The Russian troops themselves were not so confident. Ferdinand Pflug, a German doctor in the tsarist army, thought that ‘each one seemed convinced that the next day’s battle would end in defeat’.14 Few if any of these men had ever engaged in a battle with the army of a major European power. The sight of the mighty allied fleet anchored just off shore and ready to support the enemy’s land forces with its heavy guns made it clear to them that they were going to fight an army stronger than their own. While most of their senior commanders could hark back to their memories of battle in the wars against Napoleon, the younger men, who would do the actual fighting, had no such experience on which to draw.
Like all soldiers on the eve of a big battle, they tried to hide their fear from their comrades. As the heat of the day gave way to a cold night, the men of both the armies prepared themselves for the next morning: for many of the men these would be their last hours. They lit fires, cooked their dinners and waited. Most of the soldiers ate little. Some went through the ritual of cleaning their muskets. Others wrote letters to their families. Many of them prayed. The next day was a religious holiday in the Orthodox calendar, the date on which the Russians marked the birth of the Blessed Virgin, and services were held to pray for her protection. Groups of soldiers sat around the fires, talking late into the night, the older ones recounting tales of past battles to the younger men. They drank and smoked, and told jokes, trying to seem calm. Now and then the sound of men singing would drift across the plain. From the Sevastopol Road, where Menshikov had set up his tent, the band and choir of the Tarutinsky Regiment could be heard – their deep bass voices rendering the lines of a song composed by General Gorchakov:
He alone is worthy of life
Who is always ready to die;
The Russian Orthodox warrior
Strikes his foes without thinking twice.
The French, the English – what of them?
So what about the stupid Turkish lines?
Come out, you infidels,
We challenge you to fight!
We challenge you to fight!
Gradually, as the dark sky filled with stars, the fires died down and the hum of talking became quieter. The men lay down and tried to sleep, though few did, and an eerie silence settled over the valley, broken only by the barking of hungry dogs roaming the deserted village.15
At three o’clock in the morning, Chodasiewicz could not sleep. It was still dark. In the Russian camp the soldiers ‘were collected around the huge fires they had kindled with the plunder of the village of Burliuk’.
After a short time I went up the hill (for our battalion was stationed in a ravine) to take a peep at the bivouac of the allied armies. Little, however, was to be seen but the fires, and now and then a dark shadow as someone moved past them. All was still and had little appearance of the coming strife. These were both armies lying, as it were, side by side. How many, or who, would be sent to their last account, it would be impossible to say. The question involuntarily thrust itself upon me, should I be one of that number?16
By four o’clock the French camp was stirring. The men prepared their coffee and joked about the beating they were going to give to the Russians, and then the order came for them to put on their kitbags and fall into line to listen to the orders of their officers. ‘By thunder!’ the captain of the 22nd Regiment addressed his men. ‘Are we Frenchmen or not? The 22nd will earn distinction for itself today, or you are all scoundrels. If any one of you lags behind today, I will run my sabre through his guts. Line up to the Right!’ In the Russian camp the men were also up with the first light and listening to speeches from their commanders: ‘Now, lads, the good time has come at last, though we have waited some time for it; we will not disgrace our Russian land; we will drive back the enemy, and please our good father, Batiushka the Tsar; then we can return to our homes with the laurels we have earned.’ At seven o’clock in the Russian camp prayers were said to the Mother of God calling on her aid against the enemy. Priests carried icons through the ranks as soldiers bowed down to the ground and crossed themselves in prayer.17
By mid-morning the allied armies were assembling on the plain, the British on the left of the Sevastopol Road, the French and Turks on the right, stretching out towards the coastal cliffs. It was a clear and sunny day, and the air was still. From Telegraph Hill, where Menshikov’s well-dressed spectators had arrived in carriages to watch the scene, the details of the French and British uniforms could be clearly seen; the sound of their drums, their bugles and bagpipes, even the clinking of metal and the neighing of the horses could be heard.18
The Russians opened fire when the allies came within 1,800 metres – a spot marked with poles to let their gunners know the advancing troops were within range – but the British and the French continued marching forward towards the river. According to the plan that the allies had agreed the day before, the two armies were to advance simultaneously on a broad front and try to turn the enemy’s flank on the left – the inland side. But at the final moment Raglan decided to delay the British advance until the French had broken through on the right; he made his troops lie on the ground, within range of the Russian guns, in a position from which they could scramble to the river when the time was right. There they lay for an hour and a half, from 1.15 to 2.45 p.m., losing men as the Russian gunners found their range. It was an astonishing example of Raglan’s indecisiveness.19
While the British were lying on the ground, Bosquet’s division arrived at the river near the sea, where the cliffs rose so steeply to the heights, almost 50 metres above the river, that Menshikov had thought it was unneccessary to defend the position with artillery. At the head of Bosquet’s division was a regiment of Zouaves, most of them North Africans, who had experience of mountain fighting in Algeria. Leaving their kitbags on the riverbank, they swam across the river and quickly climbed the cliffs under heavy cover of the trees. The Russians were amazed by the agility of the Zouaves, comparing them to monkeys in the way they used the trees to scale the cliffs. Once they had reached the plateau, the Zouaves hid behind rocks and bushes to pick off the defending forces of the Moscow Regiment one by one until reinforcements could arrive. ‘The Zouaves were so well hidden’, recalled Noir, who was among the first to reach the top, ‘that a well-trained officer arriving on the scene would hardly have been able to pick them out with his own eyes.’ Inspired by the Zouaves, more French soldiers climbed the cliffs. They hauled twelve guns up a ravine – the men hit their horses with their swords if they refused to climb the rocky path – arriving just in time to engage the extra soldiers and artillery that Menshikov had transferred from the centre in a desperate attempt to stop his left flank being turned.20