For all the Russians’ losses, their sortie of 26 October had revealed the weakness of the British defences on Mount Inkerman. Raglan had been warned on a number of occasions by de Lacy Evans and Burgoyne that these crucial heights were vulnerable and needed to be occupied in strength and fortified; Bosquet, the commander of an infantry division on the Sapoune Heights to the south of Inkerman, had been adding his own warnings in almost daily letters to the British commander; while Canrobert had even offered immediate help. But Raglan had done nothing to strengthen the defences, even after the sortie by the Russians, when the French commander was amazed to learn that ‘so important and so exposed a position’ had been left ‘totally unprotected by fortifications’.39
It was not just negligence that lay behind Raglan’s failure but a calculated risk: the British were too few in number to protect all their positions, they were seriously overstretched, and would have been incapable of repulsing a general attack if one had been launched at several points along their line. By the first week of November, the British infantry were exhausted. They had scarcely had a rest since their landing in the Crimea, as Private Henry Smith recalled in a letter to his parents in February 1855:
After the battle of the Alma and the march to Balaklava, we were immediately put to work, starting from 24 September during which time we never got more than 4 hours sleep out of 24, and very often did not get as much time even as to make a tin of coffee, before we were sent on some other duty, till the siege opened on 14 October, and although shell and shot fell like hail, as from the dreadful fatigue we had to undergo, we were so regardless as to lie down and sleep even at the mouth of the cannon … We were often being 24 hours in the trenches, and I believe there was not an hour’s drying in the 24, so that when we came to camp we were wet to the skin and all over mud even to the shoulders, and in this very state we had to march to Inkerman battle without as much as a bit of bread or a sip of water to satisfy a craving hunger and thirst.40
Menshikov’s plan was a more ambitious version of the sortie on 26 October (‘Little Inkerman’ as that dress rehearsal later became known). On the afternoon of 4 November, only a few hours after the arrival of the 4th Corps from Bessarabia, he ordered the offensive to begin at six o’clock the next morning. Soimonov was to lead a force of 19,000 men and 38 guns along the same route taken on 26 October. Capturing Shell Hill, they were to be joined there by Pavlov’s force (16,000 men and 96 guns), which was to cross the Chernaia river and ascend the heights from the Inkerman Bridge. Under General Dannenberg, who was to take over the command at this point, the combined force was to drive the British off Mount Inkerman, while Liprandi’s army distracted Bosquet’s corps on the Sapoune Heights.
The plan called for a high degree of coordination between the attacking units, which was too much to expect from any army in an age before the radio, let alone from the Russians, who lacked detailed maps.aj It also called for a change of commander in the middle of the battle – a recipe for disaster, especially since Dannenberg, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, had a record of defeat and indecisiveness that was hardly likely to inspire men. But the biggest flaw of all was the whole idea that a force of 35,000 men and 134 guns could even be deployed on the narrow ridge that was Shell Hill, a rocky piece of scrubland barely 300 metres wide. Realizing its impracticality, Dannenberg began to change the battle plan at the last minute. Late at night on 4 November he ordered Soimonov’s men not to climb Mount Inkerman from the northern side, as had been planned, but to march east as far as the Inkerman Bridge to cover Pavlov’s crossing of the river. From the bridge, the attacking forces were to climb the heights in three different directions and round on the British from the flanks. The sudden change was confusing; but even more confusion was to come. At three o’clock in the morning, Soimonov’s column was moving east from Sevastopol towards Mount Inkerman when he received another message from Dannenberg, ordering him to march in the opposite direction and attack from the west. Thinking that another change of plan would endanger the whole operation, Soimonov ignored the order, but instead of meeting Pavlov at the bridge, he now went back to his own preferred plan of attacking from the north. The three commanders thus went into the battle of Inkerman with entirely different plans.41
