The floor of the museum is covered in depth with the debris of broken glass, of vases, urns, statuary, the precious dust of their contents, and charred bits of wood and bone, mingled with the fresh splinters of the shelves, desks, and cases in which they had been preserved. Not a single bit of anything that could be broken or burnt any smaller had been exempt from reduction by hammer or fire.
For several days Brown did nothing to stop the atrocities, even though he had received reports that a contingent of French and British troops had taken part in the looting. Brown saw the Tatars as allies, taking the view that they were engaged in a ‘legitimate rebellion’ against Russian rule. Eventually, having been informed of the worst atrocities, Brown dispatched a tiny force (just twenty British cavalrymen) to restore order. They were far too few in number to have any real effect, though they did shoot some British troops whom they had caught committing rape.24
According to Russian witnesses, it was not just the allied soldiers who had taken part in the looting, the violence and rape; it was also officers. ‘I saw several English officers carrying to their ship furniture and sculptures, and all sorts of other items they had plundered from our homes,’ recalled one resident of Kerch. Several women claimed they had been raped by British officers.25
The development of all these broader plans was held back because, with the coming of the spring, the British and French troops got bogged down once again in the siege of Sevastopol, which still held first place in the allied strategy. Despite the recognition that a change of plan was needed for the siege to work, the allies remained wedded to the idea that one last surge would bring the walls of Sevastopol tumbling down and force Russia to accept a humiliating peace.
In terms of actual fighting, the siege had gone through a quiet period in the winter months, as both sides concentrated on the strengthening of their defensive works. The French did most of the trench digging on the allied side, mainly because the British-held ground was very rocky. According to Herbé, they dug 66 kilometres of trenches, and the British just 15, during the eleven months of the siege. It was slow, exhausting, dangerous work, cutting into the hard ground in freezing temperatures, dynamiting the rock that lay underneath, under constant fire from the enemy. ‘Every metre of our trenches was literally at the cost of one man’s life and often two,’ recalled Noir.26
The Russians were particularly active in their defensive works. Under the direction of their engineering genius Totleben, they developed their earthworks and trenches on a more sophisticated level than ever before seen in the history of siege warfare. In the early stages of the siege the Russian fortifications were little more than hastily improvised earthworks reinforced with wickerwork, fascines and gabions; but new and more formidable defences were added in the winter months. The bastions were reinforced by the addition of casemates – fortified gun emplacements dug several metres underground and covered with thick ship-timbers and earthworks that made them proof to the heaviest bombardment. Inside the most heavily fortified bastions, the Malakhov and the Redan (the Third), there was a maze of bunkers and apartments, including one, in the Redan, with a billiard table and ottomans, and in each there was a small chapel and a hospital.27
To protect these crucial bastions the Russians built new works outside the city walls: the Mamelon (the Kamchatka Lunette) to defend the Malakhov, and the Quarry Pits in front of the Redan. The Mamelon was constructed by the soldiers of the Kamchatka Regiment (from which it derived its Russian name) under almost constant fire from the French during most of February and early March. So many men were killed in building it that not all of them could be evacuated, even under cover of the night, and many dead were left in the earthworks. The Mamelon was itself a complex fortress system protected by the twin redoubts of the White Works on its left flank (so named because of the white clay soil exposed by the excavation of the defences). Henri Loizillon, a French engineer, described the surprise of his fellow-soldiers at what else they found inside the Mamelon when they captured it in early June:
Everywhere there were shelters in the ground covered up with heavy timbers where the men had taken cover from the bombs. In addition, we discovered an enormous underground capable of holding several hundred men, so the losses which they suffered were much less than we supposed. These shelters were all the more curious for the surprising comfort we found there: there were beds with eiderdowns, porcelains, complete tea services, etc., so the soldiers had not been badly served. There was also a chapel whose only remarkable object was a rather beautiful gilded wooden sculpture of Christ.28
