Let Our Fame Be Great (10 page)

The Russians attempted to protect the wrecks near their new fort at Shapsugo/Sashe, but were driven back by the Circassians, who raided the ships for all they could find then burnt them.

Bell walked along the shore and saw the Circassians plundering the wrecks of ‘small arms, damaged powder, silver coin, ship stores, bales of merchandise . . . iron water-tanks, copper sheathing, bolts, bars of iron ... [which] will, no doubt, soon by transformed into swords, ploughshares, axes, knives and other necessaries'. The death toll appears to have been high. ‘A creek into which the sea seemed to have made its way during the gale – surmounting its barrier of shingle – was piled full of these planks; and among them was said to be an immense number of corpses, of which the intolerable stench gave proof superabundant.'

Lorer was a thoughtful man, and his humane memoirs make touching reading. He sat in this devastating scene and looked at the thickly wooded hills rising above the little army, at the plane trees, chestnuts and hazels, and wondered what it would take to conquer them. He could see little villages in the mountains, and wished to wander up to the huts and learn more about them, but the sniper fire was so intense that the soldiers were pinned down and he could not venture far.

When a Circassian delegation, under a flag of truce, came to ask for the return of the dead, Lorer received a chance to observe the enemy, and was deeply impressed with how they conversed with the general. The conversation was one of several recorded between generals and Circassian delegations, and may be identical to one recorded elsewhere by Tornau. A story similar to Tornau's account is still quoted with pride by Circassians to this day, so it may be apocryphal but it is too poetic to leave out. The general started with a demand to know why the Circassians were rebelling against their lawful sovereign.

‘The sultan,' said the general, ‘made a present of you to the Russian tsar.'

‘Aha, now I understand,' replied one Circassian with commendable wit, and pointed out a bird sitting on a nearby tree. ‘General, I give thee that little bird, take it.'

The general's response is not given. Lorer recorded a similar conversation, which shows a similar degree of dignity from the Circassians, who appear not to have been overawed by the lofty personage they were conversing with.

‘Why do you not submit to our great ruler,' asked the general of the delegation. ‘And stop us having to spill blood in vain? I know that in the mountains with you is hiding the Englishman Bell, he incites you and he promises help from England, but believe me, he is lying to you, you will receive no help from anyone, and it would be better to give him up to me hand-and-foot, and you'll receive for this a lot of silver from our ruler who is very rich.'

The highlanders' leader, whom Lorer calls a prince although he is unlikely to have enjoyed the wealth that such a Russian title implies, replied with a gentle reproach.

‘If it is true that your tsar is rich, then why does he envy our poverty and does not let us quietly sow our millet in our poor mountains? Your tsar must be a very greedy and jealous tsar. As for the Englishman Bell, we cannot give him up, because he is our friend and guest and he does us a lot of kindness. With us, like for you, there are scoundrels who you can buy, but we, princes and lords, will always remain honest, and you do not have enough gold and silver, to deflect us from the route of honesty.'

The Russians would not be seen off with gentle dignity alone, however, and the war continued in its brutal course. Bell and Longworth regularly saw burnt villages and hamlets on the paths of Russian attacks (although it was not clear who had set fire to the houses, fleeing defenders or vengeful attackers), and areas traversed by Russian roads had become deserted as the Circassian civilians fled into the hills.

Lorer's exile continued to be spent on excursions along the coast. The next year he took part in a second amphibious attack to build another fort, but the efforts were not subduing the Circassians, even though they appear to have throttled the Circassians' trade with the Turks. The frustration shown by the general's comments was filtering through into all the senior officers of the army, and the war was particularly brutal under the leadership of General Grigory Zass, who commanded the right flank of the army.

Brutality as a military tactic had been pioneered by General Alexei Yermolov, who was proconsul in the Caucasus from 1816 to 1827. He once famously said: ‘I desire that the terror of my name should guard our frontiers more potently than chains of fortresses, that my word should be for the natives a law more inevitable than death.' He became a byword for massacre and horror, especially in the eastern Caucasus.

Yermolov was a veteran of the Napoleonic campaigns, and adored by his soldiers, with whom he shared the hardships of garrison life. But his independent spirit was out of fashion when Nikolai came to the throne. Not realizing that Nikolai's older brother had turned down the chance of ascending the throne, he ordered the army of the Caucasus to swear allegiance to Konstantin. This gaff undermined whatever trust the tsar had in him, and his position was chipped away at until mistakes in a war against Persia cost him his job. Even without his presence, however, the army maintained levels of brutality that shocked Lorer.

Lorer's equivocal position in the army, as an educated soldier, gave him access to the likes of Zass and he visited the general in his home. ‘I told him I did not like his system of war, and he replied like this: Russia wants to conquer the Caucasus at whatever cost. How would we take these peoples, our enemies, except with fear and terror? They are not fit for philanthropy, and Yermolov only managed to achieve more than us by hanging people without mercy, by plundering and burning villages.'

Zass, who according to Bell and Longworth was himself feared and hated in the mountains, entered into his role with gusto. Lorer later went to tea with the general, as part of a group that included a doctor and the doctor's wife. Zass had erected an artificial mound outside his house and impaled the heads of Circassians on spikes set into it. The doctor's wife complained about the sight, and asked Zass to remove the heads before she came to tea. Zass here betrayed a mental state that surely bordered on the insane.

He agreed to take down the heads, but was loath to part with them. The visitors had not been in his house long before they noticed a revolting smell. Zass had, apparently, decided to store the heads in a
box under his bed. He got out the box and showed off the heads to his appalled visitors. He would clean them up, he said, and send them to friends as souvenirs.

Zass was also, according to Longworth, in the habit of mutilating the bodies of Circassians killed in the fighting, since he knew how desperate his opponents were to regain the dead.

During their stay in Circassia, the Englishmen repeatedly complained that they were not allowed to take part in battles. They regularly heard skirmishes, but wanted to see large-scale military campaigns in which the Circassian cavalry routed their Cossack foes. They were asking the impossible here, since, as the Circassians already knew, the Russian artillery was too terrible to be braved in the field. But they finally secured permission to join an assault across the river Kuban towards the end of January 1838. The assault had been long discussed and the forces had to wait for some time before all the horsemen joined them.

Bell described how 1,500 warriors gathered together to listen to a speech by one elder, which lasted several hours. The old man wished the force to refrain from plunder, and only to destroy forts and capture ammunition. Previously the force had not known its destination, since the elders had wanted to avoid betrayal by spies, and it was only now that the old man explained the plan at length, before resigning command to a second man. A third man had been gathering support among the younger warriors for a more abrupt attack, but appears to have been satisfied with the decisions taken at this point and shelved his plan, leaving a united force ready for the morning.

Bell decided to stay on the Circassian side of the Kuban as a medic, but Longworth (together with another Englishman, called Knight, who had joined them unexpectedly) was in the thick of the action. By two in the morning, the force was reinforced and came to around 5,000 horsemen. They set off towards the river, across rough country choked with marshes, thickets, woodland and scrub.

The subsequent events were chaotic.

Longworth got lost in the dark, fell asleep in the saddle, was chased by an angry housewife whose thatched roof his horse stopped to eat, set out across country, fought his way through thorns, and finally
found an acquaintance who had also lost his companions. Together, by daybreak, they found the rest of the army.

Eventually, the force was reunited and stood on the banks of the Kuban, ready to attack Russia across the frozen river. But its hopes were dashed: the ice had fractured and the attack was doomed. Instantly, the infantry which had been assigned to protect the army's rear, and about a third of the cavalry, vanished.

The remaining 3,000 or so horsemen wanted to continue the attempt, and a few individuals attempted to construct bridges over the gaps in the ice. Despite orders to the contrary by the senior commanders, who feared an ambush with no possibility of retreat, about 300 young men accompanied by the two Englishmen invaded Russian territory on the far side.

The two Circassian forces, now separated by the river, stood and looked at each other for an hour or so while messages went back and forth urging their respective courses of action as the better. After lengthy deliberations and a certain amount of prayer, the smaller force decided to press on through the forest of reeds that blocked the northern bank. It moved a few kilometres in good order into Russian territory when the Circassians came across the ambush their more cautious comrades had been dreading, and which clearly showed how deeply their plans had been betrayed to the enemy.

A causeway they would have had to cross was completely dominated by cannon, while a strong force of Cossacks and infantry waited at the far end. The Circassian force stopped now for further debate, only for the discussion to be forestalled by the most hot-headed members of the group, including the two Englishmen, who charged the guns. A mad gallop foundered halfway along the causeway in a deep bog, which came up to their stirrups and which none of the warriors could circumvent. ‘Our party was compelled reluctantly to retreat and disperse with the main body on the opposite bank,' concluded Longworth. The reaction of the Russians was not recorded.

As an attack, it was a complete fiasco. But, as a demonstration of the shortcomings of the Circassians, it is rather instructive. The difficulties they faced in uniting under one leader, in maintaining a force, in keeping their plans secret, in crossing difficult terrain, and in
facing down artillery are all laid bare in a single episode. The attack, like much that the Circassians did when they tried to be ambitious, was a complete failure.

The Englishmen remained in Circassia some time, but they must have already known that their hopes that Britain would fight to secure their friends' freedom were pointless. Letters were few, but when they came they painted a uniformly gloomy picture of how Urquhart's plan had unravelled. Longworth remained until June, spending much of that time bedridden with a fever. Bell stayed for another year, but eventually he too was forced to return home a broken man.

They did not vanish entirely from history, however, and were both to write about Circassia again. Bell found a new lost cause to champion, and became the British representative to the Mosquito Coast, a part of the Caribbean shore of central America that London claimed as a protectorate despite Nicaraguan and American objections, whence he wrote a letter to the London
Times
about Circassia in 1855. Longworth was to return to Circassia as an official government agent. Their actions were provoked by an event that could yet have saved Circassia from conquest: the Crimean War.

The cause of the Crimean War was in fact more bizarre than Urquhart's peculiar plan of provoking Russia to seize a merchant ship, and ignite a world war. It started with a spat between France and Russia over who had the right to protect Christians in the Holy Land, but was really about the Russian desire to dominate the Ottoman Empire. Action rapidly moved into the Black Sea, where Russia destroyed the Ottoman fleet. The British and French navies stormed into the sea in response, forcing the Russians to scuttle their own ships in the harbour of Sevastopol.

That left Russia's Black Sea forts – its frontline against the Circassians – undefended, so their garrisons pulled back beyond the Kuban river, destroying the fortifications behind them. The Circassians had the best chance of securing their independence since Turkey had so casually given them away a generation before. They had powerful potential allies in Britain and France, who like them were sworn to fight the Russians. They had free access to the Turkish markets that had long been cut off by the Russian forts. They had the morale boost given by seeing their Russian enemies running away to the borders of three decades before. They could finally take the initiative.

They did nothing.

With the Russian evacuation of the Black Sea coast, Sefer Bey, a Circassian prince who had been friends with Urquhart, scurried back into action. The Turks despatched him to the old fort of Anapa, now once more in Turkish hands, to take control of Circassia. So began a great fiasco, despairingly chronicled by Longworth, in which all sides squabbled and disagreed and the prize of an independent, free Circassia was lost for ever.

Longworth returned to Circassia in 1855, shortly after British troops had moved into Crimea in their drive to destroy Russia's naval power in the Black Sea. He was an official agent of the British government but his trip was a sideshow, ignored rightly by historians of the terrible conflict which raged on the Crimean peninsula to the west of Circassia. But, for a historian of Circassia, his account provides unique information.