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‘God gives us brothers, but we choose our friends.’
At the court there was talk of dismembering the Ottoman Empire, starting with the Russian occupation of the Danubian principalities. In a memorandum written in the final weeks of 1852, Nicholas set out his plans for the partition of the Ottoman Empire: Russia was to gain the Danubian principalities and Dobrudja, the river’s delta lands; Serbia and Bulgaria would become independent states; the Adriatic coast would go to Austria; Cyprus, Rhodes and Egypt to Britain; France would gain Crete; an enlarged Greece would be created from the archipelago; Constantinople would become a free city under
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and to protect the Eastern Christians from the Turks. ‘I cannot recede from the discharge of a sacred duty,’ the Tsar emphasized. ‘Our religion as established in this country came to us from the East, and these are feelings, as well as obligations, which never must be lost sight of.’8
The failure of the Menshikov mission convinced the Tsar that he needed to resort to military means. On 29 May he wrote to Field Marshal Paskevich that if he had been more aggressive from the start he might have been successful in extracting concessions from the Turks. He did not want a war – he feared the intervention of the Western powers – but he was now prepared to use the threat of war, to shake the Turkish Empire to its foundations, to get his way and enforce what he saw as Russia’s treaty rights to protect the Orthodox.
Unprepared for a real war against Russia, the Ottomans began a phoney one to avert the threat of an Islamic revolution in the Turkish capital and to force the West to send their fleets to make the Russians back down.
However, as the Russian troops advanced towards Silistria there was no mass uprising by the Bulgarians, nor by any other Slavs,
The Bulgarians welcomed the Russian troops as liberators from the Turks, they joined them in attacks on Turkish positions, but few signed up as volunteers, and there were only small, sporadic uprisings, nearly all of them put down with brutal violence by Omer Pasha’s men.
In Stara Zagora, where the largest Bulgarian revolt took place, dozens of women and young girls were raped by Turkish troops.
The repressive nature of the Russian occupation, with public meetings closed, local councils taken over by the military, censorship tightened and food and transport requisitioned by the troops, bred widespread resentment. The Russians were despised by the Moldavians and Wallachians, the British consul reported, ‘and everybody laughs at them when it can be done with safety’. There were dozens of uprisings in the countryside against the requisitioning, some of them repressed by the Cossacks with ruthless violence, killing peasants and burning villages. Omer Pasha’s Turkish forces also carried
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and raping girls – to deter others from rising up against them or sending volunteers to the Russians.
(in a foretaste of the sort of fighting yet to come in the Crimean War the Turks killed more than a thousand wounded Russians left behind on the battlefield).
If Serbia was lost, there was a real danger that the entire Balkans would rebel against the Ottomans.
Nationalist feelings were running high in Greece in 1853, the 400th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and many Greeks were looking towards Russia to restore a new Greek empire on the ruins of Byzantium.
the British, who for several years had secretly been running guns and money to the rebels in Circassia and Georgia, and had long been planning to link up with Shamil.
On 9 October the Sultan answered Shamil’s appeal, calling on him to launch a ‘holy war’ for the defence of Islam and to attack the Russians in the Caucasus in collaboration with the Anatolian army under the command of Abdi Pasha.
Bashi Bazouks of Abdi Pasha’s army in Ardahan captured the important Russian fortress of St Nicholas (Shekvetili in Georgian), to the north of Batumi, killing up to a thousand Cossacks and, according to a report by Prince Menshikov, the commander-in-chief, torturing hundreds of civilians,
raping women and taking shiploads of Georgian boys and girls to sell as slaves in Constantinople.
had obtained the object for which they had come into the bay, the destruction
of the Turkish Squadron, and on every consideration they should then have ceased firing, and had they done so, they would have avoided merited censure, but they reopened their fire on the stranded hulks, and in addition to the ships already engaged, their frigates came into the Bay to range close to them and complete their demolition. Many men thus lost their lives either by the shot or by drowning in their attempts to reach the shore … Together with the ships the Russians destroyed the Turkish quarter of Sinope with shells and carcasses, the ruin is complete, not a house is standing, the
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(Austria, Prussia, Britain and France) at the Vienna Conference. If the Tsar agreed to the immediate
thought it our duty to uphold and defend the cause of peace as long as peace was compatible with the honour and dignity of our country … but the Emperor of Russia has thrown down
the gauntlet to the maritime Powers … and now war has begun in earnest.’
Newspapers published petitions to the Queen demanding a more active stand against Russia.27
The position of the British government – a fragile coalition of Liberals and free-trade Conservatives weakly held together by Lord Aberdeen – was dramatically altered by the public reaction to Sinope.
French support was crucial to Palmerston and the war party in the British cabinet. Napoleon was determined to use Sinope as a pretext to take strong action against Russia, partly from the calculation that it was an opportunity to cement an alliance with Britain, and partly from the belief that an emperor of France should not tolerate the humiliation of his fleet, should the Russian action go unpunished.
On 19 December Napoleon proposed that the French and British fleets should enter the Black Sea and force all Russian warships to return to Sevastopol. He even threatened that the French would act alone, if Britain refused. This was enough to make Aberdeen reluctantly capitulate: fear of a resurgent France, if not fear of Russia, had forced his hand.
This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion.
Henry Reeve, its chief for foreign affairs, who wrote of his profession in 1855: ‘Journalism is not the instrument by which the various divisions of the ruling class express themselves: it is rather the instrument by means of which the aggregate intelligence of the nation criticizes and controls them all. It is indeed the “Fourth Estate” of the Realm: not merely the written counterpart and voice of the speaking Third.’
the editors themselves had approved the stories, and in some cases had even written them, because they sold newspapers.
The obstacle was brushed aside by Evangelical radicals who pointed to the Tanzimat reforms as evidence of Turkish liberalism and religious tolerance.
It was the British, not the French, who wanted war and pushed hardest for it in the early months of 1854.
Like so many wars, the allied expedition to the East began with no one really knowing what it was about. The reasons for the war would take months for the Western powers to work out through long-drawn-out negotiations between themselves and the Austrians during 1854. Even after they had landed in the Crimea, in September, the allies were a long way from agreement about the objectives of the war.
Britain’s war aims escalated, not just from the bellicose chauvinism of the press but from the belief that the war’s immense potential costs demanded larger objectives, ‘worthy of Britain’s honour and greatness’.
the Queen had shared Aberdeen’s reluctance to commit British troops to the defence of the Turks. But now she saw the necessity of war, as she and Albert both explained to the Prime Minister:
The labour of putting into writing the grounds for a momentous course of action is a wholesome discipline for statesmen; and it would be well for mankind if, at a time when the question were really in suspense, the friends of a policy leading towards war were obliged to come out of the mist of oral intercourse and private notes, and to put their view into a firm piece of writing.
If such a document had been recorded by those responsible for the Crimean War, it would have disclosed that their real aim was to reduce the size and power of Russia for the benefit of ‘Europe’ and the Western powers in particular,
Church leaders seized upon the war as a righteous struggle and crusade. On Sunday, 2 April pro-war sermons were preached from pulpits up and down the land.
the Reverend John James said that Russia’s offensive against Turkey was an attack ‘on the most sacred rights of our common humanity; an outrage standing in the same category as the slave trade, and scarcely inferior to it in crime’.
May it not be the Divine will that England, after having triumphed as the champion, shall be called to the still loftier distinction of the teacher of mankind?’
and the conversion of the infidel?’
Back in London, the British cabinet also felt that forcing Russia out of the Danube area was not enough to justify the sacrifices made so far. Palmerston and his ‘war party’ were not prepared to negotiate a peace when the Russian armed forces remained intact. They wanted to inflict serious damage on Russia, to destroy her military capacity in the Black Sea, not just to secure Turkey but to end the Russian threat to British interests in the Near East.
expelling the Russians from the principalities ‘without crippling their future means of aggression upon Turkey is not now an object worthy of the great efforts of England and France’.40
‘small results’ would not be enough to compensate for the inevitable human losses of the war, and that only ‘great territorial changes’ in the Danube region, the Caucasus, Poland and the Baltic could justify a campaign in the Crimea.44
The Four Points were conservative in character (nothing else would satisfy the Austrians) but vague enough to allow the British (who wanted to reduce the power of Russia but had no real idea how to translate this into concrete policies) to add more conditions as the war went on. Indeed, unknown to the Austrians, there was a secret fifth point agreed between the British and the French allowing them to raise further demands depending on the outcome of the war. For Palmerston, the Four Points were a way of binding Austria and France to a grand European alliance for the pursuit of an open-ended
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Those who could not walk, about 1,600 wounded Russian soldiers, were abandoned on the battlefield, where they lay for several days, until the British and the French, having cleared their own, took care of them, burying the dead and carting off the wounded to their hospitals in Scutari on the outskirts of Constantinople.
the Russians had been ‘told the most fantastic stories by their priests – that we were monsters capable of the most ferocious savagery and even cannibals’. Reports of these ‘dishonourable’ killings outraged British soldiers and public opinion, reinforcing their belief that the Russians were ‘no better than savages’.
But such outrage was hypocritical. There were many incidents of British soldiers killing wounded Russians, and disturbing cases of the British shooting Russian prisoners because they were ‘troublesome’. It should also be remembered that the British walked among the Russian wounded, not only to give them water, but sometimes to steal from them. They took silver crosses from their necks, rooted through their kitbags for souvenirs, and helped themselves to what they fancied from the living and the dead. ‘I have got a beautiful trophy for you from the Alma, just one to suit you,’ wrote Hugh
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With the harbour blocked and no possibility of back-up from their ships, the allied commanders decided that it was too dangerous to attack Sevastopol from the north, so they now committed themselves to attack the city from the southern side, where their ships could use the harbours of Balaklava (for the British) and Kamiesh (for the French) to support their armies.
The change of plan was a fatal error of judgement – and not just because the city’s defences were in fact stronger on the southern side. Moving south of Sevastopol made it harder for the allied armies to block the Russian supply route from the mainland, which had been a crucial element of the strategic plan. If the city had been taken quickly, this would not have been a major problem; but once the allied commanders had ruled out a coup de main, they fell into the trap of conventional military thinking about how to besiege a town, ideas going back to the seventeenth century that involved the
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The French favoured the idea of a longer siege, and they brought the British round to their traditional way of thinking. It seemed less risky than a quick storming. Burgoyne, the chief engineer, who had been in favour of a quick attack, changed his mind on the absurd grounds that it would cost 500 lives to seize Sevastopol in a lightning strike, losses that were ‘utterly unjustifiable’ in his opinion, even though th...
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