After neglecting the fronts in Asia Minor and the Caucasus for so long, the main concern for Britain was the Russian siege of Kars. Alexander stepped up pressure on the Turkish fortress town to strengthen his negotiating position in peace talks with the British following the downfall of Sevastopol. The capture of Kars would open the way for the Tsar’s troops to advance towards Erzurum and Anatolia, threatening British interests on the land route to India. Alexander had ordered the attack against Kars in June in the hope of diverting allied troops from Sevastopol. A Russian force of 21,000 infantry, 6,000 Cossacks and 88 guns led by General Muraviev advanced from the Russian-Turkish border to Kars, 70 kilometres away, where a Turkish force of 18,000 troops under the command of the British General William Williams, knowing they would be defeated in an open battlefield, had spent all their energies on the fortification of the town. Among the many foreign officers in the Turkish force at Kars – a legion of Polish, Italian and Hungarian refugees from the failed rebellions of 1848–9 – there were many skilful engineers. The Russians launched their first attack on 16 June, but when this was vigorously repulsed they laid siege to the city, intending to starve the city’s defenders into surrendering. The Russians saw the siege of Kars as their answer to the allied siege of Sevastopol.
The Turks favoured sending an expeditionary force to relieve Kars. Omer Pasha pleaded with the British and the French to let him redeploy his Turkish forces in Kerch and Evpatoria (some 25,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry) and ‘throw myself upon some point of the coast of Circassia, and by menacing from thence the communication of the Russians, oblige them to abandon the siege of Kars’. The allied commanders were reluctant to make a decision and passed the matter on to the politicians in London and Paris, who were at first unwilling to move the Turkish contingent from the Crimea, and then approved the plan in general terms but argued over the best way to get to Kars. It was only on 6 September that Omer Pasha left the Crimea for Sukhumi, on the Georgian coast, from where it would take his army of 40,000 men several weeks to cross the southern Caucasus.
Meanwhile Muraviev was getting restless before Kars. The siege had taken a terrible toll on the town’s defenders, who suffered from shortages of food and from cholera; but Sevastopol had fallen, the Tsar needed Kars quickly, and with Omer Pasha’s army on its way, he could not wait for the blockade to break the morale of the Turks. On 29 September the Russians launched a full-scale assault on the bastions of Kars. Despite their weakened state, the Turkish forces fought extremely well, deploying their artillery to great effect, and the Russians suffered heavy casualties, about 2,500 dead and twice that number wounded, compared to about 1,000 Turkish casualties. Muraviev returned to his siege tactics. By mid-October, when Omer Pasha, after several delays, was only just beginning his long march south from Sukhumi, the defenders of Kars were starving; the hospital was packed with victims of scurvy. Women were bringing their children to the house of General Williams and leaving them there for him to feed. The horses of the town had all been slaughtered for their meat. People were reduced to eating grass and roots.
On 22 October word arrived that Selim Pasha, Omer Pasha’s son, had landed an army of 20,000 men on the north coast of Turkey and was marching towards Erzurum. But by the time he reached the town, only a few days’ march away, the situation in Kars had become even worse: a hundred people were dying every day, and soldiers were deserting all the time. Among those who were fit to struggle on, morale sank to an all-time low. Heavy snowfalls at the end of October made it practically impossible for the Turkish relief forces to reach Kars. Omer Pasha’s army was held up by Russian forces in Mingrelia, and then showed no sign of hurrying towards Kars, resting for five days in Zugdedi, the capital of Mingrelia, where the troops became distracted by pillaging and kidnapping children to sell as slaves. From there, they failed to make much headway in very heavy rain through the deeply forested and marshy territory. Selim Pasha’s forces were even slower to advance from Erzurum. It turned out that he did not have 20,000 men, but less than half that number, far too few to defeat Muraviev’s forces on their own, so Selim Pasha decided not to try. On 22 November a note was handed by a British diplomat to General Williams, informing him that Selim Pasha’s army would not come to Kars. With all hope gone, Williams surrendered the garrison to Muraviev, who, to his credit, ensured that the 4,000 sick and wounded Turkish soldiers were well cared for, and distributed food to the 30,000 soldiers and civilians he had starved into submission.42
