An old-fashioned or modern war?
Simon Heffer
THE CRIMEAN WAR: A CLASH OF EMPIRES
by Ian Fletcher anti Natalia Ishchenko Sind/mount, £25. pp, 557, ISBN 1862272387 £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
HELL RIDERS by Terry Brighton Penguin/Viking, £20, pp. 364, ISBN 0670915289
£18 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848
This month is the 150th anniversary of the battle of Balaklava, still the most famous 'exploit' of the Crimean war. Those who know little or nothing about that particular conflict will, even in these uneducated times, have heard a line or two of Tennyson's famous poem marking a feature of the battle, 'The Charge of the Light Brigade'. Of these two new books on the war, one deals with the whole campaign, the other with its most famous incident. One of the interesting facts all the authors present in their books is that of the 664 men who rode into the Valley of Death (a number Terry Brighton, by various means, raises to 666) about 540 eventually got out of it again. By far the highest casualty rate was among the horses. Compared with the Somme or an evening in the Blitz, the Valley of Death was a piece of cake. The selling point of Ian Fletcher and Natalia Ishchenko's book is that it is jointly written by an Englishman and a Russian, thereby providing perspectives on both sides of the conflict. Since the French, Turks and, later on, the Austrians were also involved, even this two-hander cannot give a complete picture. Certainly, though, the personalities and perceptions of the Russian side are well brought out, and add to a picture of completeness. Aficionados of military history will find much of what they like here. Blow-by-blow descriptions of the Alma, Balaklava and Inkerman are provided with such detail that one could almost believe the authors, with a roving team of cameramen, were present in the thick of the fighting. Sometimes, though, the progress can be hard to follow. It would have been helpful to the reader had there been more, and more precise, maps: those in this book are, frankly, inadequate. The authors are good at providing penportraits of the leading protagonists on each side: Lord Raglan, who until his death from cholera in the summer of 1855, was the British commander-in-chief, is especially well drawn, as is his French colleague Canrobert. The benefit of the Russian input is that various local manuscript sources have been consulted, which lends an air of originality to parts of the text. All the rest is compiled rather relentlessly from secondary sources, so will provide nothing new to the Crimea buff. The basic story is competently told, outside the battles. Although comprised of hardy regulars, the British army was short of battle experience — its commanders had mostly not seen action since Waterloo, almost 40 years beforehand — but conducted itself with great professionalism and dedication. It was woefully illequipped and had a miserable time in the Crimean winter, as it sat outside Sevastopol in freezing and wet conditions for which it was not prepared. About half of it was eliminated by death, disease or wounds during just over a year. In the warmer months cholera felled many men on all sides, and medical resources, even after the arrival of Florence Nightingale, were limited.
The war was marked by incompetence on all sides. Sevastopol, which was under siege from the autumn of 1854 until the late summer of 1855, could have been overrun almost immediately had the British pressed home their advantage. Inkerman, fought in a fog, was almost a farce. In the end, it was the French who inflicted the crucial defeat on the Russians that had them suing for peace, so it is hard for Britain to claim this was a war it won.
This book suffers from two faults. First, it is appallingly written: the clichés volley and thunder from almost all of its 540 pages, and reading it quickly becomes about as exhausting as fighting the war itself. Second (and perhaps it is a related fault) the narrative is often unclear. One crucial passage near the opening of the book, where the authors outline the causes of the war, is occasionally impermeable.
Yet, for all that, the story is redeemed by tales of heroism, men carrying on in the face of overwhelming odds or horrible wounds, and insights into the nature of 19th-century warfare. The authors plainly know their stuff. At the end of their work, they pose the question about whether the Crimea was the last old-fashioned war or the first modern one. An anecdote they relate from the battle of Balaklava would seem to put it firmly in the former camp. Lord Cardigan was assaulted by a pair of Cossack lancers during the Light Brigade's manoeuvres. They tried to capture him. One of them speared his thigh with a lance. Cardigan refused even to draw his sword, 'considering it unworthy of a commanding officer to be seen brawling with private soldiers'. A man with such a sense of propriety as that deserved better than to be commemorated by an item of knitwear.
Terry Brighton's book, though helped by dealing with a specific area of the conflict, is superior in almost every respect to its rival. The author has relied entirely on accounts written by survivors of the charge, or by witnesses to it. He quotes extensively from them. He is thorough and accurate, but never allows himself to be so bogged down by the detail that the reader is at a loss to fathom what is going on. His explanation of the causes of the war is more concise and clear. His conclusions about whose fault the 'blunder' was are equally well set out. He writes with pace and precision, and as an account of this episode his book will he hard to beat.
He is also far better on the background of the main players than Fletcher and Ischenko, sufficiently so to allow us to forgive his repeated solecism of referring to Lord George Paget, a younger son of the Marquess of Anglesey, as 'Lord Paget', and imagining he knew Lord Lucan well from the House of Lords, where in fact Paget had no right to sit. He tells us of the hatred between Lucan and his brother-inlaw, Cardigan, which was so bad that the two men could hardly hear to be in the same room as each other. He recounts at the end that Cardigan returned in triumph to England whereas Lucan slunk back and was accused of bungling the charge. The two men were both reviled by the soldiery for their capriciousness and martinet-like qualities (though Mr Brighton acquits Cardigan of having run away during the thick of the battle). Before long Cardigan's arrogance (he had slept on his yacht in Sevastopol Bay rather than with his men in camp, and would not bother to get to the field of play much before 10 a.m., after a leisurely breakfast) soon demolished his reputation again and, like Lucan, he spent the rest of his life as a justified victim of obloquy. Many of the soldiers who survived ended up in the workhouse; the last died, aged 96, in 1927. At the end of his excellent book, the author prints a list of every man who rode in the charge, and whether he was killed or wounded. Even if they escaped penury, too many were to die out in India after the mutiny a few years later. None, though, would ever take part in more glorious a moment than Balaklava.
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