Seeing now under what conditions the besieged would have to act after giving twenty day’s respite, one may ask how it came to be imagined, by both the French and the English, that the blow they were going to strike would be likely to achieve their end.
The Allies trusted much to the power of their ordnance as well as to the quality of their triops; and, apart from the baneful delays which their plan of attack.had involved, it was not an Ill-advised measure. The Allies, we saw, hoped to be able to get down the fire of the place to an extent which would enable their assaulting columns to gain the Redan, and Flagstaff Bastion, without ,up to that time, undergoing an overwhelming loss from artillery; and they trusted that, once they had pierced the enemy’s line, their troops would be so overmaster any soldiery that could be gathered to meet them in rear of the assaulted ramparts, as to be able to cut into two the whole structure of the Russian defences.
This hope was even, perhaps better founded than the Allies at the time understood it to be; for we now know that , notwithstanding the large reinforcements then lately brought into Sebastopol, the extent and confirmation of the ground which the garrison had to defend put it almost our of their power to be prepared at each point against the apprehended assaults with what they judged competent forces.The
It was with batteries of 126 pieces, including 18 heavy mortars, that the Allies hoped to.get down the fire of the enemy’s defences; and of these , 53 were French, and 73 English. Of the English guns,29 were manned by ourseamen, the rest by our Royal.Artillery.The battery which the French had constructed by the sea shoes ( near the site of an old Geonoese fort), and also regarded as standing, in some measure, apart from the general plan of atack; and the rest of the siege ordnance with which the Allies thus proposed to conquer the enemy’s fire were distributed into three systems. One of these was the system or string of batteries erected by the French on the crest of Mount Rodolph, an armed with 49 pieces.Another was the bending line of English batteries on Green Hill, an armament of 41 pieces, which our people called the ‘Left,’ or ‘Chapman’s Attack.’ The third, called the ‘Right,’ or ‘Gordon’s Attack,’ was on the Woronzoff Height , and its two-faced array of batteries mounted 26 pieces.
Without counting the batteries of the Jagoudil -a ship lying moored across the head of the man–of–war Harbour.-Or any other of the guns still on deck which could be more or less brought into use , the Russians , we saw had in battery for the land defences of Sebastopol on its South side 341 pieces of artillery; but of these, there stood opposed to the batteries established by the Allies only 118 pieces, including five heavy mortars. Amongst the rest of the 118 pieces there were some guns of great calibre;but,upon the whole , a salvo from the 126 battering pieces now prepared for the siege was a good deal more weighty than one from the 118 pieces with which the Russians meant to engage them.
It therefore appears that, as regards the weight of ordnance brought into actual service for the artillery conflict of the 17th of October, the garrison was inferior to its assailants; but it must be understood that, irrespective of the 118 pieces thus awaiting an encounter with the battering guns of the besiegers, the Allies, if proceeding to assault, might have to incur whilst advancing not only the shell and shot of ship’s guns trained and pointed beforehand from the waters below, but also the fire of as many as 160 guns established in land batteries which swept the approaches of the place;and that , even after traversing the approaches thus guarded, and coming at last to close quarters, the still surviving assailants might be encountered in front or in flank by the blasts of yet 63 more pieces of cannon delivering grape–shot and canister.
It must also be borne in mind that potentially, the ordnance arm of the Russians had a much greater ascendant than is indicated by giving the number and calibre of their guns already in battery. To an extent which, for a long time to come, must enable them to outdo their assailants in artillery conflict, the garrison could not only command endless supplies of guns and ammunition, but (because of their strength in workmen as well as in material) could ceaselessly repair and re-arm , or shift or improve their batteries, and augment them.in numbers and power.
In distributing his batteries along the lines of defence, Colonel Dr Toldleben had not apportioned them rateably to the strength of the respective systems of ‘Attack’ which they were destined to.encounter. Whilst he ventured to meet the 73 guns and mortars of the English with so few as 54 pieces of ordnance, and those too, upon the whole, of a lighter calibre, homemade ready to answer the 53 guns and mortars which the French had in battery with a fire of 64 pieces.
At intervals throughout the night,the Russians, as It was their custom to do, fired some shots with the purpose of disturbing the working parties of the besiegers, but elicited no reply.
So early as an hour before day-break, our volunteer sharpshooters, having stolen forward under the cover of darkness , were fastening upon ground very near to the Russian batteries.
Notwithstanding that the intervention of the Allied navy had been suddenly postponed to a later hour, the moment appointed for the opening of the land cannonade remained unalteted . At half–past six in the morning of the 17th of October, three shells were discharged from one of the French batteries, and forthwith the Allies were to open fire along the whole line of their works.
The signal had not yet been given, when the breaking grey of the morning enabled the Russians to see the Allies, in the night-time, had cut their embrasures, and that seams of earth hitherto blank had all at once put on the look- significant of man and his purpose – that is given by guns seen in battery. Here and there, as this change was described, a Russian battery opened fire. More followed. Some French guns began to.make answer. There were more and more light. A body of French tirailleurs with a support pushed forward towards the enemy’s lines. Sebastopol beat to arms. The three appointed signal shells sprang out from the lines of Mount Rodolph. In a minute, some English guns opened; and presently, along all the enemy’s works, from the Central to the Flagstaff Bastion, and thence across to the Redan, and thence on again to the Malakoff, there pealed a sustained cannonade. Then and quickly again, and from.time to time, this sustained cannonade was out-thundered by salvoes of a kind strange to the land-service people.No ships were in action; but at the first roar of the mightier outburst, the seamen who heard it grew radiant. They knew by what manner of men such a salvo as that was delivered.
Whether serving the guns of the English, or forming part of the garrison, the sailors engaged in this conflict had brought with them many of their familiar usages; and the Russian sailors especially, who were fighting at the land defences to the number of several thousands, clung fast, it seems, to their customs.Their naval system had been in a great measure copied – copied even, perhaps, with servility – from that of the English; and thus it resulted that, in each of the main fastnesses which constituted the line of defence, there was much of the warlike practice, and even, indeed, if the lesser routine, which obtains on board vessels. The ‘bastion’ stood for the ship. The parapets were bulwarks, the embrasures were port -holes. Every piece the men had to serve they tended and fondled and cursed in their natural seamanlike way; and that too with more affection when they knew it for one of their own familiar ship’s guns. As in our naval service, so also with the Russian seamen, the drum used to beat to quarters; but to other of their duties the men, though on shore, were still called by the boatswain’s whistle.They were piped to their meals; they were piped to their ‘grog’.Night, for them, was a period divided into ‘watches;’ and- with the same-glass instead of the clock – they measured and marked lapse of time just as though they were still on board a ship; so that when, for example, it was noon, they reported it always ‘eight bells,’ and as they had due sanction, were ready to ‘make it eight.’ But, so well had these Russians been taught, that they could not be got to stop short in their old English lesson at the point their Commanders desired. To the exceeding vexation of Todleben, they could not at all be persuaded to train and point every gun with a separate attention to the object for which he designed it. Knowing what nation it was that manned the works at Mount Rodolph, the men at Flagstaff and the Central Bastions were too strongly vent on the end, aim, and purpose of what they had learnt from the English, to be able to forgo all the rapture of ‘giving the Frenchman a broadside.’ And, that being done to begin with, their rooted faith was that, with no greater pauses of time than were of absolute need for sponging and loading, and firinf, one broadside should follow another.
To be serving the guns; to be swiftly repairing the havoc from time to time wrought in the parapets (and especially in the revetments of the embrasures) by the enemy’s round-shot and shell; to be quenching the fires which were constantly seizing upon gabions, fascines, and timber; to be replacing guns; to be tending and removing in litters the men newly wounded, and to be toiling thus, hour by hour, in the midst of a dim pile of smoke, with a mind always equal to an instant encounter with death ,-this was alike the duty of the French, of the English, and of the Russians , who worked the power of artillery in the conflicting batteries; and, until there occurred that disaster to the French of which we shall presently speak, the duty was performed with unflinching persistency by besieged and besiegers alike.
The works which covered the Russian batteries had been constructed in haste, with dry, gritty earth laboriously brought to the spot; and , no rain having come in the interval to bind the loose heaps into solid structures, they formed of course sorry ramparts.The embrasure s , too, were weak. Some of them, for want of facines and hurdles, have been reverted with bags of earth , with planks , or with clay.There were other embrasures which had not been reverted at all. Of the revetments formed with clay , some were brought down in fragments by the mere blast of the guns firing out from between them; and those that had been made of earth-sacks and planks very often took fire and fell. There was need of heroic stubbornness to be able to cling to the determination of sacrificing numbers of lives with the object of restoring defences so easily brought to ruin; but the garrison had been taught that it was of great moment to them to have their embrasures in the best state that might be possible, and at whatever cost of life to those who were charged with the toil, they repaired them again and again.
But the Russians – and that every minute- had to hold themselves in readiness for a yet harder trial.Expecting an assault, they ever kept steadfastly in sight that last appeal to ‘Mitrail’ which their great Engineer had designed; and often, very often they imagined that the appointed moment had come. From the irrepressible tendency of the seamen to deliver their fire in broadsides, it resulted – for no breath of wind was stirring – by the men, by these rapid discharges, piled up above and around the huge, steadfast, opaque banks of smoke, which so narrowed the field of every man’s sight that he hardly could see the outline of a comrades’s figure at a distance of two or three paces.
Now a dim bank of smoke, admitting distorted and descended rays, yet confining within straightened limits the scope of a man’s real vision-this , we know, is a lens which gives infinite favour to the creatures of an imagination already excited by battle. The grey, floating wreaths ,through their movement can scarce be descried, are all the while slowly changing in place, as well as in form; and from that cause, or that cause in part, it seems to result that , when once the thick cloud which obscures a man’s vision has been peopled and armed by his fancy , the shapes which appear before him do not long continue at rest.They grow larger; they move; and the unreal creature of the brain which at first seemed like infantry halted is presently a column advancing. With the Russians – a firm, robust people -the imagination, through straying beyond the bounds of reality was still guided in part by knowledge; for the images men saw in the smoke were the images of what well be.As in a quarter of the field at the Alma (which the onset of the English horse might fairly enough have been looked for), there had seemed to come on from behind the smoke a host of cavalry charging, so when, as people believed, the Allies would storm the defences, men easily fancied they saw indeed many times over – the enemy’s columns of infantry coming on to deliver the assault. The quality of the Russian soldier being what I have said, these pictures of his imagination did not drive him at all into panic, but still they much governed his actions. Again, and again, those who manned guns so planted as to be no service except against assailing infrantry, worked as hard at their loading and firing as though the assault had begun, and many a blast of mitral was sent tearing through phantom battalions.
So long as the conflict should be one between covered batteries on one side and covered batteries on the other, there could not well be any approach to equality in point of losses between the besiegers and the besieged ; for the Russians were not only forced to keep manned the 223 guns which they had prepared against the expected assualts , but also to have close at hand near the gorges of their bastions the bodies of infantry with which they designed to meet the same contingencies ; and, both gunners and foot soldiery being imperfectly sheltered against batteries of the Allies, it could not but result that the troops this kept in expectation would be , many of them, killed or wounded ; whilst the besiegers , in the other hand, could keep our of fire the troops with which they meant to assault till the moment for their onset should come.
Though Prince Mentschikoff had come from the country of the Upper Belbec of Severnaya,or North Side, and although he indeed crossed the roadstead on the morning of this cannonade, and visited a part of the lines of the Karabel faubourg, he did not stay, as we shall see, amid the scenes of the artillery conflict which raged on the south of Sebastopol; and the virtual control of the whole force of soldiers and sailors engaged in defending the place still remained in the hands of the seaman whom the popular voice had raised up to be chief and commander of all.
If Korniloff had been in command of a military garrison so organised, and so highly instructed in all their duties, as to warrant him in relying upon their exact performance of orders , he would probably have thought it his duty to remain, for the most part, at the central and commanding spot which he had chosen as his dwelling; for there, better than at the ramparts, he would have been able to understand the general state of the conflict; there, with th greatest dispatch , he might have pushed forward his reserves to the endangered post; there, most quickly, he would have been able to learn where his presence was needed. But the forces defending Sebastopol were not of such a kind as to warrant Korniloff in taking this strictly military view of the position in which events had placed him.On the contrary – and that he knew – it was the collapse of the military structure which had my upon him this great charge; and a true instinct told him that, as the hope of defending Sebastopol against a determined attack had had little to test on at first save that spirit of enthusiastic devotion with which he had inspired his people , both seamen and soldiers , so, although the defence of the place was no longer a task of such utterly overwhelming difficulty as to need being faced in a spirit of romantic desperation , it still must depend for success upon his power of exalting and sustaining men’s minds. Therefore , overruling the numberless advisers who strove to move him from his decision, he judged it his duty to be visiting the lines of defence, to be sharing in the risks of the day with the gunners who stood at the ramparts, and, in short, to cause himself to be seen at all the chief posts of danger.
Men belonging to Korniloff’s Staff have commemorated the acts and words of their hero, in this the last day of his life, with almost pious exactness; and although it be plain that, amongst our people at home, the uneventful rise of a Russian Admiral from bastion to bastion will never evoke that kind of interest which it wrought in the minds of his fellow-country-men , I yet imagine that some portion of the material derived from those loving records may help to give true impressions of the nature of the business which engaged the chiefs in Sebastopol on the day of the first cannonade , and may even, in an incidental and passing way, afford better insight into the conditions of things within the fortress than could well be imparted by formal words of siege narrative saying when, where, and how the men were struck down and replaced, when and where a gun was dismounted , or an embrasure spoilt and restored.
The instant he heard the opening of the cannonade , Korniloff hastened to spring into his saddle ; and then- at so eager a pace that his Staff could hardly keep up with him- he galloped off to Flagstaff Bastion. By the time that he had gained the esplanade by the left face of the bastion , the firing had grown to its full height and power. Already the smoke of the salvoes in which the sailors delighted had enwrapped the whole field of sight in a thick steadfast cloud. Seen through it, the sun in the east was a full red and lustreless orb. Yet, by the darts of fire which , from moment to moment, were piercing the cloud, Korniloff and the officers with him could make out where the enemy’s guns were in battery, or where their own were replying.In their rear, too, they saw through the smoke a third belt of fire; for behind the gorge of the bastion, the skilled contriver of the defences had planted two batteries, which threw their shells over the heads of the men engaged at the ramparts in front.
It was hot at this time in the Flaggstaff Bastion; for the batteries of the French on Mount Rudolph– unstricken , as yet, with the havoc which awaited them – were exerting their full might; but also- and this was more formidable, by reason of the greater calibre of the guns- the left face of the bastion was battered, and, at the same time , its right face enfiladed, by the fire from Chapman’s Attack.
Korniloff conversed with the gunners, and to some of them he gave directions in regard to the pointing off the guns; but it does not appear that he brought himself to put a check upon his seaman by preventing them from firing in broadsides.He passed from gun to gun along the whole bastion , and then went along the winding boulevard line to that new work adjoining the Peressip, which because of its sudden growth, men called the ‘Mushroom‘ Battery. Whether it was that the minds of men were so kindled as to be capable of giving new colour and form to what their sight conveyed to them, or that Korniloff ‘s look and bearing were really in some degree altered by the opening of, the long-promised conflict, it is certain that the language of those who rode with him along the line of the boulevard, gives a kind of support to that old superstition of the Scots which assured the believing word that approaching death was foreshown by a sign, and that when his end drew near the doomed man was clothed with a preter-natural brightness.’Calm and stern, was the expression of his face , yet a slight smile played on his lips . His eyes, those wonderful , intelligent, and piercing eyes – shone brighter than was their wont.His cheeks were flushed. He carried his head loftily. His thin and slightly bent form had become erect. He seemed to grow in size.’
Korniloff returned the same way back to the right wing of the Flagstaff Bastion ; and, after speaking with Vice-Admiral Novolisky , he remounted his horse and descended into the ravine , going on through that part of the defences which connected to the Flagstaff and the Central Bastions. The road lay along a steep slope, and the blaze from the French batteries was constant, and their fire so heavy, that for a moment the afrighted chargers of Korniloff and his Staff refused to confront the storm; but Korniloff soon conquered the will of his horse; and when he had done so he said with a smile, ‘I cannot bear to be disobeyed.’ In the valley he passed near the Taroutine battalion, and the soldiers were overheard saying, ‘This is indeed a brave fellow.’
Gaining at length the Central Bastion, Korniloff there found Admiral Nachimoff toiling hard at his duty, and seeming to be as much at home in the batteries as though he were on his own ship.Nachimoff’s appearance at this time might be regarded, perhaps , as somewhat characteristic of that tendency to self-immolation, which we have attributed to him; for, as though he would be decked out for sacrafices, he distinguished himself from others by choosing to wear his full uniform,with all the heavy splendour of a admiral’s epaulet; and already from a slight wound then lately received , the blood was coursing down his face.
While conversing with Nachimoff, Korniloff mounted the banquette at the projecting angle of the bastion, and there are for some time the two Admirals stood; for they were trying to ascertain the effect of the Russian fire upon the enemy’s batteries . Driving in from moment to moment, the round shots so struck the parapet and its defenders as to cover the Admirals and the officers at their side with the pelting of loose , gritty earth,and even sometimes to sprinkle them with the blood of men wounded. Shells also were bursting on all sides , and slaughtering the people at the batteries
Seeing the danger to which Korniloff exposed himself, Captain Ilynsky approached the Admiral , and entreated him to leave the bastion. By that time Korniloff had descended from Banquette, and was looking to see how the men at th batteries were pointing their guns. Ilynsky tried to carry his purpose by saying to Korniloff that his presence at the bastion denoted a want of trust in his subordinates; and added that he would do take care to fulfil his duty as to render unnecessary the presence of the Admiral. Korniloff answered, ‘And if you are to do your duty, why do you wish to prevent me from doing mine? My duty is to see all. Korniloff visited the battery at the george of the Central Bastion , and then went on to the work which we call the Land Quarantine. Seeing that the men were suffering from thirst, he gave orders for hauling up casks of waters to the batteries. Then, needing food, he rode home to his quarters. Before he yet broke his fast, Korniloff found time to finish a letter which he had been writing to his wife. This, along with a watch he regarded as a kind of heirloom, Korniloff entrusted to the courier who was about to be despatched to Nicolayeff. ‘Pray,’ said he, ‘give this watch to my wife-it must belong to my eldest son;’ and then, in words half playful, but susceptible of an interpretation which would give them a mournful significance, he went on to say , ‘ I am afraid that here it will get broken.’
It was soon after this that Baron Krudener came in with messages from Admiral Istomin, the officer in command at the Malakoff. Istomin’s words purported to convey an assurance that all was going well at the Tower; but the words were accompanied by an entreaty. The entreaty was, that Korniloff would not needlessly imperil a life so precious as his by coming up to the Malakoff Hill. He persisted in his determination to go thither; but a delay was obtained by inducing him to ascend to the terrace on the house-top in order to form a more general and extended idea of the scope and power of the cannonade than he had yet been able to gather. It would seem that he was painfully impressed by what he saw; for, after first giving some practical directions for insuring an unfailing supply of ammunition to the batteries, he once more disclosed in private that want of hopefulness which we have already remarked upon as forming an anomalous characteristic in one who could kindle, and sustain the heroism of other men. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘that no means will suffice against such a cannonade.’
It may be said that, at the time, there was some ground, not, indeed, for so great despondency as which weighed upon Korniloff , but, at all events, for grave forebodings. The artillery conflict then raging between the French and the Russians had hitherto seemed so equal as to disappoint the reckoning of the great Russian Engineer; for Todleben’s idea of overwhelming the batteries on Mount Rodolph by a mightier and more embracing array of ordnance-power had been baffled, as yet, by the prowess of the French artillerymen; and also, it would seem, by the obstinancy with which the Russian seamen still clung to their favourite notion of constantly firing in ‘broadsides.’ The fronting walls of the cazern at the gorge of the Land Quarantine Bastions, were in some places destroyed, in others, grievously injured ; and, the parapet of that last cazern being also destroyed, the five guns ranged behind it were also reduced to silence. Also, the lower part of the town wall was a good deal damaged, and in some places broken through , by the French shot. Moreover, there were some of the Russian batteries opposed to the French, in which a large proportion of the gunners originally serving the guns had already been killed or wounded , and replaced by fresh combatants.
But if the strife of great guns between the French and tyhe Russians was the for a while almost equal , it was otherwise with the conflict of artillery-power going on in the Karabel faubourg;for there, the beisiegets were obtaining the ascendant. With all his skill and all the resources at his command, Todleben, as we saw,had failed to provide sufing means to counteract the two English attacks. Before the first hour of the cannonade had passed , it began to appear that our batteries were proving to be of greater power than those opposed to them. This superiority resulted in part from the greater calibre of the English guns, but in part also from the skill with which they had been planted on Green Hill and Woronzoff Height. Already a good deal of havoc had been wrought in the Redan, as well as the fronting walls of the cazern near it. Some of the guns on the summit of the Malakoff Tower had been dismounted, and the rest were now silent; for the English shot had not only ruined the parapet, but had flung its stone fragments upon the gunners with an effect so destructive as to compel an abandonment of all further attempt to work the two or three guns still remaining in the battery. For the rest of the day it was no longer from the tower itself, but only from some guns covered by the glacis and and its flanking entrenchments, that the famous position of the Malakoff still asserted its power.
And although at the Russian batteries the men were still firm, yet elsewhere, it would seem, there was need of that exaltation of spirit which Korniloff knew how to create by his presence among the combatants.
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