We had all long since forgotten the discomfort of early rising. In my
case I had never been to bed, so to buckle on my sword and revolver
was the work of one moment; in another I was threading my way among
the streets of tents, from which our men, cold, damp, pale, and
worn-looking, were pouring towards their various muster-places, many
of them arranging their belts as they hurried forward.
"What is the row? what is up?" were the inquiries of all.
But no one knew, and on all hands the mounted officers were riding
about and crying,
"Fall in, 19th Regiment!" "Fall in, 23rd Fusileers!" and so on. "Stand
to your arms; turn out the whole; uncase the colours, gentlemen!"
"It is gunpowder-plot day," cried a laughing aide-de-camp, galloping
past with such speed and recklessness that he nearly rode me down.
It proved to be a sortie from Sebastopol, made chiefly by a new
division of troops brought up by forced marches from Bessarabia and
Wallachia, many of them in wagons, kabitkas, and conveyances of all
kinds; and all these men, to the number of many thousands, left the
beleaguered city inflamed by the sermon I have described, by harangues
of a similar kind, by the money or martyrdom they hoped to win, and
by a plentiful distribution of coarse and ardent raki; while to
Osten-Sacken, Volhonski, and other officers of rank, one of the Grand
Dukes held out threats of degradation and Siberia if we were not
attacked and the siege raised! All our men, without breakfast or other
food, got briskly under arms, by regiments, brigades, and divisions;
they were in their gray greatcoats, hence some terrible mistakes
occurred in the hurry and confusion; many of our officers, however,
went into action in _scarlet_, with their epaulettes on--most fatally
for themselves. All the bells in Sebastopol--and some of these were
magnificent in size and tone--rang a tocsin, while the troops
composing the sortie, at the early hour of three A.M., stole, under
cloud of darkness and a thick mist, into the ravines near the
Tchernaya, to menace the British right, our weakest point; and,
unknown to our out-guards, and generally unheard by them--though more
than one wary old soldier asserted that he heard "something like the
rumble of artillery wheels"--in the gloom and obscurity several large
pieces of cannon were got into position, so as completely to command
the ground occupied by us. Cautiously and noiselessly the masses of
Russian infantry had stolen on, the sound of their footsteps hidden by
the jangle of the bells, till they, to the number of more than 50,000
men, were on the flank as well as in front of our line; and the first
indication we had of their close vicinity was when our outlying
pickets, amid the dense fog of that fatal November morning, found
themselves all but surrounded by this vast force, and fighting
desperately!
Knapsacks were generally thrown aside, and the muskets of the pickets
were in some instances so wet by overnight exposure, that they failed
to explode, so others taken from the dead and wounded were substituted
for them. There was firing fast and furious on every hand; the
musketry flashing like red streaks through the gray gloom, towards the
head of the beautiful valley of Inkermann, even before our regiment
was formed and moved forward to the support of the pickets, who were
retreating towards a small two-gun battery which had been erected, but
afterwards abandoned during the progress of the siege. The great
Russian cannon now opened like thunder from those hills which had been
reached unseen by us, and then began one of the closest, because
confused, most ferocious, and bloody conflicts of modern times. The
Russian has certainly that peculiar quality of race, "which is
superior to the common fighting courage possessed indiscriminately by
all classes--the passive concentrated firmness which can take every
advantage so long as a chance is left, and die without a word at last,
when hope gives place to the sullen resignation of despair."
Descriptions of battles bear a strong family likeness, and the history
of one can only be written, even by a participant, long after it is
all over, and after notes are compared on all sides; so to the
subaltern, or any one under the rank of a general, during its
progress, it is all vile hurly-burly and confusion worse confounded;
and never in the annals of war was this more the case than at
Inkermann. Though hidden by mist at the time, the scene of this
contest was both picturesque and beautiful. In the foreground, a
romantic old bridge spanned the sluggish Tchernaya, which winds from
the Baidar valley through the most luxurious verdure, and thence into
the harbour of Sebastopol between precipitous white cliffs, which are
literally honeycombed with chapels and cells: thus Inkermann is well
named the "City of the Caverns." These are supposed to have been
executed by Greek monks during the reigns of the emperors in the
middle ages, and when the Arians were persecuted in the Chersonesus,
many of them found shelter in these singular and all but inaccessible
dwellings. Sarcophagi of stone, generally empty, are found in many of
the cells, which are connected with each other by stairs cut in the
living rock, and of these stairs and holes the skirmishers were not
slow to avail themselves. Over all these caverns are the ivied ruins
of an ancient fort but whether it was the Ctenos of Chersonesus
Taurica, built by Diophantes to guard the Heruclean wall, or was the
Theodori of the Greeks, mattered little to us then, as we moved to get
under fire beneath its shadow; and now, as if to farther distract the
attention of the Allies from the real point of assault--which at first
seemed to indicate a movement towards Balaclava--all the batteries of
the city opened a fearful cannonade, which tore to shreds the tents in
the camp, and did terrible execution on every hand. Louder and louder,
deeper and hoarser grew the sounds of strife; yet nothing was seen by
us save the red flashes of the musketry, owing to the density of the
fog, and the tall brushwood through which we had to move being in some
places quite breast-high; and so we struggled forward in line, till
suddenly we found the foe within pistol-shot of us, and our men
falling fast on every side. Till now, to many in our ranks, who saw
these long gray-coated and flat-capped or spike-helmeted masses, the
enemy had been a species of myth, read of chiefly in the newspapers;
_now_ they were palpable and real, and war, having ceased to be a
dream, had become a terrible fact. Vague expectancy had given place to
the actual excitement of the hour of battle, the hour when a man would
reflect soberly if he could; but when every moment may be his last,
little time or chance is given for reflection.
In this quarter were but twelve thousand British, to oppose the mighty
force of Osten-Sacken. Upon his advancing masses the brave fellows of
the 55th or Westmoreland Foot had kept up a brisk fire from the rude
embrasures of the small redoubt, till they were almost surrounded by a
force outnumbering them by forty to one, and compelled to fall back,
while the batteries on the hills swept their ranks with an iron
shower. But now the 41st Welsh, and 49th or Hertfordshire, came into
action, with their white-and-green colours waving, and storming up the
hill bore back the Russian hordes, hundreds of whom--as they were
massed in oblong columns--fell beneath the fatal fire of our Minie
rifles, and the desperate fury of the steady shoulder-to-shoulder
bayonet charge which followed it.
On these two regiments the batteries from the distant slope dealt
death and destruction; again the Russians rallied at its foot, and
advanced up the corpse-strewn ground to renew an attack before which
the two now decimated regiments were compelled to retire. Their number
and force were as overwhelming as their courage, inflamed by raki and
intense religious fervour, was undeniable; for deep in all their
hearts had sunk the closing words of the bishop's prayer: "Bless and
strengthen them, O Lord, and give them a manly heart against their
enemies. Send them an angel of light, and to their enemies an angel of
darkness and horror to scatter them, and place a stumbling-block
before them to weaken their hearts, and turn their courage into
flight." And for a time the Russians seemed to have it all their own
way, and deemed their bishop a prophet. Our whole army was now under
arms, but upon our right fell the brunt of the attack, and old Lord
Raglan was soon among us, managing his field-glass and charger with
one hand and a half-empty sleeve. Under Brigadier-general Strangeways,
who was soon after mortally wounded, our artillery, when the mist
lifted a little, opened on the Russian batteries, and soon silenced
their fire; but the 20th and 47th Lancashire, after making a gallant
attempt to recapture the petty redoubt, were repulsed; but not until
they had been in possession of it for a few dearly-bought minutes,
during which, all wedged together in wild _mêlée_, the most hideous
slaughter took place, with the bayonet and clubbed musket; and the
moment they gave way, the inhuman Russians murdered all our wounded
men, many of whom were found afterwards cold and stiff, with hands
uplifted and horror in their faces, as if they had died in the act of
supplication.
Driven from that fatal redoubt at last by the Guards under the Duke of
Cambridge, it was held by a few hundred Coldstreamers against at least
_six thousand_ of the enemy. Thrice, with wild yells the gray-coated
masses, with all their bayonets glittering, swept madly and bravely
uphill, and thrice they were hurled back with defeat and slaughter.
Fresh troops were now pouring from Sebastopol, flushed with fury by
the scene, and in all the confidence that Russia and their cause were
alike holy, that defeat was impossible, and the redoubt was
surrounded.
Then back to back, pale with fury, their eyes flashing, their teeth
set, fearless and resolute, their feet encumbered with the dying and
the dead, fought the Coldstream Guardsmen, struggling for very life;
the ground a slippery puddle with blood and brains, and again and
again the clash of the bayonets was heard as the musket barrels were
crossed. Their ammunition was soon expended; but clubbing their
weapons they dashed at the enemy with the butt-ends; and hurling even
stones at their heads, broke through the dense masses, and leaving at
least one thousand Muscovites dead behind them, rejoined their
comrades, whom Sir George Cathcart was leading to the advance, when a
ball whistled through his heart, and he fell to rise no more.
The combat was quite unequal; our troops began slowly to retire
towards their own lines, but fighting every inch of the way and
pressed hard by the Russians, who bayonetted or brained by the
butt-end every wounded man they found; and by eleven o'clock they were
close to the tents of the Second Division.
The rain of bullets sowed thickly all the turf like a leaden shower,
and shred away clouds of leaves and twigs from the gorse and other
bushes; but long ere the foe had come thus far, we had our share and
more in the terrible game. Exchanging fire with them at twenty yards'
distance, the roar of the musketry, the shouts and cheers, the yells
of defiance or agony, the explosion of shells overhead, the hoarse
sound of the round shot, as they tore up the earth in deeper furrows
than ever ploughshare formed, made a very hell of Inkermann, that
valley of blood and suffering, of death and cruelty; but dense clouds
of smoke, replacing the mist, enveloped it for a time, and veiled many
of its horrors from the eye.
Bathurst and Sayer, Vane and Millet of ours were all down by this
time; many of our men had also fallen; and from the death-clutch or
the relaxed fingers of more than one poor ensign had the tattered
colour which bore the Red Dragon been taken, by those who were fated
to fall under it in turn. I could see nothing of Caradoc; but I heard
that three balls had struck the revolver in his belt. Poor Hugh Price
fell near me, shot through the chest, and was afterwards found, like
many others, with his brains dashed out. In the third repulse of the
Russians, as we rushed headlong after them with levelled bayonets, I
found myself suddenly opposed by an officer of rank mounted on a gray
horse, the flanks and trappings of which were splashed by blood,
whether its own or that of the rider, I knew not. Furiously, by every
energy, with his voice, which was loud and authoritative, and by
brandishing his sword, he was endeavouring to rally his men, a mingled
mass of the Vladimir Battalion and the flat-capped Kazan Light
Infantry.
"Pot that fellow; down with him!" cried several voices; "maybe he's
old Osten-Sacken himself."
Many shots missed him, as the men fired with fixed bayonets, when
suddenly he turned his vengeance on me, and checking his horse for a
second, cut at my head with his sword. Stooping, I avoided his attack,
but shot his horse in the head. Heavily the animal tumbled forward,
with its nose between its knees; and as the rider fell from the saddle
and his cap flew off, I recognised Volhonski. A dozen of Fusileers had
their bayonets at his throat, when I struck them up with my sword, and
interceding, took him prisoner.
"Allow me, if taken, to preserve my sword," said he, in somewhat
broken English.
"No, no; by ----, no! disarm him, Captain Hardinge," cried several of
our men, who had already shot more than one Russian officer when in
the act of killing the wounded.
He smiled with proud disdain, and snapping the blade across his knee,
threw the fragments from him.
"Though it is a disgrace alike for Russian to retreat or yield, I
yield myself to you, Captain Hardinge," said he in French, and
presenting his hand; but ere I could take it, I felt a shot strike me
on the back part of the head. Luckily it was a partially spent one,
though I knew it not then.
A sickness, a faintness, came over me, and I had a wild and clamorous
fear that all was up with me then; but I strove to ignore the emotion,
to brandish my sword, to shout to my company, "Come on, men, come on!"
to carry my head erect, soldierlike and proudly. Alas for human nerves
and poor human nature! My voice failed me; I reeled. "Spare me,
blessed God!" I prayed, then fell forward on my face, and felt the
rush of our own men, as they swept forward in the charge to the front;
and then darkness seemed to steal over my sight, and unconsciousness
over every other sense, and I remembered no more.
So while I lay senseless there, the tide of battle turned in the
valley, and re-turned again. But not till General Canrobert, with
three regiments of fiery little Zouaves, five of other infantry, and a
strong force of artillery, made a furious attack on the Russian flank,
with all his drums beating the _pas de charge_. The issue of the
battle was then no longer doubtful.
The Russians wavered and broke, and with a strange wail of despair,
such as that they gave at Alma, when they feared that the angel of
light had left them, they fled towards Sebastopol, trodden down like
sheep by the French and British soldiers, all mingled pell-mell, in
fierce and vengeful pursuit. By three in the afternoon all was over,
and we had won another victory.
But our losses were terrible. Seven of our generals were killed or
wounded; we had two thousand five hundred and nine officers and men
killed, wounded, or missing; but more than fourteen thousand Russians
lay on the ground which had been by both armies so nobly contested,
and of these five thousand were killed.