Although Topkapi Palace had already been reduced to ruins, it had been built on high ground and still retained its outermost walls. The Ottomans' assault was far from as smooth as they had imagined.
With offense and defense reversed, the Ottomans still suffered grievous casualties, retreating after leaving several hundred corpses behind.
All three men found this deeply humiliating, so they organized a larger charge.
This time, casualties were indeed much lower, with only a little over a hundred bodies left behind. Yet the gains were even more negligible. They retreated while still over a hundred meters from the walls; many had not even caught sight of the Russians' faces.
Only then did the three realize that their side's morale had been ground away by days of fighting. The only reason they had swiftly dealt with the scattered Russian remnants left in the rear earlier was their superiority in numbers and the monetary rewards.
Now, these men began firing from two or three hundred meters away from the Russians, then looked for chances to shrink behind the ruins.
Only the honest ones would charge forward under the lash of whips, but even those honest men were not entirely unafraid of death.
The moment they left the whips' reach, those honest men would immediately find somewhere to hide, or simply lie flat on the ground and play dead.
Whether the soldiers feared death was hard to say, but the officers wielding the whips certainly did. They could not possibly brave artillery fire and head to the very front line.
It would have been one thing on flat ground, but this was a slope, and they were attacking uphill.
That greatly increased their chances of death or injury. On top of that, the troops besieging Sarayburnu were not under unified command, so