On 7 December, a trumpeter was sent up to the fortress with letters from Potemkin and Suvorov demanding that Ismail surrender to avoid what the Prince called shedding the 'harmless blood of women and children'.14 Suvorov was more direct: if Ismail resisted, 'nobody will be spared'.15 The Turks responded defiantly by parading round the ramparts, already decorated by many banners - presenting, thought Richelieu, 'a most picturesque vision of this multitude of magnificently dressed men'.16 When the Seraskier asked for a ten-day truce, Suvorov rejected this delaying tactic. Ribas planned the assault. After a war council on 9 December, Suvorov ordered the storming of Ismail from all sides - six columns on the land side and four across the Danube. 'Tomorrow,' Suvorov told the army, 'either the Turks or the Russians will be buried at Ismail.'17 The Seraskier, like a voice already beyond the grave, declared: 'The Danube will stop its course, the heavens will fall to earth before Ismail surrenders.'18
At з a.m. on 11 December, the heavens did fall to earth. A sustained artillery barrage pounded the fortress before a rocket zigzagged across the sky to give the order to advance. The Turkish artillery took a murderous toll on the attackers. Ismail was, recalled Langeron, a 'spectacle of horror and beauty' as the ramparts were crowned with flames.19 Damas, who commanded a column attacking across the Danube, was one of the first atop the walls: as Potemkin had seen, the river side was weakest. On the land side, the first two columns had broken into the town, but Kutuzov's spearhead was beaten back twice with terrible losses. Suvorov was supposed to have sent him a note congratulating him on taking Ismail and appointing him its governor. This encouraged him to throw himself at the walls a third and successful time. A priest brandishing a crucifix, with bullets ricocheting off it, brought up the reserve. By the time the sun rose, all the columns were on the ramparts, but several had not yet descended into the streets. Then the Russians poured into Ismail like a 'torrent that floods the countryside'. The hand-to-hand fighting between 60,000 armed soldiers now reached its bloodiest: even as late as midday, the battle was not decided.20
Ismail assumed the incarnadine horror of a Dantean hell. As the 'urso- maniacs' screamed 'Hurrah' and 'Catherine II', and the Turks fell back, they were overtaken again by the lust for havoc, a fever of blood madness to kill everything they could find. 'The most horrible carnage followed,' remembered Damas, 'the most unequalled butchery. It is no exaggeration to say that the gutters of the town were dyed with blood. Even women and children fell victims to the rage.' The screams of children did not stop the Russians. A Turk ran out of a building and pointed his gun at Damas, but it did not fire and the 'poor wretch' was killed instantly by his men.
Four thousand Tartar horses escaped from the underground stables to stampede over the dead and dying, their frantic hooves pulping the human flesh and shattering the skulls of the dying, until they themselves were butchered. The Seraskier and 4,000 men were still defending the bastion on which his green tent was pitched. When they were about to surrender, an English sailor in Russian service tried to capture the Turkish general and shot him down but was himself pierced with fifteen bayonets. At this the Russians sank into a grim orgy of death, methodically working their way through the entire 4,000 men, of whom not one survived.
The Turks awaited their death with a resignation that Richelieu had never seen. 'I won't try to paint the horror which froze all my senses.' But he managed to save the life of a ten-year-old girl whom he found soaked in blood and surrounded by four women with their throats cut. Two Cossacks were about to kill her when he took her hand and 'I had the pleasure to see that my little prisoner had no other harm than a light scratch on her face probably from the same sword that had killed her mother.' A Tartar prince, Kaplan Giray, and his five sons, proud descendants of Genghis Khan, made a last stand in the bastion: the father fell last surrounded by the wreath formed by the bodies of his brave sons.
The massacre resembled a macabre pantomime as the resistance ebbed. The blood-crazed Russians draped themselves in every piece of clothing they could find - masculine or feminine. They stripped their victims before killing them to preserve their clothes. They pillaged the Turkish shops, so the delicious smell of spices pervaded the air torn by the cries of the dying. Unrecognizable Cossacks, more terrifying than ever in wigs and dresses, marauded through the fragrant spicy streets, knee deep in a marsh of mud-congealed cadavers, reeking of blood, wielding dripping swords and pursing naked unfortunates as horses whinnied and galloped, dogs barked and children screamed.
The heat
Of carnage, like Nile's sun-sodden slime, Engendered monstrous shapes of every crime.
The bodies themselves were piled so high that Langeron found it impossible not to walk on them. Richelieu, still holding the hand of his child, met Damas, and the two had to clear bodies to let the little girl walk along. The massacre continued until four in the afternoon, when the Turks finally surrendered.
The glow
Of burning streets, like moonlight on the water, Was imaged back in blood, the sea of slaughter.
Ismail's surviving senior Pasha laid out some carpets on the ground in the middle of the ruined fortress, surrounded by the bodies of his massacred compatriots, and smoked a pipe as tranquilly as if he was still sitting in his seraglio. Thus was conquered 'one of the keys of the Ottoman Empire'.21 Almost 40,000 died22 in one of the greatest military massacres of the century.
On a scrap of paper, now yellowed and almost smelling of gunpowder, Suvorov told Potemkin: 'Nations and walls fell before the throne of Her Imperial Majesty. The assault was murderous and long. Ismail is taken on which I congratulate Your Highness.'23
The Prince was 'as happy, as affectionate as a Sultan'.24 He ordered the guns to be fired to celebrate and at once wrote to Catherine, sending the new favourite's brother, Valerian Zubov, whom he liked, with the news - which he recounted with all due credit to Suvorov. 'I congratulate you with my whole heart,'25 Catherine replied. The hostile Langeron claimed that the man who had not wanted to lose ten men a month earlier now boasted, 'What are 10,000-12,000 men to the cost of such a conquest?' Potemkin may have played the bloodthirsty conqueror, but it is more revealing that he never visited Ismail, despite planning to do so daily: he fell ill, as he often did after the suspense was over, but he also had no wish to parade through the 'hideous spectacle'.26 He finally sent Popov instead. He was certainly delighted with his victory, but he was also profoundly upset about Russian casualties - he lost his great-nephew Colonel Alexander Raevsky, one of two brothers who were 'dearest of all his nephews'.[101] His attitude was more likely to have been that it was a dirty job well done. He was relieved it had fallen because he and Catherine hoped this would jolt the Turks into a generous peace. Potemkin was also delighted to hear that, when the news reached Vienna, the Prince de Ligne had had to eat his weasel words about his generalship.27
It is said that, when Suvorov arrived in Jassy right after the battle, Potemkin ' received him splendidly and asked, 'How I can reward you for your services?' Suvorov snapped, 'No, Your Highness, I'm not a merchant ... No one can reward me but God and the Empress!' This is fiction that has become history.f The two originals did not meet until February, and their notes to each other were jubilant. When both arrived almost simultaneously in Petersburg, Potemkin continued to praise and promote his favourite commander.28 Serenissimus moved the army into winter quarters and travelled over to his