The Crimean War

Europe's Conflict with Russia

Hugh Small

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780750985871
  9780752443881
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750987424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Crimean War was the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign, the outcome of which was indecisive; most historians regard it as an irrelevant and unnecessary conflict despite its fame for Florence Nightingale and the Charge of the Light Brigade. Here Hugh Small shows how the history of the Crimean War has been manipulated to conceal Britain's – and Europe's – failure. The war governments and early historians combined to withhold the truth from an already disappointed nation in a deception that lasted over a century. Accounts of battles, still widely believed, gave fictitious leadership roles to senior officers. Careful analysis of the fighting shows that most of Britain's military successes in the war were achieved by the common soldiers, who understood tactics far better than the officer class and who acted usually without orders and often in contravention of them. Hugh Small's mixture of politics and battlefield narrative identifies a turning point in history, and raises disturbing questions about the utility of war.

1

Truth: The First Casualty of War

The truth about sensible Victorian Britain’s invasion of Russia in the winter of 1854 has never been published. This is because a deliberate deception was mounted during and after the Crimean War to disguise Britain’s failures, and historians have been deceived ever since. The original purpose of the deception was to downplay the importance of the war by blaming its outbreak on mistakes by discredited politicians and to reassure Victorian public opinion that Britain had not suffered from the indecisive outcome. Historians today still rely on versions of official documents which were altered to disguise the reasons why Britain invaded the Crimea, and retell a ‘fairy tale’ (in the phrase of William Howard Russell, who was present) pretending to describe events on the battlefield. The British Government suppressed inconvenient official studies of what went wrong in Florence Nightingale’s hospital. Both French and British Governments kept secret a mutiny of the British generals, which caused their joint siege of Sebastopol to continue after its futility became obvious and then made Britain’s exasperated ally withdraw from the struggle. Official documents containing the truth on all this and more have lain unexamined since they were released fifty years after the war. There has been little interest in the Crimean War from academic historians; they may have been put off by the early portrayal of the war as a historically irrelevant mistake.

It is understandable that British historians close to the events should misrepresent a war in which their side did badly. It is also understandable that their government should cooperate by withholding documents that would have revealed the truth. At the end of the war the popular mood was ugly, and there was strong feeling that heads should roll (at least figuratively) among the aristocrats who had at first mismanaged the conflict and then allowed it to end prematurely. The truth would have been inflammatory.

The British Government had tried to create a symbolic victory by ending the stalemated war with a ceremonial bang in late 1855. Using explosives, their demolition teams reduced to rubble the Russian naval dockyards and military arsenal at Sebastopol, on the shore of one of the world’s finest natural harbours. After a bloody sixteen-month siege of Russia’s most prized military installation, British statesmen claimed that the Russian invasion of Turkey three years earlier had been avenged and that the forthcoming Treaty of Paris would prevent Russia from ever again deploying warships in the Black Sea or from fortifying Sebastopol or any other port on its shore. They declared victory.

The peace was unpopular in Britain, where there was no victory parade as there was in France. The government tried to drum up enthusiasm for a ceremony of rejoicing, involving fireworks and illumination of public buildings, by combining it with the Queen’s birthday. The popular feeling remained that there was unfinished business, that ‘we have driven the robber from the gates of Turkey but have refused to take him into custody’ in the words of one London newspaper. It was a peace ‘which France insisted upon, and which the British people somewhat sulkily acquiesced in’.¹ The nation’s anger was heightened by the way the arsenal and dockyards of Sebastopol had finally fallen after simultaneous assaults by French and British troops. The French easily captured their objective, the key fortress of the Malakoff, but the British were driven back from their objective at the Redan fortress and contributed nothing to the victory. A British diplomat articulated the resentment that this caused, ‘We were all sick and angry when the news came. The general should have sent every man he had in that army to take the Redan or to die in it before he allowed the French to claim, as they had a right to do, that they took the Malakoff … and to let them see the backs of our soldiers in retreat.’²

Unsurprisingly, the British troops idling in the Crimea in the summer of 1856, waiting for their transports home or to colonial garrisons, began to look on their French comrades with animosity. Traditional rivalry, in suspense as long as the Russians were the common enemy, now reappeared. A British officer wrote, ‘I heard lots of our fellows say yesterday, “how I wish those bloody French would just come out with their sixty thousand men and fight us”.’³

The bitterness in Britain had a human dimension: more than 20,000 British soldiers had died in the war. One example of these individual tragedies may illustrate the loss to the country. William Poole, a twenty-year-old infantry captain from Shropshire who was shot during the final pointless attack on the Redan, was one of 400 army officers to die. Poole was the son of an artillery officer who fought at Waterloo; he was educated at Rugby and joined the 23rd Regiment – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – as an ensign (second lieutenant) at the age of eighteen. One year later he landed in the Crimea with his regiment and fought at the Alma and at Inkerman. During the long siege of Sebastopol he made himself unpopular with some of his comrades by complaining about the way the war was going. He moonlighted as a trader – buying whole sheep and slaughtering them and selling the parts retail. This entrepreneurship was useful when the commissariat food distribution system broke down, but was also frowned on by his fellow officers. By the summer of 1855 he had tired so much of the war that he ‘sent in his papers’ officially requesting to resign his commission and go home. This was his privilege, but was considered unpatriotic. On September 8th the French and British launched what proved to be their final infantry assault on Sebastopol, and carnage ensued particularly among the officers of the 23rd who tried bravely and unsuccessfully to lead their unwilling raw recruits into the Redan fortress through a hail of short-range grapeshot. Poole was out in front despite having resigned his commission and was shot through the body, the missile nearly severing his spine. He was in severe pain for several weeks – a ‘miserable existence’ according to his commanding officer. In the third week of September the Official Gazette arrived showing that Poole had been ‘gazetted out’ of the army on 7 September – the day before the battle in which he had been wounded. On 24 September Poole died, conscious and talking until the last few hours and aware that he had not needed to lead the assault because he was already a civilian.⁴

William Poole’s conflicting sense of duty and independence of spirit seem typical of a certain type of Englishman of that time. It was a mixture that had contributed to the unique industrial strength and social stability of the nation. It was in theory a time of searching parliamentary debate and open government, and Poole’s family would have been confident that the truth about this unsatisfactory war and the final doomed assault would become known. After 150 years, now that reputations are no longer a subject of personal or party pride, it is easier to meet their expectations. We can cast a cold eye on those times, do without the fictions, and learn the lessons of the war at last.

The fictions tend to appear at crucial turning points in the war’s history, and it is ‘an easy inference’, as the lawyers say, that they were designed to mislead. The analysis which follows identifies the lies and the facts that they conceal, and highlights the new facts in a revisionist account of the Crimean episode. It should be more entertaining than previous accounts if only because what you are not supposed to know is always more interesting. It is a psychological as well as a military and political history, recording how a historical delusion is created, sustained and even reinforced over the years.

One thing that emerges is that the distortions, by giving undue credit to greater men, have concealed the qualities of the common soldiers of Victorian Britain. Until now the other ranks in the Crimean campaign have been admired mostly as victims, for their passive qualities of bravery and stoicism under inhuman treatment. We have been kept in ignorance of their tactical genius and initiative, which convinced politicians at home to overrule the generals and let the men fight the way they wanted to. In those days before battlefield signalling equipment was available, military personnel at all levels were expected to disobey orders when they knew them to be wrong. The common soldier, well-armed, informed, and extensively trained, was not the blindly obedient automaton of the First World War but an important decision-maker. This new insight holds the key to understanding one of the few truly glorious military victories in history: the Charge of the Light Brigade.

2

Britain’s Anti-Crusade Against Russia

Many accounts of the Crimean War set the scene by emphasising that Britain had not fought a major land war since defeating Napoleon in 1815 and by 1855 was committed to peaceful coexistence with other nations in the interests of free trade. London’s Great Exhibition of 1851 is often invoked to describe a climate of peace and prosperity in the Britain of the 1850s which was supposedly incompatible with war. Such scene-setting is appropriate for a conclusion that Britain drifted into hostilities in 1854 without good reason, manipulated by Turks and Frenchmen, and this is the interpretation favoured by the earliest historians still smarting from the war’s disappointments. An alternative conclusion, that British statesmen were following an intelligent geopolitical strategy in going to war, was not put forward until well over a century later. In 1991 Professor Andrew Lambert analysed admiralty correspondence to show that a desire to counter a Russian challenge to the Royal Navy was instrumental in Britain’s decision to fight. This new view has since become widely accepted among experts, although it leaves much unexplained. Professor Lambert’s example helps to answer the question, always directed at revisionists, ‘why has no other historian said so before?’ by showing that a long time can pass before dispassionate historians get around to examining the available documents. If we now accept that Britain didn’t enter the war simply because its statesmen were asleep at the wheel we can set the scene differently.

In 1854, Britain was in charge. The Napoleonic Wars of the generation before had added enormous strength to British foreign policy in two ways. First, the naval victories culminating in Trafalgar established Britain’s mastery of the seas. Second, Britain’s unique steadfastness in opposing Napoleon’s mission of conquest, by fighting and by subsidising the armies of its Allies in the struggle, gave the country a reputation as an honest broker and peacemaker in international affairs. Partly this reputation also rested on Britain’s preference for expansion through international trade rather than through conquest. Britain was the only country committed to free trade, and most of its foreign policy was geared to opening up markets. Markets for its own manufactured goods: Britain produced half of the world’s total of smelted iron. Markets for other countries’ goods too: Britain owned 40 per cent of the world’s merchant shipping. On its small islands it possessed one half of all the railway lines of Europe and Asia, with most of the remainder being built and often run by British operators or financiers. Since the late 1840s Britain had experienced unparalleled prosperity which was being felt by all classes. At the outbreak of the Crimean War, Britain was the world’s only superpower, its pre-eminence far exceeding that of the US today.

The free trade idea to which Britain owed its power and prosperity was a liberal one; traditional Tory landowners had opposed it because the free import of grain reduced the value of their land. The liberal way to expand world trade was to liberate nations from the old empires which bound them into trade monopolies, and give them constitutional governments in which the self-interest of the people would favour the competitive free trade at which Britain excelled. Britain encouraged the liberation of the new South American states which seized independence from Spain in the 1820s, and fought for the independence of Greece from the Ottoman Empire later in the decade. In 1836 the British Government authorised the recruitment of 10,000 British volunteers to fight in Spain on the liberal constitutionalist side in the civil war, which was in fact a proxy war between liberal European governments and authoritarian ones including Russia. The Duke of Wellington and other Tories strongly objected to the role of British troops in Spain. Nevertheless the British Auxiliary Legion was a major contributor to the liberal victory and many of its officers and men later fought in the Crimea.

Britain therefore regularly favoured force to pursue its imperial aims, while avoiding direct rule of overseas territories unless they were incapable of organising their own trading links. Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century, British trade with countries coloured red on the map never much exceeded one third of all Britain’s trade.¹ Not all trade was good: in 1807 Britain banned the transatlantic slave trade. By 1840, the dangerous West African station occupied twenty-five Royal Navy vessels and 3,000 men chasing illegal slave ships. Replacing its once-profitable slave trade with trade in manufactured goods allowed Britain to occupy the moral high ground while still enriching itself. The liberal ideals of independent constitutional government and free trade were noble enough to justify threats or actual use of force, and went hand-in-hand to promise a new world order under British leadership. Free trade and warfare were therefore not incompatible – the second was necessary to protect the first in a world where autocratic empires were opposed to the whole idea of open markets.

In the 1850s most of the continent of Europe was under the control of three empires – the Russian, the Austrian (Austro-Hungarian, with strong ties to other Germanic states), and the Turkish (Ottoman). The last tolerated a degree of self-rule to its outlying provinces, but the others maintained rigidly centralised authoritarian regimes devoted to suppressing the revolutionary and nationalist forces that had burst out most recently in 1848.

The Russian Empire had been constantly expanding by conquest since the fourteenth-century princedom of Muscovy had extended its rule over other ethnic Russians. The geography of the Eurasian land mass encouraged Russia’s absorption of provinces on its border by a process well described by Tolstoy in Hadji Murad: local chiefs invited their Russian neighbour to help in their own rebellions, and then found them harder to get rid of than their former oppressors. In the 150 years following the accession of Peter the Great in the late 1600s Russia had acquired a great European empire, pushing its frontiers 700 miles towards Paris, 600 miles nearer to Stockholm, 500 miles nearer to Constantinople, and 1,000 miles closer to Teheran. It had built a new European seaport in its captured Baltic domains: St. Petersburg, which replaced Moscow as capital until Lenin reversed the change in 1918. By seizing control of Poland, Russia had abrogated the terms of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, at which the victorious Allies, including Russia and Britain, had redrawn the map of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

Russia, and continuing Russian expansion, was a great obstacle to world trade. The Russian grain trade was of great interest to Britain but the Russians’ refusal to hear of free trade forced Britain to develop the grain trade of the Ottoman Empire instead. The treaties existing between Britain and Turkey had permitted Britain to bully the weaker Ottoman Empire into a free trade policy.² The opening of the Danube delta (controlled by Russia and the gateway for east European grain) to international traders was one of the stated British diplomatic objectives of the Crimean War. This is not emphasised by those historians who portray the war as an unsuitable adventure for a trading nation.

The European expansion of Russia in the hundred years before the Crimean War
(Source: McNeill, Position of Russia in the East).

Free trade and Russian expansion were not the only areas of dispute between Britain and Russia. The 1832 Reform Act had given Britain exceptional political freedom, and dissidents from all over Europe enjoyed safe refuge there to the resentment of Austria and Russia who believed that escaped revolutionaries should be handed back to them for punishment. This was also a bone of contention between the Turkish Empire and Russia because the Turks, encouraged by their friends the British, refused to act against political refugees fleeing through their territory on their way to asylum in Britain or France.

After Britain, France was the most powerful independent state in Europe. The revolution of 1848 had overthrown the restored Orléans monarchy and as a result that country was also considered by Austria and Russia to be a danger to the established order. France’s new ruler, the forty-five-year-old Napoleon III, was the nephew of the first Napoleon, being the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland. He had begun his political career by taking part in revolutionary attempts against the restored monarchy in France, and had been elected to the largely ceremonial role of President when the Second Republic was forme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Truth: The First Casualty of War
• 2 Britain’s Anti-Crusade Against Russia
• 3 From Phoney War to Invasion
• 4 From Success to Stagnation
• 5 Balaclava: They Were the Reason Why
• 6 Winter Above Sebastopol
• 7 The Allied Change of Plan
• 8 I’m a General, Get Me Out of Here
• 9 Europe Loses the War
• 10 Postscript 2017
• A Note on Sources
• Bibliography
• Notes
• List of Maps
• List of Illustrations