The other two regiments (the Grenadiers and Coldstream Guards) filled the gap left by the Scots Fusiliers, but refused orders to advance up the hill. Instead, on their own initiative, the 2,000 Guards formed into lines and fired fourteen volleys of Minié rifle shot into the Russian infantry. The volleys delivered an intensity of fire achieved by half a dozen machine guns. They stunned the Russian infantry, who fell in heaps upon the ground, and then withdrew up the hill. By disobeying their commanders, who had ordered them to charge with bayonets, the Guards had demonstrated a crucial innovation – the long-range firepower of the modern rifle – which would prove decisive in all the early battles of the Crimean War. The Minié was a new weapon. Most regiments had been issued with it only on their way to the Crimea, and had received a hurried training in how to use it. They had no idea of its tactical significance – its ability to fire with a lethal accuracy from well beyond the range of the Russian muskets and artillery – until the Guards discovered it for themselves on the Alma. Reflecting on the impact of the Minié rifle, the Russian military engineer Eduard Totleben wrote in his history of the Crimean War:
Left to themselves to perform the role of sharpshooters, the British troops did not hesitate under fire and did not require orders or supervision. Troops thus armed were full of confidence once they found out the accuracy and immense range of their weapon … Our infantry with their muskets could not reach the enemy at greater than 300 paces, while they fired on us at 1,200. The enemy, perfectly convinced of the superiority of his small arms, avoided close combat; every time our battalions charged, he retired for some distance, and began a murderous fusillade. Our columns, in pressing the attack, only succeeded in suffering terrible losses, and finding it impossible to pass through the hail of bullets which overwhelmed them, were obliged to fall back before reaching the enemy.
Without entrenchments to protect their infantry and artillery, the Russians were unable to defend their positions on the heights against the deadly Minié rifles. Soon the fire of the Guards was joined by that of the 2nd Division under Evans, on the British right, whose 30th Regiment could clearly see the gunners of three Russian batteries from the riverbank and take them out with their Minié rifles without the Russians even knowing where the firing was from. As the Russian infantry and artillery withdrew, the British slowly advanced up the hill, stepping over the dead and wounded bodies of the enemy. ‘Most of the wounded were crying out for water,’ Private Bloomfield wrote. ‘A man of my company gave a wounded Russian a drink of water, and as he left him, the Russian rose on his elbow, took his musket in his hand, and fired at the man that gave him the water. The bullet passed close by the man’s head. The man turned round immediately and ran his bayonet through the body of the Russian.’ By four o’clock in the afternoon, the British were converging on the Russian positions from all directions – the Guards on the left overcoming the last Russian reserves on the Kurgan Hill, Codrington’s men and the other Guards closing in on the Great Redoubt, and the 2nd Division pushing up the Sevastopol Road. With the French in command of the cliffs above the Alma, it was clear that the battle had been won.24
By this stage, on the Russian side, there were signs of panic, as the enemy closed in and the devastating effect of their long-range rifle fire became apparent. Priests went round the lines to bless the troops, and soldiers prayed with growing fervency, while mounted officers used the knout to whip them forward into line. But otherwise there was a general absence of authority among the Russian commanders. ‘Nobody gave any direction what to do,’ recalled Chodasiewicz. ‘During the five hours that the battle went on we neither saw nor heard of our general of division, or brigadier, or colonel: we did not receive any orders from them either to advance or to retire; and when we retired, nobody knew whether we ought to go to the right or left.’ The drunken Kiriakov gave a general order to retreat from the left flank of the heights, but then lost his nerve and went missing for several hours (he was discovered later hiding in a hollow in the ground). It was left to the junior commanders to organize the retreat from the heights, but ‘we had the greatest difficulty to keep our men in order’, recalled Chodasiewicz, who had to threaten ‘to cut down the first man who should break out of the ranks’ – a threat he had to carry out more than once.
