While the British were hauling up their guns, the French took the lead in digging trenches, moving slowly forward in a zigzag formation towards the defences of Sevastopol, as the Russians fired at them with artillery. The opening of the first trench was the most dangerous because there was little protection from the Russian guns. Armed with shovels and pickaxes, the first shift of 800 men crept forward under cover of the night, using rocks for shelter, until they reached a point within a kilometre of Sevastopol’s Flagstaff Bastion, and on lines marked out by their commanders began digging themselves into the ground, piling up the soil in gabions in front of them to protect themselves from the Russians. On that night, 9/10 October, the sky was clear and the moon was out, but a north-west wind took the sound of digging away from the town, and by dawn, when the sleepy Russians at last discovered them, the French had dug a protected trench 1,000 metres long. Under heavy bombardment, 3,000 French soldiers went on with the works, digging new entrenchments every night and repairing trenches damaged by the Russians the next day, while shells and mortar whistled past their heads. By 16 October the first five French batteries had been built with sacks of earth and wood for palisades, fortified breastworks and parapets, and more than fifty guns (cannon, mortars and howitzers) mounted on raised platforms on the ground.11
Following the French, the British dug entrenchments and sited their first batteries on Green Hill (the Left Attack) and Vorontsov Hill (the Right Attack), the two positions separated by a deep ravine. Shifts of 500 men on each attack worked day and night while more than twice that number guarded them from the Russians, who launched sorties at night. ‘I am off duty this morning at 4 am after 24 hours in the trenches,’ Captain Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his family.
When we got under the breastwork that had been thrown up in the night we were pretty well under cover, but were obliged to lie down all the time for this of course was the target for the enemy’s artillery day and night and the trench was only half made. However a few men were placed on the look out, their heads a few inches above the work, to give notice when they fired, by watching the smoke from the guns by day and the flash by night and calling out ‘Shot’ – when all in the trenches lie down and get under cover of the breastwork till it has passed, and then resume their work. By attending to this we only lost one man during the day; he was killed by a round shot.12
On 16 October it was finally decided to begin the bombardment of Sevastopol the following morning, even though the British works were not quite completed. There was a mood of optimistic expectation in the allied camp. ‘All artillery officers – French, English and naval – say [that] after a fire of 48 hours, little will be seen of Sevastopol but a heap of ruins,’ wrote Henry Clifford, a staff officer in the Light Division, to his family. According to Evelyn Wood, a midshipman who had watched the battle of the Alma from the topmast of his ship before being transferred to the land attack with the Naval Brigade,
On 16 October the betting in our camp was long odds that the fortress would fall in a few hours. Some of the older and more prudent officers estimated that the Russians might hold out for 48 hours, but this was the extreme opinion. A soldier offered me a watch, Paris made, which he had taken off a Russian officer killed at the Alma, for which he asked 20 s[hillings]. My messmates would not allow me to buy it, saying that gold watches would be cheaper in 48 hours.13
At dawn on 17 October, as soon as the fog had cleared, the Russians saw that the embrasures of the enemy batteries had been opened. Without waiting for the enemy guns to open fire, the Russians began shelling them along the line, and soon afterwards the allied counter-bombardment began with 72 British and 53 French guns. Within a few minutes the gun battle was at its height. The booming of the guns, the roaring and the whistling of the shot, and the deafening explosions of the shell drowned out the calls of the bugles and the drums. Sevastopol was completely lost in a thick black pall of smoke, which hung over the whole darkened battlefield, making it impossible for the allied gunners to hit their target with any military precision. ‘We could only sit and guess and hope we were doing well,’ wrote Calthorpe, who watched the bombardment with Raglan from the Quarries on Vorontsov Hill.14
