Finally, Dannenberg decided to call off the action and retreat. He had to overcome the angry protests of Menshikov and the Grand Dukes, who had watched the slaughter from a safe position 500 metres behind Shell Hill and called on Dannenberg to reverse the withdrawal. Dannenberg told Menshikov, ‘Highness, to stop the troops here would be to let them be destroyed to the last man. If your Highness thinks otherwise, have the goodness to give the orders yourself, and take the command from me.’ The exchange was the beginning of a long and bitter argument between the two men, who could not stand each other, as each man tried to blame the other for the defeat at Inkerman – a battle where the Russians had vastly outnumbered the enemy. Menshikov blamed Dannenberg, and Dannenberg blamed Soimonov, who was dead, and everybody blamed the ordinary soldiers for their indiscipline and cowardice. But ultimately the disorder came from the absence of command, and there the blame must rest with Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, who lost his nerve completely and took no part in the action. The Grand Duke Nikolai, who saw through Menshikov, wrote to his older brother Alexander, soon to become Tsar:
We [the two Grand Dukes] had been waiting for Prince Menshikov near the Inkerman Bridge but he did not come out of his house until 6.30 a.m. when our troops had already taken the first position. We stayed with the prince all the time on the right flank, and not once did any of the generals send him a report on the course of the battle … . The men were disordered because they were badly directed … . The disorder originated from Menshikov. Staggering though it is to relate, Menshikov had no headquarters at all, just three people who work at those duties in such a fashion that, if you want to know something, you are at a loss to know whom to ask.55
Ordered to withdraw, the Russians fled in panic from the battle-field, their officers powerless to stop the human avalanche, while the British and French artillery fired at their backs. ‘They were petrified,’ recalled a French officer; ‘it was no longer a battle but a massacre.’ The Russians were mowed down in their hundreds, others trampled underfoot, as they ran down the hill towards the bridge and struggled to cross it, or swam across the river to the other side.56
Some of the French chased after them, and a dozen men or so from the Lourmel Brigade even entered Sevastopol. They were carried away by the chase and unaware that they were on their own, the rest of the French having turned back long before. The streets of Sevastopol were virtually empty, for the whole population was on the battlefield or standing guard at the bastions. The Frenchmen walked around the town, looting houses, and made their way down to the quay, where their sudden appearance caused civilians to flee in panic, thinking that the enemy had broken through. The French soldiers were equally afraid. Hoping to escape by sea, they rowed off in the first boat they could find, but just as they were rounding Fort Alexander into the open sea, their boat was sunk by a direct hit from the Quarantine Battery. The story of the Lourmel soldiers became an inspiration to the French army during the long siege, giving rise to the belief that Sevastopol could be taken with a single bold attack. Many thought their story showed that the allied armies could and should have used the moment when the Russians were in flight from the heights of Inkerman to pursue them and march into the town as those audacious men had done.57
The Russians lost about 12,000 men on the battlefield of Inkerman. The British listed 2,610 casualties, the French 1,726. It was an appalling number killed in just four hours of fighting – a rate of loss almost on a par with the battle of the Somme. The dead and wounded were piled on top of each others bits of bodies, torn apart by shells, lying everywhere. The war correspondent Nicholas Woods observed:
Some had their heads taken off at the neck, as if with an axe; others their legs gone from the hips; others their arms, and others again who were hit in the chest or stomach, were literally as smashed as if they had been crushed in a machine. Across the path, side by side, lay five [Russian] Guardsmen,ak who were all killed by one round shot as they advanced to charge the enemy. They lay on their faces in the same attitude, with their muskets tightly grasped in both hands, and all had the same grim, painful frown on their faces.
Louis Noir thought the Russian dead, who were mostly killed by bayonets, had a ‘look of furious hatred’ captured at the moment of their death. Jean Cler also walked among the wounded and the dead.
Some were dying, but for the most part they were dead, lying pell-mell, upon one another. There were arms upraised above the mass of yellow flesh, as if begging for pity. The dead who were lying on their back had generally thrust out their hands, either as if to ward off the danger, or to beg for mercy. All of them had medals, or little copper cases, containing images of the saints, on chains around their necks.
Underneath the dead there were men alive, wounded and then buried under bodies struck down later on. ‘Sometimes, from the bottom of a heap,’ wrote André Damas, a French army chaplain, ‘one could hear men breathing still; but they lacked the strength to lift the weight of flesh and bones that pressed them down; if their faint moans were heard, long hours passed before they could be cleared.’58
Major-General Codrington of the Light Division was horrified by the scavengers who robbed the dead. ‘The most disgusting thing to feel is that the horrid plunderers, the prowlers of a battle-field, have been there, pockets turned inside out, things cut to look for money, everything valuable systematically searched for – officers particularly stripped for their better clothes, with just something thrown over them,’ he wrote on 9 November.59
It took the allies several days to bury all their dead and evacuate the wounded to field hospitals. The Russians took much longer. Menshikov had refused the allied offer of a truce to clear the battlefield for fear that his troops would become demoralized and might even mutiny at the sight of so many dead and wounded on their side compared to the losses of the enemy. So the Russian dead and wounded lay there for several days and even weeks. Cler found four Russian wounded men alive at the bottom of the Quarry Ravine twelve days after the battle.
The poor fellows were lying under a projecting rock; and, when asked on what they had contrived to subsist all this time, they replied by pointing, first, to Heaven, which had sent them water and inspired them with courage, and then to some fragments of mouldy, black bread, which they had found in the pouches of the numerous dead, who lay around them.
Some of the dead were not found until three months later. They were at the bottom of Spring Ravine, where they were frozen stiff, looking much like ‘dried-up mummies’, according to Cler. The Frenchman was struck by the contrast he had noted between the Russian dead at the Alma, who had ‘an appearance of health – their clothing, underclothing, and shoes were clean and in good condition’, and the dead at Inkerman, who ‘wore a look of suffering and fatigue’.60
As at the Alma, there were claims that the Russians had engaged in atrocities against the British and the French. It was said that they had robbed and killed the wounded on the ground,al sometimes even mutilating their bodies. British and French soldiers put these actions down to the ‘savagery’ of the Russian troops, who they said had been well primed with vodka. ‘They give no quarter,’ wrote Hugh Drummond of the Scots Guards to his father on 8 November, ‘and this should be represented, as it is a scandal to the world that Russia, professing to be a civilized power, should disgrace herself by such acts of barbarity.’ Describing the ‘dastardly conduct’ of the Russian troops in his anonymous memoir, another British soldier wrote: