The French Foreign Legion Page 16
Raglan’s command numbered 27,000 officers and men at the time, drawn from the Grenadiers, 93rd Highlanders, Scots Fusiliers, Coldstream and Codrington’s Brigade, five infantry divisions and a cavalry division. The supporting artillery had twenty-six field guns.
The Turkish general Ismail Pasha brought with him an even more heterogeneous collection. All able-bodied male subjects in the Ottoman Empire were liable for conscription on reaching twenty years of age, which gave a theoretical wartime army of 570,000 men, each recruit serving five years in active service and seven with the reserves. Ismail Pasha’s command thus included troops from Egypt, Serbia, the Danubian principalities, Tunis and Tripoli. Cavalry were both irregular Polish units and Don Cossacks living in Ottoman territory. His infamous bashi-bazouks were regarded as the least reliable of all the troops, more prone to pillage and rape than standing firm and obeying orders.
Five days later, the combined force marched south in formation with the French in the centre, the English on the left flank and the Turks on the right. Before they reached the coast south of Balaklava, they had to cross five watercourses. The Bulganek River was forded without opposition, but the next river-crossing at the end of that day’s march gave them a foretaste of what lay ahead. The Alma River, although fast-flowing, was shallow enough in places for men to wade across, but on the heights above its southern bank, the Russian positions manned by 37,000 men under Prince A.S. Menshikov were clearly visible.[128]
By 0700hrs next day, the French were drawn up in two lines facing south, brewing their ritual coffee while the English slowly took up their position on the right flank. The Turks were to the right of them and beyond the Turks, the sea. So confident of the outcome was Menshikov that he was entertaining thirty young ladies of the garrison to lunch – with the slaughter of the invaders to be viewed through spy-glasses as the intended entertainment.
At 1130hrs the Allies advanced, crossed the Alma and continued towards the Russian positions in full view of the enemy. Not having fought since Waterloo forty years before, the British contingent advanced in impeccable order with heavy European backpacks, suffering many casualties while the veterans of the Armée d’Afrique shed their backpacks at the river. The Legion was then ordered forward to occupy some high ground for two field artillery positions. At 300 metres’ range – the limit for effective musketry – they began exchanging fire with the Russians on it. The rapidity of their re-loading was due to the large leather cartridge pouches on their belts that earned them the nickname of ‘leatherbellies’.
In Europe, manufacture of personal firearms was a cottage industry. Although the US military had already introduced production-line assembly of interchangeable parts, the great technological breakthrough was French. In 1849 Capt Claude-Etienne Minié made the round musket balls used until then obsolete by inventing longer, smaller-diameter bullets which retained velocity better, although less accurate. The French army combined his ideas in the carabine modèle 1846 à tige and the fusil d’infanterie 1848 à tige.
In order to overcome the tendency of muzzle-loading rifled barrels to become increasingly difficult to load as powder residue collected in the grooves, Minié suggested a major simplification that enabled his new projectile to be loaded into dirty barrels with ease. Because it no longer deformed when being rammed home, it also had greater accuracy. William Russell, the London Times correspondent in the Crimea described how volleys of Minié balls clove through the Russian ranks ‘like the hand of the Destroying Angel’.
However, although some of the British line infantry units had been issued with the new rifled musket on landing at Kalamitsky Bay, their lack of practice with the new weapon gave them no advantage at the Alma. Later in the war Russian infantry armed with smooth-bore muskets were no match for British soldiers firing P/51 rifled muskets, although many infantrymen in Raglan’s force still had the old smooth-bore Brown Bess muskets their grandfathers had been issued to fight Napoléon .
At the Alma, after a series of skirmishes that lasted until 1730hrs, the Russians retreated. The Legion was then relieved, withdrew to the river, collected its backpacks and made camp, counting its casualties of five wounded officers and fifty-five other ranks wounded and dead. Expecting a trap, the divided Allied command did not pursue the retreating defenders, although it is possible that obeying Vegetius’[129] maxim that speed in warfare is even more important than numbers could have ended the campaign within days. Certainly, the Russians appreciated this respite, which permitted the Black Sea Fleet to scuttle a whole squadron of men o’ war, blocking the entrance to Sevastopol harbour. Various subsequent delays also enabled Menshikov to improve his defences in many other ways.
On 26 September St-Arnaud, his tuberculosis exacerbated by severe cholera, was taken aboard the Berthollet for immediate repatriation to France, but died the same day, leaving Canrobert as C-in-C of the French contingent in the run-up to the next battle of the campaign over a month later on 25 October at Balaklava[130], overlooking the bay on the southern coast where the British were bringing in supplies, chosen by Raglan as a good anchorage for his richer officers’ private yachts.
By then the bataillon de marche had been disbanded and the elite companies reintegrated in the Legion brigade that arrived in the second wave from Gallipoli under Achille Bazaine, that veteran of the first Legion now promoted to brigadier at the age of forty-three – a good two decades younger than many of his fellow commanders. With him came his young bride, Maria de la Soledad Tormo, his former landlady’s daughter in Tlemcen, for whose education he had paid. As a beautiful girl of seventeen she would be an obvious target for other men’s lust in a prolonged campaign.
Attractive and socially accomplished thanks to the education he had paid for, Maria had neglected none of her home comforts in accompanying her husband on this new adventure. The most cumbersome of them was her grand piano. Whether she played her part as the colonel’s gracious lady by selflessly entertaining the sick and dying with her recitals, as was reported in Paris, she did entertain several of his fellow officers when Bazaine’s duties took him away from home.
Russians regard the sheltered southeast coast of the Crimea as a winter riviera, but the Polish legionnaires must have shuddered at what winter would be like in their bleak and windswept tented encampment on the exposed plateau overlooking Strelitzka Bay. For men who had left Algeria in the heat of midsummer and survived the cholera and boredom of the depot, the approach of winter was firmly in Menshikov’s favour.
On 5 November he launched 40,000 troops through the dawn mist against the weaker end of the line held by 8,000 English troops, many of whom died before even emerging from their tents. As reported in the Times, for two hours the balance of advantage in the battle of Inkerman swung to and fro until, around 1000hrs a French corps of 3,000 men including Chasseurs d’Afrique cavalrymen attacked the Russians on the flank at the same time as a further 8,000 Russians attacked the main French positions, including those of the Legion.[131] Not until after midday were the Russians driven off with casualties totalling 15,000, against 2,600 English and 900 French dead and wounded, among which the Legion counted three officers and forty-three legionnaires dead and many wounded.[132]
News of this victory and that of the Alma reached Paris and London within a day of the events via the new telegraph submarine cable laid under the Black Sea especially for the purpose. It may have sounded fine to Napoléon III and Queen Victoria, whose new poet laureate Alfred Tennyson immortalised in verse the English cavalrymen killed in the great blunder at Balaklava on 25 October, but Menshikov’s ally General Winter attacked the Allies soon afterwards. On 14 November a violent storm heralded his arrival by flooding the trenches and blowing away many of the twelve-man bell tents set up on the plateau above Sevastopol, leaving thousands of men with no shelter.
With all the firewood for miles around requisitioned for earthworks, men still wearing their summer uniforms died from exposure before the winter greatcoats were issued in December. Anothe
r consequence of the storm were shortages caused by many supply ships being driven aground after permission to enter the inadequate harbour in Cossack Bay was withheld by the Royal Navy harbourmaster. Among the drowned on HMS Rip van Winkle were Richard Nicklin, the first official war photographer, and his two sapper darkroom assistants.
The appalling commissariat problems were caused largely by private contractors supplying substandard food and short measures, but great blame attaches also to Admiral Boxer, in charge of transport arrangement at Constantinople/Gallipoli. Ships arrived at Balaklava without prior notice and without manifests; some arrived at Constantinople and were sent back to Europe without being unloaded. In Cossack Bay the quayside was covered with rotting food, soaked boxes of ammunition and powder barrels, with the water of the harbour between the steam and sail-powered transport ships covered by a carpet of refuse and excrement. There was a lack of forage to feed the pack animals that might have moved supplies up to the plateau and cavalry horses were so starving that they ate each other’s manes and tails in desperation. Only late in January 1855 was the situation partially rectified after British civilian navvies constructed a narrow-gauge railway line up to the heights.
News of this chaos reaching London in the highly critical despatches of William Russell, by February the groundswell of public criticism and complaint toppled the Aberdeen government, with Lord Palmerston replacing him as Prime Minister and Lord Panmure becoming Secretary for War. This resulted in some improvement in the organization and administration of the British Army, and as spring approached the chaos was slowly cleared.
By March 1855 a Land Transport Corps was formed and in June 1855 a new-style medical corps was set up to provide hospital services on the peninsula, but by then hundreds of thousands had died unnecessarily. As a measure of that, in Üsküdar the death rate before Florence Nightingale’s arrival had been 44%; six months later she had brought it down to 2.2% by imposing elementary hygiene and insisting on sound nursing practice – not that any legionnaires benefited from her attentions.
Chapter 11: Theirs not to reason why
Crimea 1855 – 1856; Italy 1859
Once the ground froze up on the plateau above Sevastopol, it was almost impossible to dig trenches. From dawn to dusk protracted artillery duels between the Allied guns and the Russian batteries caused random casualties. Shattered by a Russian shell, frozen earth fragmented into ice shrapnel. And when the ground thawed, the trenches flooded again. Count Georges de Villebois-Mareuil described one anonymous legionnaire standing up in his trench when it would have been wiser not to. Perhaps the water-level in the trench was too high to squat. The count continued, ‘The thoughtful face of an old soldier, hardened by firm resolution. One feels that [the legionnaire] is unaware of the intense cold, as he is of everything but the enemy and his single-minded goal of dying at his post.’[133]
Having failed to attack Sevastopol after the initial landings, the Allies settled down to a long process of reducing by gunfire a city without a continuous defensive masonry wall. As evidenced by the unofficial photographs of Roger Fenton and James Robertson, superintendent of the Imperial Mint at Constantinople, the Sevastopol defences built by Menshikov’s German sapper Gen Todleben were far more resilient and easily rebuilt earthworks reinforced with timber, brushwood and earth-filled cylindrical wicker baskets known as gabions – plus sandbags.
The main earthen rampart was protected by a palisade of sharpened stakes and a ditch and rifle pits, beyond which lay the forerunner of barbed wire – the abbatis or tangle of earth and branches – and fougasses, which were pits filled with stones at the bottom of which lay an explosive charge. Incidental unpleasantness in wait for the unwary legionnaire included boot-piercing caltrops and concealed planks with sharp nails punched through, facing upwards. Beneath the ground, in an ugly rehearsal of Flanders 1914-18, both the Russian and Allied sappers mined and counter-mined, killing each other in the tunnels with sharpened shovels when they met.
The French positions were directed against the Flagstaff battery, the Central Bastion and the Quarantine Bastion, stretching on the right flank to the Malakov, the Little Redan and by the end of February 1855, the Mamelon strongpoint. If that sounds quite orderly, to call this a siege is a misnomer because the city could not be cordoned off altogether: vast stretches of countryside to north and east unoccupied by the Allies made it possible for the Russians to bring in supplies and reinforcements throughout the campaign.
The hellish daytime artillery bombardments ceased with the light, after which the night was taken up for both sides by patrolling in the no man’s land between the lines and raiding parties suddenly erupting from the dark to murder all the men in a trench or rifle pit before disappearing as slyly as they had come.
For the Legion and most other Allied soldiers, issued clothing was so inadequate that wounded men of both sides were stripped of outer clothes, underwear and boots, long before their last breath. In the Crimean winter, this meant death by exposure for many who would have survived their wounds.
In Florence Nightingale’s hospital at Üsküdar, across the Bosporus from Constantinople, the buildings had been infested with rats and fleas on her arrival and water was restricted to one pint per head per day for all purposes. Furniture, clothing, and bedding were either inadequate or totally lacking. The wards being grossly overcrowded, men lay in the corridors on straw palliasses in their own filth and everyone else’s. At first refused entrance to the wards by the doctors, when finally admitted after the influx of wounded from the battle of Inkerman shortly after her arrival, the Lady with the Lamp requisitioned not medical supplies, but 200 scrubbing brushes and facilities for her patients’ filthy and verminous clothes to be washed and disinfected outside the wards.
But she was dealing with men who had survived several days before arriving at Üsküdar. If these were the conditions back at base, those in what passed for field hospitals just behind the lines on the other side of the Black Sea, and on board the transports bringing the wounded back, defy the modern imagination.
Wastage was so high that Napoléon III created another foreign legion by decree on 17 January 1855. During his years of exile, his own military education had been at officer school in Thun. Impressed by Swiss soldiery, he recruited in Switzerland – as the English were already doing to make good their losses – for what he had originally intended to call ‘la Légion Suisse’, until Col Johann Ulrich Ochsenbein, a Swiss professional soldier who was hired to command it, persuaded the Emperor that it would be a diplomatic faux pas. He was right: the recruiting competition between the English Swiss Legion of two regiments and the French Swiss Legion comprising two line regiments and a battalion of skirmishers led to federal legislation in 1859 forbidding Swiss citizens to serve in foreign armies.[134] Ochsenbein’s new Legion was therefore officially referred to as 2nd Foreign Brigade, with 1st Brigade consisting of the Legion units already in the Crimea.
Promoted to general, Ochsenbein became the last foreigner to reach this rank in the French army. His legion never amounted to much except on paper, and he spent the rest of the Crimean campaign in Besançon near the Swiss border, trying to entice recruits to cross into France and sign up. Since the British were offering an enlistment bonus of 150 francs and he had only twenty francs per man to offer, recruitment was slow. A better source of reinforcements ‘on the ground’ was Sardinia-Piedmont, which joined the alliance against Russia in January 1855 and actually did sent 15,000 troops under Gen de la Marmora.
In the Crimea, the first Legion engagement of the New Year came on the night of 19-20 January when 2nd Battalion of the 2nd Regiment suffered a savage surprise attack. Similar Russian sorties in February and March left so many corpses littering the battlefield that truces were arranged for burial parties, with the officers in charge exchanging cigars, champagne and civilities with their opposite numbers in French, the second language of most of Menshikov’s officers. There were few illicit perks for the burial squads; most of the bod
ies had by then already been plundered by men desperate enough to risk their lives for warmer clothing, a few coins in a purse strapped to the leg or the most coveted prize of all, a pair of sapogi or Russian boots.
On 3 February the overworked Tsar Nikolai I died of an ordinary cold that turned to pneumonia and was succeeded by his son Aleksandr II. At Sevastopol the change of Tsar made no difference. On 22 February and again on 22 March violent sorties from the garrison badly dented but did not destroy the siege lines, strengthened by the arrival of 13,500 Swiss, Germans and Poles and the contingent from Piedmont-Sardinia.
On 9 April the Allies began their second great bombardment of Sevastopol. 520 Allied guns poured 165,000 rounds into the complex of defences and were answered by 998 Russian guns firing about 90,000 rounds in reply. The two-way bombardment thundered on for ten days, directly causing 6,131 casualties to the defenders, 1,587 to the French and 263 in the much-reduced British line. Except to the dead and wounded, it made little difference because the Russians repaired the damage every night.
It was all very well for Raglan to hector Canrobert about launching a ‘big push’, but the main burden would have been on the French and Canrobert was under daily pressure via the telegraph cable to Varna from an Emperor with a magnificent new military moustache and a Hitler complex who always ‘knew better’ than his generals on the spot.
As winter became spring the British role in the siege was so severely handicapped by sickness that only 11,000 men were left fit to man the trenches, as against 90,000 French and 50,000 Turks facing 100,000 Russians. Raglan had anticipated that the campaign would be ‘over by Christmas’ and had to reduce rations so close to starvation level that the French took over responsibility for supplying both armies. In a major logistical effort during the eighteen months from July 1854 the French supply fleet delivered to the Crimean theatre 310,000 men, 42,000 horses, 1,676 artillery pieces and 600,000 tons of materiel.