It was this feeling of defencelessness that fuelled the panic flight. Menshikov, the commander of the Russian forces in the Crimea, had been taken by surprise. He had not thought the allies would attack so close to the onset of winter, and had failed to mobilize sufficient forces to defend the Crimea. There were 38,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors along the south-western coast, and 12,000 troops around Kerch and Theodosia – far less than the numbers of attackers imagined by the frightened population of the Crimea. Simferopol had only one battalion. 6
On 14 September, the same date as the French had entered Moscow in 1812, the allied fleets dropped anchor in Kalamita Bay, south of Evpatoria. From the Alma Heights, further to the south, where Menshikov had positioned his main forces to defend the road to Sevastopol, Robert Chodasiewicz, the captain of a Cossack regiment, described the impressive sight:
On reaching our position on the heights, one of the most beautiful sights it was ever my lot to behold lay before us. The whole of the allied fleet was lying off the salt lakes to the south of Evpatoria, and at night their forest of masts was illuminated with various-coloured lanterns. Both men and officers were lost in amazement at the sight of such a large number of ships together, especially as many of them had hardly ever seen the sea before. The soldiers said, ‘Behold, the infidel has built another holy Moscow on the waves!’, comparing the masts of the ships to the church spires of that city.7
The French were the first to disembark, their advance parties scrambling ashore and erecting coloured tents at measured distances along the beach to designate the separate landing points for the infantry divisions of Canrobert, General Pierre Bosquet and Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin. By nightfall they had all been disembarked with their artillery. The men put up the French flag and went off to hunt for firewood and food, some of them returning with ducks and chickens, their water cans refilled with wine they had discovered in the nearby farms. Paul de Molènes and his Spahi cavalry had neither meat nor bread for their first meal on Russian soil, ‘but we had some biscuit and a bottle of champagne which we had set aside to celebrate our victory’.8
The British landing was a shambles compared to the French – a contrast that would become all too familiar during the Crimean War. No plans had been made for a peaceful landing unopposed (it was assumed that they would have to fight their way onto the beach), so the infantry was landed first, when the sea was calm; by the time the British tried to get their cavalry ashore, the wind was up, and the horses struggled in the heavy surf. Saint-Arnaud, set up comfortably in a chair with his newspaper on the beach, watched the scene with mounting frustration, as his plans for a surprise attack on Sevastopol were undermined by the delay. ‘The English have the unpleasant habit of always being late,’ he wrote to the Emperor.9
It took five days for the British troops and cavalry to disembark. Many of the men were sick with cholera and had to be carried off the boats. There were no facilities for moving baggage and equipment overland, so parties had to be sent out to collect carts and wagons from the local Tatar farms. There was no food or water for the men, except the three days’ rations they had been given at Varna, and no tents or kitbags were offloaded from the ships, so the soldiers spent their first nights without shelter, unprotected from the heavy rain or the blistering heat of the next days. ‘We brought nothing on shore with us excepting our blankets and great coats,’ George Lawson, an army surgeon, wrote home to his family. ‘We suffer dreadfully from want of water. The first day was very hot; we had nothing to drink but water drained out of puddles from the previous night’s rain; and even now the water is so thick that, if put into a glass, you cannot see the bottom of it at all.’10
