For the ordinary troops, Mary Seacole and the private stores of Kadikoi had less significance in improving food provisioning than the celebrated chef Alexis Soyer, who also arrived in the Crimea during the spring. Born in France in 1810, Soyer was the head chef at the Reform Club in London, where he came to the attention of the leaders of the Whig and Liberal governments. He was well known for his Shilling Cookery Book (1854), found in every home of the self-improving middle class. In February 1855 he wrote a letter to The Times in response to an article about the poor condition of the hospital kitchens in Scutari. Volunteering to advise the army on cooking, Soyer travelled to Scutari, but soon left with Nightingale for the Crimea, where she visited the hospitals at Balaklava and fell dangerously ill herself, forcing her to return to Scutari. Soyer took over the running of the kitchens at the Balaklava Hospital, cooking daily for more than a thousand men with his team of French and Italian chefs. Soyer’s main significance was his introduction of collective food provisioning to the British army through mobile field canteens – a system practised in the French army since the Napoleonic Wars. He designed his own field stove, the Soyer Stove, which remained in British military service until the second half of the twentieth century, and he had 400 stoves shipped in from Britain, enough to feed the whole army in the Crimea. He set up army bakeries and developed a type of flat bread that could keep for months. He trained in every regiment a soldier-cook, who would follow his simple but nutritious recipes. Soyer’s genius was his ability to convert army rations into palatable food. He specialized in soups, like this one for fifty men:
1. Put in the boiler 30 quarts, 7½ gallons, or 5½ camp-kettles of water
2. Add to it 50 lbs of meat, either beef or mutton
3. The rations of preserved or fresh vegetables
4. Ten small tablespoonfuls of salt
5. Simmer for three hours, and serve.42
The construction of a railway from Balaklava to the British camp above Sevastopol was the key to the improvement of supply. The idea for the Crimean railway – the first in the history of warfare – went back to the previous November, when news of the terrible conditions of the British army first broke in The Times, and it became apparent that one of the main problems was the need to transport all supplies along the muddy track from Balaklava to the heights. These reports were read by Samuel Peto, a railwayman who had made his mark as a successful London building contractoray before moving into railways in the 1840s. With a grant of £100,000 from the Aberdeen government, Peto assembled the materials for the railway and recruited a huge team of mainly Irish and very unruly navvies. They started to arrive in the Crimea at the end of January. The navvies worked at a furious pace, laying up to as much as half a kilometre of track a day, and by the end of March the entire railway line of 10 kilometres connecting Balaklava with the loading bays near the British camp had been completed. It was just in time to help with the transport of the newly arrived heavy guns and mortar shells that Raglan had instructed to be taken up from Balaklava to the heights in preparation for a second bombardment of Sevastopol which the allies had agreed to begin on Easter Monday, 9 April.43
The plan was to overwhelm Sevastopol with ten days of continual bombardment, followed by an assault on the town. With five hundred French and British guns firing round the clock, almost twice as many as in the first bombardment of October, this now became not only the heaviest bombardment of the siege, but the heaviest in history until that time. Among the allied troops, desperate for an ending of the war, there were high expectations for the attack, making them impatient for it to begin. ‘The works are continuing, as always, and we are hardly advancing!’ Herbé wrote to his family on 6 April. ‘The impatience of the officers and soldiers has created a certain discontent, everybody blames each other for the mistakes of the past, and one senses that an energetic breakthrough is now needed to reimpose order … Things cannot go on like this much longer.’44
