With all the fog and mixing-up of men, there were many instances of friendly fire on the Russian side. Soimonov’s troops, in particular the Ekaterinburg Regiment, began firing at the men inside the Sandbag Battery, some thinking they were firing on the enemy, others on the orders of an officer who feared the insubordination of his men and tried to discipline them by having others shoot at them. ‘The chaos was something extraordinary,’ recalled Chodasiewicz: ‘some of the men were grumbling at the Ekaterinburg Regiment, others were shouting for artillery to come up, the buglers constantly played the signal to advance, and drummers beat to the attack, but nobody thought of moving; there they stood like a flock of sheep.’ A bugle call to manoeuvre left caused a sudden panic among the Tarutinsky men, who thought that they could hear the distant noise of the French drums. ‘There were shouts on all sides of “Where is the reserve?”,’ recalled an officer. Fearing they had no support, the troops began to stampede down the hill. According to Chodasiewicz, ‘Officers shouted to the men to halt, but to no avail, for none of them thought of stopping, but each followed the direction prompted by his fancy or his fears.’ No officer, however senior, was able to reverse the panic retreat of the men, who ran down to the bottom of the Quarry Ravine and crowded around the Sevastopol aqueduct, which alone stopped their flight. When Lieutenant General Kiriakov, the commander of the 17th Infantry Division who had gone absent at the Alma, appeared at the aqueduct and rode among the men on his white charger, slashing at them with his whip and shouting at them to climb back up the hill, the soldiers paid him little attention, and then shouted back at him, ‘Go up there yourself!’ Chodasiewicz was ordered to collect his company, but he had only 45 men left out of a company of 120.50
The Tarutinsky men had not been wrong when they thought they could hear the sound of the French drums. Raglan had sent an urgent call for help to Bosquet on the Sapoune Heights at 7 a.m., after he had arrived to inspect the battle at Home Ridge (he had also sent an order for two heavy 18-pounder cannon to be brought up from the siege batteries to counter the Russian cannonade but the order had gone astray). Bosquet’s men had already sensed that the British were in danger when they heard the early firing. The Zouaves had even heard the Russians on the march the night before – their African experience having taught them how to listen to the ground – and they were ready for the order to attack before it came. Nothing suited their type of fighting better than the foggy conditions and bushy scrubland of the hills: they were used to mountain warfare from Algeria and were at their best when fighting in small groups and ambushing the enemy. The Zouaves and Chasseurs were eager to advance, but Bosquet held them back, fearful of Liprandi’s army, 22,000 soldiers and 88 field guns in the South Valley under the command of Gorchakov, which had begun a distant cannonade against the Sapoune Heights. ‘Forward! Let’s march! It’s time to finish them!’ the Zouaves cried impatiently when Bosquet appeared among their ranks. They were angry when the general walked before them. ‘A revolt was imminent,’ recalled Louis Noir, who was in the first column of Zouaves.
The deep respect and true affection which we felt for Bosquet were tested to the limit by the impetuosity of the old Algerian bands. Suddenly Bosquet turned and drew his sword, placed himself at the head of his Zouaves, his Turks and Chasseurs, undefeated troops he had known for years, and pointing his sword towards the 20,000 Russian troops amassed on the redoubts of the opposing heights, shouted in a thunderous voice: ‘En avant! A la baïonnette!’51
In fact, the size of Liprandi’s army was not as large as Bosquet had feared, since Gorchakov had foolishly decided to position half of them behind the Chernaia river in reserve, and had dispersed the rest between the lower slopes of the Sapoune Heights and the Sandbag Battery. But the Zouaves did not know this; they could not see their enemy in the thick fog, and attacked with fearsome energy to overcome what they believed to be their disadvantage in numbers. Charging forward in small groups, and using the brushwood for cover while they fired at the Russian columns, their tactic was to scare the Russians off by any means they could. They yelled and screamed and fired in the air as they ran forward. Their bugles sounded and their drummers beat as loud as they could. Jean Cler, a colonel of the 2nd Zouave Regiment, even told his men as they prepared to go into the battle: ‘Spread out your pants as wide as they will go, and make as big a show of yourselves as you can.’52
