BOOKS.
TWO CRIMEAN VOLUMES.*
IF anything could add to the gloomy effect which the recent successive revelations of the sufferings of the army in the Crimea tend to produce upon our minds, it would be the moment at which they have begun to appear. The excitement connected with the suppression of the Indian Mutinies, the marvellous triumphs of the small parties of our soldiery, the fame as soldiers of Nicholson, Henry Lawrence, Outram, Havelock, the businesslike management of Mansfield and Lord Clyde—in a word, the reconquest of India, following so- soon as it did upon the incapacity and horrors of the Crimea —dulled the public sense of the catastrophe through which we had passed. The passionate excitement of the time passed away or was deflected into other channels. Gradually it came to be believed that the stories that we had received of those terrible Crimean sufferings contained much exaggera- tion, and that after all rather an unnecessary fuss had been made about them. Surely, whatever else may or may not be true about the Ruler of the universe, this much is certain, that if he in any way disposes the course of events, or exercises an influence on men's minds, there is an almost awful irony about the way in which thoughts and events in different parts of the universe are juxtaposed 1 Since the beginning of the summer of last year, we have been receiving from the East accounts of a war carried on by one of those Eastern nations whom only a few years ago we were accustomed to look upon as feeble, worn-out, and entirely negligable quantities. Every month, almost every week, has brought us clearer and more decisive evidence of the method, the order, the military, sanitary, medical, surgical, and scientific skill with which that war is being conducted. It is difficult to say whether the completeness of the preparations of the Government, or the knowledge and skill of the Generale in the field, is the more conspicuous feature in the drama which is presented to us. As it happened, just when this war was beginning, a party of old Crimean officers visited the scene of the last great war in which we were engaged. Since then, two of them, Lord Wolseley and Sir Evelyn. Wood, have been pouring forth the outcome of the pas- sionate indignation excited in them by the reminiscences, • (1.) Letters from Camp to his Relatives during the Siege of Sebastopol. Bf Colin Frede,iek Campbe'l, late Lieutaiant-Colonel 6th Regiment. With a Preface by Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley. London Richard Bentley and Son. 181,4.—(2.) The Great War with Russia. The Invasion of the Crimea: ta, Personal Retrospect of the Battles of the A tm, Balaclava, and lokerman, and of the Winter of 1561-66, Sc. By William Howard awn% LL.D. London: Rontledge and Sons. 1606.
awakened in their minds by that visit. Naturally, when the subject has once been reopened, others have begun to give us either old letters hitherto kept back because the public would have hardly been prepared for the disclosures which they contained, or private records which at another time might have seemed too personal for publication. Thus
it has happened that we have received almost side by side the story of the way in which Japan makes war in 1894, and of our
mode of making war in 1854. We have already had one par- ticular aspect of the case presented to us in the recently pub. fished memoirs of Sir Beauchamp Walker. We are promised a series of personal records by Sir Daniel Lysons. Others also are announced. The two volumes which we have before us themselves possess, each in its own way, a value quite peculiar to themselves. For not a few readers of the Spectator the letters of Lieutenant-Colonel Campbell will furnish a strange link to the past, and will have a human interest which is only in a secondary degree connected with the history of the campaign which they describe. This, rather than any other, was the link which connected Kingsley, Maurice, and the whole group of men who were round them, directly with the Crimea. The " John " and the "Archi- bald" of these letters, brothers of Lieutenant-Colonel Camp- bell, are the two first names that appear on p. 551 of the first volume of Mr. Maurice's Life as Archibald M. Campbell and John Donald Campbell, who with Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, John Malcolm Ludlow, Daniel Macmillan, Edward Strachey, and others join in presenting to Mr.
Maurice a wedding present, as from those who had been most closely associated with him in the meetings which led up to the great co-operative movement. The " Charles" of these letters, whose death is felt by Colonel Campbell as a staggering blow amid all the visions of slaughter which pass before his hardened eyes, the dear cousin, brother of the editor, whose home was always Campbell's English home, is the C. B. Mansfield, whose name also appears on the above- mentioned list of names of Maurice's friends. He is the Charles Mansfield whose memoir Kingsley wrote, and on the anniversary of his death for many years Mr. Maurice held a special Communion Service for the friends who mourned his loss. Though not the only link which bound the band that gathered round Maurice and Kingsley to the army in the Crimea, Colonel Campbell's was thus by far the closest. Two Years Ago largely owed its genesis to the interest excited in Kingsley's mind in the Crimean War through Campbell, and probably through some of these very letters. Close, however, as is the personal interest for many of the present generation of this particular aspect of the book, the evidence which it supplies of the details of the sufferings of our men, supported as this is by the other testimony which we have been lately receiving, affords ample justification to Dr. Russell in seizing the opportunity to demand a recon- sideration of the view that was taken, for many years after the war, of the correctness of his letters to the Times during its progress. It is not too much to say that the tendency of all this fresh evidence which has been lately published, —written, as much of it has been, with the calmness of forty years after ; written, as much of it was, under the direct impressions of the hour,—is to show conclusively that, if the army in the Crimea was to be saved at all from destruction, Dr. Russell could not have withheld his hand. No one word too much was said either of the mis- management, of the sufferings, or of the facility with which many, if not most, of those sufferings could be, as they, in fact, ultimately were, chiefly through his agency, relieved, if only England were roused to the necessity for relieving them. It was a great service. The circumstances amid which it was rendered under their personal aspect, with which this volume is mainly concerned, are most dramatic in their inte- rest. The man whose presence in the Crimea was perhaps, for its after welfare, more necessary to that army than that of any General or other officer who disembarked, was throughout most of the time almost literally hanging on " by the skin of his teeth" to the skirts of that army,—a pariah and an out cast. Certainly there is a strange irony which presides over the course of history !
Dr. Russell, as might be expected, tells the story of his personal adventures exceedingly well. No one who is familiar with his volume on The British Expedition to the Crimea, or with the earlier work containing simply the Letters from the Crimea, will find this new publication in anywise stale. The subject-matter is altogether different. From the Letters from. the Crimea, Dr. Russell was almost as completely absent, so far as his personal doings and sufferings were.concerned, as Shakespeare from his plays. This volume contains, in regard to the author of those letters, the sort of con-.
fessions for which, from Shakespeare, the world would give much. As a mere story of personal experiences, written by one who well understands the art of using a graphic pen, the volume would be well worth reading. From the wider point of view, the insight which we get into the materials of which history is necessarily composed, whether in the form of the letters of newspaper correspondents or others, of official despatches, or of the personal testimony of supposed eye- witnesses, it is very instructive. To take, as an illustration, the Battle of the Alma. We have, first, just what Dr. Russell saw, or thought that he saw, and an apparently very frank and fair account of the opportunities which he had for seeing it. Then we hear of the gathering round him of the actors, each assuring him that the deeds of their particular portion of the army were all decisive, moat of them completely ignoring the action of that part of the army which they could not see ; most of them in flat contradiction to one another ; most of
them giving accounts of the battle utterly in conflict with the evidence of his own eyes. Then we have the story as told by the great historian of the Crimea and the official de- spatches of Lord Raglan. Neither of them are, of course, placed textually and completely before us. Both of them are given with sufficient fullness to enable us to see, let us say, the difficulties which interpose themselves in the way of accurate statement. On the whole, all these different aspects of the question are presented to us with a certain commend- able dryness. We are left to form our own conclusions, and are not interrupted by too many comments on the part of the author. Very dramatic and interesting also is the sense which Dr. Russell conveys of the unwillingness with which he went to the Crimea, of the personal discomfort, the per- sonal suffering, almost the personal ignominy which dogged him at every step ; the small hope of any recognition or reward which lightened his footsteps ; the certain risk of failure and breakdown from ill-health, or, at first at all events, of expulsion from the army. That might have meant not only ruin so far as one particular career was concerned, but the closing to him of all careers, because of his necessary abandonment on leaving England of all professional prospects as a Parlia- mentary barrister. Consequently there was present the ever. haunting sense of the dangers to which wife and children were exposed. After all, it is only another illustration of the conditions under which the best work has always to be done. If you would save a nation or an army you must take account of the certainty that you will be cursed by the nation or the army that you save. It would be too much to expect that under these circumstances the volumes should be entirely free from a certain sourness and bitterness not altogether whole- some or commendable. It could hardly be otherwise. To have gone through such scenes, to have endured so much suffering, and at the end of life to be able to record the past with entire geniality would indeed be a rare gift. That, how- ever, is the only unfavourable comment that we have to pass on this most instructive, most valuable, and most interesting volume.
We can strongly commend it to all readers, whether they do or do not know anything of the history of the Crimean War. If they know nothing of the story, they will, in- cidentally, and without its being pressed upon them, obtain a very fair idea of the sequence of events ; and in some cases, such as that of the great day at Balaclava, where all the incidents were seen as from the box of a theatre by the narrator, a very graphic narrative of some of the most important events. The more they know of the details from other sources, the more they will be interested in following the personal experiences of one who, though he held no official position, exercised unquestionably a most important influence on the course of events.
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