The Crimean War полностью

The loss of comrades was a major strain on soldiers’ nerves. It was not the sort of thing that men would often write about, even in the British army where there was no real censorship of their letters home; stoical acceptance of death in battle was expected of the soldier, and perhaps was needed to survive. Yet in the frequent outpouring of sorrow at the loss of friends we may perhaps catch a glimpse of deeper and more troubling emotions than such letter-writers felt able to express. Commenting on the published correspondence of his fellow-officer, Henri Loizillon, for example, Michel Gilbert was struck by the anguish and remorse in a letter to his family on 19 June. The letter contained a long list of names, a ‘funereal accounting’ of the soldiers who had fallen in the previous day’s assault on the Malakhov, and yet, Gilbert thought, one could feel from it ‘how much his soul was haunted by the breath of death (souffle de la mort). The list of names goes on and on, endlessly despairing, friends who disappeared, the names of officers who have been killed.’ Loizillon appeared lost in grief and guilt – guilt because he had survived – and it was only with the final humorous lines of his letter, in which he described the unsuccessful prayers of a fellow-soldier, that his ‘vigorous spirit of self-preservation reappeared’:

My poor friend Conegliano [Loizillon wrote], at the moment when we were leaving for the attack, told me (he is very religious): ‘I have brought my rosary, which the Pope blessed, and I have said a dozen prayers for the general [Mayran], a dozen for my brother, and for you as well.’ Poor boy! Of the three, it was only me his prayers helped to save.⁶

Apart from the effect of witnessing so many deaths, the soldiers in the trenches must have been worn down by the horrendous scale and nature of the injuries endured by all the armies in the siege. Not until the First World War would the human body suffer so much damage as it did in the fighting at Sevastopol. Technical improvements to artillery and rifle fire made for much more serious wounds than those inflicted on the soldiers of the Napoleonic or Algerian wars. The modern elongated conical rifle shot was more powerful than the old round shot, and heavier as well, so it went straight through the body, breaking any bones along its way, whereas the lighter round shot tended to deflect on its passage through the body, usually without breaking bones. At the beginning of the siege the Russians used a conical bullet weighing 50 grams, but from the spring of 1855 they began to use a larger and heavier rifle bullet, 5 centimetres long and weighing twice as much as the British and French bullets. When these new bullets struck the soft part of the human body, they left a bigger hole, which could heal, but when they hit the bone, they would break it more extensively, and if an arm or leg was fractured, it would almost certainly require amputation. The Russian practice of holding their fire until the final moment, and then shooting at the enemy from point-blank range, guaranteed that their rifle power caused the maximum damage.⁷

In the allied hospitals there were soldiers with some gruesome wounds, but there were just as many in the Russian hospitals, victims of the even more advanced artillery and rifle fire of the British and the French. Khristian Giubbenet, a professor of surgery who worked in the military hospital in Sevastopol, wrote in 1870:

I do not think that I ever saw such awful injuries as I was forced to deal with during the final period of the siege. The worst without a doubt were the frequently occurring stomach wounds, when the bloody guts of men would be hanging out. When such unfortunates were brought to the dressing stations, they could still speak, were still conscious, and went on living for a few hours. In other cases the guts and the pelvis were ripped out at the back: the men could not move their lower bodies but they retained their consciousness until they died in a few hours’ time. Without a doubt, the most terrible impression was created by those whose faces had been blown up by a shell, denying them the image of a human being. Imagine a creature whose face and head have been replaced by a bloody mass of tangled flesh and bone – there are no eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, tongue, chin or ears to be seen, and yet this creature continues to stand up on its own feet, and moves and waves its arms about, forcing one to assume that it still has a consciousness. In other cases in the place where we would see a face, all that remained were some bloody bits of dangling skin.⁸