The Crimean War полностью

Confident of a quick victory, the allied commanders had made no plans for the troops to spend a winter on the heights above Sevastopol. They did not fully realize how cold it would become. The British were particularly negligent. They failed to provide proper winter clothing for the troops, who were sent to the Crimea in their parade uniforms, without even greatcoats, which arrived later on, after the first cargo of winter uniforms had gone with the steamship Prince. The French were better prepared. They issued their troops with sheepskins and eventually with fur-lined hooded cloaks, which became known as the criméennes, originally worn by officers alone. They also let the soldiers wear as many layers as they preferred, without anything remotely like that peculiar British military fetish for ‘gentlemanly’ dress and appearance. By the depths of winter the French troops had become so motley in their uniforms that they hardly looked like a regular army any more. But they were considerably warmer than their British counterparts. ‘Rest assured,’ wrote Frédéric Japy of the 3rd Zouave Regiment to his anxious mother in Beaucourt:

these are my clothes beginning with my skin: a flannel vest (gilet), a shirt, a wool vest, a tunic, a jacket (caban); on my feet some boots, and when I am not on service, leather shoes and leggings – so you see I have nothing to complain about. I have two jackets, a light one issued by the Zouaves and a monumental one which I bought in Constantinople for the cold; it weighs a little less than 50 kilograms, and I sleep in it when I am on trench duty; if it gets soaked, there is no way to carry it, nor to march with it; if I can, I shall bring it back to France as a curiosity.

Louis Noir described how the Zouaves dressed to survive the cold:

Our battalions, and notably those who came from Africa, survived the freezing temperatures admirably. We were well dressed. Usually, on top of our uniform, we wore either a large greatcoat with a hood, perhaps a criméenne or a sheepskin shaped as a jacket; the legs were protected by long fur-lined leggings; and every man had been issued with a warm sheepskin hat. But there was no regulation uniform; each man dressed in his own style. One man dressed like a bedouin, another like a coachman, and another like a priest; others preferred to dress in the Greek style; and some stoics added nothing to the uniform. There were all sorts of clogs and boots – leather, rubber, wooden-soled and so on. Headgear was left entirely to the imagination of every man …

Dressed in summer uniforms, the British envied the warm sheepskins and criméennes of the French. ‘They certainly are the proper clothing for out here,’ George Lawson, the army surgeon, wrote in a letter to his family:

I wish our men had something of the sort … Many of them are almost shoeless and shirtless, their great coats worn to a thread and torn in all directions, having had not only to live in them during the day but sleep in them by night, covered only by the wet blanket which they have just brought up with them from the trenches.⁴

The allied commanders had also given little thought to the shelter the men would need. The tents which they had brought with them were not insulated on the ground, and provided little real protection from the elements. Many were irreparably damaged by the storm – at least half those used by the regiment of Captain Tomkinson of the Light Brigade, who complained that the tents were unfit to live in: ‘They let in water to such an extent that in heavy rains the ground beneath them is flooded and the men are obliged to stand up round the pole during a whole night.’ Inspecting the camp at Kadikoi, Lord Lucan found a large number of tents unfit for habitation. They were ‘rotten, torn and not capable of sheltering the men’, who were ‘nearly all frozen to death’ and suffering terribly from diarrhoea.⁵

Crimean Winter, Crimean Summer by Henry Hope Crealock, a captain in the 90th Light Infantry Regiment. The caption reads: ‘The British Soldier – how he dressed in the depths of a Crimean winter – 0 degrees in the sun!!! The British soldier, how he dressed in the height of a Crimean summer – 100 degress in the shade!!’

British officers were much better sheltered than their men. Most of them employed their servants to install a wooden floor or dig and line with stones a hole inside their tents to insulate them from the ground. Some had them build a dugout in the ground which they walled with stones and covered with a brushwood roof. On 22 November Captain William Radcliffe of the 20th Regiment wrote to his parents: