They certainly did. Prokofii Podpalov, an orderly to General Golev in the Redan, recalled noticing the steady build-up of activity in the Quarries in the evening – the ‘sound of voices, of footsteps in the trenches, and the rumbling of the wheels of the gun carriages being moved towards us’, which ‘made it obvious that the allies were preparing to give the signal for an assault’. At that moment the Russians had been withdrawing their forces from the Redan. Men were going back into town for the night. But noticing these signs of an imminent attack, Golev ordered all his troops to return to the Redan, where they mounted the cannon and took up their positions on the parapets. Podpalov recalled the ‘extraordinary silence’ of the men as they waited for the assault to begin. ‘That grave-like silence contained within it something sinister: everybody felt that something terrible was approaching, something powerful and threatening, with which we would fight for life and death.’60
The French attack had been scheduled to begin well before first light, at three o’clock, with three hours of bombardment, followed by the storming of the Malakhov at 6 a.m., an hour after sunrise. During the evening of the 17th, however, Pélissier made a sudden change of plan. He had decided that in those first minutes of daylight the Russians could not fail to see the French preparing to attack, and they would bring up infantry reserves to defend the Malakhov. Late that evening he issued a new order for the stormers to attack the Malakhov directly at 3 a.m., when the rocket signal to begin would be fired from the Victoria Redoubt, behind the French lines near the Mamelon. This was not the only sudden change that evening. In a fit of temper, and seeking to claim the expected success, Pélissier also removed General Bosquet, who had questioned his decision to begin the assault without a bombardment. Bosquet had a detailed knowledge of the Russian positions, and he had the confidence of the soldiers; he was replaced by a general who had neither. The French troops were unsettled by the sudden changes – none more so than General Mayran, the man chosen to lead the assault with the 97th Regiment, who was personally insulted by the fiery Pélissier in another argument, prompting Mayran to storm off to his post saying, ‘Il n’y a plus qu’à se faire tuer’ (‘There’s nothing left to do but get killed’).61
It was Mayran, in his eagerness, who made a fatal blunder, when he mistook a shell trailing light from its fuse as the rocket signal to attack, and ordered the 97th to begin the assault fifteen minutes too early, when the rest of the French troops were not ready. According to Herbé, who was with the 95th Regiment in the second column just behind Mayran, the general had been provoked by an incident shortly after two o’clock in the morning, when two Russian officers had crept up to the French trenches and called out in the dark,
The 97th rushed forward – only to be met by a deadly barrage of artillery and musket fire by the Russians, who were well armed and ready on every parapet. ‘Suddenly the enemy was coming towards us in a huge wave,’ recalled Podpalov, who watched the scene from the Redan.
Soon, in the dim light, we could just make out that the enemy was carrying ladders, ropes, spades, boards, etc. – it looked like an army of ants on the move. They came closer and closer. Suddenly, right across the line, our bugles sounded, followed by the booming of our cannon and the firing of our guns; the earth shook, there was a thunderous echo, and it was so dark from the gunsmoke that nothing could be seen. When it cleared, we could see that the ground in front of us was covered with the bodies of the fallen French.
