The Russian position was more or less hopeless. By the time their artillery arrived, the whole of Bosquet’s division and many of the Turks had reached the plateau. The Russians had more guns – 28 to the French 12 – but the French guns were of larger calibre and longer range, and Bosquet’s riflemen kept the Russian gunners at a distance where only the heavier French guns could take effect. Sensing their advantage, some of the Zouaves, exalted by the fighting, danced a polka on the battlefield to taunt the enemy, knowing that the Russian guns could not reach them. Meanwhile, the guns of the allied fleet were pounding the Russian positions on the cliffs, undermining the morale of many of their troops and officers. When the first Russian battery of artillery arrived, it found the remnants of the Moscow Regiment already in retreat under heavy fire from the Zouaves, whose Minié rifles had a longer range and greater accuracy than the outdated muskets of the Russian infantry. The commanding officer on the left flank, Lieutenant General V. I. Kiriakov, was one of the most incompetent in the tsarist army, and was rarely in a sober state. Holding a bottle of champagne in his hand, Kiriakov ordered the Minsk Regiment to shoot at the French but misdirected them towards the Kiev Hussars, who fell back under the fire. Lacking confidence in their drunken commander, and unnerved by the lethal accuracy of the French rifles, the Minsk Regiment also began to retreat.21
Meanwhile, in the centre of the battlefield, the two other French divisions, led by Canrobert and Prince Napoleon, were unable to cross the Alma in the face of heavy Russian fire from Telegraph Hill directly opposite. Prince Napoleon sent word to General de Lacy Evans, on his left, calling on the British to advance and take some pressure off the French. Raglan was still waiting for the French attack to succeed before committing British troops, and at first told Evans not to take orders from the French, but under pressure from Evans he finally gave way. At 2.45 p.m., he ordered the infantry of the Light, 1st and 2nd Divisions to advance – though what else they should do he did not say. The order was typical of Raglan’s thinking, which remained rooted in the bygone age of Napoleonic battles, when the infantry was used for primitive direct attacks on prepared positions.
As soon as the men rose from their lying positions on the ground, the Russian Cossack skirmishers, who had been hiding in the vineyards, set alight the village of Burliuk to obstruct their advance – though in fact all this did was raise a cloud of smoke, which made it more difficult for the Russian gunners to hit them. The British advanced in thin lines to maximize their rifle power, although in this formation it was hard to keep the men together over rough terrain without effective commanders of the line. The Russians were amazed by the sight of the thin red line emerging from the smoke. ‘This was the most extraordinary thing to us,’ recalled Chodasiewicz; ‘we had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep, nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation our massive columns.’
The advancing lines broke up as they passed through the burning village and vineyards. A greyhound ran around them chasing hares. Moving forward in small groups, the British cleared the village of the Russian skirmishers and drove them out of the vineyards. ‘We rushed on driving the enemy’s skirmishers before us,’ recalled Private Bloomfield of the Derbyshire Regiment. ‘Some of these skirmishers even got up trees, so they could get a good shot at us, but we saw them and brought them off their perch. Some of these when falling from the trees … would catch their feet or clothes in some parts of the tree and hang there for hours.’ As they neared the river, the British came within firing range of the Russian guns. Men fell silently as they were hit but the rest of the line kept moving forward. ‘The most striking thing to me’, recalled Lieutenant General Brown of the Light Division, ‘was the silent way in which death did its work. No sight or sound betrayed the cause; a man dropped, rolled over, or fell out of ranks to the dust. One knew the little bullet had found its destination, but it seemed to happen in mysterious silence – they disappeared, were left, as we went past them.’22
Under heavy fire, the men reached the river, collecting in groups at the water’s edge to unload their equipment, unsure of the water’s depth. Holding their rifles and ammunition pouches above their heads, some men managed to wade across, but others had to swim, and some drowned in the fast current. All the time, the Russians fired at them with grape-shot and shell. There were 14 Russian guns in the earthworks and 24 on either side of the road bridge. By the time Private Bloomfield reached the Alma near the bridge, ‘the river was red with blood’. Many men were too frightened to get into the water, which was full of dead bodies. They hugged the ground on the riverbank while mounted officers galloped up and down, shouting at the men to swim across, and sometimes even threatening to cut them with their swords. Once they had crossed the river, all order was lost. Companies and regiments became jumbled together, and where there had been lines two men deep there was now just a crowd. The Russians began to advance down the hill from either side of the Great Redoubt, firing on the British down below, where mounted officers galloped round their men, urging them to reform lines; but it was impossible, the men were exhausted from crossing the river, and happy to be in the shelter of the riverbank where they could not be seen from the heights. Some sat down and took out their water cans; others got out bread and meat and began to eat.
Aware of the danger of the situation, Major-General Codrington, in command of the 1st Brigade of the Light Division, made a desperate effort to regroup his men. Spurring his white Arab charger up the hill, he bellowed at the crowd of infantry: ‘Fix bayonets! Get up the bank and advance to the attack!’ Soon the whole of Codrington’s brigade – the regiments all jumbled up – began scrambling up the Kurgan Hill in a thick crowd. Junior commanders gave up forming lines – there was no time – but urged their men to ‘Come on anyhow!’ Once they had climbed onto the open slopes, most of the men began to charge with yells and screams towards the Russian guns in the Great Redoubt, 500 metres up the slope. The Russian gunners were astonished by the sight of this British mob – 2,000 men running up the hill – and found easy targets. Some of the Light Division’s advance guard reached the entrenchments of the Great Redoubt. Soldiers clambered over the parapets and through the embrasures, only to be shot or cut down by the Russians, who hurriedly withdrew their guns. Within a few minutes, the Great Redoubt was a swarm of men, pockets of them fighting on the parapets, others cheering and waving their colours, as two Russian guns were captured in the confusion.
But suddenly the British were confronted by four battalions (some 3,000 men) of the Vladimirsky Regiment pouring into the Redoubt from the open higher ground, while more Russian guns were pitching shell at them from higher up the Kurgan Hill. With one loud ‘Ooorah!’ the Russian infantry began charging with their bayonets, driving out the British, and firing at them as they retreated down the hill. The Light Division ‘made a front’ to fire back, but suddenly and unexpectedly there was a bugle call to cease firing, copied by the buglers of every regiment. For a few fatal moments there was a confused pause in the firing on the British side: an unnamed officer had thought that the Russians were the French and had ordered his men to stop firing. By the time the mistake was corrected, the Vladimirsky soldiers had gained the upper hand; they were steadily advancing down the hill and British troops were lying dead and wounded everywhere. Now buglers truly did give the order to retreat, and the whole rabble of the Light Division, or what was left of it, was soon running down the hill towards the shelter of the riverbank.