The defeat on the Chernaia was a catastrophe for the Russians. It was now only a question of time before Sevastopol would fall to the allies. ‘I am sure that this is the second-to-last bloody act of our operations in the Crimea,’ wrote Herbé to his parents on 25 August, after being wounded on the Chernaia; ‘the last will be the capture of Sevastopol.’ According to Nikolai Miloshevich, one of the defenders of the naval base, after the defeat ‘the Russian troops lost all their trust in their officers and generals’. Another soldier wrote: ‘The morning of 16 August was our last hope. By the evening it had disappeared. We began to say farewell to Sevastopol.’22
Realizing that the situation was hopeless, the Russians now prepared to evacuate Sevastopol, as Gorchakov had warned they would have to do if they were defeated on the Chernaia in his letter to the Minister of War on the eve of the battle. The evacuation plan centred on the building of a floating bridge across the sea harbour to the North Side, where the Russians would have a commanding position against the allied forces if they occupied the town on the southern side. The idea of a bridge was first advanced by General Bukhmeier, a brilliant engineer, in the first week of July. It was rejected by scores of engineers on the grounds that it would be impossible to build, especially where Bukhmeier had suggested, between Fort Nicholas and the Mikhailov Battery, where the sea harbour was 960 metres wide (which would make it one of the longest pontoon bridges ever built) and strong winds often made the water very rough. But the urgency of the situation persuaded Gorchakov to give his backing to the dangerous plan, and with several hundred soldiers to cart the timbers from as far as Kherson, 300 kilometres away, and vast teams of sailors to link them to the pontoons, Bukhmeier organized the building of the bridge, which was finally completed on 27 August.23
Meanwhile the allies were preparing for another assault on the Malakhov and the Redan. By the end of August they had come to realize that the Russians could not hold out much longer. The flow of deserters from Sevastopol had become a flood after the defeat on the Chernaia – and they all told the same stories of the terrible conditions in the town. Once the allied commanders recognized that a new assault would probably succeed, they were all the more determined to launch it as soon as possible. September was approaching, the weather would soon turn, and there was nothing they feared more than a second winter in the Crimea.
Pélissier took the lead. His position had been greatly strengthened by the routing of the Russians on the Chernaia. Napoleon had had his doubts about Pélissier’s policy of persisting with the siege – he had been in favour of a field campaign – but with this new victory he set aside these reservations and gave his full support to his commander to push ahead for the victory he craved.
Where the French commander led, the British were obliged to follow: they lacked the troops or record of success to impose their military policies. After the catastrophe of 18 June, Panmure was determined to prevent a repeat of the unsuccessful British attack against the Redan, and for a while it seemed a new assault involving the British had been ruled out. But, with the victory at the Chernaia, things looked very different, and from the momentum of events a new logic developed that drew the British into a new assault.
By this time the French had sapped up to the abbatis of the Malakhov, only 20 metres from the fortress ditch, and were taking heavy casualties from the Russian guns. They had dug so close to the Malakhov that when they talked they could be clearly heard by the Russians. The British too had dug as far as they were able in the rocky ground towards the Redan – they were 200 metres from the fort – and were also losing many men. From the top of the naval library, the Russians could make out the facial features of the British soldiers in the exposed trenches. Their sharpshooters in the Redan could take them out without any difficulty as soon as they raised their heads. Every day, the allied armies were losing between 250 and 300 men. The situation was untenable. There was no point delaying an assault: if it could not succeed now, it would probably never do so, in which case the whole idea of continuing the siege should be abandoned before the onset of winter. That was the logic by which the British government now permitted Raglan’s replacement, General James Simpson, to join Pélissier in planning a last attempt to take Sevastopol by an infantry assault.24
The date for the operation was set for 8 September. This time, in contrast to the botched attempt of 18 June, the assault was preceded by a massive bombardment of the Russian defences, beginning on 5 September, though even before that, from the last days of August, the intensity of the allies’ artillery fire had been steadily growing. Firing 50,000 shells a day, and from a much closer range than ever before, the French and British guns caused immense damage. Hardly a building was left standing in the centre of the town, which looked as if it had been hit by an earthquake. The casualties were horrendous – something like a thousand Russians were killed or wounded every day from the last week of August and nearly 8,000 in the three days of the bombardment – but the last brave defenders of Sevastopol dared not think of abandoning the town. ‘On the contrary,’ recalled Ershov,
even though we were defending a half-destroyed Sevastopol, essentially a phantom of a town, without any more significance except for its name, we prepared ourselves to fight for it to the last man in the streets: we moved our stores to the North Side, put up barricades and got ready to transform every ruined building into an armed citadel.25
The Russians were expecting an assault – the bombardment left no room for doubt about the allies’ intentions – but they thought that it would come on 7 September, the anniversary of the battle of Borodino, their famous victory against the French in 1812 when one-third of Napoleon’s army had been destroyed. When the attack did not come, the Russian defenders let down their guard. They were even more confused on the morning of the 8th, when the bombardment started up again with a furious intensity at 5 a.m. – the French and British guns firing more than 400 shells a minute – until suddenly at ten o’clock it stopped. Again the assault did not come. The Russians had anticipated that the allies would attack either at dawn or at dusk, as they had always done before. So they interpreted this new bombardment as an indication of a possible assault that evening. That idea was reinforced at 11 a.m. when the Russian lookouts on the Inkerman Heights reported what they believed to be a preparatory build-up of allied ships. The lookouts were not mistaken: the allied plan had called for the navy to join the assault by attacking the coastal defences of the city, but that morning the fine hot weather broke and a strong north-west wind and a heavy sea forced this part of the operation to be cancelled at the last moment; so the ships that had gathered at the mouth of the sea harbour did not look as if they could be ready for an imminent attack. And yet that is precisely what the allies had in store. On Bosquet’s wise insistence, the assault had been set to start at noon – just when the Russians would be changing the guard and would expect it least.26