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A lone Russian woman, Daria Mikhailova, cared for the wounded with a cart and supplies purchased at her own expense. Daria was the 18-year-old daughter of a Sevastopol sailor killed at the battle of Sinope. At the time of the invasion, she was working as a laundress in the Sevastopol naval garrison. According to popular legend, she sold everything she had inherited from her father, bought a horse and cart from a Jewish trader, cut her hair and dressed up as a sailor, and went with the army to the Alma, where she distributed water, food and wine to the wounded soldiers, even tearing her own clothes to make dressings for their wounds, which she cleaned with vinegar. The soldiers saw through Daria’s disguise, but she was allowed to carry on with her heroic work in the dressing station at Kacha and then as a nurse in the hospitals of Sevastopol during the siege. Legends spread about the ‘heroine of Sevastopol’. She came to symbolize the patriotic spirit of the common people as well as the Russian female ‘spirit of sacrifice’ that poets such as Alexander Pushkin had romanticized. Not knowing her family name, the soldiers in the hospitals of Sevastopol called her Dasha Sevastopolskaia, and that is how she has gone down in history. In December 1854 she was awarded the Gold Medal for Zeal by the Tsar, becoming the only Russian woman of non-noble origin ever to receive that honour; the Empress gave her a silver cross with the inscription ‘Sevastopol’. In 1855 Daria married a retired wounded soldier and opened a tavern in Sevastopol, where she lived until her death in 1892 (H. Rappaport, No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (London, 2007), p. 77).
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The engineering department of the War Ministry had failed to implement a plan of 1834 to reinforce the city’s defensive works, claiming lack of finance, though at the same time millions were spent on the fortification of Kiev, several hundred kilometres from the border. Afraid of an Austrian attack through south-west Russia, Nicholas I had kept a large reserve of troops in the Kiev area, but saw no need to do so in Sevastopol since he dismissed the danger of an attack by the Turks or the Western powers in the Black Sea. He had overlooked the huge significance of steamships, which made it possible to carry large armies by sea.
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According to a Russian source, the Tatar spies were shot on the orders of the British when the truth was discovered (S. Gershel’man, Nravstvennyi element pod Sevastopolem (St Petersburg, 1897), p. 86).
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A pejorative Turkish term for a Balkan Christian.
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After the Russian annexation of the Crimea, the Giray clan had fled to the Ottoman Empire. In the early nineteenth century the Girays had served as administrators for the Ottomans in the Balkans and had entered into military service. The Ottoman Empire had various military units made up of Crimean émigrés. They had fought against the Russians in 1828 – 9, and were part of the Turkish forces on the Danubian front in 1853 – 4. Mussad Giray was stationed in Varna. It was there that he persuaded the allied commanders to take him with them to the Crimea to rally Tatar support for their invasion. On 20 September the allies sent Mussad Giray back to the Balkans, praising him for his efforts and considering that his job was done. After the Crimean War, the French awarded him with a Légion d’honneur medal.
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Balaklava (originally Bella Clava: ‘beautiful port’) was named by the Genoese, who built much of the port and saw it thrive until their expulsion by the Turks in the fifteenth century. Plundered by the Turks, the town remained a virtual ruin until the nineteenth century, although there was a monastery in the hills above the town and some Greek soldiers stationed there, who were expelled by the allies.
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A hot drink made with honey and spices.
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Defensive tall wicker baskets filled with earth.
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A Turkish term for a woman who is dressed improperly. In the Ottoman period it was used to describe non-Muslim women and had sexual connotations, implying that the woman ran a brothel or was herself a prostitute.
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It is something of a mystery as to why the Russians, faced by such a tiny defence force, did not make a quicker and more powerful attack against Balaklava. Various Russian commanders later claimed that they lacked sufficient troops to capture Balaklava, that the operation had been a reconnaissance, or that it was an attempt to divert the allied forces from Sevastopol rather than capture the port. But these were excuses for their failure, which perhaps could be explained by their lack of confidence against the allied armies on an open battlefield after the defeat of the Russian forces at the Alma.
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Soimonov relied on a naval map, without any markings on the land. A member of his staff showed him the way by drawing on the map with his finger (A. Andriianov, Inkermanskii boi i oborona Sevastopolia (nabroski uchastnika) (St Petersburg, 1903), p. 15).
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Woods was mistaken: the Russian Guards were nowhere near the Crimea.
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A reasonable mistake to make amid the heavy fog and brushwood on the heights, where non-wounded soldiers lay down on the ground to ambush the enemy.
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Tolstoy is citing the official figures passed for publication by the military censors. The true Russian losses were double that amount.
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So incompetent was the commissariat that it took shipments of green, unroasted coffee beans, instead of tea, the usual drink of the troops in an Empire based on the tea trade. The process of roasting, grinding and preparing the coffee was too laborious for most of the British soldiers, who threw the beans away.
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Born Princess Charlotte of Württemberg, she was received into the Russian Orthodox Church and given the name Elena Pavlovna before her marriage to the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich in 1824.
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The telegraphs were meant for military use; journalists were not allowed to clog them up with long reports, so there was a time lag between the headline story in a newspaper, which arrived by cable, and the full report, which came later by steamship. There were often false reports because of this – the most famous in The Times, on 2 October 1854, which announced the fall of Sevastopol on the basis of telegraph communications of the victory at the Alma and Russell’s first dispatch from the Crimea, covering the landing of the allied troops. It was not until 10 October that Russell’s full report on the Alma got to London, by which time the true situation had been clarified by further telegraphs.
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The vicar Joseph Blakesley, who styled himself ‘A Hertfordshire Incumbent’, wrote so many lengthy letters to The Times, offering his learning on anything associated with the war, from the climate in the Crimea to the character of Russia, that he earned a reputation as a popular historian and was later even appointed to the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge University, despite his lack of academic credentials.
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There was some basis to the rumours about America. US public opinion was generally pro-Russian during the Crimean War. The Northern abolitionists were sympathetic towards the Western powers but the slave-owning South was firmly on the side of Russia, a serf economy. There was a general sympathy for the Russians as an underdog fighting against England, the old imperial enemy, as well as a fear that if Britain won the war against Russia it would be more inclined to meddle once again in the affairs of the United States. Relations between the USA and Britain had been troubled during recent years because of concerns in London about America’s territorial claims over Canada and its plans to invade Cuba (Clarendon had told the British cabinet that if Cuba was invaded Britain would be forced to declare war against America). Isolated in Europe, the Russians developed relations with the USA during the Crimean War. They were brought together by their common enemy – the English – although there were lingering suspicions on the Russian side of the republican Americans and, on the American side, about the despotic tsarist monarchy. Commercial contracts were signed between the Russians and Americans. A US military delegation (including George B. McClellan, the future commander of the Northern army in the early stages of the Civil War) went to Russia to advise the army. American citizens sent arms and munitions to Russia (the arms manufacturer Samuel Colt even offering to send pistols and rifles). American volunteers went to the Crimea to fight or serve as engineers on the Russian side. Forty US doctors were attached to the medical department of the Russian army. It was at this time that the USA first proposed the purchase of Russian-America, as Alaska was known, a sale that went ahead in 1867.