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Title: Sevastopol—Siege to Be Raised (1855)
Description: Leading article of the New-York Daily Tribune on the second bombardment of Sevastopol (April 9-22, 1855): the confusion of regular and irregular attack, the waste of ammunition, and why the siege will have to be raised.
Author: Friedrich Engels
Date: 1855-05-10
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/originales/1855%20Sevastopol%E2%80%94Siege%20to%20Be%20Raised
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*Published unsigned as a leading article in the* New-York Daily Tribune*, No. 4386, May 10, 1855, p. 4, under the heading “Sevastopol—Siege to Be Raised”; attributed to Friedrich Engels by MEGA² (I/14), which first identified him as its author. Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/1855%20Sebastopol%2C%20el%20sitio%20ser%C3%A1%20levantado).*

On the morning of the 9th of April the second bombardment of Sevastopol began. It was continued, according to the latest news, up to the 22d, for thirteen successive days, with the energy and vivacity of what the Russians themselves call an “infernal fire.” And what was the result? “That,” so says the telegraph, “the superiority of the fire of the Allies was established beyond a doubt.” Thirteen days’ violent, almost incessant cannonade, and no better result than this paltry satisfaction—how is this possible?

A bombardment or cannonade of this sort always forms part of an irregular attack, that is, an attack where the enemy’s fortifications are not approached by the slow but steady and sure method discovered first by Vauban and brought to perfection by his successors. The regular attack proceeds from parallel to parallel by the well-known zig-zag trenches; erecting fresh batteries at every new point gained in advance, protected by the fire of the more rearward batteries; extending the third or fourth parallel at the foot of the glacis; creeping up the glacis by the double sap; forming a sort of last parallel at the very edge of the ditch, called the crowning of the glacis; constructing in it the breaching and counter-batteries; opening the breach; forming a subterraneous descent into the ditch; and finally risking the assault under the most favorable circumstances possible. In this method every step is gained by using all the positions secured beforehand as a base of operations to every fresh advance. Every act is regular and well supported, and though it may be contested for a moment, must ultimately attain its end if no mistakes are made.

There are cases where this systematic way of proceeding would be out of place. Wherever a fortified town is of but little intrinsic strength, where the fortifications are dilapidated, the garrison weak, the arsenals ill-provided, the ground before the works broken so as to allow the besiegers to proceed unseen by the garrison to close proximity with the town; where the fortress is a town containing some thousands or tens of thousands of inhabitants whose terror once excited may be brought to bear upon the moral firmness of the garrison and commander; there the forcible or irregular attack, undertaken by a force of sufficient superiority, will be less tedious, less expensive, and yet secure the same result. Or where the fortified position to be carried is of the nature of an entrenched camp, defended by works the ditches of which have no masonry scarps, are of little breadth and depth, and consequently do not require breaking to make an assault possible, then a regular attack would be equally misplaced.

All the cases where the forcible attack may be successfully carried out may be reduced to one of the above two. Either the object of attack is a weak fortress with numerous inhabitants and little resources, or it is an intrenched camp.

In the first case the production of a great moral impression is the decisive thing. A forcible attack upon even the smallest fortress, without a decisive battle gained beforehand, a complete investment established, a vast superiority of force displayed, every hope of relief entirely destroyed, never did nor will lead to success. The campaign of 1815 in France, therefore, furnishes us with the model examples of successful irregular attacks. The French army was annihilated, the north of France was inundated by the invading troops that marched from town to town without any resistance. Large masses of troops surrounded the smaller fortresses on the north frontier, and one after another they fell after a few days’ resistance. The mode of attack in such case is very simple. The natural despondency of the garrison must be worked upon. For this purpose the besiegers open their trenches close to the fortress, say at from 300 to 400 yards, which they are enabled to do by the superior number of troops they can bring to protect the works. In this parallel they construct a number of mortar and howitzer batteries to bombard the town, while a few enfilading or dismounting batteries directly engage the guns of the enemy. The bombardment must do the main work. The destruction of part of the town and the burning effects of shells thrown at all hours of the night, will soon bring the inhabitants down upon the garrison, itself harrassed by night-alarms and want of rest. If a few guns on the ramparts are dismounted, if a powder-magazine or two are blown up, the inutility of further resistance will soon, though wrongly, be acquiesced in by the commander, and a few hours’ more bombardment will bring about a capitulation. Thus, in this case the principal thing required is an imposing force and ammunition enough to tire out the garrison.

In the second case, that of an intrenched camp, the theory of regular trenches is out of the question, as it would give the enemy time to strengthen his works in the same proportion. Even single detached batteries are erected in such cases only where the ground favors natural approaches; they always must be made in a single night and therefore are generally merely cut into the solid earth to the depth of three feet or so. The principal cover for the artillery, which can seldom or never be got in heavier calibre than 12-pounders, must be found in the natural undulations of the ground. As no siege artillery—unless in very exceptional cases, and then in very inconsiderable strength only—can be brought forward, the fire of the attack is mainly directed to dismounting the guns and killing the defenders of the enemy’s works. As soon as the enfilading fire has succeeded in silencing the artillery of the defense and making some impression upon the garrisons of the lunettes or redoubts, the whole of the attacking artillery advance to effective grape range and prepare by an unremitting hail of case-shot for the actual assault upon the works. This sort of cannonade, being almost exclusively the work of field-artillery, would not be mentioned here in the account of a siege, had not the allies, by a very singular mistake, mixed up the application of siege-artillery and field-artillery in this siege.

Now Sevastopol is neither a small fortress liable to a forcible attack in the manner described, nor an intrenched camp or hastily-defended open town. When the Allies first arrived the place might have been considered an open town covered by hasty intrenchments but secured by strong redoubts, and by its extent taking the dimensions of an intrenched camp. If such was the case the mode of attack fit for intrenched camps might have been employed with a good chance of success. The whole of the field-artillery and whatever could be moved of the lighter ship and siege-guns should have been brought up to the front—the latter forming the supports, the former the movable batteries—to advance as soon as the Russian fire became subdued; and after a four or six hours’ cannonade the assault should have been made. Possibly this might have been done, but the difficulty experienced in bringing up the siege-train and the ammunition proves that it was a doubtful matter; yet it would have been better than anything that has been done. The idea was abandoned and a sort of regular-irregular siege resolved upon, an operation which was at any given moment to leave the besiegers the choice of finishing up by a methodical advance or of attempting the forcible attack and bombardment. But the defenses of Sevastopol grew up twice as quick as the allied trenches; and by the time the batteries of the attack were ready to open the place was a fortress surrounded by an enceint, thrown up, it is true, in haste and not properly riveted, but if the want of rivetments laid it open to an assault, the unparalleled profusion of guns with which the rampart was bristling utterly precluded such an idea before the enemy’s fire was completely silenced.

The first bombardment—17th October to 5th November—was undertaken because the regular attack proceeded so slowly; and the regular attack proceeded slowly and even imperceptibly because it was carried on in the contempt of all rules, embracing the whole of the southern lines instead of one or two fronts, and scattering the working forces and the effects of the fire instead of concentrating them. Sevastopol was no longer a place fit for any sort of irregular attack. A concentrated regular attack only could have succeeded. It had no timid inhabitants to be worked upon. It was not even properly invested. Its extent was such as to scatter the effects of the bombardment over a surface where they appeared but trifling. The houses, built of solid free-stone, were bad material for large fires. Accordingly, the first bombardment had no lasting effect whatever except to squander the precious ammunition of the Allies, to deteriorate their guns, and to disable their offensive forces for five months.

The second bombardment necessitated immense preparations. The old guns, with bores ruined by firing and of too weak a caliber, had to be replaced by heavier ones. Shot and powder had to be brought up in enormous quantities. The besiegers suffered tremendously by sickness, and the return of spring alone enabled them to work with some degree of activity. If it is considered that with the present heavy guns every shot consumes in iron and powder about fifty pounds on an average, and that thus there are only forty rounds to a tun weight, the delays of the Allies will be readily explained. Now there must be at least 350—some say 500 guns in the batteries before Sevastopol. Take only ten rounds per hour per gun, and fourteen hours of fire per day, and you have, for the thirteen days bombardment, from the 9th to the 22d April, the enormous mass of 637,000 projectiles, weighing, with their charges, above 14,500 tuns. Reduce this number even to 400,000 projectiles weighing 1,000 tuns—still there remains a mass of iron thrown into the place unparalleled in history and yet necessitated by the foolish resolution to take a place of such extent and defended by so numerous guns by an irregular attack, for this reason only, that the regular attack had been carried on upon a wrong principle.

The leading motive in the selection of the mode of attack was a certain confusion of the two cases where a forcible attack is justified; that of a weakly garrisoned town, and that of an intrenched camp. Because in the beginning Sevastopol presented all the features of an intrenched camp it was to be attacked as such, even after it had changed its character entirely. The only difference admitted was this, that siege artillery was to take the place of field artillery. But here this plan of attack became mixed up with notions of siege, with trenches, regular batteries and bombardment. Sevastopol was to be bombarded like a fortress and cannonaded like an intrenched camp, and when all the ammunition was nearly consumed, though no white flag appeared on the ramparts, the army was to march to the assault, as the Russians did at Warsaw in 1831.

The results of such an ill-planned, badly-defined system of attack were easily to be foreseen. The effects of the bombardment on the town must be almost null; those of the cannonade against the defenses very trifling. There remained the chance of silencing the enemy’s fire. With the number of guns and the skill of using them nearly equal on both sides that chance was pretty small, for every night’s repairs might make up for every day’s destruction. But supposing the fire of the Russians to be actually silenced, what then? Could the assault be ordered? The storming columns would have to pass for a distance of 600 yards under the rifles and then the musketry of the Russians, supposing even that the Russians had not a number of masked guns in reserve to be unmasked and used with cannister against the storming columns at a moment when the presence of these very columns prevented the besiegers from using their own artillery. Moreover, almost up to the very day when the bombardment was opened, the Russians had proved their superiority in means of offense, had advanced in front of the lines, thrown up fresh works on disputed points, held them and armed them with guns. Such a garrison, which remains master of the ground in front of its own lines, may very quietly wait for an assault. It has nothing to fear.

On the 10th, the second day, the Allies professed to have attained a superiority of fire; but every succeeding morning they found the Russian works repaired and as strong as before. On the 14th the French tried to carry one of the Russian outworks; they had to dislodge the Russians twice, and held it when the dispatch left. Later dispatches from the allied camp, however, mention no permanently maintained positions; and thus it is probable that the work had to be abandoned again. On the 15th Gorchakoff declares that, owing to diligent repairs, the defenses are in nearly as good a state as they were before the bombardment. Finally, on the 17th, the very best news the Allies could send to Vienna is that they are now sure of the superiority of their fire over that of the Russians.

The thirteen days’ firing of which we have reports must have completely exhausted the ammunition of the besiegers. Indeed, the dispatches of Prince Gorchakoff state that from the 19th to the 22d their fire had greatly slackened, and the fact that though the British Government had received news up to the 27th by the new submarine telegraph they withheld it from the public, proves that the Allies had gained no substantial advantage. After having shot away their vast stores of powder and ball, there would remain nothing for them but an assault which could be directed against the outworks only. Suppose the outworks taken, the power of offense of the Allies would again be exhausted, for they would have plenty to do to hold their outworks. Their guns would be ruined and mostly unfit for further use, their ammunition exhausted; their troops weakened by the assault and demoralized by the disproportion of the losses suffered and the means employed to the results secured. A new stand-still like that of the winter is not possible while the heat of the spring sun develops a poisonous miasma under their very feet, therefore we shall be justified in saying that the bombardment of Sevastopol is but the first step to raising the seige of that place. For even in the best event, if 40,000 or 50,000 more soldiers are thrown into the Crimea, and a campaign is attempted against the Russians in the field, the seige will have to be raised, and trenches, batteries and all abandoned to the Russians, until in the very uncertain future there is a better of renewing the attempt to take the place, under better auspices. We shall soon hear that the siege has been raised.