The Charge of the Heavy Brigade

Scarlett's 300 in the Crimea

M J Trow

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781399093019
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

‘Glory to each and to all, and the charge that they made!Glory to all three hundred, and all the Brigade!’ Everyone has heard of the charge of the Light Brigade, a suicidal cavalry attack caused by confused orders which somehow sums up the Crimean War (1854-6). Far less well known is what happened an hour earlier, when General Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade charged a Russian army at least three times its size. That ‘fight of heroes’, to use the phrase of William Russell, the world’s first war correspondent, was a brilliant success, whereas the Light Brigade’s action resulted in huge casualties and achieved nothing. This is the first book by a military historian to study the men of the Heavy Brigade, from James Scarlett, who led it, to the enlisted men who had joined for the ‘queen’s shilling’ and a new life away from the hard grind of Victorian poverty. It charts the perils of travelling by sea, in cramped conditions with horses panicking in rough seas. It tells the story, through the men who were there, of the charge itself, where it was every man for himself and survival was down to the random luck of shot and shell. It looks, too, at the women of the Crimea, the wives who accompanied their menfolk. Best known were Florence Nightingale, the ‘lady with the lamp’ and Mary Seacole, the Creole woman who was ‘doctress and mother’ to the men. But there were others, like Fanny Duberly who wrote a graphic journal and Mrs Rogers, who dutifully cooked and cleaned for the men of her husband’s regiment, the 4th Dragoon Guards.

Chapter 1

The War That Would Not Boil

On the roof of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem stands a little wooden ladder. It was put there over 150 years ago and cannot be moved for the same reason that the great powers went to war in the Crimea. The Holy Sepulchre, actually the Church of the Resurrection, was built by the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, on what was believed to be the site of the original tomb of Christ on the slopes of the hill at Calvary. The circular building called the Anastasia was destroyed by the Seljuk Turks in 1009 and was rebuilt by Christian crusaders from the west – in a sense the spiritual forebears of the Cavalry Division sent to the ‘seat of war’ in 1854. The current restored version is shared by the Coptic church, the Armenians and the Syrians, as well as the Catholic Church based in Rome. All of them today claim either the notorious ladder or the ledge on which it stands, meaning that no one can move it.

‘Protection of the holy places’ was the official cause of the Crimean War. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Christ had been hijacked and thoroughly westernised by Europeans. The disciple James had, according to legend, centuries before, morphed into Santiago, who had sailed to Spain in a stone boat. The Virgin Mary had been sighted at various shrines throughout France. Joseph of Arimathea was Christ’s uncle and had brought his nephew with him to England, where he had planted a thorn bush at Glastonbury. Umpteen Victorian paintings of the New Testament portray Jesus as a blue-eyed, auburn-haired Englishman; he was probably the product of a minor public school!

Despite this centuries-old willingness to claim Christianity as a local, European idea, there were other, more practical considerations involved. The powers that be in the 1850s could claim a spiritual cause célèbre, the tired old chestnut of the just war, but everyone knew that the real reason for the Crimean War was naked politics.

From 1793, the armies of Revolutionary France, and all they stood for, had torn Europe apart. The French did their best to annihilate the ancien régime which had stood for a thousand years. The French monarchy was overthrown. The Catholic calendar, with its saints’ days, its Christmas and its Easter, was torn up and replaced with a Republican version based largely on the weather, so that August, the hottest month, became Thermidor. The aristocracy fled in the face of quasi-legal tribunals and the threat of the guillotine, taking to any country that would have them, tales of terror. The most terrifying aspect of the post-Revolutionary period was the astonishing success of the reformed French army; when that army came to be led by arguably the finest general of his – and several other – generations, the ancien régime looked doomed.

Fast forward to 1815. After umpteen coalitions and a great deal of blood and expense, Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna was set up to restore some kind of ancien régime sanity to a shell-shocked Europe. Perhaps inevitably, the pendulum of realpolitik swung too far back. The winners at Vienna – Britain, Austro-Hungary, Prussia and Russia – imposed a rigidity on politics to ensure that another Napoleon could never rise. They also, because that is the nature of war-winners, grabbed as much territory as they could.

The problem was that the French Revolution had unleashed ideologies that did not fit into the outdated eighteenth-century concepts of imperial government. Liberalism and nationalism were uneasy bedfellows, but they found common ground in opposing the old tyrants of the ancien régime who were, miraculously after 1815, still there. The tsar still lorded it over ‘all the Russias’ in a despotic, semi-Medieval state where serfdom and abject poverty were the norms. The emperor of Austria-Hungary still attempted to hold together a leaking ship that extended from Vienna to the wild, lawless states of the Balkans. The Sultan, in his legendary city of the Golden Horn, Constantinople, still ruled a vast empire that straddled Europe and Asia with a government so incompetent that Turkey was known as ‘the sick man of Europe’.

In these domains, democracy was a joke. The people were yoked to centuries of tradition, yet, surely and steadily, they were demanding change. Having upset the whole apple cart in 1789, the French found that they had a taste for revolution, taking to the streets again in 1830 and yet again in 1848. In Russia, a cohort of young Guardsmen in the tsar’s own entourage, became the Decembrists in 1825, demanding an upper- and middle-class government to replace the tsar’s autocracy. The Year of Revolutions, 1848, saw armed riots occurring everywhere, from Paris, through Vienna, to Berlin and St Petersburg.

Britain, of course, was different! Here, the ‘revolution’ of 1848 focused on the Chartists, working men who wanted a six-point charter granting, in effect, power to the people. But the supposed 5 million-signature petition demanding change that was given to parliament in that year, contained fewer than 2 million names; and among these were ‘Victoria Rex’, ‘Pugnose’, ‘Big Ears’ and no less than four versions of the signature of that arch anti-reformer, the Duke of Wellington. When a mass demonstration drew up on Kennington Common in South London, the police outnumbered the protesters.

This was because Britain’s path towards imperialism was taking an altogether different direction. By the mid-century, Britain already had the largest empire in the world and that was to grow still further fifty years later. But that empire was entirely overseas. Having lost the American colonies in the War of Independence, Britain concentrated on Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, above all, India, which became, in the cliché of the time, the jewel in the imperial crown. The ‘scramble for Africa’ would come later. Today, among the chattering classes, British imperialism is a dirty word, ignoring the civilising effect of British control on societies that routinely advocated slavery, female genital mutilation and widow-burning. At the same time, Britain advocated liberty and democracy, being alone among the great powers (other than France) with a truly democratic parliamentary system, albeit a limited one before 1928, when women, as well as men, were given the vote.

Given that the British empire was so far-flung and did not involve the Middle East at that time, squabbles over who controlled the holy places were seen as largely irrelevant. What did concern Britain – and this turned into a phobia by 1854 – was the threat of the Russian bear.

By western European standards, Russia was hopelessly backward. The tiny Medieval kingdom of Muscovy had grown vast by the nineteenth century, largely as the result of the westernisation programme of Tsar Peter the Great and the menacing expansionism of his successors. The growth of industrialisation, world trade, shipping, the railways and advances in medicine and public health, had largely passed Russia by. It would not abolish the Medieval concept of serfdom until after the Crimean War, in 1861, and even then the condition of the peasantry remained economically appalling. Even as late as 1900, the death rate in Russia from disease and starvation was terrifying. Eighty-three per cent of the adult British population was literate, as compared with 28 per cent in Russia. The tsar’s empire was the only one in Europe not to have a constitution or a truly national parliament.

What Russia could do – and did with vehemence under Nicholas I – was to act as the policeman of Europe and punish would-be offenders. He sent in the army to crush a Polish rebellion in 1830; another in Romania in 1848; a third in Hungary a year later. Basing its power on its rigid autocracy and the rather dubious claim that it had defeated Napoleon in 1812–13, Nicholas’s Russia threw its weight around and threatened expansion to the south, which brought it into a headlong clash with the Ottoman empire of the Turks. There was nothing new in this. Catherine the Great had annexed the Crimea in 1783. Alexander I had taken Bessarabia in 1812 and Nicholas himself the Danube delta in 1829. One man who watched his army do it because he commanded a cavalry squadron there, was George Bingham, an officer in the 17th Lancers, who, by the time of the Crimea, was Lord Lucan, commanding the Cavalry Division.

The problem, clear to everybody in the corridors of power, was the ‘sick man of Europe’. The ‘sublime porte’, as the Sultan’s government was called, was anything but. The greatest military power on earth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was now a pale imitation of its former self. The porte was trying to hold together a vast territory of Muslims and Christians, ethnic groups from Magyars to Anatolians – and it was not doing very well.

The Congress of Vienna had made much of the balance of power, a political concept of which the rather smug British approved. No one country must be allowed to dominate another, but in the case of Russia and Turkey, this is exactly what was happening. Most British people had no knowledge of Russia at all – it might just as well have been on the far side of the moon. There was, as yet, no link between British and Russian royal families and even though the two countries had been allies against Napoleon, there had never been an occasion for their armies to appear on the same battlefield. Among senior politicians and cabinet ministers at Whitehall, virtually the only one who spoke Russian was the ‘terrible Milord’, Palmerston; and that skill was considered bizarre.

The prime minister who so badly handled the beginning of the Crimean War was George Hamilton Gordon, the 4th Earl of Aberdeen. Educated, as most politicians were, at a public school (Harrow) and Cambridge University, he had danced gavottes and slogged through mountains of paperwork at the Congress of Vienna as British ambassador to Austria. He sat in the arch-reactionary Tory government of the Duke of Wellington at the end of the 1820s and became Foreign Secretary, a post he took up again under Robert Peel in 1841. A skilled diplomat, Aberdeen did a great deal to establish a working relationship with the old enemy, France, and handled the Oregon Treaty of 1846 which established the 49th Parallel as the frontier between the United States and British Canada. With Peel’s fall, effectively over the contentious Corn Laws in that year, Aberdeen became the recognised leader of the party. A free trader and highly experienced, he became prime minister in December 1852.

Whether Aberdeen was actually a pacifist is debatable, but his natural diplomatic tendencies led him to see the Turko-Russian stand-off in the light of arbitration. As happened so often in the nineteenth century, ‘our man’ on the spot had different ideas. Stratford Canning, 1st Viscount de Redcliffe, had a diplomatic ‘history’ with Russia. In 1833, when he was given the post of ambassador to St Petersburg, Nicholas refused to meet him. Canning’s attitude was decidedly anti-Russia by 1842 when he got the Constantinople post and the ‘great Elchi’ as the Turks called him, resisted Nicholas’s offer to protect Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire.

The Turkish government officially turned down the tsar’s offer of involvement, which was seen for what it was, a naked act of aggrandisement, in May 1853 and in reprisal, Nicholas ordered his troops into Moldavia and Wallachia – Turkish vassal states – two months later. The porte, unwisely, declared war and the Turkish fleet was seriously battered by the new Russian ironclads at Sinope in November.

A furious round of diplomacy now ensued, de Redcliffe keen to bolster the Turks’ position, Aberdeen looking for a compromise. In the meantime, the issue of the protection of the holy places took centre stage, France championing the Catholic Church’s claims and Russia that of the Orthodox Church.

Endlessly poring over the maps in Whitehall, the mandarins there, including the Horse Guards (War Office) and the Admiralty, could see at a glance what the problem was. If the Russian bear knocked out ‘poor little Turkey’, the way was open to the eastern Mediterranean and the British overland route to India. The Russians already had a sizeable naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea. All they had to do was to cross the Black Sea, seen as a glorified Russian lake, sail through the straits of the Dardanelles and they would be in the Aegean. From there, it was only a few days’ voyage to Egypt and the desert crossing to the Red Sea, which led, in turn, to the Indian Ocean. At all costs, this Russian expansion to the south-west must not be allowed to happen. Accordingly, Britain and France both declared war on Russia on 27 March 1854, making them allies for the first time in nearly a thousand years; that, in itself, was going to cause potential problems in the future.

The satirical magazine Punch or the London Charivari made much of this new alliance. ‘Our volume,’ the editor wrote, ‘Mr Punch’s Twenty-Seventh … shall be sent, an alliance-offering, to the people of France.’ As always, Punch was marvellously tongue-in-cheek – ‘And thus was England and France bound together, with nothing but good fellowship and give and take jest and good humour … And as it is in 1854, so may it ever be!’ Throughout the year, the magazine featured accounts ‘from the seat of war’, written by ‘our very own Bashi-Bozouk’, a reference to the roguish (and wholly unreliable) Turkish light cavalry. There was a whole plethora of weak jokes at the expense of ‘Old Nick’ (the tsar) and the vacillation of Aberdeen, whose heart seemed not to be in a war at all.

J.H. Stocqueler, writing a history of the British army in 1871, saw it, as most Englishmen did, in terms of black and white: ‘The Czar … addressed [his people] in the language most calculated to stimulate their zeal – “England and France have taken up the cause of Turkey; [they] have ranged themselves by the side of the enemies of Christianity” – thus turning the whole thing into an old-fashioned crusade.’

But the Turks checked the Russians at Silistria – ‘The Turkish soldiers were not deficient in a wild courage strengthened by religious fanaticism.’ And they were led by Omar Pasha, ‘a German’ Stocqueler calls him. In fact, he was a Croatian Moslem convert, whose real name was Mihajlo Latas. Every British soldier who saw or met him was impressed. Captain Nigel Kingscote, ADC (aide-de-camp) to the commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan, wrote, ‘He is a capital fellow. Quite different to the Turks in general, hates all display … He is a sporting looking fellow and sits well on his horse in a plain grey frock coat and long jack boots; he is very fond of horses’ – which, of course, endeared him to the whole officer class.

Stocqueler is more interested in the advance British contingent, 4,000 strong, which was sent out to stiffen the Turks. No one believed that the Turkish army could hold out by themselves, but gallant officers like Colonel Cannon of the Honourable East India Company and Captains Nasmyth and Butler, made all the difference. The writer had a rather rose-tinted view of the men about to be sent to the East:

Education and the Reform Bill had wrought an important metamorphosis in the character of the British soldier – he had become a thinking member of society and cared to know ‘the reason why’ when the Government deemed it necessary that he should take the field against a political enemy.

Apart from jumping the gun a little by referring to Tennyson’s ‘reason why’, the Reform Bill of 1832 had made no difference at all to the average ‘Ranker’. It had doubled the electorate, but the voting qualification still depended on the ownership of property and that excluded virtually all of them. Similarly, improvements to education were severely limited to the Sunday and Board schools. There was no Education Act until 1870 and no compulsory attendance until several years after that. According to Helen Rappaport, in No Place for Ladies: the Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War, a fifth of the army was illiterate and a higher percentage still could only write their name. For example, Private Joseph Tagg, who rode the charge of the Heavy Brigade with the 5th Dragoon Guards, had five good conduct medals, but he ‘signed’ his name with an ‘X’ on his discharge. Understanding complex politics was beyond men like him. And they knew virtually nothing of Russia; ironically, the Russian exhibit bound for the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park’s Crystal Palace in 1851, which some of them may have attended, never turned up!

Victoria’s government, as well as that of the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef; the king of Prussia, Wilhelm; the French emperor, Napoleon III had all urged the tsar to reconsider his action against the Turks, but he refused. Negotiations dragged on throughout the spring and summer and as Nicholas became ever more entrenched and stubborn, especially as the Turks were more than holding their own, a mood of Russophobia gripped Britain which Aberdeen and the queen could not contain. Because of her parentage and her marriage (her mother and husband were both German) Victoria had an unusually European outlook, which contrasted with that of the majority of her subjects.

By that time, the two armed camps were in place. Each of the five powers – Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Piedmont – had their own agendas and their own reasons for reining in Russian ambitions. Britain was concerned with the tsar’s southern expansion, especially now that British protectorates of Malta, Corfu and the Ionian islands gave her a real toe-hold in the Mediterranean. France had a commercial interest in the Levant and a long history of friendship with the Sultan; in addition, Napoleon III, anxious to emulate his formidable uncle, the first emperor, was looking for a successful war to wage. The little kingdom of Piedmont was in effect Sardinia and it had ambitions above its size by 1854 to spearhead a move towards Italian unification, which would not become a reality for seven years. Two Piedmontese officers were to ride behind Lord Cardigan in the charge of the Light Brigade. Prussia, in effect, took no part in the war. The move towards a united Germany was already underway but Otto von Bismarck was not yet its leading light. Consolidation and reform were the issues in Prussia, but it was still in her interests to curb any possible westward expansion by the tsar. The Austrian empire had been dominated until 1848 by the arch-reactionary cynic Count Metternich, but the ‘coachman of Europe’ had been overthrown in the Year of Revolutions and the Austrian empire was a hotbed of intrigue and dissent, especially among the Balkan states. The Austrians saw themselves, rather than the Prussians, as the natural leaders of ‘Germany’. They were also opposed to the Turks w...