The sudden arrival of warm spring weather raised the morale of the allied troops. ‘Today it is spring,’ Herbé wrote on 6 April; ‘the sun has not left us for three weeks, and eveything has changed in appearance.’ The French soldiers planted gardens near their tents. Many, like Herbé, shaved their winter beards, washed their linen, and generally spruced up their appearance, so that ‘if the ladies of Sevastopol should give a ball and invite the French officers, our uniforms would still shine brightly among their elegant costumes’. After such a cruel winter, when all was hidden under mud and snow, the Crimea appeared to be suddenly transformed into a place of great beauty, with a profusion of colourful spring flowers on the heathlands, fields of rye grass a metre or so high, and birdsong everywhere. ‘We have had a few warm days only,’ wrote Russell of
and yet the soil, wherever a flower has a chance of springing up, pours forth multitudes of snowdrops, crocuses, and hyacinths … The finches and larks here have a Valentine’s-day of their own, and still congregate in flocks. Very brilliant goldfinches, large buntings, golden-crested wrens, larks, linnets, titlarks, and three sorts of tomtits, the hedge sparrow, and a pretty species of wagtail, are very common all over the Chersonese; and it is strange to hear them piping and twittering about the bushes in the intervals of the booming of the cannon, just as it is to see the young spring flowers forcing their way through the crevices of piles of shot and peering out from under shells and heavy ordnance.40
In the British camp, the spirit of the troops was lifted by improvements in the supply of foodstuffs and other basic goods, mainly as a result of the private enterprise that took advantage of the opportunities offered by the failure of the government to provide for the troops in the Crimea. By the spring of 1855 a vast array of private traders and sutlers had set up stalls and shops in Kadikoi. Although prices were extortionate, anything could be purchased there, from potted meats and pickles, bottled beer and Greek raki to roasted coffee, tins of Albert biscuits, chocolate, cigars, toiletries, paper, pens and ink, and the best champage from Oppenheim’s or Fortnum & Mason, which both had outlets in the main bazaar. There were saddlers, cobblers, tailors, bakers and hoteliers, including the famous Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman who provided hearty meals and hospitality, herbal remedies and medicines at the ‘British Hotel’ she set up at a place she named Spring Hill near Kadikoi.
Born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish father and Creole mother, this extraordinary woman had worked as a nurse in the British military stations in Jamaica and had married an Englishman called Seacole, who died within a year. She had later run a hotel and general store with her brother in Panama, where she had coped with outbreaks of disease. At the start of the Crimean War she travelled to England and attempted to get herself recruited as a nurse with Florence Nightingale, but she was rejected several times, no doubt partly because of the colour of her skin. Determined to make money and to help the war effort as a sutler and hotelier, she teamed up with Thomas Day, one of her husband’s distant relatives, to set up a company, ‘Seacole and Day’. Setting sail from Gravesend on 15 February, they collected stores in Constantinople, where they also recruited a young Greek Jew (whom she would call ‘Jew Johnny’). Although rather grandly named, the ‘British Hotel’ was really just a restaurant and general store in what Russell described as ‘an iron storehouse with wooden sheds’, but it was much loved by British officers, its main clientele, for whom it was a sort of club, where they could indulge themselves and enjoy comfort food that reminded them of home.41
