All along the coast, the Russian population fled in panic, followed by the Greeks. The roads were clogged with refugees, the carts and livestock heading north, against the flow of Russian soldiers moving south from Perekop. Simferopol was swamped by refugees from the coastal areas who brought fantastic stories about the size of the Western fleets. ‘Many residents lost their heads and did not know what to do,’ recalled Nikolai Mikhno, who lived in Simferopol, the administrative capital of the peninsula. ‘Others began to pack their things as fast as they could and to leave the Crimea … They began to talk in frightening terms about how the allies would continue their invasion by marching straight on Simferopol, which could not protect itself.’5
It was this feeling of defencelessness that fuelled the panic flight. Menshikov, the commander of the Russian forces in the Crimea, had been taken by surprise. He had not thought the allies would attack so close to the onset of winter, and had failed to mobilize sufficient forces to defend the Crimea. There were 38,000 soldiers and 18,000 sailors along the south-western coast, and 12,000 troops around Kerch and Theodosia – far less than the numbers of attackers imagined by the frightened population of the Crimea. Simferopol had only one battalion. 6
On 14 September, the same date as the French had entered Moscow in 1812, the allied fleets dropped anchor in Kalamita Bay, south of Evpatoria. From the Alma Heights, further to the south, where Menshikov had positioned his main forces to defend the road to Sevastopol, Robert Chodasiewicz, the captain of a Cossack regiment, described the impressive sight:
On reaching our position on the heights, one of the most beautiful sights it was ever my lot to behold lay before us. The whole of the allied fleet was lying off the salt lakes to the south of Evpatoria, and at night their forest of masts was illuminated with various-coloured lanterns. Both men and officers were lost in amazement at the sight of such a large number of ships together, especially as many of them had hardly ever seen the sea before. The soldiers said, ‘Behold, the infidel has built another holy Moscow on the waves!’, comparing the masts of the ships to the church spires of that city.7
The French were the first to disembark, their advance parties scrambling ashore and erecting coloured tents at measured distances along the beach to designate the separate landing points for the infantry divisions of Canrobert, General Pierre Bosquet and Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin. By nightfall they had all been disembarked with their artillery. The men put up the French flag and went off to hunt for firewood and food, some of them returning with ducks and chickens, their water cans refilled with wine they had discovered in the nearby farms. Paul de Molènes and his Spahi cavalry had neither meat nor bread for their first meal on Russian soil, ‘but we had some biscuit and a bottle of champagne which we had set aside to celebrate our victory’.8
The British landing was a shambles compared to the French – a contrast that would become all too familiar during the Crimean War. No plans had been made for a peaceful landing unopposed (it was assumed that they would have to fight their way onto the beach), so the infantry was landed first, when the sea was calm; by the time the British tried to get their cavalry ashore, the wind was up, and the horses struggled in the heavy surf. Saint-Arnaud, set up comfortably in a chair with his newspaper on the beach, watched the scene with mounting frustration, as his plans for a surprise attack on Sevastopol were undermined by the delay. ‘The English have the unpleasant habit of always being late,’ he wrote to the Emperor.9
It took five days for the British troops and cavalry to disembark. Many of the men were sick with cholera and had to be carried off the boats. There were no facilities for moving baggage and equipment overland, so parties had to be sent out to collect carts and wagons from the local Tatar farms. There was no food or water for the men, except the three days’ rations they had been given at Varna, and no tents or kitbags were offloaded from the ships, so the soldiers spent their first nights without shelter, unprotected from the heavy rain or the blistering heat of the next days. ‘We brought nothing on shore with us excepting our blankets and great coats,’ George Lawson, an army surgeon, wrote home to his family. ‘We suffer dreadfully from want of water. The first day was very hot; we had nothing to drink but water drained out of puddles from the previous night’s rain; and even now the water is so thick that, if put into a glass, you cannot see the bottom of it at all.’10
At last, on 19 September, the British were prepared and, at day-break, the advance on Sevastopol began. The French marched on the right, nearest the sea, their blue uniforms contrasting with the scarlet tunics of the British, while the fleet moved south alongside them as they advanced. Six and a half kilometres wide and just under 5 kilometres long, the advancing column was ‘all bustle and activity’, wrote Frederick Oliver, bandmaster of the 20th Regiment, in his diary. Apart from the compact lines of soldiers, there was an enormous train of ‘cavalry, guns, ammunition, horses, bullocks, pack-horses, mules, herds of dromedaries, a drove of oxen, and a tremendous drove of sheep, goats and bullocks, all of which had been taken from the surrounding countryside by the foraging parties’. By midday, with the sun beating down, the column began to break up, as thirsty soldiers fell behind or left to search for water in the nearby Tatar settlements. When they reached the River Bulganak, 12 kilometres from Kalamita Bay, in the middle of the afternoon, discipline broke down altogether, as the British soldiers threw themselves into the ‘muddy stream’.11
Ahead of them, on the slopes rising south from the river, the British got their first sight of the Russians – 2,000 Cossack cavalry who opened fire on a scouting party from the 13th Light Dragoons. The rest of the Light Brigade, the pride of the British cavalry, prepared to charge the Cossacks, who outnumbered them by two to one, but Raglan saw that behind the Russian horsemen there was a sizeable infantry force that could not be seen by his cavalry commanders, Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, who were further down the hill. Raglan ordered a retreat, and the Light Brigade withdrew, while the Cossacks jeered and shot at them, wounding several cavalrymen,x before themselves retreating to the River Alma, further south, where the Russians had prepared their positions on the heights. The incident was a humiliation for the Light Brigade, which had been forced to back down from a fight with the ragged-looking Cossacks in full view of the British infantry, men from poor and labouring families, who took malicious pleasure from the embarrassment of the elegantly tailored and comfortably mounted cavalry. ‘Serve them bloody right, silly peacock bastards,’ wrote one private in a letter home.12
The British bivouacked on the southern slopes of the Bulganak, from which they could make out the Russian troops amassed on the Alma Heights, 5 kilometres away. The next morning they would march down the valley and engage the Russians, whose defences were on the other side of the Alma.
Menshikov had decided to commit the majority of his land forces to the defence of the Alma Heights, the last natural barrier on the enemy’s approach to Sevastopol, which his troops had occupied since 15 September, but his fears of a second allied landing at Kerch or Theodosia (fears which the Tsar shared) led him to keep back a large reserve. Thus there were 35,000 Russian soldiers on the Alma Heights – less than the 60,000 Western troops but with the crucial advantage of the hills – and more than 100 guns. The heaviest guns were deployed on a series of redoubts above the road to Sevastopol that crossed the river 4 kilometres inland, but there were none on the cliffs facing the sea, which Menshikov assumed were too steep for the enemy to climb. The Russians had made themselves at home, pillaging the nearby village of Burliuk after forcing the Tatars out, and carrying off bedding, doors, planks of wood and tree branches up onto the heights, where they constructed makeshift cabins for themselves and gorged on grapes from the abandoned farms. They stuffed the village houses with hay and straw in preparation for burning them when the enemy advanced. The Russian commanders were confident of holding their positions for at least a week – Menshikov had written to the Tsar promising that he could hold the heights for six times as long – winning precious time for the defences of Sevastopol to be strengthened and shifting the campaign on towards winter, the Russians’ greatest weapon against the invading army. Many officers were sure of victory. They joked about the British being only good for fighting ‘savages’ in their colonies, drank toasts to the memory of 1812 and talked of driving the French back into the sea. Menshikov was so confident that he invited parties of Sevastopol ladies to watch the battle with him from the Alma Heights.13