They fired, I should imagine, at the flash of the enemy’s guns on Shell Hill, and drew a heavy fire on themselves in return. Some [of the gunners] fell, and we also suffered, although we had been ordered to lie down to obtain what shelter we could from the ridge. One round shot, I remember, tore into my company, completely severing the left arm and both legs off a man in the front rank, and killed his rear rank man without any perceptible wound. Other casualties were also occurring in other companies … . The guns … were firing as fast as they could load, and each successive discharge and recoil brought them closer to our line … We assisted the gunners to run the guns into their first position, and some men also aided in carrying ammunition.45
The main thing at this stage was to keep the noise of the barrage up to make the Russians think that the British had more guns than they actually had, pass the ammunition and wait for reinforcements to arrive.
If Soimonov had known the weakness of the British defences, he would have ordered Home Ridge to be stormed, but he could see nothing in the fog, and the heavy firing of the enemy, whose Minié rifles were deadly accurate at the short range from which the British fired, persuaded him to wait for Pavlov’s men to join him on Shell Hill before launching an assault. Within minutes Soimonov himself was killed by a British rifleman. The command was taken up by Colonel Pristovoitov, who was shot a few minutes later; and then by Colonel Uvazhnov-Aleksandrov, who was also killed. After that, it was not clear who would take up the command, nobody was keen to step up to the mark, and Captain Andrianov was sent off on his horse to consult with various generals on the matter, which wasted valuable time.46
Meanwhile, at 5 a.m., Pavlov’s men had arrived at the Inkerman Bridge, only to discover that the naval detachment had not prepared it for their crossing, as they had been ordered to by Dannenberg. They had to wait until seven o’clock before the bridge was ready and they could cross the Chernaia. From there, they fanned out and climbed the heights in three different directions: the Okhotsky, Yakutsky and Selenginsky regiments and most of the artillery branching to the right to reach the top by the Sapper Road and join Soimonov’s men, the Borodinsky ascending by the centre route along the Volovia Ravine, while the Tarutinsky Regiment climbed the steep and rocky slopes of the Quarry Ravine towards the Sandbag Battery under cover of Soimonov’s guns.47
There were fierce gun battles across the heights – small groups of fighters dashing everywhere, using the thick bushes to conceal themselves and fire at each other like skirmishers – but the most intense was on the British right flank around the Sandbag Battery. Twenty minutes after they had crossed the bridge, the advance battalions of the Tarutinsky Regiment overpowered the small picket in the battery, but then came under a series of attacks from a combined British force of 700 men under the command of Brigadier Adams. In frenzied hand-to-hand fighting, the Sandbag Battery changed sides several times. By eight o’clock Adams’s men were outnumbered by the Russians ten to one, but because of the narrow ridge on which the fighting for the battery took place, the Russians could not make their numbers tell in one assault. Once the British had regained the battery, the Russians came at them again in a series of attacks. Private Edward Hyde was in the battery with Adams’s men:
The Russian infantry got right up to it, and clambered up the front and sides of it, and we had a hard job to keep them out. Directly we saw their heads above the parapet, or looking into the embrasures, we fired at them or bayoneted them as fast as we could. They came on like ants; no sooner was one knocked backwards than another clambered over the dead bodies to take his place, all of them yelling and shouting. We in the battery were not quiet, you may be sure, and what with the cheering and shouting, the thud of blows, the clash of bayonets and swords, the ping of the bullets, the whistling of the shells, the foggy atmosphere, and the smell of powder and blood, the scene inside the battery where we were was beyond the power of man to imagine or describe.48
