The allied armies have at length begun to act. They have taken 
Bomarsund. On the 3d or 4th ult., the French troops and British 
marines were landed on the island of Aland; on the 10th, the 
place was invested; on three succeeding days the batteries were 
erected and armed; on the 14th fire was opened; on the 15th the 
two round towers were taken by storm, one by the French, the 
other by the English; on the 16th, after a short engagement in 
which the allies lost very few men, the large casemated fort 
surrendered. This short way of proceeding certainly looks rather 
spirited. From all the information we possessed, it was to be 
expected that a regular siege, with at least one parallel and about a 
fortnight of open trenches, would be necessary to reduce the 
place. Even The London Times, which for a long time had talked in 
a way as if the allied infantry had but to charge the stone walls 
with the bayonet in order to make them crumble, had to admit, 
that after all a siege was inevitable, and that this tedious operation 
would probably last a fortnight. 

If, then, the attack has been brought to a successful issue in 
about a week from the investment, and on the sixth day after 
breaking ground, the natural inference is that the besiegers must 
have found far less difficulty than they expected. What it was that 
facilitated the attack, we of course can merely guess until the 
detailed accounts of the siege arrive; but there are many 
circumstances which may have operated in their favor. A 
considerable number of the garrison were Finlanders, and in part 
even Alanders. They certainly were not very much inspired with 
Russian patriotism, and if the reports from deserters may be 

trusted, they were even resolved not to fight if they could help it. 
The inhabitants of the island appear to have received the allies, as 
soon as they saw they were about to attack Bomarsund seriously, 
as deliverers from the Russian yoke, and must have given them all 
kinds of information and assistance. But the main point, after all, 
must have been something very defective in the construction of 
the fortress itself. As no ground plans of it are to be had, and all 
our knowledge of it is derived from views and sketches, and from 
non-professional (at least as far as engineering is concerned) 
descriptions, which are necessarily very vague, and as both views 
and descriptions are of a somewhat conflicting nature in the 
details, we cannot pretend to state where the defect lay. 

To judge from the sketches, however, the two round towers 
flank each other by their fire in a certain degree; but as in every 
round fortification the guns must have a radiating position, and 
their fire must be exceedingly eccentric, the smaller the fort, and 
with it the number of guns, the greater becomes the eccentricity 
and the less effectual is the fire. Montalembert, therefore, took 
great care not to propose the employment of such towers unless 
this eccentricity was counteracted by the strong support which 
each tower would receive from its neighbors on the right and left 
and from the main fortress in the rear. If five or six such towers 
could concentrate their fire on one point, the fire would then 
become as concentric and effectual as it would be eccentric and 
weak before. Montalembert, besides, knew very well that in the last 
stages of a siege, whenever it comes to storming, infantry fire is 
the most effectual that can be brought to bear on the assailants. 
Therefore, beside the contrivances in his towers for admitting 
infantry defense, he generally connected the separate towers by a 
sort of covered way or trench, not for safe communication only, 
but also for infantry fire. What such a trench can do, we have just 
seen at Arab Tabiassi, where the whole flanking defense was 
confined to such a trench, and where the Russians were driven 
back, time after time, by a mere handful of Arnauts.” Finally, 
Montalembert tried to make his towers entirely safe against a coup 
de main.” He surrounded them with a ditch, with a covered way, 
and sometimes considered them merely as the réduit, or last 
reserved position in a large, strong redoubt. This was his maturest 
plan, and evidently the best. It has been adopted with more or less 
alteration in almost all recent fortifications where the smaller 

,, See this volume, p. 279.—Ed. 
> Sudden attack.— Ed. 

The Capture of Bomarsund (Article 1) 381 

towers of Montalembert were adopted. Beside these difficulties of 
access he has the whole of the lower storey or cellar of the tower 
arranged for infantry defense in a very ingenious way. 

Now, in every one of these respects the Russians appear to have 
omitted important features. The time occupied by the breaching — 
fire, twenty to thirty hours, is evidently too short to enable even 
thirty-two pounders to effect a practicable breach, unless, indeed, 
the masonry was of a nature not usually seen in fortifications. It 
may, therefore, be presumed that the towers were taken by 
scaling, the soldiers entering through the embrasures, and by 
bursting open the gates. This presupposes a very ineffectual 
flanking fire, and as it appears that the large fort has no batteries 
in the rear to assist the towers, each tower was flanked by the fire 
of the other only. This fault is the greater, as from the sketches it 
would appear that the ground was very uneven, allowing storming 
parties to creep up, covered by accidents of ground, to a pretty 
close proximity. Then, to judge from the sketches and from the 
event, preparations against a coup de main must have been 
altogether neglected. There is no trace of a redoubt thrown up 
around the towers, and the redoubts which the Russians had 
constructed in front of them were abandoned almost without 
resistance. There was, it is said, a ditch around each tower; but it 
must have been very shallow with no contrivances for infantry 
defense within it. The towers once taken, the larger fort, which 
they command, was necessarily at the mercy of the Allies. It 
consequently fell, very likely with no more than a show of 
resistance. 

Judging these fortifications from what this short siege makes 
them appear to be, it would almost seem that their constructors 
never calculated upon a serious attack on the land side. They must 
have built the towers with a view merely to resisting the attacks of 
parties of marines, which at the most could not exceed a couple of 
thousands, and not muster in sufficient strength either to attempt 
an assault or to conduct to its close a regular siege. Consequently 
the water-front was the strongest, and the land-front, formed by 
the towers, more show than reality. And yet the result would 
almost show that a party of 1,000 marines might have stormed 
the towers many months ago, and thereby reduced the main 
fort! 

As to the storming itself, it must have been done very -well by 
both French and English. The English are well-known stormers; 
it is their favorite maneuver, and hardly ever fails them. The 
French prefer to charge a body of troops in the open field; and in 

sieges their mathematical turn of mind prefers the methodical 
march of that eminently French science which Vauban invented. 
But the ardor of a British veteran seems to have driven them on. 
There was at Bomarsund an old Colonel Jones—the man who 
improved upon Vauban, when, with hardly half-sufficient means, 
and against brave and determined garrisons, at Badajos, Ciudad 
Rodrigo and Saint Sebastian, he contrived to shorten a siege by 
about one-third of its prescribed duration. Colonel Jones is not a 
common engineer. He does not, like the rest of his profession, see 
in a siege a mere school-festival in which the chief engineer is 
under examination, and must prove before the eyes of the army 
how far all the rules and regulations of formal sieges and of 
Vauban’s “attaque des places fortes’ are retained and_ properly 
arranged in his memory. He does not think that the whole army is 
there for the sake of the engineers, to protect them while they 
exhibit their tricks. Instead of this, Colonel Jones is first a soldier, 
and then an’ engineer. He knows the British soldier well, and 
knows what he can trust him with. And the short, determined, and 
yet unpretending way in which Bomarsund was taken in half the 
prescribed time, is so much like the breaching and storming of the 
Spanish fortresses that nobody but old Jones can be at the bottom 
of it. As to the French, they could never have invented this way of 
taking a fortress. It goes against their grain; it is too blunt, too 
destitute of manners and politeness. But they could not contest the 
authority of the man who had tried his irregular way of taking 
fortresses upon themselves fifty years before, and found it to 
answer in every case. And when they came to the storming, they 
appear not to have been behind the English in resolution. 

It is singular that the Russians, who have prided themselves so 
much upon their storming capacities, from Perekop and Ochakov 
down to Warsaw and Bistritz, these Russians have been repulsed 
in every assault upon field-works, and, indeed, were not able, 
before Silistria, to reduce a field-work by a regular siege, and had 
to decamp without the fortress being relieved; while on the other 
hand, the very first act of the war was the storming by the Turks 
of a permanent Russian fortification—St. Nikolai—while the 
celebrated fortress of Bomarsund has been taken by assault almost 
without the honor of an open trench. We must not forget to note 
that the fleets appear not to have in any way effectually 
contributed to this victory. They seem, after all, to shun the 
neighborhood of casemated batteries as much as ever. 

This success of the allies, however, is of such a nature that it will 
very likely induce them to do nothing more in the ensuing 

The Capture of Bomarsund (Article I) 383 

autumn. At all events, the grand expedition to Sevastopol has not 
yet sailed, and a few weeks more delay is already promised. Then 
it will be too late, and thus that repose and relaxation during the 
winter, which is so necessary after the fatigues of the camp at 
Varna, will be secured to the heroes of the allied forces. 

Written on August 19, 1854 Reproduced from the New-York 

Tribune, No. 4174, September 4;  re- 
printed in the New-York Semi-Weekly