Big Trouble in Little Crimea
A Small War with Big Ideas
Crimea River
The idea of Crimea causing trouble for the world doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched as it was before Russia’s decision to annex it in 2014. Even so, the Crimean War of 1853–1856 is rarely more than a footnote these days. What I want to suggest here is that it is worth our attention because it encapsulates the world of the 19th century in all kinds of different ways.
Most of the time, the Crimean War is a footnote. It’s just a little mid-century European war that lacks the glamour of National Unification, like the ones fought over Germany and Italy, or the horror and tragedy of the First World War, when that 19th century world broke down in blood. In this country, the UK, the Crimean War is sometimes remembered as the context for the poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and the nursing revolution of Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. I don’t think many people who know that, though, know anything more about it.
I think this should change for a simple reason: the war had profound impacts on the world that help us understand the era in which it took place. The 19th century, Victorians and so forth, seems like a time of transition to us, where the ancient became the modern as the result of industrialisation, inventions and increasing civil liberties. This view is biased by knowing what happened next, in what direction the train of history would go and what excess baggage would be thrown from the carriages. To the people at the time, it was more like a smoothie of different factors blending together, some of which seem to us as more or less modern. Crimea can tell us about how the people of the 19th century saw things.
This article isn’t about the Crimean War itself, though of course I urge you to go look it up. Still, we need a bit of context. Britain and France in 1853 joined the Ottomans (an empire based in and around modern Turkey) in defending against an invasion from the Russian Empire. Sardinia, part of what is now Italy, was also involved. Britain and France were the decisive factor that defeated the Russians and they did that by fighting them on the Crimean peninsula, hence the name. Following the mode of the time, I am going to focus on the three Great Powers — Britain, Russia and France — involved and one distinctively 19th century thing that we can see through the lens of the war they fought.
British Pens
It is a little incongruous to describe any monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London to be ‘tucked away’, but a bust of a journalist is at least ‘overshadowed’ when it’s in the same building as extravagant tombs to Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington.
But any fawning military buff ought to be just as interested in this little fellow as in the generals and admirals. William Howard Russell is not much known any more but, in his time, he was a household name thanks to his graphic and gripping war correspondence.
Russell was among the first of that breed. Time was that months, even years, would pass between what happened at the Front and any word of it coming home. The famous economist David Ricardo was (falsely) accused of making his fortune by receiving the news of Waterloo before anyone else and manipulating the stock market accordingly. Now, though, the telegram via Vienna meant it took ‘only’ three weeks to get news from a continent away to newspapers on British breakfast tables.
Images painted by Russell’s words flooded Victorian households. They saw the incompetence of aristocratic officers and the subsequent sufferings of the soldiers. The ‘man on the street’ was stirred by feelings of attachment to those brave boys and antipathy to the enemy. Public opinion reared its head — ugly or otherwise — as a factor in the foreign policy calculations of the government. Readers would be right to see foreshadowings of the First World War here.
There were plenty of consequences at the time, too. The Secretary of State sent the famous nursing mission headed by Florence Nightingale after Russell’s reports of the foetid conditions of British field hospitals. Incidentally, Russell wrote very favourably of the healing arts of Mary Seacole, who had been turned down for the mission and decided to go using her own resources.
What’s more, it was the moving report — again, by Russell — of the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava that inspired Alfred Tennyson to write his poem. The gallantry and élan of the sabre-shaking, shiny-helmeted lancers and hussars against a dull background of industrial war was one thing. Their chivalry and devotion to duty in following through a hopeless order was another. Altogether we have a set-piece of glory to set against the age of monstrous machines and dry strategy. It mattered very little militarily, but it mattered a great deal to the people back home and what they wrote.
Victorian society was no stranger to the themes of chivalry. The artist-cum-architect Pugin, the author Walter Scott, and the precursors of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were pioneers of a resurgence of interest in the mediaeval past. In particular, they popularised an idealised, slow-paced, harmonious Middle Ages with strong community spirit and space for individual expression, as well as honourable and impeccably courteous knights. You can see the appeal when contrasted to an increasingly dirty Britain, full of smoke and factories, working on the impersonal logic of profit. Whatever the truth of it, you can understand why this fiction was appealing.
Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was a key milestone in British neo-medievalism and, indeed, in poetry overall. I have no proof for this but my feeling is that it is one of the most famous poems in the English language to this day. Its publication was a trifle cheeky because Tennyson was Poet Laureate and it wasn’t really the done thing to express any criticism, no matter how guarded, of official decisions. Yet The Charge of the Light Brigade truly captured the mood of the time and only served to increase his popularity.
To push a metaphor, it seems to me like Victorian literature was charging into its own valley, with the shot and shell of modernity, represented by the telegram and the ever faster pace of life and news, on one side, while the pushback of a utopian idea of antiquity thundered on the other. Writers and readers, just like society at large, had to grapple with these tensions and contradictions. I would argue that such conflicts define what Victorian Britain really means and that they were embodied in the Crimean War.
Russian Peasants
‘On paper we are completely prepared… But awesome shortcomings in everything will be revealed at our first battle movements… There are few surgical instruments, and those are of poor quality; doctors will end up amputating the wounded with dull knives. The Commissariat is in such an awful condition that even in peacetime it is a mess, and wartime the troops will be without shoes, coats, and breadcrusts. Everything is just great for parades, and just terrible for war.’
If Cassandra were a mid-19th century Russian military academician, then she would be Dmitry Milyutin. His prophecy was proven absolutely correct less than a year after he penned these words.
Milyutin was one of the few critical voices of the Tsar’s army at that time. In part, this was because Tsar Nicholas wasn’t famous for his tolerance of constructive criticism. Nicholas was obsessed with drilling his troops perfectly for the parade ground — thus Milyutin’s reference at the end — creating a glorious image of unity and discipline upon which Nicholas loved to feast his eyes. He wasn’t inclined to listen to know-it-all academics.
Another reason for optimism was pure numbers. At the height of the war to come, Britain and France had 200 000 soldiers on the front. Russia had two million. This order of magnitude advantage gave the Tsar an aura of invincibility. Within living memory, the vast Russian army had put their country at the centre of Europe both figuratively and literally, as they hunted the once fearsome Napoleon across the plains. Austria and France had to accept that gone were the days when they were all that mattered. Russia was a new star in the constellation of European politics, far too bright to ignore.
So why was Crimea such an abysmal failure for them? Why did they suffer double the casualties of everyone else? Why did they have to sign humiliating terms that meant they couldn’t even build a navy in their own Black Sea waters? Such questions never have simple answers, but one reason stands out: serfdom.
Serfs were peasants who were owned by their masters. Aristocrats could act towards these people, their property, with utter impunity. The government would call on owners to send men from their estates to the army.
It was all fine and good in the Napoleonic Wars to send massed ranks of poorly trained conscripts to point muskets at other massed ranks of poorly trained conscripts. Forty years after Russia’s glorious victory against the French at Leipzig, though, the tables had turned. Most of Russia’s horde had to walk hundreds of miles from the heartland in the north-west to the far-flung borders of the empire. They suffered terribly from inadequate food and clothing and the inevitable disease. Even before a Russian commander got to the battlefield, up to half his ‘soldiers’ would be dead or have fled. Those poor conditions the British complained about were ten times worse among the Russians.
The (un)lucky ones who finally got to the front met the French armed with state-of-the-art rifled muskets, supported by ironclad ships, and zooming about on railways. I mention the French in particular because (a) they did most of the fighting and (b) their army was better. Although the image of the Second French Empire is often of military incompetence, they were far more disciplined, meritocratic and technologically-advanced than any other participant, including the British.
The end of the commission system, that let rich Brits buy a position as an officer, following the Crimean War is reasonably well known. But this military reform is chicken feed compared to what happened on the Russian side. After the defeat, reformists got the upper hand at last. In 1861, so very long afterwards, the new Tsar Emancipated the Serfs. I’ve righteously capitalised it because I would rank it as one of the three most important things that happened in the whole 19th century. The Emancipation completely changed the character of the world’s largest country. It ushered in a sprint to industrial and capitalist expansion, despite the way in which many free peasants were still effectively tied to masters, that no one could control, never mind roll back. The inconceivably huge human resources of Russia were now part of the global transformation of the world from agriculture to industry, and all which that entailed, to consequences no one could predict. That struggle between, and combination of, capitalism and aristocracy is definitive of the period.
French Priests
On Good Friday, 1846, forty people died in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Worshippers fought with their fists and knives and pistols they’d smuggled in, but also improvised weapons of crucifixes and candle-sticks and chalices. A year later, and then again the year after that, Catholic and Orthodox monks laid into each other.
All of this unseemly violence was the result of the Monks’ Dispute: a squabble between Greek Orthodox and Latin Catholic Churches in the Holy Land as to the rights of the different denominations to Christianity’s holiest sites. The central symbol of the struggle were the keys to the main door of the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem. Greek Orthodox monks had the only ones and the Catholics had to make do with a side-door. There were certainly other petty problems of precedence, such as who got to lead services at Mary’s tomb and who had the right to do-up the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How on earth did something like this have anything to do with the Crimean War?
Let’s sprinkle in religion to the chivalry and serfs to make it fully mediaeval. I am using the same comic tone that many historians discussing the subject can’t avoid. It seems so remarkably abstruse and trivial to modern eyes, a kind of side-show to the ‘real’ politics that historians of the 19th century are so often interested in. But this is a mistake. Forty dead isn’t funny, and it wasn’t funny to them either. In fact, it goes to the heart of the world that made the Crimean War.
At that time, the Holy Land was in the possession of the Ottoman Empire, but that possession was getting looser and looser. Russia, an Orthodox Empire, had kept winning wars against the Ottomans over the past century or so. Alongside all the territory they’d snapped up, Russia squeezed out a special guarantor status for the Orthodox community in Ottoman lands. Essentially, this was a right to involve itself in Ottoman affairs. The latest iteration of this was in the 1830s, when Russia ensured unlimited access for Orthodox pilgrims to holy sites. Pilgrims from the Russian Empire flooded the Holy Land and Russia could sit secure in its identity as the Third Rome, the home and defender of true Christianity.
Unfortunately, though, there were other true Christianities. Other European powers followed suit by intimidating the Ottomans into giving up rights for their brand of Christian to visit. Troubles followed. The Ottoman authorities tried to defuse the growing antipathy between Christians and their foreign patrons inside their borders. In 1850, they sent two keys to the door of the Church of the Nativity to the French, while assuring Russia that they wouldn’t fit in the lock!
Clearly compromise by deception didn’t work. Two years later, one before the war, Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great man, launched a coup in France and declared himself Emperor. Now we need to switch our attention to Paris but the importance of religion is no less here. Sixty years after the French Revolution, France was still bitterly divided about what kind of country it was going to be. On the one hand we have the liberals and radicals, who clove to Enlightenment values and wanted a secular republic with the separation of Church and state. On the other we have traditionalists, who embraced a role for religion and sacral monarchy. The Church was very much in this latter camp. They supported Louis Napoleon and his coup. Now the Emperor had to keep that support.
So it was that the very same year he took power, Napoleon III (as he styled himself) sent a warship to bully the Ottomans into giving up more rights to the Catholics. They duly did. Napoleon triumphantly acquired the Church keys for the glory of France. But such a slight could not be borne in Moscow. The Tsar sent an embassy to Constantinople to get their primacy back and remind the Ottomans whose thumb they were under. Now Britain got concerned and used its influence to make sure the Ottomans did not give in on key points. Frustrated but uncowed, Nicholas mobilised his arms. Soon enough the Crimean War would be in full swing, and all for the sake of a Church key.
That is an overstatement, but it’s not an understatement either. The idea that this was just a bit of a theatre over the top of Great Powers fighting for their geopolitical interests in the disintegrating Ottoman Empire — the Eastern Question — is too much of a simplification. We’ve seen how religion was, for France, not only key in the struggles between progressives and conservatives for the soul of the nation, but, very practically, to the rulership of Napoleon III. The interests of the Great Powers in swallowing up ever more land were ideological interests, and powerful ideas like nationalism and religion were part of those ideologies. In other words, religion and nationalism were not an excuse for imperialism but part of why it happened. If the keys to the Church of the Nativity were a pretext, then they were a very 19th century pretext.
