Mayran was among those who were hit in the first wave. Helped to his feet by Herbé, he was badly wounded in the arm, but refused to retreat. ‘Forward the 95th!’ he called back to the second line. The reinforcements moved forward, but they too were shot down in huge numbers by the Russians guns. This was not a battle but a massacre. Following their instincts, the attackers lay down on the ground, ignoring Mayran’s orders to advance, and engaged the Russians in a gun battle. After twenty minutes, by which time the battlefield was littered with their dead, the French troops saw a rocket in the sky: it was the real signal to attack.62
Pélissier had ordered the rocket to be fired in a desperate attempt to coordinate the French assault. But if Mayran had advanced too early, his other generals were not ready: expecting a later start, they had not managed to prepare in time. The troops from the reserve lines were rushed forward to join in the attack, but the sudden order to advance unsettled them, and many of the men ‘refused to leave the trenches, even when their officers threatened them with the harshest punishments’, according to Lieutenant Colonel Dessaint, the head of the army’s political department, who concluded that the soldiers ‘had an intuition of the disaster that awaited them’.63
Watching from the Vorontsov Ridge, Raglan could see that the disjointed French assault was a bloody fiasco. One French column, to the left of the Malakhov, had broken through, but its supports were being devastated by the Russian guns on the Malakhov and the Redan. Raglan might have helped the French by bombarding the Redan, as agreed in the original allied plan, before launching an assault; but he felt bound by a sense of duty and honour to support the French by storming the Redan immediately, without a preliminary bombardment, even though he must have known, if only from the events of the previous hour, that such a policy was bound to end in disaster and the needless sacrifice of many men. ‘I always guarded myself from being tied down to attack at the same moment as the French, and I felt that I ought to have some hope of their success before I committed our troops,’ Raglan wrote to Panmure on 19 June, ‘but when I saw how stoutly they were opposed, I considered it was my duty to assist them by attacking myself … Of this I am quite certain, that, if the troops had remained in our trenches, the French would have attributed their non-success to our refusal to participate in the operation.’64
The British assault began at 5.30 a.m. The attacking troops ran forward from the Quarries and the trenches on either side, followed by the supporting parties carrying ladders to scale the walls of the Redan. It soon became apparent that it was a hopeless task. ‘The troops no sooner began to show themselves beyond the parapet of the trenches, than they were assailed by the most murderous fire of grape that ever was witnessed,’ reported Sir George Brown, who had been given the command of the assault. The first Russian volley took out one-third of the attackers. From the trenches on the left, Codrington observed the devastating effect of the barrage on the troops attempting to run across 200 metres of open ground towards the Redan:
The moment they showed themselves, fire of grape was opened upon them – it ploughed the ground – it knocked over many, the dust blinded them, and I saw many swerve away to the trenches on their left. The officers told me afterwards they were blinded by the dust thrown up by the grape; and one told me he was quite blown – out of breath – before he got halfway.65
Overwhelmed by the torrent of grape-shot, the troops began to waver; some lost their nerve and ran away, despite the efforts of their officers to regroup the men by shouting threats. Eventually, the first line of attackers and the leading ladder-men reached the abbatis, about 30 metres from the ditch of the Redan. While they struggled to squeeze through the gaps of the abbatis, the Russians ‘mounted the parapets of the Redan and delivered volley after volley into us’, recalled Timothy Gowing:
They hoisted a large black flag and defied us to come on. The cry of ‘Murder’ could be heard on that field, for the cowardly enemy fired for hours upon our countrymen as they lay writhing in agony and blood. As some of our officers said, ‘This will never do – we’ll pay them for this yet!’ We would have forgiven them all had they not shot down poor, defenceless, wounded men.
The storming party dwindled to the last hundred men, who started to retreat, in defiance of their officers, whose threats to shoot them were ignored. According to one officer, who had urged a group of men to continue the attack, ‘they became impressed with the conviction that another step forward and they would be blown into the air; they would fight any number of men, they said, but they would not step forward to be blown up’.66 It had been widely rumoured that the Redan was mined.
