1 NOVEMBER 1968, Page 19

Doctor arms

DAVID WILLIAMS

Surgeon in the Crimea George Lawson. Edited, enlarged and explained by Victor Bonham Carter assisted by Monica Lawson (Constable 35s) 'We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do ...' So the British sang, before Oom Paul and his band of Boers showed them that if they did

they'd be in bad trouble. Knowing nothing of the sound of things to come they couldn't be aware of the lament that was to rise faintly out of the tunnelled Flanders mud fifteen years later: 'Oh my, I don't want to die. I want to go home.' Nor, of course, could the perkier tune of twenty-five years after that be familiar—the one dbout hanging the washing on the Siegfried Line that dwindled away as the sleep-denied huddle on the Dunkirk beaches listened to the shriek of the Stukas.

But at least they ought to have known that a history of British military ineptitude lay close behind them. Reading again, from the far more aggressively critical viewpoint of an individual, intelligent soldier in the Crimean War, of the unbelievable blunderings that went on for months while Lords Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan tried to take Sebastopol, you wonder how this country ever managed to grab the biggest empire of all time.

Was it, perhaps, that while we were bad at war-games, the others were worse? Well, not at any rate in the Crimean debacle. George Lawson, a young surgeon-volunteer who left Woolwich for Malta, en route for Gallipoli, in March 1854, found .the French far more effi- cient Their organisation was thorough enough to ensure some degree of comfort for the troops: 'They understand doing things much better than we do' he writes.

Once the decision had been taken to tackle the Russians in the Crimea, Lawson, stationed throughout almost all his serving time at Bala- clava, was given plentiful reasons for believing that it wouldn't be difficult for anyone, even the odious Turks, not to 'understand doing things better than we do.'

Raglan, the C-in-C, was old and unassertive. During the opening stages of the campaign at any rate, he was right more often than he's been given credit for. But he couldn't get people to listen to him. St Arnaud, the French com- mander, even when on his death-bed, could be wrong and still successfully resist him. Raglan could have done with Florence Nightingale, over at Scutari, to be on hand as aide-de-camp to provide the stiffening.

Lawson, an ingenuous and trusting young man, doesn't spell out the gross deficiencies in the British military set-up as revealed by the Crimean disasters, but the source of the short- comings can be deduced from much of what he says. The basic trouble was non-integration. The titled general officers considered themselves stars and dwelt apart. Mundane matters like provisioning and equipping an army in the field were beneath their notice, to be dealt with by the lower orders in Civvy St—by people like poor William Filder, snatched away at the age of sixty-eight from an undemanding little job in Ireland and saddled with being Commissary- General to the forces in the Crimea. It was a job that a Beaverbrook in his prime would have quailed at. Mr Filder, hampered by vague insouciance on the part of the High Command, did his best, but his best was inevitably not good enough to stave off needless human suffering on a vast scale.

Why does a shooting war always catch the current British-in-Command with their trousers down? 'It seems to be a defect in the system of the British Army,' gently remarked the Com- missioners sent out by Palmerston to inquire into the Crimean catastrophes, 'that no one is specially responsible. . . .' Except perhaps for General Sir George Brown, who made himself particularly responsible for turn-out and 'insisted on • everyone wearing the stiff leather stock, even though it strangled them,' or for • General Eyre, whose rule of life was 'six days shalt thou labour and on the seventh day have heavy marching parade.'

Surgeon Lawson's letters, uncomplaining but observant, make fascinating reading. Victor Bonham Carter and Monica Lawson fill in the background for us with a copiousness which never seems excessive because it is always strictly relevant. They also provide excellent sketches of the supporting characters—though `supporting' isn't perhaps quite the word.