THE CRIMEAN WAR.*

THE two books before us are intended to supply the materials for a cool historical estimate, at this distance of time, of the rights and wrongs, the blunders and the achievements, of the much-vexed Crimean War. Sir Anthony Sterling served practically throughout the campaign, and after collecting his home-correspondence, had some copies privately printed, and dying more than twenty years ago, desired that the book should be published. The executors, however, con- sidered that there was too much in the collection which would injure the personal feelings of those concerned in the criticisms of the writer ; but now that nearly all who can be considered to have been responsible have passed away, the publication is put forward as a " salutary record of the mismanagement that has too frequently attended military expeditions from this country," as in the case of the Waterloo campaign of earlier days, and later on at the Cape, and on the Nile. General Lysons, who is responsible for the second collection, is himself still living, and publishes his letters to his mother and sister during the Crimean War, on the plea of having been "the very first soldier to jump on shore at the landing of the army at Old Fort,' and never to have left the camp of the Light Division for a single day from the commencement to the end of the war." Unlike his precursor, General Lysons has no desire to pose as a severe and unsparing critic, but contents himself with a straightforward record of the doings and sufferings of himself and those around him, of hairbreadth escapes and personal experiences, which will be attractive to a different class of readers from those who will appreciate the strictures of Sir Anthony Sterling. The General's book is dedicated to the Duke of Cambridge, as a kind of guarantee of " no offence i' the world," and may be treated as an antidote to the more pretentious work. We are not sure that much is gained, even though it be at so appreciable a distance of time, by exposures more or less authoritative—it is but what Sir Anthony thought, after all—of the mismanagement inherent in all military expeditions, especially at the outset. It is not only England that is guilty of such mistakes. We have read of them in connection with ancient Rome and Greece ; we have heard of them very frequently indeed where France has been concerned ; and Germany herself has not been free from the imputation at times. The figure of Moltke, thinking and planning out in his tent every detail of his war, is, as we believe, unique in history. It is to the end of a campaign, and not to its beginning, that men must look, if they are to judge of it as a whole. We believe that it is not so much for its conduct • (1.) The Story of the Highland Brigade in the Crimea Founded on Letters written during the 'ears 1864.1866, and 18.66. By Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Sterling. London: Remington and Co. 1895.—(2.) The Crimean War from First to Last. By General Sir Dan el Lysons, 0.0.B. London: Julia Murray.

as for its inception that History will record her condemnation of the Crimean War, if condemned at her bar it is to be ; not so much for its execution as for its design. No good has come, nor does it seem that good ever can come, of attempts of the Western Empires to sustain or to protect the Sultan's power. The disparity is too complete ; the opposition too entire. Nature and Religion throw their bars in the way of the alliance ; and they are bars that, in these matters, it seems impossible to bridge over. The Russian question is an enduringly grave one ; but Turkish alliances seem to give no clue to its solution.

Sir Anthony Sterling, however, is of the good old type of soldier who has nothing to do with considerations of this kind. Against everything that the authorities either advised or did, he is the grandest and most unmitigated grumbler to be found. Rightly or wrongly, he convinced himself that politics alone were the motive-power of everything that was done :—

" As Vinoy said to me last winter, when I was trying to arrange something for the convenience of landing his stores at Balaclava, `Jo vois que chez vous tout se fait par la politique.' I believe, [he writes in another place] that the Court had been planning to give Codrington the command of the army, but that Lord Pan- inure, the responsible man, has concluded that Markham shall have it, and that he positively would have been named in the spring ; this design his illness will disturb ; and should he not recover, Lord P. will have to look out for some one else. I cannot imagine what has given his lordship so high an opinion of his capacity. In India he was considered to be very brave, and the best ibex-shot rn the country The moment that we receive definite orders to go into winter quarters, which we expect every day, C. intends to ask for six weeks' leave of absence. He will go direct to London and take Lord Hardinge and Lord Panmure by the throat, and, I think, will not come back to this army. I shall wait till I hear from him before doing anything. If they try to make me serve after the injustice I have suffered, there will be nothing left for me but to sham sick, which I disdain to do, or to sell out. Strictly speaking, I ought to refuse any employment except on the personal staff, unless I am promoted into my proper place,—viz., a colonel, with date of 17th July ; but in extremities my iron temper may have to yield a little, and I may have to eat my leek. Nothing can possibly be more against the grain. There is, indeed, the resource

of writing to the newspapers, with my name subscribed Would that I were an M.P., or rather a Peer ; had I been either the wish would be unnecessary, for I should not have been passed over."

The subsequent letters tell us that Sir Anthony followed up his reflections by the Englishman's resource of writing to the Times in support and vindication of his favourite " C.," whose full name is suppressed for no especial purpose, as it can only be an open secret to all who are acquainted with the particulars of the time. His hero-worship seems to have been shared by other observers, if we are to trust Pelissier's remark that " Je ne vois jamais cet homme sans avoir envie de l'embrasser." The letter to the Times, though it brought Sir Anthony many compliments, seems to have had, upon those terrible persons the authorities, no effect at all. At an earlier date (February, 1855) we find Sir Anthony anticipating a great change in the constitution of the English Army, and hoping that it would consist in an exact copy of the French organisation invented by the first Napoleon. We are not ourselves able to put much faith in a critic who takes what seems to us so purely impossible a view, nor do we profess to understand the data on which he founded so radical a theory of change. It must surely be an accepted fact that every nation must vary its system of organisation according to its national characteristics. If the England of 1855 should have copied the military arrangements of France, her successor of forty years later should reproduce the system of Moltke. Military success or national stability, we venture to think, are not to be attained in this way. But Sir Anthony Sterling was nothing if not an impugner of every- thing that was done, in contrast to all that ought to have been. The letter which we have last quoted gives us another specimen of his combativeness in an onslaught upon the reform so identified in our day with the name of Miss Nightingale.

That lady and her nurses seem to have been nothing to the stout old soldier but a kind of tote noire, who had no business whatever to interfere with such a soldierly prerogative as wounds and sickness :-

"We are going to make an attempt upon Miss Nightingale. She keeps all our men when they are discharged from hospital, and makes nurses of them, not considering that the other men are doing their duty in the trenches. I believe she has about SOO men of the Highland Brigade thus employed. There ought to be men enlisted as nurses, and the soldiers should be left to fight. The Chief Medical Officer out here ought to have been intrusted with Nightingale powers."

In another place he hopes to " recover our convalescents out of the Nightingale's claws." Of all this we can only say that History has made up her mind about Miss Nightingale and all that is so honourably connected with her name, far too completely to be likely to change it now. In this instance at all events, it was English organisation and English arrange- ments that were found worthy of foreign imitation in more than one quarter ; and we imagine that Sir Anthony's com- ments will be read with more of amusement at the old soldier's grumblings than with any other marked feeling.

" We have here a certain Miss 5—, who has rebelled on geographical principles. She avers that she signed articles to obey the Nightingale as her lieutenant in Turkey in Asia, but not in Russia in Europe She drinks her bottle of claret, and has her own private reasons besides her benevolence-bump, for coming here ; but her geography seems to be out in the matter.

Amid this grim war female traeasseries are out of place."

Another letter from the Balaclava camp ends with a wail over the English authorities for refusing to be warned by him before he started, about the dangers of fever, and dis- misses them briefly as fools who purchase their experience. " Poor England ! purse-proud and boastful, how low art thou fallen !" This appears to us, we confess, a poor sort of spirit in which to fight his country's battles, and does not allow us to wonder much that the writer's promotion was not so rapid as he thought it ought to have been. Furthermore, as his observation led Sir Anthony to the conclusion that Louis Napoleon had more of the qualifications of a good General than any one else he could hear of, we should not be sur- prised to find his qualities as a military critic submitted to rather serious question.

We cannot deny that in this revival of the story of the old Crimean War the book of Sir Daniel Lysons possesses much more attraction than the more pretentious companion that we have coupled with it in the present article.

In its fresh-air straightforwardness, and absence of com- plaint about anything, it seems to reflect the spirit of the man, and the frank and soldierly face we find upon the frontispiece : —" To-morrow morning we expect to be at work early. I do not think that we shall meet with much opposition in landing, but the attack on the intrenched camp will be heavy work, no one knowing what number they may have against us ; but we shall thrash them somehow, that's certain." In these pages, at all events, there is nothing to be found about purse-proud England, or any intimation of a suspicion that she had fallen so low as Sir Anthony found her. It is a simple and stirring account of battle and adventure, and the General's much more simple summary of early misadventure deals with both the allies equally :—" The French are not fit to move—no more are we—and to complete the misfortunes of this ill-omened expedition, Varna has been burned to the ground, together with nearly all our commissariat and engineer stores, all the French stores, and the private supplies and shops, &c. I suppose we are quite done for, and will have to sneak into winter-quarters, the laughing - stock of all the world. I am heartily

sick of such blundering." Yes; we suppose that it was

a big blunder, the Crimean War. So was the Siege of Troy. So was the Invasion of Russia. So, apparently, were most of them, unless superintended by Bismarck and strategised by Moltke, when they came to be considered a few years afterwards. It is doubtful now, and very doubtful, whether the Crimean War served any purpose whatever but to get rid of a large number of lives, perhaps appropriately enough for statistical purposes ; and whether it left behind, with all respect to Sir Anthony, any memory so salutary as Miss Nightingale's, or any change so useful as that con- nected with her name. It is such books as these before us

which make us more and more hold with Green, that it is not in the records of war and battles that the history of a nation

is mainly to be written. We are only thankful that poor purse proud England has got on her legs again so well as she has, and apparently with as much reason to be content with her purse.