The plan was to overwhelm Sevastopol with ten days of continual bombardment, followed by an assault on the town. With five hundred French and British guns firing round the clock, almost twice as many as in the first bombardment of October, this now became not only the heaviest bombardment of the siege, but the heaviest in history until that time. Among the allied troops, desperate for an ending of the war, there were high expectations for the attack, making them impatient for it to begin. ‘The works are continuing, as always, and we are hardly advancing!’ Herbé wrote to his family on 6 April. ‘The impatience of the officers and soldiers has created a certain discontent, everybody blames each other for the mistakes of the past, and one senses that an energetic breakthrough is now needed to reimpose order … Things cannot go on like this much longer.’44
The Russians knew about the preparations for a bombardment. Deserters from the allied camp had warned them about it, and they could see with their own eyes the intense activity in the enemy’s redoubts, where new guns appeared every day.45 On the night of Easter Sunday, a few hours before the shelling was due to begin, prayers had been held in churches throughout the town. There were also prayers in all the bastions. Priests processed along the Russian defences with icons, including the holy icon of St Sergius which had been sent by the Troitsky Monastery in Sergiev Posad on the orders of the Tsar. It had accompanied the early Romanovs on their campaigns and had been with the Moscow militia in 1812. Everybody felt the immense significance of these holy rituals. There was a general sense that the city’s destiny was about to be decided by divine providence, a feeling reinforced by the fact that both sides were celebrating Easter, which that year fell on the same day in the Orthodox and Latin calendars. ‘We prayed with fervency,’ wrote a Russian nurse. ‘We prayed with all our might for the city and ourselves.’
At the midnight Mass at the main church, so brightly lit with candles that it could be seen from the enemy’s trenches, a vast crowd spilled onto the streets and stood in silent prayer. Every person held a candle, bowing periodically to cross themselves, many people kneeling on the ground, while priests processed with icons and the choir sang. In the middle of the night there was a violent storm and the rain came pouring down. But no one moved: they thought the storm was an act of God. The worshippers remained out in the rain until first light, when the bombardment started and they dispersed, still dressed in their finest Easter clothes, to help in the defence of the bastions.46
A storm picked up that morning, so intense that the booms of the first guns were ‘almost overpowered by the howling of the wind, and the dull monotonous plashing of the rain, which continued to descend with unabated violence’, according to Whitworth Porter, who watched the bombardment from the heights. Sevastopol was completely shrouded in black gunsmoke and the morning fog. Inside the town, people could not tell where the bombs and shells were coming from. ‘We knew that there was an enormous allied fleet at the harbour entrance just in front of us but we could not see it through the smoke and fog, the driving wind and pouring rain,’ recalled Ershov. Confused and frightened crowds of screaming people ran about the streets in search of cover, many of them heading towards Fort Nicholas, the one remaining place of relative safety, which now began to function like a sort of bustling ghetto within Sevastopol. In the centre of the town, there were bombed-out houses everywhere. The streets were filled with building debris, broken glass and cannonballs, which ‘rolled around like rubber balls’. Ershov noticed little human dramas everywhere:
A sick old man was being carried through the streets in the arms of his son and daughter while cannonballs and shells exploded around them – an old woman following behind … . Some young women, dressed up prettily, leaning up against railings of the gallery, exchanged looks with a group of hussars from the garrison. Beside them, three Russian merchants in conversation – crossing themselves every time a bomb exploded. ‘Lord! Lord! This is worse than Hell!’ I heard them say.
In the Assembly of Nobles, the main hospital, nurses struggled to cope with the wounded, who arrived by the thousand. In the operating room, Pirogov and his fellow-surgeons went on amputating limbs while a wall collapsed from a direct hit. There was no attempt by the allies to avoid the bombing of the city’s hospitals. Their firing was indiscriminate, and among the wounded there were many women and children.47
Inside the Fourth Bastion, the most dangerous place throughout the siege, the soldiers ‘hardly ever slept’, according to Captain Lipkin, one of the battery commanders in the bastion, who wrote to his brother on 21 April. ‘The most we could allow ourselves was a few minutes’ sleep dressed in our full uniforms and boots.’ The bombardment from the allied guns, only a couple of hundred metres away, was incessant and deafening. The bombs and shells came in so quickly that the defenders had no sense of their danger until they landed. One wrong move could get them killed. Living under constant fire bred a new mentality. Ershov, who visited the bastion during the bombardment, felt ‘like an inexperienced tourist entering a different world’, although he himself was a seasoned artilleryman. ‘Everybody rushed about, there seemed to be confusion everywhere; I could not understand or make out anything.’48
Tolstoy returned to Sevastopol in the middle of the bombardment. He had heard the bombs from the River Belbek, 12 kilometres away, where he had spent the winter in the Russian camp attached to the 11th Artillery Brigade. Having decided that he could best serve the army with his pen, and wanting time to write, he had applied to join the staff of General Gorchakov as an aide-de-camp. But instead, much to his annoyance, he had been transferred with his battery to the Fourth Bastion, right in the thick of the battle. ‘I’m irritated,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘especially now when I am ill [he had caught a cold], by the fact that it doesn’t occur to anybody that I’m good for anything except chair à canon [cannon fodder], and the most useless kind at that.’
In fact, once he had got over his cold, Tolstoy’s spirits rose, and he started to enjoy himself. He was on quartermaster duty at the bastion four days out of eight. Off duty, he stayed in Sevastopol in a modest but clean dwelling on the boulevard, where he could hear the military band playing. But when he was on duty he slept in the casemate in a small cell furnished with a campbed, a table littered with papers, the manuscript of his memoir Youth, a clock and an icon with its vigil light. A fir post held up the ceiling, from which was suspended a tarpaulin sheet to catch falling rubble. Throughout his stay in Sevastopol, Tolstoy was accompanied by a serf called Alexei, who had been with him since he had gone to university (he figures in more than one of Tolstoy’s works as ‘Alyosha’). When Tolstoy was on duty at the bastion, his rations from the city were carried out to him by Alexei, a duty involving considerable danger.49
The cannonade was incessant. Every day, 2,000 shells landed on the bastion. Tolstoy was afraid, but he quickly got the better of his fear, and discovered a new courage in himself. Two days after grumbling at being treated as cannon fodder, he confided to his diary: ‘The constant charm of danger and my observations of the soldiers I’m living with, the sailors and the very methods of war are so pleasant that I don’t want to leave here.’ He began to feel a close attachment to his fellow-soldiers in the bastion, one of whom would later remember him as a ‘fine comrade’ whose stories ‘had captured the spirit of us all in the heat of the battle’. As Tolstoy wrote to his brother, expressing an idea that would lie at the heart of War and Peace, he ‘liked the experience of living under fire’ with these ‘simple and kind men, whose goodness is apparent during a real war’.50