Who won the Battle of the Alma?
On 20 September 1854 the allied army of Britain and France, with an Ottoman contingent alongside, won the first major battle of the campaign in the Crimea at the Alma river, storming the heights where Prince Menshikov's Russians had taken up a strong position across the road to the great naval fortress of Sevastopol. It was a hard frontal victory that cost the allies some 3,000 men and the Russians perhaps 5,000 or more, and it opened the way south, though the allies failed to follow it up at once.1
The Crimean War is best remembered for a doomed cavalry charge, but that came later. The first major battle of the campaign in the Crimea was fought on the slopes above the river called the Alma, where a British and French army had to wade a river and climb open hillsides under Russian guns toward the road to Sevastopol. On the far side, Orlando Figes writes, ladies from the city had come out to Telegraph Hill to watch the enemy beaten.2
Why the allies came to the Crimea
The war began in 1853 as a quarrel between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Russian troops occupied the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, today part of Romania, and Britain and France, anxious to prop up the weakening Ottoman state and check Russian expansion toward the Mediterranean, came in on the sultan's side in 1854.3› Battle of Sinop, 1853
By the summer the original cause of the war had almost disappeared. An allied army gathered at Varna on the Bulgarian coast, but the Russians, beaten at Silistria and pressed by Austria, pulled out of the principalities. Rather than go home, London and Paris chose a new objective: Sevastopol, the base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet in the Crimea.4
Landing and march
On 14 September 1854 the allies began landing at Calamita Bay, a beach on the west coast of the Crimea 28 miles north of Sevastopol. The French were ashore quickly; the British landing dragged on for days in rising surf, with cholera among the troops and no tents or transport ashore.5
On 19 September the army set off south with the French and the Turks on the right, next to the sea, the British on the inland flank and the fleet keeping pace offshore. Hamley counts five streams running west to the sea across the line of march. At the first, the Bulganek, the Light Brigade ran into Cossacks, and Raglan, who could see a mass of Russian infantry waiting behind them, pulled it back: in Figes's account, the British army's first sight of the Russians.6
Armies and commanders
The allied commanders were an odd pair. Lord Raglan had served on Wellington's staff and lost an arm at Waterloo; since then, Edward Hamley writes, his only military experience had been in office as Military Secretary at the Horse Guards, and he had never held a command. Marshal Saint-Arnaud, in Hamley's words, was a gallant man experienced in the warfare of Algeria, where most of the French generals had served.7
Counts of the two armies vary from source to source, but the proportions do not. The National Army Museum puts the allies at about 30,000 French, 26,000 British and 4,500 Turks, and Figes counts some 60,000 Western troops against 35,000 Russians of Prince Aleksandr Menshikov on the heights, with more than 100 guns. Hamley gives the Russians 33,000 infantry, 3,400 cavalry and 120 guns.8
The Russian position
Menshikov had chosen his ground well. The north bank of the Alma sloped gently down to the water; the south bank rose steeply, and near the sea it ended in cliffs. The coast road crossed the river by a bridge and climbed between two heights, Telegraph Hill to the west and Kourgane Hill to the east. On Kourgane Hill the Russians had built two earthworks, which the British called the Great and Lesser Redoubts, with heavy guns sweeping the open slopes below.9
The Russian commander believed the cliffs by the sea were too steep for an army to climb, and he put his strength where he expected the blow, astride the road. In Hamley's account the French were to move against the Russian left near the sea, and the British attack on the front was to wait until that movement began to take effect; Figes describes Raglan holding his men back until the French had broken through.10
The French on the cliffs
Around midday on 20 September allied warships opened fire on the Russian positions near the shore. General Bosquet's division waded the river by the sea, and his Zouaves, many of them veterans of mountain fighting in Algeria, scrambled up a cliff that Menshikov had not thought worth defending with artillery. French troops were soon on the plateau, and the guns of the fleet were pounding the Russian flank.11
Then the attack stalled. The divisions of Canrobert and Prince Napoléon, further inland, could not get their artillery up the narrow tracks, and the Russians shifted troops and guns to meet them. The flank attack that was meant to unhinge Menshikov's line had won a foothold but no more.12
The British cross the river
All this time the British infantry lay in the long grass on the north bank under Russian round shot, waiting for the French. Toward three o'clock Raglan ordered them forward. The village of Bourliouk was burning in front of them, and the men waded or swam the Alma holding their rifles above their heads, while regiments lost their order and became mixed on the far bank.13
The Light Division, with Major General Codrington of its first brigade riding at the front, went straight up the slope at the Great Redoubt and took it at heavy cost. It could not hold it. A Russian column of the Vladimir Regiment came down in a bayonet counterattack, and in the confusion of a bugle call to cease firing, which Figes says an officer gave because he took the Russians for French, the British were driven back down the hill.14
The Guards and the Highlanders
Raglan, meanwhile, had ridden off on his own across the river to a knoll that looked into the flank and rear of the Russian line. Hamley calls it a singular position for a commander, beyond the support or even the knowledge of the rest of his army and too far from the main struggle to direct it. Two guns he called up there fired on the flank of the batteries guarding the road and made them pull back.15
Behind the Light Division came the First Division of the Duke of Cambridge: the Guards Brigade and Sir Colin Campbell's Highlanders. The Scots Fusilier Guards, caught up in the retreating troops, were thrown back with heavy losses. The Grenadiers and the Coldstream kept their formation, halted in line and poured volley after volley into the Russian columns before closing in, while the Highland Brigade took the Lesser Redoubt and turned the Russian flank.16
The British infantry carried the new Minié rifle, which most regiments, Figes writes, had been issued only on their way to the Crimea. It could hit the dense Russian ranks from far beyond the reach of their smoothbore muskets. On the left the French at last took Telegraph Hill, and by about half past four the Russian army was streaming south off the heights.17
The chance that was lost
The road to Sevastopol was open, and the city's defenses on the landward side were weak. But there was no pursuit. Raglan kept his small cavalry force for observation and defense, and when he proposed pushing the retreating enemy with the troops that had not fought, Saint-Arnaud declined: his men, Hamley writes, had left their knapsacks below the heights and could not advance until they had them back. The Russians withdrew into the fortress unmolested.18
Instead of marching straight on the city, the allies went round it to besiege it from the south, with supply ports at Balaklava and Kamiesch. That gave the Russians time to strengthen their works, which held against the first great bombardment on 17 October. Saint-Arnaud did not see it: within days of the battle, Hamley writes, he was visibly dying, and General Canrobert succeeded him in command.19› Siege of Sevastopol, 1854
A month after the Alma, Menshikov struck back at the British base at Balaklava, in the battle remembered for the Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade. The siege itself dragged on for almost a year, through a winter of storms, cold and disease that crippled the British army, until the French stormed the Malakoff in September 1855 and the Russians abandoned the city.20› The Battle of Balaclava, 1854
The price of the Alma
No two counts of the losses agree. Hamley gives the British loss as 2,002 killed, wounded and missing; the Light Division's first attack alone cost 47 officers, 50 sergeants and 800 rank and file. The French official return gave 1,340, a figure Hamley thought greatly exaggerated, and Figes counts 1,600 French. The National Army Museum puts the Russian loss at 5,000, and the Russians stated their own as 5,709; Figes writes that exact numbers cannot be known, because so many men were abandoned on the field.21
The wounded of both sides suffered terribly. The British had left their medical stores and ambulance corps behind in Bulgaria and needed two days to clear their own casualties. Figes describes some 1,600 wounded Russians lying on the hillside for days before the allies, having seen to their own men, could care for them. The scandal of the army's medical arrangements, reported home by The Times, would soon bring Florence Nightingale to the hospitals at Scutari.22› Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War
Legacy and memory
For Orlando Figes, the early battles in the Crimea, on the Alma and at Balaklava, were not very different from the fighting of the Napoleonic Wars. The Alma also showed the pattern of the whole war, which the National Army Museum sums up as military and logistical incompetence alongside the bravery and endurance of the soldiers; of the British side of the battle, Edward Hamley wrote that all “we had to be proud of was the dash and valour of the regiments engaged.”23
In France the battle gave its name to a new bridge over the Seine in Paris, built between 1854 and 1856 and opened by Napoleon III. Four statues of soldiers of the Crimean army stood on its piers. When the narrow stone bridge was replaced by a steel one between 1970 and 1974, only one was kept: the Zouave by Georges Diebolt, who still stands at the foot of the pier. Parisians use him as an informal flood gauge; in the great flood of 1910 the water reached his shoulders.24
For the wider story of the age of rifles and railways, see the greatest battles of the industrial age and the industrial age era page, or look up what else happened on 20 September in history.
