The Crimean War (71 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

Tags: #History, #Military, #General, #Europe, #Other, #Russia & the Former Soviet Union, #Crimean War; 1853-1856

BOOK: The Crimean War
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By the autumn of 1876 war fever had spread to the Russian court and government circles. Cherniaev’s army faced defeat. Responding to his desperate pleas for help, the Tsar sent an ultimatum to the Porte and mobilized his troops. This was enough to force the Turks to end hostilities against the Serbs, who duly made their peace with them. Abandoning the Serbs, the Russians shifted their support to the Bulgarians and demanded autonomy for them, which the Turks would not accept. With Austria’s neutrality assured through promises of gains in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in April 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey once again.
From the start, the Russian offensive in the Balkans assumed the character of a religious war. It was overwhelmingly redolent of the opening Russo-Turkish phase of the Crimean War. As the Russians crossed the Danube under the command of the Grand Duke Nikolai, they were joined by Slav irregulars, Bulgarians and Serbs, some of them demanding money to fight, but most fighting for their national cause against the Turks. This was the sort of Christian war that Nicholas had wanted when his troops had crossed the Danube in 1853–4. Encouraged by the rising of the Slavs, Alexander considered pushing on to seize Constantinople and impose a Russian settlement on the Balkans. He was urged to do so not only by the pan-Slav press but by his own brother, the Grand Duke Nikolai, who wrote to him after his armies had captured Adrianople, a short march from Constantinople, in January 1878: ‘We must go to the centre, to Tsargrad, and there finish the holy cause you have assumed.’ Pan-Slav hopes were at their height. ‘Constantinople must be ours,’ wrote Dostoevsky, who saw its conquest by the Russian armies as nothing less than God’s own resolution of the Eastern Question and as the fulfilment of Russia’s destiny to liberate Orthodox Christianity.
It is not only the magnificent port, not only the access to the seas and oceans, that binds Russia so closely to the resolution … of this fateful question, nor is it even the unification and regeneration of the Slavs. Our goal is more profound, immeasurably more profound. We, Russia, are truly essential and unavoidable both for the whole of Eastern Christendom and for the whole fate of future Orthodoxy on the earth, for its unity. This is what our people and their rulers have always understood. In short, this terrible Eastern Question is virtually our entire fate for years to come. It contains, as it were, all our goals and, mainly, our only way to move out into the fullness of history.
51
 
Alarmed by the advance of the Russian troops to Adrianople, the British ordered their Mediterranean fleet to enter the Dardanelles and agreed in Parliament to raise £6 million for military purposes. It was a repeat of the movements that had led to the Crimean War. Under pressure from the British, the Russians agreed to an armistice with the Ottomans but continued advancing towards Constantinople, halting only under threat from the Royal Navy at San Stefano, a village just outside the Turkish capital, where on 3 March they signed a treaty with the Turks. By the Treaty of San Stefano, the Porte agreed to recognize the full independence of Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as the autonomy of a large Bulgarian state (to include Macedonia and part of Thrace). In exchange for a narrow strip of land to the south of the Danube, Romania ceded back to Russia southern Bessarabia, the territory taken from the Russians by the Treaty of Paris. With the restoration of her Black Sea status completed seven years before, Russia had succeeded in reversing all the losses she had suffered after the Crimean War.
The Treaty of San Stefano was mainly Ignat′ev’s doing. It was the realization of most of his pan-Slav dreams. But it was totally unacceptable to the Western powers, which had not gone to war to stop the Russians bullying the Turks in 1854 only to allow them to do so again twenty-four years afterwards. In Britain, the old warlike feelings against Russia were expressed in ‘jingoism’, a new aggressive mood of can-do foreign policy summed up by the current hit song of pubs and music halls:
We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.
 
Afraid of British intervention and a possible repeat of the Crimean War, the Tsar ordered the Grand Duke to withdraw his troops to the Danube. As they did so they took part in revenge attacks against the Muslims of Bulgaria which were joined and sometimes instigated by Christian volunteers: several hundred thousand Muslims fled Bulgaria for the Ottoman Empire at the end of the Russo-Turkish war.
Determined to halt the extension of Russian power into the Balkans, the great powers met at the Congress of Berlin to revise the Treaty of San Stefano. The main objection of the British and the French was the establishment of a greater Bulgaria, which they viewed as a Russian Trojan horse threatening the Ottoman Empire in Europe. With direct access to the Aegean Sea in Macedonia, this enlarged Bulgarian state could easily be used by the Russians to attack the Turkish Straits. The British forced the Russians to agree to the division of Bulgaria, returning Macedonia and Thrace to direct Ottoman control. A week before the Berlin congress, Benjamin Disraeli, the British Prime Minister, had concluded a secret alliance with the Ottomans against Russia, whereby Britain was allowed to occupy the strategic island of Cyprus and bring in troops from India. The revelation of this alliance, along with Disraeli’s threats of war, forced the Russians to concede to his demands.
The Congress of Berlin ended Russia’s pan-Slav hopes. Ignat’ev was dismissed as the Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople and went into retirement. Arriving back in London to a hero’s welcome, Disraeli claimed that he had brought back ‘Peace with honour’ from Berlin. He told the House of Commons that the Treaty of Berlin and the Cyprus Convention would protect Britain and its route to India against Russian aggression for years to come. But tensions in the Balkans would remain. In many ways the congress sowed the seeds of the future Balkan wars and the First World War by leaving so many border disputes unresolved. Above all, the fundamental problem of the Eastern Question, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Turkey, remained without a cure. As the British Foreign Secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury, acknowledged on his return from Berlin, ‘We shall set up a rickety sort of Turkish rule south of the Balkans once again. But it is a mere respite. There is no vitality left in it.’
52
 
 
In Jerusalem, where all these international conflicts had begun, the end of the Crimean War was proclaimed on 14 April 1856. A salute from the Castle guns announced that the Pasha had been informed of the peace, and his troops assembled on the public square outside the Jaffa Gate for thanksgiving prayers led by the imam. It was to the same square that they had been summoned in September 1853 to go and fight for their Sultan against Russia.
53
History had come full circle in Jerusalem.
Twelve days later, on 26 April, the old religious rivalries began once again. Fights broke out between the Greeks and the Armenians during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For several days before the sacred ceremony, rival groups of pilgrims had smuggled various weapons into the church and concealed them there. Others were supplied with knives and iron spikes thrown from a window near the roof of the St Nicholas Convent. It was not clear how the fighting started, the British consul Finn, who witnessed it, reported three days afterwards, but ‘during the conflict the missiles were also flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps and tearing church pictures representing the most sacred subjects of faith – glass and oil pouring down upon their heads – and silver lamps on silver chains were beaten down and the materials have since vanished’. The Pasha left his place in the gallery and ordered up his guard to separate the fighters. But he was badly hurt by a blow to his head and had to be carried away on his men’s shoulders – the crowd in the church being too thick to allow a passage otherwise – while his secretary was also beaten up. Eventually, a squadron of the Pasha’s soldiers rounded up the rioters, the church attendants cleared up all the mess, and the ceremony of the Holy Fire proceeded as usual, the monks standing guard before the tomb of Christ, the congregation chanting ‘Lord have mercy’, until the patriarch emerged bearing lighted candles, and, as the church bells rang, the pilgrims pressed towards him to light their torches from the miraculous flames.
54
 
The end of the Crimean War was marked by modest festivities in Britain. There was general disappointment that peace had come before the troops had scored a major victory to equal that of the French at Sevastopol and that they had failed to carry out a broader war against Russia. Mixed with this sense of failure was a feeling of outrage and national shame at the blunders of the government and military authorities. ‘I own that peace rather sticks in my throat,’ Queen Victoria noted in her journal on 11 March, ‘and so it does in that of the
whole
Nation.’ There was no great victory parade in London, no official ceremony to welcome home the troops, who arrived at Woolwich looking ‘very sunburnt’, according to the Queen. Watching several boatloads of soldiers disembark on 13 March, she thought they were ‘the picture of
real
fighting men, such fine tall strong men, some strikingly handsome – all with such proud, noble, soldier-like bearing … . They all had long beards, and were heavily laden with large knapsacks, their cloaks and blankets on the top, canteens and full haversacks, and carrying their muskets.’
1
But if there were no joyous celebrations, there were memorials – literally hundreds of commemorative plaques and monuments, paid for in the main by groups of private individuals and erected in memory of lost and fallen soldiers in church graveyards, regimental barracks, hospitals and schools, city halls and museums, on town squares and village greens across the land. Of the 98,000 British soldiers and sailors sent to the Crimea, more than one in five did not return: 20,813 men died in the campaign, 80 per cent of them from sickness or disease.
2
Reflecting this public sense of loss and admiration for the suffering troops, the government commissioned a Guards Memorial to commemorate the heroes of the Crimean War. John Bell’s massive ensemble – three bronze Guardsmen (Coldstream, Fusilier and Grenadier) cast from captured Russian cannon and standing guard beneath the classical figure of Honour – was unveiled on Waterloo Place at the intersection of Lower Regent Street and Pall Mall in London in 1861. Opinion was divided on the monument’s artistic qualities. Londoners referred to the figure of Honour as the ‘quoits player’ because the oak-leaf coronels in her outstretched arms resembled the rings used in that game. Many thought the monument lacked the grace and beauty needed for a site of such significance (Count Gleichen later said that it looked best in the fog). But its symbolic impact was unprecedented. It was the first war memorial in Britain to raise to hero-status the ordinary troops.
3
The Crimean War brought about a sea change in Britain’s attitudes towards its fighting men. It laid the basis of the modern national myth built on the idea of the soldier defending the nation’s honour, right and liberty. Before the war the idea of military honour was defined by aristocracy. Gallantry and valour were attained by high-born martial leaders like the Duke of York, the son of George III and commander of the British army against Napoleon, whose column was erected in 1833, five years after the Duke’s death, from the funds raised by deducting one day’s pay from every soldier in the army. Military paintings featured the heroic exploits of dashing noble officers. But the common soldier was ignored. Placing the Guards Memorial opposite the Duke of York’s column was symbolic of a fundamental shift in Victorian values. It represented a challenge to the leadership of the aristocracy, which had been so discredited by the military blunders in the Crimea. If the British military hero had previously been a gentleman all ‘plumed and laced’, now he was a trooper, the ‘Private Smith’ or ‘Tommy’ (‘Tommy Atkins’) of folklore, who fought courageously and won Britain’s wars in spite of the blunders of his generals. Here was a narrative that ran through British history from the Crimean to the First and Second World Wars (and beyond, to the wars of recent times). As Private Smith of the Black Watch wrote in 1899, after a defeat for the British army in the Boer War,
Such was the day for our regiment,
Dread the revenge we will take.
Dearly we paid for the blunder
A drawing-room General’s mistake.
Why weren’t we told of the trenches?
Why weren’t we told of the wire?
Why were we marched up in column,
May Tommy Atkins enquire …
4
 
As the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his
English Notebooks
, the year of 1854 had ‘done the work of fifty ordinary ones’ in undermining aristocracy.
5
The war’s mismanagement also triggered a new assertiveness in the middle classes, which rallied round the principles of professional competence, industry, meritocracy and self-reliance in opposition to the privilege of birth. The Crimean War had furnished them with plenty of examples of professional initiatives having come to the rescue of the badly managed military campaign – the nursing work of Florence Nightingale, the culinary expertise of Alexis Soyer, Samuel Peto’s Balaklava railway, or Joseph Paxton’s navvies, who were sent to build the wooden huts that sheltered British soldiers from a second winter on the Sevastopol Heights. Thanks to the press, to which they wrote with their practical advice and opinions, the middle classes became actively involved in the daily running of the war. Politically, they were the real victors, since by its end the war was being run on professional principles. It was a sign of their triumph that in the decades afterwards, Whig, Conservative and Liberal governments alike all passed reforms promoting middle-class ideals: the extension of the franchise to the professional and artisan classes, freedom of the press, greater openness and accountability in government, meritocracy, religious toleration, public education, and a more caring attitude towards the labouring classes and ‘deserving poor’ which had its origin in, among other things, a concern for the suffering of the soldiers during the Crimean War. (That concern was the impetus for a series of army reforms brought in by Lord Cardwell, Gladstone’s War Minister, between 1868 and 1871. The purchase of commissions was replaced by a merit-based system of promotions; the period of enlistment for privates was drastically reduced; pay and conditions were improved; and flogging was abolished in peacetime.)
The new-found confidence of the British middle classes was epitomized by Florence Nightingale. She returned from the Crimea as a national heroine, and her image was sold widely on commemorative postcards, figurines and medallions to the public.
Punch
depicted her as Britannia carrying a lamp rather than a shield, a lancet rather than a lance, and in verse suggested that she was more worthy of the public’s adoration than any dashing noble officer:
The floating froth of public praise
blown lightly by each random gust,
Settles on trophies, bright for days, to
lapse in centuries of rust.
 
The public heart, that will be fed, but has
no art its food to choose,
Grasps what comes readiest, stones for
bread, rather than fast, will not refuse.
 
Hence hero-worship’s hungry haste takes
meanest idols, tawdriest shrines,
Where CARDIGAN struts, plumed and laced,
or HUDSON in brass lacquer shines.
 
Yet when on top of common breaths a
truly glorious name is flung,
Scorn not because so many wreaths
before unworthiest shrines are hung.
 
The people, howe’er wild or weak, have
noble instincts still to guide:
Oft find false gods, when true they seek;
but true, once found, have ne’er denied.
 
And now, for all that’s ill-bestowed or
rash in popular applause,
Deep and true England’s heart has
glow’d in this great woman’s holy cause.
6
 
In popular plays and drawing-room ballads, Nightingale’s patriotic dedication and professionalism served to compensate for the damage done to national pride by the recognition that stupidity and mismanagement had caused greater suffering to the soldiers than anything inflicted by the enemy. In one play,
The War in Turkey
, produced in the Britannia Saloon in London, for example, there was a series of comic scenes ridiculing the incompetence of the British authorities, followed by a scene in which ‘Miss Bird’ (Nightingale) appears and sorts out all the problems left behind. The scene ends with a moral lesson: ‘In that young lady we behold true heroism – the heart that beats in her bosom is capable of any heroic deed.’
7
The legend of the Lady with the Lamp became part of Britain’s national myth, retold in countless histories, schoolbooks and biographies of Florence Nightingale. It contained the basic elements of the middle-class Victorian ideal: a Christian narrative about womanly care, good works and self-sacrifice; a moral one of self-improvement and the salvation of the deserving poor; a domestic tale of cleanliness, good housekeeping and the improvement of the home; a story about individual determination and the assertion of the will that appealed to professional aspirations; and a public narrative of sanitary and hospital reform, to which Nightingale would dedicate herself for the rest of her long life after her return from the Crimea.
In 1915, when Britain was at war again, this time with Russia on its side, a statue of the Lady with the Lamp was added to the Crimean War Memorial, which was moved back towards Regent Street to accommodate the new figure. The statue of Nightingale was joined by one brought in from the War Office of a thoughtful Sidney Herbert, the Secretary at War who had sent her to the Crimea.
8
It was belated public recognition for a man who had been hounded out of office during the Crimea War partly on account of his family connections to Russia.
 
 
On a sunny Friday morning, 26 June 1857, the Queen and Prince Albert attended a parade of Crimean veterans in Hyde Park. By a royal warrant the previous January, the Queen had instituted a new medal, the Victoria Cross, to reward bravery by servicemen regardless of their class or rank. Other European countries had long had such awards – the French, the Légion d’honneur, since 1802; the Dutch, the Military Order of William, and even the Russians had a merit medal before 1812. In Britain, however, there was no system of military honours to recognize the bravery of the troops on the basis of merit, only one to reward officers. The war reports by Russell of
The Times
and other journalists had brought to the attention of the British public many acts of bravery by ordinary troops; they had portrayed the suffering of the soldiers in heroic terms, giving rise to a widespread feeling that a new award was needed to recognize their deeds. Sixty-two Crimean veterans were chosen to receive the first Victoria Crosses – a small bronze medal supposed to be cast from the captured Russian cannon of Sevastopol.
bk
At the ceremony in Hyde Park, each one took his turn to bow before the Queen as Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, read out his name and gave the citation for gallantry. Among these first recipients of Britain’s highest military honour were sixteen privates from the army, four gunners and one sapper, two seamen and three boatswains.
9
The institution of the Victoria Cross not only confirmed the change in the idea of heroism; it also marked a new reverence for war and warriors. The troops who had received the Victoria Cross found their deeds commemorated in a multitude of post-war books that exalted the bravery of men at arms. The most popular,
Our Soldiers and the Victoria Cross
, was brought out by Samuel Beeton, best known as the publisher of his wife’s book,
Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management
, in 1861. Written to inspire and teach boys, the preface of
Our Soldiers
claimed:
Boys – worthy to be called boys – are naturally brave. What visions are those which rise up before the young – what brave words to speak, what brave actions to do – how bravely – if need be – to suffer! … This is the leading thought in this book about Soldiers – it is meant to keep alive the bravery of youth in the experience of manhood.
10
 
This didactic cult of manliness animated the two major British novels set against the background of the Crimean War: Charles Kingsley’s
Two Years Ago
(1857) and Henry Kingsley’s
Ravenshoe
(1861). It was also the pervading theme of Charles Kingsley’s
Westward Ho!
(1855), a New World adventure story set at the time of the Spanish Armada, which was inspired by the militarism and xenophobia of Britain during the Crimean War. Its author himself described it in 1854 as ‘a most ruthless and bloodthirsty book (just what the times want, I think)’.
11
The argument for war was also at the heart of Thomas Hughes’s hugely influential novel
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(1857), whose most famous scene, the fight between Tom and the bully Slogger Williams, was clearly meant to be read by the public as a moral lesson on the recent war against Russia:

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