It is ironic that the Crimean War, a major conflict which claimed many thousands of British, French, Russian and Turkish lives, should largely bc remembered today by just one inept and minor incident, the Charge of the Light Brigade. Yet the war was a pan-European conflict which brought down a government (that of Lord Aberdeen) in London, put the Emperor Louis Napoleon of France in a prestigious position on the Continent, curbed Russian imperial ambitions,and probably saved the rickety Ottoman Empire for a further two generations.
It also brought about a social revolution by which the common British soldier or infantryman, "Tommy Atkins", was in future to he regarded a~ a human being with some rights of his own and not as mere imperial cannon-fodder, wretchedly treated and housed in foully unhygienic barracks. The unhealthy monopoly of the aristocracy over officer commissions was also largely broken, a state of affairs for which the great Duke of Wellington had been much to blame. The frank on-the-spot reports from the front by William Howard Russell (an Irishman, incidentally) back to The Times in London marked the emergence of the modern warcorrespondent, though Russell was not alone in the field.
Other courageous writers were there, too, and it was largely through press agitation over official ineptitude and disorganisation that public opinion in Britain was aroused. Meanwhile, Roger Fenton's photographs made the war the first to be recorded on camera, and - another "first" - a new military decoration was introduced, the Victoria Cross. And the remarkable Florence Nightingale, funded not by the Government but by collections raised as a result of press-fuelled public anger, sailed for the Crimea with her own nursing staff to revolutionise the Army's medical and hospital services.
The elderly British commander, Lord Raglan, and his staff were savagely criticised for the poor state of the Army' s commissariat, and in fact Raglan, who had been one of Wellington's staff officers at Waterloo 40 years before, was largely an aristocratic anachronism. He was essentially a desk soldier who had never commanded as much as a battalion in the field, though his personal courage was never in doubt. He was, however, a conscientious and honourable man who worked and worried himself virtually to death to improve a chaotic situationwhich he had inherited from more than a generation of official neglect. Soldiering was not highly regarded in Britain, which looked mainly to the Navy for its protection. After Waterloo in 1815, the Army went downhill in quality and leadership, and when Britain blundered into war with Russia in 1854, the land force it sent abroad was adequate to fight a small colonial war, not a multi-racial empire with a backward political system but a population of millions to draw on.
The war itself largely originated in the Russian Czar's bullying of Turkey over the rights of Orthodox Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, an area in which France had previously claimed special rights. This move was, however, little more than a propaganda front for territorial ambitions and the mailed fist. Czar Nicholas had at first attempted to negotiate with Britain in a half-veiled attempt to carve up the territories of the 'Sick Man of Europe", as he called Ottoman Turkey. The British backed away from his overtures, fearing for their own empire in India and their other interests in the East, and rather hesitantly backed the Turks in- stead. The recently crowned French emperor, an enigmatic character whom nobody quite trusted, also had his own ambitious agenda; he wanted to free France from the constraints imposed after defeat in 1815, to humble Russia and exalt himself and his regime, to create an independent kingdomof Poland, and to unite the Turkish-dominated provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia into a new country, Rumania, which would be friendly to French interests.
So France and England, for centuries mortal enemies, found themselves fightingside by side by land and sea (both nations sent substantial fleets) for the capture of Sebastopol, the capital of the Crimea. A Russian field army was well beaten at the Alma, but the victory was not followed up and an engineering officer of genius, Todleben, was given time to fortify Sebastopol so effectively that the siege in the end almost wore out the Allies' resources. Another field victory, at Inkerman, again was not followed up and merely left a battlefield covered with bodies. In between these came Balaklava, tactically a Russian win but profiting them little; it is largely remembered for the series of blunders which sent the Light Brigade of about 700 horsemen (not 600, as Tennyson said, only discovering his mistake when it was too late) under Lord Cardigan careering down a narrow valley with Russian guns firing on them from three sides ("Cannon to right of them,/Cannon to left of them,/Cannon in front of them! Volley'd and thunder'd"). This abysmal piece of muddled leadership and staff inefficiency has been gilded over by Tennyson's famous and fatuous poem and deservedly so. the grim Crimean winter set in and the British army, ill-equipped for the conditions and without proper clothing for the snow and howling winds, rotted away in inadequate tents while the French made themselves relatively snug in wooden huts. The steady bravery of the British infantry had impressed everybody, but the core of elite troops was fatally eroded by sickness and neglect, while replacements from back home were raw and often inadequate. Lord Raglan, broken in spirit and pride, took sick and died and his successor, Sir James Simpson, did not want the post and did not measure up to it. Meanwhile, the dithering French commander, Marshal Canrobert ("Robert Can't", the English called him), had been replaced by the fire-eating Pelissier. sent out by the Emperor to force the pace.
It was chiefly due to Pelissier's energy and drive that finally, after weeks of heavy bombardment by land and sea, the great combined assault on Sebastopol took place. The French carried the fortifications called the Malakoff, the key to the Russian defensive ring, but the British infantry uncharacteristically baulked in its attack on the neighbouring Redan. Jealousy and rank snobbery had meant that the crack Highland regiments, under the low-born but ultra-capable Sir Colin Campbell, were not chosen to head the assault. Instead, the use of many green young troops at the striking point ensured a humiliation for British arms and made the French performance shine all the brighter.
WITH Allied troops flooding into the streets of the devastated city-port, theRussians withdrew in good order to the northern side of Sebastopol harbour via pontoon bridges. In spite of largely obsolete weapons and inferior field commanders, they had fought well - including young Leo Tolstoy, who took part asa junior artillery officer. (His remarkable first book, Sebastopol Sketches, brings the fighting before us with cinematic immediacy). The war bogged down again in stale- mate and this time it was the turn of the French troops to suffer, through a cholera epidemic in which many thousands died. By now Louis Napoleon wanted peace with honour, and Austria - which had preserved a devious neutrality throughout - made the first overtures towards a settlement.
The peace talks eventually took place in Paris, in a relaxed and gentlemanly atmosphere after the long, embittered campaign. Lord Palmerston, while remaining in London, controlled the British delegates with a firm hand and scrutinised every item of the complex negotiations. In the end Russia made some concessions, both in frontier adjustments and in navigation rights to the Danube and the Black Sea, but she was not brought to her knees, and Louis Napoleon's hopes of a "free" Poland were frustrated, while his projected state of Rumania was not created for another two decades. Turkey, the Sick Man, lived on precariously, and though Britain extracted promises from the Sultan for internal reforms and complete religious toleration, in practice these were never enforced. A year later, in any case, the Indian Mutiny broke out and Britain had other problems on its hands. Meanwhile, the new young Czar, Alexander, realised that his empire urgently needed social reform and economic progress, if revolution was to be staved off, and it was in this new socio-political climate that the emancipation of the Russian serfs took place a few years later.
The chief merit of Trevor Royle's book is that it sets the war firmly in its ramified political context and devotes as much space to the diplomatic manoeuvres, before and after, as it does to the actual fighting and the long, grim months of static siege warfare.
Tactically and strategically, the Crimean War was prophetic in many respects, and an American party of military observers studied it and its lessons closely - one of them, incidentally, was George McClellan, who half-a-dozen years later was to lead the Army of the Potomac against the rebellious South. And in terms of Balkan politics, the settlement led eventually and circuitously to the situation in which Russia and Austria faced each other in growing fear and hostility, until these detonated the First World War. both empires have now vanished forever, and so have the Ottomans, but the Baulkans remains the powder-keg of Eastern Europe.