Meanwhile, 2,000 men from the 3rd Division under the command of Major-General Eyre on the left flank broke through into the suburbs of Sevastopol itself. They had been instructed to occupy some Russian rifle pits and, if the attack on the Redan allowed it, to advance further down the Picquet House Ravine. But Eyre had exceeded his orders and had pushed on his brigade, defeating the Russians in the Cemetery, before coming under heavy fire in Sevastopol’s streets. They found themselves in a ‘cul-de-sac’, recalled Captain Scott of the 9th Regiment: ‘we could neither advance nor retire, and had to hold our ground from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., 17 hours under a tremendous fire of shot, shell, grape, canister, and hundreds of their sharpshooters, our only cover being the houses which crumbled about us at every discharge.’ According to Lieutenant Colonel Alexander of the 14th Regiment, the storming of the city became something of an escapade, as some of the Irish soldiers ‘rushed on into part of Sevastopol, got among houses with women in them, pictures, mahogany, furniture and pianos; they got also among strong wine … Some of the Irish boys dressed themselves up as women and so fought; some of them brought back looking glasses, tables and a gooseberry bush with the berries on it!’ But for the rest of the troops, sheltering in bombed-out and crumbling buildings from the enemy’s fire, the day passed with no such amusements. It was only under cover of darkness that they were able to retreat, carrying hundreds of wounded men with them.67
The next morning a truce was called to clear the killed and wounded from the battlefield. The casualties were enormous. The British lost about 1,000 men, killed and wounded; the French perhaps six times that number, though the precise figure was suppressed. A Zouave captain who was part of the team sent out into no man’s land to collect the dead described what he saw in a letter home on 25 June:
I will not tell you all the horrible sensations I experienced on arriving on that ground, strewn with bodies rotting in the heat, among which I recognized some of my comrades. There were 150 Zouaves with me, carrying stretchers and flasks with wine. The doctor with us told us to care first for the wounded who could still be saved. We found a lot of these unfortunates – they all asked to drink and my Zouaves poured them wine … There was an intolerable smell of corruption everywhere; the Zouaves had to cover their noses with a handkerchief while carrying away the dead bodies, whose heads and feet were left dangling.68
Among the dead was General Mayran, who was blamed for the defeat in Pélissier’s account to Napoleon, although, if truth be told, Pélissier himself was at least as responsible for his last-minute changes to the plan. Raglan certainly believed that Pélissier was principally at fault, not just for the changes of plan but for his decision to limit the attack to the Malakhov and the Redan rather than commit to a broader assault on the town which might have had the effect of scattering the Russian defenders – a decision he believed Pélissier had made from worries that the French troops might ‘run riot’ in the town, as he explained in his letter to Panmure.
But Raglan’s criticisms were no doubt coloured by his own sense of guilt for the needless sacrifice of so many British troops. According to one of his physicians, Raglan fell into a deep depression following the failure of the assault, and when he was on his deathbed, on 26 June, it was not from cholera that he was suffering, as had been rumoured, but ‘a case of acute mental anguish, producing first great depression, and subsequently complete exhaustion of the heart’s action’.69 He died on 28 June.
11
The Fall of Sevastopol
‘My dear father,’ Pierre de Castellane, an aide-de-camp to General Bosquet, wrote on 14 July. ‘All my letters should begin, I think, with the same words, “nothing new”, which is to say: we dig, we organize our batteries, and every night we sit and drink around the campfire; every day two companies of men are taken off to hospital.’1
