Victoria's Cross (7 page)

The ceremonials in Hyde Park that June day in 1857 were therefore the culmination of a remarkably profound revolution in British social attitudes. Up to that point few questioned the fiction that officers were natural gentlemen, born to lead, while the other ranks were brutes in need of regular flogging to punish drunkenness and generally maintain discipline. Under the pressure of widespread public anger, fed by detailed newspaper reporting of events in the Crimea, this fiction was rent apart. In the Crimea, Britain's political and military leaders had revealed themselves to be incompetent and, on occasion, selfishly callous, while those whom they led endured unnecessary hardships and sometimes demonstrated remarkable individual bravery. Of course, this had long been true; there was qualitatively little difference between the rank and file of Waterloo and their successors at Balaclava. What had changed was that newspapers sent to the Crimea skilled professional reporters, such as
The Times
' s William Howard Russell, whose colourful writing brought home starkly the appalling conditions endured
by officers and men. It became impossible for the monarchy and Parliament to remain in ignorance, and, in turn, it became politically useful to elevate some of the rank and file to hero status. The lasting importance of the VC is that henceforth individuals from the ‘brute' class could claim a place alongside the most elevated peer of the realm, as decreed by the highest rank of all, the monarchy, driven by political pressure, exercised beyond the ballot box through newspapers.
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Yet although Victoria felt genuine sympathy for the men who stood before her that day (and the thousands more, alive and dead, who could not), this deliberately public gesture also helped shore up the crumbling edifice of the royal prerogative – the ‘residue of discretionary or arbitrary authority', according to the constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey, ‘which at any given time is legally left in the hands of the Crown',
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in this case authority over Britain's military forces.
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Over the course of Victoria's reign, the royal prerogative gradually shrank in significance, while Victoria fought every step of the way to defend against Parliamentary encroaches her vestigial control over the army. For her, the creation of the VC was primarily a deeply conservative step, a reassertion of her dwindling personal authority in military matters; that it paradoxically also represented a radical departure from tradition by dissolving the ‘them and us' officers-and-men distinction was welcomed by her as enlarging her status as the
people's
monarch.

The warrant establishing the Victoria Cross was promulgated on 29 January 1856. The War Office then instructed Horse Guards, the army's headquarters in London, to circulate a letter to all Crimean war commanders, asking for nominations of suitable candidates for the new medal. The response was extremely varied. Some commanding officers returned lengthy lists of names, with colourful descriptions of events, while others listed a few names and brief accounts. Still others asserted that their subordinates required no medal to encourage them to do their duty. Indeed, the COs of the 42nd, 50th, 56th, 62nd, 71st
and 79th regiments, most of which had seen action in the Crimea,
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declined to nominate anyone, which meant their officers and men missed the chance of a possible VC. Some COs were astonishingly importunate on their own behalf. Lieutenant Colonel Daubeney of the 55th Foot nominated himself, staking his claim over six densely written pages and obtaining endorsements from six privates and one sergeant. His ink was wasted; he failed to get the VC he so obviously coveted.
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The first 111 Victoria Cross winners were therefore doubly fortunate: they had survived – no posthumous VCs were permitted – and their commanding officer had bothered to write a recommendation. In fact, they were
trebly
fortunate: in the Crimea, as in all wars, certainty of what actually happened amid the shot and shell, the smoky confusion, the cacophony of voices struggling to be heard above dying men and horses, was shaky to say the least. A contemporary account from a British officer reveals the kind of confusing disinformation that was standard on the Crimea's battlefields:

[I]t is almost impossible to get at the truth of things that take place out here. We hear one day that ‘A. behaved very well in the Sortie last night'. Next day it appears that ‘A. couldn't be found on that occasion' & that B. was the man, & perhaps next day we find that B. was not there at all! Just conceive of the difficulty of ‘an authority' getting at the truth of anything. I could give you 50 illustrations of this . . . To this day I don't know, & cannot find out, who was the Officer of Artillery who at ‘Inkerman' brought up two large guns that helped materially to gain the day. I ought to know for they fired away within 20 yards of me for some hours, & I positively cannot say who it was. 4 or 5 Officers all claim the honour of it. Where is the truth there?
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The genesis of the Crimean War was little understood even at the time, steeped in the treacherous waters that always swirled around the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman Empire was usually described in
contemporary diplomatic language. In Britain, the Crimean War's enduring legacies are a national reverence for Florence Nightingale, feted as the saviour of forlorn British wounded, and the Victoria Cross.
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The events of October 1853 to February 1856 in which Britain, France, Turkey and Sardinia were victorious in their struggle to contain, temporarily, the political and territorial ambitions of Russia, saw the VC blossom from the corpse heaps at Sebastopol, Alma and Inkerman. For Britain the political and military humiliations were grievous, the death toll unnecessarily high.

Prior to actual hostilities Britain was engulfed by war fever and anti-Russian sentiment, stoked by newspaper depictions of Russia as an uncivilized despotism opposed to liberty and free trade. Russian troops invaded the Turkish-ruled principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia; Turkey declared war on Russia on 23 October 1853. Britain and France followed suit at the end of March 1854, after Russia initially ignored an ultimatum to withdraw its troops, although it eventually did so in July 1854. The immediate
casus belli
had therefore disappeared; but resentment against Russia in Paris and London had reached such a pitch that neither capital was in a mood for compromise. In Britain Lord Lyndhurst made an inflammatory anti-Russian speech in the House of Lords on 19 June 1854:

If this semi-barbarous people with a Government of the same character, disguised under the thin cover of a showy but spurious refinement . . . a despotism the most coarse and degrading that ever afflicted mankind – if this Power with such attributes should ever establish itself in the heart of Europe (which Heaven in its mercy avert!) it would be the heaviest and most fatal calamity that could fall on a civilized world.
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Lyndhurst wanted to see Sebastopol, the Russian Black Sea port on the Crimean peninsula, ‘razed to the ground'. Queen Victoria enthusiastically endorsed the war, as did many others with radically
different views, including Marx and Engels; unlike them, Victoria frequently stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to wave farewell to her troops. At the start of the war the British monarch's only regret was that none of her four sons was old enough to fight. The chauvinist British public had its hatred of Russia fed by an intoxicated press that was just becoming aware of its power to influence public opinion. The Queen, the press, public opinion – all pushed the irresolute and instinctively non-interventionist prime minister Lord Aberdeen into declaring war, even as he informed Victoria that he had ‘such a terrible repugnance for it, in all its forms'. To which she retorted: ‘This will never do.'
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On 24 February 1854, a month before war was declared, Victoria wrote to Aberdeen that ‘we are going to make war upon Russia!' and that ‘the country is eager for War at this moment, and ready to grant men and money'.
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If Victoria was ready for war, her army was not. It embarked with no maps of the Crimea, instead relying on outdated travellers' memoirs. The assumption was that the war would be short, so no winter clothing or hut-building equipment was shipped out. Army commanders had no idea how many Russian troops were stationed on the peninsula, nor where they were situated. General Sir Ian Hamilton, a professional soldier who in 1921 reviewed the British army's history, considered that the men who went to the Crimea were impressive:

England has never sent forth a more splendid body of troops than those she embarked for the Crimea . . . but its indomitable spirit had been broken . . . Not the skill of Todleben, not the fighting qualities of the Russian soldiers, not General January or February, not pestilence, not superior armament, but just the good old British national Generalissimo, Sir Muddle T. Somehow, K.G, O.M, G.C.B, marched our poor fellows off by battalions into another and, let us hope, better organised world.
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Cholera, scurvy and dysentery swept through the army's ranks in the first few months. As early as mid-November 1854, two-thirds of the British army's pack animals were dead, mostly through starvation or disease. George Frederick Dallas, a lieutenant with the 46th Regiment, wrote on 11 December 1854: ‘The horses have all been so starving that they have eaten each other's tails! & it is a fact that not one horse in ten of the Artillery has any hair at all left on that ornamental part of their persons, which adds considerably to their ghastly appearance.'
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The casualty rate was astonishingly high. Out of the total British contingent of almost 83,000, around 19,000 died, mostly from disease, and a further 11,374 were disabled. The Commissariat Department in London was responsible for supplying the army, but was controlled by the Treasury and rapidly became a byword for corruption and mismanagement. Among its achievements was the shipping of left and right boots for the army on different vessels, one of which sank in a severe gale off the shore of Balaclava on 14 November 1854. On 14 January 1855, at the height of a bitterly cold Crimean winter and less than a month after Captain Scobell stood up in the House of Commons to call for a new Order of Merit for the British armed forces, Lieutenant Dallas gave his family joyful news – boots had arrived:

We got up at last about 20 pairs of boots per company [around 100 men], a great want as the men were all in a wretched state. Would you believe that they are all too small! & except for a very few men useless! . . . With endless wealth, great popular enthusiasm, numberless ships, the best material for Soldiers in the World, we are certainly the worst clad, worst fed, worst housed Army that ever was read of.
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Eleven days later
The Times
scathingly denounced those responsible for the unfolding disaster: ‘If Government . . . choose to sell themselves to the aristocracy, and through the aristocracy to their
enemies, it is their own affair; we wipe our hands of the national suicide.'
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Abortive efforts were made to investigate the origin of the Crimean shambles and to allocate responsibility. Two commissioners, Colonel Alex Tulloch and Sir John McNeill, were sent by Parliament to the Crimea in February 1855. Tulloch knew the army's ways intimately, having spent twenty years at the War Office; McNeill was a Scottish surgeon and Poor Law commissioner. Their report was devastating:

Out of about 10,000 men who died during these seven months [the winter of 1854–5], belonging to the Crimean Army, only 1,200 were cut off by that epidemic [cholera], the remainder perished by no foeman's hand – no blast of pestilence, but from the slow, though sure, operation of disease, produced by causes, most of which appeared capable at least of mitigation.
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To Queen Victoria's consternation, their report was presented to Parliament in January 1856.
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For the army's senior ranks, the report was an affront to their authority and their dignity. Victoria admonished Palmerston, then prime minister, that if ‘military officers of the Queen's Army are to be judged as to the manner in which they have discharged their military duties before an enemy by a Committee of the House of Commons, the command of the Army is at once transferred from the Crown to that Assembly'.

The government responded by announcing on 17 February 1856 a Commission of Inquiry consisting of seven senior military officers, none of whom had either served in or visited the Crimea; this commission exonerated all the officers censured by Tulloch and McNeill. Detailed daily newspaper reports presented the British breakfast table with a grotesque contrast between the valiant struggle of the rank and file and the appalling conditions in which they lived and died, and the managerial blunders of the Commissariat in London and the
ineptitude of the military commanders. Readers of
The Times
enjoying their morning coffee discovered that even this small luxury was beyond the troops:

The cruellest farce now performing in the Crimea is that of giving the soldiers their coffee in the berry. One has hardly patience to read the detail of its preparation – it has to be roasted over a few twigs in the lid of a can, and then pounded between stones! . . . I would ask if the authorities have yet sent out ground coffee packed in tin, or – which might be as convenient – coffee in the berry already roasted, and to grind it some thousand or two of coffee-mills, which may be readily purchased at about 3s each? Our bigwigs are certainly contemptible blunderers.
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Lord Raglan, the commander of the British expeditionary force, despite his complete lack of experience of commanding troops in the field, finally caught up with the coffee chaos, complaining in a letter to Queen Victoria on 20 January 1855 about the Commissariat's delivery of unroasted coffee beans to the front.
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