the lack of suitable ports for the Allies, and so on.32 The
Commanders-in-Chief prevailed. They had precise orders from their
governments: there was nothing more to be done in the Balkans, and other
landing places, such as Anapa on the Circassian coast, did not promise the
same success as the Crimea with Sevastopol.
It must be stressed here that the invasion of the Crimea was, in the last
resort, a political and not a military decision. The Cabinet in London was
resolved to seize the opportunity of reducing the naval threat posed by
Russia in the Near East, with the Crimea and Sevastopol being its symbol.
This was the real meaning behind the third of the Four Points agreed upon
with France and Austria on 8 August (‘revision of the Straits convention of
1841’). For Napoleon the Crimea in itself mattered little, although he was
all in favour of the expedition. What counted, especially after the fruitless
sojourn in European Turkey and the dreadful experience in the Dobrudja,
was some telling success over Russia, and the Crimea happened to be the
best means of achieving this.
Thus Napoleon wrote to Saint-Arnaud on 23 June 1854, ‘I don’t see
anything else to be done than taking the Crimea … To all intents and
purposes, means must be found to land a great stroke [frapper un grand
coup] before the bad season begins.’33 It is interesting to note that Napoleon
at this time was also in favour of carrying the war into Asia if the expedition
to the Crimea should prove impossible from a military point of view. His
Minister of War, Marshal Jean-Baptiste Vaillant, favoured a diversionary
movement to the Circassian coast in order to underpin the resistance of
Shamil’s mountain warriors against the Russians and thus to divide the
Russian forces.
At the last meeting of the Allied commanders at Varna on 26 August, the
departure for the Crimea was finally fixed for 2 September. It was delayed
by the slow preparation of the British fleet and army. The armada, consisting
of some 350 ships carrying 30,000 French, 25,000 British and 6,000 Turks,
set out on 7 September. Another 11,000 French troops were to follow
later, depending on the transport facilities available. Of the French army,
over 58,000 had by now been transported to the East, some 5,000 had died
in the Balkans, and others were hospitalized at Gallipoli, Constantinople or
Varna.
Before dealing with the war on the Danube, general studies of the whole war
must be considered. The most detailed and authoritative accounts by
contemporaries are César L. de Bazancourt, L’expédition de Crimée jusqu’
à la prise de Sébastopol. Chroniques de la guerre d’Orient, 2 vols (Paris
1856, 5th edn 1857; German trans., 2 vols, Pest, 1856; English trans., 2
vols, London 1856; editions after the 5th have the title L’expédition de
Crimée. L’armée française à Gallipoli, Varna et Sébastopol. Chroniques
militaires, 2 vols, Paris, 1858; last edn 1863–4); César L. de Bazancourt,
L’expédition de Crimée. La marine française dans la Mer Noire et la Baltique.
Chroniques de la guerre d’Orient, 2 vols (Paris, 1858); Modest I. Bogdanovič,
Vostočnaja vojna 1853–1856 gg., 4 vols (St. Petersburg, 1876); Arthur
William Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea: Its Origin, and an Account
of its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan, 8 vols (Edinburgh and
London, 1863–87; 6th edn in 9 vols, Edinburgh, 1877–8; a French
translation, incomplete, in 6 vols, Brussels, 1864–70). A later account, from
a French point of view, is Camille Rousset, Histoire de la guerre de Crimée,
2 vols (Paris 1877, 2nd edn 1878). The more important accounts of the
twentieth century are Tarle, Krymskaja vojna I–II (cf. above, Chapter 3).
René Guillemin, La guerre de Crimée. Le Tsar de toutes les Russies face à
l’Europe (Paris, 1981), is a very good account on the military and especially
the naval side; the passages on diplomacy are faulty. The viewpoint is French,
but it takes into account the British and Russian side as well. It covers most
theatres of war; the chapters on the White Sea and the Pacific are somewhat
out of proportion compared with those on the Crimea and the Baltic; and
there is no chapter on the Caucasus. Alain Gouttman, La guerre de Crimée
1853–1856 (Paris, 1995), is the newest account by a French historian, based
almost exclusively on French published sources and concentrating on the
Crimean theatre of war. A. J. Barker, The Vainglorious War, 1854–56
(London, 1970), is the British equivalent of Gouttman; it is sound but does
not go beyond the Crimea. Another solid account, based on archival research
but again restricted to the Crimean theatre of war, is W. Baring Pemberton,
Battles of the Crimean War (London, 1962). R. L. V. ffrench Blake, The
Crimean War (London, 1971, repr. 1993), has some short chapters on the
theatres of war besides the Crimea. See also German Werth, Der Krimkrieg.
Geburtsstunde der Weltmacht Rußland (Erlangen, 1989; paperback edn
Frankfurt and Berlin, 1992). As to the newest Russian studies, cf. the
voluminous book by Čennyk, Krymskaja kampanija, and the shorter one by
Skrickij, Krymskaja kampanija, listed above in Chapter 6.
For the war on the Danube in 1853 and 1854, the most detailed account
is A. N. Petrow, Der Russische Donaufeldzug im Jahre 1853/54, ed. A.
Regenauer (Berlin, 1891). This is a slightly shortened version of the Russian
original, published in 1890 and based on Russian archival material. There is
no equivalent for the Turkish side, but cf. now the short chapters in Badem,
The Ottoman Crimean War, pp. 101–9 (for 1853), pp. 177–90 (for 1854),
and also in Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 242–7 (1853), pp. 254–
68 (1854). On the naval engagement at Sinope there is a long chapter in
Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, I, pp. 346–83. Cf. also Boris I. Zverev, Sinopskoe
sraženie (Moscow, 1953). The significance of Sinope for Britain’s entry into
the war is stressed by Martin, Triumph, pp. 148–53, 170–8. On the siege of
Silistria there are detailed accounts in Petrow, Donaufeldzug, and in Tarle,
Krymskaja vojna, I, pp. 452–500.
124
12
The Black Sea theatre
The invasion of the Crimea and the Battle of

the Alma, 20 September 1854
Sevastopol, the target of the Allied invasion, was a formidable fortress,
impregnable from the sea. It was founded after the annexation of the Crimea
from Turkey in 1783, as a military port and fortress to be used as a stepping
stone for a future Russian naval descent on Constantinople. The name given
to the place was derived from the Greek and means ‘exalted city’ or ‘city of
fame’. In 1804 it was designated the main naval port of Russia’s Black Sea
fleet. Admiral Michail Petrovich Lazarev, who was Commander-in-Chief of
the fleet from 1833 to 1851, played the major role in its construction and
development. His construction plan of 1834, imposing in its dimensions,
provided for the building of eight forts or batteries, three on the north side
of the main bay and five on its southern side – three more were added at the
beginning of 1854. Altogether they contained 571 guns.
The fortress of Sevastopol had, however, an Achilles’ heel: this was its
almost open side towards the land. In the 1830s eight bastions were projected
that were to protect the city along an arc of 7.5 kilometres. At the opening
of hostilities in October 1853, only bastion eight was near completion. In
the spring of 1854 the construction of the other bastions was hastened, but
in September three-quarters of the defence line was still open. The main
northern fort, which was to protect the city from the Allied army marching
down from Eupatoria, was, according to Totleben, in a pitiful state.
Prince Menshikov, the Russian Commander-in-Chief and commander of
the Black Sea fleet, exhibited an optimistic air throughout the summer of
1854. According to Totleben’s testimony – the famous engineer had been
sent by Prince Gorchakov from the Principalities to assist in the construction
work at Sevastopol – Menshikov did not expect an Allied invasion of the
Crimea in 1854 because he thought the season was too late, and did not
deem it possible for the enemy to land a sufficient number of troops
anywhere on the coast. The Tsar in St Petersburg was in the same haughty
mood, and gleefully received the news about the poor state of the Allied
armies at Varna. Menshikov had, however, requested and been granted
125
MAP 3 The Crimean campaign, 14 September 1854–8 September 1855.

THE BL ACK SEA THEATRE 127
reinforcements. The 16th and 17th Infantry Divisions based in Yaroslavl

and Moscow were ordered south. It took them several months to reach the
Crimea. They arrived in time, however, in September 1854. The forces at
Menshikov’s disposal in those fateful days were 38,000 troops and 18,000
seamen, who had already partly left their ships, lying idly at anchor in the
bay, in order to help in the defence works. There were another 12,000 troops
in the eastern part of the Crimea who guarded the areas of Feodosia and
Kertch.1
Menshikov made no attempt to oppose the enemy when the latter finally
landed on 14 September at Eupatoria and he has been much criticized for
his failure to do so. It must be remembered that his reconnaissance facilities
were very poor; he could not know that the Allies would land in force at
that point. The enemy might use the landing there as a feint and then rush
the bulk of his troops on board the ships to Sevastopol, or another point
near to it, and land them there. At Eupatoria, furthermore, any Russian
defenders rushed to the scene were the target of the powerful guns of the
enemy ships. So his decision to wait for the enemy to assemble and then
meet him in open battle on the banks of the River Alma was not an
unreasonable one. What turned out to be at fault was his decision to meet
the invading army frontally on high ground at the mouth of the river, instead
of waiting further inland, so threatening the enemy’s flanks and trying to
throw him back into the sea.
While the Allied armada was en route from the Bulgarian coast to the
Crimea, it was decided to send out another reconnaissance party to search
for a new landing place – it had by now been established that the mouths of
the Katcha and Alma rivers were occupied by an estimated 30,000 Russian
troops. This mission, in which Lord Raglan took part in person, singled out
the large and long beach of Eupatoria further to the north, where no Russian
troops could be spotted and where the countryside was less rugged than
further to the south, thus granting good observation for the ships’ guns.2
After a leisurely seven days’ cruise the armada finally arrived at Eupatoria
on 14 September. The troops disembarked in fine weather, without being
molested in any way from the coast. The disembarkation of the French
troops took only two days; that of the British took double that time. Saint-
Arnaud was dismayed: he wanted to give battle to the Russians as soon as
possible and not grant them time to bring fresh forces into play. Menshikov,
still full of optimism about the chances of an encounter, did not budge. On
19 September the Allied armies were at last ready to move south. The north
side of Sevastopol was 46 kilometres away, and on the Alma Menshikov’s
army was waiting for them.
Saint-Arnaud’s plan seems to have been this: to beat the Russian army
and thus open the way to the north side of Sevastopol; occupy the north fort
there overlooking the bay, overrun the rest of the northern batteries from
behind, and then bombard, in concert with the fleet, the Russian fleet and
the southern defences of the city.
The Allied armies marched south, their right wing formed by the four
French divisions and the Turkish contingent, their left by the British army. On
the coastline they were covered by the Allied fleet which was progressing
south at the same speed. At noon the Bulganak river was crossed, the first of
the four small rivers on the way to Sevastopol. Five kilometres to the south
the Allied armies could clearly make out the heights beyond the Alma river
where the enemy was waiting for them. As the British divisions were still
incomplete, some of their troops not yet having left Eupatoria, it was decided
to stop and wait until the next day to give battle to the Russians. Thus, on the
evening of 19 September, the two armies camped within sight of each other.
Menshikov had local geography on his side. His troops were posted on
the heights beyond the south bank of the Alma, overlooking the undulating
plain to the north. He allowed his left wing, on the seaward side, to remain
very weak with only one battalion being posted there. This proved to be the
decisive mistake in his deployment. There are two possible reasons for the
weakness of his left wing: first, massing troops within the range of the ships’
guns would be suicidal; secondly, the coast on his side of the Alma was so
steep and rugged that it seemed impossible for the enemy to climb up the
escarpments.
Saint-Arnaud’s plan of action did not neglect these steep coastal hills,
because the ships had observed at least one narrow footpath leading uphill.
Saint-Arnaud hoped to outflank the Russians on both wings. Bosquet’s
division with the Turks was posted on his right. The other French divisions
formed the centre, two in front and one in reserve; the British army stayed
on the left as they had brought part of their cavalry with them from Bulgaria
(whereas the French cavalry had been left behind to hasten the embarkation
and disembarkation). Raglan seems to have taken note of the plan of his
colleague, but did not act accordingly on the following day; his men never
tried to outflank the Russians as they were supposed to do. It was agreed
that the troops should line up on the following morning between 6 and
7 o’clock.
The figures given in the sources for the strength of the two enemy armies
vary. What is clear, however, is that the Allies had a substantial numerical
advantage. Figures for the Russian army are given as between 33,600 and
40,000, those for the Allied armies vary as much; but 61,000 had landed
at Eupatoria, so this must have been the total that opposed the Russians on
20 September.3
Early in the morning of that day, Bosquet’s division was the first to move
into position at the appointed time. The signal for the opening of the battle
could not be given because the British were not ready, the formation of their
thin long lines took hours, the officers insisting on a meticulous execution of
what their men had learned on the parade ground. (Later on during the
battle the British marched through the Alma river still trying to keep their
formations. If someone drowned, the line closed up or the gap was filled by
the man in the second rank.)
At last, after hours had passed, the signal for beginning the battle could
be given. Bosquet had by then discovered that the ground uphill across the
river was weakly manned. So he hastened his men, the famous Zouaves of
Africa, to climb up the ravines – a considerable risk. If the Russians had
discovered the danger on their left flank, they could easily have rushed
reinforcements thither from the plateau. However, Menshikov did not allow
his subordinate commanders to act on their own initiative and did not take
seriously the news that the first French had appeared on the heights. Only
later were five battalions sent as a relief, but by then Bosquet’s men, to the
amazement of the Russians, had even managed to find a path along which
to drag their guns and bring them into position.
The success of Bosquet’s audacity was greater than even Saint-Arnaud
had expected. Without waiting for the British to do their outflanking
manoeuvre on the opposite wing – which, in fact, they never intended to
perform – Saint-Arnaud made his two divisions in the centre cross the river
and climb up the heights and even brought up his reserve division from the
rear. Although the French were received with cannonballs and shrapnel
from the Russian guns, and although hand-to-hand fighting developed, the
French had the advantage of the precision and long range of their Minié
rifles. The crews of the Russian guns had not protected themselves by
earthworks or other means and were therefore an easy target for French
sharpshooters. Many Russian gunners, unless they were hit, simply deserted
their guns.
On the left wing, which at its far end was 8 kilometres away from the
coast, things did not go so well as on the right and in the centre. The British
lines, many of them still in meticulous order, advanced and retreated several
times. They, too, had the advantage of the Minié rifle, whose bullets, to the
amazement of the Russians, penetrated several ranks of the enemy at close
range. When French troops finally came to the relief of the British, the
Russians on that wing had to fall back as well. Late in the afternoon the
Russians were in full, but orderly retreat.
The Allies have often been criticized for not pursuing the shattered
Russian army, and rightly so. There were of course enough reasons to halt
and lick the wounds which the Allies had themselves received. The ground
was covered with hundreds of their dead and of wounded who had to be
looked after. The French, as was their custom in battle, had left their
knapsacks behind and of course wanted to retrieve them. The commanders
did not possess any information about possible Russian reserve forces
further south or in the interior, and had no knowledge of the topography of
the country on the way to Sevastopol. Therefore they never thought of
pursuing the enemy. But did not Saint-Arnaud himself plan to march south
after the battle and occupy the northern forts of the city? Already a dying
man, the Marshal could not stand the physical strain of staying in the
saddle and of crossing two more rivers and a terrain that became more
rugged as one approached Sevastopol. Raglan, the one-armed office-general,
MAP 4 The Battle of the Alma, 20 September 1854.
was too old and feeble himself, and too gentle, to overtax the morale of his
tired army.
However, the Russians feared that the Allies would pursue and enter
Sevastopol from the north. A Russian eyewitness later wrote that the
Russians wondered at the time why they were not being followed: ‘This
mistake saved our army from the final knock-out and it saved Sevastopol
from being taken by the enemy.’4
For losses in dead and wounded at the Battle of the Alma, the statistics
given later on by Totleben for the Russian side look fairly reliable: about
1,800 men and officers killed and 3,900 wounded, including 728 men
missing. The British casualties are given as 2,000, of whom 362 were killed.
Later figures published by the French Moniteur say that there were 2,060
wounded British soldiers in the French hospitals on the Bosphorus. The
French losses are put at 1,200 to 1,400 wounded and 140 to 250 killed.
FIGURE 10 Victory of the Alma. Punch 27 (1854), p. 148. University Library of

Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
The Alma produced a profound impression everywhere in Europe. A year

and a half had passed since the Eastern crisis had begun and now the armies
of three great powers had clashed for the first time. Menshikov reaped what
he had sown in Constantinople. Tsar Nicholas and high society in St
Petersburg and Moscow were dumbfounded, but continued to invoke the
spirit of 1812. From a military point of view, the importance of the Alma
must not be overrated. True, if the Russians had won the battle, this might
well have been the turning-point of the war, for the Allies could hardly have
stayed on in the Crimea. On the other hand, the Allies did not follow up
their success; had they done so, this might have been the end of the war.
When they had recovered and marched down to Sevastopol, they did not
knock at its gates, which were defended by a mere handful of naval infantry
from the ships (4,000 to 5,000 men). Menshikov with his defeated army had
not dared go inside the fortress for fear of receiving the final blow, but made
his way into the interior of the Crimea.
The siege of Sevastopol: the beginning

The behaviour of the Allied armies in the days immediately after the
Battle of the Alma was of the utmost importance for the further conduct
of the war. They spent fully two days on the battlefield resting,
replenishing their supplies, burying the dead, collecting the wounded and
bringing them on board the ships which in turn ferried them to the hospitals
in and around Constantinople. At last, on 23 September, they began their
march south across the Katcha and Belbek rivers to the north side of
Sevastopol.
At the bivouac on the Belbek, on the evening of 24 September, the
commanders took the fateful decision not to attack Sevastopol from the
north. This was exactly contrary to Saint-Arnaud’s original intention, but
the Marshal had by now lost his power of decision: he was a dying man,
cholera having attacked his body, which had long been in the grip of
intestinal cancer. It was Sir John Burgoyne, the Chief Engineer of the
British army, who had persuaded first Lord Raglan and then Saint-Arnaud
to abandon the plan of attacking the north side. His main argument was
that it was safer to invade the city from the south side, the defences of
which would be almost non-existent, whereas the Russians would have
used the time to strengthen their northern defences. Furthermore, the
south side had a natural hinterland, the Chersonese peninsula, which had
a number of good natural bays and harbours that could be used as
supply bases for the Allied armies. Balaklava harbour, to the east of the
peninsula, should be the first goal of the Allied movement round Sevastopol.
On top of this the Russians had, on 23 September, blocked the entrance
to the Northern Bay, the main bay of the city, by scuttling seven of
their older warships. This made the cooperation of the Allied fleets in
bombarding the north side impossible. Saint-Arnaud accepted these

arguments, which were not opposed by any of the other British or French
generals.
Thus, on 25 September, the Allies left their bivouac on the Belbek, the
British still guarding the left flank as they were the only ones who had some
cavalry to protect their march, the French and Turks keeping to the right.
None of the opposing armies made any reconnaissance, so neither side knew
anything of the whereabouts of the other. The Russians inside Sevastopol,
who were daily and hourly expecting the invasion from the north, did not at
once learn of the miraculous decision of the Allies, although it saved them
from being quickly overrun.
What was the state of affairs of the Russian army and of Menshikov’s
plans in these fateful days after the Battle of the Alma?
Menshikov with his battered army had left the battlefield and moved
south to Sevastopol. He made his army bivouac on the outskirts of the city
and went inside to make his decision known to the local commanders: he
would neither hold the Katcha or Belbek lines nor the north side of the city;
the local forces, largely made up of sailors from the fleet, should take care of
themselves. The entrance of the harbour should be blocked by scuttling
some of the ships; the remaining ships should point their guns at the north
side where the enemy was expected soon. He himself would march his army
to the north-east on the road through Mackenzie’s Farm to Bakchisarai, in
order to save the vital link to Simferopol and from there to Perekop and
southern Russia. Of course the local commanders felt betrayed by their
chief, but could not argue with him and were obliged to accept this high-
handed decision.
On 24 September, Menshikov’s forces left the outskirts of the city and
marched out to Bakchisarai. Menshikov was widely criticized then and later
for his decision both to scuttle part of the ships and leave the local garrison
to its fate. From a military point of view it made some sense: the sunken
ships did effectively block the entrance to the main bay to the powerful
Allied ships; Menshikov probably saved his army from a second defeat by
not allowing it to be trapped in Sevastopol; and he could well use it to return
to the city and either encircle the Allies after they had overrun the city or at
least threaten their flank. The latter is what actually happened. It led to the
curious situation that the Allied armies were besieging the city and were at
the same time themselves being besieged in their rear.
It was a huge blunder on the part of the Allies not to attack the north
side of Sevastopol, even after the scuttling of the Russian ships. The city
on that side had poor fortifications and had 4,000–5,000 troops and
sailors to defend it. The total strength of the garrison, when Menshikov
left the city on the night of 23–24 September, amounted to no more than
17,800 men. General Dimitrij E. von der Osten-Sacken, who was later
commander of the garrison, wrote in a letter at the beginning of October
1854:
If the enemy had acted energetically, then the whole army [of the Crimea]
would not have been sufficient for the defence of Sevastopol which is
completely unprepared to withstand a siege. The hope of Sevastopol lies
first of all in God’s help and then – in the intrepid Kornilov.5
And Kornilov himself wrote at that time in his diary, ‘Maybe, God has not
yet abandoned Russia. If, after all, the enemy, after the Battle of the Alma,
had directly marched into Sevastopol, he would have easily conquered it.’ It
is interesting to note that both the Russians and the Allies had no proper
reconnaissance service and were therefore moving and marching in the dark
– a situation which is characteristic of the whole Crimean War.
This fact is thrown into full relief by another curious occurrence at this
time: on 25 September a British advance guard inadvertently ran into the
rear guard of Menshikov’s army marching north-east near Mackenzie’s
Farm and took some of the Russians prisoner. Oddly, they were not properly
interrogated, so the British marching south did not realize that they had just
missed Menshikov’s army marching north-east.
On the following day, Saint-Arnaud, feeling his death approaching,
formally handed over command of the French army to General Canrobert.
Saint-Arnaud died on 29 September on board the ship that was to bring him
to Constantinople.
On arrival at Balaklava the Allies decided that the port was much too
narrow for the two navies to remain there. The French navy had discovered
that Kamiesh Bay, south-west of Sevastopol city, was a good and large base
for the French army. It was another mistake for Raglan to accept this division
of bases. It meant that the British army, facing Sevastopol during the coming
siege operations on the right-hand (north-eastern) side, had a line of
communication from Balaklava harbour that was far too extended. Supplies
had to be brought uphill from the harbour to the Inkerman plateau over a
distance of up to 14 kilometres. The disadvantage became painfully obvious
during the coming winter months. Another drawback was that the British
sector did not, because of lack of men, reach Inkerman Bay, the easternmost
part of the main bay, thus leaving the Russians a vital opening to the road
north to Bakchisarai and Simferopol. Finally, Balaklava harbour, even for
the British army alone, was too small to be able to handle the transfer of
supplies from the ships to the front line. The choice of Balaklava proved to
be a fatal decision which was to be responsible for the bulk of British
casualties during the months to come.
The two Allied commanders were far too timid to risk an immediate
attack on the almost defenceless city. First they wanted to establish
themselves at their bases and await reinforcements from Varna and
Constantinople, only then venturing an attack. In fact, during the first days
of October the British received 4,000 more men, bringing their total to
22,000; at the same time the French 5th Division and other detachments
arrived so that Canrobert disposed of 42,000 troops, plus the 5,000 Turkish
reserve troops. The Allies had to face two fronts, one visible, the other
invisible as far as the Russian enemy was concerned: they formed a ‘corps of
observation’ which had to face east and north-east and be on its guard
against a possible attack by Menshikov’s army; and a ‘corps of siege’, which
was to form a semicircle on the heights surrounding the city of Sevastopol
and the Korabelnaya suburb on both sides of the main bay, and prepare an
attack downhill through the amphitheatre-like outskirts towards the centre
of the city.
While the Allied armies were settling down, grouping their forces and
leisurely preparing their siege, digging their first trenches (to the relief of the
Russians who had by then realized that the Allies had no intention of
storming the city immediately), the Russian defenders of the city used the
invaluable time left to them to strengthen their incomplete defences. Their
efforts approached a miracle which has gone into Russia’s history as one of
its greatest feats. It was supervised by Admiral Kornilov, who was ably
assisted by Admiral Nakhimov and Colonel Totleben. Many guns were
taken from the remaining ships and put into position. The defence works
were carried out day and night. Not only were the sailors involved, but the
whole population including women and children. Their frantic activity
could at times be watched by the enemy soldiers only 2 kilometres away.
Within a couple of days the line of defence round the city was visibly
strengthened; ships were moored, their guns pointing to the Allied lines. By
the middle of October, 341 guns were in position, 118 of which were of
heavy calibre and able to reach the enemy siege lines, the rest being able to
deliver grapeshot in case the enemy should storm the city.
The lines of communication within the city were also improved. As early
as April 1854 a sapper battalion had begun the construction of a road from
the Korabelnaya suburb to the Inkerman bridge, which for the most part
ran near the coast and thus avoided the Sapun plateau which was now in the
hands of the Allies. This road was the main lifeline from the city to the rest
of the Crimea. Another improvement was the construction of a pontoon
bridge across the Southern Bay, which shortened the distance between the
city centre and the Korabelnaya suburb. From 3 October some of
Menshikov’s troops made their appearance on the Tchernaya river, and a
few days later the defenders of the city received their first real reinforcements
from Menshikov’s army, bringing their total to 25,000 men. Menshikov’s
main force remained posted on the open north side, whence it could easily
escape.
On the evening of 16 October an Allied council of war fixed the first
bombardment of Sevastopol for the following morning. Should it succeed,
an assault should be tried. The bombardment from both wings of the
besiegers was to be reinforced by the cooperation of the Allied fleets. Both
naval commanders were sceptical about the success of a ranged battery of
wooden ships against well-protected, casemated forts on land. It must be
remembered that Sevastopol had very strong coastal forts to meet an attack
from the sea, whereas the defences on the land side had been neglected.
The Allied naval commanders also knew that the very existence of the
expeditionary corps depended on reliable sea communications, which the
fleets were expected to provide. Risking them in a battle with coastal defences
therefore posed a real problem. The reservations of both Dundas and
Hamelin in granting naval support were therefore logical, but the commanders
on land were their superiors, and they had to give in. Ideally the ships would
have to open their broadsides simultaneously with the land batteries. Lack of
proper coordination – and perhaps their clandestine opposition – made
Hamelin and Dundas decide not to open the ships’ fire before 10–11 o’clock.
The number of guns facing each other on land was about equal. The
French had six batteries mounted with fifty-three guns on their left wing,
the British eleven batteries with seventy-three pieces on the right. On the
opposite side the Russians disposed of 118 guns (out of about double that
number) capable of being used against the Allied batteries.
The Allied preparations on the heights surrounding the city were easily
visible, so the Allies could not count on surprise when they opened fire on 17
October at 6.30 am. They were greeted by counter-fire almost simultaneously.
Thus the bombardment was a veritable duel between the two sides. After
9.30 a Russian bomb hit a French powder magazine, producing havoc and
resulting in fifty-five fatal casualties. When shortly afterwards a second,
although smaller, explosion put another battery out of action, the order to
cease fire was given to the remaining French batteries at 10.30.
On the right wing the British fared better. Their guns were superior in
number and calibre to the Russians’ and they had been properly dispersed,
so they managed to maintain fire throughout the day. They were able to
inflict heavy damage on the opposite batteries and bastions, especially to the
Malakhov and to Bastion No. 3 (the Great Redan). In the latter a powder
magazine exploded and battered the defences to pieces. Had Raglan been an
abler and more audacious general, and known the extent of damage done,
he would have realized that this was the moment to venture the assault and
occupy one of the most important bastions inside Sevastopol. Totleben later
admitted that this was another golden opportunity which Raglan let slip.
On the sea the Allies had met a near disaster. Their fleets had formed a
line from north to south outside the entrance to the main bay, facing, among
others, the formidable forts Constantine and Alexander. They were not
ready to open fire before 1 pm, that is, hours after the French batteries had
been silenced. Fire was exchanged for five hours, after which not one of the
thirty major ships had escaped more or less serious damage. None of them
had sunk, however. The casualties were high: seventy-four Allied sailors
were dead, 446 wounded. This was a heavy toll compared with the slight
losses in men and damage done to the Russian forts. The Allied naval
commanders were justified in their doubts about leading a battle fleet of
wooden ships, even though they had superior armament, against well-built
and properly defended stone forts on land. Worse than the damage inflicted
on the Allied fleets was their loss of prestige. They never again during the
war lined up in a ranged formation in front of the coastal batteries of the
Black Sea. The lesson the Western powers drew from this experience was to
try out a new type of vessel, the ironclad ship, which could better withstand
the impact of cannon fire.
The bombardment on land was also a dismal failure. It was resumed and
continued during the following days at a diminishing rate until 25 October,
but achieved nothing. The Russians managed to repair the damage done to
their defences each night. They, too, had suffered a great loss: Kornilov had
been in the Malakhov and died on the first day of the bombardment due to
a severe wound. The hero was dead, but lived on in the defenders of the
city, military or civilian. In his hour of death he is reputed to have said,
‘May God bless Russia and the Tsar, and save Sevastopol and the fleet.’
These are the words engraved on the monument later erected on the
Malakhov in his honour. He was replaced as naval Commander-in-Chief by
Admiral Nakhimov.
The Battle of Balaklava, 25 October 1854

The first and inconclusive bombardment of Sevastopol was the real beginning
of more than 300 days of trench warfare between the two sides. The French
and British were digging themselves in, opening a network of parallels and
approaches and multiplying their batteries. The Russians were doing
likewise, constructing new batteries such as the Gervais battery to protect
the strategic Malakhov, and linking all their earthworks round the city
centre and the Korabelnaya suburb with a deep trench. Both sides had also
replenished their forces from the outside: the Allies could dispose, at the end
of October 1854, of some 70,000 men, made up of 42,000 French, 23,000
British and 5,000 Turks. Menshikov’s force at that time stood at about
65,000; it had just been strengthened by the 12th Infantry Division under
Lieutenant-General Pavel P. Liprandi who had arrived by forced marches
from Bessarabia. If Menshikov had waited a few days more before launching
a diversionary movement, he would have had at his disposal, with the arrival
of the two remaining infantry divisions from the 4th Corps in Bessarabia
(10th and 11th), a total of 85,000 men.
But Menshikov gave in prematurely to the constant goading and prodding
from St Petersburg that urged him not to give up Sevastopol, but to try a
relief movement in favour of the beleaguered city. Thus he adopted General
Liprandi’s plan of an attack on the right south-easterly flank of the British
line of observation, with Balaklava being the ultimate target. The plan was
a sound one; if successful it would have evicted the British from their sole
base of supply and might well have inaugurated a turning-point in the war.
The defences of Balaklava harbour, or rather of the entrance to the small
valley of Balaklava, were weak. They consisted of an outer and an inner line.
The former was made up of four redoubts strewn along the Voroncov road,
built on elevated ground between the North and South Valley and facing the
Fedukhin heights in the north. Each of the lightly constructed redoubts was
manned by about 250 Turkish troops who were mostly poorly trained
Tunisians – Omer Pasha, still with the bulk of his forces at Eupatoria, had
taken care not to give away first-line troops. The inner defence line consisted
of a number of batteries forming a semicircle about a kilometre outside the
entrance of the gorge to Balaklava. Towards the northern end of the circle
was the village of Kadikioi, where a British field battery and an infantry
battalion were stationed. Further outside was Lord Lucan’s cavalry division,
which was encamped at the foot of the Sapun heights.
It is again typical of the conduct of the Allied headquarters that they did
not bother to carry out a systematic reconnaissance of the outer defence line
of Balaklava or, for that matter, along the whole line of their corps of
observation. Raglan even scorned the use of spies; otherwise he would have
taken seriously a report that the Russians were assembling troops along the
Tchernaya river between the Traktir bridge and the mouth of the Baidar river.
In fact, Liprandi was assembling a force of 25,000 men there. They were
to advance in an extended line parallel to the outer defence line of Balaklava
and then to overrun the four redoubts, with part of the force staying on the
Fedukhin heights in order to protect the other part marching towards the
gorge of Balaklava. The harbour installations and ships, being practically
undefended, would then be destroyed. The troops would, according to
circumstances, either install themselves inside Balaklava or leave it after
carrying out the work of destruction.
Before dawn on 25 October the Russian troops deployed according to
plan. The four redoubts were quickly overrun, most of the Turks having fled
beforehand, in view of the vastly superior numbers of the enemy, and headed
towards the inner defence line of Balaklava. The Fedukhin heights were also
duly occupied, with Russian guns overlooking the North Valley firmly
installed. The surprise achieved by the Russians was complete. Had Liprandi
shown more dash and self-assurance he could have followed up his first
performance by a second raid towards the inner defence line. Lucan’s cavalry
and a small force of infantry to the right flank of the Russians would not
have been a match for the attackers. Instead, only part of his cavalry and
some Cossack regiments advanced. What now developed during the morning
hours of 25 October was more or less a duel of cavalry forces, on the lines
of the artillery duel of 17 October, rather than a full-fledged attack by a
superior force against a vastly inferior enemy.
Lord Raglan and, later on, General Bosquet had by then posted themselves
on a vantage point on the Sapun hills overlooking the movements to the east
of them. Raglan ordered two divisions of the corps of observation to march
in the direction of the scene of action. Bosquet in his turn had some of his
chasseurs d’Afrique march down into the plain. All these relief movements
would take hours to perform.
In the meantime the Russian cavalry force was charged and driven back
by the Heavy Brigade of Lucan’s cavalry under Brigadier General James
Scarlett. It smashed into the Russian ranks and within minutes returned
with remarkably light losses, but with good effect as the Russian hussars
and Cossacks retreated in disorder. This was a golden moment for the Light
Brigade under its commander, Lord Cardigan, which was posted to the left
of the Heavy Brigade, to take up the pursuit of the fleeing Russians. But
Cardigan, being on bad terms with Lord Lucan, his chief and brother-in-law,
kept to the letter of an order issued by Lucan and did not move, although
some of his officers implored him to seize the opportunity.
What now followed has gone down in British military mythology and
British national consciousness, immortalized by countless tales and by
Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. Only the
bare facts need be retold here.
The first stage of the famous ‘charge of the Light Brigade’ was a vague
order given by Lord Raglan from his elevated vantage point on the Sapun
mountains. To him the Russians seemed to be retreating. Through his
telescope he was able to see that they were removing the British guns from
the captured redoubts. In order to prevent this he issued the following order,
scribbled down by the Quartermaster-General, General Richard Airey, on a
paper to be passed on to Lord Lucan and then to Lord Cardigan:
Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the
enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop of Horse
Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate, R. Airey.6
FIGURE 11 Lord Raglan’s order to the Light Brigade in his own handwriting.
Courtesy of Inge and Dieter Wernet.
Both Lucan and Cardigan could not make much sense of the order, since
what Raglan was able to see from his elevated point was not visible in the
plain where the cavalry stood. So they were completely in the dark about
their real target. They both knew that if they obeyed the order to the letter the
attack would not only be pointless but also suicidal. When Lucan remonstrated
with the messenger, asking him to explain the order orally, he was angrily
told with a contemptuous gesture: ‘There, my Lord, is your enemy; there are
your guns.’ The gesture pointed to the east of the Voroncov road. The
transmission of the order to Cardigan was marked with similar unhelpfulness
and contempt. The delivery of the fateful message down the chain of command
was thus marred by incompetence, personal pique, snobbishness and, in the
end, by what would later come to be called Kadavergehorsam in the German
army, that is, slavish obedience to a command.
To cap its pointlessness, the order was executed by Cardigan and his
officers with the punctiliousness of barrack yard drill: when in the heat of
the attack, a rider was being shot down from his horse, the cry ‘Close the
ranks!’ was to be heard again and again. When Cardigan rode out with his
658 men into the open North Valley, which was surrounded on all three
sides, left, right and ahead, by hills studded with Russian artillery, he did so
as if he was on the parade ground. The three lines had to be formed
meticulously. Then the orders were given to start and hasten the speed. The
Russian gunners were for a moment seized with incredulous amazement
before they started to pour their fire into the line. Everyone else looking on,
including Raglan, was dumbfounded. Bosquet, stricken with horror, shouted,
‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. C’est de la folie.’7 Liprandi, on
later hearing of the rashness of the British cavalry, insisted that they were
drunk.
Stolidly advancing and being showered with cannonballs, canister and
bullets, the Light Brigade, or what was left of it, even reached the Russian
guns and sabred some of the gunners. The retreat of the remnants was
covered by a relief attack of the French chasseurs d’Afrique. Of the men who
had ridden to the attack, slightly less than 200 returned; 134 were killed,
many more wounded. Cardigan escaped the havoc in the ‘Valley of Death’.
With the disastrous attack of the Light Brigade over, there was no further
action between the Russians and the Allies. The affair of 25 October near
Balaklava can hardly be called a battle. Losses on both sides were slight: the
Russians put their casualties at 550 in all, of whom 238 were fatal; Allied
losses were about the same.
The result of the ‘battle’ was relatively unimportant. The Russians had
not reached their goal, the occupation or destruction of the British supply
base. They kept, however, two of the four redoubts, those lying to the east,
and also the Fedukhin heights. They could regard the ‘battle’ as at least a
tactical success. On the Allied side, the spine of the British cavalry was
broken for the rest of the war, though its role was unduly magnified by the
contemporary world and by posterity. As a result of the experience of
MAP 5 The Battle of Balaklava, 25 October 1854.
25 October, the right flank of Balaklava was strengthened in order to ward

off another Russian attack. The Allied supreme command in the Crimea
realized that after the failure of the first bombardment a long siege was in
train. In London and Paris the governments and public opinion were
beginning to realize that the invasion of the Crimea was not just a formality,
and that the Western powers were not well prepared for an all-out war. But
worse was to come in the following three weeks.
The Battle of Inkerman, 5 November 1854

With winter approaching, the Allies had decided on a new assault on the city
of Sevastopol for 6 November, with the intention of making this a turning-
point in the campaign – but the Russians thwarted their plan.
After the indecisive Battle of Balaklava and under mounting pressure

from the Tsar in St Petersburg, Menshikov, although reluctantly and not
believing in ultimate success, had made up his mind to act. Two of the
Tsar’s sons, Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael, had just arrived as
harbingers of the Tsar’s impatience. At the same time, in the first days of
November, the two remaining infantry divisions from the 4th Corps, the
10th and the 11th, had arrived from Bessarabia under General Dannenberg.
The Russians now had a clear superiority in numbers: there were about
107,000 men outside and inside Sevastopol (not counting the sailors).
The Allied forces could be estimated at 71,000 men, roughly half the Russian
number.8
Besides the area north-east of Balaklava, which had just been probed,
there was another even weaker point in the Allied line: the extreme easterly
end of the observation line, the Inkerman ridge or Cossack mountain. It
rises south of the butt-end of the main bay and bounds the Tchernaya at
its mouth towards the east. To the west it is separated from the adjoining
ridge, the Victoria ridge covering the Korabelnaya, by the Careening ravine
(Kilen-balka in Russian) and is indented towards the bay and river by a
number of smaller ravines. The Inkerman ridge, not to be confused with
the Inkerman heights beyond the Tchernaya, rises to a height of about
130 metres. The ground is rocky and covered with brushwood. In
October 1854 it was no man’s land. At the northern end towards the
coast of the bay ran Sappers’ Road, which was in Russian hands. At the
southern end on the heights was the easternmost end of the British line of
observation, thinly manned by the 2nd Division under General Sir George
de Lacy Evans. Their camp was poorly fortified. The 2nd Division stood at
3,500 men; to their left was posted the Guards Brigade with 1,600 men;
adjoining them was the Light Division under Sir George Brown with another
3,500 men. Taken together they formed the British wing of the line of
observation. Their strength – 8,600 men – was a third of the whole British
force, the other two-thirds forming the siege line. Thus, because of its
weakness and the exposed position, this sector was an easy and obvious
target for Menshikov’s army or part of it, the only difficulty being that the
enemy was on elevated ground and access was not simple. From a
topographical point of view the roles were reversed compared to the
situation at the Battle of the Alma: there the Russians were on high ground
and the Allies had to force their way up.
Menshikov’s plan of campaign looked simple and logical on paper, and,
if properly executed and if all imponderable factors – for example the
weather – turned out well, it had every chance of success. The overall
intention was to deliver a crippling blow to the British army, to destroy it or
roll it back, occupy the Inkerman ridge and gain control of the Careening
ravine and thus open the way to the strategic Sapun heights and the
Chersonese plateau, easing the pressure from the north-eastern corner of the
siege of the city. For the whole operation, Menshikov earmarked an imposing
force of 57,000 men, almost treble the strength used against Balaklava on
25 October.
The main thrust of the attack, fixed for 5 November, was to be directed
against Inkerman ridge. Menshikov assigned 35,000 troops, a force more
than four times superior in number to the British defensive line. It was to
approach the mountain in two columns. The right wing, under Lieutenant-
General Fedor I. Soimonov, commander of the 10th Infantry Division, newly
arrived, would move with 19,000 men from Sevastopol on Sappers’ Road,
cross the Careening ravine and then climb up Inkerman ridge on the right
hand side. The left wing, under Lieutenant-General Prokofij Ia. Pavlov,
would start off with 16,000 men from Inkerman village, cross the Tchernaya
at its mouth on Inkerman bridge, which was under repair at the time (this
was one of the snags in the plan!), then fan out into the various smaller
ravines giving access to Inkerman ridge and join with Soimonov’s column at
the top.
Strangely, Menshikov would not accompany either of the columns; he
would stay behind and let General Dannenberg, commander of the 4th
Corps, newly arrived with his two divisions, accompany Pavlov’s force
and on joining with Soimonov’s force assume overall command. Why
Dannenberg, who knew nothing of the difficult terrain and was held in
low esteem by all the other generals? Why did Menshikov himself virtually
renounce leadership of the battle? Did he want to avoid a possible defeat
like that on the Alma? Was he, the courtier and admiral, conscious that
he lacked the capacity to lead a great army into battle? Perhaps so. As
to his choice of Dannenberg, he later excused it by saying that it would
not have mattered who of his generals had commanded.9 Such strange
behaviour is indicative of the utter distrust Menshikov felt towards the
generals surrounding him. It is also typical that he worked out his plan
in secret, without discussing it with, or even showing it to, his fellow
generals.
A third sizeable force, made up of 22,000 men under General Piotr D.
Gorchakov, brother of M. D. Gorchakov, Commander-in-Chief of the
army of the Danube, was to be posted at Tchorgun village, upstream on the
Tchernaya, to effect a diversionary movement: it was to distract the
enemy forces at the centre of its observation line on the Sapun mountains,
attack it and if possible occupy the heights. This was a clever move, since it
would engage the French forces under General Bosquet nearest to those
British who would bear the brunt of the main attack and deprive the British
of the help which they would certainly need in view of their numerical
inferiority.
A second diversionary movement, though of much smaller dimensions,
was to be effected on the left wing of the French siege line by a force inside
Sevastopol. General Nikolaj D. Timofeev was to make a sally from bastion
No. 6 (Quarantine Bastion) with 3,000 men to immobilize the French forces
in that sector. It was probably a flaw in this otherwise excellent plan of
campaign that 3,000 men was not a strong enough force to achieve anything
decisive.
In addition to the two intrinsic flaws in Menshikov’s plan – the choice
of Dannenberg as commander of the main force and the insufficiency of
Timofeev’s sallying party – there were more to come in the preparatory
and main stages of its execution. First, the weather was inauspicious. During
4 November it was raining all day, and the rain continued throughout
the night. On the following morning, when the attack was to start, it
changed into a drizzle; the area was enwrapped in thick fog which reduced
visibility to a few metres. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage:
the marching columns could not be seen by the enemy but commands were
difficult to execute; fighting was haphazard and invariably ended in utter
confusion; the junction of the two main forces could hardly be effected;
and many of the muskets and rifles could not fire because of the damp.
During the morning, however, the fog partially lifted, so that the officers
could more properly direct their men. Despite this, because of the fog
there was no real battle between the forces involved, but a continuous series
of uncoordinated small attacks and counter-attacks. The two sides
intermingled with each other, with much hand-to-hand fighting, the Russians
sometimes shooting or clubbing to death their own men, and the natural
fright of the individual soldier degenerated into an animal-like frenzy, the
men wrestling with each other and strangling the enemy with their bare
hands.
Another flaw that quickly became apparent in the execution of
Menshikov’s plan of campaign, due this time to human incapacity, was
that Dannenberg unilaterally changed parts of Menshikov’s order after it
had been issued to Pavlov and Soimonov. There were changes in the
exact movement of Soimonov’s troops, in the use of his reserves and,
most important of all, in the timing of his march: instead of beginning
it at 6 am, he was to start at 5 am. These changes were due in part to
the vague wording of some of Menshikov’s phrases, but may also have
reflected the tense relations between the two commanders. In any event, the
result was more confusion on the part of Soimonov and Pavlov – a repetition
of what had occurred in the British command structure leading to the
dreadful charge of the Light Brigade. Dannenberg’s changes led to the two
columns missing each other on the heights of Inkerman ridge the following
morning.
The vagueness and confusion in the Russian order of battle is partly
attributable to the fact that there were no maps available of the local terrain,
while Dannenberg, having recently arrived from Bessarabia, had no personal
knowledge of the ground on which he was to operate. Menshikov had been
conscious of the lack of maps and had asked St Petersburg to send him one.
First it was refused him with the excuse that it was the only one available;
then it was sent to him and arrived – the day after the battle had taken place.
This lack of theoretical preparation was typical of warfare in the middle of
the nineteenth century, and especially typical of the Russian military

establishment. A look at a good map would have shown Dannenberg and
Menshikov – the latter at least must have had some knowledge of the terrain
on and around Inkerman Ridge – that the ridge was too small an area on
which to deploy so large a force (35,000 men), even taking into account that
they would arrive there in echelons and that reserves would have to be held
back.
A final, inexcusable mistake in Menshikov’s plan of battle is the fact that
on 4 November Inkerman Bridge, which Pavlov’s 16,000 men were to cross,
was still unusable and that Menshikov ordered it to be repaired during the
night. Of course, it was not ready in the early hours of next morning, so that
Pavlov’s column was halted for some time and arrived late on Inkerman
Ridge when Soimonov’s troops were already engaged with the British.
The Russian preparations were bound to go wrong the following
morning. It is most confusing for a latter-day historian to read and make
sense of the accounts, Russian or English, of the Battle of Inkerman, which
are mostly provided by ‘eyewitnesses’ pretending to give details which they
could hardly have seen in view of the bad weather conditions on 5 November.
At least the more important and decisive facts are known, as is, of course,
the result.
In the early morning of 5 November, Soimonov’s forces climbed up the
western side of Inkerman Ridge in their grey columns, unseen by the British
sentinels. Soimonov left his reserve behind and soon arrived at the crest
without seeing or hearing anything of Pavlov’s men who were to join him.
His troops were soon involved in fierce fighting with the British. Soimonov
was one of the first to be killed, and his second in command was immediately
wounded. The Russians fell back on their reserve battalions. Their
commander dared not move them forward without receiving an order from
above. As Soimonov was dead, his deputy put out of action and Dannenberg
still with Pavlov’s forces, he stayed put.
Pavlov’s 16,000 men, who were supposed to arrive simultaneously on
Inkerman Ridge, were in the meantime halted at Inkerman Bridge and had
to wait there until 7 o’clock. After crossing it, they fanned out on three
different routes and by 8 o’clock began to climb up the mountain with
their guns. Two of their regiments were soon involved in fighting with the
British. They even took No. 1 redoubt on the British far right, the so-called
Sandbag Battery. They had to retreat, however, when the British moved in
reserves. After the mist began to rise slowly, the Russians could make use of
their powerful artillery which they had massed in their rear; two frigates in
the main bay were able to take part in the attack. With more Russian
columns being able to press upon the British lines, the latter showed signs of
giving in. Raglan, who had appeared on the scene, decided to send for
French aid.
Bosquet’s forces on the Sapun heights had in the meantime been tackled
by Gorchakov’s Tchorgun force of 22,000 men. But in what a way!
MAP 6 The Battle of Inkerman, 5 November 1854.
Gorchakov, who had obviously misinterpreted the word ‘diversion’,

restricted himself to a cannonade that failed to do any damage as it was
launched from too great a distance. His behaviour is only surpassed by the
conduct of Menshikov, the nominal Commander-in-Chief who excelled in
utter passivity, having retreated to a telegraph hill from which he thought he
could oversee and direct the battle. Bosquet soon convinced himself that
Gorchakov’s pinpricks were a harmless ‘distraction’, and he therefore sent
the relief demanded. At first, only a few units arrived, but then Bosquet
committed the bulk of his troops. Their arrival was psychologically
important, comparable to the appearance of the Prussians during the
Battle of Waterloo. The British, on the verge of defeat, were crying,
‘Hurrah for the French.’ To the Russians the arrival of the fresh French
troops, mostly Zouaves, struck terror into their hearts. Fierce fighting
continued for a while; at the Sandbag Battery it was especially stubborn, the
position changing hands several times. When Bosquet had the opportunity
to inspect it after it had been retaken, he is reputed to have exclaimed, ‘Quel
abattoir [What a slaughterhouse].’10 Later, this name was given to the
Battery.
Dannenberg, who had arrived with Pavlov’s troops, decided to give up
the battle between 12 and 1 o’clock. There was no pursuit by the British or
French, so the Russians made an orderly retreat down the ridge and across
the Tchernaya.
The only Russian operation which went according to plan was the sortie
by Timofeev’s men from the Quarantine Bastion to the far left of the French
siege line on Mount Rodolphe. By 9.30, covered by the mist, they started out
unseen, suddenly appeared among the French batteries, put many of the
French gunners to death and spiked a number of guns. However, they were
soon repulsed by relief troops who furiously pursued them back to the
Russian bastion. The French losses there were appalling, higher even than
on Inkerman Ridge: 950 men dead and wounded. The Russian casualties are
put at 1,100.
Timofeev’s sortie completely achieved its aim of keeping the French busy
in that sector. It is therefore safe to say that, if Gorchakov had acted in the
prescribed sense and had not remained inactive with his large force, he
might well have overrun Bosquet’s position in the centre. Bosquet would
then have been prevented from coming to the relief of the British and the
whole outcome of the Battle of Inkerman would have been different.
The balance sheet in terms of human losses was appalling.11 Russian
casualties on Inkerman Ridge are given as almost 11,000 men dead and
wounded; taking Timofeev’s operation into account, the figure rises to about
12,000; the fifteen men lost in the Tchorgun force are negligible. It may
therefore be said that of the 35,000 men involved on Inkerman Ridge, a
third were annihilated, an extraordinarily high proportion for not more than
six hours’ fighting. The corresponding figures for the British and French are
more difficult to assess. Official statistics for the British give 632 officers and
men killed and 1,873 men wounded, of whom many probably died on their
way to Skutari (Constantinople), or at that hospital. French figures released
in Paris, and therefore most probably ‘rectified’, detail a loss of 1,726 men,
including those at Mount Rodolphe (950 men).
What was the overall strategic result of Inkerman? The outcome
revealed several points about the Russian army: first of all the incompetent
leadership and the almost non-existent staff work at headquarters. It is
strange that at the beginning of the battle, Menshikov transferred its
direction to Dannenberg, who had already cut a poor figure on the Danube
at Oltenitsa against the Turks. He had no knowledge of the terrain and
could not acquire it on paper, as no maps were available. When he appeared
on the scene he gave contradictory orders. The whole coordination of the
troop movements to Inkerman Ridge and of the diversionary actions was
flawed.
Menshikov must of course bear the brunt of the blame. His secretiveness,
his envy of his rivals and the vagueness of many of the details in an otherwise
good plan of campaign spoilt the chances of success right from the start. He
was not able to use the substantial superiority in numbers of men and in
artillery to strike a decisive blow at the enemy. Only a part of his force
became actively involved in the battle; many of the guns remained unused
down in the valleys and on Sappers’ Road. During the engagement, the
attack in columns proved deadly in view of the superior firepower of the
British. The old smooth-bore muskets were no match for the long-range
Minié rifles. Massed bayonet attacks for which the Russian soldiers were
well trained proved obsolete against the modern rifles that kept the Russian
columns at a distance of a hundred or more metres. In general, after
Inkerman the Russians had to give up all hope of driving the Allies into the
sea. But at least, through the bare fact of their attack, they forced the Allies
to postpone the renewal of their bombardment of the city.
Inkerman was a victory for the Allies; for the British, though, it was a
Pyrrhic one. It put their small army out of action for some time to come. The
British in the Crimea and at home became acutely aware of the insufficiency
of their army, of its inability to fulfil the threefold obligation of protecting
Balaklava, covering their overextended lines from the harbour to their
extreme right and simultaneously providing enough forces for the siege. The
Allies had finally to resign themselves to a long siege. First of all they had to
overcome the rigours of the oncoming winter, which soon proved to be
especially hard and dreadful.
The November storm of 1854 and the

Crimean winter of 1854–5
On 14 November 1854, a week after the bloody Battle of Inkerman,
the belligerents were hit by a terrible storm that swept over the southern
parts of the Crimea. It was accompanied by torrential rain that filled the
trenches round Sevastopol with water and transformed the ground into
a quagmire. The hardship it produced for men and animals, especially in
the exposed British camp, the losses it entailed in supplies in Balaklava
harbour, and the consequences, which were aggravated by a severe winter,
have gone down in English historical consciousness as one of the great
dramas of the Crimean War. The French in their trenches were of course as
badly hit as their British comrades, but conditions at their supply base
proved to be better after the storm, due to an old jetty dating back to Greek
times which protected the ships at anchor in Kamiesh Bay. The Russians in
the city of Sevastopol felt the rigour of the hurricane, too, but they had stone
houses which provided better shelter, although many were unroofed by the
storm.
On land, tents were torn down and barracks destroyed. The most pitiful
creatures were the sick and wounded in the makeshift hospitals which often
collapsed or were blown away. The chaos in the village and harbour of
Balaklava was indescribable.
At sea the damage done to the Allied fleets and the supply ships was
much greater. Balaklava and Kamiesh were two of the busiest harbours in
Europe at that time, with numerous ships arriving and leaving daily.
Balaklava was always so cramped that many ships had to wait outside. The
warships were posted along the coast, most of them at the mouth of the
Katcha and off Eupatoria. Both places had no harbours to offer shelter to
ships in distress. At Eupatoria, one of the most modern vessels, the screw-
propelled Henri IV , as well as the corvette Pluton, went aground. For the
British the most grievous loss was the steamer Prince, which was riding at
anchor outside Balaklava. It was laden with the major part of the winter
equipment for the British army, with hospital material and other stores. The
Resolute went to the bottom of the sea filled with ammunition. The total
losses for the British side were five avisos or steam corvettes and fifteen
transports; for the French, the losses comprised three transports, besides the
Henri IV and the Pluton. The Turks lost two steam frigates. Human
casualties, mostly on board the ships, are put at 500. Thus, on the Allied
side, the November hurricane caused as many dead as the Battle of the
Alma. As to the material losses, the figures which Sidney Herbert, the
Secretary at War in London later published, obviously on the basis of the
freight lists of the ships lost, give an idea of the extent of the disaster: 25,000
fur caps, 8,000 sealskin boots, 15,000 pairs of leather boots, 40,000 fur
coats, 40,000 leggings, 10,000 gloves.12
The Battle of Inkerman and the November storm were the overture to a
disastrous winter, in which all three armies in and around Sevastopol
suffered. The British army was by far the worst affected. There were two
reasons for this: the length of the line of communication from Balaklava
harbour to the British camp on the heights and the British siege sector;
and the incompetence of the British supply system. The November storm
had aggravated a situation which was inherent in the army’s lack of
preparation and foresight for a siege operation. Up to the first bombardment
of 17 October, Raglan had not envisaged a prolonged stay in the Crimea for
his army; therefore he did not press for the necessary preparations to be
made on a large scale. Responsibility for the supply of the army was in the
hands of the Commissariat, a civilian organization that was under the direct
control of the Treasury in London. As it turned out to be unable, during the
ensuing months, to collect the necessary number of horses and mules in the
Black Sea and Mediterranean areas, and as it was totally incapable of
tackling the problem of properly distributing the large amounts of supplies
at Balaklava up to the village of Kadikioi and thence to the British lines, it
was dissolved in the spring of 1855 and superseded by a new military
organization, the Land Transport Corps.
To people outside the Crimea it must have indeed looked unbelievable

that supplies of every kind, which had been transported over 5,000
kilometres from Britain to the Black Sea, were rotting near the jetties at
Balaklava, and that animals and men almost within sight of these necessities
were starving and dying. Animals did not get enough hay and became too
weak to haul their carts and carry their loads; there were cases of horses
eating each other’s manes and tails. As a consequence, the bulk of them died,
their carcasses littering the roads to the front line. Cavalry horses had to
take over their duties, but they, too, disappeared for want of forage. What
was left of Lucan’s cavalry practically vanished during the winter and as
they were in charge of the guard duty on the far right of the British lines they
had to be replaced by French troops.
The British soldiers had a miserable lot. Their rations were inadequate
and their winter equipment was non-existent until the arrival of new supplies
by ship at the end of the year. The effective strength of the troops was
dwindling daily. On 12 December 1854 it could still be put at 20,000
(compared to the 70,000 French troops). Five weeks later it was down to
13,000, with over 5,000 men hospitalized, the rest having died in the
meantime not because of enemy bullets, but because of the rigours of the
winter.13
The communication lines from Balaklava harbour to the siege and
observation lines were periodically impassable during the winter. No proper
preparations had been made to metal them and in rainy periods they were
transformed into mud tracks. After many of the draught- and pack-animals
had died, men had to carry provisions and ammunition to the front. As the
British soldiers were not used to such hard work or were too weak to do it,
the Turks had to be used for the purpose. In the end, in order to prevent the
British lines from collapsing, several hundred French soldiers had to assist
them.
The situation improved somewhat when the British firm of Peto, Brassey
and Betts arrived on the scene, with navvies and engineers to build a railway
from Balaklava harbour to the British camp. The first section to Kadikioi
village, begun on 8 February 1855, was opened on 23 February. A month
later the final section to the camp was finished. For the second bombardment
of Sevastopol, in April 1855, ample ammunition had been hauled up,
especially of the heavier types which had hitherto been impossible to move
to the front.
Although all kinds of supplies had arrived by sea at Balaklava harbour,
the whole site was in utter chaos, as is evidenced by the accounts of
eyewitnesses or by the photographs taken by Roger Fenton and James
Robertson, the first war photographers in history. Here the incompetence of
the Commissariat was especially glaring. After the Prince had gone down in
the November hurricane, fresh orders had been placed in Britain for new
winter equipment. When it arrived it turned out that all the boots were too
small for the men to wear. As an eyewitness wrote at the time:
FIGURE 12 The winter of 1854–5: the funny aspect. Punch 28 (1855), p. 64.
University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
The men lie down in their tents, and to give ease to their feet take off their
boots. The frosts, however, are sharp, and in the morning the boots are as
hard as iron; there is no getting them on, nor is there a way to thaw or
soften them.14
Sometimes ships arriving at Balaklava with vital necessities, like forage for
the draught animals, were sent back to the Bosphorus because there was no
space in the overcrowded harbour to unload them or – the most glaring
example of red tape – the ships’ papers were not in order. In another case,
iron beds arrived in one ship at Scutari and were held there for some time,
whereas the legs had long been sent to Balaklava.
The utter helplessness of the British army was soon highlighted by the
British press. The Times opened a series of articles on 19 December by
sharply criticizing the government and its agencies for the abject situation in
which the British army in the Crimea found itself. The paper had an on-the-
spot correspondent, William Howard Russell, who delivered, in minute
detail, reports on the misery of the army. Until that time The Times had
supported the government in its efforts to show teeth to the Russian bear; at
the beginning, in fact, it had goaded the government on in its opposition to
Russian pretensions. Once the war had begun, the paper had sent a bevy of
correspondents to the war theatre on the Danube, to Constantinople, to
Scutari and then to the Crimea. Their reports were avidly read by a public
eager for news from the Orient. When the Allies landed at Eupatoria on
4 September 1854 and drove the Russians away from the Alma, it was
expected that the war would soon be over.
But the confidence of the public was shaken, when, at the end of September,
the news arrived in Western Europe that Sevastopol had fallen, only for those
reports to be quickly proven false. The spirit of the public was again rising
when the bad news of the murderous Battle of Inkerman and of the havoc
the hurricane had wreaked arrived. Then Russell’s articles about the
disorganization of the army before Sevastopol led to a paroxysm of national
hysteria. This in turn prompted a search for a scapegoat or scapegoats, which
were found in Lord Raglan; his Adjutant-General, Major-General James
Estcourt; the Quartermaster-General, Richard Airey; the various offices and
departments responsible for the supply system; the government itself; and
ultimately the outworn aristocratic leadership of the army and the state. On
23 January 1855 the radical Member of Parliament, James Arthur Roebuck,
tabled a motion of inquiry into the conduct of the war in the Crimea, which
a few days later swept away the government of Lord Aberdeen and brought
a new administration, under the vigorous Palmerston, to power.
In comparison with the British army, the French Armée d’Orient was in
much better shape during the winter of 1854–5, although it, too, had to
cope with much hardship. First of all, its supply bases, Kamiesh Bay and the
neighbouring Kazatch Bay, were much better suited for providing the army
with the necessities of daily life and of occasional fighting. The bases were
much more spacious and they were nearer the front. Then, most important
of all, their whole administrative system was properly organized. Algeria
had provided a perennial battleground where the army had acquired a
system by which its most important asset, the individual soldier, was properly
cared for. There were well-stocked warehouses on the quays of the bays in
the Crimea, there were well-paved roads from both bays to the siege lines,
the rations for the soldiers were sufficient and balanced and the clothing was
appropriate for the winter season.
The French could even spare several hundred men for repair work on the
road to Balaklava and for carrying ammunition on their backs to the front
line. They assisted the British with various equipment, including the
ingenious cacolets, a double-seat placed on the back of a mule which was
often the only means of carrying a wounded soldier from the trenches down
to the hospital. In sum, the French soldiers were generally well fed, well clad,
well treated by their officers and well fitted for the murderous trench
warfare. In contrast their British counterparts were, as one of their own
veterans described them at the time, ‘the careworn, threadbare, ragged men,
who form the staple of the English forces in the Crimea’.15
The situation of the Russian army in the winter of 1854–5 was better
than that of the British, but worse than that of the French army. Although
the war was fought on Russian soil, the supply of the Russian army was
more difficult than that of the Allies. As there were no railways south of
Moscow, all supplies and reinforcements had to be transported on wagons.
In winter the transport system came almost to a standstill, as the animals
that drew the carts depended on hay which they could not carry with them.
It was the southern provinces of Russia which had to provide the bulk of the
provisions besides the Crimea itself, which, however, did not produce much
beyond grapes in the southern parts and cattle in the northern parts.
In the long run the Russian supply problem remained chronic and
insoluble. When the Russian army in the Crimea received 6,000 ox-carts in
November 1854, this number melted away, until a few weeks later only
1,000 of them remained. When at the beginning of December the Tarutinsky
Regiment, part of the 17th Division, left Nizhnyj Novgorod, it took five
months to reach the Crimea.16 Besides reinforcements in men, the problem
of military supplies – ammunition, weapons and gunpowder – soon turned
out to be unmanageable. During the first bombardment the defenders of
Sevastopol made lavish use of the stocks within the city, but thereafter
shortages forced Nakhimov to introduce rationing. During 1855 the
relatively free supply of war materials on the side of the Allies and the
dwindling resources in that sector on the Russian side became more and
more decisive for the final outcome of the war in the Crimea.
Another distressing factor in the daily care for the armies in the Crimea
was the hospital situation. Throughout the Allies’ stay in the Crimea there
were always tens of thousands of soldiers hospitalized. The majority of the
patients were in hospital due to sickness; mostly cholera, scurvy and typhus.
Those wounded in battle were in the minority. It may be said that roughly
half of the patients died in hospitals on all sides, a high proportion of which
was due to the low standards of hygiene and due to the medical service.
About 80 per cent of the deaths during the Crimean War occurred in
hospital, the balance on the battlefield.
During the first Crimean winter the British army was the worst stricken
of the three armies. In the following winter the situation changed radically,
and it was the French army that now suffered awful losses.17
FIGURE 13 The winter of 1854–5: the tragedy. Punch 28 (1855), p. 95. University
Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
The siege of Sevastopol – the second stage,

February–May 1855
The only military event of importance in the early months of 1855 was the
Russian attempt to dislodge the Allies from Eupatoria. After the landing of
the Allied armies on 4 September 1854 and their march south to Sevastopol,
this seaside town had been garrisoned by only 300 French troops. Several
Allied warships were moored along the coast and after the November storm
the Henri IV and the Pluton, which had been destroyed by the hurricane,
were still used as sea-batteries, some of the guns pointing towards the town
and others being transferred to the defences of the town.
From the beginning of 1855 the bulk of Omer Pasha’s army of the Danube
was being transported from Varna to Eupatoria. By the middle of February
some 35,000 to 40,000 troops had disembarked there, with more to come.
Naturally, the Russians became alarmed at such a concentration of enemy
troops, the more so as the Turks were seen reconnoitring the road from
Simferopol to Perekop. It was feared that they might cut this vital lifeline for
the army of the Crimea. Menshikov, spurred on by the Tsar, decided to
attack the Turks and drive them out of the place. The task was entrusted to
General Stepan A. Khrulev. After reinforcements had arrived, bringing the
Russian troops in the region to a total of 19,000 men, Eupatoria was
attacked on the morning of 17 February 1855. Although preceded by a
bombardment, the attack was repulsed. The Russians lost about 700 men,
109 of them dead, and retreated into the interior.
The defeat at Eupatoria created a bad impression in St Petersburg. It
became more and more obvious that the balance of forces was changing in
favour of the Western powers. One of the immediate results was that
Emperor Nicholas recalled Menshikov from the post of Commander-in-
Chief in the Crimea and put M. D. Gorchakov, just arriving on the scene
from Bessarabia, in his place. Nicholas, who died shortly afterwards (on
2 March 1855), expressed his gloomy misgivings about the prospects of
the Russian situation in his last letter to Gorchakov. Hearing of the
rumours which were then prevalent in Europe, that French troops might
march through Germany and attack Russia in Poland, so inciting the
Poles to revolution, he was even ready to let the Austrians occupy southern
Russia in order to strengthen his own position in Poland if they entered
the war.18
Just as Nicholas had become more and more impatient with his
Commander-in-Chief in the Crimea, Napoleon III in Paris was growing
nervous about the prospects of the war. At the end of January 1855 he sent
General Adolphe Niel, a siege expert and one of his close aides, to the
Crimea. Niel had no precise orders, but his general mission was to spur
Canrobert on to greater activity and to report home on the situation before
Sevastopol. The French were to receive more reinforcements, and the depot
at Constantinople was to be transformed into a camp where a substantial
army of reserve was to be built up.
At the end of February, Napoleon surprised the world with the
announcement that he intended to go to the Crimea in person in order to
instil more fire into the French generals and bring the campaign to a
successful close by meeting the Russian army in an open battle, preferably
at Simferopol. This news created much unrest in the diplomatic and military
world. Napoleon was, however, successfully talked out of this lunatic idea
during his state visit to Britain in the middle of April, although officially he
gave up his plan only a fortnight later.
In the Crimea itself the two commanding generals, Canrobert and Raglan,
saw no other way out of the deadlock than energetically pushing on the
siege until the final assault could be made on the city of Sevastopol. At the
beginning of February 1855 the general plan of siege operations was
changed. This corresponded to the wishes of Lord Raglan and also to the
order which Niel had brought with him from Paris – the French, in view of
their numerical superiority, were to take over the right sector of the siege
ring, notably in front of the Malakhov and the Little Redan, the British
concentrating their efforts in the centre on the Great Redan. This meant a
deterioration in the French lines of communication and supply.
Canrobert grudgingly accepted the change. He also had to swallow a
reorganization of his own troops, by now 80,000 strong. They were to be
divided into two army corps: one in charge of the left sector of the siege
against the city of Sevastopol, with General Pélissier, just arrived from
Algeria, as the commander; the other forming the corps of observation with
the additional charge of occupying the right sector of the siege, with General
Bosquet in command. Bosquet had by now, prompted by many of his
generals and also by Niel, accepted a change in the target of the main attack:
instead of concentrating the main effort and the final assault on the left
sector towards the city, they should be directed on the right and centre
towards the Korabelnaya suburb and the Malakhov.
This reorientation of the ‘old siege’ was now called the ‘new siege’. The
Malakhov bastion was clearly the centrepiece of the whole Russian
fortification system around Sevastopol, and Totleben had by now strongly
fortified it. If the Allies could take it, they would achieve several aims:
threaten both the suburb and the city itself, as well as a large section of the
main bay and the ships’ bridge which the Russians had by now built to
connect the city with the northern side; and from the Malakhov the adjacent
bastions, the Little Redan and the Great Redan, could be attacked in the
flanks or in the rear.
Some 600 metres in front of the Malakhov, as seen from the Russian side,
is a small hill which the French called Mamelon vert and which was, at the
beginning of February 1855, in no man’s land between the two sides.
Bosquet decided to take it as a preliminary step to an attack on the Malakhov.
To prepare for its occupation, work for the construction of two flanking
batteries was commenced. Great was the surprise when the French saw that
the Russians had overnight built a redoubt – the Selenghinsky redoubt – on
the northern slope of the Inkerman Ridge which covered both the Malakhov
and the Mamelon. Canrobert immediately reacted and had the redoubt
attacked, but the French were driven off with heavy losses. The Russians
had a second surprise up their sleeves when they built another redoubt close
to first during the night of 28 February–1 March; this came to be called the
Volhynian redoubt. The Mamelon was thus protected by two new
earthworks. To top everything, Totleben’s men erected, during the night of

10–11 March, a third redoubt, the Kamchatka lunette (in contrast to a
redoubt, a lunette is open towards the defenders) right on top of the
Mamelon. The Russians had thus outdistanced the French. During the
following weeks sorties and counter-attacks were launched, each time with
much bloodletting and no result.
At a council of war on 2 April 1855 the Allied generals decided to launch
another all-out bombardment, the second according to the Russians who
counted that of 17 October 1854 as the first. If successful, an attack would
ensue. The army of observation was strengthened by the arrival of 20,000
Turks from Eupatoria. For the bombardment the Allies disposed of about
500 guns, roughly four times the strength they had had during the first
bombardment. The Russians could use almost 1,000 guns for their defence
this time. Both sides had improved their means of attack and defence in
other respects. At the Mast bastion (No. 4 according to the Russian counting)
the French had driven their trenches to within 130 metres of the salients, but
the Russians had everywhere perfected their fortifications.
On the morning of 9 April the Allies started their bombardment. The
Russians replied, although it became obvious that they had to economize
with their projectiles which they hurled into the enemy trenches. On the
following day the bombardment was continued. To the great amazement of
the Allies, the Russians had set to work furiously during the night to repair
the damage. So it went on day after day and night after night until the
bombardment was stopped with the tenth bout on 18 April. The Allies had
showered 168,700 rounds on the Russians and the defenders had replied
with half that number. The strategical result of the bombardment was nil.
The human losses were not as high as might have been expected after such
a murderous exchange: 1,500 on the French side, 260 on the British and,
according to Totleben, 6,000 on the Russian side. On balance, the Russians
had fought well and had maintained their newly built outposts.
After the failure of the second artillery duel, the Allies tried a new
stratagem. The admirals of both navies, Admiral Lyons and Admiral Bruat,
had for weeks urged on the Commanders-in-Chief an expedition to Kertch,
on the eastern tip of the Crimean peninsula, and to the Sea of Azov in order
to cut one of the Russian lines of communication along the Don river
through the Sea of Azov to the Crimea, and to destroy supplies in the various
ports of that sea. Another reason was to allow the two navies, which had
hitherto been reduced to a mere ancillary role to the armies, to perform
some feats of their own and satisfy public opinion at home, especially in
Britain. Raglan was taken by the idea, but Canrobert hesitated as he regarded
such an expedition as a dissipation of forces. Influenced by the failure of the
recent bombardment, he finally gave in. Thus on the evening of 3 May 1855,
a flotilla of fifty-six ships, with over 7,000 French and 2,500 British troops
on board, weighed anchor and proceeded north-east towards Theodosia
and Kertch.
The expedition soon ended in a fiasco due to a new technical invention

which had just been introduced in the Allied armies in the Crimea – the
telegraph. On 25 April a telegraph line had been opened between Varna and
Balaklava, thus linking the theatre of war directly with Paris and London.
Napoleon had just returned from his state visit to London and Windsor,
where, as described earlier, a general plan of campaign had been concocted,
which aimed at breaking the deadlock before Sevastopol by sending two
armies to Simferopol reinforced by fresh troops from the camp at
Constantinople. He wired the outlines of the plan to Canrobert. Raglan,
however, received no official communication, and was only informed by
private letter.19
In the early hours of the morning of 4 May, Canrobert received another
telegram. Its wording was peremptory:
The moment has come to get out of the situation in which you find
yourself. It is absolutely necessary to take the offensive. As soon as the
corps of reserve [from Constantinople] has joined you, muster up all your
troops and do not lose a single day [ne perdez pas un jour]. I regret not
being able to come in person to the Crimea.20
Together with the earlier message to collect all available ships and bring
reinforcements over from Constantinople, Canrobert thought he had
received unequivocal orders. He immediately sent a despatch boat to the
flotilla which had almost reached its destination, telling the French
commander to return at once. The British commander had no choice but to
do likewise. The anger and disgust on the British side knew no bounds.
Relations between the two sides, already very strained, almost reached
breaking point. Raglan, usually suave in his manners, refused point-blank to
prepare the diversionary movement to Simferopol as he had received no
orders.
Relations between the two Allies improved, however, as soon as
Canrobert, tired of the strain that the burden as Commander-in-Chief of the
French forces exerted upon him, asked the Emperor to relieve him of his
post. Pélissier took over command on 17 May. The latter had quite different
notions of obedience, and, since Raglan had still received no definite orders
to execute the new plan of campaign, he went on with the siege and, in order
to placate his British counterpart, agreed to send a new expedition to Kertch.
The details were agreed upon at an Allied council of war in which Omer
Pasha took part. The flotilla and the landing party were strengthened
because it was felt possible that the Russians were now expecting a fresh
expedition. In fact, the Russians at that time had about 9,000 troops
stationed in the east of the Crimea between Theodosia and Kertch, but they
had not been reinforced. The Allied troops were made up of 7,000 French,
3,000 British and 5,000 Turks. They embarked on sixty ships and put to sea
on 22 May. Two days later, Kertch and Yenikaleh at the entrance to the Sea
of Azov were taken without resistance, the Russian troops fleeing from their
positions after having destroyed them. Over the following days, Allied
vessels entered the Sea of Azov, gave chase to Russian ships and bombarded
several places along the coast like Taganrog and Yeisk. Besides destroying
ships, government storehouses and port installations, the Allies set fire to
many civilian buildings. As on the Finnish coast the previous year, the
captains of British ships especially were not particularly fussy about
distinguishing between military and non-military objects. Admiral Lyons
was proud to claim the destruction of 250 vessels in the ports, along with
vast quantities of grain, flour and fodder.21
To describe the result of the expedition to Kertch as a huge success, as
British historians invariably do to this day, is unwarranted. Andrew
Lambert’s claim in 1990, that ‘as military operations, the capture of Kertch
and the subsequent control of the Sea of Azov rank among the finest
achievements of the war’, is certainly an exaggeration. His further judgement,
that ‘it was the decisive blow of 1855, leading to … the fall of Sevastopol’,
is even wider of the mark.22
The French naval historian Claude Farrère put things in perspective when
he wrote in 1934 that the expedition was ‘a marginal affair’. This tallies
with the judgement of Totleben, who must have had more accurate
information about the supply situation of the troops in Sevastopol, and who
concluded that ‘the entry of the enemy fleet into the Sea of Azov did not
impose on our Crimean army any shortages in the supply of food’. On the
other hand the psychological effect of the Kertch expedition was certainly of
some importance: it boosted the morale of the Allied troops before Sevastopol
and especially of the public and the government in Britain.
Some of the ships of the Allied flotilla were dispatched to the Circassian
coast of the Black Sea in order to cope with the Russian strongholds there,
Sudjuk Kaleh and Anapa. They found the places deserted. The expedition
was over by 15 June. Yenikaleh was left in the hands of the Turkish division,
with a regiment each of British and French attached to it. Nothing of
importance happened in the area for the rest of the war.
The siege of Sevastopol – the last stage,

June–August 1855
At the same time as the Kertch expedition set out, the Allies scored two other
minor successes in front of Sevastopol. French troops from the corps of
observation attacked Russian outposts at the village of Tchorgun. The
Russians had by then evacuated the Fedukhin heights and the Turkish
redoubts which they had taken in October 1854 during the Battle of Balaklava.
French cavalry now occupied the heights, while the newly arrived Sardinian
troops were deployed on their right, with Gasfort Hill as their main stronghold.
The new French Commander-in-Chief, General Pélissier, had infused his

officers and troops with a fresh spirit of determination. He was also on good
terms with Lord Raglan. Ignoring positive orders from Paris to invest the
city of Sevastopol completely and to get moving to Simferopol, he doggedly
stood to his plan that the siege in its present circumference was to be kept
up, but with redoubled vigour. He had by now enough human resources at
his disposal: with reinforcements from Constantinople, the Sardinians
(17,000) arriving from 8 May, the bulk of Omer Pasha’s troops (55,000,
including units left at Eupatoria and Yenikaleh) now stationed around
Sevastopol, and with the British strength having been brought up to 32,000,
the Allies now totalled 224,000 men, of whom 120,000 were French. In the
sector of the ‘old siege’, on the French left, the Russians had dug out and
occupied counter-approaches in front of the Quarantine and Central
bastions. Pélissier had them attacked on 22 and 23 May. In spite of fierce
Russian resistance, the trenches were taken by the French, who thus
tightened the ring around the Russians in that sector. The losses on both
sides – 3,000 Russians, 1,500 French – are an indication of the tenacity and
ferocity which characterized the following three months.
Pélissier’s main objective, however, lay in the sector of the ‘new siege’,
with the Malakhov bastion the central point. First, the outposts in front of
it and on its left flank, newly built and fortified by the Russians (the two
FIGURE 14 The Valley of the Shadow of Death. Photo by Roger Fenton.

redoubts and the lunette on the Mamelon vert), had to be taken. Lord
Raglan, himself eager to finish with the siege and likewise averse to the
French Emperor’s strategic ideas, readily fell in with Pélissier’s plan and
assumed responsibility for a British attack on the ‘Quarries’, a Russian
outpost in front of the Great Redan.
The opening of a new all-out bombardment – the third – was scheduled
for 6 June. When, on 5 June, Pélissier received an order from Paris, enjoining
him not to persist in the siege ‘before having invested the place’ and to
consult with Lord Raglan and Omer Pasha ‘in order to take the offensive, be
it by the Tchernaya or against Simferopol’,23 he simply put it in his pocket
and feigned the deficiency of the telegraph when answering it three days
later. Thus, unperturbed by the possible wrath of his Emperor, Pélissier had
the bombardment started on 6 June in the afternoon. The aim was a limited
one: to destroy the three outposts and occupy the Mamelon vert. Along the
sector of the ‘new siege’ and well into the sector of the ‘old siege’, the artillery
fire was kept up without respite for at least twenty-four hours, until the
afternoon of 7 June. The Russians did not show their habitual dexterity in
repairing the damage overnight this time. At six o’clock in the evening the
two redoubts on the Russian left wing were completely reduced to ruins.
The Kamchatka lunette was in similar shape, and the outworks of the
Quarries had been demolished by the British gunners.
At this moment the signal for an assault was given. Those attacking the
two redoubts had about 500 metres to cross, those attacking the lunette a
little less. Both groups managed, despite heavy losses, to reach the outworks
and get a footing in them. On the Mamelon vert, the French Turcos and
Zouaves defied their orders and pursued the Russians fleeing towards the
Malakhov. There they came under the fire of the Russian garrison, and many
of them having jumped into the moat, two metres deep, in front of the
bastion, were helplessly trapped for want of ladders. The French panicked
and were driven back by the Russians, who even managed briefly to regain
Kamchatka lunette until it was retaken by French reinforcements.
The French were now masters of the two redoubts as well as of the
Mamelon vert. The British likewise were successful in occupying the
Quarries. The Allies had thus gained valuable positions from which to
launch their assault on the strongholds of the Malakhov and the Great
Redan. The captured works were soon converted into batteries against the
Russian defences. The losses, though, were appalling: 5,500 dead and
wounded on the French side, 700 on the British, and over 6,000 on the
Russian side. Yet the end of the carnage was not in sight.
The Allies had, in front of the Korabelnaya suburb, wrung from the
Russians some ground which brought them nearer to the enemy glacis.
Pélissier wanted to top this preliminary success with a final one – the assault
on the Malakhov. At an Allied council on 16 June he fixed the following day
for a fresh bombardment and the day after that – 18 June – for an assault
on the Malakhov, the adjacent bastions and the Great Redan. Lord Raglan,
162
MAP 7 Sevastopol in the summer of 1855.

who was by now a dying man and therefore had no stomach to remonstrate,
agreed.
The assault ended in a complete failure, the only one for the Allies. Nearly
everything went wrong on their side, but Pélissier himself committed several
blunders. There is, first of all, the haste and impatience with which he
prepared the next stroke after his relative success of the third bombardment.
He deliberately chose 18 June for the assault as it was the 40th anniversary
of the Battle of Waterloo, for which he wanted to take revenge. He may have
secretly hoped that victory would bring him the baton of a Field Marshal.
At the council of 16 June several officers tried to dissuade him from the
attack because the distance the assault troops had to cover still seemed too
great. Pélissier would not hear of it. He committed a more serious blunder by
transferring General Bosquet, who was one of the officers warning him of
the uncertain prospect of the assault, to the corps of observation at the
Tchernaya. Bosquet knew almost every inch of the ground on which the
attack was to be launched, whereas his replacement, General Auguste M. E.
Regnault de Saint-Jean d’Angély, had only recently arrived in the Crimea at
the head of the Imperial Guard. Of the topography of the assault sector he
knew nothing. Perhaps Pélissier wanted to curry favour with the Emperor by
letting the general of the Imperial Guard share in the honour of the expected
success. Whatever the reason, Bosquet, an independent character who was
popular with his soldiers and who had reaped success after success – at the
Alma, at Inkerman and at the recent bombardment – was taken from the
front line.
A final flaw in the preparation of the assault was that the preliminary
bombardment was to stop in the evening of the first day and not recommence
until the very beginning of the assault, which was fixed for 3 am on 18 June.
Pélissier should have known his counterpart, Totleben, well enough to
realize that he would leave no stone unturned to repair the damage done to
his bastions and batteries post-haste. Instead, an almost complete lull of
several hours was given to the Russians to do what they had always done so
ingeniously – put up new defence walls, replace the guns put out of action
by new ones, and so on. After the bombardment the Russians expected an
assault and they had ample time to prepare themselves for it. They had
always been clever enough not to mass too many troops in the exposed
bastions so as not to incur excessive casualties from a bombardment. They
kept their reinforcements at a short, but safe, distance. They had also
concentrated plenty of field guns which could be easily moved to danger-
points. These could fire at wider angles than the siege guns in their
embrasures, and they were especially effective in showering assault columns
with case-shot. Another precautionary measure by the Russians was the
completion of a second bridge across the Southern Bay over which quick
reinforcements could be moved from the town centre to the suburb.
A final blunder committed by Pélissier was that the reserve – the Imperial
Guard – was placed too far away from the scene of action: 1,700 metres.
As arranged, the bombardment – the fourth – began at dawn on 17 June

along the whole line of circumvallation. The Russians replied at once with
their guns, but were slowly silenced one by one due to the superiority of the
Allies. Pélissier was ebullient and thought he could go ahead with the assault.
The plan was that three French divisions should rush forward at a signal
given personally by Pélissier at 3 o’clock in the morning. The division on the
right had the Point Battery and the Little Redan (Nos 1 and 2 according to
the Russian counting) as their objectives and had to cover a distance of some
750 metres. The soldiers of the centre division had to leap only 300 metres
across open ground and then overrun the outworks on the left hand (as seen
from the Russian side) of the Malakhov and climb up the bastion. The
division on the left had to tackle the right flank of the Malakhov and also
occupy the Gervais battery on the right of the kurgan (hill). Further to their
left the British were to advance towards the Great Redan (300 metres ahead
of their outer trenches), but only after the French had captured the Malakhov
and planted the tricolour on it.
The assault started in confusion, developed in confusion and ended in a
complete defeat. First of all, the Russians were everywhere on the alert, and
there was no element of surprise. Things on the Allied side went wrong from
the start for reasons similar to those that afflicted the Russian deployment
at the Battle of Inkerman. The French division on the right began its assault
about a quarter of an hour before 3 am because its commander mistook the
firing of a rocket for Pélissier’s signal. No sooner had the soldiers covered
200 or 300 metres than they received a shower of Russian fire in which the
warships riding at anchor in the Careening Bay joined. The division
immediately retired in disorder. The centre division fared no better. According
to eyewitnesses, Pélissier gave his signal late, but even then the division was
not ready to press ahead, as it had lost its way during the night and had not
reached its forward trenches in time. When it belatedly moved to its target
it was hit by the fire of the Russians who were awaiting it. The division to
its right was somewhat more successful. The Gervais battery was taken and
some French even reached the Malakhov; however, the Russian commanding
general there had ordered reserves in time and repelled the attackers. The
survivors fled back to their trenches. Raglan’s troops, too, joined the fray in
confusion, and, although they came near the Great Redan, they were driven
back. At 8.30 in the morning, Pélissier at last sounded the general retreat.
The losses of the Allies had never been so heavy as on this occasion. The
French lost about 3,600 men, 1,600 of them killed; the figure does not seem
very reliable, as this would leave 2,000 men wounded, a very low figure
compared with the number of dead. The British had 1,500 out of action.
Totleben puts the losses of the Russians at 1,500 on 18 June and 4,000 men
dead and wounded during the preceding bombardment.
It seems that Napoleon had been right when he telegraphed Pélissier, in a
tardy reaction to the bombardment of 6 June, ‘that a ranged battle which
might have decided the fate of the Crimea would not have cost me more’.
And he added, ‘I persist therefore in my order that you make every effort to
take the field resolutely.’24 After hearing the details of the failure of 18 June,
he was disgusted and ordered Vaillant, his Minister of War, to have Pélissier
replaced by Niel. Vaillant, knowing that his master’s wrath would soon die
down, had the order sent by ordinary mail instead of by telegraph, and then
intercepted it when the Emperor had calmed down. Pélissier did not shoulder
responsibility for the debacle, but placed the blame on General Mayran,
commander of the division on the right wing, and on General Jean L. A.
Brunet in the centre – both of whom had died in action.
Although the Russians had, on 18 June, successfully braved the onslaught
of the Allies, their forces in terms of men and material were beginning to wear
thin. On the day of the bombardment in which the Allies hurled 72,000 rounds
into the Russian positions, the Russians could reply with only 19,000 rounds,
that is, a ratio of almost 4:1 in favour of the Allies. Also, the daily losses in men
during those summer months were clearly to the disadvantage of the Russians:
the French were losing 200 men, the Russians 300 to 400 per day during May
and June, and, beginning with the bombardment of 17 August, 1,000 – an
appalling rate which the world would only get used to fifty years later in the
trenches of the Great War. On both sides there was also a loss in leadership: on
28 June, Lord Raglan died from an attack of cholera, which had made its
reappearance in the Allied camps; on 10 July, Admiral Nakhimov, the heroic
organizer of the defence of Sevastopol, was hit by a bullet while inspecting the
Malakhov and succumbed that same day.
The haemorrhage was more than made up by the reinforcements that
both sides were pouring into the Crimea. Since the month of June the French
had been receiving new recruits at a rate of 2,000 per day. Late in July, two
Russian divisions, the 4th and 5th, arrived in the Crimea, although worn out
by the long march, adding another 22,000 men to Gorchakov’s army, and
13,000 militia arrived a few days later.
The simultaneous arrival of a special officer, Baron Pavel Alexandrovich
Vrevsky, from St Petersburg at Gorchakov’s headquarters was of particular
significance. Vrevsky was Adjutant General to the Tsar and, like General Niel
in the case of Emperor Napoleon, was the mouthpiece of the sovereign’s will
and intentions. The new Tsar, Alexander II, was goading his Commander-in-
Chief into taking the offensive against the enemy, just as Nicholas had done
before and as Napoleon was doing towards Pélissier. Alexander, in his letters
and through Baron Vrevsky, did not peremptorily order Gorchakov to begin
a battle, but he made it clear to him that he was expecting just that of him.
Thus, in his letter of 1 August, he urged on Gorchakov ‘the necessity to do
something decisive in order to bring this frightful massacre to a close’.25 To
relieve his conscience, and to place responsibility on several shoulders, the
Tsar concluded that Gorchakov should convene a military council.
On receipt of that letter, Gorchakov acted as his master had recommended,
and, after informing his generals, the military council met on 10 August.
Vrevsky was present. The majority was in favour of an offensive, but
General Osten-Sacken, with three other generals, voted against it. He

deployed telling figures in favour of his position: between the beginning of
the siege and 1 December 1854 the Russian army had lost 5,000 men, and
from that day to 28 July 1855 another 48,023, plus 12,000 casualties at the
Battle of Inkerman. Losses due to illness were not included in these figures.
Osten-Sacken concluded that the south side of Sevastopol should be
evacuated.26
Although Gorchakov was relieved that the decision for an attack was
taken collectively, he regarded it with great misgiving. He knew that the
Russians at Sevastopol were now, in contrast to November 1854 before the
Battle of Inkerman, outnumbered by the Allies. The decision was really a
frivolous one, taken first and foremost in order to satisfy the Tsar and not to
reach a specific military target such as the annihilation of the British camp
at Balaklava or the expulsion of the Allies from the Crimea.
The offensive was to be launched against the Fedukhin heights, which
the Russians had occupied during the Battle of Balaklava, but given up in
May 1855, and which were now held by French units amounting to 18,000
men, and against Gasfort Hill, where 9,000 Sardinians had entrenched
themselves. Against these 27,000 men, who could, however, be strengthened
by other parts of the Allied army of observation, Gorchakov concentrated
an army consisting of two wings of almost equal strength: the right wing
was formed of the 7th and 12th Infantry Divisions (15,000 men) under the
command of General Nikolai A. Read; the left wing of the 17th and 6th
Infantry Divisions (also 15,000 men) under General Pavel P. Liprandi.
Behind them, two reserve divisions (the 5th and the 4th, 20,000 men
altogether) were posted. Read’s men were to cross the Tchernaya river, and
a water canal running parallel to it, and then storm the French positions.
Liprandi’s troops were to clear Telegraph Hill and Gasfort Hill of the
Sardinians. The plan also envisaged, though imprecisely, a sortie of 20,000
men from Sevastopol against the French at Kamiesh and possibly also
actions against Balaklava.
These strategic dispositions looked sound on paper, but their tactical
execution was marred by incompetence, lack of coordination and obscure
orders. Gorchakov had reserved to himself the decision, to be made after
the opening of the battle, as to where to concentrate the main effort –
whether against the Fedukhin heights or Gasfort Hill. His generals were
told to approach the Tchernaya, overrun the first Allied positions there, that
is, the Traktir bridge across the river and Telegraph Hill in front of Gasfort
Hill, and then halt and await his express orders. Halting the troops and
waiting for new orders was an extremely dangerous tactic, as it was certain
that the enemy would not stay idle while the Russians pondered their
next move.
During the night of 15–16 August the Russian troops came down from
the Mackenzie heights, and took up their positions along the Tchernaya and
in front of Telegraph Hill and the village of Tchorgun. At dawn their guns
opened fire on the French and Sardinian positions. Both the French and the
Sardinians had been well aware of the Russian movements and had therefore
taken precautionary measures. Liprandi’s troops easily took Telegraph Hill,
and therefore Gorchakov, who was with Liprandi, decided to concentrate
his main thrust towards the Sardinian sector. He sent an aide to Read with
the curious order ‘to begin the thing’ (načinat’ delo).27 Read interpreted this
not as meaning that he should intensify his cannonade, but that he should
begin the attack. The aide, asked whether he – Read – was right in doing so,
could not clarify ‘the thing’ as he did not know himself what the order really
meant.
The execution of this order – a typical expression of the Russian officers’
blind obedience and inability to decide the right thing on the spot – was
bound to court disaster. The preliminary firing of the Russian guns had
achieved almost nothing because the distance was too great. The only
sensible thing would have been to draw the guns closer to the enemy lines
and begin an effective cannonade. Instead, Read sent part of his 12th
Division across the river and ordered them to climb up the Fedukhin heights,
where they came under fire from the French and suffered heavy losses. The
7th Division further to the right, ordered by Read ‘to begin the thing’ (Read
had automatically passed on Gorchakov’s ambiguous order), also moved
across the river without adequate artillery support and likewise came under
well-aimed fire from the French positions.
Liprandi, on hearing the musketry fire on his right wing, decided to
change his original disposition and sent part of the 17th Division along the
Tchernaya to help in taking the Fedukhin heights. On their march to the
right they were an easy target for the French guns up the hill. While both of
Read’s divisions had to retreat, he was given the 5th Reserve Division in
order to renew the senseless assault. Instead of waiting until it could be used
in full strength, he sent one battalion after another into what was certain
destruction. Although there was some hand-to-hand fighting with the
French, the Russians on their right wing, where Gorchakov had by now
concentrated his main effort, were in full retreat recrossing the river. General
Read was killed, as was Baron Vrevsky who had been one of the most ardent
supporters of the offensive. Gorchakov regrouped the remnants of his
divisions across the river. Seeing that the Allies took no measures for a
pursuit, he ordered a general retreat to the Mackenzie heights.
The Battle of the Tchernaya was almost a repetition of the Battle of
Inkerman, the main difference being that this time the Allies had a clear
superiority in numbers and far better fortified positions. In both cases it was
the Tsar in faraway St Petersburg who pressed his Commander-in-Chief ‘to
do something’ in terms of an offensive. In both cases the Commander-in-
Chief went into battle against his own will. In both cases the strategic
dispositions were good, but their actual execution was extraordinarily ill
managed, leading to appalling casualties. The official Russian losses are
given as 8,010 men and 260 officers, a horrible figure, especially if one
considers the short duration of the actual fighting – no more than three
hours. The French lost about 1,500, the Sardinians 250.
The actual losses of the Russians may well be rated above 10,000. At
least this is the figure given by Field Marshal Paskevich, who received the
news of the lost battle on his deathbed. In September 1855 he dictated a
letter addressed to Gorchakov, but in fact never sent it to him. It is, though,
a telling document, indicative of the spirit of the Russian military leadership,
of the utter prostration of the leading Russian generals towards their master
in St Petersburg, their careerism and their lack of independence in taking
decisions. In his letter, Paskevich writes that he would not believe that the
‘master’ had ordered Gorchakov to invite certain defeat, knowing as he did
that the fortifications on the Fedukhin heights were stronger than those at
Sevastopol. Strangely for a Russian general of the nineteenth century, he
went on to appeal to conscience. Conscience should have told Gorchakov,
he wrote, that, even had a strict order to attack been given, the obvious
impossibility of executing it should have prompted him to disobey and ask
to be relieved. ‘Then the blood of ten thousand men would not lie on your
soul … because you did not dare to state your opinion frankly.’28 Never
during his career, or for that matter in 1853 when Paskevich crossed the
Danube against his own will, had the Field Marshal listened to his conscience.
The letter is as much a self-indictment as it is an indictment of Prince
Gorchakov.
The fall of Sevastopol and its consequences

After the unsuccessful bombardment of 18 June, Pélissier, flouting the
Emperor’s orders, still kept to his doctrine of continuing and stepping up
the siege, until the human losses of the enemy would be so great and the
destruction of his fortifications so vast that a new assault would bring about
the desired end. The Allies now had more than 800 guns at their disposal.
This meant that along one kilometre of the front 150 pieces were lined up
so that they could pound their deadly charges on the city and suburb of
Sevastopol. Never before in history had such massive firepower been
concentrated in front of an enemy. The Allies could fire up to 75,000 rounds
per day, and more, into the Russian defences.
Confronted by this enormous arsenal, the Russians had to economize. In
August 1855 they could reply with only one round for every five or six of
the Allies. The destruction wrought by the Allied guns was of course great.
The Russians were hardly in a position, as they had been hitherto, to
rebuild overnight the defence works that had been battered down during
the day.
After the Battle of the Tchernaya, Pélissier did not grant a respite to the
Russians. On 17 August the Allies opened a bombardment which lasted
unabated, day and night, until 27 August. This extensive artillery preparation
was one of the lessons he had learnt from the unsuccessful assault of 18
June. Another was that the trenches had to be pushed nearer the Russian
bastions so that the distance the infantry had to cover on leaving the trenches
could be decisively shortened. In the first days of September the French
trenches had approached the Central Bastion and the Mast Bastion in the
city by 70 and 50 metres respectively. In front of the Korabelnaya the
distances were even shorter: 40 metres in front of the Little Redan and
25 metres in front of the Malakhov.
The Russians, too, made efforts to improve their defences. Underneath
the Malakhov and elsewhere they were digging tunnels which were filled
with explosives, so that in case of being overrun they could be ignited and
the bastions blown up. On 27 August a floating bridge across the main bay
to the northern side was finished. It was built of timber hauled in from
southern Russia – a feat testifying to the logistical and engineering capabilities
of the Russians. Its main purpose was not to enable more supplies and
reinforcements to enter the fortress, but to allow Gorchakov to order a
sudden evacuation rather than surrender.
At an Allied war council on 3 September it was decided to renew the
bombardment (the sixth) on 5 September, and maintain it unabated for
three days and nights, and then, on 8 September, launch the final assault.
The bombardment should take place along the whole circumference of the
siege line, with the assault launched on both sectors of the ‘old’ and ‘new
siege’. The Malakhov should be stormed first, and, after the tricolour was
planted there, the other bastions should be stormed, the Great Redan again
being the only one reserved for the British. Bosquet, who had been allowed
to return to the siege, was to be in charge of the assault on the Korabelnaya.
The division of General Marie MacMahon, who had recently arrived from
Algeria, was singled out for taking the Malakhov.
The bombardment was, according to the testimony of Gorchakov himself,
‘infernal’. The Allied tactics were to stop it every now and then for a short
time in order to lure the Russians out of their shelters, since a lull in the
firing would make them expect an immediate assault which they would have
to repel. The bombardment would then be reopened, causing heavy casualties
among the Russian ranks. This proved successful, the Russians losing more
than 7,500 men during these three days alone. The degree of destruction
which the Allied bombardments effected is proved by Russian sources,
which say that, out of the 2,000 houses of Sevastopol, only fourteen were
intact at the beginning of September 1855.
The assault on the Malakhov on 8 September was fixed for midday. This
was a clever move, as this was the time when the Russians least expected an
attack (attacks were usually launched at dawn or at dusk) and when the gun
crews in the bastions were exchanged or sent to draw their rations. Another
means of surprise were the frequent false alarms caused by the ceasing of the
Allied bombardment which the Russians were no longer taking seriously.
This is what actually happened on the morning of 8 September. The Allied
fire was stepped down decisively for several hours but ignored by the
Russians, who, on the Malakhov, retired for their meals.
At noon the Zouaves of MacMahon’s division jumped from their trenches
and within seconds covered the short distance to the ditch in front of the
Malakhov, climbed up the parapet and reached the embrasures. Most of the
Russian gunners there were stabbed to death and the soldiers in their shelters
and dugouts taken by surprise. The tricolour was soon hoisted, giving the
signal for the assaults against the other bastions. Inside the Malakhov the
French soldiers, being instantly reinforced, were able to hold their own in
the outer part of the bastion. The Russians, however, were able to reorganize
themselves behind the first traverse (barricade).
It was in this difficult situation that General MacMahon was asked by a
British liaison officer whether he would be able to hold fast to his position.
He is reputed to have given the reply that has since become famous: ‘Tell
your general that I am here and that I shall stay here’ (que j’y suis, et que j’y
reste).29 As already noted, the possession of the Malakhov was of decisive
importance, as it dominated the Korabelnaya and part of the main bay, and
as the neighbouring bastions – the Great Redan and the Little Redan – could
be taken from the rear.
The Allied assaults on these bastions and all the others in the new and old
siege sectors – a dozen altogether – proved unsuccessful. The British, whose
force numbered about 11,000 men, tried three attacks against the Great
Redan which was defended by 7,500 Russians, but were three times repulsed.
The same happened to the French: as soon as they were inside any of the
other bastions they were dislodged by the Russians.
There are probably several reasons why the Malakhov remained in the
hands of the French. First, the surprise of the very first assault was complete;
in all other bastions the Russians had time to rally their forces. Second, the
Malakhov, in contrast to the other bastions, had several barricades inside
which were of course supposed to act as additional obstacles to the attackers
once they had managed to enter the bastion; but they could also act as a
defensive wall for the intruders. Third, the bastion had been constructed in
a closed form, so that it was difficult to reconquer and reinforce once it was
in the hands of the enemy.
Thus, although several fierce counter-attacks were made by the Russians,
the French occupiers were able to hold their own. They were, however,
greatly agitated by rumours that the bastion would be blown up by igniting
the powder in the mines beneath. When they found out that 260 Russians
were still working in the mines they managed to take them all prisoner and
found out that the powder had not yet been put in place.
General Gorchakov, who was on the north side when the assault had
begun, had gone over in the afternoon to inspect the situation of the
Malakhov. Judging a counter-attack useless, he issued, after 5 pm, the order
for a general retreat from the Korabelnaya and the south side. The movement
was carried out mostly across the floating bridge. It lasted all night and was
completed the following morning. Sappers were the last to leave; they set
fire to the many powder magazines, of which at least thirty-five were blown
up at intervals. On 9 September the town was burning on all sides and the
Allies dared not enter it for fear of explosions. Only on 12 September did
they officially take possession of the ruins of Sevastopol.
The assault of 8 September took a heavy toll in human lives for both
sides. According to Totleben, the Russians lost 12,913 men, the vast majority
in the Korabelnaya. Allied casualties amounted to 10,040, three-quarters of
them French, one-quarter British.
In Paris, where the news of the conquest of the south side of Sevastopol
arrived on 9 September, Napoleon’s first reaction was to renew his urgent
recommendations to Pélissier to move into the interior of Crimea and make
the Russians evacuate the whole peninsula. The General, however, thought
himself to be the best judge of the state in which his army found itself. He
dared not even make a move to the north side of Sevastopol in order to
dislodge Gorchakov’s army; thus during the following weeks nothing of
importance happened in that theatre of war. Napoleon was conscious that
the honour of the French nation was satisfied by the conquest of Sevastopol.
Public opinion in France was averse to a continuation of the war on a grand
scale in that remote corner of Europe. Prince Albert was right when he
summed up the general feeling in France at the end of October 1855: ‘Si la
France doit continuer la guerre à grands sacrifices, il lui faut des objets plus
nationaux, plus Francçais: Poland, Italy, the left bank of the Rhine, etc.’30
When Napoleon sounded out the British government soon after the fall of
Sevastopol as to whether they were ready to work with him at the future
peace congress for the re-establishment of the kingdom of Poland, London
replied on 22 September that it was not. Napoleon then lost all interest in
any future campaign in the Crimea.31
The state of mind in Britain regarding the continuation of the war against
Russia was quite different from that in France. The Times, which at the time
was as good a barometer of public opinion as one can think of, called the
conquest of Sevastopol ‘a preliminary operation’.32 Palmerston emphasized
that ‘Russia was not yet half beaten “enough”.’ The generals on the spot and
the War Office in London were eager to obliterate the memory of the
mismanagement of the war in the preceding winter and demonstrate that
they were quite up to the task of waging a new winter campaign and a
campaign in 1856. Efforts to recruit foreign legions were in full swing and
the dockyards were bustling with activity building a formidable new armada
for operations in the Baltic – against Kronstadt, the ‘Sevastopol of the North’
– in 1856. The Queen gave vent to the general feeling in Britain when she
exclaimed that ‘she cannot bear the thought that “the failure on the Redan”
should be our last fait d’Armes’.33
In France, the yearning for peace was so widespread after the French fait
d’armes at the Malakhov that Napoleon, in view of the increasing divergence
of peace aims between London and Paris, could not but take heed of it. In a
letter he sent to Queen Victoria on 22 November 1855 he laid before her

some sober facts and figures:
Your Majesty has in the East, I think, 50,000 men and 10,000 horses. As
to myself I have 200,000 men and 34,000 horses. Your Majesty has an
immense fleet in the Black Sea as well as in the Baltic; I, too, have an
imposing one, though of smaller size. Well then, in spite of this formidable
war machinery it is evident to everybody that although we can cause her
much harm we cannot tame her with our forces alone.34
Palmerston, for whose consumption just as much as for the Queen’s this
letter was meant, might very well fly into a rage about this undisguised
announcement that France was backing out of the war; he might threaten
the Emperor that Britain would go it alone rather than make a bad peace –
but he could not ignore facts. There followed many angry exchanges between
London and Paris. France was working out an ultimatum with Austria,
which the latter was prepared to present to St Petersburg, with the threat of
entering the war unless it was accepted unconditionally. Palmerston could
rave as much as he liked at this new development, but his threat of Britain
carrying on the war on her own was obviously a hollow one. Cowley, the
British ambassador in Paris, who had to deliver all these angry despatches
from his government, hit upon the idea of convening a military council in
Paris where the question of what should be done about preparing a campaign
for 1856 should be discussed. This move reduced the tension between
London and Paris. It will be dealt with in Chapter 16.
There were two military events after the fall of Sevastopol that were of some
importance for the rest of the war: the seizure of the fortress of Kinburn by the
Allies on 17 October; and the capture of the fortress of Kars on 26 November
1855. As the latter will be dealt with in the chapter on the Caucasus, it is only
necessary to say a few words about the former event.
The plan to bombard Kinburn was of French, not British, origin, although
it was mainly an amphibious undertaking on the lines of the former
expedition to Kertch and the Sea of Azov. Kinburn was a fort on a long
narrow sand spit at the mouth of the Dnieper Liman (gulf) which is the
common estuary of the rivers Dnieper and Bug. Farther upstream on the
Dnieper is the important town and harbour of Kherson, and upstream on
the Bug is Nikolaev, where most of the Black Sea fleet was then built.
Kinburn and Ochakov, lying opposite the estuary, were forts, partly stone-
built, which were to protect the entrance to the gulf.
The choice of Kinburn as a target for a bombardment goes back to
Admiral Bruat, who imagined that its seizure might offer the Allies either a
suitable base for an operation in 1856 against Nikolaev or alternatively a
pawn for the future peace negotiations. As a work of fortification, Kinburn
was of mediocre dimensions and strength, and its garrison was far smaller
than that of Kertch before its capture by the Allies in May. Napoleon was in
favour of Bruat’s idea because it at least offered a way out of the military
inactivity in which his army in the Crimea found itself in September 1855.
On the 26th, after the British government had fallen in with the idea, an
order was telegraphed to Pélissier, who had by then been nominated Marshal
of France, to occupy Kinburn.
At Sevastopol the Allies formed an expeditionary corps consisting of
4,000 French and 4,000 British soldiers, plus a 950-man naval brigade. As
the expedition to Kertch had been under British command, the Kinburn
force was to be under the command of the French General, Achille Bazaine.
The combined fleet consisted of ten ships of the line (four of them French),
seventeen frigates (six of them French) and a number of corvettes, mortar
boats and other ancillary vessels. The force was to be joined en route by the
three French ironclad ships, the ‘floating batteries’ which had just arrived at
Sevastopol from France and were originally intended for the bombardment
of that city.
On 14 October the armada assembled off Odessa and moved on
towards Kinburn. On the following day the troops landed on the sand spit
some 4–5 kilometres to the south-east of the fort, in order to cut it off
from the interior. They then approached the fort and dug themselves in
some 400 metres opposite the enemy ramparts. Meanwhile the ships had
taken up their positions around the sand spit, so that the fort and the two
batteries in front of it were literally encircled. The three floating batteries
anchored nearest to the fort, some 800 to 1,000 metres away. Firing began
on 17 October at 9 am.
The use of the ironclads proved a resounding success; together they
hurled over 3,000 projectiles into the fort and in return received some
seventy rounds. Those that hit the iron plates produced insignificant dents.
Together with the fire from the other ships, the ironclads soon reduced the
fort and its two batteries. In the afternoon they surrendered, and 1,400 men
and forty officers were taken prisoner. The Russian losses were comparatively
slight: forty-five dead and 130 wounded. The Allies lost two dead and thirty-
two wounded. Fort Ochakov opposite the estuary, fearing the same fate as
Fort Kinburn, was blown up by the Russians on the following day. Thus the
two inland ports of Kherson and Nikolaev were now cut off from the Black
Sea, just as the Sea of Azov had been five months earlier. The Allied troops
remained in possession of Kinburn for the rest of the war.
Although British admirals of the time and later British historians thought
the praise of the three French ironclads was exaggerated, they fully deserved
it. They had clearly proved their invulnerability against enemy projectiles as
far as their armoured parts were concerned. In any case, the British were so
impressed that they hastened the construction of ironclads of their own,
which were to be used in the campaign of 1856 against Kronstadt. In the
following years there was sharp competition between Britain and France in
perfecting this new weapon. The 17th of October 1855 was the birthday of
the modern armoured ship.
The Battle of the Alma
The Allied landing at Eupatoria and the Battle of the Alma are recounted
in many books. The Alma takes a particularly prominent place in British
historiography. Here is a selection: Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 95–
119; Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna, pp. 84–93; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 61–
103; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 179–231; Guillemin, Guerre
de Crimée, pp. 53–62; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 277–302;
Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 48–115; Hibbert, Raglan, pp. 78–118;
Peter Gibbs, The Battle of the Alma (Philadelphia and New York, 1963);
Figes, Crimea, pp. 200–25; Fletcher and Ishchenko, Crimean War,
pp. 71–93.
The siege of Sevastopol – the beginning

The classical account of the siege of Sevastopol is that by the chief Russian
engineer, Eduard I. Totleben, Opisanie oborony goroda Sevastopolja, 2 vols
in 3 parts (St Petersburg, 1863–74); vol. 1 has 2 parts, vol. 3 has 3 parts in
2 vols; the French translation is Eduard I. Totleben, Défense de Sébastopol,
2 vols in 3 parts (St Petersburg, 1863–74); the German translation is Eduard
I. Totleben, Die Vertheidigung von Sebastopol … 2 vols in 4 parts (Berlin
1864–72). On the scant intelligence information, cf. Stephen M. Harris,
British Military Intelligence in the Crimean War, 1854–1856 (Portland, OR,
1998). For the march of the Allied armies south to Sevastopol, their
entrenchment, the Russian defence works and the first bombardment of the
place on 17 October 1853, see Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 120–55;
Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna, pp. 93–103; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 104–37;
Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 62–76; Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée,
pp. 62–76; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 302–23; Barker, Vainglorious
War, pp. 116–49; Figes, Crimea, pp. 222–40. The most recent account of
the siege is by Anthony Dawson, The Siege of Sevastopol 1854–1855
(Haverton, 2017).
The Battle of Balaklava

Apart from contemporary accounts and books of the nineteenth century, the
fullest treatment of Balaklava, with an analysis of the characters of Lords
Lucan and Cardigan, is by Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why
(London, 1953). See also John Selby, Balaclava: Gentlemen’s Battle (New
York, 1970), pp. 107–73; Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 150–74; Rousset,
Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 323–43; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp.
327–43; Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 156–64; Seaton, Crimean War,
pp. 138–56; Vladimir Šavšin, Balaklava (Simferopol, 1994), pp. 66–86.

The newest accounts are by Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko, The
Battle of the Alma 1854: First Blood to the Allies in the Crimea (Barnsley,
2008); Čennyk, Krymskaja kampanija, book 4 (also on the Battle of
Inkerman; see above, Chapter 6). Inge and Dieter Wernet, two specialists on
the history of fortifications, have produced a great book on the siege of
Sevastopol, printed on glossy paper, with 450 superbly reproduced
illustrations and plans: Die Belagerung von Sevastopol 1854–1855 (Aix-la-
Chapelle, 2017). For the Battle of Balaklava, cf. Inge and Dieter Wernet,
Belagerung, pp. 126–35.
The Battle of Inkerman

Apart from numerous eyewitness and nineteenth-century accounts, there is
no modern study of the battle. One has therefore to rely on the general
studies of the war. See, for the Russian side, Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2,
pp. 165–92; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 157–78; Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean
War, pp. 322–35. For the British side, see Barker, Vainglorious War,
pp. 175–93; Patrick Mercer, ‘Give Them a Volley and Charge!’ The Battle of
Inkermann [!] (Staplehurst, 1998). For the French, see Rousset, Guerre de
Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 344–92; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 343–53; Inge
and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 145–64; Figes, Crimea, pp. 254–72.
The November storm of 1854 and the Crimean

winter of 1854–5
On the havoc the November hurricane wreaked on the Allies and on the
rigours of the winter, see Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 194–211, 225–6;
Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, vol. 1., pp. 270–330 (gives the view from above
and from London); Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 362–74 (quotes from
eyewitnesses); Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 98–106 (concentrates on
the French fleet). In general there is a spate of letters, eyewitness accounts
and memoirs of officers, and sometimes also of privates, from all armies in
the Crimea which would provide ample material for writing a history of the
war as seen ‘from below’, but it has still to be produced. Cf. now Inge and
Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 185–192.
On the supply problems for the British army, see Sweetman, War and
Administration, pp. 41–76; John Sweetman, ‘Military Transport in the
Crimean War, 1854–1856’, English Historical Review 88 (1973): 81–91;
John Sweetman, ‘Ad Hoc Support Services during the Crimean War, 1854–6:
Temporary, Ill-Planned and Largely Unsuccessful’, Military Affairs 52
(1988): 135–40; G. F. Chadwick, ‘The Army Works Corps in the Crimea’,
Journal of Transport History 6 (1964): 129–41; Brian Cooke, The Grand
Crimean Central Railway: The Story of the Railway Built by the British at
Balaklava during the Crimean War of 1854–56 (London, 1990, 2nd edn
1997).
On Roger Fenton, the first war photographer, there are a number of books,
e.g. John Hannavy, Roger Fenton of Crimble Hall (London, 1975); Roger
Fenton: Photographer of the 1850s (London, 1988) (this is a catalogue of a
London exhibition in 1988); Lawrence James, 1854–56, Crimea: The War
with Russia from Contemporary Photographs (New York, 1981) (featuring
photographs by Fenton, James Robertson and others). Taken from the
extensive holding of Fenton’s photographs in the Royal Collection, Sophie
Gordon reproduces 250 photographs of the Crimean War (mostly portraying
British officers), taken between March and June 1855: Shadows of War: Roger
Fenton’s Photographs of the Crimea, 1855 (London, 2017). A new study of
the pictorial history of the Crimean War, which not only includes photographs,
but also artistic sketches, engravings, newspaper illustrations, is Ulrich Keller’s
Ultimate Spectacle: A Visual History of the Crimean War (Amsterdam, 2001).
For a collection of essays about the Crimean War in literature, pictorial media
and music, see Georg Maag, Wolfram Pyta and Martin Windisch (eds), Der
Krimkrieg als erster europäischer Medienkrieg (Berlin, 2010). There are two
monographs on the same subject: C. Dereli, A War Culture in Action: A Study
of the Crimean War Period (Bern, 2003); Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean
War in the British Imagination (Cambridge, 2009).
The articles of The Times war correspondent, William Howard Russell,
were published under the title The War, 2 vols (London 1855–6). A later
selection is provided by Nicolas Bentley (ed.), Russell’s Despatches from the
Crimea, 1854–1856 (London, 1966). A new selection of The Times articles
including some by unnamed correspondents from the Baltic, is provided by
Andrew Lambert and Stephen Badsey, The War Correspondents: The
Crimean War (London, 1994). The effect of the Crimean winter on British
domestic policy is fully discussed in Conacher, Aberdeen Coalition. Olive
Anderson has written a number of articles illuminating various domestic
aspects of the war in Britain; they are collected in A Liberal State at War:
English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London, 1967,
repr. Aldershot, 1994).
There is no modern full-length study on the supply system of the French
Armee d’Orient. One has to rely on the nineteenth-century literature and on
scant remarks, e.g. in Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 362–7; Guillemin,
Guerre de Crimée, pp. 115–16, 119–24, 153–63. The same observation
applies to the Russian supply system, although there is considerable
information in Totleben, Opisanie. Cf. the remarks in Bestužev, Krymskaja
vojna, pp. 11–12, 138, 160–3; Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War, pp. 337–41.
There is a moving eyewitness account about everyday life in Sevastopol by
Leo Tolstoy, The Sebastopol Sketches, transl. in English (Harmondsworth
and New York, 1986).
The siege of Sevastopol – the second stage,

February–May 1855
On the Battle of Eupatoria of 17 February 1855 and its consequences, see
Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 305–14; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 183–
8; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 2, pp. 47–53; Inge and Dieter Wernet,
Belagerung, pp. 243–51. The siege war before Sevastopol in the early months
of 1855, the fighting about the Mamelon vert and the second bombardment
of 9 April 1855 are dealt with in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 338–52;
Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 2, pp. 55–86, 111–47; Barker, Vainglorious
War, pp. 224–33; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 251–89. The
expedition to Kertch in May 1855 is passed over by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna,
vol. 2. Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna, pp. 127–8, deals lightly with it. For the
British side there is documentary evidence in Alfred C. Dewar (ed.), Russian
War, 1855. Black Sea: Official Correspondence (London, 1945); cf. also
Lambert, Crimean War, pp. 223–35; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 2,
pp. 156–65, 203–7; Treue, Krimkrieg, pp. 67–73; Battesti, La marine, vol. 1,
pp. 139–43; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 289–92, 295–301.
The siege of Sevastopol – the last stage,

June–August 1855
The situation before Sevastopol from mid-May 1855 to the fourth
bombardment on 17–18 June 1855 is dealt with by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna,
pp. 345–403; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 2, pp. 183–299; Gouttman,
Guerre de Crimée, pp. 391–417; Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 240–56; Inge
and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 302–15, 318–20, 330–55. For the battle
on the Tchernaya on 16 August 1855, see Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2,
pp. 429–47; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 194–208; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée,
vol. 2, pp. 334–57; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 320–30. The
battle on the Tchernaya is passed over cursorily in English books.
The fall of Sevastopol and its consequences

The final bombardment and the capture of Sevastopol are discussed in Tarle,
Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 448–74; Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 208–18;
Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War, pp. 445–59; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée,
vol. 2, pp. 358–402; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 429–42; Guillemin,
Guerre de Crimée, pp. 191–202; Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 262–8; Figes,
Crimea, pp. 373–97; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 356–65.
The search for peace after the fall of Sevastopol is fully discussed in
Baumgart, Peace. The German original is Winfried Baumgart, Der Friede
von Paris. Studien zum Verhältnis von Kriegführung, Politik und

Friedensbewahrung (Munich and Vienna, 1972).
The expedition to Kinburn is not mentioned in Russian historiography
(Tarle, Krymskaja vojna; Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna). Curtiss, Russia’s
Crimean War, and Seaton, Crimean War, pass it over in silence since they
obviously could not fall back on Russian literature. Even Rousset, Guerre de
Crimée, vol. 2, pays scant attention to it (pp. 414–16). See Guillemin, Guerre
de Crimée, pp. 203–9; Battesti, La marine, vol. 1, pp. 145–52; Lambert,
Crimean War, pp. 255–62; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung, pp. 368–85.
On the ironclads, see Treue, Krimkrieg, pp. 125–31; Basil Greenhall and
Ann Giffard, The British Assault on Finland, 1854–1855: A Forgotten
Naval War (London, 1988), pp. 301–6; G. A. Osbon, ‘The First of the
Ironclads: The Armoured Batteries of the 1850’s’, Mariner’s Mirror
50 (1964): 189–98. Cf. also G. A. Osbon, ‘The Crimean Gunboats’, Mariner’s
Mirror 51 (1965): 103–16, 211–20; Inge and Dieter Wernet, Belagerung,
pp. 371–4.
13
The campaigns in the Baltic,
1854 and 1855
Strictly speaking, calling the war of 1853–6 the Crimean War is a misnomer:
there were a number of other theatres of war besides the Crimea where the
belligerents met each other. The war on the Danube in 1853–4 has already
been dealt with. Another area where the two Western powers came to grips
with Russia was the Baltic in 1854 and 1855. It clearly shows that the
Crimean War was not only related to the Eastern Question, but was also a
contest between Britain and Russia about whether Russia was to be allowed
to grow in power and press on her neighbours – Turkey in the south and
south-east, Austria, Prussia and Germany in the south-west and west, and
Sweden in the north-west. It was a typical contest of modern European
history, between Britain trying to uphold a balance of power on the European
continent and one of the European great powers trying to obtain a
dominating position in Europe and, in the case of Russia, also in Asia.
France’s entry into the war had little or nothing to do with this general
struggle for the European balance or for dominion in Europe; it went back
to Napoleon’s personal desire to establish himself in France after becoming
Emperor and regain for France a position in Europe that had been damaged
by the Eastern crisis of 1840–1 and the revolution of 1848.
In the eyes of both Britain and France, then, Russian power was to be
curtailed in all areas where possible. Palmerston’s words in the already cited
memorandum of September 1855, that Britain’s ‘real object of the War’ was
‘to curb the aggressive ambition of Russia’, were therefore one of the best
descriptions of that war – at least from a British perspective. Palmerston
went on, referring to Russia’s threatening position in northern as well as in
southern Europe:
We went to war, not so much to keep the Sultan and his Mussulmen in
Turkey, as to keep the Russians out of Turkey; but we have a strong
interest also in keeping the Russians out of Norway and Sweden.
He regarded Sweden’s entry into the coalition of the West as ‘a part of a long
line of circumvallation’ around Russia.1
179
This attitude applies to the whole duration of the war. Weeks before the
declaration of war, at the end of February 1854, a new squadron was hastily
formed to meet Russia’s diplomatic and military pressure in northern
Europe. Strategic planning in that area in those months was vague and
unfinished, since, obviously, attention was fixed on south-eastern Europe,
the Turkish Straits and the Danube. Britain took the lead in sending a fleet
to the Baltic; France acted in her wake. The sending of an expeditionary
force was not under consideration at the outbreak of the war, since Britain
had none and France was expediting the movement of her divisions to
Turkey and then to the Crimea. France, however, had at her disposal a huge
military camp at Boulogne where the French ‘army of the north’ had its
headquarters. The camp provided a reservoir of forces which could, if need
be, be quickly transferred to the Baltic.
What were the forces which Russia could muster in the north and in the
Baltic? Ground forces in the St Petersburg military district totalled 80,000
men; the Sveaborg district, that is, the Finnish coastal areas, had the same
number; and in the Dvina district, that is, in the Baltic provinces,
another 40,000 men were stationed. Together with the forces of the garrisons,
this was an army of 270,000 men.2 Although the Western powers did
not know the exact number, a landing on a grand scale was deemed out of
the question. Efforts were therefore undertaken to lure Prussia and Sweden
into the Western diplomatic and military front, but, as has been noted,
Prussia under Frederick William IV remained staunchly neutral with a pro-
Russian bias, and King Oscar of Sweden put his demands and guarantees so
high – subsidies, support by Western troops, retrocession of Finland under
Western guarantees, Austria’s entry into the war – that these two powers,
vital for a ground war against Russia, could not be counted upon during
1854.
Russia’s sea forces, too, were formidable on paper, as discussed in
Chapter 6. The Baltic fleet totalled 196 vessels, including twenty-five ships
of the line, but there was not a single steamship among them. The training
of the crews – as a meeting of Russian naval experts just before the war had
revealed – was nil, although their number, 40,000, was high. Manoeuvring
the ships in units was therefore impossible: the only sensible thing for the
Baltic fleet to do on the approach of a Western squadron was to hide in its
harbours. The best-protected ports were Kronstadt and Sveaborg, among
the lesser ones were Reval, Åbo and Hangö. Apart from fortifications, these
ports made use of another defensive instrument which was new at the time
– sea mines. The Russian engineer, Boris S. Jakobi, had constructed them
and hundreds were laid in the waters around Kronstadt and in the approaches
to Sveaborg. They were of some nuisance value, but whenever a British
vessel hit one of them it did not cause much damage.
On 11 March 1854 the first part of a British naval expedition left Spithead
under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Napier. Another unit soon
followed, so that the British squadron amounted to forty-four vessels with
THE CAMPAIGNS IN THE BALTIC, 1854 AND 1855 181
about 2,000 guns and a combined strength of 21,800 men. The remarkable
thing about this armada was that, in contrast to the British Black Sea fleet,
it consisted almost exclusively of screw- and paddle-driven steamers. Its
mobility was therefore high. It soon became apparent – and Napier
continually emphasized – that it had three basic weaknesses: the crews were
badly or not at all trained; there were no good pilots to guide the ships
through the dangerous waters of the Baltic; and the fleet lacked small craft
with low draught, especially gunboats, which alone could enter the shallow
coastal waters.
The first task of the British squadron was to make sure that no Russian
ships would pass the Danish Sound in order to molest the British coast. This
sort of fear is typical of moments such as the outbreak of war, when hysterical
feelings have the upper hand over sober thinking. In view of the poor state
of the Russian fleet, its entering the North Sea should have seemed impossible.
On 20 March the British squadron anchored south of Copenhagen, surely a
warning to Denmark not to pursue her pro-Russian bias. After the
declaration of war, Napier, on the orders of Sir James Graham, declared a
blockade of the Russian coasts. He was further instructed to reconnoitre the
fortified places on the Russian coasts, especially to ascertain the condition of
the fortress of Bomarsund on the Åland Islands and ‘on no account to attack
defenceless places and open towns’.3
During March and June 1854, units of the British squadron visited several
fortified places: they bombarded Hangö twice, penetrated into the Gulf of
Riga, occupied Libau on the coast of Courland and towed away two ships
from the harbour of Reval. Along the Finnish coast in the Gulf of
Bothnia, several coastal places were raided and shipyards and warehouses
destroyed and burnt down. The reports of Rear-Admiral James Plumridge,
in charge of the squadron that raided the Finnish coast, reveal that the
instruction not to attack defenceless places was not taken very literally.
Thus the town of Brahestad (Raahe) went up in flames on 30 May, and two
days later it was the turn of Uleåborg (Oulu). Captain George Giffard, in
charge of the raid on Uleåborg, recorded with some pride, ‘Sent the armed
boats of the squadron . . . to take, burn, or destroy . . . The fire from the
immense quantities of pitch, tar and timber, could be seen for many miles
around.’4
These raids were counter-productive in a number of ways. In very many
cases, the goods destroyed were not contraband of war or war matériel,
but goods bought by British merchants who up to the outbreak of the war
were the main foreign traders in these regions. Moreover, these brutal
bombardments produced a widespread anti-British feeling among the local
Finnish population. There were also unfavourable comments in the
neutral press in Prussia, Sweden and Denmark. Even The Times
condemned the raids and thereby laid the ground for the angry feelings
with which the fleet was received in Britain when it returned home at the
end of 1854.
MAP 8 The war in the Baltic, 1854–5.
At the port of Gamlakarleby (Kokkola), Plumridge’s men for once met a

fate which they deserved. On entering the port on 7 June the two British
boats were received with heavy fire and grapeshot from Russian infantry
and Finnish militia. They were lucky to lose only fifty-two men; killed,
wounded or missing. The conduct of the raids in the Gulf of Bothnia was an
infamous episode in the history of the Royal Navy.
The effect of the blockade of the Russian Baltic coast in the campaign of
1854 was slight and unimportant. Unfortunately there are no statistics
available. There was much blockade-running in which several neutral
shipping companies and firms took part: American, Prussian, Belgian, Dutch
and from the Hanse towns. Even British firms were involved. American and
especially Belgian arms and ammunition and other contraband of war found
their way through the Baltic to Russia, mostly by way of a thriving coastal
trade which, because of the shallow waters, was out of reach of the heavy
British ships.
There was, however, one operation of the Allies which met with success.
More than a month after the British squadron had left for the Baltic, a
French fleet, put together at Brest, departed for the same destination where
it was to cooperate with the British. It consisted of twenty-six vessels, most
of them sailing ships, with 2,500 men on board, and was under the command
of Vice-Admiral Alexandre Ferdinand Parseval-Deschênes. On 12 June 1854
it joined the British fleet at Baresund at the entrance to the Gulf of Finland.
Ten days later a combined fleet moved up to Kronstadt in order to inspect
the place. The approach from the north was inaccessible because of shallow
water. The southern approach was possible through a narrow and tortuous
channel, but the huge complex was protected by at least eight forts with at
least 1,000 guns. As no charts were available, the two admirals decided that
the fortress was impregnable. After almost a month of cruising, charting and
sounding, both fleets received orders from their governments to proceed to
the Åland Islands and attack and occupy the fortress of Bomarsund there. A
French expeditionary corps of 12,800 men under General Count Achille
Baraguey d’Hilliers (the former ambassador to Constantinople) was on its
way from Calais to assist in the operation.
The Åland Islands had been ceded to Russia by Sweden in 1809. On the
main island in the north, the Russians began in 1829 to build a fortress at
Bomarsund. It was obviously meant to exert pressure on Sweden and its
capital Stockholm. By 1854 only one fifth of the fortifications were finished;
of the fourteen planned defensive towers, only three had been built. The
complex was garrisoned by 2,175 men commanded by Major-General Jakov
A. Bodisko. By the time the British fleet appeared, the Åland Islands had
already been cut off from assistance from the Russian mainland and on
8 August the French troops began to disembark at three different points,
without meeting resistance. In comparison with the French force of some
11,000 men, the participation of a British detachment of 900 men was no
more than symbolic. On 14 and 15 August the two outposts in the north of
the main fortress surrendered, bringing the French siege troops and batteries
within 800 metres of the citadel. On 15 August, thirteen ships of the line and
frigates took up their positions along the coast so that Bomarsund was
completely invested. There was no need for an assault: it was sufficient to
rely on the effect of the gunfire. After a heavy bombardment the main
fortress and the third fort surrendered.
Once Bomarsund was taken, the question of what to do with it arose. It

was no use keeping it, as the sea between the islands and the Finnish
mainland would freeze during the winter, allowing a Russian force, even
with heavy guns, to cross it. A fresh attempt was therefore made to offer it
to King Oscar of Sweden in order to lure him into the war against Russia,
FIGURE 15 Admiral Lord Napier returning home from the Baltic, November
1854. Punch 27 (1854), p. 117. University Library of Heidelberg, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
but his other demands could not be met and he declined. The three forts and
the citadel were completely destroyed by 2 September 1854, and the French
expeditionary corps returned home as the winter season was approaching.
After the Allied fleets had left the Baltic in September and October, the
Russian flag was again hoisted on the ruins of Bomarsund.
The strategic value of the destruction of Bomarsund was small or nil,
although it had some political value in the struggle for Sweden’s participation
in the war. With the approach of the winter season, this struggle ceased.
In Britain, Admiral Napier was made a scapegoat for the meagre results
of the Baltic campaign of 1854. Rear-Admiral Maurice Berkeley, Lord
Commissioner in the Admiralty, had warned him as early as 5 September,
writing, ‘John Bull is getting uproarious because nobody is killed and
wounded. Meetings are being called to condemn the Government, because
Kronstadt and Sebastopol have not been captured.’5 The storm soon broke
and the Board of Admiralty directed it at Napier’s head. As he was a
quarrelsome man, he spent the rest of his life – he died in 1860 – conducting
a campaign of self-vindication in the press, in books and in Parliament.
The Allies learnt the lesson of the failure of the 1854 Baltic campaign and
in 1855 their fleets set out much better equipped. First, all the vessels,
including the French ones, were steamships, so that their mobility was
enhanced. Some of them had been detached from the Black Sea squadrons,
as no major amphibious operation was planned there. Second, a great
number of light vessels which could operate in shallow waters was
incorporated in both fleets. The total number of British ships was 105,
including eleven battleships, thirty cruisers and some fifty gunboats and
mortar vessels. The fleet was commanded by Rear-Admiral Sir Richard
Saunders Dundas, who turned out to be as cautious and uninspiring as Lord
Napier, whom he replaced. The French fleet was much smaller in size and
was under the command of Rear-Admiral André Édouard Penaud, who had
been second in command in the Baltic in the preceding year and therefore
already had some valuable experience in the area.
No major operation was planned by the Allies besides the enforcement of
the blockade and no expeditionary force was attached to the fleets, as all
efforts were concentrated on the Crimea, the major object of war in 1855.
In his instructions, the French admiral was told to let his ships cruise along
different sections of the Russian coast in order to keep the enemy in suspense
and make him disperse his forces. If possible, he was to undertake, in
conjunction with the British squadron, raids on Sveaborg and Reval.6
Kronstadt was as hard a nut to crack as Sevastopol, and was therefore not
a target in 1855. The bombardment of Sveaborg or Reval was principally
meant for home consumption.
The Russians, for their part, had not been idle in stepping up their
defences. Their army of the north was brought up to a strength of 303,000
men stationed mainly in Finland (69,000), Estonia (20,000), Courland
(40,000), Dunaburg (7,000) and St Petersburg (12,000). Some 90,000 men
served as a mobile force and 20,000 as a reserve corps.7 The production and
laying of mines was accelerated; thus Kronstadt was protected by 300 of
these ‘infernal machines’. Others were laid around Sveaborg. In terms of the
material damage they actually produced, they again proved relatively
innocuous. The British were quick to respond to the danger and developed
a system of minesweeping – the first operation of this kind in history. They
hauled up about fifty of them and took a keen interest in the way they were
constructed and worked. Admiral Dundas was himself wounded in the face
when one of them was dismantled on board.
The main body of the British fleet left home waters at the beginning of
April 1855. In the following weeks the blockade of various areas of the
Baltic was declared, depending on when the British ships arrived. The small
French squadron left Brest on 26 April and joined the British fleet on 1 June.
The blockade of the Russian coasts was now enforced much more effectively
than in 1854 due to the presence of many light-draught vessels. Many
coastal places were visited and bombarded, especially in the Gulf of Finland.
Lovisa and Kotka, for example, were almost completely burnt down.
Kronstadt was inspected several times and was found to be even better
protected than in 1854. In addition to the minefields, which proved their
nuisance value to the Allied ships, the admirals were surprised to discover
quite a number of screw-propelled Russian gunboats that had not been
sighted the year before. Any large-scale assault on the fortress was therefore
out of the question.
Discarding Reval as a possible target for bombardment, the two admirals
singled out Sveaborg (Suomenlinna) as the next choice. They realized that its
destruction in itself was of no great value, but ‘the wish to do something’, as
they acknowledged, was the prime mover of the plan and its execution.8
Sveaborg, five kilometres south of Helsingfors which it covers, had been
built by the Swedes as a fortress in 1749. It consists of seven rocky islands
where the Russians had built various military and naval installations, besides
a number of batteries. Access to the islands had been made impossible by the
Russians in the same way as to the main bay of Sevastopol: by scuttling
several of their own ships. The two admirals decided that the main attack
should not be carried out by the heavy ships, as the experience of 17 October
1854 in front of Sevastopol had proved that the firepower of solidly built
forts on land was clearly superior to that of wooden ships, even though they
disposed of more guns. Thus the main thrust of the bombardment was to be
carried out by the small gunboats and mortar ships. The heavy ships were to
form a protective cordon behind the line of the small vessels.
After the waters at Sveaborg had been carefully charted and the last four
French gunboats had arrived from France, the bombardment was finally
scheduled to begin on 9 August at 7 am. During the nights of 7–9 August,
the French erected a battery on the small island of Abraham, which the
Russians had left unfortified. Altogether sixteen gunboats and sixteen
mortar boats (with five each from France) were posted in front of Sveaborg
at a distance of 2.5–3 kilometres from the centre of the fortress.
The bombardment was kept up, with interruptions, from 9 to 11 August.
Altogether 6,000 shells were fired and a number of installations on the islands
went up in flames. On the first day the Russian gunfire was already slackening
but the Allies, too, had unexpected trouble. On a number of British mortars
the barrels of the guns became defective prematurely, and eight of them burst.
It was later established that these were newly-built guns whereas the older
ones – one dating back to 1813 – had stood the stress of firing much better.
Poor construction methods on the part of the firm that had built them was
the cause. The news was not published at the time, but insiders were ashamed
that the first industrial nation in the world produced such slipshod weapons
while those of France remained serviceable. The Allied vessels waited
throughout 12 August to see whether the Russians were still able to return
fire. The population of Helsingfors expected a landing after the fire had
ceased and fled from the city, but nothing of the sort happened. On the
following day the ships steamed away and were not seen again.
The offical Allied announcements of the bombardment of Sveaborg were
devoid of truth. The poor performance of the new guns was passed over in
silence. It was claimed that the fortress of Sveaborg was completely razed –
which it was not; that eighteen Russian ships had been sunk – the majority
had been scuttled by the Russians themselves; that the number of dead on
the Russian side was probably 2,000. As to the real Russian casualties, the
figures range from sixty-two killed and 199 wounded (M. Borodkin) to
forty-four killed and 147 wounded (E. V. Tarle). On the Allied side there was
one person killed and ten were wounded.
The strategic result of the bombardment of Sveaborg was negligible. In
contrast to the Bomarsund affair a year before, the Allies did not go ashore
in order to destroy the forts properly because they had no landing parties.
Even so, the Russians could not repair the fortress quickly enough to hold
up an Allied assault on Kronstadt in 1856. In St Petersburg the impression
the Allied bombardment produced on the government and the population
was less than that of Bomarsund in 1854.
After Sveaborg, Admiral Penaud wanted to follow up the Allied ‘success’
by a similar assault on Reval, as his instructions had originally envisaged.
He even received some reinforcements for this purpose, but the British
mortar boats were in bad shape and the plan had to be abandoned. Nothing
of importance was done during the rest of the good weather. Between the
middle of September and 23 October 1855 the Allied squadrons left for
their home ports. The prospects for a return in 1856 looked much better,
due to the huge naval construction programme which the British government
launched, and to Sweden’s diplomatic alignment with the Western powers
through the treaty of 21 November 1855 which was to be the prelude to
Sweden’s entry into the war.
Although it is often claimed that the Baltic theatre of war is neglected in
historical literature on the Crimean War, this is not correct. For the British
side there are, apart from nineteenth-century letters, diaries and biographies
of participants, two volumes of documents: David Bonner-Smith and Alfred
C. Dewar (eds), The Russian War, 1854. Baltic and Black Sea. Official
Correspondence (London, 1943); David Bonner-Smith (ed.), The Russian
War, 1855. Baltic. Official Correspondence (London, 1944). There are four
modern monographs: Lambert, Crimean War; Duckers, Crimean War at Sea
(both have several chapters on the Baltic and offer details on the naval
aspects of the war); Greenhill and Giffard, Assault on Finland; Rath, The
Crimean War (devotes most of his book to the north). For the 1854
campaign, see C. I. Hamilton, ‘Sir James Graham, the Baltic Campaign and
War-Planning at the Admiralty in 1854’, Historical Journal 19 (1976): 89–
112. The Swedish side is covered by the books mentioned in Chapter 5 by
Cullberg, Roi Oscar, and Hallendorff, Konung Oscar. For public opinion in
Sweden, see also Sven Eriksson, Svensk diplomati och tidningspress under
Krimkriget (Stockholm, 1939). The Finnish side and the question of the
Åland islands is covered by Mikhail M. Borodkin, Kriget vid Finlands kuster,
1854–1855 (Helsingfors, 1905) (the book was also published in Russian:
Vojna 1854–55 gg. na Finskom poberež’e, St. Petersburg, 1903; rev. and
enlarged edn 1904); Carl Michael Runeberg, Finland under Orientaliska
kriget (Helsingfors, 1962) (the latter also deals with political and diplomatic
aspects). The Russian side is covered by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2,
pp. 42–94, 417–28 (the bibliography is on pp. 587–8). For the French side,
cf. Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 217–52; Battesti, La marine, vol. 1,
pp. 89–101, 126–33. Cf. also Treue, Krimkrieg, pp. 92–113. On Denmark’s
role, cf. Emanuel Halicz, Danish Neutrality during the Crimean War (1853–
1856): Denmark between the Hammer and the Anvil (Odense, 1977).
14
The Caucasian battlefield,
1853–5
The Caucasus region was the traditional second theatre of war in all Russo-
Turkish conflicts of the nineteenth century, the Danube region being the
more important one. In the eighteenth century, some of the areas of the
Caucasus had been loosely connected with the Sultan of Constantinople.
Russia’s push into this area had begun under Peter the Great but by the time
of the Crimean War, 150 years later, the conquest was not yet complete. In
the west, the Circassians remained unruly, in the east the mountaineers in
parts of Daghestan had successfully resisted Russian attempts at domination
for decades. They rallied under their leader (or imam) Shamil, who since the
1820s had several times eluded capture by the Russians.
Since the Napoleonic Wars, Britain viewed Russia’s piecemeal conquest
of northern Caucasia and of Transcaucasia with mounting alarm. In a wider
sense the area was part and parcel of the Eastern Question, that is, Turkey’s
retreat from the northern dominions of her vast empire which Russia
conquered from her. In another, but related, sense the Caucasus region was
an important element in the so-called ‘Great Game for Asia’, the struggle
between Britain and Russia for predominance in Central Asia. Britain
regarded Russia’s conquest of the Caucasus and her gaining a foothold
beyond the Caspian Sea as a threat to the safety of her Indian empire.
This anxiety was not at the centre of British strategic planning during
the Crimean War, but it lurked in the minds of Foreign Office officials,
diplomats and political writers. Thus Sir George Hamilton Seymour wrote,
while he was still envoy in St Petersburg, in December 1853, ‘That a fire
might be lighted up in those regions which half the military power of Russia
might be unable to extinguish is I think to be inferred.’1 But it was only in
the spring of 1855 that Clarendon acted upon this suggestion and sent
consul Longworth on a fact-finding mission to the Caucasus, as discussed in
Chapter 3. Longworth’s reports were not very encouraging, as he discovered
that the internecine strife between the peoples and the innumerable tribes of
the Caucasus did not predispose them to be a serious partner in the war
against Russia.
189
Even Shamil, the soul of the resistance of the Caucasian mountaineers

against Russia, made no serious efforts to establish a link with Britain, or,
for that matter, with Turkey. He seems, however, to have requested and
received arms and ammunitions through the British and French embassies at
Constantinople. Thus, Marshal Vaillant announced to Saint-Arnaud on 16
May 1854 that 10,000 flintlocks and 300,000 rounds of ammunition were
to be sent to Shamil via Constantinople.2 Whether they reached their
destination cannot be verified from the documents. Perhaps they came into
the hands of the Circassians, because Captain Hippolyte H. Manduit was
sent to their country in the summer of 1854 to ascertain the possibility of
furnishing arms to the tribes there. As far as is known the French were more
active in the Caucasus at the beginning of the war than the British, whereas
their interest slackened towards the end of the war after the fall of Sevastopol,
while that of the British was now reaching a high pitch.
Shamil, however, seriously tested Russia’s military resilience twice during
the Crimean War, in 1853 and in 1854. When war was at the point of
breaking out between Russia and Turkey in the middle of 1853, the Russians
had to reinforce their garrisons along the Turkish frontier because the
Turkish Anatolian army was being furnished with supplies from the Turkish
fleet and was obviously planning a movement towards Tiflis. This was
Shamil’s moment to strike. He wanted to exploit the fair season of the year
and did not wait for the Turkish army to begin its invasion, but concentrated
a band of 15,000 of his warriors and tried to break through the Russian
lines at the village of Zakataly, some 150 kilometres east of Tiflis. Shamil’s
men were, however, repulsed and retreated to the mountains. They now
turned north, and, after a long march, invested the Russian military outpost
of Meseldereg, 80 kilometres north of Tiflis. Only when reinforcements
reached the place could the Russians drive them off. Thus any hope of
linking up with the Turkish Anatolian army now vanished, so much the
more as the destruction of the Turkish fleet at Sinope on 30 November 1853
made the supply problem more difficult than ever.
A second and similar opportunity presented itself to Shamil in the fair
season of the following year. In the middle of July 1854 he moved again
with a horde of 16,000 of his tribesmen towards Tiflis. His advance guard
was beaten on 15 July at the village of Shilda, 80 kilometres north-east of
the Georgian capital, but the main body of his men forced the Russians to
retreat to Tsinandali, 60 kilometres north-east of Tiflis. He was on the point
of breaking through the Russian lines when he was halted by a rising of the
indigenous population, the Kakhetians, who as part of the Georgian people
were loyal to the Russians. For three days Shamil’s men fought against the
Kakhetians. When Russian reinforcements arrived they had to turn back
and flee to Daghestan. The threat which Shamil’s mountaineers posed to the
Russian army was now over for the rest of the Crimean War.
The fighting with Shamil’s bands in 1853 and 1854 was a nuisance to the
Russians; it was not, however, of any strategic importance. The beginning of
THE CAUCASIAN BATTLEFIELD, 1853–5 191
MAP 9 The war in the Caucasus, 1853–5.
the Russo-Turkish war in October 1853 forced the Russians to concentrate

their efforts on the frontier with Turkey. In the Caucasus region the Russians
had one great advantage: whereas Shamil’s Muridist forces were clearly
hostile to the Russians and sympathetic to the Turks, the Circassians on the
north-eastern coast of the Black Sea were sitting on the fence, and in the end
they favoured neither of the two sides. Furthermore, the Russians could rely
on the sympathies, and even on the aid in terms of men and supplies, of the
Christian Georgians, the Kakhetians and the Armenians. On no account did
these peoples wish to fall again under the domination of the Turks. The
rising of the Kakhetians against Shamil was the surest sign of their anti-
Turkish and pro-Russian attitude. Another sign is that many Georgians and
Armenians served in the Russian army or cooperated with them with their
militia units. Many of their officers held high commands in the Russian
army, including Prince Ivan M. Andronikov, Prince Grigorij D. Orbeliani
and Prince Ivan K. Bagration.
With regard to the offensive capability and strength of both armies on the
Caucasus front, the facts and statistics seemed to favour the Turks, but in
reality the Russians, although weak at the beginning, held their positions
and were soon able to extend them to the detriment of the Turks.
The Turks had strong fortresses at Trebizond, Erzurum, Batum and,
especially, Kars. The latter had been transformed into a fortified camp along
modern lines under the supervision of a British colonel, William Fenwick
Williams. The fortresses of Ardahan and Bayezid were, however, of inferior
quality. In the summer of 1853 the Turkish Anatolian army had its
headquarters at Erzurum under Müşir Abdi Pasha. There were 16,000 regular
soldiers there, but two-thirds of them were moved to the frontier. At Kars
there were originally 5,000 troops, although they were quickly strengthened
to 8,000. Ardahan was the point best situated for various reasons (proximity
to the frontier, facilities for uniting a major force, sympathies of the local
population) for an invasion across the frontier. It also held 20,000 men. A
third camp existed at Bayezid with approximately 10,000 men. At the
fortified port of Batum there were another 4,000 to 5,000 troops.
At the beginning of the new campaign of 1854, the Turks were able to
bring their strength on the Caucasian frontier to 120,000 men, but after
losses during the campaign of that year, epidemics in the following winter
and the high rate of desertion (which is typical of the Anatolian front), the
Anatolian army fell to less than 70,000 men.
Originally the Turkish war plans were offensive and were geared to an
invasion of the Transcaucasian regions, with Tiflis, the Georgian capital,
being the main target. The Turkish military leadership, however, was
incapable of sustaining an offensive after an initial success. It was untrained
for such a task, the Turkish general being more interested in satsifying his
personal greed by amassing a fortune through all kinds of embezzlement.
Although the Turkish leadership counted among its members a number of
able European officers from the Hungarian and Polish revolutionary armies
of 1848–9, such as Richard Guyon and George Kmety, or from Britain, like
Williams, jealousy between them and their Turkish counterparts prevented
any fruitful cooperation for the benefit of the country.
At the beginning of the war the Russian army’s position in the Caucasus
did not look any brighter than that of the Turkish Anatolian army. Prince
Michael Semenovich Voroncov, the Governor-General and supreme
commander of the Caucasus, was pessimistic about the prospects of the
coming war, especially after an Anglo-French fleet had entered the Black Sea.
The greatest difficulty for him was the fact that his own Caucasian army
was scattered over a vast area and that only a fraction of it could be
concentrated in the south-west on the frontier with Turkey. In his reports to
the Tsar and to Paskevich he put the strength of the Russian troops to be
deployed on the Turkish frontier at four battalions. This was probably a
gross understatement in order to underpin his demand for sixteen additional
battalions. Paskevich, who knew the Caucasus region from his own
experience, was prepared to send him even more than the required
reinforcements: four battalions for the Black Sea port of Poti, two for the
garrison of Erivan and another twenty for an investment of, or an attack on,
the central fortress of Kars.3 With such a force, or even a lesser one, Paskevich
was confident that the Russians could proceed offensively in Transcaucasia,
that is, not only take Kars and Ardahan and thus prevent any surprise
attacks from the mountain tribes along the Black Sea coast, but also conquer
Bayezid as the most important point of communication between Turkey and
Persia and as the place through which the whole British trade to northern
and central Persia passed.
At the end of September 1853, Voroncov’s army received as reinforcements
the 13th Division, which disembarked at the port of Anaklia. In the spring
of 1854 the Russian army of the Caucasus consisted of 160,000 men, of
whom half were stationed along the Turkish frontier.4 Although such a force
should have been enough not only for the defence of Transcaucasia but also
for an invasion across the Turkish frontier, Voroncov asked for his recall. He
was temporarily replaced by General Read (who later lost his life at the
Battle of the Tchernaya). Read was even more despondent than Voroncov,
as he feared an Allied landing on the eastern shores of the Black Sea and a
Persian attack. When he advocated the evacuation of practically all of
Transcaucasia, he was soon replaced by General Nikolai Nikolaevich
Muraviev, who became Governor-General of the Caucasus and supreme
commander of the Caucasian army. Muraviev was able to instil an offensive
spirit into his army and was to become the hero of Kars.
There were several military engagements in 1853 and 1854 in
Transcaucasia, often with heavy losses, especially on the Turkish side, but
none was decisive. On the night of 27–28 October 1853, a Turkish unit
from Batum overran the Russian post of Fort St Nicholas just across the
border, thus forcing the Russians to evacuate the garrison of Redutkaleh
and cutting the sea links with the Crimea. On 13 November there was an
engagement between Turkish and Russian troops west of Akhaltzikh, where
the Russians carried the day.
Three days earlier, however, the Russians had been beaten south of
Aleksandropol, losing 20 per cent of their force. The Turkish high command
was unable to follow up this success. When the Russians received
reinforcements, the Turks withdrew to the village of Bashgedikler (Bash-
Kadyklar), halfway between Kars and Aleksandropol. There on 1 December
1853 the two sides met again in a bloody encounter. The Turkish army,
amounting to 36,000 men, was routed and retreated to Kars. Some 15,000
are said to have deserted. The losses in dead and wounded were at least
6,000, on the Russian side the figure was 1,500. This time the Russian
commander did not follow up his victory and did not pursue the Turks, who
thus obtained a valuable breathing space.
In the campaign of 1854 the first notable encounter between the two
sides was on 15 July along the frontier river Cholok. Both sides suffered
heavy casualties, the Turks 4,000, the Russians 1,500. This Russian success
on their right flank was soon complemented by one on their left flank. It was
Bashgedikler all over again. Not far from this village, at Kurukdere (Kjurjuk-
Dar), the two armies clashed on 5 August. The encounter left 8,000 Turks
on the field dead, wounded or taken prisoner, and another 10,000, mostly
irregulars, deserted. This time the Russian losses were also quite high: 3,000
dead and wounded. As both armies retreated to their fortresses – the Turks
to Kars and the Russians to Aleksandropol – the whole affair was mere
bloodletting and had no strategic consequences. The rest of the year and the
winter of 1854–5 saw no action of importance.
The prospects for 1855 looked bleak for the Turks. Their army had
dwindled to about 54,000 men, of whom 16,500 were stationed along the
eastern shores of the Black Sea and near Erzurum, some 11,000 on the upper
Euphrates, 12,000 at Bayezid and 14,500 at Kars. Because of the fundamental
importance of the latter, its garrison was strengthened to almost 20,000 and
Bayezid was correspondingly weakened. Omer Pasha and the government
at Constantinople were well aware of the danger in eastern Anatolia.
Throughout the summer, Omer Pasha was pressing his Allied counterparts to
have the bulk of the Turkish troops in the Crimea transferred to the Caucasus.
Both Pélissier and Simpson were adamant in refusing the Turkish request as
they wanted to concentrate all their efforts on Sevastopol. The opposition of
the British government to this diversion was withdrawn in August 1855, so
at the beginning of September the Turkish forces began their embarkation
for Batum.
Muraviev’s plan in the summer of 1855 was to concentrate his efforts on
the blockade of Kars and to cut its links with Erzurum, its supply base. In
view of the small garrison of Erzurum (1,500 men), he could easily have
captured the place and thus have hastened the investment of Kars, but fear of
dividing his forces led him to decide otherwise. When he heard that the first
of Omer’s troops had landed at Batum, he changed his plans to starve out
Kars, since he feared that Omer Pasha might move to Kutaisi and on to Tiflis,
thus isolating him in the south. He decided instead to storm the fortress.
The defences of Kars had, however, been vastly strengthened in 1855. A
ring of eight forts and a system of trenches and redoubts had been built
around the citadel, which commanded the heights surrounding the fortress.
Muraviev failed to prepare his attack properly by carefully reconnoitring
the strong and weak points of the fortress, by letting his troops familiarize
themselves with the terrain and by bringing enough artillery into position.
For the assault on 29 September 1855 he had 25,000 men at his disposal.
But it miscarried in several respects. Instead of beginning at night, the assault
opened in broad daylight. One of the units had lost its way in the darkness
and began its attack in a section not assigned to it. Orders were not always
clear. As in the Crimea, the Russians went into action in their old assault
columns, thus offering a good target to the defenders, many of whom had
modern rifles. At 11 am the attack was called off and the Russians retreated.
About 7,500 of their men were killed or wounded, whereas the Turks had
again, as at Silistria on the Danube, shown their capacity for stubbornly
defending a fortified place.
The Turks did not follow up their resounding success. They hoped that,
with the approach of winter, there would be no prospect of the Russians
resuming the siege, which is exactly what Muraviev did. Not far from Kars
he built a fortified camp and within a short time closed the blockade ring
round Kars again. Hunger was the best weapon for the Russians. One
hundred Turks were dying daily in the fortress, with no chance of getting
supplies. General Williams signed a document of capitulation and on 26
November 1855 the fortress surrendered. Ten generals and over 18,000
officers and men handed over their arms to the Russians. The capture of
Kars was a great boon to the Russians after the fall of Sevastopol. It
effectually paved the way to sounding out prospects for peace and finally to
peace negotiations.
Obviously Omer Pasha’s arrival on the eastern shores of the Black Sea
had been too late. He had planned to transport troops from Bulgaria and
the Crimea to Batum, where together with the garrison they would form an
army of 45,000 men. By the end of September he had some 30,000–35,000
troops at his disposal. His target was the capture of Kutaisi, and ultimately
of Tiflis, in order to isolate the Russian army along the Turkish frontier and
at Kars. He chose Sukhum instead of Redutkaleh as his base of operations,
although the distance from the latter to Kutaisi was shorter, because he thus
avoided a movement through marshy terrain. From Sukhum, his troops
marched south and south-east to reach the River Ingur, where Omer expected
to meet the Russian army under Prince Bagration. The latter stationed his
troops in isolated detachments along the Ingur river.
On 1 November the two armies came into contact with each other. They
were about equal in numbers (some 20,000 Turks as against 18,500
Russians). On 7 November, Omer Pasha attacked. There was confused
fighting in the woods, until Bagration, although not really beaten, ordered a
general retreat south-east to Kheta and Zugdidi. Omer Pasha did not pursue
him, but later moved his army in a leisurely fashion to Zugdidi, which
Bagration had abandoned. Slowly moving south, Omer Pasha was caught
by the autumnal rains and ordered a withdrawal to the coast. This promenade
through Mingrelia was not a distinguished episode in Omer’s career. Had
the peace negotiations not been opened, Muraviev would have begun the
new campaign in 1856 with a march on Erzurum, which would have had all
prospects of success.
Britain’s interest in the Caucasus in 1853–6 is discussed in two articles:
Norman Luxenburg, ‘England and the Caucasus during the Crimean War’,
Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 16 (1968): 499–504; Garry J. Alder,

‘India and the Crimean War’, Journal of Commonwealth History 2 (1973–
4): 15–37. Accounts of the military history of the Caucasus in 1853–6 suffer
from an imbalance of the sources; there is much from the Russian and little
from the Turkish side. Candan, Ottoman Crimean War, has some chapters,
pp. 190–256; so has Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman Empire, pp. 278–306. A
number of Russian documents for 1853–4 are in Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija,
vol. 2. A thorough treatment is found in Chadži Murat Ibragimbejli, Kavkaz
v Krymskoj vojne 1853–1856 gg. i meždunarodnie otnošenija (Moscow,
1971). The author covers Shamil’s struggle as well as the military campaigns
in 1853, 1854 and 1855 and also Omer Pasha’s operations in Mingrelia. Cf.
the relevant chapters in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 1, pp. 280–7; vol. 2,
448–74 (the bibliography in vol. 1, pp. 539–40, vol. 2, pp. 606–7 includes
accounts by British officers with the Turkish army). For an English summary,
see W. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the
Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828–1921 (Cambridge, 1953),
pp. 57–102. The newest Russian book on ‘the Caucasus and the Great
Powers’ is by Vladimir Vladimirovič Degoev, Kavkaz i velikie deržavy
(Moscow, 2009), pp. 169–360. The author devotes more than a third of his
book to the Crimean War period, making extensive use of the relevant
literature, especially the AGKK edition.
15
The minor theatres of war: the
White Sea and the Pacific
Besides the four major theatres of war during the Crimean War – the
Danube, the Crimea, the Baltic and the Caucasus – there were two minor
ones: the White Sea and the Barents Sea in northern Europe, and
Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Far East. The dimensions
of the actions that took place there, especially in the White Sea, were small
indeed; compared to the stubborn trench warfare at Sevastopol involving
tens of thousands of victims, they were perhaps infinitesimal. However, the
mere fact that they existed points to the important consideration that the
‘Crimean’ War contained the germs of a worldwide contest which would
have developed into an outright world war in 1856, with the two German
great powers, the secondary powers of Europe and the United States being
directly involved. The First World War would then have taken place sixty
years earlier. That it was prevented raises the interesting question why and
by what mechanism this was done? The answer will be briefly discussed in
the next chapter.
The sea route to the White Sea had been discovered in the sixteenth
century during an English polar expedition. Shortly afterwards the English
erected a small fort, called Archangel, at the mouth of the Dvina river. It
became their main port of call in this region for their trade with Russia.
Thus, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was already a lively
trade to and from Archangel, and after the outbreak of the Crimean War it
was natural for the Board of Admiralty in London to stop that trade,
although part of it affected British interests. The major part of the trade with
Archangel, however, took place with the population of Finmark, the
northernmost part of Norway. For them this coastal trade – ‘cabotage’ – was
vital. The Swedish government therefore asked the French and British
governments after the outbreak of war not to stop this cabotage. Due to
climatic conditions, the sea route was open each year by the middle of April
at the earliest and closed by the middle of October at the latest.
In the spring of 1854 the British fitted out a small squadron of three ships
– a sailing frigate and two corvettes (sailing ships with auxiliary steam
197
propulsion) under Captain Erasmus Ommaney. The French contributed two

ships, one sailing frigate and one corvette, under Captain Pierre É. Guilbert.
Both the British and French squadrons set out rather late for the White Sea.
They established a base at the Swedish (Norwegian) port of Hammerfest for
coaling and revictualling en route. By the decision of both governments, the
blockade of the White Sea was declared effective as of 23 July. The French
ships entered the White Sea on 8 August, where they joined the British
squadron which had arrived ahead of them.
The British had already committed their first act of hostility. It was rather
a silly one, devoid of any strategic importance and very much on the lines of
the raids of Admiral Plumridge’s ships on the Finnish coast. On 18 July two
of the British ships approached the Solovetskie Islands at the entrance to the
bay of Onega. On the main island stood – and still stands today – a monastery
that had been founded in the fifteenth century as a hermitage and later
developed as an important place of pilgrimage. Besides its religious and
cultural importance (it possessed valuable collections of icons and vestments),
it was also the centre for the economic development of this part of northern
Russia. As the Swedes had besieged the place several times at the end of the
sixteenth century, the monastery was protected by walls, towers and a
number of guns. This martial appearance was obviously the excuse for
Captain Ommaney to open, without warning, a bombardment against the
monastery. What else could he have done in that remote corner of Russia?
Archangel itself was a strongpoint which he dared not attack by sea or by
land, as he estimated the garrison to comprise 6,000 men. Thus a
bombardment of the ‘fortress’ of Solovetskie would make good reading in
the English papers and satisfy John Bull. Having silenced the Russian battery
on 18 July, Ommaney demanded, on the following day, the unconditional
surrender of the place. This was refused. Thereupon a new bombardment
opened and did some damage to various buildings of the monastery. On 20
July the two British ships sailed away. Besides the senseless material damage,
the Russians suffered no casualties, whereas the British were left to rue one
dead and five wounded.
A month later the British White Sea squadron performed a second feat. It
was as ridiculous as the first, and barbaric, but made good news in the
British press. The French were already present but were not asked to take
part. On 22 August one of the British ships steamed into the mouth of the
River Kola, destroyed a Russian battery barring its route and then stopped
in front of the village of Kola, not far away from the later city of Murmansk,
built during the First World War and completely destroyed by the Germans
in the Second World War. Kola was then a fishing village and of no strategic
importance whatever. The British ship started a cannonade at 3 o’clock in
the morning of 23 August which continued with few interruptions until the
morning of 24 August. The place was set on fire and almost completely
razed. Of the 128 wooden houses, 110 were destroyed.1 The French captain
did not hide his disgust at this inglorious act of war from his British
THE MINOR THEATRES OF WAR 199
colleague. The Scandinavian press, obviously furnished with appropriate

details by the Russians, was full of anti-British comment.
Apart from these two acts of war, the Allied White Sea squadrons tried to
ensure the blockade of the Russian coast. They started their journey home
at the end of September.
The campaign of 1855 in the White Sea was uneventful compared with
the preceding year – there were no ‘exploits’ like those of 1854. The British
set out again with three vessels, under Captain Thomas Baillie. The French
this time had three ships commanded by Captain Guilbert. On 11 and 14
June the British and French commanders respectively declared the blockade
of the White Sea in force. Unlike the summer of 1854, the Allied commanders
did not allow the cabotage to Finmark by Russian vessels and seized some
sixty of these small coastal ships. As they could not be towed as prizes to
Britain or France, they were set on fire or sunk, the crews being dumped
near a coastal village. On 9 October both squadrons left for home.
The balance sheet of the two campaigns in the White Sea was poor. One
could argue that the five or six Allied ships might have been better employed
on the Mediterranean and Black Sea route, where every single ship was
urgently needed. But the mere fact of their appearance in northern Russia
immobilized several thousand Russian soldiers there (although they would
have been stationed there anyway). More important was the fact that no
Russian privateers could leave the White Sea and harass British shipping in the
North Sea, or at least – as there were actually no vessels at Archangel capable
of playing such a role – no American merchantman could enter the White Sea,
be fitted out as a privateer at Archangel and then roam the North Sea.
War activities in the Far East in 1854 were of far greater dimensions than
those in the White Sea. Despite a distinct superiority in firepower and men,
they ended in ignominious failure for the Allies. They must be set in the
wider framework of the conflict of interests between Britain and Russia
emerging in that region in those years. Britain had gained a firm foothold in
China with the occupation of Hong Kong in 1842 after the First Opium War.
France and the United States followed suit, and set in motion a great power
struggle about opening up China and Japan in the following years and
decades. Russia joined in at the end of the 1840s. The driving force behind
Russia’s activities was Count Nikolai Nikolaevich Muraviev-Amurskij (not
to be confused with the general of the same name, commander of the Russian
forces in the Caucasus), Governor-General of Eastern Siberia from 1847. In
1854 he headed an expedition along the Amur river to its mouth, in order to
wrest the area north of that river from weaker China. He was aided by Rear-
Admiral Efim Putiatin, who headed a mission to Japan in 1852 to establish
Russia’s influence there, and who succeeded in signing a treaty of commerce,
peace and friendship with Japan on 7 February 1855; that is, in the midst of
the Crimean War.
The British government was conscious of these Russian activities in the
Far East and seized the opportunity of the outbreak of war in March 1854
to counter them and cripple Russia’s newly gained influence in that area as
far as possible. The opportunity was really a golden one. Britain’s China and
Pacific squadrons together with France’s naval forces there enjoyed a clear
superiority over Russia’s maritime forces (twenty-five as against six men-of-
war) and over her coastal defences along the Sea of Okhotsk and the
Kamchatka Peninsula. As for Russian America, the Hudson Bay Company,
Britain’s oldest trading company in North America which held sway over
huge tracts of land in what is today Canada, and its Russian counterpart,
the Russian-American Company that controlled Alaska at that time, made a
deal early in 1854, before the outbreak of the war, not to extend hostilities
to their dominions. Both the British and the Russian governments endorsed
this deal, so that a clash of the belligerents was specifically excluded from
this area. This is remarkable given the relentless ideological struggle and the
fierce war efforts of the two sides elsewhere.
In the Far East, Muraviev sensed the danger which Anglo-French
superiority posed to Russia and realistically appraised the importance of the
Amur river as a line of communication to the Sea of Okhotsk and Kamchatka.
He had troop reinforcements ferried to Mariinsk and Nikolaevsk on the
lower stretches of the Amur, to Ayan on the coast and to Petropavlovsk on
the south-eastern shore of Kamchatka. The danger to these fortified places
did not come from the British China squadron, but from the combined
Pacific squadrons of the Allies.
The flagships and other units of these squadrons, with the Commanders-
in-Chief Rear-Admiral David Price and Rear-Admiral Auguste Fébvrier-
Despointes, were lying at anchor in Callao harbour, Peru, in April 1854,
alongside a Russian frigate, neither side yet cognizant of the outbreak of
war. The frigate had been sent from Kronstadt to the Pacific well before the
war, to reinforce Admiral Putiatin’s squadron in Japanese waters. It left
Callao on 26 April. On 7 May the news of the outbreak of war at last
arrived at Callao. After a pause of another ten days, the Allied squadrons set
sail in order to pursue the frigate and mop up other Russian men-of-war
encountered in the Pacific. They made a detour to the Marquesas Islands,
where they were joined by other Allied ships and then headed for Honolulu
on Hawaii (Sandwich Islands), where they arrived on 17 July. Here they
learned that the Russian frigate had left that location a month earlier for
Petropavlovsk. They stayed at Honolulu for another eight days, Admiral
Price poking his nose into the relations between King Kamehameha III and
the American mission to Hawaii. When the Allied squadrons finally left
Honolulu on 25 July, heading north-west, they numbered nine vessels.
On 28 August the Allied armada arrived at the entrance of Avacha Bay,
Kamchatka, and after reconnoitring it decided to move on to Petropavlovsk,
which lies 12 kilometres inland. There they found the Russian frigate and
another Russian armed transport blocking the entrance of the harbour, with
their broadsides facing outwards. The Russians had unloaded half the guns
and distributed them to the six batteries overlooking the harbour. The
Russian garrison had received reinforcements sent by Muraviev on 5 August,

and it now numbered 1,013 men. The defensive works had been thoroughly
overhauled. The governor of Petropavlovsk was the Russian admiral, Vasilij
Stepanovich Zavoiko. The Allies had about 2,000 men at their disposal; that
is, a force about double the size of the Russian one. On 29 August there was
a first exchange of fire, but it did not last long and was inconclusive. The
Allies decided to launch a major attack on the following day in order to
silence, first of all, at least four of the batteries.
The bombardment was opened on 30 August in the morning. After a
couple of hours, something unexpected happened: Admiral Price retired to
his cabin and shot himself. He was obviously unable to stand the strain of
the cannonade and may have convinced himself that Petropavlovsk was too
well defended and could not be conquered. He may have been struck by the
contrast between his own Nelsonian grandiloquence when addressing his
crew while still at Callao (‘Great Britain has a right to expect from it [the
Pacific squadron] a proper account of the Russian Frigates that are known
to be on the Station’2) and the reality now confronting him. The French
admiral took command of the Allied squadrons and decided to stop the
bombardment and attempt a landing on the following day.
On 31 August a party of sailors and marines landed and took one of the
batteries; they were repulsed by a Russian counter-attack and re-embarked.
It was decided to renew the raid, but after more thorough preparation.
Fighting was reopened on 4 September and it ended in an unmitigated
disaster on the Allied side. The Allies landed a party of 700 men, 400 French
and 300 British, the two groups acting independently of each other. They
were able to climb a hill, but were ambushed by Russian sharpshooters and
thrown back. Reports of the number of casualties for both sides differ
widely, although the Petropavlovsk engagement is one of the best documented
of the Crimean War. According to the most reliable Russian source –
Miliutin’s diary (Dmitrij Alekseevich Miliutin was then an official in the
Russian war ministry, later Russian war minister) – the Russians suffered
115 dead and wounded, if the days of 29–31 August, 1 and 4 September are
taken together, and fifty for 4 September only.3 Estimates of the Allied
casualties for that day range from sixty to 350. One source states 209 were
killed and most of the rest wounded. At any rate, this was sufficient for
Despointes to call off the siege and leave for the open Pacific. The French
made their way to San Francisco, while the British wintered at Vancouver.
On the Allied side it was determined that the two squadrons should make
their reappearance at Petropavlovsk at the beginning of the summer season
of 1855. The armada was brought up to sixteen ships: six French under
Rear-Admiral Martin Fourichon and ten British under Rear-Admiral Henry
William Bruce. They arrived in batches on the Kamchatka coast at the end
of May and the beginning of June, but to their great amazement Petropavlovsk
was deserted and partly destroyed – a typical Russian reaction. The Allies
burnt the rest of the town and razed what was left of the embrasures.
MAP 10 The theatre of war in the Far East, 1854–5.
Expecting the Allies to return with a larger force, Muraviev had ordered
the evacuation of Petropavlovsk as early as December 1854, the evacuation
itself taking place in mid-April 1855. The inhabitants and the stocks were
brought to Nikolaevsk at the mouth of the Amur river, to strengthen the
defences there. Some of Bruce’s ships, and also a few more from the French
and British China stations, were sent out to find the whereabouts of the
evacuees and their ships. The Russians made a fool of them once more. They
knew sea passages for which the Allies had no charts, so there was no
encounter and no shot fired. The Allied ships returned to their stations
without having achieved anything. The Times in London was right in
commenting on 10 September 1855, shortly before it could print the news
of the fall of Sevastopol, ‘In the course of the preceding operations no
brilliant success has been achieved, but the Seas of Kamchatka, Japan, and
Okhotsk have been traversed in almost every direction.’
The campaign of 1854 in the Far East had ended in a resounding victory
for the Russians; that of 1855 had a completely sterile outcome for the
Allies: 1854 taught them that it is difficult to attack and conquer a well
fortified place by sea without proper preparations. For the Russians the
lesson was the high value of possessing the lower Amur, and Muraviev took
great pains in the following years to wrest the whole Amur region from the
Chinese. He succeeded in 1858 with the Treaty of Aigun. The action at
Petropavlovsk in 1854, the non-action there in 1855 and Muraviev’s activity
on the Amur heightened the tension which had been building up between
Britain and Russia in the Near, Middle and Far East.
Surprisingly there are no older accounts in English historiography on the
operations in the White Sea. Only very recently have historians paid attention
to the subject: Andrew Lambert, ‘The Royal Navy’s White Sea Campagin of
1854’, in Naval Power and Expeditionary Wars: Peripheral Campaigns and
New Theatres of Naval Warfare, ed. Bruce Elleman and S.C.M. Paine (New
York, 2011), pp. 29–44. Rath, Crimean War, deals with it in two chapters:
pp. 15–32 and 93–109. Duckers devotes one chapter to it in The Crimean
War. For the Russian side there is a booklet: Russkij sever i Rossija v gody
Krymskoj vojny, 1853–1856 gg. (Vologda, 1979), but it is not very revealing.
Tarle has a brief chapter in Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 193–9. Valuable
remarks are found in Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 255–71.
In contrast to the White Sea, the operations at Kamchatka are
extraordinarily well documented and researched. There are numerous
eyewitness accounts from the three participating sides, commemorative
articles and even a number of (Russian) books. There are two useful English
language articles (with bibliographies): John J. Stephan, ‘The Crimean War
in the Far East’, Modern Asian Studies 3 (1969): 257–77; Barry M. Gough,
‘The Crimean War in the Pacific: British Strategy and Naval Operations’,
Military Affairs 37 (1973): 130–6. There is also a new book, thoroughly
researched: Rath, The Crimean War. The author, however, overrates the
importance of that distant theatre of war. Somewhat less controversial is
John D. Grainger, The First Pacific War: Britain and Russia, 1854–1856
(Rochester, NY, 2008).
204
16
Allied war preparations for 1856
and the war council in Paris,
January 1856
There were no major war operations in the Crimea after the fall of Sevastopol
on 8 September 1855, although Napoleon was continually pressing his
Commander-in-Chief to follow up his success. The only operation of some
importance was the amphibious one, already discussed, against Kinburn on
17 October, in which the French ironclads showed their value as a new
weapon.
The reasons why the French and British armies in the Crimea did not use
their victory to expel the Russians from the peninsula are obvious:
1 The Russians had not left their stronghold Sevastopol entirely; they
were still entrenched on the north side of the city. Because of the
estimated Russian strength, the two Allied commanders were not
prepared to attack the Russians there and on the Mackenzie heights
frontally.
2 Psychologically speaking, the Allied troops were tired and worn out
after almost a year of exacting siege war.
3 They were still labouring under the shock of the preceding winter. In
September 1855 they had to face a second such winter and naturally
wanted to prepare for this.
4 The British Commander-in-Chief, General Simpson, not a daring
commander, was made the scapegoat in London for the failure on
the Redan; his replacement on 22 October 1855 by General Sir
William John Codrington did not produce any immediate forward
strategy.
Much more important than the state of the Allied army at Sevastopol were
the divergent strategical aims of the governments in London and Paris. The
British government wanted to concentrate the military effort in 1856 on an
all-out attack against Kronstadt and St Petersburg. This could only be
205
accomplished by the cooperation of a large French army and the British

navy. A second attack was to be launched against the Russians in the
Caucasus by a British army with a few French troops attached to it. While
Emperor Napoleon was in favour of a combined attack against Kronstadt,
he was firmly opposed to a diversion in the Caucasus as this would obviously
serve British interests only.
Napoleon’s strategic objectives immediately after Sevastopol were the
eviction of the Russians from the north side of the town and from the
Mackenzie heights, and ultimately the occupation of Simferopol. But
Pélissier would not budge. As we have already seen, the decisive moment
passed when Napoleon’s thirst for continuing the war was quenched by the
British refusal, delivered on 22 September 1855, to open up the Polish
question, create a new front in Central or Eastern Europe and thereby
change the whole character of the war. With his generals in the Crimea
immovable and his grand political design for a remapping of Europe nipped
in the bud, Napoleon quickly lost interest in continuing the war; he tried to
open up channels for peace with St Petersburg and started withdrawing
troops from the Crimea. Anglo-French relations were fast deteriorating and
reached their nadir when London learned in October that the French and
Austrian governments were hatching the terms of an ultimatum to be
delivered by Austria to St Petersburg, a step in which London had not been
asked to participate.
It was at this moment that Napoleon, fearing that his relations with the
British government might soon reach a breaking point, wrote a letter to
Queen Victoria (on 22 November 1855) in which he pointed out three ways
to continue the war:
1 Restrict military activities to a waiting game by simply blockading

the Black Sea and the Baltic and by waiting for Russia to use up her
forces and sue for peace.
2 Direct an appeal to all nationalities, proclaiming the resurrection of
Poland and the independence of Finland, Hungary, Italy and
Circassia.
3 Seek the alliance of Austria, which would force the rest of Germany
in her wake, thus compelling Russia to propose conditions of
peace.
At the end of his letter, Napoleon confirmed his preference for the third
option, but he let it be clearly understood that a redrawing of the map of
Europe would be a policy worthy of fresh sacrifices.1
Although in London the Prime Minister, Palmerston, was personally in
favour of the war developing into a war of nationalities, the rest of the
Cabinet and the Queen were conscious of the incalculable dangers of such a
hazardous policy and opted for trying out the effect of an Austrian
ultimatum. In her reply to Napoleon, Queen Victoria suggested that the
ALLIED WAR PREPARATIONS FOR 1856 207
FIGURE 16 First page of a letter from Queen Victoria to Lord Clarendon. AGKK
III/4, pp. 489–90.
military aspects of the ultimatum – preparing for a possible Russian refusal

by working out a plan of campaign for 1856 – should be discussed at an
Allied council of war.
The idea of such a council of war had already been raised by Napoleon
immediately after the fall of Sevastopol,2 but it slumbered for some weeks
until the British ambassador to Paris, Cowley, reawakened it when inter-
allied relations began to deteriorate due to the French withdrawing troops
from the Crimea.
Why not a month or six weeks hence, when all military operations . . .
must be necessarily suspended invite them [the Commanders-in-Chief]
and the Admirals to come home for a week or two. Let then a great
Council of War be held . . . – let it be thoroughly explained to them . . .
that something must be done in the Spring. What this something is to be
should then be maturely deliberated.
The idea fell on fertile ground both in London and Paris. Both governments
saw it as a convenient means of extracting themselves from the impasse
into which they had manoeuvred themselves. It took more than the six
weeks which Cowley had expected for the council to convene. Finally, on
10 January 1856, after the Austrian ultimatum had already been delivered
at St Petersburg, the council opened its discussions in Paris.
By common consent the terms of reference of the council were restricted
to military matters. The political decision on the plan of campaign to be
finally adopted was specifically reserved to the two governments. The
council was presided over by Napoleon himself. The two Commanders-in-
Chief in the Crimea had not been called to take part, but were represented
by the two chiefs of the general staffs, with a number of other generals and
admirals in attendance. Lord Cowley took part as the political representative
of his government, but the Duke of Cambridge officially led the British
delegation.
The council of war met four times between 10 and 18 January 1856. Its
proceedings were firmly in the hands of Napoleon. He opened the first
session by reading a list of fourteen questions with reference to the situation
in the Crimea (e.g., can Eupatoria be made a base for a large operation?)
and another five questions relating to the Baltic.3 Two sub-committees were
formed, one for the Crimea and one for the Baltic. Each member had to give
his response to the questions in writing and hand it in at the subsequent
meeting. For the fourth session, which took place on 18 January, each
member had to work out a plan of campaign. On the basis of these proposals,
Napoleon hammered out a plan of his own which was ready by 20 January.
This plan, together with all the documents of the preceding sessions, was
then sent to London.
It became clear during the military discussions that the highest priority
was given to continuing operations in the Crimea. The Russian army of
the Crimea, which was estimated at 130,000–150,000 men (the estimate
was correct), was to be attacked in a pincer movement. An Allied army
of 100,000 men operating from Eupatoria under a French commander
was to threaten the Russian army in the rear and force it to retreat. A
smaller army of 70,000 men or more, based at Sevastopol and Balaklava,
would push the Russian army north into the arms of the Eupatoria army.
In view of this priority, the British proposal for a simultaneous operation
in the Caucasus was dropped, and in the Baltic no major campaign was
planned.
Napoleon’s own plan of operations was drafted along these lines with
minor modifications. In the Baltic, operations would be restricted to the
destruction of Kronstadt. The pincer movement to Simferopol was
complemented – this was Napoleon’s old hobby horse – by a third
diversionary attack from Alushta, on the eastern coast, against Simferopol
with 16,000 Allied troops.
In London, Napoleon’s plan of campaign was accepted with a few minor
modifications and one major one.4 The Eupatoria army was to be reduced
in favour of an expedition to the Caucasus. This was to be British-led,
consist of 40,000 to 50,000 men and be carried out simultaneously with
operations against Simferopol. Apart from strategic considerations, this
operation was to be launched for political reasons – to make good the fall
of the fortress of Kars and forestall the setting up of a select committee of
Parliament to investigate the disaster.
In his reply to the British government of 4 February 1856, Napoleon
made it clear that the forces available would not permit such a simultaneous
operation. The British government gave in and on 10 and 11 February 1856
orders were sent to the two Commanders-in-Chief in the Crimea telling
them to prepare for the operations in the Crimea, which were to start in
April 1856.5 The army of Eupatoria was to consist of 79,500 French, 25,500
British and 15,000 Sardinian troops (120,000 altogether) and be under
French command; the army of Sevastopol was to be composed of 48,500
British and 16,500 French troops (65,000 in all) led by the British
Commander-in-Chief. Each of the two armies was to incorporate 5,000 men
from the German and Swiss foreign legions. The 15,000 Turkish troops
were to remain stationed at Kertch. A diversionary movement from Alushta
was not mentioned. General Codrington was told that the expedition to the
Caucasus would not take place for the time being, but as the Crimean
operation would be finished in a month’s time, he should lose no time ‘in
turning the British arms in that direction. You will therefore take this
contingency into your consideration, and make such previous arrangements
as you are enabled to do for its accomplishment.’
As is known, there was no further campaign in 1856 and the military
council in Paris in January 1856 must be regarded as a mock battle. But it
nonetheless fulfilled a number of functions: it smoothed the political and
strategic differences between the two Allied governments; it served Napoleon
as a smokescreen behind which he could conceal his decision not to continue
the war in 1856; it applied pressure on Russia to accept the Austrian
ultimatum because the fact that the council took place was released to the
European press; and it fulfilled the duty of the military and political
leadership in both countries to prepare for war so long as a peace treaty was
not yet signed.
It was an irony of history that, in the very days that the military council
took place in Paris, Tsar Alexander in St Petersburg convened a council of
his political and military experts to advise him whether to accept the
Austrian ultimatum or not. This ultimatum consisted of the Four Points,

over which the Vienna peace conference had broken down in the spring of
1855, with the essential third point now being given more precision (the
Black Sea was to be neutralized; there were to be no ships of war in it; all
naval ports and arsenals were to be scrapped) and a fifth point added at the
instigation of the British government (the Allied governments would reserve
to themselves the right to add new demands to the Four Points at the future
peace conference, a vague point which later came to mean the demilitarization
of the Åland Islands; the admittance of Allied consuls in Russia’s Black Sea
ports; and the consideration of the political situation of the Circassians). At
a first crown council which met on 1 January 1856 the Tsar accepted this
ultimatum, with the important modification that Russia accepted the peace
conditions without the fifth point and without the cession of Bessarabian
territory, a new demand now contained in point one.6 As Austria insisted on
an unconditional acceptance, since it would otherwise break off diplomatic
relations, the Tsar convened a second council, which met at the Winter
Palace on 15 January 1856, at the same time as the Allied military council
was sitting in Paris.
The vast majority of the members of this council were in favour of
accepting the Austrian ultimatum without further ado. The reasons adduced
were indicative of Russia’s desperate situation. Nesselrode pointed to the
deterioration of Russia’s international standing: Austria’s attitude was now
becoming more hostile than ever; she would probably join the war in the
new campaign. Nesselrode expressly mentioned the war council in Paris,
stating that it had decided to occupy the whole Crimea and allow French
troops to move along the Danube to Bessarabia (the latter point had been
discussed in Paris, but no such decision had in fact been taken). The war
would thereby be transferred to Austria’s border, and Austria would become
quickly involved in it; Prussia and the German Confederation would then
no longer be able to withstand the pressure to join in on the Allied side. He
also pointed to the rising hostility of Sweden; her treaty with the Western
powers of 21 November 1855 had just become known in St Petersburg and
created a deep impression. The prospect of almost the whole of Europe
lining up against Russia in 1856 must have been a nightmare for the Tsar.
Other members of the council raised other reasons for accepting the
Austrian ultimatum. Voroncov, erstwhile governor of the Caucasus, stressed
the dire prospect of losing the Crimea, the Caucasus, Finland and Poland if
the war continued. From this it is evident that the Russian leadership was
seriously expecting a revolt and the secession of these non-Russian border
provinces – a development which Napoleon III and Palmerston were in fact
seriously entertaining and trying to encourage.
Peter Meyendorff, the former ambassador to Vienna, painted a bleak
picture of Russia’s financial and economic situation. Continuing the war, he
argued, was bound to lead to bankruptcy of the Russian state. A look at the
statistics underlines the cogency of this prophecy. The deficit of the state for
1856 would be eleven times as high as the average deficit of the years 1851–
3. Foreign trade between 1853 and 1855 had dwindled by four-fifths and
the blockade of Russia’s coasts was beginning to tell.
Of special interest for the purposes of this book is the memorandum of
Major-General Miliutin, which was probably circulated to the members of
the conference before it met. The basic thrust of the memorandum was the
conviction that Russia, whose economy was based on the existence of
serfdom, could not continue a war with the prospect of success against two
great European powers who were so industrially developed. Miliutin
presented the following details to support his case:
1 The human reservoir for recruiting young men from among the serfs
would soon be exhausted. The mass of the 800,000 men drafted
since the beginning of the war lacked proper military training and
there were not enough officers for this purpose. The economy could
not bear a further drain of young men.
2 The supplies of arms and ammunition were nearly exhausted. Of the
1 million rifles that were stored in the arsenals at the beginning of
the war, only 90,000 were left. Of the 1,656 field guns, only 253
were still in the depots. Russia’s primitive arms industry could not
supply the quantities needed, while clandestine imports provided no
more than a trickle of supplies.
3 Worse still were the low stocks of gunpowder and projectiles. The
production of gunpowder in 1855 had only satisfied the
consumption at Sevastopol without counting the needs of other
fronts. The raw materials for the production of gunpowder –
saltpetre and sulphur – were not available in sufficient quantities.
4 The supply of food for 1856 would not fulfil the needs of the army.
5 The transport situation would not allow any major movement of
supplies and troops. The lack of railways doomed Russia’s war
machinery to come to a virtual standstill.
The essence of Miliutin’s memorandum was self-evident. Russia did not

have the human reserves and the war matériel necessary to successfully
continue the war. Tsar Alexander drew from this desperate situation the
only possible rational conclusion: to accept the Austrian ultimatum and
thus open the door for the re-establishment of peace.
The search for peace after the fall of Sevastopol is discussed in Baumgart,
Peace of Paris, pp. 1–99. On the war council in Paris, January 1856, cf.
Baumgart, ‘Ein Kriegsrat Napoleons III. Englisch-französische Feldzugspläne
gegen Rußland 1855/56’, in Festschrift für Eberhard Kessel zum 75.

Geburtstag, ed. Heinz Duchhardt and Manfred Schlenke (Munich, 1982),
pp. 212–35; Martin Senner, ‘La guerre de 1856 n’aura pas lieu. Ein
“Scheinkriegsrat” Napoleons III.’, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 54
(1995): 31–59. On the two crown councils in St. Petersburg early in January
1856, cf. Baumgart, Peace of Paris, pp. 68–80; Igor V. Bestužev, ‘Krymskaja
vojna i revoljucionnaja situacija’, in Revoljucionnaja situacija v Rossii v
1859–1861 gg. (Moscow, 1963), pp. 189–213.
PART FIVE
The End of
the War
213
214
17
The Paris peace congress,
February–April 1856
Russia’s acceptance of the Austrian ultimatum on 16 January 1856 was the

decisive step for the opening of peace negotiations. On 1 February a protocol
was signed in Vienna between Buol and the diplomatic representatives of the
four belligerent powers (excluding Sardinia), stating that preliminaries of
peace, an armistice and a definitive peace treaty should be signed, and that
plenipotentiaries of these five powers should meet within three weeks. The
Five Points were annexed to the protocol.
Contrary to the diplomatic usage of the time, the preliminaries of peace
were not in fact negotiated and signed. Instead, the Vienna protocol was
annexed to the first protocol of the peace negotiations, which opened in
Paris on 25 February 1856. This procedure was due to Napoleon’s wish for
a speedy conclusion of peace. As mentioned earlier, diseases like scurvy and
typhoid fever were raging in the French army and immobilizing it. At the
end of February, of 150,000 soldiers, 22,000 were reported sick. This figure
jumped to 42,000 at the beginning of April.1
Hostilities were declared ended on 29 February. A formal armistice was
concluded on the Traktir bridge on the Tchernaya on 14 March. It was to
be valid on land only. The British government had feared that an extension
to the sea would lead to the lifting of the blockade, thereby giving Russia
free communications by water. The Allied naval commanders were, however,
instructed not to commit hostile acts against enemy coasts.
Peace negotiations opened in Paris on 25 February and the peace treaty
was signed on 30 March. After that date the peace congress held five more
sessions in which matters outside the Eastern Question were discussed, but
no resolutions were taken. The choice of Paris for the congress instead of
Vienna, which had been the centre d’entente during the war, was a clear
indication of the new international standing of France in Europe. It was also
the apex of Napoleon’s personal reputation in Europe. His dream of
converting the Paris peace congress into an international meeting, where a
general redrawing of the map of Europe – Napoleon’s grand design – would
take place, did come to fruition. The peace congress was, according to
215
international usage, presided over by the host country so that Count

Walewski took the chair. The Russian delegation was led by Count Orlov,
adjutant general to the Tsar. Count Buol represented Austria, while Lord
Clarendon had come from London. The Sultan had sent his Grand Vizir, Ali
Pasha. Sardinia had been admitted as a belligerent power, mainly due to
British pressure, and was represented by Count Cavour. Prussia, as one of
the five great powers, was admitted belatedly, on 18 March, after the main
questions had been dealt with.
Three territorial matters were discussed and resolved. The trickiest one
was the cession of part of Bessarabia. This cession was of Austrian origin
and was incorporated in Point One on the Danubian Principalities. Britain
had supported the demand, whereas Napoleon was unwilling to force it on
the Russians. It was supposed to remove Russia from the left bank of the
Danube and enable the Principalities (and the suzerain power, Turkey, and
the neighbouring power, Austria) to build a line of fortifications from the
fortress of Chotyn in the north, south beyond the Pruth river, and south-east
beyond the Danube to Lake Sasyk, north of the mouth of the Danube.
During the discussions the Russian delegation managed by open demands
and foul play (by producing an inaccurate map) to reduce the extent of the
territorial cession. They tried to bring the possession of Kars into the deal
and offer its retrocession for a reduction of the slip of Bessarabian territory.
Despite this maneuvre, the main reason for Russia succeeding in her demand
was the support given her by France. This points to the remarkable
realignment of powers which brought France and Russia, which had been
waging war against each other, closer together before the opening of the
congress. The new boundary line in Bessarabia that was finally agreed gave
several advantages to Russia compared to the territory she had in principle
ceded through her acceptance of the Austrian ultimatum:
1 The area she had to give up was much smaller.

2 Russia kept the important fortress of Chotyn and did not directly
border on the Bukovina.
3 Russia retained the village of Bolgrad, the centre of her Bulgarian
colony in Bessarabia. As she did not reveal that there were two
villages of the same name close to each other, she regained direct
access to the Yalpukh Sea and thereby to the Danube.
In another territorial question, Russia scored a similar success. This time

Britain was the dupe. The Fifth Point had, indirectly, provided for ‘the
consideration of the territories on the east coast of the Black Sea’. When
Clarendon was asked what the British meant by this vague demand, he
revealed that the line of the Kuban river should henceforth be the border
between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. When he was confronted with
treaty documents (the Treaty of Adrianople of 1829 and the Petersburg
convention of 1834) stating that Russia enjoyed the rightful possession ‘of
THE PARIS PEACE CONGRESS, FEBRUARY–APRIL 1856 217
the territories on the east coast of the Black Sea’, he had to give in and drop
his demand. The meagre point gained was the setting-up of an international
commission that had to delineate the frontier line unequivocally.2
Russia ceded the fortress of Kars and the adjoining territories after she
had been assured of the reduction of her Bessarabian cession.
Another territorial question which was hidden behind the Fifth Point was
the future of the Åland Islands. The fortress of Bomarsund had been razed
by the French and British navies in the summer of 1854. Sweden, with the
sympathy of Britain, was trying hard in January 1856 to obtain the cession
of the Åland Islands. But it was too late. She had to content herself with the
reduction of her demand to the demilitarization of the islands. This Count
Orlov readily conceded in the peace negotiations, adding with some irony
that Russia no longer attached any value to the fortifications as their
construction had been faulty from the start.
It is quite remarkable that the solution of the Third Point posed few
difficulties during the peace negotiations. Russia had accepted the principle
of neutralization, that is, demilitarization, of the Black Sea. The Third Point
had been the heart of Britain’s war aims. Originally it was worded as the
‘revision’ of the Straits convention of 1841 ‘in the interest of the European
balance of power’. During the Vienna peace negotiations in the spring of
1855 it was clarified and now meant the ‘cessation of Russia’s preponderance
in the Black Sea’. The peace conference foundered on Austria’s and Russia’s
resistance to this formula. The French Foreign Minister, Drouyn, had tried
in vain to save the conference by bringing under consideration the
‘neutralization’ of the Black Sea. The idea was now resurrected and accepted
by Russia. The blood spilt at Sevastopol had made this possible. During the
Paris peace congress only one or two side issues that emanated from the
principle were discussed. One point of contention was the number and size
of the police vessels that were to be granted to Russia and Turkey. According
to the British documents it was Palmerston who was pettifogging in this
matter, because he feared such police vessels could form the nucleus of a
future Russian Black Sea fleet. In the end, Russia was granted six steamships
with a weight of up to 800 tons each, and four light steam or sailing
ships of up to 200 tons each. Another point which the British treated with
pettiness was whether the Sea of Azov and the inland ports of Kherson and
Nikolaev fell within the scope of the principle of demilitarization. Here
Orlov gracefully conceded the point and the British delegates carried the
day.
According to the First Point, Russia had to give up her exclusive
protectorate over the two Danubian Principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia.
This she had done by accepting the Austrian ultimatum. During the peace
negotiations the Russian delegates could lean back and let the others
hammer out an alternative arrangement. The Austrian documents now
published clearly show that it is wrong to state, as older books on the
Crimean War often do, that Austria was trying hard to use her occupation
of the Principalities to keep them for good. Some of the generals – like Hess
and Coronini – certainly had this idea in mind, but the documents show that
Emperor Francis Joseph and Buol never considered such a solution, even
though Napoleon every now and then threw out a bait in this direction.
They wanted a European solution to the status of the Principalities.3
In Paris it was again Napoleon who was the troublemaker. On 8 March
he threw the gauntlet into the ring of the negotiations by making Walewski
announce his intention to unite the two provinces. This proposal, supported
lukewarmly by Clarendon (after the conclusion of peace, Britain was against
it), militated against the interests both of Turkey and of Austria. The
unification of the Principalities would loosen the bonds between the suzerain
and his provinces and finally lead to independence. Such an independent
medium-sized power on the flank of the Habsburg Empire would become a
focus of territorial ambition for the Rumanians living in the Austrian crown
land of Transylvania. It might also form an instrument of aggression in the
hands of Russia, the other neighbouring power.
Why did Napoleon pose this dangerous principle, the principle of
nationality, which had, up to that time, not been invoked in international
relations? He had two objectives in view. By calling upon this new-fangled
maxim, Napoleon hoped to create a precedent which he might invoke in
other instances more directly advantageous to France – on the left bank of
the Rhine, in Belgium or Savoy, for example. Another function that the
principle would serve was, in a tortuous – typically Napoleonic – way, to
raise the power of Sardinia and make that country dependent on him: the
Duke of Modena in northern Italy was to be deposed and made king of the
united Principalities. The Duchy of Parma would then be transferred to
Modena and the latter be apportioned to Sardinia.4
Due to Austrian and Turkish resistance, the proposal was rejected. In the
final peace treaty the status of the Principalities was paraphrased in negative
terms: there was to be no more Russian protectorate; there was to be no
further Russian interference in the internal affairs of the provinces, and so
on. The positive side was shrouded in vagueness: the Principalities were to
enjoy autonomy from the Porte; a mixed European commission was to be
set up to inquire into the actual state of the provinces and then propose the
basis for their future organization. It is obvious that these stipulations
simply postponed the final decision and contained the germs for a future
power struggle in this corner of Europe.
The Second Point demanded the freedom of navigation of the Danube,
which had been impeded by Russia in the past. The peacemakers in Paris
wanted to apply the principle of internationalizing rivers that flow through
several countries to the Danube. The principle had been proclaimed by the
Congress of Vienna and later on had been applied to the Rhine and the Elbe
rivers. As regards the Danube, Austria wanted to restrict the principle to the
delta and the lower Danube, but this was a weak position in view of the
precedents that existed. In order to implement the principle the congress set up
two commissions. One was the European Commission which had the task of
dredging the river from Isacchea down to the delta region within two years. Its
delegates would represent France, Austria, Britain, Prussia, Russia and Sardinia.
The other commission was the Permanent Riverain Commission consisting of
delegates from Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, Turkey and the three Danubian
Principalities (i.e. including Serbia). Its mandate was to work out a statute for
the navigation and policing of the Danube and ultimately assume the role
performed by the European Commission when the latter had been wound up.
The Fourth Point of the ultimatum concerned the immunity of the non-
Muslim subjects of the Sultan. As noted earlier in relation to the Menshikov
mission, the right assumed by Russia in a piecemeal fashion since the Treaty of
Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) to act as the protector of the Orthodox Christians
within the Ottoman Empire had originally given rise to the occupation by
Russian troops of the Danubian Principalities and to the outbreak of the
Russo-Turkish war in 1853. Just before the opening of the Paris peace
negotiations, on 18 February 1856, the Sultan published the hat-i humayun,
an edict in which the equality of all cults and races within his empire was
solemnly proclaimed. This was a revolutionary break with the old Ottoman
principle that the subjects of the Sultan consisted of two classes: the Muslims,
the dominant class; and the non-Muslims, the subject class. The proclamation
of equality meant that Muslims would now be free to change their religion –
an act which, according to the Koran, was punishable by death. Another
consequence of the hat was that Christian missions would now be allowed to
operate in the empire free from fear of persecution or molestation. Christian
subjects of the Sultan would also be admitted to all public offices and there
would be mixed courts for judicial matters concerning Christians and Muslims
alike.
The Sultan proclaimed the hat of his own accord, but with the intention
of forestalling any discussion at the peace congress that might infringe upon
his dignity as an independent sovereign. In this calculation he was right. The
powers found an innocuous formula in the peace treaty which acknowledged
‘the high value’ of the communication of the hat to the peace congress.
The congress finished its work in nineteen sessions within five weeks and
signed the peace treaty on 30 March 1856. This speedy conclusion was due
to efficient management by Napoleon, who behind the scenes gave audiences
to the delegates when they found themselves at an impasse and wanted to
appeal to him as an arbiter. It was also due to the negative experience of the
Vienna peace conference a year earlier and to the general exhaustion of the
belligerent powers in the theatres of war.
The delegates stayed in Paris beyond 30 March and held another five
sessions. They discussed matters loosely or even wholly unconnected with
the Eastern Question. The former included the Allied blockade, the evacuation
of the occupied territories and the setting up of the international commissions
provided for by the treaty. In the famous session of 8 April 1856, Walewski
as president of the congress placed the Italian Question on the agenda. This
FIGURE 17 The first page of the Treaty of Paris of 30 March 1856. Courtesy of Le
Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris.
was of course due to the untiring machinations of Cavour behind the scenes
and to the wish of Napoleon ‘to do something for Italy’. Napoleon had
originally wanted to let the congress glide into a general discussion of all
international questions currently unsolved or likely to produce contention in
the future, ranging across Poland and the question of Cracow, the Italian
Question, the situation of the press in Belgium, political refugees in
Switzerland, the issue of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, the Danish Sound dues
and many others. Such discussions would offer the opportunity to revise
the whole treaty structure of the Vienna Congress and begin a general
‘remaniement de la carte de l’Europe’, but after many exchanges behind the

scenes, Napoleon was dissuaded from opening this Pandora’s box.
The Italian Question was the only one which Britain – besides Cavour, of
course – wanted to put on the agenda. It was to be expected that Buol would
jump up and tell the congress that it had no mandate to discuss matters
outside the framework of the Eastern Question. This is what actually
happened. There were angry recriminations and counter-recriminations –
the Russian delegates relishing the scene as the enemy powers cut each other
up mercilessly. The upshot of it all was the meaningless ‘wish’ expressed by
the congress to see a speedy evacuation of the Papal States by foreign troops
(among them French troops!). Nobody was satisfied and everybody was
angry. ‘We have made bad work of it today with the Italian question,’
Clarendon wrote to Palmerston. Cavour was in despair and described the
declarations of 8 April as ‘sterile wishes’.5 The Italian Question was later
solved not because of the Paris congress but in spite of it.
Another ‘sterile wish’ was placed on record in the session of 14 April.
There Clarendon rose and asked the congress to give a general extension to
the principle laid down in article 8 of the peace treaty that in case of future
dissension between Turkey and one of the European great powers the
disputants should, before using force, ask the powers not concerned to offer
their mediation. This principle should be applied to all future international
conflicts. After some desultory discussion, the proposal for a resolution was
watered down to the expression of a ‘wish’ that the powers in conflict with
each other should, before having recourse to arms, appeal to ‘the good
offices’ of a friendly power.
From the documents now published it emerges that Clarendon’s source
of inspiration for his proposal was the London ‘Peace Society’, which had
asked the Foreign Secretary to introduce into the peace treaty an article
about arbitration in international conflicts.6 This idea was one of the core
features of the international peace movement of the nineteenth century. In
contrast to the wish expressed by the Paris congress on 14 April to appeal to
the ‘good offices’ of a third power by two states at loggerheads with each
other, the Peace Society had asked for ‘arbitration’ to be provided for in the
peace treaty. ‘Arbitration’ supposed the existence of a court or some such
institution which would arbitrate and confront the conflicting powers with
a decision they had to accept. The appeal to the ‘good offices’ was a
completely non-obligatory affair.
Greater binding force was given to another proposal on international law
that was brought forward in the session of 8 April 1856, again by Lord
Clarendon. The congress, this time with unanimity, subscribed to the
following principles of maritime law:
1 Abolition of privateering.
2 No seizure of enemy goods under neutral flags (except contraband
of war).
3 No seizure of neutral goods under enemy flags (except contraband).

4 Effectiveness of blockades.
These proposals, which the British and French governments had worked
out, were an outgrowth of the practice of both powers during the Crimean
War. The right of privateering had in fact fallen into disuse since the end of
the Napoleonic Wars. The European powers had issued no more letters of
marque (government licences to capture a vessel of an enemy state) since
1815. Point 1 of the declaration is therefore only the formal renunciation of
a practice in naval warfare that had lost its importance. Points 2 and 3 were
in favour of neutral trade in times of war. Any ships carrying goods not
contraband of war were now no longer subject to being halted, boarded and
captured. The fourth principle underlined the necessity that for a blockade
to be valid it had to be applied by force of arms, not simply by a paper
declaration. Britain was now quite ready to subscribe to a more liberal
approach to ships’ cargoes than in former times of war because by the
middle of the nineteenth century she was more dependent on the free flow
of goods than ever before. On the other hand, she could now more easily
cripple the war effort of an enemy country by virtue of her naval superiority,
which would permit an effective blockade of enemy coasts.
With its declaration on maritime law the Paris peace congress closed its
work after the actual signing of the peace treaty, not with a ‘sterile wish’, but
with a resolution that marked an important advance in international law.
18
The consequences of the war
for international relations
In assessing the results of the Crimean War, two different, but complementary
perspectives may be chosen: (i) the significance of the Treaty of Paris within
the narrower framework of Russo-Turkish relations; and (ii) the repercussions
of the Crimean War for international relations.
The Crimean War gave a chance of survival to the Ottoman Empire. Had
Tsar Nicholas had his will in 1853 and had the Menshikov mission
succeeded, this huge but decrepit empire would have fallen under the sway
of Russia. The integrity of Turkey was, however, ensured by the war effort
of Britain and France. Turkey was received as an equal member into the
Concert of Europe and was put under the collective guarantee of the
European great powers. This did not save Turkey from outside interference
– in fact, it now became much more frequent and marked than in the period
before 1853. However, this constant meddling in the internal affairs of
Turkey by each of the great powers naturally led to competition, which in
turn neutralized their influence. In the event, this was a major reason for the
long survival of the Ottoman Empire until the First World War. Another
reason was the will of the new Turkish leaders, Reshid, Ali and Fuad Pasha,
to introduce and implement reforms to the structure of the empire.
The effect of these reforms was not only impaired by the interference of
the European powers, but also by the poison of nationalism. It led to the
disintegration of the empire, starting on its periphery – the Balkans, Syria,
Palestine, Egypt and Crete. In the Balkans the first peoples to emancipate
themselves from Turkish dominion and suzerainty were the Serbs, the
Rumanians and the Montenegrins. Turkey as the suzerain power and Austria
as the immediate neighbour were the champions of the status quo of 1856 in
the Balkans. This was vague enough. France on the other hand supported the
process of emancipation in these regions. To a certain extent she was joined
by Russia, which wanted to take revenge for the defeat of 1856. Britain
vacillated. The leading circles in Rumania and Serbia took political matters
into their own hands, sure of French support, and exploited every European
crisis after 1856 – the wars of 1859, 1864, 1866 and 1870–71 – in order to
free themselves from the Turkish yoke. Step by step Serbia, Rumania and
223
Montenegro obtained autonomy until their independence was sanctioned by

Europe in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin.
The stipulations of the Treaty of Paris that were most vexatious to Russia
were the neutralization of the Black Sea and the cession of parts of Bessarabia.
Neutralization meant the restriction of Russia’s sovereignty over her Black
Sea coast. Her foreign policy after 1856 was geared to regaining that
sovereignty. On the other hand, each of the European powers, except Britain,
offered Russia concealed help to undo that stipulation. After 1858, hardly a
year elapsed in which Russia was not told by France, Prussia or Austria that
they would support her in scrapping the article for a quid pro quo. In the
summer of 1866 – during the Austro-Prussian war – Alexander M. Gorchakov,
Russia’s Foreign Minister after the end of the war, prepared a circular for
Russia’s diplomatic representatives abroad announcing the neutralization of
the Black Sea to be null and void. But the war of 1866 was over too soon for
Gorchakov’s pronouncement to be opportune. Four years later, after the
outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, the moment seemed once again
propitious. On 31 October 1870, Gorchakov took the circular from the
drawer and announced to Europe that Russia no longer felt herself bound by
the relevant articles of the Paris peace treaty. Although there was a general
outcry over the unilateral way in which Russia handled the question, all the
signatory powers, Britain now included, did not raise material objections. In
a European conference, which took place in London between January and
March 1871, Russia’s action was sanctioned post festum.
The article of the Treaty of Paris that dealt with the cession of part of
Bessarabia remained in force only a few years longer. After Russia’s next
war against Turkey in 1877–8, which this time did not lead to a general
European war, one of Russia’s demands was the retrocession of Bessarabia.
The relevant article in the Treaty of San Stefano of 3 March 1878 was given
European sanction by the Berlin Congress of that year. Thus Russia had
undone two of the most humiliating clauses of the Paris peace treaty within
a relatively short time.
The repercussions of the Crimean War for the policy of the European
great powers and their mutual relations were far reaching. Together with the
revolution years of 1848–9, the Crimean War marks a turning-point in
European history. The Concert of Europe, which had been formed after the
Napoleonic Wars in order to subdue revolutionary movements and settle
international conflicts through international conferences, had to a large
extent broken down. Power politics that had been softened up to that time
by the principle of solidarity were now pursued in a more naked, brutal and
unilateral form. The age of realpolitik began and was pursued by a new
generation of statesmen – of whom Schwarzenberg in Austria, Napoleon III
in France, Gorchakov in Russia and Bismarck in Prussia are the most
conspicuous representatives.
For Russia, the Crimean War marked a radical change in her foreign
policy. The war had revealed the basic weaknesses in the fabric of her
CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR FOR INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS 225
MAP 11 Russian losses under the Treaty of Paris, 1856.
power: her autocratic government system, her sterile social structure, her
army system based on serfdom, the backwardness of her economy. Defeat in
war had taught the new Tsar that reforms had to be introduced, but reforms
that would not undermine his autocratic power. Thus the abolition of
serfdom was prepared and implemented as a necessary prerequisite for
reform of the army. Foreign capital was attracted in order to build a railway
network that would develop industry and make the army, the most important
pillar of the autocratic system, more mobile. Russian policy after 1856 was
therefore focused on development of the social and economic resources of
the country.
Foreign policy now played second fiddle to domestic policy. Russia
relinquished her role as the ‘gendarme of Europe’, a role she had played for
decades under Alexander I and Nicholas I. In one of his first diplomatic
circulars to Europe, the new Foreign Minister announced, ‘People say that
Russia is sulky. Russia is not sulky, she is collecting her strength.’1 Russia
would also abstain from intervention in foreign countries in order to defend
general principles, like solidarity among the great powers and the legitimacy
of sovereigns. Russia would now go about her own business, and this meant
first and foremost revising the Paris peace treaty of 1856.
To facilitate such a policy Russia was open to a rapprochement with
France. This had been initiated before and during the Paris peace congress.
Napoleon had by then dropped Austria as a partner because she was such a
dyed-in-the-wool conservative power that any revision or any redrawing of

the map of Europe seemed impossible. Why should not two revisionist
powers come together? Napoleon dreamt of bringing Britain into such an
alliance, but he misinterpreted the deep-rooted antagonism of that power
towards Russia. So he had to content himself with a rapprochement with
Russia. Yet it never reached the intimacy of a proper alliance. It bore fruit
when France together with Sardinia waged war on Austria over northern
Italy in 1859, when Russia repaid Austria in kind by concentrating an army
of observation on the Galician frontier. It showed its first cracks when Tsar
Alexander II realized that France’s intervention in the process of Italian
unity was openly revolutionary. It broke down when Napoleon supported
the Polish uprising of 1863.
Austria was the country that suffered the most serious consequences
from the Crimean War. She may be accused of having vacillated between an
alliance with Russia, which Nicholas had offered her, and a war alliance
with the two Western powers, but, as already noted, there was no alternative
to this policy. Any participation in the war on either side would have meant
a general European convulsion which would in turn have led to a second
edition of the revolution of 1848–9 and the break-up of her multinational
empire. Such prospects were clearly before Buol’s and Francis Joseph’s eyes,
and they therefore chose the lesser evil of staying out of the war and running
the risk of isolating Austria in the midst of the other great powers. Their
search for a firm alliance with Britain and France was unsuccessful because
the conditions for such an alliance, in terms of the inner structure of the
three powers, were missing. Austria had thus to cope with the forces of
nationalism by falling back on her own resources. She succumbed to them
in two wars: in 1859 when Italian nationalism allied itself with France; and
in 1866 when Prussia, allied to the new Italy, solved the perennial problem
of German dualism in her favour.
Prussia had managed to withstand the temptations from East and West
during the Crimean War. She was the power that profited more than any
other country from the disintegration of the Concert of Europe. She profited
from Austria’s weakness and from the passiveness of Russia’s foreign policy
after 1856. This was not due to the dynastic ties that existed between the
houses of Hohenzollern and the Romanovs, or any sense of gratitude that
the Tsar might have felt for Prussia’s neutrality during the Crimean War, but
rather the immobility of her two neighbours that she exploited under
Bismarck and which paved the way to German unification. In three short
wars she brought about the kleindeutsch solution of the German question
without having to fear the intervention of Russia or any other power.
Napoleon III found himself in 1856 at the zenith of his power. He had
managed to strike the death blow to the Holy Alliance, the guardian of the
system of 1815. He had allied himself to Britain and together with her had
brought Russia to her knees. For a short while he was the arbiter of Europe,
but as he made the principle of nationality the focal point of his foreign
CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR FOR INTERNATIONAL REL ATIONS 227
policy he barred the way to a lasting alliance with one of the great powers.
Although his alliance with Britain survived the Crimean War, both partners
drifted apart and their interests soon collided over Italy and over countless
details of the Eastern Question. France lost Russia over the Polish uprising.
Napoleon flirted again with Austria, but in the German Question he was no
match for the craftiness of Bismarck. He finally discredited himself through
his Mexican adventure. He had come to power through revolution and
finally perished through war.
For Britain, the Crimean War ended too soon. Great exertions had been
made to continue the war in 1856, with hundreds of gunboats built
specifically for a grand naval campaign in the Baltic. In February 1856 the
British army in the Crimea for the first time surpassed the French army in
numbers. The humiliation of the failure before the Redan was not yet
avenged. Napoleon’s yearning for peace after Sevastopol and Austria’s
ultimatum cheated Britain out of a resounding success in the campaign of
1856. Therefore the general feeling in the country, both in terms of public
opinion and within the government, was one of despair and exasperation.
Much blood had been spilt and much money had been spent. And the result?
Russia’s power was not reduced substantially, but had received only a
scratch on the surface. The antagonism between the two countries remained
as strong as ever; it was now merely transferred from the Near to the Middle
and the Far East. The result of Britain’s disappointment over the meagre
results of the Crimean War was that she turned her back on the affairs of the
European continent and concentrated her efforts on reforms at home and on
the consolidation of her empire overseas. Sir Robert Morier later described
the Crimean War as ‘the only perfectly useless modern war that has been
waged’.2 In a somewhat softer tone, Disraeli, who was Leader of the
Opposition during the Crimean conflict, referring to the many problems it
had left unsolved and the new ones it had created, called the struggle ‘a just
but unnecessary war’.3 Indeed, it was as unnecessary as every war is, but it
was rich in consequences.
(for chapters 17 and 18)
The Paris peace congress of 1856 is discussed in Baumgart, Peace of Paris.
All the issues mentioned here are discussed at length in this book. There are
two collections of essays commemorating the 150th anniversary of the
peace congress: George-Henri Soutou (ed.), Napoléon et l’Europe. 1856, le
congrès de Paris (Versailles, 2006); Gilbert Ameil (ed.), Le congrès de Paris
(1856). Un événement fondateur (Brussels, 2009). How the results of the
war related to the execution of the peace treaty is dealt with by Werner E.
Mosse, The Rise and Fall of the Crimean System, 1855–71: The Story of a
Peace Settlement (London, 1963). For a general discussion on the context of

international relations, cf. the corresponding chapters in Winfried Baumgart,
Europäisches Konzert und nationale Bewegung. Internationale Beziehungen
1830–1878 (Paderborn, 1999, 2nd edn 2007). A new study on Austria after
the war is provided by Katharina Weigand, Österreich, die Westmächte und
das europäische Staatensystem nach dem Krimkrieg (1856–1859) (Husum,
1997).
19
The medical services
As to human losses in the wars in modern European history up to the

Crimean War,1 the general statement is correct that death from actual
fighting plays a far lesser role than death from disease, first of all from
infectious disease. Most of the time soldiers do not fight, but sit or lie in
cramped space in the most uncomfortable conditions of life. Such masses of
men are an ideal hotbed for infectious diseases – and these affect the health
of armies either marching or camping. When in the summer of 1829, during
the Russo-Turkish War, Russian troops arrived at Adrianople, the capture of
Constantinople seemed just a matter of days away. But then dysentery
spread among the army to such a degree (more than one-third of the
Russians in the city of Adrianople were affected) that the Russian
commander-in-chief preferred to conclude peace with the Turks as quickly
as possible.2
Twenty-five years later, at the time of the Crimean War, medical science
had progressed compared with 1829; but the decisive breakthrough in
combating infectious disease had not yet succeeded. The causes of such
diseases – bacteria – were not yet discovered and therefore could not be
controlled, but instead rage freely. A handful of researchers at the time
adhered to the theory of ‘contagium vivum’, that is, that the focus of
infectious diseases could only be found within the living organism; but the
majority adhered to the ‘miasma theory’, that is, that (infectious) diseases
arise solely outside the human body. The actual dissemination could not be
described. It was only when Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur made their
discoveries in the second half of the nineteenth century that the causes
became clearer. In 1882, Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus and a year
later the cholera bacillus so that from now on preventive countermeasures
(vaccination) could be taken.
The Crimean War with its many epidemics that raged among the soldiers
was the occasion for an acrimonious debate between ‘miasmatics’ and
‘contagionists’ (who thought that the centres of contagion were to be sought
within the human body). Thus in July–August 1854, when cholera spread
among the Allied troops assembled at Varna, the surgeon general of the
British Army of the East, Dr John Hall, advocated the opinion that by
229
taking the troops from the unhealthy town of Varna with its heaps of
garbage and swampy surroundings and transporting them across the Black
Sea to the Crimea, the health of the soldiers would improve considerably. In
reality, the cholera travelled with them on board the ships to Eupatoria.3
Hall’s French colleague, Dr Auguste Marroin, was quite right when he
wrote:
The convalescents coming from the hospital at Gallipoli brought the

infection with them on our ships and then to the hospitals at Varna . . .
On the day of the departure of the ships [on 1 September 1854], the
cholera struck the vessels with an extraordinary intensity . . . This fact
seems to furnish arguments to the contagionists.4
Diseases: cholera, typhoid, hospital

gangrene, scurvy
Cholera
In contrast to typhoid or scurvy, cholera was a fairly new disease for
Europeans. It had invaded the continent thirty years earlier, when it was
transported from the Ganges region of India to Eastern Europe in the mid-
1820s, whence it trickled across the Russian frontiers to Central and Western
Europe. In the course of the nineteenth century it caused millions of deaths
in Europe and the United States. The epidemic of 1832 – the second of its
kind in Europe – caused, in France alone, the death of 103,000 people. The
Crimean War occurred during a third epidemic visiting Europe from 1847
to 1857. In 1854 the cholera wave reached the British Isles. It wrought
havoc in London especially: in the three summer months of June to August,
the death rate there amounted to 11,777.5 At the same time it hit the Allied
expeditionary corps in Varna.
The starting-point of this cholera epidemic was not in Varna itself, but in
southern France. Even at the time, its progress could be clearly traced.6 On
26 June 1854, the French steamer Alexandre had left Marseilles with troops
on board. The soldiers were taken ill immediately on departure. The first
casualty was disembarked at Messina, the second at Piraeus. The soldiers
had previously marched through Avignon where the cholera was already
raging; Marseilles was affected, too. In the course of further shipments, the
cholera spread among the French expeditionary corps. Instead of isolating
the infected vessels at Gallipoli or Constantinople, the French Commander-
in-Chief, Marshal Saint-Arnaud, ordered them to proceed to Varna and
thereby gave free reign to the disease. On 21 July, ninety-four cases were
registered there, thirty-seven of which ended fatally. The men died within a
few hours.
THE MEDICAL SERVICES 231
Saint-Arnaud made matters worse by ordering three of his divisions away

from the crowded situation in Varna to march to the Dobrudja in order to
expel Russian troops there. The expedition very quickly ended in utter
desaster. In the hot and humid climate the soldiers dropped dead like
flies. Within a few days, 6,000 died, having hardly seen any Russians. Thus
without engaging with the enemy, all three divisions were decimated.
In the same period there were also many cholera victims in the English
camp at Varna. The disease spread among the two fleets.7 The Allied
commanders, spurred on by orders from London, hit upon the idea of
evacuating the troops to the Crimea as quickly as possible. But this proved
of no avail. Throughout the war, cholera remained a constant companion of
the Allied troops in the Crimea. In the winter of 1854–5 it did not spread
significantly, but with the onset of warmer weather in 1855, the disease in
both armies developed again into an epidemic. In the British camp at
Balaklava the death toll rose to 1,600 within a few months.8
Prominent victims of the cholera included Marshal Saint-Arnaud, on
29 September 1854, and Lord Raglan, the British Commander-in-Chief, on
28 June 1855. Admiral Bruat, the Commander-in-Chief of the French fleet
in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, followed suit on 19 November
1855. Nonetheless, cholera caused fewer deaths among officers than among
the ranks. This phenomenon was attributed to better living conditions and
observation of the basic rules of hygiene among officers.9 Although the
opinion was still widespread that bad air on the ships, in the tents and
barracks was the main cause of the disease spreading, it was noticeable that
officers who helped themselves to much wine and avoided water were hardly
affected by cholera. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century
that the opinion gained ground that the main cause of cholera was polluted
water.
In total, cholera was responsible for 11,000 deaths in the French Armée
d’Orient and 4,500 deaths in the British Army of the East.10 The death rate
among cholera cases in both armies reached 60 per cent. It is remarkable
that cholera in the Russian garrison in Sevastopol never grew to the
dimension of an epidemic as it did with the French and British.11 This may
be due to the fact that the Russians, who were quartered in fortified garrisons,
had a far more regular supply of drinking water than the Allied soldiers.
One of the Russian staff physicians, Anton Hubbenet, pointed out that each
soldier was questioned by his officer twice a day about stomach and
intestinal complaints, proof that precautions against the spread of disease
were applied in a systematic fashion by the Russians. According to Hubbenet,
there were few cholera cases in 1854, whereas for the year 1855 he mentions
the figure of 3,500 deaths.12
In November 1855 the German Legion, comprising 10,000 men, arrived
at Skutari (Constantinople) and was immediately struck by cholera. Some
200 cases were registered,13 but there are no figures for the death rate.
Typhoid
In British books on the Crimean War and in British national identity, the
‘Crimean winter’ of 1854–5, with its thousands of victims from diverse
diseases, has been raised to a myth, especially due to by the articles by The
Times correspondent William Howard Russell. In addition to cholera,
diarrhoea and scurvy, frostbite is also at the top of Russell’s list. But he does
not mention the causes of death. These reflected the poor supply of clothes
and food. Yet, Russell does not mention a disease that was well known and
widespread at the time – typhoid. It was never an epidemic in the British
army, but judging from French research, the picture for the French Armée
d’Orient was quite different. Although the death rate due to typhoid
among French soldiers was almost the same in both winters (1854–5 and
1855–6) – that is, 11,00014 – it was the second winter that stood out, not
because of the statistics – 20,000 soldiers suffering from typhoid, 10,000 of
whom died – but because there was hardly any fighting in this period.15 In
the same winter, the British Army of the East lost only sixteen soldiers due
to typhoid.
The first cases of typhoid appeared in the French army in spring 1855,
but the number was at first limited. In January 1856 the number of infected
men rose dramatically and reached its climax in March when in one day
alone, 257 new cases were recorded.16 The French physicians knew very well
what the causes really were. Because typhoid is infectious, the situation was
exacerbated due to ‘the impossibility to isolate the infected men and the
overcrowding of hospitals’.17 From the beginning of the war, those who
were sick but could be moved were evacuated from the Crimea to
Constantinople, while the convalescents who were no longer fit for military
service were reshipped to France. In this way the highly infectious disease
spread widely. The inspector of the French medical service, Lucien Baudens,
demanded two precautionary measures to check the disease: ‘First to send
no more sick to France and secondly to keep all typhoid cases in the Crimea
and isolate them from the sick bound for Constantinople.’18 Tragically,
Baudens himself fell ill with typhus and died in Paris in 1857.
The really nasty thing about the epidemic was that because of the high
risk of infection the medical staff themselves succumbed. In the winter
months of 1855–6, forty-six doctors died from typhoid (eighty-two during
the whole war) as did twenty-four ‘Sisters of Mercy’ (thirty-one in all).19
Only when the evacuation of the Armée d’Orient was completed, in August
1856, did the epidemic die down.
Hospital gangrene
Like cholera, hospital gangrene was widespread in all three (four, if the
Turks are included) Crimean armies. It was one of the most dreaded diseases
in the overcrowded military hospitals at that time. Baudens called it ‘the
most terrible enemy the Army of the East had to fight with’.20 Gangrene
develops in fresh or healing wounds and makes them grow deeper and
larger. The tissue involved decays: it ‘necrotizes’. There was no treatment for
this problem at the time: the affected limbs, mostly feet or hands, had to be
amputated. A few years later, in the 1860s, the English surgeon Joseph Lister
promoted the idea of sterile surgery, that is, he disinfected the wounds and
protected them with sterile dressings so that they could no longer get into
contact with putrefactive agents. In the Crimean War, all wounded soldiers
were liable to hospital gangrene either due to an injury or to its surgical
treatment.
There are no statistics about the number of those who died from gangrene.
The official statistics generally carry the designation ‘killed and wounded’.
Sometimes the categories are separated, but there are no details about the
wounded who survived or died sooner or later. In any event, it is hardly
possible to extract the number of gangrene-dead from the general number
of casualties. Many wounded soldiers developed several diseases that
ended in death, so that the statistician is at a loss to determine who died
from which disease. At any rate, contemporary data permit us to establish
the ratio between those who were wounded and died and those who were
discharged and cured. It varies between 1:3 and 1:5, so that a rough
average of 1:4 should be realistic. In individual cases, however, one must
differentiate. Thus, on the battlefield of the Alma, there were about 1,800
Russians killed and 3,900 wounded. Nobody counted the latter. The
Russian army had to evacuate the field after having lost the battle and
had not been able to recover these men. The Allies’ first priority was their
own dead and wounded, and only two or three days later did they attend
to the Russians, many of whom had by then succumbed to their wounds.
To a much higher degree, this also applies to the Battle of Inkerman of
4 November 1854.
Scurvy
Scurvy exemplifies the phenomenon that Crimean soldiers often suffered
from several diseases which exacerbated their physical weakness. It was a
disease well known long before the Crimean War and was widespread
among ships’ crews, in besieged fortresses and among expeditionary groups.
It was already known that it was a nutritional disorder, which led to
spontaneous bleeding, pain in the limbs, and so on, and that it could be
combated by vitamin C. The absence of vitamin C from a diet for two to
four months causes tooth bleeding or even the loss of teeth, which makes
chewing very painful or even impossible, bleeding from the nose and the
intestines and also ulceration, which may lead to gangrene.
In the Crimean War the British fleet and army were much less affected by
scurvy than their French allies. This was possibly due to the experience of
the British as a seafaring nation who knew how to deal with the disease
much better than the French. Since the 1760s, ships of the Royal Navy had
been obliged to carry lemons as part of their food supplies as a preventive
measure.
The first cases of scurvy in the French Crimean navy appeared as early as
August 1853. In the second half of 1854, scurvy developed to epidemic
proportions in both the navy and the army. The cause was the uniform food
which mostly consisted of salted meat and dried vegetables. The
countermeasures were obvious. The symptoms could be subdued by
introducing fresh meat and fresh vegetables. The nutritional situation was
normally good at Constantinople, where there were many military hospitals
and where the necessary food could be procured in the bazaars. Shipping
traffic between Constantinople and Kamiesh (the French supply depot in the
Crimea) and Balaklava developed curious practices: in winter, half pigs and
cows were hung up in the open air; in summer, live animals were put on
board which could be slaughtered on the spot.
In spite of these preventive measures, the death rate among soldiers
suffering from scurvy was appallingly high. However, the available records
differ widely and point to a problem which is inherent in all statistics
relating to the Crimean War: their unreliability, which at times is incredible.
Baudens mentions 26,000 cases of scurvy in the French army for the
period of April 1855 to August 1856. Of these, 3,634 died.21 The surgeon
general of the Armée d’Orient, Jean Charles Chenu, writes of 16,000
scurvy cases for the longer period of October 1854 to March 1856, of
whom 1,109 died.22 He lists 1,935 scurvy cases and 165 dead for the British
army in the same period. The latter figure at least shows that scurvy did
not assume epidemic dimensions in the British Army of the East. In
Russian statistics, scurvy does not show up at all because, obviously, their
supply sitution was much more favourable as the hinterland was open to
them.
The medical service: surgeons and

nursing staff
In comparison with the Napoleonic Wars, the medical and nursing situation
during the Crimean War was relatively good on both sides. This is due to the
fact that the war of 1854–6 was a trench war which enabled a stable
infrastructure for the medical service; the Napoleonic Wars, in contrast,
were mobile wars which did not permit of a mobile medical service. And
after all, forty to fifty years had elapsed since the Napoleonic Wars, during
which medical treatment had made some progress. Of course, the Crimean
War years cannot be compared with the two world wars of the twentieth
century in terms of medical advances.
Surgeons
The French medical service, which dates back to the beginning of the
eithteenth century, suffered, under Napoleon, from a basic problem which
Chenu in 1870 formulated thus:
Les médecins de l’armée française ne sont . . . que des agents d’exécution,

sans autorité, sans initiative et sans responsabilité. Ils ne dirigent rien, et il
leur est même interdit de s’immiscer dans les détails du service administratif.
[The doctors of the French army are . . . only executive organs having
neither authority nor initiative nor responsibility. They have . . . no right
whatsoever to interfere in the details of the administrative service.]23
In the Crimean War the subordination of the medical service to the

commissariat meant that the doctors did not develop initiatives in questions
vital to the medical service: in the construction and the equipment of military
hospitals or tents, in the supply of food and medical material, in the
ambulance service from the front line to the various hospitals at Kamiesh
and Constantinople, and so on. Besides, the rank of surgeon carried no
military status unlike later on (and today), so that at the barrack gates,
curious scenes might be played out: for example, the medical inspector (who
possessed the highest rank in the medical hierarchy) would not be saluted by
the guard, whereas an accompanying officer, whatever his rank, would be.24
The training of surgeons in the French army was better organized than in
the British army. They had gone through the normal training in the medical
faculties and then specialized in the military hospital of Val-de-Grâce in
Paris. The surgeons who were on duty in the Crimea and at Constantinople
came from this hospital or from the army in Algeria where they had gained
useful experience.25
The medical service in the French Armée d’Orient was inspected by two
prominent military surgeons: Michel Lévy and Lucien Baudens. Lévy was
one of the great hygienists of the nineteenth century. In his book of 1845,
Traité d’hygiène, he underlined the importance of public hygiene, which he
termed ‘social medicine’. When he inspected the hospitals in Constantinople
and the Crimea, he waged a futile battle against the routine and apathy of
the commissariat. The members of this service did not know what prevention
or hygiene really was. Thus, in the hospital in Constantinople they had
cholera cases and wounded soldiers in proximity. Six months after Lévy had
departed from the Levant, Baudens took over the duty of inspection in
September 1855. He fought the same futile battle against the indolence of
the commissariat officers. His recommendations regarding hygiene were
either ignored or put into practice too late.
The 550 French surgeons on duty in the East suffered a high death toll:
eighty-three died while on duty, only one of them from a war wound: fifty-
eight from typhoid, eighteen from cholera and six from other diseases.26
The death toll in the British medical service was somewhat lower because
there was no typhoid epidemic in the British army. In contrast to France,
there was no special training centre for military surgeons in Britain, but they
were supposed to have obtained a commission at one of the royal surgical
institutions and practical experience in a hospital. When the war started in
the East, it was not easy to establish a medical corps in sufficient numbers.
During the first Crimean winter, when everything went wrong in the British
army, quite a number of surgeons made use of their right to quit the service
and return to Britain. It was simply nerve-racking to grapple each day with
the red tape instead of helping the sick and wounded as conscience
demanded. At the political top in London there were not only two state
secretaries for war (one Secretary at War and one Secretary for War and the
Colonies), but also three different organizations overseeing the medical and
hospital services of the British army: the Commissariat and the Purveyor’s
Department, both of which came under the authority of the Treasury, and
the Medical Department, which was answerable to the Secretary at War
(Sidney Herbert until February 1855, Lord Panmure thereafter).27 The
spheres of authority of the first two organizations overlapped inextricably,
so that a surgeon who ordered some medical equipment was sent back and
forth with the result that a sick man on the spot would come to a wretched
end over the interminable red tape.
The immovability of these institutions was so scandalous that, together
with the deadlock in the fighting at Sevastopol, it provoked a change of
government in January 1855. During the course of the war, no fewer than
four committees of inquiry investigated this bureaucratic quagmire. The
result, though, was quite remarkable. The supply of the British army and of
the medical service worked much better in the second Crimean winter. The
service was now up to its task and the mortality rate among soldiers dropped
significantly, ultimately reversing the situation that had prevailed in the first
Crimean winter in comparison to the condition of the French army. Now
the British were doing well whereas the French lost thousands and thousands
of sick, so that Napoleon III began to seriously consider withdrawing his
army from the East in the spring of 1856.
A typical British expedient in the second half of the Crimean War was to
recruit civilian doctors from across Britain and even institute two hospitals
managed entirely by civilian doctors: at Smyrna and at Renköy (Renkioi) on
the Dardanelles.28
Of the 720 British doctors who served in the East, fifty died of sickness
and two from war wounds.29 The ratio between survivors and dead looks
much better than on the French side.
Civilian doctors not only served in the British medical service of the East
but also, in greater numbers, in its Russian counterpart – 118 altogether.30 A
special feature of the Russian side was the presence of 114 German and
American doctors in the Russian medical corps. Their salary was higher
than that of the Russian doctors, which produced much envy of the
foreign personnel. The communication problems created additional

complications.
A high percentage of Russian military surgeons in the Crimea were young
and inexperienced, many of whom had not even finished their training.
Anton von Hubbenet specifies their number as 1,231, working alongside
more experienced colleagues who numbered 1,608.31 Compared with the
French and British surgeons, the figure is enormous, the more so when one
adds the ‘auxiliary surgeons’, which brought the total to 3,759.
However, this figure must be seen in relation to the size of the Russian
army in the Crimea. In the garrison of Sevastopol alone there were 170,000
soldiers during the whole siege period;32 in addition there were approximately
230,000 men stationed in other garrisons of the Crimea. Hubbenet’s casualty
list (dead, wounded and sick) for Sevastopol amounts to the appallingly
high number of 139,000, which means that only about 31,000 survived the
war without injury or sickness.33 The total number of Russian army
personnel in the Crimea who were treated medically up to 13 November
1855 is about 325,000. In light of these figures, the number of military
surgeons is by no means high so that the complaint in the sources of a want
of medical personnel – which one reads in the French and British Armies of
the East as well – is very justified.
There is another fact peculiar to the Russian side which should be
mentioned. Although no clear difference is made in Russian statistics
between wounded and sick, the number of wounded, in comparison with
the corresponding Allied figures, is incomparably higher. The number of
Russian casualties in the battles of the Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, Evpatoria
and the Tchernaya (over 26,000 dead and wounded)34 was enormous. And
the rate of wounded and dead in the twelve months’ siege is even higher.
This can be illustrated by just a few statistics: the two days of the Allied
bombardment of 17–18 June 1855 cost the Russians about 5,500 dead and
wounded; the continuous bombardment in August produced 1,000 dead
and wounded per day. The list of dead and wounded from October 1854 to
8 September 1855 amounted to 100,000.35 These figures clearly show that
Russian surgeons had to look after many more wounded than did the Allies.
The most prominent Russian surgeons to serve in the Crimean army were
Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov and Anton Christian von Hübbenet (Hubbeneth).
Pirogov was professor at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg;
Hubbeneth was professor of medicine at the Saint Vladimir University in
Kiev. Pirogov was the most renowned Russian surgeon of the time, who
made a name for himself in the field of ‘war surgery’. When he went to the
Crimea he took with him several surgeons he had trained in St Petersburg.
He arrived there in November 1854, and in the course of the following
months he performed numerous operations and amputations. His letters
from Sevastopol, written in the form of a diary from November 1854 to
December 1855, are published36 and give a graphic description of his work
in the Crimea. Hubbeneth brought with him four of his best disciples from
Kiev. A comprehensive report of his stay in the Crimea was published in

1870. It is Hubbeneth to whom we are in debt for the wealth of statistics
about the self-sacrifice of Russian surgeons in the Crimea.37 Of the 2,839
surgeons, 354, or one-eighth, died, only five of them from war wounds. Of
the 3,759 auxiliary surgeons, 1,664 died (or were unfit for service) during
the years 1853 to 1856.
Nursing staff
There are practically no sources available regarding non-medical auxiliary
staff. Suffice to say that this group – medical orderlies, stretcher-bearers,
dressers, and so on – performed the lower services and consisted of older,
convalescent or punished soldiers who were mostly drunk and difficult to
manage.
In contrast to this male group of auxiliary personnel, we are well informed
about the female nursing staff. Their activity on both sides of the Crimean
War is a novel thing in the history of war and of the medical service. Up to
that time, the employment of women in the rough and brutal circumstances
of war was inconceivable. In comparison with the medical service – trained
and untrained – their number is small indeed. It may have been 500
altogether in all three armies. From the viewpoint of the surgeons – and this
is well documented in the British case – their presence was unwelcome.
The relationship gradually changed, but tensions remained until the end
of the war. Between the most prominent nurse, Florence Nightingale, and
the surgeon general of the British Army of the East, Dr John Hall, there
developed a deep-seated animosity which almost resulted in a parliamentary
committee of inquiry. Pirogov, on the other side, seems to have gladly taken
the Russian sisters with him; at least he is full of praise for them during his
stay at Sevastopol.38
The British nurses

Among the nurses of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale is the most
prominent and the best known. She has become a legend and the books on
her are her legacy. Through the classical biography of Cecil Woodham-
Smith39 and her letters from the Crimean War published by Sue M. Goldie,40
Nightingale has emerged as a figure of some substance. Most of the surgeons
in Constantinople and in the Crimea met her with dislike or even hostility
because she ruled over the hospitals with an iron fist and regularly subverted
the procedures of the hospital service. In contrast to the surgeons, she had
the immeasurable advantage that public opinion in Britain was unanimously
on her side and praised her to the skies, while the Secretary at War, Sidney
Herbert,41 supported her with enthusiam and the Queen was her mighty
protectress.
Nightingale was the symbol of a mighty reform movement in Britain

which wanted to improve the lot of the industrial workers, slum dwellers,
the privates in the army, the child workers, the slaves in the British colonies
and the whole milieu of the underclass. Her activity in the East therefore
caused a sensational response in her mother country. Nightingale was
absolutely convinced of her misson. On the one hand her letters reveal a
boundless conceit, on the other a morbid distrust of almost everybody she
had to deal with at Skutari (Constantinople) and Balaklava: the military
surgeons, the officers of the army and of the commissariat, the ambassador
in Constantinople (Lord Redcliffe), the chief surgeon of the hospitals in
Constantinople (Dr Duncan Menzies) and the principal medical officer of
the Army of the East (Dr John Hall). She even developed reservations about
the nurses she had brought with her from England because they did not
sacrifice themselves for the sick with the same selfless devotion that she did.
She hated red tape which, in the special situation of the war, clung to routine
and produced immobility. She hated the surgeons because they did not care
two hoots about the wellbeing of the soldiers, whom they and the officers
regarded as ‘the scum of the earth’. She did not trust anybody an inch
because she feared rivalry. Like someone possessed, she was wrapped up in
her work. At heart she revelled in the feeling of riding a wave of popularity
in Britain, but she also feared the prospect of falling from this pinnacle if she
should fail in her superhuman effort to save thousands of wounded and sick
from death.
When the war correspondent William Howard Russell published his
moving reports in The Times about the suffering of the British army in the
Crimea, on 9, 12 and 13 Ocotber 1854, the moment had come for Florence
Nightingale to leave England for the East. On 9 October, Russell had said of
the Battle of the Alma, ‘The number of lives which have been sacrificed by
the want of proper arrangements and neglect must be considerable.’42 And
on 13 October, he wrote about the conditions in the Skutari hospital:
The manner in which the sick and wounded are treated is worthy only of
the savages of Dahomey . . . The worn-out pensioners who were brought
as an ambulance corps are totally useless, and not only are surgeons not
to be had, but there are no dressers or nurses to carry out the surgeon’s
directions . . . Here the French are greatly our superiors. Their
arrangements are extremely good, their surgeons who have accompanied
the expedition in incredible numbers. These devoted women are excellent
nurses.
On 24 October 1854, Florence Nightingale set out with a group of thirty-

eight nurses for Constantinople, where she arrived on 5 November. The
group, which had been pulled together in a great hurry, consisted of fourteen
professional nurses from English hospitals and ten Catholic and Anglican
Sisters of Mercy. The surgeons at Skutari received them with coolness, even
hostility. Nightingale therefore went to work with caution. But when the
hospital organization broke down with the arrival of the many wounded
from the Crimea, the contribution of the nurses was accepted with gratitude.
Nightingale’s activity has been described in many books and articles so
that it is only necessary to point to its beneficial results. Step by step she
introduced a basic standard of cleanliness and order into what had been the
chaotic and unhygienic conditions of the hospitals. With the support of The
Times, she had a sum of money at her own disposal, which had been gathered
in Britain. This meant she could circumvent the army bureaucracy. But she
soon groaned under the red tape which, in many ways, she was forced to
produce herself. The result was that she did not have much time for her
personal work at the sickbed. The image of the ‘Lady with the lamp’,
therefore, is far from accurate. Rations for the sick were raised to a level
worthy of human beings and diet kitchens were introduced. After months of
indefatigable activity, even mental and emotional care was introduced by
setting up recreation and reading rooms and even singing hours and theatre
performances.
At the same time, Nightingale kept a keen eye on the Catholic nurses lest
they should proselytize among the convalescents. In this respect, there was
an oversensitivity about Nightingale that strikes one as odd today. When
on 15 December 1854, at the instigation of Sidney Herbert, a second
group of forty-six sisters arrived at Skutari from Britain, Nightingale was
on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She behaved in the same manner as
the doctors had when she had arrived some weeks before. She cut dead
the leader of the group, Mary Stanley,43 with whom she had been friends,
and did not admit her to the two hospitals at Skutari. She got ready to
leave Constantinople because Herbert had sent the group without her
knowledge. On top of this, she dreaded the predominance of the Catholic
element as fifteen of the women were of that denomination. She wrote
angry letters to Herbert, but in the end came to terms with Stanley and
the other new arrivals and tacitly allowed them to work in the new
hospital being established at Kuleli (north of Skutari) at the end of January
1855.
However, when some of Stanley’s sisters moved to the hospitals at
Balaklava in the Crimea, relations darkened again between Nightingale and
her former friend because Nightingale had strictly forbidden the newcomers
to work in a hospital at the front line. Nonetheless, Nightingale paid several
visits to the Crimea in order to reform and improve nursing in the hospitals
there. On her first visit in May 1855 she fell ill herself, suffering from the
‘Crimean fever’ (probably typhoid symptoms). For several days she hovered
between life and death, yet such was the animosity between her and Dr Hall
that he put Nightingale, not yet fully recovered, on board a steamer bound
for England without an intermediate stop at Constantinople. When
Nightingale got wind of the plan during the journey, she took ashore on the
Bosphorus. She returned twice to the Crimea (in October 1855 and March
1856) and was nominated ‘General Superintendent of the Female Nursing

Establishment of the military hospitals of the Army’, thus gaining a triumph
over Hall44 who denounced her activity in the Crimea as illegal because up
to that time she had borne the title ‘Superintendent of the Female Nursing
Establishment of the English Hospitals in Turkey’.
In spite of her personal weaknesses – a domineering nature, a craving for
popularity – one must admit that Florence Nightingale was thoroughly
committed to her mission to improve the lot of the British army’s rank and
file. While on board a steamer to Balaklava on 5 May 1855, she wrote to her
family:
What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine, they are not wounds &
blood & fever, spotted & low, & dysentery chronic & acute, cold & heat
& famine. They are intoxication, drunken brutality, demoralization &
disorder on the part of the inferior – jealousies, meanness, indifference,
selfish brutality on the part of the superior.45
Cecil Woodham-Smith’s judgement still holds true: Florence Nightingale ‘set

herself a new and gigantic task – she determined to reform the treatment of
the British private soldier’.46
The Sisters of Mercy in the French and Russian armies

Civil nurses and Sisters of Mercy served not only in the British army but also
in the French Armée d’Orient and the Russian Crimean Army. In the
Sardinian expeditionary corps, too, there were sixty ‘sisters’.47 The term
‘Sister of Mercy’ or ‘Sister of Charity’ denotes a religious affiliation in both
Catholic and Protestant orders (here they were called deaconesses) and in
the Russian Orthodox Church of those who worked in nursing and other
activities. In the French version they were known as Vincentians.
There was a French hospital in Constantinople as early as the end of the
seventeenth century, which cared for sick seamen. In 1846 it was handed
over to the Sisters of the Congregation of St Vincent de Paul. In the course
of the Crimean War, 255 Sisters of Charity served on the French side. Of
these Vincentians, twenty-three died while on duty at Constantinople, Varna
and in the Crimea.48
In Russia the ‘Order of the Exaltation of the Cross’ was founded shortly
after the Battle of the Alma by Grand Duchess Helena,49 a member of the
royal house of Württemberg and wife of the Grand Duke Michael Pavlovich.
She was also the person who moved the famous surgeon Pirogov to go the
Crimea. Thanks to Pirogov’s intercession and authority, the Russian sisters
did not face the obstacles that confronted Florence Nightingale. The first
sisters, sixty-eight in total, arrived in Simferopol between 12 December
1854 and 10 April 1855. In the course of the war months their number rose
to 161. Pirogov assigned them various tasks: together with priests, one
group had to look after the fatally ill and mortally wounded; another group
assisted in emergency surgery in the Assembly Hall of the Nobility, the main
hospital in Sevastopol; the less seriously wounded were prepared for later
operations in other quarters; the minor casualites were tended immediately
and then handed over to their regiments. Of the Russian sisters, seventeen
died during the war months.
Before the arrival of the first group, some local women had already
rendered a great service in helping the wounded. In his letters, Pirogov
mentions Darja, an orphan and daughter of a Black Sea sailor, and Marfa,
who helped in a field-dressing station and in a hospital of the city.
A third category of sisters who arrived in the theatre of war at the end of
1854 were the Widows of Charity, a small group of sisters who were
recruited by the Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna from the dower houses of St
Petersburg and Moscow. Their number cannot be ascertained, but twelve of
them lost their lives while on duty. The Order of the Exaltation of the Cross
was still active after the Crimean War until 1894, when it merged with the
Russian Red Cross.
The treament of the sick

As already noted, certain sections of the medical art had gone through a
period of upheaval during the Crimean War. The antiseptic and aseptic
treatment of wounds was not yet invented, so that gangrene often ended
fatally. But in the area of anaesthetics, medicine had made a breakthrough
just before the war.
In 1839 the famous French surgeon Alfred Velpeau had written, ‘Avoiding
pain in operations is a chimera which is impossible to pursue.’50 Eight years
later he admitted that the use of ether, which had been applied in the United
States in operations for the first time (in 1844), would drastically change
surgery and beyond it physiology and psychology, too. In the same year,
1847, the great benefit of chloroform was first recognized, but a long debate
would now ensue about its advantages and disadvantages. During the
subsequent decades, the deaths caused by both forms of anaesthetic were
more or less equal on a low level.
In the First Schleswig War (1848–9), chloroform was used sporadically,
but in the Crimean War it was used extensively. In the French army, 20,000
operations were carried out using chloroform in the Crimea51 and it was
also applied by Russian surgeons. Its use in the British Army of the East was
controversial. Although in England Queen Victoria had given birth to her
eighth child in 1853 under chloroform, she had been rebuked for doing so
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, citing the Bible, while the conservative
John Hall expressed his opposition to its use with the oft-quoted line,
‘However barbarous it may appear, the smart use of the knife is a powerful
stimulant, and it is much better to hear a man bawl lustily than to see him
sink silently into the grave.’52 Young British surgeons did not agree and
made ample use of chloroform.
Most surgical operations in the Crimean armies involved the extraction
of bullets, resections (the cutting out of organ parts) and amputations. While
the round (or spherical) bullet which got stuck in the body often caused only
flesh wounds because if it hit a bone it was simply deflected, the new pointed
(cylindro-conical) bullets fired by the Minié and Enfield guns had a much
greater striking force, which could easily smash a bone. The death rate after
amputations in all three armies – depending on the gravity of the wound and
on the amputated part of the body – was between 70 and 100 per cent (but
less in the case of dissevered fingers), that is, 80 per cent on average. In his
report, the Russian surgeon Hubbeneth, who had carried out hundreds of
amputations, posed the not unreasonable question why, in view of the slim
chance of success, so many amputations were carried out. The simple answer
Hubbeneth offered was that the severely wounded soldier would suffer even
greater pain without an amputation: ‘The slightest movement causes the
most cruel pains! He cannot help screaming after an amputation; without it
he would imagine to die soon.’53
All the armies in the Crimea used a remarkable range of drugs, although
to varying effect, for example opium for soothing and pain relief and also
against diarrhaea; digitalis for heart trouble; quinine and antimony for
reducing fever. Brandy, red wine and beef tea were administered for
strengthening the body, while arrowroot and salep (root) were used as
sedatives.
Hospitals
The Crimean War produced hundreds of thousands of casualties on both
sides who had to be cared for in hospitals. An adequate infrastructure did
not exist at the beginning of the war and had to be constructed in piecemeal
fashion as the conflict progressed. The supply of beds always lagged behind
the requirements.
The Russian army was able to adapt the billets that existed in Sevastopol,
on the northern side of the city, and behind the lines in the Crimea as well
as many civil hospitals beyond the Crimean peninsula. The Allies had to
establish their main hospitals in the very cramped area at Kamiesh and
Balaklava. According to the regulations of the medical service, each regiment
and each division had to provide field-dressing stations and ambulances
behind their lines. The severely sick and wounded were supposed to be
transferred to buildings and barrack camps away from the front line. The
Turks assisted their Allies in this task by offering various forms of
accomodation on the Bosphorus for the sick and convalescent. The great
disadvantage here was that the sick had to undertake an excruciating voyage
of more than 310 miles, lasting two or three days, which many did not
survive. Nonetheless, most of the French and English sick had to endure this
ordeal. The French were mostly put up in Turkish military compounds
(hospitals, barracks, hut camps, drill grounds, palaces of the Sultan) on the
European side of the Bosphorus, while the English were located on the
Asiatic side.
The French hospitals

The first French hospital to come into operation was the sailors’ hospital of
the Vincentians in Constantinople, referred to earlier. When the first French
troops arrived, a hospital was established for them at Gallipoli (on the
Dardanelles). In Constantinople itself, they were soon given the Turkish
military hospital at Matepe, followed by other hospitals at Dolmabakche and
Pera (on the banks of the Bosphorus), in the Turkish barracks of Ramichiflik
and Daoud Pasha (both of them together with Maltepe situated on a plateau
which made the transport of the sick difficult) and at Gulhane (on the
Bosphorus). A big barrack encampment was also established on a plateau in
Maslak. The hospital of Canlidshe (Kamlica) was exceptional: it was a holiday
retreat of the Egyptian Viceroy on the Asiatic side and was reserved for the
French officers who later on moved to the Russian embassy building at Galata.
Baudens writes of a total of nineteen French hospitals in Constantinople,54 a
figure that probably includes the hospital at Gallipoli and another hospital on
Princes’ Island, which used the local naval training school.
One other hospital worth noting was the one at Varna on the western
shores of the Black Sea. It was used by both the French and the British
during the war, the sick and wounded sent there from the Crimea, especially
from Eupatoria. In Sevastopol itself, the French had a hospital at Kamiesh,
their main storage depot. More than twenty French hospitals were in
operation during the Crimean War, in addition to a small number of hospital
ships stationed in the bay of Kamiesh or on the Bosphorus. These vessels
could of course accomodate only a limited number of patients.
The British hospitals

The two biggest British hospitals were established at Skutari on the Asiatic
side of the Bosphorus in September 1854. The General Hospital was
originally a military hospital and could accommodate 1,000 patients. One
kilometre to the north, the Barrack Hospital, originally a run-down Turkish
barracks (Selim Barracks), had a similar capacity. It was here that Florence
Nightingale installed her headquarters. It still exists today (its cleanliness
can compete with every five-star hotel) and has a small room dedicated to
Britain’s most famous nurse. In addition to the two main hospitals, there
were two other smaller facilities in the vicinity: an emergency hospital,
called the Stables, and at Haydar-Pasha a hospital for officers.
FIGURE 18 The General Hospital at Skutari on the Asian side of the Bosphorus.
Courtesy of Inge and Dieter Wernet.
At the end of January 1855, at the height of the Crimean winter, there
were 4,500 sick and wounded accommodated at Skutari.55 Another thousand
were waiting for disembarkation from transport ships.
The death rate of the dysentery patients in those weeks was 60 per cent:
forty-five people died every week. Because of the critical situation, a Turkish
barracks at Kuleli, five miles north of Skutari, was converted into a British
hospital. Florence Nightingale, who supervised the sisters there for a few
weeks only, placed obstacles in the path of the newly arrived group around
Mary Stanley – this was by no means a sign of human greatness.
At the same time, a hospital for convalescents was finished at Abydos in
the Dardanelles, but there were no nurses yet stationed there. Accommodation
for convalescents existed also in Corfu and Malta. The British and French
also sent many sick and wounded back to their home countries where they
were received by the public with great warmth.
In the Crimea itself, due to the restricted size of the two Allied encampments
and the lack of infrastructure, there was only a limited hospital capacity. At
Balaklava, the first general hospital set up could house only 100 patients; it
was overcrowded at all times. To relieve the congestion a second hospital
was built – Castle Hospital – on top of a hill overlooking the sea and near
the ruins of an ancient Genoese fortress. Even today one can easily identify
its outline in the form of rectangular excavations. Later on, another small
hospital was added in the precincts of St George’s monastery on the southern
coast. Like the French at Kamiesh and on the Bosphorus, the British, too,
had various ships lying at anchor at Balaklava and on the Bosphorus which
served as emergency hospitals.
A distinct feature of the British hospital organization was the fact that in
1855 a civil hospital was opened for soldiers at Smyrna on the western coast
of Turkey and another one at Renköy on the Dardanelles in October.56 They
served as relief institutions for the light and convalescent cases. The hospital
at Smyrna was established in a large Turkish barracks and soon had 1,000
patients. Apart from the civilian doctors, eighteen sisters from England had
arrived, whose services Florence Nightingale had refused at Skutari. The
hospital at Renköy was a testimonial to British engineering and architecture
of the time, employing the services of none other than Isambard Brunel.
Within a short time, he had erected a complex with prefabricated parts
furnished with the most modern sanitary facilities. It could accommodate
up to 1,000 patients, but in fact only 500 beds were installed, which were
occupied by 1,300 patients until February 1856. Florence Nightingale made
no contribution to this development.
The Russian hospitals

Although the hinterland with its numerous hospitals for the sick and
wounded was open to the garrison of Sevastopol, the situation of these
soldiers was more miserable than that of their Allied counterparts. The
hospital capacity of Sevastopol and also that of Simferopol fifty miles away
was soon exhausted and the sick had to be transported over ever longer
distances. Railways did not yet exist in the Crimea. In summer, transportation
through the treeless steppe was mere torture, while at other times of the year
the roads were sunken in mud and hardly passable. The bullock carts and
wagons requisitioned from the farmers were unsprung and open-top with
the result that many sick and wounded never made it to their destination.
On 29 October 1854, a convoy of wounded, many still with bullets in their
bodies due to lack of treatment by the surgeons, began a journey from
Simferopol to the German colony of Melitopol, beyond the Crimea. The
convoy reached its destination on 7 November, but it wasn’t until the end of
the month that the survivors could be operated on, after the hospital had
scraped together the necessary instruments and medicine.57
At the beginning of the Crimean War, the Russians had a hospital capacity
of 2,000 beds and emergency accommodation for 1,000 further cases. The
Battle of the Alma brought almost 6,000 casualties, many of the wounded
leaving the battlefield and making their own way to Sevastopol. After the
Battle of Inkerman, the Russian hospital system in Sevastopol broke down.
In the crisis situation, Simferopol was chosen as the general hospital and
several auxiliary hospitals were established. In addition, hospitals at
Bakhchisaraj, Karazubazar (today Belogorsk), Feodosia and Perekop could
receive a limited number of patients. Soon the transport radius had to be
widened: to Melitopol (as mentioned), Kremenchug, Nikolaev, Kherson and

Berislav. In 1855 the Crimean army had at its disposal some 57,000 hospital
beds.58
As already noted, the main hospital at Sevastopol was set up in the
Assembly Hall of the Nobility. However, as it faced increasing bombardment
from the Allies, its operation had to be dispersed to several buildings in
Artillery Bay. Another hospital was also opened in Korabelnaya suburb. As
this, too, came under fire, it had to be evacuated to the north side, but for
many this was but the first stage of a longer journey into the interior, a
journey that not everyone completed.
The Sardinian and Turkish medical services

The Sardinian army, coming directly from Genoa, arrived in Balaklava at
the end of May and beginning of June 1855 and comprised 15,000 men.
They were stationed on the Tchernaya on the observation front opposite the
Russians. In the course of the following months the Sardinians increased to
a total of 21,000 men. When the soldiers arrived the situation they
encountered was not particularly promising: ‘The harbour [of Balaklava]
looked like a sewer. The water was covered with rubbish of all sorts and
from it rose a repulsive stench.’59 On their march to the front line they
regularly found dead animals which had not been buried. No wonder that
the soldiers were immediately struck by the cholera. At the beginning of
June there were already 869 sick, 387 of whom died.
Yet the Sardinians were not badly equipped in terms of medical services.
They were accompanied by 150 surgeons, 286 dressers and forty or sixty
Sisters of Charity. Facing a war, they had, naturally, prepared for tending the
wounded rather than the sick. Their only combat mission was during the
Battle of the Tchernaya on 5 August 1855, which claimed 30 to 34 dead and
156 wounded. In Sardinian and Italian national consciousness, the battle
has been celebrated as an Italian victory. But people have forgotten the
number of soldiers who died of disease. Their number soon reached the
appalling figure of 2,257. No other army came close to this ratio of 98.5 per
cent of dead due to sickness and only 1.5 per cent due to wounds.
Only one source could be traced for the Turkish medical service in the
Crimean War, namely the report of the inspector of the French Medical
Service, Baudens.60 The new book by the Turkish historian C. Badem sheds
no light on the matter. Baudens’ report must not be generalized. He offers
no data for the situation at the front line, but only for the four hospitals
which the Turks had reserved for themselves in Constantinople. For the
situation here, Baudens is full of praise, describing the ‘organization of the
Ottoman medical service’ as ‘very satisfactory’. But it should be borne in
mind that he only arrived in Constantinople in September 1855, when the
medical service in the city was in much better shape than a year earlier. The
population of the city had also been spared the typhoid epidemic that had
struck the French army. Baudens placed particular focus on the cleanliness
of the Turkish hospitals: ‘The fumigation of rooms with chlorine and
especially with aromatic herbs, repeated several times per day, draws off the
disgusting miasmas that emanate from the sick; a usage which I would like
to introduce into our hospitals in France.’ He also envied the wash-houses
and described the food provided for the sick as ‘healthy and very simple’. Of
course, we need more sources to truly determine the accuracy of this very
positive picture.
The death toll of the war

At the end of a military history of the Crimean War it is appropriate to say
something about the impact of the conflict in terms of human victims.
However, assembling the necessary statistics is a Sisyphean task, as the data
drawn from various sources reveals one contradiction after another. One
general point can be made at the outset about the two major Allied armies:
that for each soldier killed in action or who shortly succumbed to his
wounds, there are at least four who died of sickness. This figure does not
apply to the Sardinian army, as noted above, or to the Russian army, as will
be shown shortly.
One must set aside the numbers published daily and monthly by the
bulletins of all armies because they do not differentiate between soldiers
killed in action, those who died of their wounds soon afterwards or those
who died of sickness. Such statistics cannot be taken at face value. The
official French figures were often dressed up or were simply wrong. The
Moniteur observed in February 1855 that ‘If these statistics are wrong, they
mislead public opinion; if they are correct, they are even more objectionable;
they give away to the enemy something of the plans and means of attack
which the commanders-in-chief work out in the deepest secret.’ The French
commander-in-chief Canrobert reported tersely: ‘The sanitary state of the
army, the weather and the morale of the troops are excellent.’61 A man who
equates the medical state of the army with the state of the weather, describing
both as ‘excellent’, cannot be taken seriously.
In Britain the press could not be as easily muzzled as in France. However,
what Russell published in The Times was general impressions and
experiences, not precise figures, which the military authorities, of course,
were not likely to make available. And what do the actual numbers held in
the archives tell a researcher? Florence Nightingale lamented in a letter of
9 June 1856, ‘The Medical Statistics of the L[and]T[ransport]C[orps] [which
was responsible for the transportation of the wounded and sick] are in a
state of great confusion, so that it is hardly possible to obtain correct results.’
She was very much interested in statistics and regretted the absence of
reliable figures. In contrast, she admired the French achievement in that
respect: ‘Their Medical Statistics should make us envious. How they keep
any is a physical problem.’62
In sum, the statistics put together at the time of the Crimean War are far
from reliable. One has therefore no choice but to resort to accounts, from
both sides, compiled in the months and years after the war for internal
purposes. They must, of course, be questioned as well, but broadly speaking
they are not misleading.
The total number of French troops that served in the Crimea is, according
to Baudens, who refers to the Moniteur de l’Armée of 27 November 1857,
309,270 men.63 Whether this includes soldiers sent to the Baltic in 1854 and
1855 is uncertain, but unlikely. To this figure, one must relate the total
number of soldiers sent to hospital. The surgeon general of the French
Armée d’Orient, Gaspard-Léonard Scrive, gives the relevant figure for the
period from 1 April 1854 to 1 May 1856 as 192,091.64 Included in this
number are about 40,000 wounded, a very imprecise figure. The number he
gives for those who died of sickness is 62,000. The Moniteur of 23 October
1856 assessed a death toll of 69,299 for all categories.65 Comparison of
these statistics suggests that those provided by the Moniteur – published at
the express wish of the Emperor – were fabricated. The figures published by
Baudens in 1862 and1864 are nearer the truth:66
FIGURE 19 The Dragon (of war) devouring the soldiers. Kladderadatsch 12, 11
March 1855, p. 48.
Killed in action 8,750

Died of sickness and wounds in the Crimea 31,000
Died in hospitals at Constantinople of sickness and wounds 32,000
Died on the expedition to the Dobrudja 6,000
Died en route from the Crimea to Constantinople 7,500
Died in the hospitals of Gallipoli, Varna and elsewhere 3,000
Died during the evacuation of the Crimea and the Turkish Straits 5,000
This adds up to a total of 93,250 deaths. If one includes the dead of the
two expeditions to the Baltic in 1854 and 1855 and those who died of their
wounds after returning to France (their exact number cannot be established)
one arrives at a figure of at least 100,000 French deaths.
The figures for British casualties vary widely in the relevant sources. The
principal medical officer of the British Army of the East, John Hall, gives the
total number of British soldiers who arrived in the Crimea as 97,934 up to
April 1856.67 The total number of deaths for the Crimea, for Bulgaria
(Varna) and for the inmates of the hospitals are, according to him, 21,412.
However, the figure is not broken down into men killed in action or dead of
wounds and sickness. But as a whole it is very similar to the information
provided to the House of Commons by Lord Panmure, Secretary of War, on
8 May 1856.68 When the deaths in the Baltic69 are added, one reaches a total
figure of 22,000 British deaths.
The number of casualties suffered by the Russians differs widely in the
older literature. But Hubbenet, who offers many (in part inconsistent)
statistics in his book, is the most trustworthy. He determines that there were
85,000 Russians who died in the Crimea;70 with the inclusion of the Danube
front and southern Russia in general, the total is 110,000.71 But Hubbeneth
points out that the figure may be too low in view of the high rate of sickness
in 1856 in the army in southern Russia. Not included in his figures are the
casualties in the Caucasus. According to more recent research, the figures
are as follows:72 by the end of 1853, the number of the Russian field army
totalled 1,123,583 men. During the war, another 878,000 men were called
up. This means a total of 2,001,583 men under arms. The effective force of
the Russian army by the end of 1855 was 1,527,748. The difference yields
the total number of dead (those killed in action as well as those dead from
sickness) as 473,835. If from this figure the ‘normal’ death rate of the
Russian army is subtracted, which is 35 per thousand per year (double the
rate of Western armies), that is, about 100,000, the sum total of dead
amounts to roughly 364,000 men.73 The most recent study of the matter
revises the figures yet again: about 105,000 deaths (from all causes) in the
Crimea and about 60,000 on the Danube, with the number of dead for the
whole Russian army for 1853–6 totalling about 406,000.74
If one adds to the number of dead of these three armies (486,000), 2,300
Sardinians and an estimated 45,000 in the Turkish army, the total number
of dead for the war is about 533,300. The British diplomat Sir Robert
Morier’s judgement that the Crimean War was ‘perfectly useless’ seems a
gross understatement in view of such a figure.
There is no comprehensive account of the medical aspect of the war, covering
all its features and all its participants (France, Britain, Russia, Turkey and
Sardinia). General books about the conflict devote a few pages, if any, to the
matter, but there is much specialized research, mainly from a national
perspective. An early book on the French medical service, which also touches
on the services of the other participants, is Lucien Baudens, La guerre de
Crimée. Les campements, les abris, les ambulances, les hôpitaux etc. etc
(Paris, 1858, 2nd edn 1858, repr. 2011). We owe much statistical data on the
French side of this matter to the zoologist and surgeon Jean Charles Chenu,
De la mortalité et des moyens d’économiser la vie humaine: extraits des
statistiques médico-chirurgicales des campagnes de Crimée en 1854–1856 et
d’Italie en 1859 (Paris, 1870). The British medical history is well covered by
John Shepherd, The Crimean Doctors: A History of the British Medical
Service in the Crimean War (Liverpool, 1991). For the Russian medical
service, we have a good though dated account by Anton Hubbeneth, Service
sanitaire des hôpitaux russes pendant la guerre de Crimée, dans les années
1851–1856 (St Petersburg, 1870). A more recent study, based on archival
research, is provided by Julija A. Naumova, Ranenie, bolezn’ i smert’.
Russkaja medicinskaja služba v Krymskoj vojnu 1853–1856 gg (Moscow,
2010). A new study, based on archival sources, that examines the toll of the
war on the Russian population, on the animals and on the environment is
that by Mara Kozelsky, Crimea in War and Transformation (New York,
2019).
Diseases during the war are covered in many articles. Notable is the book
on cholera by Frank Spahr, Die Ausbreitung der Cholera in der britischen
Flotte im Schwarzen Meer während des Krieges im August 1854. Eine
Auswertung von Schiffsarztjournalen der Royal Navy (Frankfurt, 1989). A
comprehensive survey of diseases and epidemics in European history is
provided by Stefan Winkle, Geißeln der Menschheit. Kulturgeschichte der
Seuchen (Düsseldorf, 1997, 3rd edn 2005, repr. 2014).
There are few biographies of the major surgeons of the Crimean War.
There is an old life-and-letters biography of Sir John Hall, Inspector General
of Hospitals. He had intended writing a book on the medical history of the
war, but nothing came of it. The Crimean letters of Nikolaj I. Pirogov, the
great Russian medical pioneer, are now edited (in Russian only):
Sevastopol’skie pis’ma i vospominanija (Moscow, 1950; re-edited in his
Collected Works (in Russian) as vol. 5, 1961). Regarding medical staff in the
war, the best known is of course Florence Nightingale. Her collected works
are now published in twelve volumes between 2001 and 2012. Volume 14,
edited by Lynn McDonald, covers the Crimean War. Nightingale’s
correspondence with Sidney Herbert form the core of that volume. An older
collection of letters from the war is handled by Sue M. Goldie (ed.), ‘I have
done my duty.’ Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War 1854–56
(Manchester, 1987). The classic biography is by Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Florence Nightingale, 1820–1910 (New York, 1951). A good modern
biography is that by Mark Bostridge, Florence Nightingale: The Woman and
her Legend (London, 2008). For the Russian Sisters of Mercy, see John
Shelton Curtiss, ‘Russian Sisters of Mercy in the Crimea, 1854–1855’, Slavic
Review 25 (1966): 84–100. For the plight of women on all sides of the war,
see Helen Rappaport, No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in
the Crimean War (London, 2007, new edn Brighton, 2013).
Epilogue
As noted in the first chapter, the Crimean War contained all the elements for
a world war. If the conflict had continued in 1856, Prussia and Sweden
would have declared war on Russia and engulfed all Europe in the fray; the
United States would have joined the Russian side because of the tension in
her relations with Britain. It was the statesmanship of Tsar Alexander II and
his advisers that made Russia stop before crossing the Rubicon.
In the subsequent fifty-eight years, Europe witnessed only a few short
wars. In the age of imperialism, when nationalism and Darwinism wielded
great influence on policymaking, the traditional principle of the balance of
power was gradually weakened. It became a dead letter in the July crisis of
1914. In that summer, a hundred years after Napoleon I, the European
powers found themselves in the Great War. It led to the dissolution of the
old empires in Europe and the rise of new ones across the world. The Crimea
featured only briefly at the end of that war – in 1918. With the collapse of
the Tsarist Empire, German troops occupied the peninsula and used it as a
springboard for an occupation of the Caucasus which, according to the
German Supreme Command, was to function as a stepping stone for an
advance on Afghanistan and India.
The same idea was revived by Hitler in the Second World War, yet also
ended in failure. In the plans of the Nazis, the Crimea was to serve as the
riviera for the Thousand-Year Reich. The Russian reconquest of the
peninsula in 1944 featured prominently in subsequent Stalinist propaganda
and in Russian nationalism. Added to the dozens of monuments
commemorating the Russian heroism of 1854–6, hundreds of further
monuments were erected in memory of the great feats of the Red Army. The
Crimea again became a symbol of the suffering and resistance of the Russian
people. Khrushchev’s decision in 1954 to assign the Crimea to the Ukraine,
then part of the Soviet Union, was done simply for economic and
administrative purposes. The peninsula by now was the home of big holiday
resorts for millions of Russian holidaymakers.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1989, the Crimea remained
part of the new independent Ukraine. But the Russian Black Sea Fleet
remained there – in Sevastopol and Balaklava – in accordance with treaties
signed by the two states. With Putin’s rise to power, a new Russian
253
nationalism was fostered which today dreams of the bygone greatness of the
Tsarist and Soviet empires. Like Hitler’s Germany, which wanted to undo
the Treaty of Versailles and recover the territories lost in 1919, Putin wanted
to restore the greatness of the Soviet past and recover those territories lost
in 1989 which contained large numbers of ethnic Russians. Thus parts of
the Dniestr region and Georgia were reoccupied by Russian troops, with
only token condemnation by the international community. In 2014, Putin
annexed the Crimea to Russia in a night-time raid, which this time was met
with more outspoken criticism and with sanctions by the Western world.
Putin burnt his fingers even further with his undisguised intervention in the
Ukrainian Donbass region.
Just as Nicholas I had wanted, in 1853, to use the Crimea to invade
Constantinople and the Turkish Straits and thus enhance Russian power,
but was met with resistance from the other great European powers, so
Putin’s occupation of the Crimea in 2014 brought instability to international
relations. The immediate consequence has been the rearmament of Western
Europe and the United States and the beginning of a new Cold War.
APPENDIX:
CHRONOLOGY
1852
9 Feb. Firman of the Sultan (ends monks’ dispute in Holy Places)
2 Dec. Napoleon III proclaims himself Emperor
27 Dec. New Cabinet formed in London by Lord Aberdeen
1853
9 Jan. Beginning of secret conversations between Tsar Nicholas
and British envoy Sir George Hamilton Seymour
28 Feb. Prince Menshikov arrives at Constantinople
19 Mar. Council of Ministers at Paris decide to send fleet to Bay
of Salamis
5 May Prince Menshikov presents ultimatum to the Porte
10 May Porte rejects Menshikov’s ultimatum
21 May Menshikov leaves Constantinople
2 June Admiral Dundas ordered to sail to Besika Bay
13–14 June Anglo-French fleets enter Besika Bay outside the
Dardanelles
2 July Russian army starts occupying the Danubian Principalities
31 July Vienna Note (mediates between Russian and Turkish
demands)
19 Aug. Turkey demands three modifications of Vienna Note
4 Oct. Turkey declares war on Russia
27–28 Oct. Turkish unit overruns Russian fort St Nicholas (near
Batum)
28–30 Oct. Turkish troops cross Danube at Vidin and occupy Kalafat
4 Nov. Encounter between Turkish and Russian troops at
Oltenitsa (Danube)
13 Nov. Anglo-French fleets arrive at Beicos Bay
30 Nov. Destruction of Turkish fleet at Sinope
1 Dec. Battle of Bashgedikler between Turks and Russians
(Caucasus)
5 Dec. Protocol of Vienna signed
20 Dec. Sweden and Denmark declare their neutrality
31 Dec. Battle of Cetate on Danube between Turkish and Russian
forces
255
256 APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY
1854
3–4 Jan. Anglo-French fleets enter Black Sea
6 Jan. (Second) Battle of Cetate (Danube)
29 Jan. Count Orlov in Vienna fails to woo Austria to Russian
side
13 Feb. General Gorchakov ordered to besiege Silistria (Danube)
(siege given up on 24 June)
27 Feb. Prussia declares her neutrality
11 Mar. British fleet (under Admiral Napier) sets out for the Baltic
12 Mar. Treaty signed at Constantinople between Turkey, Britain
and France
19 Mar. First French troops depart from Toulon for Gallipoli
27 Mar. Britain declares war on Russia, followed by France on
28 March
5 April British troops arrive in Turkish Straits
10 April France and Britain sign treaty of alliance with Turkey in
London
20 April Defensive and offensive treaty between Prussia and
Austria signed in Berlin
22 April Allied fleets bombard Odessa
19 May Allied war council at Varna
25 May French troops occupy Piraeus (Athens)
25 May Bamberg conference of German middle states (closes on
30 May)
3 June Austria demands that Russia evacuate Danubian
Principalities
12 June French fleet under Admiral Parseval-Deschênes joins
British fleet at Bomarsund
14 June Austro-Turkish convention on Principalities (at Boyadji-
Köi)
25 June French and British fleets arrive near Kronstadt
9 July Cholera spreads at Varna
10 July 50,000 French and 20,000 British troops assembled at
Varna
18 July Allied war council at Varna: decision to attack Sevastopol;
British ships bombard Solovetskie Islands in White Sea
21 July French expedition to the Dobrudja
24 July Tsar Nicholas orders total evacuation of Principalities
(afterwards occupied by Austrian troops)
5 Aug. Battle of Kurukdere (Caucasus)
8 Aug. Austria and Western powers exchange notes on ‘Four
Points’ (war aims)
16 Aug. Allied troops occupy Bomarsund on Åland Islands
20 Aug. Austrian troops begin to enter Principalities
23–24 Aug. British squadron destroys Kola (near Murmansk)
APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY 257
26 Aug. Russia rejects Four Points

29–31 Aug. British squadron bombards Petropavlovsk (Kamchatka)
(landing party leaves on 4 Sept.)
1–2 Sept. Allied troops ordered to sail to Eupatoria
14 Sept. Allied troops disembark at Eupatoria
19 Sept. Allied troops march south towards Sevastopol
20 Sept. Battle of the Alma
29 Sept. St Arnaud dies; Canrobert takes over command of French
troops
9 Oct. Allied trenches built outside Sevastopol
17 Oct. First bombardment of Sevastopol
25 Oct. Battle of Balaklava
4 Nov. Florence Nightingale arrives at Skutari
5 Nov. Battle of Inkerman
14 Nov. Hurricane destroys and damages Allied ships on Crimean
coast
28 Nov. Gorchakov in Vienna announces Russian acceptance of
Four Points
2 Dec. Alliance between Austria and Western Powers signed in
Vienna
19 Dec. First article in The Times (by W. H. Russell) on situation
of British army in the Crimea
28 Dec. Russian government expresses desire in Vienna to begin
peace talks
1855
7 Jan. Russia accepts Four Points as basis for negotiations
10 Jan. Sardinia signs political convention with Western powers
(to enter war against Russia)
23 Jan. In House of Commons, Roebuck demands inquiry into
conduct of war (leading to fall of Aberdeen government)
26 Jan. Sardinia concludes military alliance with Western powers
5 Feb. Palmerston forms new government in London
26 Feb. Napoleon III informs Palmerston of his intention to go to
the Crimea
2 Mar. Tsar Nicholas dies; Alexander II succeeds
15 Mar. Vienna conference (Austria, Western powers, Russia)
begins peace talks
9 April Second bombardment of Sevastopol (until April 18)
16 April Napoleon III and Eugénie arrive on official visit to Britain
26 April Vienna conference ends without result
8 May Walewski nominated French Foreign Minister; Sardinian
troops land at Balaklava
15 May World exhibition opens in Paris
16 May General Canrobert resigns; replaced by General Pelissier
258 APPENDIX: CHRONOLOGY
22 May Allied expedition to Kertch (returns 15 June)

4 June Official closing of Vienna conference
6 June Third bombardment of Sevastopol begins (until 7 June)
June 17 Fourth bombardment of Sevastopol (ends in failure on
18 June)
28 June Lord Raglan dies of cholera; General Simpson takes over
9–11 Aug. Allied Baltic fleets bombard Sveaborg (near Helsingfors)
16 Aug. Battle of the Tchernaya
17 Aug. Fifth bombardment of Sevastopol (until 27 Aug.)
5 Sept. Sixth bombardment of Sevastopol
8 Sept. French troops occupy Malakhov bastion; British troops
fail to take the Redan; Russian troops retreat to northern
side of Sevastopol
29 Sept. Russian attack on Turkish fortress of Kars fails
17 Oct. Fortress of Kinburn occupied by combined French and
British expedition
15 Nov. World exhibition in Paris closes
21 Nov. Treaty of alliance between Sweden and Western powers
26 Nov. Russian troops storm fortress at Kars
16 Dec. Austrian ultimatum signed (includes fifth point)
28 Dec. Austria delivers ultimatum to Russia
1856
5 Jan. Russian counterproposals rejected by Allies
10 Jan. Anglo-French council of war opens in Paris (closes
20 Jan.)
15 Jan. Tsar convenes council in St Petersburg
16 Jan. Russia accepts Austrian ultimatum
1 Feb. Protocol signed in Vienna stating that peace negotiations
should begin
18 Feb. Sultan publishes Hat-ı şerif in favour of Christians of his
empire
25 Feb. Congress of Paris opened
18 Mar. Prussian delegation takes part in peace negotiations in
Paris
30 Mar. Treaty of Paris signed
8 April Italian Question on the agenda of Paris congress;
Declaration of Paris on maritime law
16 April Congress of Paris closes
21 April Allied troops (230,000) start evacuating the Crimea
5 July Completion of evacuation of the Crimea
NOTES
2 Diplomacy during the war, 1853–6

1 The History of the Times, pp. 191–2.
2 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. 130. London, 1854,
col. 568.
3 Winfried Baumgart (ed.), Akten zur Geschichte des Krimkriegs (henceforth
AGKK ), II/1, p. 422 (see the introduction to this volume, pp. 36–7).
4 The text of the Four Points is, inter alia, in British and Foreign State Papers,
vol. 44, pp. 88–90.
5 AGKK III/3, pp. 42–4 (with the references cited there).
6 AGKK III/3, pp. 619–21, 631–8.
3 The war aims of the belligerents

1 The text is reproduced in Schiemann, Geschichte Rußlands, vol. 4,
pp. 281–2.
2 Printed in Zaiončkovskij, Vostoč naja vojna, vol. 1, pp. 582–3.
3 Zaiončkovskij, Vostoč naja vojna, vol. 1, pp. 385–6.
4 Zaiončkovskij, Vostoč naja vojna, vol. 1, pp. 437–8; Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija,
vol. 2, pp. 43–4, 243–4.
5 AGKK I/1, pp. 262–4, 321–2.
6 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, p. 109. For the following remark, cf.
Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 322–4.
7 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 402–3.
8 AGKK I/1, p. 551.
9 The text is in Gooch (ed.), Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell, vol. 2,
pp. 160–1.
10 AGKK III/4, pp. 140–2.
11 Baumgart, Peace of Paris, p. 14.
12 See Clarendon’s own account in AGKKK III/4, pp. 819–20.
13 Cf., e.g., AGKK III/2, pp. 267, 427–8, 761; III/4, pp. 194, 202, 244, 261, 987;
IV/3, p. 57, n. 215.
259
260 NOTES
14 Ernst II., Aus meinem Leben, vol. 2, p. 141.

15 Pottinger Saab, Origins of the Crimean Alliance, pp. 81–5; Badem, The
Ottoman Crimean War, pp. 91–8.
16 Di Nolfo, Europa e Italia, p. 445.
4 The non-belligerent German powers:

Austria and Prussia
1 AGKK I/1–3.
2 AGKK I/1, p. 463.
3 For a closer examination of the relevant documentary evidence, see Baumgart,
‘Die Aktenedition zur Geschichte des Krimkriegs’, pp. 217–36 (especially
pp. 220 and 223). Also Baumgart, ‘Österreich und Preußen im Krimkrieg’,
pp. 45–70 (especially pp. 54–7).
4 They are now in three collections: AGKK II,1–2; Poschinger (ed.), Preußens
auswärtige Politik; Baumgart, Der König und sein Beichtvater.
5 AGKK II/1, p. 608.
6 AGKK II/1, p. 422.
7 Strachey and Fulford (eds), The Greville Memoirs, vol. 7, p. 186.
8 AGKK III/4, p. 559; Cf. also AGKK III/4, pp. 583–4.
9 AGKK II/2, p. 757.
10 As to the following statistics, cf. A. S. Nifontov, ‘Vnešnjaja torgovlja Rossii vo
vremja vostočnoj vojny 1853–156 gg.’, in Problemy social’no-ėkonomič eskoj
istorii Rossii. Sbornik statej (Moscow, 1971), pp. 69–90.
11 Cf., e.g., AGKK II/2, pp. 844–7.
5 The neutral powers

1 The documentary evidence from the Swedish side is printed in Hallendorff,
Konung Oscar I’s politik, pp. 37–53; for the French side, see AGKK IV/2,
pp. 174–5, 184, 210–11, 219–20, 228–9, 296, 353–5, 389–90, 397–400,
402–5, 412–15, 447–8; for the British side, see AGKK III/2, pp. 214–15,
264–5, 318–19, 325–6, 340–3, 351–2, 364–6, 367–8, 381–2, 498–9, 533–4,
555–7, 591–3, 613–14, 681–3.
2 Cf. AGKK III/3, pp. 686–7. For the following despatches, see AGKK III/3,
p. 724.
3 Cf. AGKK III/4, pp. 140–2.
4 Cf. AGKK III/4, pp. 591–2, 639–41.
5 Otero, ‘España ante la guerra di Crimea’. Cf. AGKK III/4, pp. 410–46
(especially p. 426).
NOTES 261
6 AGKK III/3, pp. 772–3, 777, 780, 807–8, 828–30, 834, 852; IV/3, pp. 397–9,
452–3, 499–511.
7 Mariñas Otero, ‘España ante la guerra di Crimea’, p. 441; Becker, Historia de
las Relaciones Exteriores de España, vol. 2, pp. 228–9. As to the following
remarks, cf. the relative documents in AGKK III/4.
8 Cited in Saul, Distant Friends, p. 201.
9 Cited in Van Alstyne, ‘Anglo-American Relations’, p. 497.
10 Cf. Van Alstyne, ‘Great Britain, the United States, and Hawaiian Independence’,
pp. 15–24.
11 It was soon published by the American government: The House of
Representatives, pp. 127–32. For the following quotation, see The House of
Representatives, p. 131.
12 Eastern Papers, p. 10.
13 The relevant documents are in AGKK I/2, pp. 74–5, 128–9. For the following
remark, cf. Ritter, Frankreichs Griechenlandpolitik, pp. 205–6; AGKK I/2,
p. 129, n. 6, pp. 131–2.
14 AGKK I/2, p. 498.
15 AGKK I/1, p. 603.
16 Cited in Baumgart, ‘Die deutschen Mittelstaaten und der Krimkrieg’, p. 374.
On Bavaria, on the basis of new documents, see Baumgart, ‘Bayern und die
Europäischen Großmächte im Krimkrieg’, pp. 285–303.
17 AGKK I/2, p. 224. For the two quotations in the following paragraph, see
AGKK I/2, pp. 214–15; Simon, Die Außenpolitik Hessen-Darmstadts während
des Krimkrieges, pp. 88–9.
18 Cited in Baumgart, ‘Die deutschen Mittelstaaten und der Krimkrieg’, p. 388.
6 Russia
1 These figures are in Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 1, p. 476. Cf.
Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, p. 403. The figures are discussed in Bestužev,
Krymskaja vojna, pp. 19–22; in pp. 23–9, Bestužev discusses other aspects of
Russia’s army system.
2 Much of the correspondence between Paskevich and the Tsar up to the
summer of 1854 is printed in Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, especially in
vol. 2. Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vols 1–2, also quotes from the unpublished
correspondence.
3 Figures for the Russian navy are given in Beskrovny, ‘The Russian Army and
Fleet’, pp. 300–1. Cf. also Treue, Der Krimkrieg, pp. 36, 38–9.
5 Petrow, Der russische Donaufeldzug, pp. 36–7.
6 Cf. Nicholas’s Memorandum of November 1853 in Zaiončkovksij, Priloženija,
vol. 2, pp. 274–6.
262 NOTES
7 France
1 Figures for the French army are taken from various sources: Guillemin, La
guerre de Crimée, pp. 27, 31, 32; Treue, Der Krimkrieg, p. 84; Clodfelter,
Warfare and Armed Conflicts, p. 300; Gouttman, La guerre de Crimée,
pp. 195–201.
2 Quatrelles L’Épine, Saint-Arnaud, vol. 2, p. 300, n. 1.
3 Hess’s memoranda are printed in Rauchensteiner (ed.), Feldmarschall Heinrich
Freiherr von Hess, pp. 243–5, 247–53. Cf. the relative documents in AGKK
I/2, pp. 279–30, 850–1, 790–1. On Crenneville’s mission to Paris cf. also Koch,
Generaladjutant Graf Crenneville, pp. 30–63. As to Napoleon’s reaction
mentioned in the following paragraph, cf. AGKK IV/2, pp. 850–1.
4 On Napoleon’s idea to go in person the the Crimea and on his visit to Britain
and the plan of campaign agreed there on 20 April, cf. the documents in
AGKK III/3, pp. 364–6, 375–6, 397, 449, 581, 602; AGKK IV/2, pp. 689,
n. 1, 870–1, 874, 879–80, 881–2, 883–4, 896; AGKK IV/3, pp. 80–1, 95–7,
103–4, 124–5, 137, 218–19, 226–7, 229. See also, inter alia, Martin, The Life
of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, vol. 3, pp. 233–59; Brison D.
Gooch, The New Bonapartist Generals, pp. 181–7.
8 Great Britain
1 Martin, The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, vol. 3, pp. 188–9.
2 AGKK III/3, p. 231.
3 The figures are taken from various sources: Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy,
pp. 182, 220; Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée, p. 51; Stanmore, Sidney Herbert,
vol. 1, p. 310; Gooch, The New Bonapartist Generals, p. 206; AGKK III/4,
p. 1017.
4 AGKK III/3, pp. 271–3; AGKK IV/2, p. 829.
5 AGKK IV/4, pp. 738–40.
6 Cited in AGKK III/2, p. 255; also in Lambert, The Crimean War, p. 84.
7 More details and the necessary references are in Chapter 16.
9 Turkey
1 These figures are from Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 10, 10 January
1856. Cf. now Badem, The Ottoman Crimean War, pp. 284–5. His sources
give a total of 235,568 men in October 1855.
2 For other details of the two units, see the preceding chapter.
3 For more details, cf. now the relevant documents in AGKK III/3 and 4 (cf. the
index of both volumes under the heads ‘Türkisches Kontingent’,
‘Kosakenregiment’, ‘Baschi-Bosuk’, ‘Vivian’, ‘Czartoryski’, ‘Zamoyski’); Badem,
NOTES 263
The Ottoman Crimean War, esp. pp. 257–68; Reid, Crisis of the Ottoman
Empire, pp. 105–74.
10 Sardinia
1 Curato (ed.), Le relazione diplomatiche, vol. 2, p. 307.
2 Cavour, Carteggi, vol. 7, p. 400.
3 Di Nolfo, Europa e Italia, p. 445.
11 The Danube front, 1853–4

1 Schiemann, Geschichte Rußlands, vol. 4, p. 292.
2 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, p. 6.
4 Goldfrank, The Origins of the Crimean War, pp. 226–8.
5 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 312–17. On the Russian occupation of
the Danubian Principalities, cf. Tarle, Krymskaja vojna I, pp. 236–79; Petrow,
Donaufeldzug, pp. 39–110.
6 AGKK I/1, pp. 637–40.
8 As to the campaign on the Danube front in 1854, cf. Petrow, Donaufeldzug,
pp. 111–350; Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 1, pp. 425–500. Many documents
are in Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2.
9 Cf. Quatrelles L’Épine, Saint-Arnaud, pp. 315–18; Rousset, Histoire de la
guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 103–14.
10 Cited in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 1, p. 485.
11 Cited by Petrow, Donaufeldzug, vol. 1, p. 215.
12 The more important documents for Austria’s decision to occupy the Danubian
Principalities are in AGKK I/1, pp. 195, n. 1, 241–2, 258–60, 542–3, 550. Cf.
also Antic´, Neutrality as Independence, pp. 115–23.
13 AGKK I/1, pp. 551–4, 610, 625–7.
14 Cf. Friedjung, Krimkrieg, pp. 59–60; AGKK I/2, pp. 128–9, 147, 178–82, 184,
192–7, 232–3, 236–7.
15 Friedjung, Krimkrieg, p. 99; AGKK I/2, p. 383.
16 AGKK I/2, pp. 184, 263–4, 272, 312–14, 326–30, 344–5, 349, 358–60, 390,
398; Quatrelles L’Épine, Saint-Arnaud, pp. 349–50; Rousset, Guerre de
Crimée, vol. 1, p. 136; Zaiončkovksij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 431–2.
17 AGKK I/2, pp. 372–6; Friedjung, Krimkrieg, pp. 70, 98.
18 AGKK I/2, pp. 253–4, 258, n. 2, 261–2; Wimpffen, Erinnerungen aus der
Walachei, pp. 102–23.
264 NOTES
19 Wimpffen, Erinnerungen aus der Walachei, pp. 136–46; AGKK I/2, pp. 448–9,

458–61, 480–2.
20 Wimpffen, Erinnerungen aus der Walachei, pp. 146–65.
21 AGKK I/2, pp. 572, n. 6, 954–5; Friedjung, Krimkrieg, pp. 96, 116.
22 Nistor (ed.), Corespondenţa lui Coronini, pp. 414, 688–9, 709.
23 Nistor, Corespondenţa lui Coronini, pp. 728–9, 904–7; AGKK I/3, pp. 576–8
(also pp. 32–8).
24 Lambert, Crimean War, pp. 83–5.
25 Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, p. 203; Quatrelles L’Épine, Saint-Arnaud,
p. 313.
26 Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 7–11; Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna, pp. 67–8;
Petrow, Donaufeldzug, pp. 176–80; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1,
pp. 96–7; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 213–14; Lambert, Crimean War,
pp. 101–3.
27 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 385–95; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée,
pp. 219–21; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 105–14.
28 Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, p. 131; Benson and Esher (eds), The Letters
of Queen Victoria, vol. 3, pp. 35–6.
29 Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, pp. 133–44; Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée,
pp. 239–41.
30 Spahr, Die Ausbreitung der Cholera. More details are below in Chapter 19.
31 Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, pp. 242–54; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1,
pp. 142–58; Gooch, The New Bonapartist Generals, pp. 98–104.
32 Cf. for a general discussion of British military thinking about the expedition,
see Strachan, ‘Soldiers, Strategy and Sevastopol’, pp. 312–24.
33 AGKK IV/2, p. 283 (no. 120), n. 1. As to Vaillant’s ideas, cf. AGKK IV/2,
pp. 311–4. For the technical preparations, cf. Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée,
pp. 50–9; Figes, Crimea, pp. 197–9.
12 The Black Sea theatre

1 Seaton, The Crimean War, pp. 50–9, 104–10.
2 Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 35–56; Figes, Crimea, pp. 200–3.
3 Bestužev, Krymskaja vojna, p. 90; Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 107;
Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, p. 289; Figes, Crimea, p. 206.
4 Cited by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 113. As to the losses mentioned in
the following paragraph, cf., e.g., Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 101–2; Gouttman,
Guerre de Crimée, pp. 300–1; Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 113–14; Figes,
Crimea, p. 218.
5 Cited by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 125. The following quotation, Tarle,
Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 125.
NOTES 265
6 Cited by Barker, Vainglorious War, pp. 163–4. The quotation in the following

paragraph, Barker, Vainglorious War, p. 165.
7 Barker, Vainglorious War, p. 174.
8 The figures are given by Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 166–7.
9 Cf. Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 168. Seaton, Crimean War, pp. 174–5.
10 Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, p. 384.
11 Differing figures are in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 183; Gouttman,
Guerre de Crimée, p. 348; Rousset, Guerre de Crimée, vol. 1, p. 388; Barker,
Vainglorious War, p. 192; Figes, Crimea, p. 268.
12 Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, vol. 1, p. 278.
13 For the figures, see Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, vol. 1, pp. 291, 310.
14 Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, vol. 1, p. 296.
15 Calthorpe, Letters from Head-Quarters, vol. 1, p. 441.
16 Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War, p. 337; Seaton, Crimean War, p. 56.
17 For more details about this aspect of the war, cf. Chapter 19 below (which is
new in the second edition of this book).
18 This important letter is cited at length in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2,
pp. 314–16.
19 Douglas and Dalhousie Ramsay (eds), The Panmure Papers, vol. 1,
pp. 156–9.
21 Dewar (ed.), Russian War, p. 175.
22 Lambert, Crimean War, p. 233. Cf. the sober account by Figes, Crimea,
pp. 244–5. The following quotations are in Farrère, Histoire de la marine
française, p. 349; Totleben, Die Vertheidigung von Sewastopol, vol. 2, pp. 1,
293.
25 Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 431.
29 Gouttman, Guerre de Crimée, 436.
30 Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. 3, p. 385.
31 Baumgart, Peace of Paris, pp. 27–8.
32 Baumgart, Peace of Paris, p. 31. The following quotation, Baumgart, Peace of
Paris, p. 14.
33 Benson and Esher, Queen Victoria, vol. 3, p. 163.
34 Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. 3, pp. 525–6.
266 NOTES
13 The campaigns in the Baltic,

1854 and 1855
1 AGKK III/4, p. 141.
2 The figures are in Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, pp. 42–3.
3 Greenhill and Giffard, The British Assault on Finland, p. 137.
4 Greenhill and Giffard, The British Assault on Finland, p. 178.
5 Cited in Greenhill and Giffard, The British Assault on Finland, pp. 273–4.
6 Cited in Guillemin, Guerre de Crimée, p. 238.
8 Lambert, Crimean War, p. 282; Rath, Crimean War, pp. 14, 24, 44.
14 The Caucasian battlefield, 1853–5

1 Cited in Alder ‘India and the Crimean War’, p. 29.
2 AGKK IV/2, p. 292, n. 2.
3 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 105–7; cf. Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija,
vol. 2, pp. 110–11.
4 Zaiončkovskij, Priloženija, vol. 2, pp. 163, 445–52.
15 The minor theatres of war: the

White Sea and the Pacific
1 Tarle, Krymskaja vojna, vol. 2, p. 197. For more details, cf. the new account by
Rath, The Crimean War, pp. 98–9.
2 Cited in Gough, ‘The Crimean War in the Pacific’, p. 131.
16 Allied war preparations for 1856 and the

war council in Paris, January 1856
1 Martin, Life of the Prince Consort, vol. 3, pp. 524–6. Queen Victoria’s reply,
mentioned in the following paragraph, is printed in Martin, Life of the Prince
Consort, vol. 3, pp. 526–31.
2 AGKK III/4, p. 90. For the following quotation, see AGKK III/4, p. 289.
3 AGKK III/4, pp. 581–3. On the follwing sessions, cf. AGKK III/4, pp. 598–
600, 610, 629–30, 643–4.
NOTES 267
4 AGKK III/4, pp. 712–22, 738–40.

5 AGKK III/4, pp. 749–54. The following quotation is in Baumgart, ‘Ein
Kronrat Napoleons III’, pp. 212–35 (230). The documentary evidence is in
AGKK III/4 and in IV/3.
6 For further details, cf. Baumgart, Peace of Paris, pp. 68–80.
17 The Paris peace congress,

February–April 1856
1 Cf. Baumgart, Peace of Paris, p. 106.
2 AGKK III/4, pp. 789, 816, 818–19, 846–7.
3 AGKK I/3, pp. 30–8.
4 On this point, cf. Senner, Die Donaufürstentümer als Tauschobjekt,
pp. 118–38.
5 Baumgart, Peace of Paris, pp. 151–2.
6 AGKK III/4, pp. 956, 958, 969–71. Cf. also Henderson, ‘The Pacifists of the
Fifties’, pp. 123–52.
18 The consequences of the war for

international relations
2 Wemyss, Memoirs and Letters of Sir Robert Morier, vol. 2, p. 213.
3 This quotation, often found in the relevant books and sometimes wrongly
attributed to other British politicians besides Disraeli, goes back to a remark
Disraeli made in a leading article of 9 December 1854 in his weekly, The Press.
19 The medical services

1 This new chapter of the second edition of this work is a revised version of the
author’s article, ‘Der Sanitätsdienst im Krimkrieg’. Regarding the following
remarks, cf. Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts.
2 Curtiss, Russian Army, p. 73.
3 Cf. Mitra, Life and Letters of Sir John Hall.
4 Marroin, Histoire médicale de la flotte française dans la mer Noire, pp. 11 and
15–17. A finding aid to the reports of ship’s doctors of the French navy, which
are kept in the French National Archives and which concern every ship from
the time of the Crimean War, is provided by Brisou, Catalogue raisonné.
268 NOTES
5 AGKK III/3, p. 206, n. 19.

6 Pennanéac’h, ‘Un centenaire’, pp. 182–4.
7 See above pp. 119–120 for more details.
8 Cf. Spahr, Die Ausbreitung der Cholera.
9 Kaufman, Surgeons at War, p. 163.
10 Kaufman, Surgeons at War, p. 130; Poirier, ‘Questions sanitaires’, p. 251.
11 Pennanéac’h, ‘Un centenaire’, p. 178; Kaufman, Surgeons at War, p. 172.
12 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire.
13 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, p. 92.
15 Cadier-Rey, ‘Les aspects sanitaires’, p. 195.
16 Chenu, De la mortalité, p. 131. Pennanéac’h, ‘Un Centenaire’, p. 200, gives
lower figures. In cases where varying figures are given, one has to ask whether
only the French Black Sea fleet is considered or whether the Baltic See fleet is
included as well.
17 Baudens, Der Krimmkrieg, p. 117; for the following quotation, see Baudens,
Der Krimmkrieg, p. 132.
18 Baudens, Der Krimmkrieg, p. 150.
19 Baudens, Der Krimmkrieg, pp. 148–9.
22 Chenu, De la mortalité, p. 131. Differing figures are presented by Pennanéac’h,
‘Un Centenaire’, p. 178.
23 Chenu, De la mortalité, p. 133.
24 Lemaire, ‘Service de santé militaire,’ p. 1196.
25 Roche, ‘L’assistance médicale française à Constantinople,’ p. 634.
26 Cadier-Rey, ‘Aspects sanitaires,’ p. 189. Different figures are given by
Pennanéac’h, ‘Un Centenaire’, p. 200. Pennanéac’h obviously includes navy
surgeons and pharmacists and therefore arrives at a higher figure. Nevertheless,
the figures of both are inconsistent.
27 Sweetman, War and Administration, pp. 41–59.
28 Kaufman, Surgeons at War, pp. 164–7.
29 Cadier-Rey, ‘Aspects sanitaires’, p. 183.
30 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, p. 20. For the following remarks, see Hubbeneth,
Service sanitaire, pp. 20–1; also Parry, ‘American Doctors’, pp. 478–490.
31 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, p. 22. For the following remarks, see Hubbeneth,
Service sanitaire, p. 23.
33 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, p. 169. For the following remarks, see
Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, p. 8.
NOTES 269
35 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, pp. 128, 150, 166.

36 Pirogov, Sevastopol’skie pis’ma.
37 Hubbeneth, Service sanitaire, pp. 22–23.
38 Pirogov, Sevastopol’skie pis’ma, pp. 196–209.
39 Woodham-Smith, Nightingale. For a recent biography, see Bostridge,
Nightingale. For an older biography, see Cook, The Life of Florence
Nightingale. Her collected works are edited by McDonald (ed.), The Collected
Works, vols 1–16. Vol. 14, The Crimean War, was published in 2010.
40 Goldie (ed.), ‘I have done my Duty’.
41 The letters between him and Nightingale in 1854–5 are published in his
biography: Stanmore, Sidney Herbert, pp. 331–421; now also in vol. 14 of her
published works (see above, n. 39).
42 The Times, 9 October 1854; 13, October 1854. Cf. also Shepherd, The
Crimean Doctors, vol. 1, pp. 145–50.
43 As to Stanley’s group, cf. Bolster, The Sisters of Mercy; Luddy (ed.), The
Crimean Journals of the Sisters of Mercy; J. J. W. Murphy, ‘An Irish Sister of
Mercy’; D. Murphy, Ireland and the Crimean War. For the following remarks,
cf. Woodham-Smith, Nightingale, pp. 181–95; Shepherd, Crimean Doctors,
pp. 270–6.
44 Shepherd, Crimean Doctors, p. 250; Goldie, ‘I have done my Duty’, p. 229.
45 Goldie, ‘I have done my Duty’, p. 126.
46 Woodham-Smith, Nightingale, p. 238.
47 According to information from the Archives of the Vincentians, Paris, which
Miss Patricia Mowbray, Kew (Richmond), former head of the Florence
Nightingale Museum at St Thomas’ Hospital, London, kindly placed at the
author’s disposal.
48 Gilbrin, L’hôpital français à Constantinople, p. 143; Monsieur Vincent vit
encore, pp. 70–1.
49 Curtiss, ‘Russian Sisters of Mercy’, pp. 84–100; Sorokina, ‘Nursing in the
Crimean War’, pp. 57–63.
50 Cf. Lemaire, ‘Anesthésie’, p. 62.
51 Baudens, Krimmkrieg, p. 82.
52 Quoted by Bonham-Carter (ed.), Surgeon in the Crimea, p. 13. Cf. Shepherd,
54 Baudens, Krimmkrieg, p. 105; cf. also Roche, ‘L’assistance médicale’,
pp. 631–3.
55 Kaufman, Crimean War, pp. 194–5. As to the ‘Crimean winter’, cf. Shepherd,
56 Shepherd, ‘The Civil Hospitals in the Crimea’, pp. 199–204; Shepherd,
270 NOTES
59 Heyris, ‘Les problèmes de santé du corps expéditionnaire piémontais’, p. 58.

60 Baudens, Krimmkrieg, pp. 164–7. Cf. Shepherd, Crimean Doctors, vol. 2,
pp. 562–71 (the remarks refer to the ‘Turkish Contingent’, an auxiliary unit
attached to the British Army of the East).
61 Quoted by Cadier-Rey, ‘Aspects sanitaires’, p. 184.
62 Goldie, ‘I have done my Duty’, p. 272. For the following quotation, see Goldie,
‘I have done my Duty’, p. 273.
63 Baudens, Krimmkrieg, p. 214.
64 AGKK , III/4, p. 1015.
67 AGKK III/4, p. 1017. In the House of Commons, on 8 May 1856, Secretary of
State for War, Panmure, quantified the total number of soldiers sent to the
Levant (including Foreign Legion and Transport Corps of the Army) as
149,764. Cf. Hansard’s Parliamentary Reports, Third Series, vol. 142 (London,
1856), pp. 183–4. Cf. also Shepherd, Crimean Doctors, vol. 2, p. 591.
68 Shepherd, Crimean Doctors, vol. 2, p. 187. His number is higher by more than
1,000: 22,457.
73 Curtiss comes to a total of 450,000: Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War, pp. 470–1.
74 Naumova, Ranenie, p. 297.
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284
GENERAL INDEX
Abdülmecid, Sultan 104, 110, 216, 219 April treaty (1854)

Aberdeen, George H. Gordon, Earl of Anglo-French 98
14, 17, 152 Prusso-Austrian 19, 32, 44, 62
Åbo 180 Arab Tabia 109, 110
Abraham 186 arbitration 221
Abydos 245 Archangel 197, 198, 199
Adrianople 116 Ardahan 71, 104, 192, 193
peace of (1829) 6, 7, 16, 216 Ardant, Paul-J. 116
Ahmed Pasha 106 Argentine Confederation 86
Aigun 203 Arles 119
Airey, Richard 139, 152 Armenia 191
Aix-la-Chapelle 55 armistice 215
Akhaltzik 193 army
Åland Islands 33, 50, 51, 75, 88, 181, Alma 126–32
182, 183, 210, 217 Eupatoria 127
Albania 112 Greece 58
Albert, Prince 81, 171 Kamchatka 200–3
Aldershot 84 Sevastopol 132–78
Aleksandropol 193, 194 Varna 115–21
Alexander II, Tsar 54, 165, 209, Austria 23
211, 253 Danubian Principalities 41, 109
Alexander Karageorgievich, Prince, strength 77, 112, 113
112 Bavaria 59
Alexandre 230 Britain
Algeciras 52 Alma 128–31
Algeria 152 bibliography 90
Alicante 52 cholera 231
Ali Pasha 216, 223 casualties 232, 250
Alma, battle of the (Sept. 1854), 74, equipment 83–4
84, 127–32, 174, 233 foreign legions 84–7, 90
Menshikov 129 medical service 236–41
St. Arnaud 128, 129 Sevastopol 127–73
‘thin red line’ 128 strength 83, 113, 250
Zouaves 129 supplies 149–52
Alushta 78, 209 system 81–2
Amur 50, 199, 200, 202, 203 war plans 87–8
Anaklia 193 France
Anapa 118, 121, 159 Alma 126–32
Andronikov, Prince Ivan M. 191 Armée d’Orient 73–5, 249
285
286 GENERAL INDEX
bibliography 79 Greece 58
Boulogne 180 Hanover 61
casualties 230–1, 249 mobilization of army 20, 114
Dobrudja 120–1 Napoleon III 35
medical service 235, 241 Nicholas 31
Sevastopol 127–73 Paris peace congress 215–21
strength, 73, 75, 77, 249–50 policy after war 226
supplies 152–3 policy during war 39–41, 47
system 75–6 Polish legion 87
war plan 205–6 Russia 32, 110
German Confederation 59 Turkey 6, 223
Prussia 113 ultimatum to Russia 23, 171, 210
Russia Vienna peace conference (1855)
Alma 128, 130 21–2
bibliography 71 war plan 76–7
casualties 250–1 Western Powers 20
Caucasus 192–6 Avacha bay 200
Danube 108, 109, 110 Avignon 119, 230
Danubian Principalities 104 Ayan 200
equipment 68 Azov, Sea of 157, 159, 217
medical service 237–8, 241–2
Miliutin 211 Babadagh 108
northern districts 180 Badem, Candan 94–5, 247
officer corps 69–70 Baden 62
Petropavlovsk 200, 201, 202 Bagration, Prince Ivan K. 191, 195
Sevastopol 133–78 Baidar river 138
strength 67–8, 138, 250 Baillie, Thomas 199
supplies 153 Bakchisarai 133, 246
war plans 70–1 Balaklava 52, 83, 84, 132, 134, 149,
Sardinia 97–9, 247 150, 151, 153, 166, 231, 234,
Saxony 59 243, 245, 246, 247
Spain 52, 53 battle of (Oct. 1854) 137–41,
Sweden 50 174–5
Turkey 93–4 balance of power 179, 217
bibliography 94–5 Balta Liman, treaty of (1838) 7
Bucharest 115 Baltchik 87, 118
casualties 251 Baltic 33
Caucasus 192–6 bibliography 188
Danube 105–6, 110 blockade 46, 89
Danubian Principalities 114, 115 British fleet 89–90, 116, 180
Eupatoria 155 French expeditionary force
Arta, Gulf of 56, 58 180, 183
Athens 57, 58 plan for 1856 205, 206
Austria Russian fleet 70, 180
April treaty (1854) 19 war theatre 179–88
Crimean war (bibliography) 47 Bamberg conference (May/June 1854),
Danubian Principalities 39, 111–5 61–2, 64
Eastern question (bibliography) 9 Baraguey d’Hilliers, Achille Count 183
Four Points 59–63, 64 Barents Sea 197
GENERAL INDEX 287
Baresund 183 Buchanan, James 55

Bashgedikler 193, 194 Bucharest 87, 104, 105, 106, 109, 111,
Bashi-Bazouks 94, 95 113, 115
Batum 71, 106, 192, 194, 195 Bukovina 111
Baudens, Lucien 232, 235, 244, Bulganak 128
247, 248 Bulgaria 109, 115
Baumgarten, Alexander 106 Buol-Schauenstein, Karl Graf 21,
Baumgartner, Andreas 114 23, 41, 57, 62, 77, 111,
Bavaria 60, 62, 64 112, 114, 115, 215, 216,
Bayezid 71, 104, 192, 193, 194 221, 226
Bazaine, Achille 173 Burgoyne, Sir John 116, 132
Bazancourt, César L. de XIII
Belbek 132, 133 Callao 200, 201
Belgrade 112 Cambridge, Duke of 208
Berislav 247 Canada 12
Berkeley, Maurice 185 Canlidshe 244
Besika bay 15, 16, 17, 103 Canrobert, François C. 73, 75–6, 78,
Bessarabia 34, 71, 114, 210, 216, 224 79, 88, 119, 120, 134, 155,
Bethlehem 12 156, 157, 158, 248
Beust, Friedrich von 60–1 Cardigan, James T. Brudenell 139, 140
Bialystok 113 Careening ravine 142, 143
Bismarck, Otto Fürst von 7–8, 224, casualties 229, 230–2, 237, 244, 246,
226, 227 248–51
Black Sea Caucasus 34, 106
British fleet 107 bibliography 195–6
entry of Allied warships 17, 107 Britain 206, 209
neutralization 22, 34, 217, 224 Omer Pasha 94
Russian fleet 106–7 plans for 1856 209
blockade 46, 89, 181, 186, 198, 222 Polish legion 87
Bodisko, Jakov A. 183 war theatre 189–96
Bolgrad 216 Cavour, Count Camillo B. di 36, 97,
Bomarsund 50, 89, 181, 183–4, 185, 98, 99, 216, 220, 221
187, 217 Cetate 106
Borodkin, M. 187 chasseurs d’Afrique 138, 140
Bosquet, Pierre F. H. 120, 129, 138, Chenu, Jean Charles 234, 235
140, 143, 145, 146, 147, Chersonese plateau 142
163, 169 Chesmé, battle of (1770) 104
Boulogne 168, 180 China 199
Boyadji-Köi, treaty of (June 1854) chloroform 242
21, 110 cholera 98, 119–21, 165, 230–1, 251
Brahestad 181 Cholok 193
Braila 108 Chotyn 216
Brandis, Bernhard von 61 Christians 21, 31, 71, 86, 94, 219
Brown, Sir George 119, 142 Circassia 34, 89, 121, 189, 190, 191,
Bruat, Armand J. 119, 157, 172, 210
173, 231 Clarendon, George W. F. Villiers, Earl
Bruce, Henry W. 201, 202 of 18
Brunel, Isambard 246 Circassia 34, 189
Brunet, Jean L.A. 165 foreign legions 84
288 GENERAL INDEX
German Confederation 62 Dannenberg, Petr A. 105, 142, 143,

Paris peace congress (1856) 216, 144, 145, 147
218, 221 Danube
Prussia 44 free navigation 118, 218
Raglan 82 mouths 20
Sardinia 97 Paris peace congress 216, 218
Spain 52–3 Paskevich 69
Sweden 50 Spanish mission 52
United States 55–6 war theatre 6, 103–6, 122, 189
Clayton-Bulwer treaty (1850) 54 bibliography 122
Codrington, Sir William 17, 82, 205, Danubian Principalities 7
209 acquisition by Rusia 29
Cologne 84 Allied troops 118
Commissariat 149, 150, 236 Boyadji-Köi 21
Constantinine Nikolaevich, Grand Britain 21
Duke 71 evacuation by Austrian troops 115
Copenhagen 181 evacuation by Russian troops 10,
Coronini, Johann Count 112, 113–14, 34, 82, 100–2, 118
115, 218 occupation by Austria 39, 40, 41,
Courland 185 111–15
Cowley, Henry R. C. Wellesley, occupation by Russia 103–4
Baron 22, 83, 172, Paris peace congress (1856)
207, 208 217–18
Cracow 114, 220 Paskevich 69, 109
Crampton, John F. 55, 56 Russian protectorate 118
Crenneville, Franz Count Folliot de Danzig 46
76, 77 Dardanelles 105
Crete, 29 Darja (nurse) 242
Crimea December treaty 21, 40, 62, 76
acquisition by Russia 6 declaration of war
American doctors 54 Britain 15, 18, 39
American volunteers 56 France 15, 18, 39
bibliography 122 Turkey 15, 16, 104
invasion 121 Degoev, Vladimir V. 196
Napoleon’s planned visit 77, 88, Delafield, Richard 54
155–6 Dickson, Charles S. 86
plan for 1856 208, 209 Dieu, Charles-P. 116
Russian army 68, 208 Di Nolfo, Ennio 36
Turkish army 93 diplomacy (of Crimean War) 11–23
war theatre 125–78 diseases 230–2, 251
withdrawal of troops 207 Disraeli, Benjamin 227
Crimean winter 150–5 Dnieper 172
Crowe, John 50–1 Dobrudja 111, 120–1, 230–1, 250
Cuba 12, 51, 54, 55 Drouyn de Lhuys, Édouard 22, 23, 35,
Curtis, John R. 84 49, 52, 58, 62, 217
Czajkowski, Michael 87 Dunaburg 185
Dundas, Sir James 121, 136
Dabormida, Giuseppe 97, 98 Dundas, Sir Richard 185
Daghestan 189, 190 Dupuy de Lôme, Stanislas 78
GENERAL INDEX 289
Dvina (northern) 197 Finnish 33

Dvina (western) 180 French 86
German 84–5, 87, 209, 231
Eastern question XIII, 3–9, 32, 59, 189 Italian 84, 86
bibliography 8–9 Polish 86, 87, 91
Egypt 29, 93 Swiss 86, 87, 91, 209
Epirus 31, 56, 57, 58, 108, 112 foreign trade
Erivan 193 Britain 222
Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg 35 Prussia 43, 46–7
Erzurum 192, 194, 195 Russia 46–7, 197
Espinasse, Esprit C.M. 120 Four Points 20, 32, 62, 118, 210
Estcourt, James 152 Fourichon, Martin 201
Estonia 185 France
Eupatoria 94, 149, 160 army 73–9, 83
Allied landing-place 127 Baltic 180
battle of (Febr. 1855) 155 Caucasus 190
plans for 1856 195, 196, 208, 209 Eastern question (bibliography) 9
Russian bombardment 145 Far East 200
Turkish troops 177 Greece 58
Evans, Sir George de Lacy 142 Paris peace congress 215–22
policy after the war 223–4
Far East 199, 200, 203 Prussia 43
Farrère, Claude 159 Rhine 77
Fébvrier-Despointes, Auguste Russia 216, 225–6
200, 201 Seymour conversations 29
Fedukhin heights 138, 140, 141, 159, Spain 52
166, 167, 168 Sweden 49–51
Fenton, Roger 150, 176 Turkey 7, 223
Feodosia 127, 158, 246 Vienna peace conference (1855)
Ferdinand VIII, King 51 22–3
Finland 33, 50, 178, 181–2, 185, 188 war aims 34–5, 37
Finmark 50, 51, 197, 199 White Sea 199
fleet Francis I, King 7
Allied 136, 149, 157–9, 185, 187, Francis Joseph, Emperor 31, 41
198–203 Danubian Principalities 111, 113,
British 89–90, 104, 107, 180–2, 114, 218
185, 186, 233–4 A.M. Gorchakov 22
French 78, 79, 103, 104, 185, 186 Greece 58
Russian 70, 180, 215 Nicholas 14, 31, 108
Turkish 106–7 Orlov mission 32, 117
floating batteries 78 policy after the war 226
see also ironclads Frederick the Great, King 59
Fokşani 114 Frederick William IV, King 7
Foreign Enlistment Act 55 Curtis 84
Forey, Élie F. 58 neutrality 19, 42, 46, 180
foreign legions 171 policy during war 42–7
American 55–6 Friedjung, Heinrich 47
Anglo-Turkish 33 Fuad Pasha 223
British 84 Furious 117
290 GENERAL INDEX
Galatz 108, 114 Sweden 49–51

Galicia 111, 112, 114 Turkey 6–7, 34, 223
Gallipoli 115, 116, 117, 118 United States 53–6
Gamlakarleby 182 Vienna peace conference (1855)
Gasfort Hill 98, 159, 166 22–3
Georgia 89, 191 war aims 32–4, 37, 205–6
Gerlach, Leopold von 44 war plans (1856), 89, 91, 205–9
German Confederation/Germany 35, White Sea 197–8
59–64, 197 ‘Great Game’ 189
bibliography 64 Greece 56–8, 62, 63–64
Gervais battery 137, 154, 155, 164 Gregg, David L. 54
Giffard, George 181 Greytown 55
Giurgewo 111 Guilbert, Pierre É. 198, 199
Gladstone, William E. 32 Guyon, Richard 192
Goldie, Sue M. 238
‘good offices” 221 Halifax 56
Gorchakov, Alexander M. 22, Hall, John 229, 238, 240, 241, 242,
224, 225 250, 251
Gorchakov, Michael D. 69, 143 Halim Pasha 113
commander-in-chief Crimea 155, Hamelin, Ferdinand A. 117, 119,
165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 121, 136
170, 171 Hammerfest 198
commander-in-chief Danube 104, Hangö 180, 181
109, 110, 111 Hanover 61, 62, 64
Gorchakov, Piotr D. 143, 145, 146, hatt-i humayun 219
147 Hawaii 54, 220
Graham, Sir James 53, 88, 116, 118, Heavy Brigade 139
181 Helena, Grand Duchess 241
Granada 55 Heligoland 84, 85
Great Britain Helsingfors 116, 186, 187
army 81–91 Henri IV 149, 155
Baltic 180, 185 Herbert, Sidney 83, 90, 149, 236, 238,
Caucasus 33, 189–90 240
Danube 219 Herzegovina 104, 108
Eastern Question (bibliography) Hess, Heinrich von 76, 77, 112, 114,
8–9 218
Far East 199–203 Hesse 62
foreign legions 84–7 Hirsova 108
Four Points 21 Holland 63
Hanover 61 Hollins, George 55
maritime law 221–2 Holy Alliance 35, 60, 226
Paris peace congress (1856) 215–22 Holy Places 6–7, 12, 34, 51
Poland 35, 171 Honduras 12
policy after the war 227 Hong Kong 199
Prussia 44–6 Honolulu 200
Russia 179, 189, 199, 227 hospital gangrene 232–3
Sardinia 97, 98 hospitals 243–7
Seymour conversations 29, 70 Hubbenet, Anton von 231, 237–8,
Spain 53 243, 250
GENERAL INDEX 291
Hudson, Sir James 97 Kornilov, Vladimir A. 57, 69, 70, 134,

Hudson Bay Company 200 135, 137
Hungary 112 Kotka 186
Kremenchug 247
Iaşi 114 Kronstadt 88, 89, 90, 171, 180, 183,
Ibraila 114 185, 186, 187, 205, 206, 209
India 34, 83, 189 Kuban 216
Ingur 195 Kuleli 240, 245
Inkerman 84 Kurukdere 194
battle of (Nov. 1854) 55, 141–8, Kustendje 104
152, 175 Kutaisi 194, 195
intelligence service, see reconnaissance Kutchuk-Kainardji (1774) 16, 207,
international law 221–2 219
ironclads 78, 90, 137, 173, 178
Isacchea 108, 111, 219 La Marmora, Alfonso Marchese 98
Ismaila 108 Lambert, Andrew 116, 159
Italy 36, 98–9, 218, 219–20 Land Transport Corps 82, 149, 248
Lansdowne, Henry P. Fitzmaurice,
Jakobi, Boris S. 180 Marquess of 33
Jerusalem 12, 138, 149, 150 La Susse, Aaron, L. F. Regnault de 103
Lazarev, Michael P. 125
Kadikioi 138, 149, 150 Leiningen, Christian Graf von 15
Kakhetia 190, 191 Leonhart, Harry 61
Kalafat 94, 105, 106, 110 Lévy, Michel 235
Kalik, Anton 113 Libau 181
Kamchatka 197, 200, 201, 203 Light Brigade 139–41
Kamchatka lunette 157, 161 Liprandi, Pavel P. 137, 138, 140, 166,
Kamehameha III, King 54, 200 167
Kamiesh (bay) 83, 134, 148, 149, 152, Lister, Joseph 233
166, 234, 243, 244 Little Wallachia 104
Karazubazar 246 Lobstein, Charles-V. 49
Karlowitz, peace of (1699) 4 London
Kars 23, 71, 94, 104, 172, 192, 193–4, Napoleon’s visit 76, 78, 88, 156
195, 209, 216 Sinope 17, 107
Katcha 120, 127, 132, 133, 149 telegraph to Crimea 158
Kazatch bay 152 Longworth, John A. 34, 189
Kentucky 54 Louis Philippe, King 73
Kertch 89, 127, 209 Lovisa 186
expedition 157–9 Lucan, George C. Bingham, Earl of
Kherson 89, 172, 173, 217, 247 138, 140, 141, 150
Khrulev, Stepan A. 155 Lüders, Alexander N. 108, 109
Kinburn 78, 90, 172–3, 178 Lyons, Sir Edmund 119, 157, 159
Kinney, Henry 55
Kmety, George 192 Macedonia 57
Koch, Robert 229 Mackenzie’s Farm 133
Kola 198 Mackenzie heights 77, 166, 167, 206
Königsberg 46 McLellan, George B. 54
Korabelnaya 134, 137, 142, 156, 161, MacMahon, Marie E.M. Count 73,
162, 169, 170, 171 169, 170
292 GENERAL INDEX
Malakhov (bastion) 70, 74, 136, 137, Montenegro 15, 112, 223, 224
156, 160, 161, 164, 165, 169, Mordecai, Alfred 54
170, 171 Morier, Sir Robert 227, 251
Mamelon vert 156, 157, 177 Morning Post 44
Mamula, Lazarus von 58 Mosquito Coast 54, 55
Manduit, Hippolyte H. 190 Mount Rodolphe 147
Manteuffel, Otto baron von 43 Muchir-Abdul Pasha 192
Marcy, William 53, 54, 55, 56 Muraviev-(Amurskij), Nikolai N. 199,
Maria Theresa 59 200, 201, 202, 203
Mariinsk 200 Muraviev-(Karskij), Nikolai N. or
Marja (nurse) 242 N. N. 193, 194, 195
Marquesas Islands 200 Murmansk 198
Marroin, Auguste 230
Marseilles 89, 119, 230 Nakhimov, Pavel S. 17, 70, 106, 107,
Martin, Kingsley 17 135, 137, 153, 165
Maslak 241 Napier, Sir Charles 180, 181, 184–5
Mason, John Y. 55 Napoleon I 7, 68
Mast bastion 157 Napoleon III
Matchin 108, 109, 111 Cavour 98, 99
Matepe 244 Crimea 121
Maximilian II, King 59, 61 visit 77, 88, 121, 155–6
Mayerhofer, Ferdinand 113 Danubian Principalities 218
Mayran, Joseph 58, 165 fleet to the East 103, 107, 116
mediation 221 foreign policy after the war
medical service 229–50 225–7
Megale Idea 57, 58 Greece 58
Mehemet Ali 6, 36 Holy Places 7
Mehmet Rüştü Pasha 36 invasion of Crimea 118, 121
Melitopol 246, 247 Italy 221
Menshikov, Alexander S. or A. S. 15, 29, Kertch expedition 158
30, 57, 69, 70, 125, 127, 128, London visit 76, 78, 88, 156
129, 132, 133, 135, 137, 142, Nicholas 13–14
143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 155 Niel 165
mercenaries, see foreign legions Paris peace congress 215, 216, 218,
Meseldereg 190 219, 220, 221
Messina 230 Pélissier 161, 163, 164
Metternich, Klemens Fürst von 6, policy after the war 226–7
40, 59 Prussia 44
Meyendorff, Peter 210 Spain 52
Michael, Grand Duke 142, 241 Sevastopol 171
Miliutin, Dmitrij A. 201 Sweden 49, 51
mines 180, 186 Turkey 5, 7
Mingrelia 195–6 Vienna peace conference (1855) 22
Modena 35, 218 war aims 34–5, 179
Moderados 52 war council (Jan. 1856) 206–9
Moldavia 34, 114, 115 war plans 77–8, 83, 89, 208–9
Moniteur 131, 248, 249 Zouaves 73–4
Monituer de l’Armée 249 Napoleon, Prince 120
monks’ dispute 12 navy, see fleet
GENERAL INDEX 293
Nesselrode, Karl R. Count 31, 54, 57, declaration of war 104

104, 111, 210 Eupatoria 138, 155
Neuchâtel 220 Sevastopol 158, 160
neutrals at sea 54, 221–2 Ommaney, Erasmus 198
Newcastle, Henry Pelham, Duke of 34 Onega 198
Nicaragua 54 Orbeliani, Prince Gregorij D. 191
Nicholas I Order of the Exaltation of the Cross
Alma 132 241, 242
Austria 19, 226 Orlov, Aleksej F. 31, 32, 112,
Balkan peoples 111 216, 217
Danubian Principalities 39, 43, 63, O’Ryan, Tomás 52, 54
104, 108 Oscar I, King 49–51, 90, 180, 184
death 155 Osman Pasha 107
Francis Joseph 108 ‘Osmanli Cavalry’ 87
Frederick William IV 45 Ostend 55
‘gendarme of Europe’ 225 Osten-Sacken, Dmitrij E. von
Greece 57 133, 165
Inkerman 142 Otho, King 57, 58, 59
invasion of Crimea 124 Ottoman Empire, see Turkey
Menshikov mission 15, 223
Napoleon III 13–14 Pacific 54, 200
Orlov mission 112 Palestine 6, 12
Paskevich 69 Palmerston, Henry J. Temple, Viscount
Seymour conversations 14–15, 29, ‘beau idéal’ 32–3, 35
30 Black Sea 217
Sinope 106 foreign legions 97
war aims 29–30, 70–1, 254 Napoleon III 83
William, Prince 43 plan of campaign (1856) 89, 206
Nicholas, Grand Duke 142 Russia 179
Niel, Adolphe 76, 155, 156, 165 Sevastopol 171, 172
Nightingale, Florence 238–41, 244, Sinope 108
245, 246, 248, 252 Sweden 50, 51, 179
Nikolaev 89, 172, 173, 217, 247 Panama 54
Nikolaevsk 200, 202 Panmure, Fox Maule, Baron 236, 250
Nizhnyj Novgorod 153 Paris
Novara 86 Crenneville 76, 77
November storm (1854) 84, 148–9, peace congress (1856) 34, 98,
152, 175 215–22, 227
November treaty (1855) 51, 90, peace treaty 223–4
187, 210 telegraph to Crimea 158
nursing staff 238–42 war council (1856) 89, 172, 205–9
Parma 35, 218
Ochakov 172, 173 Parseval-Deschênes, Alexandre F. 183
Odessa 117 Paskevich, Ivan F. Count 31, 39
Okhotsk 200, 203 Caucasus 192, 193
Oltenitsa 94, 105, 106 Nicholas 69
Omer Pasha 87, 88, 94, 158, 161 Silistria 109, 110–11
Caucasus 194, 195, 196 Tchernaya 168
Danube 105, 114, 117 Pasteur, Louis 229
294 GENERAL INDEX
Pavlov, Prokofij Ia. 143, 144, 145, 147 public opinion

peace congress, Paris (1856) 34, 98, Britain 17–18, 32, 108, 141, 152,
215–22, 227 157, 171, 227
Peace Society 221 Europe 106
peace treaty, Paris (1856) 219–20, 225 France 141, 171
Pélissier, Aimable J.J. 73, 76, 78, 79, Greece 58
82, 156, 158, 160, 161, Prussia 19
163, 164, 165, 168, 171, Sardinia 97
194, 206 Turkey 16
Penaud, André É. 185, 187 United States 45, 56
Perekop 246 Putiatin, Efim V. 199, 200
Persia 71
Peru 200 Quarantine Bastion 160
Peterwardein 112 Quarries 161
Peto, Bressey & Betts 150
Petropavlovsk 197, 200, 201, 202, 203 Raglan, Fitzroy J.H. 76, 77, 78, 82, 90,
Pfordten, Ludwig von der 60 113, 117, 118, 127, 128, 129,
photography 150, 176 132, 134, 138, 139, 140, 149,
Pierce, Franklin 53–4 152, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161,
Piraeus 58, 230 164, 165, 231
Pirogov, 237, 238, 241, 242, 252 railways 68, 150, 160
Plumridge, James 181, 182, 198 Ramichiflik 244
Pluton 149, 155 Rasova 108
Podolia 71, 112 Rath, Andrew 203
Point Battery 164 Read, Nikolai A. 166, 167, 193
Poland 71, 112, 113, 155, 171 reconnaissance 127, 133, 138
Napoleon III 35, 71, 171, 206 recruitment controversy 55–6, 136,
Polish legion 35, 86, 87 156, 161, 162, 164, 169, 170,
Poti 193 171
preliminaries of peace 215 Redutkaleh 193, 195
Price, David 200, 201 Renköy 236, 246
Prim, Juan 52, 54 Reshid Pasha 223
Prince 149, 150 Resolute 149
privateering 221–2 Reval 180, 181, 185, 186, 187
Progesistas 52 revolution 31, 33, 40, 41, 53, 111
Prussia Rhine 35, 43, 77, 89, 171, 218
Crimean War (bibliography) 47 Ritter, Monika 58
Danube 219 Riza Pasha 117
German Confederation 59, 61, 62 Robertson, James 150, 176
Hanover 61, 62 Roebuck, James A. 152
Napoleon III 35 Rumania 223, 224
Paris peace congress (1856) 216, Russell, Lord John 22, 23, 39, 97
226 Russell, William H. 152, 176,
policy after the war 226 232, 248
policy during the war 41–7 Russia
recruiting by Britain 84–6 A°́ land islands 183
Turkey 7–8 army 67–71
Western powers 19, 45 Austrian ultimatum 209–12
Pruth 23, 111, 216 Belgium 183
GENERAL INDEX 295
Black Sea 224 Sapun heights 135, 138, 139, 141, 142,
Britain 32–4, 179 143, 145, 146
Caucasus 189–96 Sardinia
Danube 218 army 98–9, 247
Danubian Principalities 29, 109, Crimea 166, 167
111 bibliography 99
Eastern question (bibliography) 8–9 Danube 219
foreign policy after the war 224–5 foreign legion 86
foreign trade 45–6 intervention in the war 51, 97–9
Four Points 21 Napoleon III 35
France 216, 225–6 Paris peace congress (1856) 98–9,
Germany 61, 62 218
Greece 57, 58 war aims 36, 37–8
Kamchatka 200, 201, 202 Sasyk, Lake 216
Palmerston 32–3 Saxony 59, 60–1, 62, 64
Paris peace congress (1856) Scarlett, James 139
203–19, 224 Schilder, Karl A. 109, 110
Paris peace treaty 224 Schlettstadt 86
Sweden 50–1 Schroeder, Paul 47
Turkey 223–4 Schwarzenberg, Felix Fürst zu 224
United States 53, 54, 56 Scrive, Gaspar-Léonard 249
Vienna peace conference (1855) 23 scurvy 233–4
war aims 29–32 Scutari (province) 58, 84, 87, 112, 115,
war plans 29–32, 210–12 116, 118
White Sea 197–200 Selenghinsky redoubt 156
Russian America 200 Semlin 112
Russian-American Company 200 Serbia 31, 58, 64, 104, 108, 109, 112
Rustchuk 108, 109 Serbian-Banat corps 112
Sevastopol
Saab, Ann Pottinger 36 American doctors 54
Sadik Pasha 87 approach of Allied army 132–4
Saint-Arnaud, Achille Le Roy 75, 76, bibliography 174–8
79, 110, 113, 116, 117, 118, bombardment
119, 120, 127, 128, 129, 132, first 135–7
133, 134, 230, 231 second 157, 177
Saint-Jean d’Angély, Auguste M.E. third 161
Regnault 163 fourth 164–5, 177
Saint Nicholas 193 fifth 168–9
Saint Petersburg 185, 187, 205 sixth 169
treaty of (1834) 34, 216 defences 125, 135, 136
Salamis 16, 103, 116 evacuation by Russian troops
Sandbag Battery 145, 146 170–1
Sandwich islands 54, 200 fall 168–71, 177
San Francisco 201 J. Graham 88, 116, 118
San Juan 55 hospital 247
San Roque 52 siege 174, 176
San Stefano, peace of (1878) 224 first phase 132–7
Santiago de Cuba 53 second phase 156–9
Sappers’ Road 135, 142, 143, 146, 148 last phase 159–68
296 GENERAL INDEX
Sinope 108–9, 123 Solovetskie islands 198

White Sea 57, 58, 70 Western powers 49–51, 185, 187,
Seymour, Sir George H. 14–15, 29, 188, 197
189 Switzerland 86, 91, 220
Shamil 34, 189, 190, 191, 196
Shilda 190 Taganrog 159
Shorncliffe 84 Taif 107
Shumla 110, 117, 118 Tarle, Evgenij V. 37, 187
Sicily 98 Tarutinsky regiment 153
Silesia 44 Tchernaya 135, 138, 142, 143
Silistria 31, 32, 71, 87, 94, 108–10, battle of (Aug. 1855) 98, 166–7,
117, 118 177, 247
Simferopol 78, 88, 155, 206, 209, 246 Tchorgun 143, 159, 166
Simpson, Sir James 17, 82, 194, 205 Tehuantepec 54
Sinope, battle of (Nov. 1853) 17–18, telegraph 16, 107, 158
123, 190 Telegraph hill 74, 166, 167, 168
Sisters of Mercy 232, 241–2, 252 Tennyson, Alfred Baron 139
Skutari (Constantinople district/ Theodosia (Feodosia) 157
hospital) 147, 231, 239, 240, Thessaly 31, 108, 112
244, 245 Thrace 57
Slade, Adolphus 107 Tiflis 190, 191, 192, 194, 195
Smyrna 236, 246 Times, The 17–18, 152, 171, 176, 181,
Snow, John 119 202, 240
Soimonov, Fedor I. 143, 144, 145 Timofeev, Nikolaj D. 143, 144, 147
Solovetskie islands 198 Totleben, Edouard I. 109, 125, 131,
Soulé, Pierre 55 135, 136, 156, 163, 164, 171
Sound dues 220 Toulon 103
South Africa 86 trade, see foreign trade
spahis d’Orient 120 Trajan’s wall 108
Spain 51–3, 55, 63 Traktir bridge 138, 141, 166, 215
Spithead 180 Transcaucasia, see Caucasus
Stables 244 Transylvania 20, 39, 111, 114, 218
Stanley, Mary 240, 245 Trebizond 192
Stockholm 183 Trento 52
Stoeckl, Edaurd von 53, 54 Trochu, Louis-J. 119
Stratford de Redcliffe, Viscount 16, 86, Tsinandali 190
93, 103, 107 Tulchea 87, 108, 111
Stutterheim, Richard von 84 Tunisia 138
Sudjuk Kaleh 159 Turkey
supplies 150–3, 211 army 93–5
surgeons 235–8 Caucasus 189–96
Sveaborg 90, 180, 185, 186, 187 Danubian Principalities 219
Sweden declaration of war 15
A°́ land islands 217 decline 4–5
bibliography 63 Eastern question 8
Britain 181 France 7
entry in war 63, 90, 210 Great Britain 6–7, 34
Palmerston 33, 179 Greece 57, 58
Russia 68 Palmerston 179
GENERAL INDEX 297
Paris peace congress (1856) 223 Walewski, Alexandre F.J. Colonna,

Paris peace treaty 223–4 Count 216, 218
Prussia 7–8 Walker, William 55
Russia 6, 31, 108 Wallachia 112, 113, 114, 115
Seymour conversations 14–15, 25–6 war aims
war aims 36, 37 Britain 32–4, 37, 205–6
Western Powers 18–19 France 34–5, 37, 199
‘Turkish Contingent’ 86, 87, 89, 91, Russia 29–32
93–4 Sardinia 36
Türr, Stephan 115 Turkey 36
typhoid 232 Western powers 20
see also Four Points
Uleåborg 181 war council
ultimatum, Austrian (Dec. 1855) 40, Paris (Jan. 1856) 89–90, 208–9
171, 206, 207, 210, 211 St. Petersburg (Jan. 1856 209–12
United States 253 war plan
Crimean War (bibliography) 63 Allied commanders 118
Cuba 51 Austria 76–7
Far East 199 Great Britain 82–3
Great Britain 12, 53–6, 84 Napoleon III 76–8
Unkiar Skelessi treaty of (1833) 6, 17, Nicholas 30–1, 70–1
30 Russia 70–1, 111, 210–11
Urquhart, David 7 Western powers 87–8, 91, 205–12
Waterloo 146, 163
Vaillant, Jean-B. 121, 165, 190 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of
Valley of Death 140 61
Vancouver 201 White Sea 197–9, 203
Varna 108, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, William I, King 61
121, 230, 231, 244 William, Prince 42–3
Velpeau, Alfred 242 Williams, William F. 192, 195
Victor Emanuel, King 97, 98 Windsor
Victoria, Queen 98, 171, 206–7, 238, Napoleon’s visit 76, 78, 88, 156
242, 244 Wochenblatt Party 42
Vidin 71, 104, 106, 108, 110 Woodham-Smith, Cecil 238, 241
Vienna world war xii, 197
conferences of (1855) 22–3, 44, 45, Wurtemberg 61, 62, 64
209
congress of (1814/15) 218 Yalpukh Sea 216
Orlov mission 31 Yanina 57
protocol (1856) 215 Yaroslavl 127
Vincentians 241, 244 Yeisk 59, 89, 158, 160
Vistula 43 Yussuf, General 120
Vivian, Robert J. 86, 93
Volhynia 71, 112 Zabala, Juan de 52
Volhynian redoubt 156 Zakataly 190
Volos, Gulf of 56 Zamoyski, Władisław 87
Voroncov, Michael S. 104, 192, 193, Zavoiko, Vasilij S. 201
210 Zouaves 73–4, 129, 146, 161, 170
Vrevsky, Pavel A. Baron 165, 167 Zugdidi 195
298

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The Crimean War:

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © Winfried Baumgart, 2020

Cover design by Tjaša Krivec

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

ISBN: PB: 978-1-3500-8343-1

Series: Modern Wars

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

List of Illustrations vii

Part One Origins and Diplomacy of the War

1 The real cause of the war – the Eastern Question 3

2 Diplomacy during the war, 1853–6 11

Part Two The Belligerents and the Non-Belligerents

3 The war aims of the belligerents 29

4 The non-belligerent German powers: Austria and

5 The neutral powers 49

Part Three The Armies of the Belligerents

Part Four The War

11 The Danube front, 1853–4 103

12 The Black Sea theatre 125

13 The campaigns in the Baltic, 1854 and 1855 179

14 The Caucasian battlefield, 1853–5 189

15 The minor theatres of war: the White Sea and the

16 Allied war preparations for 1856 and the war council in

Part Five The End of the War

17 The Paris peace congress, February–April 1856 215

18 The consequences of the war for international

19 The medical services 229

Appendix: Chronology 255

1 ‘Consultation about the State of Turkey’. Napoleon III and an

1 European Russia, 1853–6. 13

Yet the diminishing utility of navies in affecting the course of continental

The Crimean War is a direct outgrowth of the so-called Eastern Question.

The interests of Russia as Turkey’s direct neighbour consisted of a mixture

Turkish Straits was felt to be dangerous to the security of these lines of

Berlin tried to exploit Austria’s predicament in order to make gains on

Pioniere im Heiligen Land. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Pilgermission

Given these preliminary remarks on the Eastern Question, it is not difficult

marching in if diplomacy did eventually fail. For a short time, everybody in

MAP 1 European Russia, 1853–6.

Although there was no such thing as public opinion in Russia in the

of emperor in December 1852, Nicholas’s disgust knew no bounds. When all

FIGURE 2 A French soldier explaining Constantinople to a Cossack. Cartoon by

FIGURE 3 ‘Right against wrong’. Punch 26 (1854), p. 143. University Library of

stipulations of restoring peace by common efforts and consultations, Britain

on making the fifth point so unacceptable to Russia that, in view of the

Fletcher and Natilia Ishchenko, The Crimean War: A Clash of Empires

FIGURE 5 Russia – the ‘Colossus of the North’. Courtesy of the Archives du

Another Russian document, again from January 1853 in Nicholas’s own

Austria the accomplice of his grand design. When Menshikov’s mission

objective. He wanted to curb Russia’s expansionism on her European and

specifications of the third point, it referred to the Caucasus region. Britain

France’s isolated international position in the wake of his revolutionary

Carteggi, vol. 7, Cavour e l’Inghilterra. Carteggio con V.E. d’Azeglio, vol. 1,

Austrian policy, although threatening military intervention and leading

FIGURE 6 The Prussian King Frederick William IV declaring his neutrality. He is

Prussia must remain in a status of neutrality; not in a vacillating and

by force. He thereupon sent letters and telegrams to St Petersburg imploring

inaccessible to historians. From other Prussian sources it becomes obvious