TABLE TALK
The valley of death
DENIS BROGAN
After the preposterous dad& of the Suez campaign of 1956, a highly intelligent young friend of mine who had been a paratroop officer in World War II reported on his experiences when he served in the Franco- British operation against Egypt. He said simply, 'It was worse than the Crimea'. Obviously, he had not served in the Crimean War, but that war has gone down in British history as the epitome of all that was wrong with the old army and, indeed, perhaps as an indication of some of the things that may be wrong with the new army.
The Crimean War, although it has one heroic, foolish episode, the charge of the Light Brigade, was a masterpiece of muddle. The system which Wellington had left behind had completely seized up. In India, it was- not the army of Assaye, but the army that was annihilated in the retreat from Kabul, about whose inner history we have recently learned a great deal from the memories of Sir Harry Flashman vc. But at the time of the Crimean War, Britain had taken no part in a European war since 1815, and when the Guards mached off with bands playing triumphantly to deal with the aggressive Russians, they were the smartest units in an army almost entirely unprepared for modern war.
Of course, nobody was really prepared for modern war; or, to put it another way, the methods of fighting a modern war did not yet exist. For example, French medical casualties were very high indeed, and of course Turkish medical casualties were even higher, and we know that the Russians lost at least as many men marching through the steppes to the Crimea as they lost in battle. The Great War of 1914 was the first in which the casualties of bad medical attention were not greater than those caused by the enemy's fire, and even in the First World War, the Mesopotamia campaign revealed in a less forgivable form many of the atrocious breakdowns of the Crimea. It is significant that the only thing remembered today in Britain about the Crimean War (if anything is) is the charge of the Light Brigade, and that is remembered mainly because of Tennyson's very patriotic poem.
The Crimean War from the Russian side was described by young Count Tolstoy, but on the allied side it is effectively described only by William Howard Russell, the highly idiosyncratic and rebellious correspondent of the Times. It is important to remember•that Russell was an Irish Catholic by origin and that he had had an uncle hanged in '98 by the forces of order. Although a loyal subject of Queen Victoria, he was never quite taken in by the British imperial myth, as he showed later by his writings about the repression of the Indian Mutiny. But he had a great deal
• Russell's Despatches from the Crimea edited and introduced by Nicolas Bentley (Andre Deutsch, 1966; Panther edition, 1970),
of intelligent sympathy for the unfortunate infantry who suffered the horrors of the siege of Sebastopol.
The British army was unlucky, but such a long run of bad luck suggests something very wrong with the War Office, and perhaps Mr Bentley, in this very useful shortened versions of the Crimean despatches of the greatest of Times correspondents, should have told us more about the basic organisa- tion of the British army. For example, he should have described the triple command of the Secretary of War, the Secretary at War, and the Commander-in-Chief who con- tinued to mess things up even more than the War Office in those remote days normally did. Russell, who was very mal vu by the High Command, by simply using his eyes and ears and being willing to make formidable enemies in the Horse Guards and in the headquarters of the British army in the Crimea, was able to expose some of the greatest scandals in British military history; but it ought to be remembered that many of the scandals were common to all armies at that time, especially the scandals produced by the badness of the military medical corps; indeed, the limitations of medical science at that time would have imposed insuperable difficulties on a medical corps composed of people like Sir William Osler or General Goethals.
The Commander-in-Chief, Lord Raglan, known today, if at all, in the history of tailoring, was a member of a very aristo- cratic family. But he had never commanded troops in the field; he was a 'staff officer. In many ways his qualifications to command in the Crimea were rather like those of General Weygand in France in 1940. It was not only bad luck, but, by luck or sharp practice, the French got a much better base in the Crimea than the British did. Then—a point not men- tioned by Mr Bentley or, in this version, by Russell—the French gambled that the Russian fleet which had destroyed the Turk- ish fleet at Sinope would not emerge from Sebastopol harbour, and so they gambled by putting a great deal of their landing forces in warships which would have made it very
difficult to fight the Russian fleet- had it emerged from Sebastopol But the real attraction of this very attractive book is not only the revelation of Russell's highly intelligent and useful indignation at the destruction of the rank- and-file of the British army, but the skill with which he does the great battle pieces. What came to be called (by a misquotation of Russell) 'the thin red line' did describe a good deal of the tactical methods of the British army. British historians tend to talk of the Crimea as a series of British victories—the Alma, Inkerman, Balaclava. But it should be noted that the British, French, Turkish, and, finally, Sardinian armies did not succeed, strictly speaking, in besieging Sebastopol at all. The Russians were not blockaded in the great fortress. They marched out in almost perfect order at the end of the great siege; they destroyed their own fleet with impunity; and few victories have been less satisfactory to the victors, especially to the British victors, than the 'fall' of Sebastopol. As Bosquet said when he saw the Light Brigade go to its destruction, 'C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre'. One cannot imagine that the Duke would, for an instant, have tolerated the misunderstanding which led to the heroic charge. It was brilliant, but it was pointless. It recalls another brilliant and pointless charge, the charge of the Chasseurs d'Afrique at Sedan in 1870, but not the suc- cessful and effective charge of von Bredow at Mars-la-Tour. The days for cavalry charges were over. Soon the greatest modern cavalry general, the only one who foresaw its only possible useful role, the young Philip Sheridan, was to replace the beau sabreur type of cavalry leader like Jeb Stuart in the American Civil War.
The long siege of Sebastopol, in which the British army was not so much damaged as destroyed—as far as the rank-and-file were concerned anyway—had one hero and one hero only, and he is not mentioned in this book. It was the great German-Russian engineer, General Todleben, who largely improvised the successful defence structure of Sebastopol. It might have been recalled to us that in another great siege, the Russian siege of Plevna in 1877, Todleben was called in again, to redeem the day on the besieging side, which he did with a success far more complete than came the way of Marshal Pdlissier, Duc de Malakoff. Indeed, one reflection which reading, or in great part re- reading, Russell has put into my head is how superior the Turkish and Russian armies in 1877 were to anybody in the great siege of 1854-55.
The formally victorious peace, the build- ing of the Pont de l'Ahna in Paris which has become mainly a meteorological monument), the various Crimean monu- ments scattered around London, often com- pletely baffling to the young who do not know what they are referring to, are deservedly fogotten; but what should be remembered was the astonishing patience of the unforfimate soldiers. (A statistical analysis of the difference in the casualty rate for officers and men would be painful to reprint.) The whole Crimean War was not only, as John Bright said, 'a crime'; it was probably the silliest war in the nineteenth century. Even the South African War was not quite as much of a nonsense. And it is perhaps an adequate comment on this campaign which caused so much pointless misery that the two greatest figures in its history were a woman, Florence Nightingale, and the great engineer Todleben who de- fended Sebastopol.
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