The Crimean War полностью

It was time to pack them off to war before they succumbed to disease or rose up against their officers. On 24 August the embarkation started. The infantry were ferried onto ships, followed by the cavalry and their horses, ammunition carts, wagons with supplies, draught livestock, and finally the heavy guns. Many of the men who marched down to the wharfs were too sick and weak to carry their own knapsacks or their guns, which were taken for them by the stronger men. The French did not have enough troopships for their 30,000 men and crammed them into their ships of war, rendering these useless if they were attacked by the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The defence of the convoy thus fell entirely to the Royal Navy, whose warships flanked the 29 steamers and 56 ships of the line carrying the British troops. On the quaysides there were disturbing scenes when it was announced that not all the soldiers’ wives who had travelled out from Britain could be taken to the Crimea.^w The grief-stricken women who were to be separated from their men fought to get on board the ships. Some were smuggled on. At the final moment, the commanders took pity on the women, having been informed that no provision had been made for them at Varna, and let many of them board the ships.

By 2 September the embarkation was complete, but bad weather delayed the departure until 7 September. The flotilla of 400 ships – steamers, men-of-war, troop transports, sailing ships, army tugs and other smaller vessels – was led by Rear Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons in HMS Agamemnon, the Royal Navy’s first screw-propelled steamship, capable of sailing at 11 knots and armed with 91 guns. ‘Men remember the beauteous morning of the 7th of September,’ wrote Kinglake.

The moonlight was still floating on the waters, when men, looking from numberless decks towards the east, were able to hail the dawn. There was a summer breeze blowing fair from the land. At a quarter before five a gun from the Britannia gave the signal to weigh. The air was obscured by the busy smoke of the engines, and it was hard to see how and whence due order would come; but presently the Agamemnon moved through, and with signals at all her masts – for Lyons was on board her, and was governing and ordering the convoy. The French steamers of war went out with their transports in tow, and their great vessels formed the line. The French went out more quickly than the English, and in better order. Many of their transports were vessels of very small size; and of necessity they were a swarm. Our transports went out in five columns of only thirty each. Then – guard over all – the English war-fleet, in single column, moved slowly out of the bay.⁵⁰

7

Alma

Soon the allied fleets were strung out across the Black Sea, a moving forest of ships’ masts interspersed with huge black clouds of smoke and steam. It was a fantastic sight, ‘like a vast industrial city on the waters’, noted Jean Cabrol, doctor to the French commander, Marshal Saint-Arnaud, who was now mortally sick on the Ville de France. Each French soldier carried rations for eight days in his kitbag – rice, sugar, coffee, lard and biscuit – and on boarding the transports he was given a large blanket which he laid out on the deck to sleep. The British had much less. ‘The worst of it all’, wrote John Rose, a private in the 50th Regiment, to his parents from Varna, ‘is we cannot get a glass of groggy for money. We have living on 1 pound and a half of brown bread and 1 pound of meat per day but it is not for men.’ ¹

The soldiers on the ships had no clear idea where they were going. At Varna they had been kept in the dark about the war plans, and all sorts of rumours had circulated among the men. Some thought they were going to Circassia, others to Odessa or the Crimea, but no one knew for sure what to expect. Without maps or any direct knowledge of the Russian southern coast, which they viewed from the ships as they might have looked upon the shores of Africa, the enterprise assumed the character of an adventure from the voyages of discovery. Ignorance gave free rein to the imagination of the men, some of whom believed that they would have to deal with bears and lions when they landed in ‘the jungle’ of Russia. Few had any idea of what they were fighting for – other than to ‘beat the Russians’ and ‘do God’s will’, to quote just two French soldiers in their letters home. If the ideas of Private Rose are anything to go by, many of the soldiers did not even know who their allies were. ‘We are 48 hours sail from Seebastepol,’ he wrote to his parents, his West Country accent affecting his spelling: