The Crimean War полностью

The Turkish army was made up of many nationalities. It included Arabs, Kurds, Tatars, Egyptians, Tunisians, Albanians, Greeks, Armenians and other peoples, many of them hostile to the Turkish government or unable to understand the commands of their Turkish or European officers (Omer Pasha’s staff contained many Poles and Italians). The most colourful of the Turkish forces were the Bashi Bazouks, irregulars from North Africa, Central Asia and Anatolia, who left their tribes in bands of twenty or thirty at a time, a motley bunch of cavalrymen of all ages and appearances, and made their way to the Turkish capital to join the jihad against the Russian infidels. In his memoirs of the Crimean War, the British naval officer Adolphus Slade, who helped to train the Turkish navy, described a parade of the Bashi Bazouks in Constantinople before they were sent off to the Danubian front. They were mostly dressed in old tribal gear, ‘sashed and turbaned, and picturesquely armed with pistols, yataghan [Turkish sword] and sabre. Some carried pennoned lances. Each squadron had its colours and its kettle-drums of the fashion of those, if not the same, carried by their ancestors who had marched to the siege of Vienna.’ They spoke so many different languages that, even within small units, translators and criers had to be employed to shout out the orders of the officers.²⁹

Language was not the only problem of command. Many Muslim soldiers were unwilling to obey Christian officers, even Omer Pasha, a Croatian Serb and Orthodox by birth (his real name was Mihailo Latas) who had been educated in an Austrian military school before fleeing from corruption charges to the Ottoman province of Bosnia and converting to Islam. Jocular and talkative, Omer Pasha enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle that his command of the Rumelian army had afforded him. He dressed in a uniform decorated with gold braid and precious stones, kept a private harem, and employed an orchestra of Germans to accompany his troops (in the Crimea he had them play ‘Ah! Che la morte’ from Verdi’s recent opera Il Trovatore). Omer Pasha was not an outstanding commander. It was said that he had been promoted on the basis of his beautiful handwriting (he had been the writing-master of the young Abdülmecid and had been made a colonel when his pupil became Sultan in 1839). In this sense, despite his Christian birth, Omer Pasha was typical of the Ottoman officer class, which still depended on personal patronage for promotion rather than on military expertise. The military reforms of Mahmud’s reign and the Tanzimat had yet to create the foundations of a modern professional army, and the majority of Turkish officers were tactically weak on the battlefield. Many still adhered to the outmoded strategy of dispersing their troops to cover every bit of ground rather than deploying them in larger and more compact groups. The Ottoman army was good at ‘small-war’ ambushes and skirmishing, and excellent at siege warfare, but it had long lacked the discipline and training to master close-order formations using smooth-bore muskets, unlike the Russians.³⁰

In terms of pay and conditions there was a huge gulf between the officers and the soldiers, a divide even wider than in the Russian army, with many senior commanders living like pashas and their troops left unpaid for several months, sometimes even years, during a war. The Russian diplomat and geographer Pyotr Chikhachev reported on the problem when he worked at the Russian embassy in Constantinople in 1849. In his calculation, the annual cost of the Turkish infantry soldier (salary, rations and clothing) was 18 silver roubles; the equivalent costs for the Russian soldier were 32 roubles; for the Austrian, 53 roubles; for the Prussian, 60 roubles; for the French, 85 roubles; and for the British foot soldier, 134 roubles. European soldiers were shocked by the conditions of the Turkish troops on the Danubian front. ‘Poorly fed and dressed in rags, they were the most wretched specimens of humanity,’ according to one British officer. The Egyptian reinforcements were described by a Russian officer as ‘old men and country boys without any training for battle’.³¹

The British were divided in their reaction to the Russian occupation of the principalities. The most pacific member of the cabinet was the Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen. He refused to see the occupation as an act of war – he even thought it had been partly justified to press the Porte to recognize the Russians’ legitimate demands in the Holy Lands – and looked for diplomatic ways to help the Tsar retreat without losing face. He certainly was not inclined to encourage Turkish resistance. His greatest fear was being drawn into a war against Russia by the Turks, whom he generally mistrusted. In February he had written to Lord Russell to warn against the sending of a British fleet to help the Turks: