The Crimean War: A Hisory

by Orlando Figes

French death rates from wounds and diseases were considerably lower than British rates during the first winter of the war (but not the second, when French losses from disease were horrendous).

On one ship, Arthur the Great, 384 wounded were laid out on the decks, packed as close as possible, much as it was on the slave ships, the dead and dying lying side by side with the wounded and the sick, without bedding, pillows or blankets, water bowls or bedpans, food or medicines, except those in the ship’s chest, which the captain would not allow to be used. Fearing the spread of cholera, the navy’s principal agent of transports, Captain Peter Christie, ordered all the stricken men to be put on board a single ship, the Kangaroo, which was able to accommodate, at best, 250 men, but by the time it was ready to sail for Scutari, perhaps 500 were packed on board.

Indeed, it was a Russian, Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered the system of field surgery that other nations came to only in the First World War. Although little known outside Russia, where he is considered a national hero, Pirogov’s contribution to battlefield medicine is as significant as anything achieved by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, if not more so.

Pirogov emphasized that giving ether to the wounded on arrival at the hospital kept them calm and stopped them from collapsing so that the surgeon could make a better choice in selecting between those cases requiring urgent operation and those that could wait. It was this system of triage pioneered by Pirogov during the Crimean War that marked his greatest achievement.

Through all these pioneering measures, Pirogov achieved much higher rates of survival than the British or the French – up to 65 per cent for amputations of the arm. For thigh amputations, the most dangerous and common in the armies of the Crimean War, Pirogov had survival rates of around 25 per cent, whereas only one in ten survived the operation in British and French hospitals.

There was nothing new in her ideas. The British medical officers in the Crimea were well aware of the benefits of hygiene and good order in the hospital. Their main problem in turning these commonsense ideals into active policies was a lack of manpower and resources – a problem Nightingale would only partly overcome.

In the month of January, 10 per cent of the entire British army in the East died from disease. In February, the death rate of patients at Scutari was 52 per cent, having risen from 8 per cent when Nightingale arrived in November.

The readers of The Times demanded explanations, and in early March a government-appointed sanitary commission arrived in Scutari to investigate. It found that the main Barrack Hospital was built on top of a cesspool, that the sewers were leaking, with sewage spilling into the drinking water. Nightingale was unaware of the danger, for she believed that infection came from contaminated vapours, but the sanitation in the hospital was clearly inadequate. The soldiers in her care would have had a better chance of survival in any Turkish village than in her hospitals in Scutari.

Through daily reports in the newspapers, photographs and drawings in periodicals, people had immediate access to the latest news about the war, and a clearer grasp of its realities, than during any previous conflict. Their reactions to the news became a major factor in the calculations of the military authorities, which were exposed to a degree of public criticism never seen before during wartime.

Louis-Napoleon was well aware of the power of the press and public opinion – his rise to power had relied on them – and for that reason the French press was censored and controlled by his government during the Crimean War.

Over much of the European continent, Palmerston was hated as a symbol of the bullying and dishonest British, who preached free trade and liberty as a means of advancing their own economic and imperial interests in the world.

But the main reason why the Tsar would not commit to a major new offensive in the Crimea was his growing fear of an Austrian invasion of Russia.

Realizing that it was impossible to defend all sectors simultaneously, he agonized over where to place his defences, and concluded that in the last resort it would be better to lose the Ukraine to the Austrians than to weaken the defences of the centre and ‘the heart of Russia’.

It was in the skill and rifle power of their infantry that the allies had their greatest superiority over the Russians – advantages that counted for very little in the siege warfare of Sevastopol. In engineering and artillery, the Russians were at least the equal of the British and the French.

Theatrical amusements were very popular in the French camp, where the Zouaves had their own theatre troupe, a transvestite vaudeville, that entertained huge crowds of noisy soldiers in a wooden shed.

In the British army (and there is no reason to suppose that it was worse affected than the Russian or the French) a staggering 5,546 men (roughly one in eight of the entire army in the field) behaved so badly that they were court-martialled for various acts of drunkenness during the Crimean War.

Many also drank during the day – and some were never sober throughout the entire siege. Drinking was the primary recreation of soldiers in all the armies, including the Turks, who liked the sweet Crimean wine.

One wrote of a Zouave, ‘a veteran of our African wars’, who appeared all right until, one day, sitting by his tent and drinking coffee with his comrades, he said that he had had enough; taking up his gun, he walked away and put a bullet through his head.

Technical improvements to artillery and rifle fire made for much more serious wounds than those inflicted on the soldiers of the Napoleonic or Algerian wars. The modern elongated conical rifle shot was more powerful than the old round shot, and heavier as well, so it went straight through the body, breaking any bones along its way, whereas the lighter round shot tended to deflect on its passage through the body, usually without breaking bones.

When these new bullets struck the soft part of the human body, they left a bigger hole, which could heal, but when they hit the bone, they would break it more extensively, and if an arm or leg was fractured, it would almost certainly require amputation.

From October to the following March, 4,000 British troops were court-martialled for drunkenness; most of them were given fifty lashes for their misbehaviour, and many also lost up to a month’s pay, but the drunkenness continued until the stocks of alcohol ran out, and the troops left the Crimea.

Where the British had drastically improved their sanitation and medical provision during the past year, the French had let their standards drop as more troops had arrived in the Crimea and they lacked the resources to cope with the increased demand.

The French economy had been badly affected by the war: trade was down; agriculture suffered labour shortages as a result of military conscriptions that had already taken 310,000 Frenchmen to the Crimea; and in the cities there were shortages of food which began to be widely felt in November 1855.

Requiring the support or armed neutrality of the Russians to defeat the Austrians, the French were unwilling to go along with Palmerston’s punitive initiatives against Russia.

The British claimed a victory; Austria celebrated the liberation of the Danube; and the Russians felt the loss of (southern) Bessarabia as a national humiliation. It was the first territory the Russians had ceded to the Turks since the seventeenth century.

They were satisfied with the compromise solution – an international declaration joined by the Porte on the importance of Christian rights in the Ottoman Empire – and in their domestic propaganda the Russians even used it as a symbol of their ‘moral victory’ in the Crimean War. In one sense they were right, in so far as the Paris congress restored the status quo in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, as Russia had demanded on behalf of the Greeks against the Latin claims, a point made by the Tsar many times.

But in other ways the peninsula was permanently changed. Most dramatically, the Tatar population had largely disappeared.

The idea of protecting the Tatars against Russian reprisals never crossed the minds of the allied diplomats, who might have included a stronger clause about their treatment in the peace treaty.

But Count Stroganov, the governor-general of New Russia, found a way around this clause by claiming that the Tatars had lost their treaty rights, if they had broken Russian law by departing from their place of residence without prior approval from the military authorities – as tens of thousands of them had been forced to do during the Crimean War. In other words, any Tatar who had left his home without a stamp in his passport was deemed to be a traitor by the Russian government, and was subject to penal exile in Siberia.

Between 1856 and 1863 about 150,000 Crimean Tatars and perhaps 50,000 Nogai Tatars (roughly two-thirds of the combined Tatar population of the Crimea and southern Russia) emigrated to the Ottoman Empire.

To encourage the Christian settlement of the Crimea, the tsarist government introduced a law in 1862 granting special rights and subsidies to colonists from Russia and abroad. Land abandoned by the Tatars was set aside for sale to foreigners. The influx of new Christian populations during the 1860s and 1870s transformed the ethnic profile of the Crimea. What had once been Tatar settlements were now populated by Russians, Greeks, Armenians, Bulgarians, even Germans and Estonians – all of them attracted by promises of cheap and fertile land or by special rights of entry into urban guilds and corporations not ordinarily available to newcomers.

Overall, counting both Circassians and Abkhazians, around 1.2 million Muslims were expelled from the Caucasus in the decade following the Crimean War, most of them resettling in the Ottoman Empire, and by the end of the nineteenth century the Muslims of these two regions were outnumbered by new Christian settlers by more than ten to one.

It was the first time in the history of the Ottoman Empire that a sultan had accepted invitations to a Christian entertainment in the house of a foreign ambassador.

For centuries the Muslims of the empire had been told that the Christians were inferior. Faced with the loss of their privileged position, the Muslims became increasingly rebellious. There were riots and attacks by Muslims against Christians in Bessarabia, in Nablus and in Gaza in 1856, in Jaffa during 1857, in the Hijaz during 1858, and in Lebanon and Syria, where 20,000 Maronite Christians were massacred by Druzes and Muslims during 1860.

Throughout the Balkan region, Christian peasants would rise up against their Muslim landlords and officials, beginning in Bosnia in 1858. The continuation of the millet system would give rise to nationalist movements that would involve the Ottomans and the European powers in a long series of Balkan wars, culminating in the conflicts that would bring about the First World War.

the independence and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were confirmed and guaranteed by the great powers (the first time a Muslim state was recognized by international law, the Congress of Vienna having specifically excluded Turkey from the European powers regulated by its international laws);

But if the Paris Treaty made few immediate changes to the European map, it marked a crucial watershed for international relations and politics, effectively ending the old balance of power, in which Austria and Russia had controlled the Continent between themselves, and forging new alignments that would pave the way for the emergence of nation states in Italy, Romania and Germany. Although it was Russia that was punished by the Paris Treaty, in the longer term it was Austria that would lose the most from the Crimean War, despite having barely taken part in it. Without its conservative alliance with Russia, which never quite forgave it for its armed neutrality in favour of the allies in 1854, and equally mistrusted by the liberal Western powers for its reactionary politics and ‘soft-on-Russia’ peace initiatives during the war, Austria found itself increasingly isolated on the Continent after 1856. Consequently it would lose out in Italy (in the war against the French and Piedmontese in 1859), in Germany (in the war against the Prussians in 1866) and in the Balkans (where it steadily retreated from the 1870s until 1914).

It was on this basis that the French and Piedmontese began their war against Austria in April 1859, in the knowledge that the Russians would advance 300,000 troops towards the Austrian frontier while they attacked in Italy. Only a few years before, Russia would have given military support to Austria against any French attempts to revise the Vienna treaty. The Crimean War had changed everything.

The Polish uprising of 1863 was the final breaking point for Russia’s policy of friendship towards France.

Napoleon wanted to land troops in the Baltic to support the Poles, but was held back by the British, who feared a renewal of the Crimean War. In the end, the competing French invasion of Mexico prevented troops from being sent. The diplomatic intervention of the Western powers on behalf of Poland angered the Russians, who felt betrayed by the French, in particular. It made the Russians even more determined to crush the Polish insurrectionaries. The Russian army burned whole towns and villages. Tens of thousands of Polish men and women were exiled to Siberia, and hundreds of insurgents were publicly hanged.

With the defeat of France and the support of a grateful Germany, united by Bismarck, in 1871 Russia finally succeeded in getting the removal of Article XI of the Paris Treaty, allowing it to recommission its Black Sea Fleet. Events moved so rapidly in the fifteen years since the treaty that the international landscape was almost unrecognizable: with Napoleon III in exile in England following his removal by the forces of the Third Republic, Austria and France reduced in power and prestige, and the establishment of Germany and Italy as new states, the issues and passions of the Crimean War rapidly receded into the distance.

Russia did not recover the dominant position it had held in Europe until after 1945. The demilitarization of the Black Sea was a major strategic blow to Russia, which was no longer able to protect its vulnerable southern coastal frontier against the British or any other fleet, should the Sultan call on them in the event of war.

Tolstoy’s experience of the Crimean War shaped his ideas on life and literature. He had witnessed at first hand the incompetence and corruption of many officers, and their often brutal treatment of the ordinary soldiers and sailors, whose courage and resilience had inspired him. It was in his diary of the campaign that he first developed his ideas for radical reform and vowed to fight injustice with his pen.

By 1859 one-third of the estates and two-thirds of the serfs owned by the landed nobles had been mortgaged to the state and noble banks.

Since the peasantry’s redemption payments would cancel out the gentry’s debts, the economic rationale was becoming irresistible.

No one resented Europe more than Dostoevsky. At the time of the Crimean War, he was serving as a soldier in the fortress of Semipalatinsk in Central Asia following his release from a Siberian prison camp, to which he had been exiled for his involvement in the left-wing Petrashevsky circle in 1849. In the only published verse he ever wrote (and the poetic qualities of ‘On the European Events of 1854’ are such that one can see why this was so), Dostoevsky portrayed the Crimean War as the ‘crucifixion of the Russian Christ’.

The only place where the Russians could even pretend to mount a counter-threat was in India. The British were extremely sensitive to any threat against their Indian empire, mainly because of their fragile tax-base there, which they dared not increase for political reasons.

The Crimean War brought about a sea change in Britain’s attitudes towards its fighting men. It laid the basis of the modern national myth built on the idea of the soldier defending the nation’s honour, right and liberty. Before the war the idea of military honour was defined by aristocracy.

As the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his English Notebooks, the year of 1854 had ‘done the work of fifty ordinary ones’ in undermining aristocracy.

But despite these allusions, the war left much less of a trace on the French national consciousness than it did on the British. The memory of the Crimean War in France was soon overshadowed by the war in Italy against the Austrians (1859), the French expedition to Mexico (1862–6) and, above all, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Today the Crimean War is little known in France. It is a ‘forgotten war’.