‘C’est la soupe qui fait le soldat,’ Napoleon once said. Soup was the mainstay of the French canteen in the Crimea. Even in the depths of winter, when fresh food supplies were at their lowest, the French could rely on an almost continuous supply of dried foodstuffs: preserved vegetables, which came in small hard cakes and needed only the adding of hot water, along with fresh or conserved meat, to make a wholesome soup; wheat biscuits, which kept for months and were more nutritious than ordinary bread because they contained less water and more fat; and plentiful supplies of coffee beans, without which the French soldier could not live. ‘Coffee, hot or cold, was all I drank,’ recalled Charles Mismer, a young dragoon. ‘Apart from its other virtues, coffee stimulates the nerves and sustains moral courage, it is the best defence against illness.’ There were many days when the French troops ‘lived on a kind of soup made from coffee and crushed biscuit’, Mismer wrote, though normally the rations ‘were composed of salted meat, lard and rice, and fresh meat from time to time, along with a supplement of wine, sugar and coffee; only bread was sometimes lacking, but instead we had biscuit, as hard as stone, which one had to crush or slice with an axe’.12
All these goods were readily available because the French had set up an efficient system of supply with well-organized wagon trains and paved roads between Kamiesh and the siege lines. The harbour at Kamiesh was far more suitable for landing supplies than Balaklava. Large warehouses, slaughterhouses, private shops and trading stalls soon sprang up around the broad horseshoe bay, where three hundred ships could unload their wares from around the world. There were bars and brothels, hotels and restaurants, including one where soldiers paid a fixed price for a three-day orgy of food, wine and women, all brought in from France. ‘I went to Kamiesh,’ Herbé wrote to his family; ‘it has become a proper town.’
You can find whatever you want here; I even saw two fashion shops selling perfumes and hats from Paris – for the
Balaklava was a crowded and chaotic harbour in which the off-loading of government supplies had to compete with private traders from virtually every nationality in the Black Sea area – Greeks, Turks, Jews, Crimean Tatars, Romanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, even a handful of Russians, who were allowed to remain in the town. ‘If anybody should ever wish to erect a “Model Balaklava” in England,’ wrote Fanny Duberly in December, ‘I will tell him the ingredients necessary.’
Take a village of ruined houses and hovels in the extremest state of all imaginable dirt; allow the rain to pour into them, until the whole place is a swamp of filth ankle-deep; catch about, on an average, 1,000 Turks with the plague, and cram them into the houses indiscriminately; kill about 100 a day, and bury them so as to be scarcely covered with earth, leaving them to rot at leisure – taking care to keep up the supply. Onto one part of the beach drive all the exhausted
Balaklava was only the beginning of the British problem. Supplies could not be taken from the port until they were released by the clerks of the commissariat through a complicated system of forms and authorizations, all filled out in triplicate. Boxes of food and bales of hay would lie around for weeks and eventully rot on the quayside before they were identified and cleared for dispatch by inefficient bureaucrats.an From Balaklava to their camps on the heights above Sevastopol the British had failed to build a proper road, so every box of bullets, every blanket and biscuit, had to be carted 10 or 11 kilometres up a steep and muddy track by horse or mule. In December and January most of these supplies had to be carried up by hand, in loads of 40 pounds a time, because there was no forage for the animals, which were rapidly dying off.
