Florence Nightingale (wikimedia.org)
Mention the Crimean War to an Englishman and, if they know of it, they’ll probably associate it with two things: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) and the level of care provided to wounded and disease-ridden soldiers under the supervision of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the healthcare reformer and pioneer of modern nursing.
Whilst it took place around thirty years before the onset of the ‘Machine Age’, the Crimean War is sometimes referred to as the first modern war. It was certainly the first major war of the industrial era and its participants would have been aware of the rate of technological progress and that future wars would be deadlier and deadlier.
Briefly, regarding the context of the war, Russia initially wanted to partition the declining Ottoman Empire (“the sick man of Europe”) with Britain and – perhaps to a lesser extent – France, just as it had partitioned Poland with Prussia and Austria. However, it was decided on either side that the strategic importance of the Eastern Mediterranean with its key trade routes was worth going to war over, although Russia maintained that it was innocently protecting the interests of Orthodox Christianity in the region. France held a similar official position regarding Roman Catholicism.
The war began in Moldavia and Wallachia, in the Danube Delta, the only point on the European Peninsula from which it’s possible to begin a march on Moscow without going through East Germany and Poland (and vice versa). The River Prut formed the border between the Russian Empire and Ottoman Empire. Today it forms the modern-day border between Romania and Moldova. Britain and France, hoping to balance the two powers against each other, readied themselves to side with the Ottoman Empire when the Russian army crossed the Prut.
Sinop is a small picturesque city on the northern coast of Turkey, about halfway between Istanbul and Batumi which are each eight or nine hours drive away. It is known as the birthplace of the Greek philosopher Diogenes, the most famous of the Cynics. A reminder if we needed it that the Black Sea was once surrounded by Greek-speaking trade ports. And in more recent times it was the site of a naval battle between Russia and Turkey on 30 November 1853. The Russians were victorious and 1st December is subsequently one of 17 days of military honour in Russia today. It was a relatively minor battle. At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 there had been an average of 37 ships on either side. Here there were around 12 on either side and far fewer ships of the line. But it did have the effect of dragging a not-so-reluctant Britain and France into the conflict.
Battle of Sinop (wikipedia.org)
The Russians were quickly forced to retreat from the Danube, leading the European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune to comment jovially on the situation on 17th August 1854: “There they are, eighty or ninety thousand English and French soldiers at Varna … the French doing nothing and the British helping them as fast as they can.” The writer’s name was Karl Marx and he ends with a warning that “this Eastern war may be carried on for thirty years, and yet come to no conclusion.”
This enforced idleness may have been the case in Varna but further south in Gallipoli, the peninsula that guards the Mediterranean entrance to the Sea of Marmara and ultimately the Black Sea, French and British sappers were very busy building fortifications to defend against a Russian attack which never materialised. When the Russians refused to negotiate terms of surrender, the Allies boarded their ships at Varna and prepared for an invasion of Crimea.
The British barracks at Scutari in the Asian part of Istanbul was turned into a temporary military hospital and it was here that a 34-year-old Florence Nightingale arrived on 4th November 1854 with a team of nurses to take care of wounded and diseased soldiers brought from the ongoing Siege of Sevastopol. This during a large and deadly cholera epidemic.
In what might now be seen as an interesting precedent for Wuhan and Covid-19, the famed civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) designed a hospital to be built from prefabricated modules in England and shipped to Turkey, where it was to be assembled on-site. The new flat-pack hospital units were built at Gloucester and assembled at Renkioi (towards the end of the war) on the opposite side of the Dardanelles from Gallipoli. Florence Nightingale described them as “those magnificent huts”.
The war itself was grim, with two strong sides equally well matched (and poorly led). A news report in the Times about a blundered and ill-fated cavalry charge at the Battle of Balaklava on 25th October 1854 inspired Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, written and published three months later, with its haunting refrain: “Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.” Rudyard Kipling wrote a better – but less famous – poem thirty-six years later about the treatment of aging veterans in the aftermath of the conflict (“The Last of the Light Brigade”): “O thirty million English that babble of England’s might, / Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night”.
The Thin Red Line by Robert Gibb (wikipedia.org)
The original “Thin Red Line” was the red-coated 93rd (Highland) infantry Regiment, who stood firm at the Battle of Balaklava (prior to that doomed Charge of the Light Brigade). Their heroic contribution was immortalised in Robert Gibb’s 1881 painting which now hangs at the regimental museum at Stirling Castle in Scotland.
Crimean War, The Sevastopol Panorama by Franz Roubaud (wikipedia.org)
The Sevastopol Panorama by Franz Roubaud was painted between 1902 and 1904 and unveiled in a specially-designed building in 1905 on the fiftieth anniversary of the Siege (following the success of a similar battle-scene panorama in Lviv ten years earlier). It remains one of the major tourist attractions in Crimea today, probably more interesting than the original Racławice panorama because busier and more detailed. In it we can see the beginnings of trench warfare.
Sevastopol fell in September 1855 after an 11-month-long siege. A Peace Treaty was signed in March 1856, favourable to the Ottomans. Sevastopol was returned to the Russians but the Russian Black Sea Fleet had to be destroyed. Historian Orlando Figes notes that this was the first time compulsory disarmament had ever been imposed on a great power: “The Allies did not really think that they were dealing with a European power. They regarded Russia as a semi-Asiatic state.” The humiliation did not last long though. Russia began to re-establish its Black Sea Fleet in 1870 with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
Perhaps the most interesting technological innovation of the Crimean War was not to do with weaponry but documentation. “Valley of the Shadow of Death” by Roger Fenton was taken on 23rd April 1855 and has been described as “the first iconic photograph of war”. Looking at a startlingly realistic image like this one (or the photograph of Florence Nightingale), we realise that we have a much stronger connection with Sevastopol than we do with Waterloo or Trafalgar thirty years earlier.
The 93rd (Highland) Regiment sailed home in June 1856. A year later they were on their way to Lucknow via Calcutta to help put down the Indian Rebellion. Florence Nightingale’s “Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is Not” was published to great acclaim in 1859. The geopolitical phrase “sick man of Europe” was first used in print in the New York Times in 1860 to describe the fate of Turkey as an eventually-prophetic warning regarding the apparent weakness of Austria. Even fifty years beforehand, there were clear signs that the Great War (WWI) was at hand. As was the Machine Age.
Autor
Thomas Riley
Thomas Riley runs the Flows and Frictions podcast for Strategy&Future. Originally from Manchester, England, he has been living and teaching English in Katowice since 2009.
Strategy&Future
Trwa ładowanie...