The Crimean War полностью

If Herbé could have visited Sevastopol, as Tolstoy was to do in November 1854, he would have found the town in a state of high alert and feverish activity. In the sweeping opening passage of his Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy takes us there in the early morning, when the city was bursting into life:

On the North Side, daytime activity is gradually supplanting the tranquillity of night: here, with a clatter of muskets, a detachment of sentries is passing by on its way to relieve the guard; here a private, having clambered from his dugout and washed his bronzed face in icy water, is turning towards the reddening east, rapidly crossing himself and saying his prayers; here a tall, heavy madzhara drawn by camels is creaking its way towards the cemetery, where the bloody corpses with which it is piled almost to the brim will be buried. As you approach the quay you are struck by the distinctive smells of coal, beef, manure and damp; thousands of oddly assorted articles – firewood, sides of meat, gabions, sacks of flour, iron bars and the like – lie piled up near the quayside; soldiers of various regiments, some with kitbags and muskets, others without, are milling around here, smoking, shouting abuse at one another or dragging heavy loads on to the ship that is lying at anchor, smoke coming from its funnel, by the landing stage; civilian skiffs, filled with a most various assortment of people – soldiers, sailors, merchants, women – are constantly mooring and casting off along the waterfront … .

The quayside contains a noisy jostle of soldiers in grey, sailors in black, and women in all sorts of colours. Peasant women are selling rolls, Russian muzhiks with samovars are shouting, ‘Hot sbitén’,^af and right here, lying about on the very first steps of the landing, are rusty cannonballs, shells, grapeshot, and cast-iron cannon of various calibres. A little further off there is a large, open area strewn with enormous squared beams, gun carriages and the forms of sleeping soldiers; there are horses, waggons, green field guns with ammunition boxes, infantry muskets stacked in criss-cross piles; a constant movement persists of soldiers, sailors, officers, merchants, women and children; carts laden with hay, sacks or barrels come and go; and here and there a Cossack or an officer is passing by on horseback, or a general in his droshky. To the right the street is blocked by a barricade, the embrasures of which are mounted with a small cannon; beside them sits a sailor, puffing at his pipe. To the left is a handsome building with Roman numerals carved on its pediment, beneath which soldiers are standing with bloodstained stretchers – everywhere you perceive the unpleasant signs of a military encampment.¹

Sevastopol was a military town. Its entire population of 40,000 people was connected in some way to the life of the naval base, whose garrison numbered about 18,000 men, and from that unity Sevastopol gained its military strength. There were sailors who had lived there with their families since Sevastopol’s foundation in the 1780s. Socially the city had a singularity: frock coats were rarely to be seen among the naval uniforms on its central boulevards. There were no great museums, galleries, concert halls or intellectual treasures in Sevastopol. The imposing neoclassical buildings of the city centre were all military in character: the admiralty, the naval school, the arsenal, the garrisons, the ship-repair workshops, the army stores and warehouses, the military hospital, and the officers’ library, one of the richest in Europe. Even the Assembly of Nobles (the ‘handsome building with Roman numerals’) turned into a hospital during the siege.

The town was divided into two distinct parts, a North and a South side, separated from each other by the sea harbour, and the only direct means of communication between the two was by boat. The North Side of the town was a world apart from the elegant neoclassical façades around the military harbour on the southern side. It had few built-up streets, and fishermen and sailors lived there in a semi-rural style, growing vegetables and keeping livestock in the gardens of their dachas. On the South Side there was another, less obvious, distinction between the administrative centre on the western side of the military harbour and the naval dockyards on the eastern side, where the sailors lived in garrisons or with their families in small wooden houses no more than a few yards from the defensive works. Women hung their washing on lines thrown between their houses and the fortress walls and bastions.²