Friedrich Engels

From Sevastopol

Written about May 8, 1855.

From the English.

[“New-York Daily Tribune” No. 4401, May 28, 1855, leading article]

The mail which arrived here on Saturday evening with the “America” gives us once more the opportunity of presenting to our readers a certain survey of the state of the war in the Crimea, although the still contradictory and indefinite character of both the official reports and the newspaper correspondences makes our task not an easy one. It is certain that the failure at Vienna was accompanied in the camp of the allies before Sevastopol by increased vigilance and activity, and that the bombardment — although it may be said to have stopped on April 24 — was nevertheless not exactly weaker on the following days. Nevertheless it is difficult to say what advantages have actually been attained; one correspondent even asserts that the advanced Russian works, Selenginsk, Volynsk and Kamchatka, as well as the trenches in front of the whole line, have been evacuated by the defenders. As this is obviously the most favourable thing the allies could achieve, we will for the present assume it to be true. Other correspondents report that the French have stormed the Flagstaff Bastion itself and entrenched themselves there, but this news merits no credence. It is nothing but a stupid exaggeration of the affair of April 21, when the French, by exploding mines, constructed an advanced trench in front of this bastion.

We will further assume that it is true that the Russians have been thrown back upon their original line of defence, although it remains very striking that reports of the capture of Mount Sapun and the Mamelon by the allies are still missing. But even supposing the redoubts on these hills were no longer in the hands of the Russians, no one can deny that they have derived great advantages from them. They held the Sapun from February 23, and the Mamelon-Kamchatka redoubt from March 12 to the end of April, during which time the trenches of the allies were either enfiladed or exposed to sustained fire in their front, while the key of the whole position — the Malakhov — was completely protected by them during the fifteen days’ cannonade. After the Russians had made such good use of them, they could afford their loss.

The various night attacks, in which the allies seized the Russian trenches and counter-approaches, need no more be described here than the sortie of the Russians, which they undertook to recapture them. Operations of this kind are of no tactical interest, except for such people as know the ground from personal experience; they are chiefly determined by the intelligence, boldness and perseverance of the subaltern officers and soldiers. In these qualities the English and French are superior to the Russians, and consequently they have well maintained their strong points in some places near the Russian works. The distance between the antagonists is here and there reduced to the range of hand-grenades, i.e. to 20 or 30 yards from the Russian covered way, or from 40 to 60 yards from the main rampart. The Russians assert that the besiegers

are 30 sashen (an old Russian measure of length, equal to 2.336 metres) or 60 yards from them. This is especially the case in front of the Flagstaff Bastion, the Central Bastion and the Redan, where the ground forms dead angles with hollows so situated that the Russian cannon cannot be sufficiently depressed below the horizontal to allow the projectiles to strike there. Since the Russian artillery has by no means been silenced, the communications with these hollows and their conversion into a complete system of trenches is a very difficult affair, and the allies will feel the flanking fire of the Russians very severely. However, as long as the allied batteries are situated some 400 or 500 yards behind the advanced trenches, it is not to be seen how they expect to maintain such exposed positions against sorties undertaken suddenly and with sufficient strength; and after the acknowledged failure of the bombardment, it will take time before new and more advanced batteries can be brought into play.

This sudden advance of the allies directly up to the foot of the Russian fortress walls is, it is true, in contrast to their previous sluggishness and irresolution, but is nevertheless quite in keeping with it. In the conduct of this siege there has never been either system or real consistency; and as a siege is essentially a systematic operation in which every step attained must, at the risk of otherwise proving useless, be immediately developed into a new advantage, it is clear that the allies have prosecuted it according to the worst conceivable plan. Notwithstanding the disappointment which took hold of the minds of the allied generals when they saw the theatre of war for the first time, notwithstanding the mistakes committed last autumn during the first siege, they might nevertheless have made greater progress. Let us leave the north side of the town entirely out of account, as the allied generals themselves did. They had resolved, once and for all, to attack the south side separately, and to run the risk of arriving at a place dominated by a fortress inaccessible to them. But here an alternative presents itself: either the allied generals felt strong enough to take the south side, and then they must now admit that they were under an unpardonable error; or they felt too weak, and why then did they not provide for reinforcements? It cannot now be denied that one mistake has followed another in this “memorable and unprecedented” siege. The hardship of the

winter quarters seems to have instilled into both the army and the generals a spirit of insuperable drowsiness, apathy and sluggishness. When the Russians boldly came out of their lines in February and formed new ones as they advanced, this should have been a sufficient incentive for them to put forth all their energy; but Canrobert could use this very serious warning for no other purpose than to damp the ardour of the Zouaves by an attack which — as he knew beforehand — could lead to no good. The work in the trenches was resumed, but more to form covered ways for assaulting columns than to push the batteries nearer to the enemy. Even after six months have been spent before the fortress, every action shows that no definite plan was pursued, no point was singled out for a general attack; indeed, that the old fixed idea of taking Sevastopol by a coup de main (surprise attack) still prevailed in the minds of the allies, crossing every reasonable proposal and frustrating every attempt at a systematic advance, and the little that was done was carried out three times more slowly than regular siege operations, while the inconsistency and the absence of a plan which characterised the whole did not even lend it the certainty of victory which is inherent in such regular operations.

But everything was expected from the reopening of the fire. That was the chief excuse for every hesitation and inaction. Although it is difficult to say what was expected from this great event — from batteries at 600 to 1,000 yards from their object of attack —, the fire was nevertheless at last opened. About 150 rounds per gun the first two or three days, then 120 rounds, then 80, then 50, finally 30, whereupon the cannonade was suspended. The effect was scarcely visi-

ble, except in the disabled guns and emptied magazines of the allies. A five days’ cannonade with full vigour would have done the Russians more harm and opened to the allies more chances of success than fifteen days of a fire which began with great fury and slackened as quickly as it had begun. But how could the allies be in a position to exploit these favourable circumstances after their ammunition had been shot away and their guns had become useless? No more than now, while the Russians are in a far better position than they were then, seeing the fire slacken and being spared a hail of 50,000 projectiles a day for five consecutive days. This prolongation of the cannonade by weakening its intensive force is so great and inexplicable a departure from all rules of war that political reasons must be at the bottom of it. When the fire of the first two days had disappointed the expectations of the allies, the necessity of keeping up at least the semblance of a cannonade during the Vienna Conference must have led to this senseless waste of ammunition.

The cannonade ends, the Vienna Conferences are suspended, the telegraph is completed. At the same time a change of scene follows. Orders arrive from Paris to act rapidly and decisively. The old system of attack is given up; storms on a small scale, lodgements by mine explosions, fighting with rifles and bayonets follow the resultless roar of the artillery. Advanced points are gained and even maintained against a first sortie of the besieged. But unless batteries are erected at a shorter distance from the Russian lines and made too hot for the besieged, nothing is gained. The advanced posts cannot be held without great and daily repeated losses, and without regularly recurring engagements of doubtful and fluctuating result. And even supposing that these batteries of the second and third parallel are to be erected, that it was necessary for their opening first to drive the Russians out of their trenches — how long will it be before these new batteries receive enough cannon to successfully return the fire of the Russians, which during the two bombardments held its own with that of the allies? The closer batteries advance to the enemy’s works, the more destructive the cross-fire that can be concentrated on them, and the more restricted the space for placing cannon; in other words, the more equal the fire of the attack becomes to the fire of the defence, unless the latter has been previously

silenced by the more distant batteries, which is not the case here.

How came it, then, that the Russians were able to withstand the attacks of the Allies so successfully? First, owing to the mistakes and irresolution of the allies themselves; second, owing to the bravery of the garrison and the skill of the directing engineer, Colonel Todtleben; third, owing to the natural strength of the position. For it must be admitted that the position is indeed strong. The bad maps which, until very recently, were the only ones available, represented Sevastopol as a town lying on the lower part of a slope and commanded by the heights in the rear; but the latest and best maps prove that the town stands on several rounded, isolated hills, separated from the slope of the plateau by ravines; these hills in fact command both the town and the plateau alike. This character of the ground appears fully to justify the hesitation to carry the fortress by storm last September; it was evidently too imposing for the allied generals even to attempt to induce the enemy to show what forces he could muster for the defence. The Russian engineer has turned this natural advantage to the fullest possible account. Wherever Sevastopol possesses a slope facing the plateau, two and even three tiers of batteries have been erected, one above the other, doubling and trebling the defensive strength. Such batteries have also been constructed in other fortresses (e.g., on the slope of the Mont-Valerien near Paris), but they are not generally countenanced by engineers, who call them shell-traps. They certainly offer a larger target to the besieger, whose salvos may strike the battery lying below or above when they miss the one that was aimed at, and for this reason they will always inflict heavier losses on the defence. But where a fortress like Sevastopol is not even invested, such a disadvantage counts for nothing compared with the enormous strength which they impart to the defensive fire. After this siege of Sevastopol, we believe that these shell-traps can be objected to but very little. For fortresses of the first rank, provided with great stores and difficult to invest, they may, where the ground is favourable to them, be employed to the greatest advantage. Apart from these shell-traps, the Russians have also departed in other respects from the usual routine of engineers. According to the antiquated systems of bastion fortification, 15 or 17 bastions would have been too few to encircle the fortress and would have defended it very badly. Instead of this, there are on the outlying heights only six bastions, while the curtain-walls connecting them are broken into lines forming angles, so as to be able to produce a flanking fire independent of that of the bastions, and from these advanced positions heavy guns sweep the ground in front. These curtains are mounted with cannon along almost their whole length, which again is an innovation, for the curtains in ordinary bastion fortifications are generally supplied with no more than one or two guns for special cases, and the whole fire-defence is thrown upon the bastions and ravelins. Without entering into further technical details, it will be seen from what has been said above that the Russians have made the very best of their possibilities, and that the allies – should they ever gain possession of the Flagstaff-Bastion or the Malachow-Bastion – may be certain of encountering a second and a third line of defence, to overcome which they will have to employ all their resourcefulness.