The ditch and the slopes leading up to the parapet quickly filled with new arrivals, like Griffith, who could not climb the parapet because of the ‘press’ created by the fighting above them. The interior of the Redan was strongly defended with a series of traverses manned by the Russians feeding in their supports from behind; the few stormers who managed to fight their way into the fortress were hemmed in by them, vastly outnumbered and subjected to a devastating crossfire from both flanks at the northern end of the V-shape. The morale of the soldiers crowded in the ditch began to fall apart. Ignoring the commands of their officers to climb the parapet, ‘the men clung to the outside of the salient angle in hundreds’, recalled Lieutenant Colin Campbell, watching from the trenches, ‘although they were swept down by the flanking fire in scores’. Many lost their nerve entirely and ran back to the trenches, which themselves were full of men waiting for the order to attack. Discipline broke down. There was a general stampede to the rear. Griffith joined the panic flight:
Feeling disgraced, tho’ I had done my best, unwillingly I turned to follow the men. I saw our trench at some distance but I never expected to reach it. The fire was fearful and I kept tumbling over the dead and wounded men who literally covered the ground. At last to my great joy I gained our Parallels and tumbled somehow into the trench … I should have said that on the way a bullet hit my water-bottle, which was slung at my side, spilt all the water and glanced off. A stone thrown up by a grapeshot hit me in the leg but didn’t hurt me much. Soon after we found … a few men and by degrees mustered most of the unhurt. It was very melancholy we found so many missing.
Henry Clifford was among the officers who tried in vain to restore discipline: ‘When the men ran in from the parapet of the Redan … . we drew our swords and beat the men and implored them to stand and not run, that all would be lost; but many fled. The trench where they ran in was so crowded that it was impossible to move without walking over the wounded who lay under our feet.’30
It was hopeless to attempt to renew the attack with these panicstricken troops, most of whom were young reservists. General Codrington, the commander of the Light Division in charge of the assault, suspended further action for the day – a day when the British had counted 2,610 fallen men, 550 of them dead. Codrington intended to renew the attack with the battle-hardened troops of the Highland Brigade the next day. But it never came to that. Later that evening the Russians decided that they could not defend the Redan against the French guns installed in the Malakhov, and evacuated the fortress. As one Russian general explained in perhaps the earliest account of these events, the Malakhov was ‘only one fortress, but it was the key to Sevastopol, from which the French would be able to bombard the town at will, killing thousands of our soldiers and civilians, and probably destroying the pontoon bridge to cut off our escape to the North Side’.31
Gorchakov ordered the evacuation of the entire South Side of Sevastopol. Military installations were blown up, stores were set alight, and crowds of soldiers and civilians prepared themselves to cross the floating bridge to the North Side. A good number of the Russian soldiers believed the decision to evacuate the city was a betrayal. They had seen the previous day’s fighting as a partial victory, in so far as they had beaten off the enemy’s attacks on all the bastions except the Malakhov, and they did not understand, or refused to acknowledge, that what they had just lost was indispensable to the continued defence of the town. Many of the sailors did not want to leave Sevastopol, where they had spent their lives, and some even protested. ‘We cannot leave, there is no authority to order us,’ proclaimed one group of sailors, referring to the absence of a naval chief following the death of Nakhimov.
The soldiers can leave but we have our naval commanders, and we have not been told by them to go. How could we leave Sevastopol? Surely, everywhere the assault has been repulsed, only the Malakhov has been taken by the French, but tomorrow we can take it back, and we will remain at our posts! … We must die here, we cannot leave, what would Russia say of us?32
