The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (75 page)

Palmerston, Lord John Russell’s foreign secretary, at first welcomed Napoleon III’s coup. His liberal sympathies had prompted him to react with delight to the 1848 revolutions all over Europe, but when what had been constitution-making turned to fighting in the streets, he became seriously alarmed. He thought that the danger of real revolution was so great that it was better for France to be ruled by military despotism. Without the authority of the queen or the prime minister, Palmerston gave official recognition to Louis Napoleon’s coup. But Queen Victoria and Russell had had enough of Palmerston’s idiosyncratic and impetuous behaviour, and he was sacked. Furious, he decided to take his revenge by bringing down the government over a bill to strengthen the militia against the Napoleonic threat. Since Palmerston could not form a government on his own, the Tory Protectionists under Lord Derby as prime minister and with Disraeli as chancellor of the Exchequer came in. But, though Disraeli made the Tories abandon protection, the Peelites continued to be close to the Whigs, and neither could do much with Palmerston outside their tent.

At the end of 1852 the Whigs and Peelites put the government in the minority and the Tories resigned. Like musical chairs, a new coalition of Peelites and Whigs headed by Lord Aberdeen took its place. Gladstone returned to the Treasury, Lord John Russell became leader of the House of Commons, and Palmerston was reinstated in the government, this time as home secretary. But though he might be at the Home Office Palmerston’s presence gave martial vigour to the administration. In 1853 when the Russians invaded two Ottoman provinces on the Danube and sank the Turkish fleet, Britain responded with war. The Eastern Question had once more taken centre stage, though the war itself was to be fought on the south coast of Russia where the Crimean Peninsula juts into the Black Sea.

The background to the conflict was quite straightforward. For a long time the Russian tsar Nicholas I had been seeking to pre-empt what he considered to be the inevitable break-up of the Turkish Empire by dividing it among the great powers. The feeble nature of Ottoman rule even before mid-century had convinced him that the empire should be parcelled out sooner rather than later. This would prevent the chaos of an uncontrolled disintegration and the creation of independent Balkan nation states. Ever since Greece had won her independence, the peoples of Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia and Macedonia had been stirred by the idea of governing themselves.

As long as Russian influence remained paramount at Constantinople, the tsar was prepared to leave the Turkish Empire alone. But in 1852 it seemed that the French were replacing the Russians as most favoured nation. For Louis Napoleon’s ambassador to Turkey persuaded the sultan that henceforth Latin monks in Jerusalem should hold the key to Christ’s tomb, the Holy Sepulchre, instead of Greek Orthodox monks. This was intended to endear Napoleon’s regime to the French clergy.

The ‘affair of monks’, as it was known, plunged Europe into war. To the Russians, for Latin monks to hold the keys to the Holy Sepulchre was no different from having French warships in the Dardanelles. What the tsar and his advisers did not want was control of their Turkish neighbour to fall into the hands of France. This was what prompted the Russian invasion in 1853 of the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (modern Romania). The Russians then refused to leave unless the Turks announced that the Greeks were the custodians of the Holy Sepulchre. When the Russians sank the Turkish fleet at Sinope on the Black Sea on 30 November the British were hot for war against the threatening Russian bear. With Palmerston always distrustful of Russian intentions, an alliance was made with the new Bonaparte emperor, who welcomed the end to France’s quarantine after Waterloo.

In January 1854 the French and British fleets, which were already at anchor off Constantinople after the Russian invasion of the Danubian provinces, sailed up the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. There they would land troops to destroy the Russian military installation at Sebastopol in the Crimea and weaken Russia so thoroughly that she would not try to seize Turkish territory again, while another British fleet would go north to Kronstadt on the Baltic coast, the Russian equivalent of Portsmouth.

From start to finish the operation was a disaster. The British troops were equipped neither for the Russian winter nor for a long siege. It had been incorrectly assumed in England that capturing Sebastopol could be achieved in six weeks. It took a year. Autumn storms wrecked almost every ship carrying food supplies and warm clothing across the Black Sea. Such clothing as did eventually arrive was often inappropriate or unwearable owing to the carelessness of the quartermaster’s agents–there were, for example, 5,000 left boots because they had not been paired before they left. The conditions of the peninsula are memorialized in the word ‘balaclava’. Our modern article of clothing derives its name from the battle named after the nearest Russian town to Sebastopol. The cold was so intense and the British so badly equipped that the men had to put stockings over their faces and cut the eye and mouth holes out. The Crimean War is also infamous for the Charge of the Light Brigade. Immortalized in the poem by the poet laureate of the day Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 600 British cavalrymen led by Lord Cardigan rode two miles up ‘the valley of death’ straight into the firing line of the Russian guns–the result of the subordinate officer Lord Lucan’s misunderstanding of an order, and only a third of them returned alive. Marshal Bosquet, a French general who witnessed the charge, exclaimed disbelievingly, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’

Fortunately those British soldiers did not suffer wholly in vain, for there was another, more influential witness at the scene of this crime of ineptitude. The correspondent of the London
Times
, W. H. Russell, called their masters to account and showed the nineteenth century that the pen really could be mightier than the sword. Russell was the first of a different breed, a war correspondent. Although most armies had endured suffering, it was the first time that a nation’s public had been made vividly aware of it. The humming wires of the telegraph had shrunk the world. Via Vienna initially and then from the new telegraph office at Constantinople, Russell sent back daily despatches reporting on the course of the war.

Above all, Russell attacked the absurd deference to regulations laid down in London and the failure of the army chiefs to adapt to circumstances. Soldiers were falling ill because of their poor diet. They could have been eating rice, which was easily available locally as it was the mainstay of the Turkish diet, but they were prevented from doing so–because rice was not the standard issue as laid down in the regulations. Bales of urgently needed supplies could not be unpacked unless a board was called–a board being six designated men required to note the contents of the bales as they were unpacked to prevent thieving. Due to the chaos and confusion of the war, bales of winter uniforms or dressings would languish for weeks unopened because enough members of a board could rarely be found at the same time. Meanwhile the troops in the field missed the winter coats waiting at the quayside, and the wounds of the sick worsened without the clean lint trussed up in the bales.

But Russell’s daring criticism had done its bit. The often lazy and somnolent genie of British public opinion, so powerful when awake, awoke now. The hopelessness of Aberdeen as a war leader and the need for a masterly and decisive character like Palmerston was signalled when the House of Commons voted in favour of a Royal Commission to investigate the way the war was being handled in the Crimea. Aberdeen treated this as a vote of no confidence, and resigned. Palmerston took over as prime minister.

But before the Aberdeen government fell in 1855, the war minister Sidney Herbert had redeemed himself a little. He had asked his friend, the wealthy thirty-four-year-old Miss Florence Nightingale, who ran a nursing home in Harley Street, to go out to Scutari to visit the British hospital on the Turkish side of the Black Sea opposite Constantinople, and find out what was going wrong with the nursing. For until Florence Nightingale started managing the hospital, more men were dying at the Barrack Hospital at Scutari than in the field hospitals. The mortality rate was running at almost 50 per cent of the hospital population. For more to survive lying on frozen ground with a thin bell tent above them than in a large hospital suggested that there was something very badly amiss. Florence Nightingale was the one person Herbert thought might make a difference to the unhappy situation by sheer force of personality, and he was right. Her time at Scutari was as important to the success of the war as Palmerston’s taking over the running of it.

To Miss Nightingale, as she tripped round the wards in her neat white apron, one of the most obvious problems was immediately apparent. Wherever she went, wounded men were lying alongside open sewers breathing in infection. The conditions were worse than those of a prison. She was also appalled by the attitude of the officers to their men. She and her thirty nurses could not believe that their simple requests, such as the removal of the men from the area of the sewage, frequent disposal of waste, clean pyjamas, a monumental quantity of lint and properly cooked meat, were seen as ‘spoiling the brutes’. She noted caustically that Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the influential ambassador to the Ottoman court, for many years had twenty-seven servants all to himself. The hospital was in full view of his palace on the Bosphorus. But, to her amazement and indignation, he offered no help at all to the British citizens he represented, even though ‘the British army was perishing within sight of his windows’.

Fortunately Palmerston listened to Florence Nightingale. The British steam engine was harnessed to help the British army. A railway was quickly built between the harbour and the siege camp at Sebastopol, for ferrying supplies efficiently and the wounded comfortably. Soyer, the sought-after chef of the Reform Club, volunteered his services in the Crimea to develop delicate food for convalescents. Under a regime of tender loving care where they were treated as human beings, the soldiers began to recover in the hospital where previously they had tended to die.

Florence Nightingale never used the word ‘germ’–in fact the concept of germs would not be known for over a decade, when it was discovered by Joseph Lister, the inventor of antiseptics. But she had an intuitive sense of bacteria, or dirt as she called it, passing from one person to another. In the case of the seriously ill, she noted, this could be fatal. By forcing the orderlies and her nurses to wash their hands between examinations, she caused the rate of infection to drop dramatically. Before the invention of antibiotics, this was almost miraculous. Thanks to elementary hygiene rules, Florence Nightingale defeated something that could destroy an army–disease.

The Royal Commissioners investigating what went wrong in the Crimea had nothing but the highest praise for Miss Nightingale, who had become known as the Lady with the Lamp (owing to her habit of wandering softly about the beds by night holding a small lamp). From the end of the Crimean War nursing became an admired profession under the strict rules she had set out. Previously the nurses used in hospitals had simply been pairs of hands, and tended to be ex-prostitutes retrieved by clergymen from a life on the streets.

For all Florence Nightingale’s dedicated work, of the 25,000 British soldiers in the Crimea, no fewer than 10,000 either lost their lives or were shipped home to England as invalids. Despite brave fighting by the British, it was the valorous French army (to whose numbers were added 15,000 Sardinian soldiers to ensure that the Italian question got a mention at the peace table) who were chiefly responsible for the fall of Sebastopol. By 1856 the war had drifted to a close, with both sides eager for peace; the Russians were particularly anxious to see the back of the British fleet which still surrounded the naval base at Kronstadt. The Treaty of Paris, signed that year, satisfied the French and English and humiliated the Russians by neutralizing the Black Sea. The demilitarization of the Black Sea proved unenforceable after 1871, however, when Russia seized the opportunity presented by war between France and Germany to abrogate the treaty unilaterally. By the 1890s the Russian fleet was one of the strongest in the world and Sebastopol had been rebuilt. Nevertheless, by insisting that Turkey put her house in order in her treatment of Christians, the treaty gave Russia less excuse to interfere in her internal affairs and rendered the continued upholding of the Ottoman Empire a more respectable aim of British diplomats.

The British military establishment proved almost as impervious to reform as the Ottoman Empire. Despite the scandal over the conduct of the Crimean War and despite the Royal Commission’s findings, only a few of its recommendations were implemented. It would take more than fifteen years and the defeat of the French army by the Prussians to make Britain sufficiently exercised about the state of her own army to revise her defences in a thorough fashion.

Since 1855 Palmerston had been prime minister at the head of a Whig government, and so he remained–apart from a Tory interlude, a second Derby–Disraeli ministry in 1858–9–for the next ten years until his death. In foreign affairs he was progressive, a Whig or–as the Whig–Peelite coalition was increasingly becoming known–a Liberal, the friend of constitutional governments and exiled Italian patriots. But, where domestic affairs were concerned, Palmerston’s reforming instincts had come to a full stop. As he would say in the early 1860s, when he was being pressed for educational and franchise reforms, ‘There is really nothing to be done. We cannot go on adding to the statute book
ad infinitum
.’ Until he died, therefore, the Liberal party was unable to follow its true path. It was kept in a conservative straitjacket.

Palmerston was soon occupied with another war, defending British interests in China. Despite the concessions made after the first China War, China remained reluctant to open herself up to trade with the west, a trade Britain was most eager to pursue. She would not even allow a British embassy on Chinese soil. When the Chinese authorities imprisoned the crew of an English ship named the
Arrow
for suspected piracy, it was the excuse for war. By 1860, after the capture of key forts in the Peiho river and the burning down of the emperor’s summer palace as revenge for the murder of unarmed westerners, Palmerston had opened the major Chinese ports up to British custom and established diplomatic relations. In 1857 Richard Cobden, the veteran Radical, had put down a motion of censure against Palmerston’s aggression, and Palmerston went to the country. But his actions towards China were completely approved and he was returned with a majority of eighty-five seats.