Crimea

Crimea: The Last Crusade, by Orlando Figes, Allen Lane RRP £30, 575 pages

“You will see war not as a beautiful, orderly, and gleaming formation ... but war in its authentic expression – as blood, suffering and death.” This was the young Leo Tolstoy, Crimea: The Last Crusademaking a name for himself as a writer by exposing the horrifying extent of the atrocities of a conflict that killed perhaps as many as 450,000 of his countrymen. At the Russian naval base of Sevastopol alone, where Tolstoy witnessed the action firsthand as an artillery officer, more than 120,000 Russians died during the protracted winter siege of the town in 1854-55.

In Britain, the Crimean War has come down to us in a series of unforgettable scenes, permanently etched on the popular memory. We all recognise the names of battles – Alma, Balaklava and Inkerman – memorialised on many a street sign, and are familiar with tales of the Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale and her nurses, and the destruction of the British army in the first winter of the war through incompetence and neglect. How few of us realise, though, that in spite of the bungling of her commanders, Britain emerged as a victor of the war, or that the consequences of defeat removed Russia as a dominant influence in central Europe for almost a century.

Orlando Figes calls the Crimean conflict the most important war of the 19th century. In many ways, it was the first modern war, fought with innovations in weaponry and industrial technology, and with war reporters and photographers directly at the battle scene (Figes includes some wonderful examples of the gritty photography of James Robertson, too often overshadowed by his contemporary Roger Fenton).

Yet the Crimean War is also curious, complex and difficult to comprehend. War aims on all sides were murky and frequently ill-defined, while the wider theatre of the conflict, including the significance of the Baltic campaign, has invariably been ignored. Tsar Nicholas I had trusted that he could rely upon the support of Prussia and Austria and the neutrality of Britain as he set out to undermine the tottering Ottoman Empire and combat French influence at Constantinople. But none of this support was forthcoming, and so, instead of a straightforward war against the Turks, Russia faced a multiple enemy numbering British, French, Sardinian, as well as Turkish forces.

The great historians of the war – Kinglake for the British, Bazancourt for the French, and the Soviet historian Eugeny Tarle – promoted national self-interest in their respective versions of events. Figes’s book claims to be the first in any language to draw extensively from Russian, French and Ottoman, as well as British sources, to illuminate the factors that brought the major powers into the conflict. It is a fine, stirring account, expertly balancing analysis with a patchwork of quotation from a wide variety of spectators and participants, together with an impressive narrative across the vast panoramic sweep of the war.

However, the book’s true originality lies in its unravelling of the Crimean War’s religious origins. The rivalry between the Catholics (supported by France) and the Greeks (backed by Orthodox Russia) over control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has sometimes been dismissed as the incidental trigger that started the war. Here it is represented as the vital spark igniting the conflagration that followed. For, as Figes’s subtitle suggests, all the major players believed that they were fighting a crusade. In particular, Tsar Nicholas’s messianic commitment to the Orthodox cause ensured a return to a traditional Tsarist policy, inciting Turkey’s 10 million Orthodox subjects to rise up against the Ottoman Empire.

Undoubtedly Britain wanted war most, and the demand for military action was fed by the corrosive strain of Russophobia that was sweeping across Europe. The British had good cause to fear Russian control of the crucial waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. But the idea of Britain as the guardian of liberalism, civilisation and free trade, protecting the underdog Turkey against Russia, its tyrannical oppressor, was an irresistible one, influencing British public opinion and furnishing a leitmotiv for the country’s foreign policy that would echo again in 1914 and 1939.

Inevitably perhaps, Figes’s treatment of some of the more conventional aspects of the war is less convincing. He rightly points to the advances in field surgery through the use of anaesthetics made by the Russian surgeon Nikolai Pirogov, although he fails to state that in the latter part of the war British army surgeons were employing chloroform in all major cases of amputation as well. Meanwhile, Figes’s characterisation of Florence Nightingale relies on tired old sexist taunts (“domineering”, “bossy”), while his account of what she achieved at Scutari ignores the facts that, deprived of her purveying skills, the hospital system in Turkey would have completely collapsed, and that the lessons she derived from her experiences subsequently formed the blueprint for the British system of military nursing that came into operation with the outbreak of war in 1914.

Memories of the Crimean War, Figes notes, continue to stir profound feelings of Russian pride and resentment against the West. In 2006, the discovery of the remains of 14 Russian infantrymen, buried with their grenades and crucifixes near where they had fallen at the Battle of Alma, were reinterred with full military honours; there are plans for a chapel on the site.

In Britain, the long-term consequences of the war were greater than for any of its other major participants. The war permanently enshrined in the national consciousness the image of the ordinary British soldier as the saviour of the nation, while promoting a new assertiveness in the middle-classes, whose professional initiatives had often come to the rescue of the mismanagement of the campaign. The positioning of London’s Crimean Memorial directly opposite the Duke of York’s column seems symbolic of a shift in Victorian values, challenging the leadership of the aristocracy, and reminding the British public of the virtues of “Tommy Atkins”, who courageously won Britain’s wars despite the blunders of the generals.

Mark Bostridge is the author of ‘Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend’ (Penguin)