The historical past of the Crimean Conflict, at the very least from the British standpoint, has been written many occasions, with full emphasis on the scandalous waste of life in futile cavalry fees in opposition to cannon, in army hospitals that ensured the demise of greater than half their sufferers and within the area the place troopers have been left to die, if not of wounds, then of chilly, warmth, hunger or exhaustion. It was the primary warfare by which an embedded journalist, William Howard Russell, and an authoritative newspaper, The Occasions, have been capable of report immediately and freely, by telegraph, the incompetence of the authorities and the desperation of the troopers. Gregory Carleton provides to his research as a parallel Leo Tolstoy’s early Sevastopol Tales, which document equal callousness and even higher slaughter among the many Russian defenders. Tolstoy was writing beneath censorship, albeit with pleasant censors. As considered one of his fellow officers noticed, Tolstoy was much less within the preventing than within the reactions of troopers and officers to demise. (Tolstoy’s later work has at its core a distinction between the demise agony of the delicate and the submissive acceptance of demise by the straightforward peasant or soldier.)
Memoirs by British and Russian authors (the latter writing a long time later when censorship slackened) fill within the gaps left by Russell and Tolstoy. Carleton describes the Crimean Conflict as a quagmire, from which all sides emerge with no beneficial properties, territorial or political, solely losses in human phrases and in status. He additionally calls it the primary fashionable warfare: true, shells and rifles have been twice as lethal as within the Napoleonic wars, however modernity in warfare is healthier outlined by the machine gun and tank, and at present by the drone, warfare by which the aggressor dangers far lower than their goal. As for quagmire, it’s true that the Crimean Conflict was a hopeless encounter between a supposedly irresistible naval pressure and a supposedly unmovable fortress (Sevastopol), provoked by a trivial dispute over an Orthodox church in Jerusalem, however fuelled by Russia’s want to ‘liberate’ the Christian Balkans from the Turks, and Britain and France’s want to cease the Black Sea being turned from an Ottoman to a Russian lake, which might give the tsar direct entry to the Mediterranean.
In stressing the cruelty of each side, Carleton, for all his cautious analysis, overlooks the variety of Russian public opinion (the thinker Alexei Khomiakov, who beloved the English because the misplaced Slav tribe of Uglichi, known as on God to punish his corrupt homeland) and ignores the absence of animosity and the chivalry of the Russian authorities. As battle loomed, Russia’s most liberal viceroy, Mikhail Vorontsov, introduced up in London and intently associated to British aristocrats, had his secretary write, in stunning English, to his nephew Sidney Herbert, Minister of Conflict, to argue that Britain’s assist to Turkey can be dwarfed by the harm Russia might trigger. The minister was later compelled to shell his uncle’s palace on the Crimean coast. Through the warfare, British and French residents have been free to maneuver about Russian territory. Anne Neilson Giray, the Scottish widow of the nephew of the final Crimean khan, was given safety in Crimea each by Russian defenders and British invaders. Above all, prisoners of warfare have been handled extra like friends than enemies. That they had first to endure gradual journeys by unsprung wagon to cities properly away from the border (to stop escape) or from Muslim areas (to stop fraternisation with Ottoman prisoners), however have been then given beneficiant lodging – in lodges, boarding faculties, even palaces – meals rations and even employment. No surprise so many officers surrendered their commissions (a euphemism for desertion) to get pleasure from comforts and life expectancy not accessible on the entrance. Even Muslim prisoners have been properly handled: a gaggle of Kurds in Tula have been publicly praised for his or her good manners and laborious work firefighting, road cleansing, serving to ladies to hold heavy hundreds, whereas French prisoners have been friends of keen Russian girls, and British officers partied all night time in Odesa lodges. Ottoman PoWs who have been Christian, or ready to transform, and had fascinating abilities have been supplied citizenship with freedom from taxation and army service. Some have been entertained by the tsar.
Data on the Ottoman military, the most important contingent in Crimea, who suffered the very best casualties (after the Russian defenders) is just not straightforward to search out (Carleton devotes simply two traces to the Ottoman majority within the invading military). The Turks revealed few experiences, solely the Egyptian troopers wrote dwelling – however Ibrahim Köremezli’s 2024 article in Belleten Türk Tarih Kurumu (from which Google translate provides a readable English model) makes use of sources from Russia, Europe and Turkey to survey the lifetime of allied PoWs in Russia: it had nothing of a quagmire about it.
The heritage of the Crimean Conflict is blended. Either side realised that docs and nurses, not generals and sergeants, have been wanted. In Britain and Russia, there was energetic medical progress: chloroform was now supplied not solely to officers and gents. Sanitation, vitamin and nursing got the identical priorities as shells and fortifications. In Russia a military-medical academy began coaching 1000’s of docs, together with ladies, in order that within the subsequent Balkan warfare, 20 years later, Russia might boast of getting ladies docs serving on the entrance.
Army classes have been learnt, too: Alexander II’s generals turned to the conquest of Central Asia and the Far East. Because the world steadily conceded the Russians the liberty of the Black Sea, Alexander, the so-called liberator, started a genocidal deportation of a whole bunch of 1000’s of indigenous Caucasians and Crimean Tatars to Anatolia. The Crimean Conflict, nevertheless, did provoke Russia’s most progressive period: serfs have been freed, the humanities flourished, a nationwide well being service was created. In Britain complacent aristocrats corresponding to Lord Aberdeen yielded to energetic radicals corresponding to Disraeli and Gladstone. Russians and Britons, however, alas, not the Ottomans, emerged wiser from their quagmire.
-
Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Delivery of Trendy Warfare
Gregory Carleton
Hurst, 264pp, £27.50
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)
Donald Rayfield’s newest e-book is ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate (Reaktion, 2024).