1st Russian soldier – ‘Englise bono!’
1st English soldier – ‘Russkie bono!’
2nd Russian soldier – ‘Francis bono!’
2nd English soldier – ‘Bono!’
3rd Russian soldier – ‘Oslem no bono!’
3rd English soldier – ‘Ah, ah! Turk no bono!’
1st Russian soldier – ‘Oslem!’ making a face, and spitting on the ground to show his contempt.
1st English soldier – ‘Turk!’ pretending to run away, as if frightened, upon which all the party go into roars of laughter, and then after shaking hands, they return to their respective beats.35
To while away the time the soldiers developed a wide variety of pursuits and games. In the bastions of Sevastopol, noted Ershov, ‘card games of all sorts were played around the clock’. Officers played chess and read voraciously. In the casemate of the Sixth Bastion there was even a grand piano, and concerts were arranged with musicians from the other bastions. ‘To begin with,’ writes Ershov, ‘the concerts were dignified and ceremonious with proper attention to the rules of listening to classical music, but gradually, as our mood changed, there was a corresponding tendency towards national melodies or folk songs and dances. Once a masked ball was arranged, and one cadet appeared in a woman’s dress to sing folk songs.’36
Theatrical amusements were very popular in the French camp, where the Zouaves had their own theatre troupe, a transvestite vaudeville, that entertained huge crowds of noisy soldiers in a wooden shed. ‘Imagine a Zouave dressed up as a shepherdess and flirting with the men (
Horse racing was also popular, especially among the British, whose cavalry was almost totally unoccupied. But it was not only the cavalry horses that took part in these races. Whitworth Porter attended a meeting organized by the 3rd Division on the downs. ‘The Day was bitterly cold,’ he noted in his diary on 18 March,
a keen west wind cutting into one’s very bones: still the course was crowded with stragglers from all parts of the army; every one who could contrive to raise a pony for the occasion had done so, and queer-looking they most of them were. I saw one huge specimen of a British officer, who could not have measured less than six foot three in his stockings, bestriding the smallest, skinniest, shaggiest pony I have ever seen.38
There was a lot of drinking in these relatively idle months. In all the armies it resulted in a growing general problem of indiscipline, swearing, insolence, drunken brawls and violence, as well as acts of insubordination by the men, all of which suggested that morale among the troops was becoming dangerously low. In the British army (and there is no reason to suppose that it was worse affected than the Russian or the French) a staggering 5,546 men (roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War. Most soldiers drank a good-sized tumbler of alcohol with their breakfast – vodka for the Russians, rum for the British and wine for the French – and another with dinner. Many also drank during the day – and some were never sober throughout the entire siege. Drinking was the primary recreation of soldiers in all the armies, including the Turks, who liked the sweet Crimean wine. Henry Clifford recalled the drinking culture in the allied camps:
Almost every regiment has a canteen, and at the door of each of these stood, no they did not stand, for very few could, but lay and rolled about, groups of French and English soldiers, in every state of intoxication. Merry, laughing, crying, dancing, fighting, sentimental, affectionate, singing, talking, quarrelsome, stupid, beastly, brutal, and dead-drunk. French just as bad as English, and English just as bad as French … What a mistake to over-pay a soldier! Give him one farthing more than he really wants, and he gives way to his brutal propensities and immediately gets
