Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [389]
Those approaching the city from the north crossed the harbour on a pontoon bridge. To the west, across the harbour mouth, the outdated Russian fleet had been sunk to prevent the allied ships getting in. The best use for our ships really, Misha considered, since they’re quite incapable of actually fighting the modern fleets of the French or the English. Beyond the line of sunken hulks, out in the open waters of the Black Sea, the allied ships lay comfortably across the horizon, blockading Sevastopol very effectively.
What a mad business it was, this Crimean War. On the one hand, Misha supposed, it was inevitable. For generations the empire of the Ottoman Turks had been getting weaker, and whenever she could, Russia had taken advantage and expanded her influence in the Black Sea area. Catherine the Great had dreamed of taking ancient Constantinople itself. And if ever Russia could control the Balkan provinces, then she could sail a Russian fleet freely through the narrow strait from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. No wonder then if the other powers of Europe watched with growing suspicion every time Russia looked at the Turks.
Yet the actual cause of the war was not a power play at all. In his chosen role as defender of Orthodoxy, the Tsar had found himself in dispute with the Sultan when the latter had removed some of the privileges of the Orthodox Church within his empire. Troops were sent by Tsar Nicholas into the Turkish province of Moldavia, by the Danube, as a warning. Turkey declared war; and at once the powers of Europe, refusing to believe that the Tsar was not playing a bigger game, entered the war against Russia.
There were in fact three theatres of war. One by the Danube, where the Austrians contained the Russians; one in the Caucasus Mountains, where the Russians took a major stronghold from the Turks; and lastly, the Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, which the allies attacked because it was the home base of the Russian fleet.
It was a messy business. True, there were moments of heroism, such as the insane British Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. But mainly it had been a stalemate, with both sides entrenched upon the peninsula, and typhus carrying off far more, despite the ministrations of Florence Nightingale and others like her on all sides, than did the actual fighting.
Above all, win or lose, the war was a humiliation for Russia. The weapons and techniques of the Russian army were shown to be hopelessly out of date. Her wooden fleet could beat the Turks, but confronted with the French or British, it was a joke. The prestige of the Russian Tsar abroad plummeted. Belief in the Tsar’s autocracy at home, too, was severely shaken.
‘Our country simply doesn’t work,’ people complained. ‘Do you know,’ a senior officer remarked irritably to Misha, ‘the allies out there can get relief supplies from their own countries far faster than we can get them from Moscow. These are modern countries fighting an empire that is still in the Middle Ages!’
The war had started in 1854. By the end of that year, everyone knew, even down to the simplest enlisted peasant, this simple but devastating fact: ‘The Tsar’s empire, our Holy Russia, doesn’t work.’
If I get out of this, Misha had decided, I’m going to resign my commission and go to live in Russka. His father and Ilya were both dead. The estate needed looking after. And anyway, he concluded, I’ve had enough.
It was only after he had been in Sevastopol a week that he encountered Pinegin.
He had almost forgotten about the man, yet suddenly there he was, hardly changed: still a captain, his iron-grey hair hardly any thinner, his weatherbeaten face as calm as ever, and a pipe as usual stuck in his mouth.
‘Ah, Mikhail Alexeevich,’ he said, as if their meeting were the most expected thing in the world. ‘We have a matter to settle, I believe.’
Was it really possible, Misha sometimes wondered, that after all these years Pinegin could really be serious? Indeed, at first he had been inclined to treat the matter as a sort of macabre joke.
But as the months