The Crimean War E-Book

Hugh Small

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 400

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hugh Small is the author of A Brief History of Florence Nightingale, and her Real Legacy, a Revolution in Public Health. He is an acknowledged expert on the war in the Crimea and has appeared on Channel 4 News, BBC2, Sky News and contributed to History Today on the subject. He lives in Central London.

Additional Crimean War material can be found on the author’s website.

www.hugh-small.co.uk

Cover illustrations: Front: Col Doherty and men of the 13th Light Dragoons. (Library of Congress) Back: 3D reconstruction of a view of the Crimean peninsula looking west. (Author)

First published in 2007 titled The Crimean War: Queen Victoria’s War with the Russian Tsars

This edition first published 2018

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Hugh Small, 2007, 2018

The right of Hugh Small to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8742 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

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

Index

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research for permission to use material from my article in the autumn 2005 issue on The 1855 Allied Campaign Plan. I acknowledge the permission of the Director of the National Army Museum to quote from Lord Raglan’s papers, and am grateful to the staff there and at the Newcastle Collection at Nottingham University, the National Archives of Scotland, the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment Museum at Preston, the British Library, The National Archives and many regional record offices. In the context of the last I would also like to thank those who have worked behind the scenes to make it possible to consult an ever increasing number of archive catalogues online.

I have benefited from the research of members of the Crimean War Research Society, and from discussions with many of them, including Keith Smith who kindly allowed me to include some of his photographs. The quotation from Mark Adkin’s The Charge is by permission of the publisher, Pen & Sword Books Ltd. I would also like to acknowledge the important role played in my research by the London Library.

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 formed after the revolution of 1848. In 1851 the French Army mounted a bloody coup, dismissed the legislature, and installed Napolean III as absolute ruler of France. His domestic support was not very solid, and he courted the powerful French Roman Catholic hierarchy by sending gunboats to Constantinople to demand more privileges for Roman Catholic clergy in the Holy Land, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey accepted these demands, provoking Russia which supported the rival Orthodox Church clergy and saw the French success as threatening its own territorial ambitions in Turkey.

France under Napoleon III was eager to pick a fight with Russia, which had destroyed the half–million-strong army the first Napoleon had invaded with in 1812; the defeat had hastened the collapse of the first French Empire. Napoleon III himself also saw Russia as an obstacle to his personal vision of a Europe of independent states like France and Britain (he was an Anglophile, having been exiled there like so many other continental revolutionaries). The French Army after its recent bloody intervention in domestic politics sought an opportunity to act respectably on the world stage. It therefore suited France to court trouble with Russia in the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire, in contrast to that of Russia, had been gradually shrinking since the high tide of its expansion had brought it to the gates of Vienna in 1683. In 1783 Russia had captured the Crimean peninsula from the Turks, and in 1829 some additional territory in the Caucasus on the east coast of the Black Sea. Although the 1815 Congress of Vienna at the close of the Napoleonic War had pledged the Great Powers to maintain the territorial status quo in Europe – by force of arms if necessary – this pledge did not extend to European Turkey. Many European powers saw Turkey’s Balkan states as an area in which they could still play territorial monopoly. Russia was particularly ambitious in this area and as Turkey’s hold over its semi-autonomous Balkan provinces diminished, Russia aggressively asserted the rights that it had obtained from Turkey’s Muslim rulers to be the guarantor of the safety of Christians in these provinces.

Tsar Nicholas I of Russia was known as the Iron Tsar for his blind faith in his three principles of government: autocracy, religious orthodoxy, and the ‘russification’ of his conquered dominions. He maintained personal control of a police state that dictated every aspect of its subjects’ lives, even maintaining spies in school classrooms and forbidding teachers to travel abroad in case they absorbed liberal ideas. His belief in the rightness of his absolute rule made him unwilling to listen to advice and his ministers unwilling to give it. He believed that the collapse of the weak Turkish Empire was both imminent and desirable, and that unless he moved quickly other European powers might install their own puppet governments in the orphaned Turkish provinces.

In the spring of 1853, after the French had extracted their concessions from the Sultan, Tsar Nicholas sent his envoy to Constantinople to demand favours for Russia’s rival Orthodox Church. Secretly, Russia’s envoy was also instructed to demand that the Turks sign a new treaty formalising Russia’s protectorate over all the Christian subjects of Turkey, a treaty which would strengthen Russia’s right to occupy Turkish territory almost at will. The Tsar’s envoy to Constantinople was not a diplomat but an old soldier, Prince Menshikov, who had fought against Turkey in past wars. This choice deliberately emphasised an iron fist approach to diplomacy without the camouflage of a velvet glove. There was not much room for diplomacy in Menchikov’s instructions: he was to take the draft treaty with him and if the Turks refused to sign it he was to threaten war and to say that Russian troops were massing on the Turkish border ready for an invasion.

The Tsar was not bluffing. It is probable that he really believed his own claim that the new treaty he demanded was no more than a clarification of treaties that already existed, which he claimed Turkey had violated by its favourable treatment of the rival church. It seems that his ministers did not dare to tell him that he might be wrong in law. Western diplomats in St Petersburg and Constantinople, when they found out what Menshikov was demanding, did not hesitate to point out to the Tsar and the Sultan that it went beyond previous treaties. Tsar Nicholas did not take their opinion seriously, but the Sultan and his advisers did and they were further encouraged to resist Menshikov by the action of the French in ordering their Mediterranean fleet to sail from Toulon to Turkish waters as a gesture of support.

The Turks refused to accept the new treaty and on 21 May 1853 Menshikov stormed out of Constantinople, figuratively slamming the door behind him. He reported to the Tsar that the failure of his mission to Constantinople had been due to the machinations of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the highly experienced British Ambassador to Turkey. This was guaranteed to enrage Tsar Nicholas, who detested Stratford and his power. Formerly Sir Stratford Canning, the Ambassador was a cousin of the late Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister George Canning and had been a diplomat since the Napoleonic Wars. In 1832 he had been posted to St. Petersburg but the Tsar had refused to allow him into Russia, fearing his reputation for getting his own way with foreign rulers. Lord Palmerston, Foreign Secretary at the time, then flouted the custom that Ambassadors must be approved by their hosts in advance and refused to appoint anyone in his place, insultingly leaving a junior chargé d’affaires in charge of the St Petersburg Embassy. In 1852 Stratford had again irritated the Tsar by supporting Turkey against him in another quarrel. When Menshikov came to Constantinople in 1853 to demand a new treaty behind a smokescreen of complaints relating to the rights of Orthodox clergy in the Holy Land, Stratford persuaded the Sultan to bend over backwards to put right all the specific ills that Menshikov complained of. This weakened Russia’s case for revising the treaty. Stratford’s advice therefore did contribute to the mission’s failure, but Menshikov’s behaviour in blaming Stratford’s anti-Russian views and personal resentment of the Tsar demonstrated his lack of diplomatic skill. It personalised and trivialised the issues, and disguised from the Tsar that the Sultan had also been strongly influenced by the prompt despatch of the French Mediterranean fleet to support Turkey.

On 31 May the Tsar sent an ultimatum to Constantinople saying that he would invade and occupy Turkey’s semi-autonomous territories of Moldavia and Wallachia (now Romania)3 unless Turkey accepted the new treaty within eight days. The Tsar did not think that other countries would react violently to this threat, and he was right. He knew that Britain would object, but he had little to fear because he was convinced that Britain could not possibly find common cause against him with its ancient enemy France.

Britain at this time was under a shaky coalition government consisting of liberals and some conservatives (including the Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen) who had deserted their party because they believed in free trade. The Court – Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – did not stay neutral in disputes between ministers as they were supposed to do but instead used their power of patronage on the conservative side.4 The coalition was uneasy enough in normal times, but Russia’s threats to Turkey produced a pronounced split between pacifist conservatives and bellicose liberals. The Court and the conservative ministers were unperturbed at the prospect of the Christian Russians liberating the Balkan provinces and even Constantinople from the ‘Mohammedan’ Turks, whom they regarded as barbarians incapable of progress. Conservatives thought of Russia as a friend: Britain’s ally against Bonaparte and later against the Turks in the war of Greek liberation. Lord Aberdeen when Foreign Secretary in 1844 had listened without objection to Tsar Nicholas’s plans to take over parts of the Turkish Empire.5 Aberdeen had since stated publicly that the Turks had no business in Europe, and the Court agreed with him; at the time of the Russian ultimatum to Turkey Prince Albert proposed that Turkey should be compelled to withdraw from Europe – including Constantinople – entirely. Furthermore, neither the Court nor the conservatives liked Napoleon III, who was pressing the British Government to support the Turks. They thought him a dangerous parvenu whose recent adoption of the title Emperor Napoleon III within weeks of the death of the Duke of Wellington was an insult. They saw it as a calculated gesture of defiance against the prohibition on re-establishment of the Bonaparte dynasty imposed by the victors of Waterloo. The more conservative ministers and their supporters at Court believed that the French and the Turks were deliberately provoking the Russians in an attempt to make Britain go to war against her old ally.6

The popular press disagreed, and mocked the government for its pacifism. The official Conservative opposition were keen to discredit their disloyal former colleagues who were now in government, and cynically supported more liberal voices calling for strong action against Russia. The liberals in the coalition government included the Home Secretary Lord Palmerston, whose assertive track record on Russia contrasted strongly with the appeasing line of Lord Aberdeen. When he had been Foreign Secretary in 1848 Palmerston had obliged Russia to withdraw from Turkey’s European provinces even though the Turks themselves had requested their presence to quell disorder. The following year, when Russia helped Austria in brutally suppressing an uprising in Hungary, the Tsar had demanded that Turkey hand over Hungarian patriots who had escaped to the Balkan provinces. Palmerston sent a British fleet to Constantinople to bolster the Turkish refusal and the Tsar backed down.7 In the British public’s eyes these recent incidents counted for more than the Greek War of Independence or the Waterloo campaign, in which Russia had been on Britain’s side. Palmerston’s anti-Russian record made him the natural champion of those who urged a tough stand against Russia now. For the liberals the ever-expanding and autocratic Russian Empire was a threat to the future of constitutional government in Europe, and France’s willingness to combine with Britain against the Tsar now presented a unique opportunity to resolve this long-standing problem.

The liberals argued that Turkey had shown itself capable of reforming itself, for example in reducing religious discrimination and adopting free trade. They did not share with their conservative colleagues the Russian Tsar’s belief that Turkey, the ‘Sick Man of Europe’, must be encouraged to expire.8 In their attitude to the French, also, Palmerston and the conservative faction in the coalition were at loggerheads. Liberals favoured Napoleon III as the product of anti-monarchical revolution, although he was less popular with the extreme-left Radicals because of his repressive domestic policy. Palmerston had actually lost his long tenure of the Foreign Office over his support for Napoleon III. According to reports in the press, Palmerston had tried to dismiss the Ambassador in Paris who was helping Victoria and Albert to undermine the new French Emperor, and the royal couple persuaded the Prime Minister to dismiss Palmerston instead. Palmerston’s policy was vindicated, because Napoleon III sent the misbehaving Ambassador home anyway and later used his personal charm at Windsor to win the admiration of Queen Victoria and her husband.

At the time of the Russian ultimatum to Turkey the public remembered that it was Victoria and Albert’s fault that Palmerston was not Foreign Secretary and that they had to put up instead with the appeaser Lord Aberdeen who had taken over much of the foreign affairs portfolio from the nominal Foreign Secretary Lord Clarendon. Public feeling against Prince Albert became hostile on account of his supposed sympathy for Russia and the Court’s earlier treatment of Lord Palmerston.

When Palmerston learned that the Russians had backed their demands for a new treaty by an ultimatum to the Turks he urged the Prime Minster to respond by sending a British ultimatum telling the Tsar that Britain would go to war if Russia carried out its threat to invade Turkish territory. Aberdeen refused,9 but he did belatedly summon the Royal Navy to join the French fleet at the Dardanelles as a gesture of solidarity with Turkey. The Turks, emboldened by this, rejected the Tsar’s demands and in July 1853 Tsar Nicholas sent his armies to occupy the Balkan territories of Turkey.

The Russian occupation did not immediately provoke war, and the other ‘Great Powers’ – Austria, Prussia, France, and Britain – now tried to make Turkey appease Russia to secure withdrawal. The Powers drafted an agreement, the Vienna Note, under which Turkey would recognise that Russia was the protector of Christians in the Turkish Empire. This fell short of the treaty that the Tsar had wanted, but would have been a concession by Turkey because until then Russia only had the right to petition Turkey if it believed that Christians were being victimised. The Turkish Government was accustomed to doing as it was told by the Great Powers but on this occasion it dug its heels in and refused to sign this Vienna Note. On 4 October 1853 the Turks issued an ultimatum to the Russians saying that if the occupying troops were not withdrawn in fourteen days Turkey would declare war. At this moment, apparently unaware that the Turks had issued the ultimatum,10 the Cabinet in London ordered the fleet to pass through the Dardanelles and anchor at Constantinople which further emboldened the Turks. The Turks declared war on Russia, without notifying Britain in advance, on 18 October 1854 and went on the offensive against the occupying Russian troops in what is now Romania.

Six weeks later a dramatic event converted a regional conflict into a European war. The Russians caught most of the Turkish fleet, laden with troops, in harbour at Sinope in the Black Sea and sank it with a loss of several thousand Turkish lives, using explosive shells for the first time in naval warfare. The British newspapers called Sinope a ‘massacre’ and pilloried the government for having sent the fleet to Constantinople without instructions to intervene. The conservative ministers who dominated the Cabinet at first stood firm in their desire to avoid going to the help of Turkey, believing that Turkey had brought the disaster of Sinope upon itself by sending its inadequate fleet to provoke Russia. They rejected the advice of their liberal colleagues and the French Emperor to send the Royal Navy into the Black Sea to clear it of Russian warships. But within a few days they changed their minds, probably because Lord Palmerston resigned from the Cabinet in protest.

The old diplomat crafted his protest with great skill. His letter of resignation to the Prime Minister complained about the Cabinet’s failure to order the Royal Navy into the Black Sea but at the same time criticised the unrelated Cabinet decision to bring forward a bill to reform the electoral system. Palmerston had previously indicated that although he disagreed with the reform plans, it was not a resigning issue; now he seemed to go back on that and left the Prime Minister free to decide which of the two reasons to use as an explanation for his resignation. Lord Aberdeen and Queen Victoria were both glad to be rid of Palmerston and agreed that it would be best to say that he had resigned out of opposition to reform. This would decrease Palmerston’s popularity with Radicals and would make it impossible for other Cabinet members, similarly opposed to appeasement of Russia but unlike him in favour of reform, to resign in sympathy with him and bring down the government. Most people now expected Palmerston to join the mainstream Conservative opposition party, but he simply sat on the sidelines for a few days. The British press and public were not taken in by the official story that Palmerston, a known hawk and liberal, had resigned over reform. His popularity increased because he had made it appear that he was the only one prepared to resign over the failure to confront Russia. Queen and Prime Minister had both been pleased to see Palmerston isolated and the government saved; however, they were soon to realise that his very isolation was the key to his power.

After a few days of reflection, the conservatives in the Cabinet came round to the view that they could no longer avoid following Palmerston’s advice to send the fleet into the Black Sea to clear it of Russian ships. The Russian action at Sinope, regardless of whether it was an atrocity or whether it was the Turks’ fault, had been an insult to the all-powerful Royal Navy which was Britain’s most important asset on the world stage. It was humiliating that the Royal Navy had stood by almost within earshot while the Russian fleet destroyed that of their Allies. Even those who had no wish to see Turkey remain in Europe now decided that Russia’s actions were beyond the pale. Prominent among Cabinet conservatives and appeasers who changed their minds at this point was Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty. Eight days after news of Sinope reached London, he wrote to the Prime Minister, ‘I have been one of the most strenuous advocates of peace with Russia until the last moment, but the Sinope attack and recent events have changed entirely the aspect of affairs. I am afraid that a rupture with Russia is inevitable.’ The other ‘recent events’ that he was referring to would have to include Palmerston’s intervening resignation and the public outcry that followed.

The Cabinet now agreed to the French Emperor’s proposal to proclaim that any Russian warship found in the Black Sea would be sunk, and sent the Royal Navy through the Bosphorus to enforce the proclamation. A few days later Palmerston asked for his job back, claiming to have discovered that the Cabinet was not so determined on electoral reform as he had believed but also remarking that he was pleased that the fleet was in the Black Sea. Queen Victoria querulously complained that she had already offered Palmerston’s job of Home Secretary to somebody else, but the new candidate hastily withdrew when Palmerston asked to be reinstated. A short ten days after he had left, Palmerston was back and one of the most careful and effective tactical resignations in British politics was over.11

Sinope was the result of a miscalculation by Tsar Nicholas. It was no heat-of-the-moment attack: the Tsar himself had authorised the action, and Prince Menshikov had commanded some of the Russian ships involved. The Tsar had correctly anticipated that the general distaste felt in the west towards the Turkish lifestyle would encourage appeasement in the face of his bloodless occupation of the Principalities. However, he failed to foresee the effect that Sinope would produce. In particular he misunderstood the Austrians, whom he thought to be his Allies because of their shared belief in autocracy and empire, and he underestimated his hereditary enemies the French, whom he thought to be militarily weak and anyway incapable of cooperating with the British.

Perhaps the Tsar was ignorant of the Austrian Prime Minister’s response when he was asked whether Austria was grateful to Russia for helping Austria to brutally suppress the uprising in its Hungarian dominion in 1848: ‘Austria will astonish the world with the magnitude of her ingratitude.’ Austria now kept its promise; concerned that war on its borders would further destabilise its fragile empire, it rapidly distanced itself diplomatically from Russia for fear that Russia’s enemies would seek to aggravate Austria’s domestic problems.

In the face of threatened action from the Royal Navy, the Russian fleet withdrew to its Black Sea fortress of Sebastopol but Russian troops did not immediately withdraw from Turkish territory. In February 1854 Britain and France sent the Tsar an ultimatum to leave the occupied provinces, and when he failed to respond both countries declared war on Russia at the end of March. Thus it was that Christian Britain found itself fighting to defend the Muslim occupation of the ancient seat of the Christian Church at Constantinople against a crusading Russia bent on its liberation.

The British coalition government was split along party lines as far as its objective in declaring war. For the liberals (as for most of the country) the objective was to roll back Russian expansion, to liberate the peripheral states incarcerated in what Karl Marx was already calling the Russian Empire’s ‘prison of nations’, and to give those states constitutional governments which would naturally lead them to adopt free trade. In contrast, the objective that persuaded the conservatives in the government to lift their veto on war was the destruction of Russian naval power. This latter, limited, view of the war’s objectives would soon disappear when the conservatives were ejected from the government during the war, as discussed in a later chapter. Any analysis which concludes that Britain fought only to constrain Russian naval power is therefore incomplete.

The idea that Britain and France might invade Russia may seem strange to us, given the lack of success of Napoleon and Hitler with apparently similar projects. This perception adds credence to the view that Britain’s declaration of war was a mistake. Unlike Napoleon, though, the European powers planned to nibble at the disaffected edges of the Russian Empire, not march on Moscow. And unlike Hitler’s opponent, the Russia of 1854 was completely un-industrialised and had no friends. As we will see, the liberal vision of a peaceful and reduced Russia was not an unrealistic dream and is one which is being belatedly realised in our time.

3

From Phoney War to Invasion

EUROPE UNITES

The governments in London and Paris first sent their troops to Varna, in what is now Bulgaria, after the Tsar in April 1854 besieged the Turkish fortress of Silistria, on the south bank of the Danube. The Tsar found that his regional support was not as strong as he had expected. The inhabitants of the Balkans, oppressed by Turkish rule though they were, did not seem to relish being occupied by Russia. Their neighbours, the Austrians, had also become very hostile to the Russians and were mobilising a large army against them. The Austrians never declared war, but they ordered Russia to leave the territory they had occupied and signed an agreement with Turkey under which Austrian troops could drive the Russians out if necessary.

The first hostilities between Britain and Russia occurred in April, when the Royal Navy bombarded Odessa, but it was to be five months before the land armies would get to grips with each other. On 13 June the first Franco-British troops to reach the Balkans disembarked at Varna in Bulgaria only seventy miles from Silistria, close enough to hear the Russian siege guns. By mid-July there were 50,000 French, 60,000 Turkish and 20,000 British troops encamped among the lakes spreading inland from Varna. Also in attendance were the British and French fleets – the Royal Navy alone counting 25,000 sailors and 3,000 guns and affording a formidable protection and supply train for the army as long as the latter stayed near the coast. Further north there were 104,000 Turkish troops including the 20,000 besieged at Silistria.1

The Crimean theatre of war.

The French and British armies were very different. The French Army included conscripts, initially enlisted for three years and then placed in reserve and called up when required. The initial three-year enlistment was sufficient to give training in weapons and drill to every Frenchman who could not afford to pay a substitute, and the civilian reserve of former conscripts was the backbone of the French Army. In addition, some middle-class men joined the ranks voluntarily as the only way to progress to officer status in what was a respected profession. Pay was not high, opportunities for pillage were expected, and families sent money to their sons in the ranks rather than vice versa as in England. Britain prided itself in being nearly the only European state not to need conscription because it could afford to pay well. As a colonial power with far-flung manpower needs, a three-year enlistment would not have allowed enough time for transport and acclimatisation as well as a useful period in the colonies. Also, the reserve was not an idea in favour in Britain, where civilians with military training were seen as a threat to political order. In 1847 a Limited Enlistment Act allowed men to sign up for ten or twelve years, so the ranks were made up partly of the hard-core unemployed (among whom many were Irish) who had signed up for at least twenty-two years and partly of younger men who had signed up because of temporary hardship or a desire to see the world. Unlike the French, the British Army almost excluded the middle-class and neither officers nor men had much experience of management or commerce.2

The French officers were much more professional than their British equivalents, but the caricature of the rich young English swell in a loud check suit making jokes in Latin and mad on hunting is misleading. Many such officers existed, particularly at the start of the war, but it would be a mistake to think that when a man purchased a commission he acquired the power and responsibility that goes with that rank today. In the day-to-day business of the regiment nearly all the work was done by the non-commissioned officers, who were much more powerful than they are nowadays, assisted by the adjutant who was usually a commissioned former NCO. To a certain extent, junior officers were there for political, ornamental, and social reasons; that was the privilege that they purchased. Many officers joined up for a few years hoping their regiment would be sent to the Cape Colony, where the climate and the hunting were marvellous, and if a posting to the disease-ridden Indies fell to the regiment’s lot they made themselves scarce. As the Crimean War progressed, there was a high turnover of British officers. As conditions worsened, professional soldiers who were attracted by allowances that increased in proportion, and by the promotion lottery that accompanied a high mortality, tended to replace more affluent dilettantes who exercised their right to send in their papers and go home.

Another significant difference between the French and British was in supply strategy. The French Army traditionally lived off the land, while the British liked to supply their army by sea, from Britain if necessary. This difference had helped Wellington to defeat the French at Torres Vedras in the Peninsular War. Wellington had persuaded the friendly locals to burn their crops for miles around so that the French invaders starved while the Royal Navy fed Wellington’s army on biscuit baked in Woolwich. This difference, in the Crimea, was aggravated by the difference in pay levels. The British complained that the French stole everything available, or at best did not pay market rates but at a price they set themselves. The French would have been justified in complaining that the British, with their exorbitant pay, could force up prices or buy up everything and leave nothing for their impecunious Allies.

Such differences encouraged the two governments to keep the armies separate, under separate commanders, which did not help coordination on the battlefield. But at Varna in the summer of 1854 the armies shared a common problem – they could not get to the front because of a lack of baggage transport.