Victory at Sebastopol Read online

  VICTORY AT SEBASTOPOL

  Historical Fiction by V. A. Stuart

  Published by McBooks Press

  THE ALEXANDER SHERIDAN ADVENTURES

  Victors and Lords

  The Sepoy Mutiny

  Massacre at Cawnpore

  The Cannons of Lucknow

  The Heroic Garrison

  THE PHILLIP HAZARD NOVELS

  The Valiant Sailors

  The Brave Captains

  Hazard’s Command

  Hazard of Huntress

  Hazard in Circassia

  Victory at Sebastopol

  For a complete list of nautical and military fiction published by McBooks Press, please see pages 217–221.

  THE PHILLIP HAZARD NOVELS, NO . 6

  VICTORY

  AT

  SEBASTOPOL

  by

  V. A. STUART

  MCBOOKS PRESS, INC.

  ITHACA, NEW YORK

  Published by McBooks Press 2004

  Copyright © 1973 by V. A. Stuart

  First published in the United Kingdom by

  Robert Hale and Co. Ltd., London

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc.,

  ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover: British Naval Boat Taking Soundings Under the Batteries of Cronstadt, from a drawing by J. W. Carmichael, engraved by E. Brandard. Courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stuart, V. A.

  Victory at Sebastopol / by V.A. Stuart.

  p. cm. — (The Phillip Hazard novels ; #6)

  ISBN 1-59013-061-8 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Hazard, Phillip Horatio (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History, Naval—19th century—Fiction. 3. Great Britain. Royal Navy—Officers—Fiction. 4. Crimean War, 1853-1856—Fiction. 5. British—Ukraine—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6063.A38V545 2004

  823’.92—dc22

  2004009176

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  Printed in the United States of America

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  The War In The Crimea

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  With the exception of the Officers and Seamen of HMS Huntress and of Colonel Gorak and his daughter, all the characters in this novel really existed and their actions are a matter of historical fact. Where they have been credited with remarks or conversations—as, for example, with the fictitious characters—which are not actually their own words, care has been taken to make sure that these are, as far as possible, in keeping with their known sentiments.

  Grateful thanks to Mr Ian Scott of Boston Spa, Yorkshire for technical advice on the Russian “infernal machine” and other explosives mentioned in the text.

  My main sources of reference were The Russian War, 1855, edited by Captain A.C. Dewar; History of the War Against Russia, E.H. Nolan, 1857; Illustrated London News, 1854–55; The Crimean War, Philip Warner, 1972; Surgeon in the Crimea, George Lawson, edited by Victor Bonham Carter, 1968.

  FOR MY DAUGHTER VALERIE STUART

  with much love

  THE WAR IN THE CRIMEA

  Notes on the main events from September, 1854–May, 1855. The siege of the Russian naval base of Sebastopol, on the Crimean Coast of the Black Sea, followed the landing, on 14th September, 1854, of the Allied Expeditionary Forces of Great Britain, France, and Turkey at the Old Fort, Kalamita Bay, some thirty miles to the north of their objective.

  Under the command of General Lord Raglan, a veteran of Waterloo, the British force consisted of 26,800 men. Together with sixty guns and about two thousand horses, they embarked at Varna, on the Bulgarian coast, and crossed to the Crimea in a fleet of fifty-five sailing transports towed by steamers, and escorted by ships of the Royal Navy, whose second-in-command, Rear-Admiral Sir Edmund Lyons, was responsible for the whole complex operation of transport and landing.

  The French, commanded by Marshal St Arnaud, landed twenty-eight thousand men and sixty-eight guns and the Turks, who were heavily engaged in fighting the common enemy on other European and Asian fronts, contributed a smaller force of seven thousand. Although badly affected by an outbreak of cholera, the Allied Armies defeated a strongly positioned Russian army, with one hundred twenty guns, on the Heights above the Alma River on 20th September, the British sustaining over two thousand casualties and the French nine hundred.

  With only a small garrison of seamen and the 50-gun Star Fort to offer resistance, Sebastopol lay open to a determined assault from the north—an assault which Lord Raglan was fully prepared to undertake. Instead of this, however, General Canrobert—who had succeeded to the French Supreme Command on 23rd September—expressed the conviction that the city was impregnable from the north and, on his insistence, the Allies struck inland and marched in a semicircle to the south-east, where bases were established at Balaclava (British) and Kamiesch and Kazatch Bays (French).

  The landing of the siege-trains, again at Canrobert’s obstinate insistence, gave the Russians the time they needed to put Sebastopol into a state of defence. Admiral Korniloff, acting on the orders of the Russian Commander-in-Chief in the Crimea, Prince Menschikoff, scuttled seven of his line-of-battle ships across the mouth of the harbour, between the stone-built forts of Constantine (97 guns, in casemates, thirty feet above sea level) Alexander (56 guns, similarly mounted) and the 50-gun Quarantine Battery, thus effectively barring both harbour and docks to the Allied naval squadrons. Behind this barrier, eight sail-of-the-line were moored from east to west inside the booms, three of these heeled over so as to give their guns sufficient elevation to sweep over the land to the northward. The rest of the Russian fleet lay at anchor at the head of the harbour, with their guns covering its entrance.

  The Russian Admiral—a courageous Officer, who was killed early in the siege—is said to have been heart-broken by the ignominious fate of the ships under his command. Yet there is little doubt that Sebastopol’s long resistance was, in no small measure, due to Prince Menschikoff’s farsighted decision to scuttle or immobilize his fleet within the confines of the harbour. Had he permitted Admiral Korniloff to sally forth, in time honoured fashion, to do battle with the Allied squadrons, Sebastopol would almost certainly have fallen to assault by sea and land within a few weeks—or even days—of the besieging armies’ flank march to the south-east. As it was, lack of troops prevented a complete investment of the city and, throughout the year-long siege, the post road from Simpheropol in the north remained open. Menschikoff established his headquarters there and was able to send reinforcements and supplies into the town, whilst maintaining a large and mobile army outside, in the Valley of the River Tchernaya, which offered a constant threat to the thinly held British perimeter and the port of Balaclava.

  It took the better part of three weeks, after the landing of the siege-trains at Balaclava and Kamiesch, for the Allies to haul their heavy guns into position on the Kheronese Upland overlooking Sebastopol and to establish the army camps an
d supply depots on the plateau. During these three unexpected weeks of grace, Colonel Franz Ivanovitch Todleben, a thirtyseven-year-old Prussian engineer, born in one of Russia’s Baltic provinces, set to work to render the city impregnable to the threatened attack. He was a military engineer of genius and, under his direction the inhabitants of Sebastopol—men, women and even children—toiled day and night to repair crumbling fortifications and to construct a four-mile-long system of connecting earthworks and batteries in which he sited his guns.

  To the north, the newly renovated Star Fort guarded the road from Simpheropol, along which Prince Menschikoff had, by 9th October, sent close on thirty thousand troops to reinforce the garrison. From east to west, in a semicircle, a series of heavily armed redoubts constituted the landward defences; the so-called Little Redan, with the Malakoff or White Tower, in front of which was a fortified hill known as the Mamelon. Further west, a huge bank of earthworks joined the formidable Redan to the Barrack Battery and, at the head of the Dockyard Creek, the Strand and Garden Batteries and the Flagstaff Bastion were connected to the Central Bastion and the semicircle was completed by more earthworks extending to Quarantine Bay and the battery sited there. In all, some 1,200 guns faced the Allied siege works on the Upland and the total of 126 guns which, in three weeks of herculean effort, had been dragged six to seven miles from Balaclava and Kamiesch to the top of the plateau.

  The Royal Navy, in addition to manhandling guns which weighed from 42 cwt (the thirty-two-pounders) to 95 cwt (the sixty-eight-pounder Lancasters) also landed a Naval Brigade of upwards of three thousand seamen and Marines to assist in the siege, and 29 of the 73 British siege-guns were manned by seamen. Of the heavy guns, 56 were taken from ships of the fleet.

  The first Allied bombardment, intended as a prelude to the long-awaited assault on Sebastopol by the land-based forces, opened at 6:30 a.m. on 17th October, and the combined fleets were ordered to attack the seaward defences in support. This they most gallantly did, pitting their wooden ships against the stone-walled forts at the mouth of the harbour, with little effect, in an engagement which lasted from noon until dusk. When they finally hauled off, with a great many ships damaged or on fire and over five hundred men killed or wounded, it was to learn that the land-based assault had not been launched, due to an eleventh-hour decision by General Canrobert not to commit his troops to the attack.

  Thereafter the role of the Allied Fleets in the prosecution of the siege became a secondary one. A blockade of the Russian Black Sea ports was established and ships-of-war—mainly the steam-frigates—kept the armies supplied with reinforcements and the materials of war. The port of Balaclava was small and quite inadequate as a base but it was the lifeline on which the British Army on the Upland depended and therefore, at all costs, it had to be held. The flower of the British cavalry—the famous Light Brigade—perished in a desperate battle to prevent a breakthrough by the Russians from the Tchernaya Valley, on 25th October, 1854. Out of a total of 675 men, 247 were killed or wounded and 475 horses were killed. On 5th November, the bloody battle on the Heights of Inkerman was fought and won in dense fog, a scant eight thousand British infantrymen—including the Brigade of Guards—having found themselves facing some sixty thousand of the enemy in a dawn attack. The battle was half over before French aid reached them, in the shape of General Bosquet’s division but, when the Russians were finally driven back, they left an estimated fifteen thousand casualties behind them.

  With the onset of the dread Crimean winter, the Allied Armies, in their exposed canvas tents, suffered appalling losses from disease—out of a total loss of 19,600 men, 15,700 British soldiers and sailors died from disease. The fleets also sustained heavy losses when a storm of hurricane force struck the Crimean coast on 14th November and, there being little or no shelter to which they could run, many ships foundered or were driven on shore and wrecked, the loss in transport and supply ships outside the congested port of Balaclava being particularly heavy. The steamship Prince, carrying protective winter clothing for the army on the Upland, went down with all hands and her entire cargo, and the French three-decker Henri Quatre, a steam-screw launched five years previously, was driven ashore at Eupatoria and smashed to pieces. It was decided to send the sailing ships-of-the-line back to England and to replace them, as far as possible, with steamers.

  Sebastopol continued to hold out, despite losses from the Allied bombardment averaging one hundred fifty a day. Reinforcements poured in along the road from Simpheropol which lay outside the range of the Allied guns and, with her vast reserves of manpower, Russia’s losses were more easily replaced than those of Britain and France, whose reinforcements could only come by sea. Supplies of grain and other essentials from depots on the eastern shores of the Sea of Azoff also reached the beleaguered city in substantial quantities, even in winter, via a second road which crossed the Putrid Sea by means of a bridge and linked up with the post road to the north.

  No troops could be spared from the siege to cut this supply route and, in winter, ice precluded naval operations in the area but, with the coming of spring, Rear-Admiral Lyons, who had succeeded Vice-Admiral Deans Dundas as British naval Commander-in-Chief, pressed for the adoption of a plan of action which both he and his predecessor had long advocated. Convinced that only by depriving the garrison of its supplies could Sebastopol be forced to surrender, the Admiral urged that a small flotilla of light draught steam-frigates and gun-vessels be sent into the Sea of Azoff for this purpose. In order to gain entry, the fortified towns of Kertch and Yenikale, whose batteries guarded the narrow Straits of Kertch, would have to be taken and occupied and the Admiral asked for a comparatively small detachment of troops to be made available for ten to fourteen days.

  Lord Raglan wholeheartedly supported the proposed expedition as a means of shortening the siege; so, too, did Lyons’ French colleague, Admiral Bruat. The British Army, however, which had been severely depleted during the winter and which had still to defend its long and vulnerable perimeter, could spare only twenty-five hundred men. As had so often been the case throughout the Crimean campaign, the final decision rested with the French Commander-in-Chief, whose army had recently been augmented by the arrival of twenty-five thousand fresh troops.

  Canrobert agreed, with reluctance, to supply seven thousand infantrymen but, as a result of telegraphic instructions from the Emperor, he ordered the recall of the French ships and troops within a few hours of their arrival off the Kertch Straits. The British, unable to proceed alone against an estimated ten thousand Russians, were compelled to abandon the initial attempt to capture Kertch and enter the Sea of Azoff, and they returned to Sebastopol on 6th May. Canrobert, aware that he had been placed in an intolerable position by having had, once again, to go back on his word, resigned the French Supreme Command, and, on 19th May, 1855, he was succeeded by General Pélissier. Within three days of Pélissier’s appointment, the second expedition to Kertch was under way, this time with the enthusiastic cooperation of the new French Commander.

  All the foregoing events have been covered by earlier

  novels in the Hazard series.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Phillip Horatio Hazard, commanding Her Majesty’s steam-screw sloop-of-war Huntress, of 14 guns, swung himself up into the mainmast shrouds and, twenty feet or so above the deck, put his glass to his eye, peering anxiously into the murk about him.

  He could see little or nothing of the land he knew to be within less than half a mile of his ship’s port quarter even from this vantage point, and the midshipman he had sent aloft to supplement the masthead look-out had not, as yet, reported sighting the White Cape, on the southern extremity of the Bay of Kertch or the formidable Pavlovskaia Fort by which it was guarded.

  Directly ahead, the entrance to the Yenikale Strait lay shrouded in a pall of low-lying fog, which the pale afternoon sunlight had seldom been able to penetrate … and visibility, he knew, would become worse when the sun sank. Nevertheless on this occasion, Phillip Hazard welco
med the fog, since it promised to make his present task—if not easier—at least not quite so fraught with peril as it might have been.

  He lowered his Dollond and glanced down at the lines of marker-buoys which, under the supervision of Mr Burnaby, the master, men of the duty watch were setting out in readiness on the after part of the upper deck, his dark brows meeting in a thoughtful frown as he counted them. The Russians, he was aware, had buoyed the deep water channel off the Cheska Bank to the east but they had also constructed extensive earthworks on the seven-mile-long spit of marshland, behind which they had set up batteries of 36-pounder guns to command the passage. These guns, crossing fire with the floating battery and the fort at Yenikale, barred the deep water channel to all but their own shipping. For this reason, he had been ordered to sound and buoy an alternative channel on the western side of the narrow strip of water, by means of which an Allied naval squadron might enter the Sea of Azoff during the next 48 hours.

  Captain Moore, of HMS Highflyer, his immediate superior, had made a preliminary survey some weeks ago in the small 6-gun Viper, and had warned him that, in places, the water shoaled to give a depth of less than three fathoms and that there were numerous silting sandbanks but … Phillip gave vent to an audible sigh as he descended to the deck. Moore had gone in for the purpose of reconnoitring the proposed landing beach at Kamiesch-Bourno, where the troops would be put ashore for the attack on Kertch. Using the return of a captured carriage—the property of the Russian Commander, Baron Wrangel—as an excuse, the Viper had made her approach in daylight, after signalling her intentions. His own orders, on the other hand, were to enter the Strait under cover of darkness and to get as close as he could to Yenikale without making his presence known to the enemy, if he could avoid it … which meant that he would be unable to use his engines.