If the British trailed the French in pillaging, they far outstripped them in their binge drinking. The occupying troops found a huge supply of alcohol in Sevastopol, and the British, in particular, set about the task of drinking it with the licence they assumed they had been given by their officers for their hard-earned victory. Drunken fights, insubordination and indiscipline became a major problem in the British camp. Alarmed by reports of ‘mass drunkenness’ among the troops, Panmure wrote to Codrington, warning him of ‘the extreme hazard to your army physically which must exist if this evil be not speedily arrested, as well as the disgrace which is daily accumulating on our national character’. He called for the soldiers’ field allowance to be cut, and for the full force of martial law to be applied. From October to the following March, 4,000 British troops were court-martialled for drunkenness; most of them were given fifty lashes for their misbehaviour, and many also lost up to a month’s pay, but the drunkenness continued until the stocks of alcohol ran out, and the troops left the Crimea.39
The downfall of Sevastopol was cheered by crowds in London and Paris. There was dancing and drinking and much singing of patriotic anthems in the streets. Many people thought that this meant the end of the war. The capture of the naval base and the destruction of the Tsar’s Black Sea Fleet had been the focus of the allied war plans, at least in so far as these were communicated to the general public, and these had now been achieved. But in fact, in military terms, the loss of Sevastopol was a long way from the defeat of Russia: a large-scale land invasion to capture Moscow or a victory in the Baltic against St Petersburg would be needed to accomplish that.
If some Western leaders hoped that the capture of Sevastopol would force the Tsar to sue for peace, they were quickly disappointed. The Imperial Manifesto announcing the loss to the Russian people struck a note of defiance. On 13 September Alexander moved to Moscow, entering it in a staged re-enactment of Alexander I’s dramatic appearance in the ‘national’ capital after the invasion by Napoleon in July 1812, when cheering crowds had greeted him on his way to the Kremlin. ‘Remember 1812,’ the Tsar wrote to Gorchakov, his commander-in-chief, on 14 September. ‘Sevastopol is not Moscow. The Crimea is not Russia. Two years after the burning of Moscow, our victorious troops were in Paris. We are still the same Russians and God is with us.’40
Alexander thought of ways to carry on the war. In late September he wrote a detailed plan for a new Balkan offensive in 1856: it would take the war to Russia’s enemies on European soil by instigating partisan and nationalist revolts among the Slavs and Orthodox. According to Tiutcheva, Alexander ‘reprimanded anyone who talked of making peace’. Nesselrode was certainly in favour of peace negotiations, and told the Austrians that he would welcome proposals from the allies if they were ‘compatible with our honour’. But for the moment all the talk in St Petersburg and Moscow was about continuing the war, even if that talk was largely bluff to pressure the allies into offering better peace terms to Russia. The Tsar knew that the French were tired of the war, and that Napoleon would favour peace, once he had achieved the ‘glorious victory’ that the fall of Sevastopol symbolized. It was the British who would be less inclined to end the war, Alexander realized. For Palmerston, the campaign in the Crimea had always been the start of a broader war to reduce the power of the Russian Empire in the world, and the British public, as far as one can tell, were generally in favour of continuing. Even Queen Victoria could not endure the idea that the British army’s ‘failure on the Redan should be’, as she put it, ‘our last
