Some were dying, but for the most part they were dead, lying pell-mell, upon one another. There were arms upraised above the mass of yellow flesh, as if begging for pity. The dead who were lying on their back had generally thrust out their hands, either as if to ward off the danger, or to beg for mercy. All of them had medals, or little copper cases, containing images of the saints, on chains around their necks.
Underneath the dead there were men alive, wounded and then buried under bodies struck down later on. ‘Sometimes, from the bottom of a heap,’ wrote André Damas, a French army chaplain, ‘one could hear men breathing still; but they lacked the strength to lift the weight of flesh and bones that pressed them down; if their faint moans were heard, long hours passed before they could be cleared.’58
Major-General Codrington of the Light Division was horrified by the scavengers who robbed the dead. ‘The most disgusting thing to feel is that the horrid plunderers, the prowlers of a battle-field, have been there, pockets turned inside out, things cut to look for money, everything valuable systematically searched for – officers particularly stripped for their better clothes, with just something thrown over them,’ he wrote on 9 November.59
It took the allies several days to bury all their dead and evacuate the wounded to field hospitals. The Russians took much longer. Menshikov had refused the allied offer of a truce to clear the battlefield for fear that his troops would become demoralized and might even mutiny at the sight of so many dead and wounded on their side compared to the losses of the enemy. So the Russian dead and wounded lay there for several days and even weeks. Cler found four Russian wounded men alive at the bottom of the Quarry Ravine twelve days after the battle.
The poor fellows were lying under a projecting rock; and, when asked on what they had contrived to subsist all this time, they replied by pointing, first, to Heaven, which had sent them water and inspired them with courage, and then to some fragments of mouldy, black bread, which they had found in the pouches of the numerous dead, who lay around them.
Some of the dead were not found until three months later. They were at the bottom of Spring Ravine, where they were frozen stiff, looking much like ‘dried-up mummies’, according to Cler. The Frenchman was struck by the contrast he had noted between the Russian dead at the Alma, who had ‘an appearance of health – their clothing, underclothing, and shoes were clean and in good condition’, and the dead at Inkerman, who ‘wore a look of suffering and fatigue’.60
As at the Alma, there were claims that the Russians had engaged in atrocities against the British and the French. It was said that they had robbed and killed the wounded on the ground,al sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote:
Aided by night, they emerge from the fog unexpectedly, like demons … Panting with murderous intent (for fair fighting is not their aim), blessed by inhuman Priests, promised plunder to any amount, excited by ardent liquids, encouraged by two of their Grand Dukes … drunk, maddened, every evil passion aroused, they rush wildly upon our soldiers. At Inkerman we saw the Russian soldiery bayoneting, beating out the brains, jumping like fiends upon the lacerated bodies of the wounded Allies, wherever they could find them. The atrocities committed by the Russians have covered their nation with infamy and made them an example of horror and detestation to the whole world.61
