The Crimean War полностью

My Hut is progressing steadily, I hope to be ‘underground’ by the end of the week. The first operation was to dig a pit, 3 feet 6 inches deep, 8 feet wide, and 13 long. An upright post is then placed in the centre of each end, & a cross-piece put on the top of these, & secured by rope, nails, or anything you can get; Poles or whatever Wood you can beg, borrow, or steal, are then placed from the earth to the cross-piece, & secured in the same way; the Gable ends are filled up with stones, mud and earth, & this forms the roof … . The Walls are the sides of the pit, & we make the roof a sufficient height for a man to stand up in. Now comes the covering of the Roof, this is generally made by twining brushwood between the Poles, & then throwing mud & earth over it, but I mean to improve on it, & am covering mine by degrees, with the skins of horses and bullocks (the former dying in great numbers) & so hope to make it water-proof beyond a doubt. This takes longer doing, for the hides have to be cured, ‘in a way.’ [Lieutenant] McNeil and I are hutting together, I have already named it ‘Hide Abbey’. He is now making the fireplace, a hole cut in one side of the Wall, & the chimney made of tin pots & clay. Oh! how I am looking forward to sitting by it.

At the top end of the social scale, British officers availed themselves of privileges which, in view of the suffering of the ordinary troops, were outrageous. Lord Cardigan (who had medical problems) slept on board his private yacht, enjoyed French cuisine, and entertained a stream of visitors from Britain. Some officers were allowed to spend the winter in Constantinople or to find accommodation at their own expense in settlements. ‘As far as comfort is concerned,’ Lieutenant Charles Gordon (the future ‘Chinese Gordon’) wrote, ‘I assure you my dear – I could not be more comfortable in England.’ Count Vitzthum von Eckstadt, Saxon Minister to London, later recorded that ‘Several English officers, who went through that rigorous winter, have since told me with a smile that they first learned of the [army’s] suffering from the newspapers’.⁶

The comfortable conditions which senior British officers were allowed to enjoy contrasted starkly with the circumstances of French officers, who lived much more closely to their men. In a letter to his family on 20 November, Captain Herbé explained the consequences of the hurricane for his living conditions:

Soldiers and officers are all lodged together in a little tent; this installation, excellent in fine weather and on the march, is gravely inconvenient during prolonged rain and cold. The ground, trampled underfoot, becomes a mass of mud, which gets everywhere, forcing everyone to splash around in the trenches and the camp. Everybody is soaked through … In these tents, the soldiers sleep together, one against the other in a group of six; each man has just one blanket, so they stretch out three beneath them on the muddy ground, and cover themselves with the other three; their knapsacks, loaded up, serving as pillows.⁷

Generally, the French were better housed. Their tents were not only more spacious but most of them were protected from the wind by wooden palisades or walls of snow erected by the men. The French constructed various types of improvised accommodation: large huts which the soldiers called ‘molehills’ (taupinères) dug out from the ground about a metre deep, the floor lined with stone, with plaited branches for the walls and roof; ‘tent-shelters’ (tentes-abris) made up from the cloth of the soldiers’ knapsacks sewn together and fastened to sticks in the ground; and cone-shaped tents (tentes-coniques), large enough to accommodate sixteen men, made from canvas sewn together and attached to a central pole. In all these structures there were ovens for cooking and keeping the men warm. ‘Our soldiers knew how to make ovens that won the admiration and the envy of our English allies,’ recalled Noir.

The body of these ovens was sometimes made of clay, and sometimes from large bomb fragments cemented in a way to form a vault. The chimneys were constructed out of metal boxes or scrap metal pieced together on top of each other. Thanks to these ovens, our troops could warm themselves when they returned from the trenches or from sentry work half frozen to death; they could dry their clothes and sleep well without being woken by the terrible night fever that tormented the poor English. Our soldiers burnt so much wood that the great forest of Inkerman entirely disappeared in a few months; not a tree, not a bush was left. Seeing our ovens, the English complained about our cutting down the trees … . But they themselves made no use of these resources. None of the English soldiers wanted to build ovens for themselves; they were even less inclined to cut their own firewood. They expected everything to be given to them by their administration, without which they were destitute.⁸