With no clear idea of where they were to go, the Russians fled in all directions, running down the hill into the valley, away from the enemy. Mounted officers tried in vain to stop the panic flight, riding round the men and whipping them, like cowboys rounding up cattle; but the men had lost all patience with their commanders. Chodasiewicz overheard a conversation between two soldiers:
1st soldier: ‘Yes, during the fights we saw nothing of these great folks [the officers] but now they are as thick as imps with their shouting “Silence! Keep step!”’
2nd soldier: ‘You are always grumbling, just like a Pole; you are enough to anger Providence, whom we ought to thank for our lives.’
1st soldier: ‘It’s all the same to you, provided you are not flogged.’
Chodasiewicz spoke of chaos and confusion, of barely sober officers, ‘of the ten minutes of fear and trembling on the second line of heights, when we saw the enemy’s cavalry coming forward to cut down the retreating stragglers, for the most part wounded men’.25
In the end the Russians were defeated, not just by the superior firepower of the Minié rifle, but by a loss of nerve among their men. For Ardant du Picq, who would develop his military theories from questionnaires he sent to the Frenchmen who had fought at the Alma, this moral factor was the decisive element in modern war. Large groups of men rarely engaged physically, he maintained, because at the final moment before the point of contact one side nearly always lost its nerve and ran away. The key thing on the battlefield was military discipline – the ability of officers to hold their men together and stop them fleeing out of fear – because it was when they turned their backs to the enemy that soldiers were most likely to be killed. The suppression of fear was thus the main task of the officer, something he could achieve only through his own authority and the unity he instilled in his men.
What makes the soldier capable of obedience and direction in action is the sense of discipline. This includes: respect for and confidence in his chiefs; confidence in his comrades and fear of their reproaches and retaliation if he abandons them in danger; his desire to go where others do without trembling more than they; in a word, the whole of
These ideas, which were to become central to the military theories of the twentieth century, first became apparent to du Picq in a letter written to him in 1869 by a veteran of the Alma. The soldier had recalled the crucial intervention of his company commander, who had halted the panic of his men after a senior commander had mistakenly assumed that the Russian cavalry was about to charge and had ordered the bugler to signal a retreat:
Happily, a level-headed officer, Captain Daguerre, seeing the gross mistake, commanded ‘Forward’ in a stentorian tone. This halted the retreat and caused us again to take up the attack. The attack made us masters of the telegraph-line, and the battle was won. At this second charge the Russians gave, turned, and hardly any of them were wounded with the bayonet. So then a Major commanding a battalion, without orders, sounds a bugle call and endangers success. A simple Captain commands ‘Forward’, and decides the victory.26
By half past four the battle was over. Most of the Russians had retreated towards the River Kacha in small groups, without leaders or any clear idea of what to do or where to go. Many men would not be reunited with their regiments for several days. At the top of Telegraph Hill the French captured the abandoned carriage of Prince Menshikov, which was being driven off by some Cossacks. In the carriage they found a field kitchen, letters from the Tsar, 50,000 francs, pornographic French novels, the general’s boots, and some ladies’ underwear. On the hill were abandoned picnics, parasols and field glasses left behind by parties of spectators from Sevastopol.27
On the battlefield itself the ground was covered with the wounded and the dead – 2,000 British, 1,600 French and perhaps 5,000 Russians, though the exact numbers are impossible to calculate, since so many of them were abandoned there. It took the British two full days to clear the battlefield of the wounded. They had neglected to bring any medical supplies on the ships from Varna – the ambulance corps with its carts and wagons and stretchers was still in Bulgaria – so doctors had to plead with the commissariat for military carts to remove the wounded from the battlefield. Storekeeper John Rowe of the commissariat emptied his cart of its saddles to help with the wounded, and on his way back to collect his cargo came across a group of wounded officers, among them Hugh Annesley:
