The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  In Russia the defenders of Sebastopol were treated as heroes when they passed through Moscow on their way northwards to St Petersburg. Within six months of the allied departure, plans were completed for rebuilding the ravaged city, although the Russians found that they had to employ an American engineer, Colonel John C. Gowen, to salvage the sunken vessels blocking the harbour, a six-year task. Work began on a restored Cathedral of St Vladimir, not completed until 1888 but designed to offer spiritual inviolability to the souls of a hundred thousand Orthodox believers who had died in the year-long battle for the city. Across the harbour, on the north shore, was the great Russian cemetery, where a new church shaped like a pyramid listed the losses of each regiment in the campaign. In this cemetery the remains of commanders who survived the war were later interred — notably, in 1861, General Gorchakov and, in 1884, Totleben.

  Diplomatic relations between Russia and her former enemies were soon restored. Queen Victoria welcomed Brunnow back to London as early as 3 May 1856, giving a dinner for him at Buckingham Palace three days later at which Aberdeen and Clarendon were among the guests;[556] he stayed on as ambassador for another eighteen years. British diplomats arrived by sea at St Petersburg at the end of the first week in August. ‘We all felt rather humbled at being brought up in a Russian ship through the forts which had successfully defied the splendid Baltic fleet,’ wrote the Foreign Secretary’s nephew, Thomas Lister; although Colonel Maude, a Balaclava artilleryman attached to the mission, declared that ‘from what he saw’ the forts ‘might have been attacked with success’. A week of embassy parties and receptions left Lister with the impression that Austria’s alleged treachery to her Russian partner rankled in St Petersburg more than any action by the belligerents themselves: ‘The hatred between the Austrians and Russians knows no bounds,’ he noted in his journal on 14 August.[557]

  A speedy reconciliation drew Russia and her old adversaries in France and Sardinia-Piedmont closer together.[558] Alexander II, Napoleon III and their foreign ministers met at Stuttgart in September 1857 in an attempt to alarm the German states by showing that a Franco-Russian entente really did exist. Ten years later the Tsar came to Paris in great state; but, despite careful re-routing of carriage processions to avoid the Boulevard de Sebastopol, the visit was not a success, Alexander narrowly escaping assassination from a young Polish patriot. At heart the Tsar continued to resent bitterly the humiliating restraints on Russian activity in the Black Sea: in 1863, at a meeting of ministers, he banged his fist on the table upon which he had signed the final ratified version of the Treaty of Paris, wretchedly reproaching himself for that ‘act of cowardice’ seven years before; and when in September 1870 he was told that Napoleon III and his army had surrendered to the Prussians at Sedan, he made the sign of the cross and exclaimed, ‘Thank God, Sebastopol is now avenged.’[559]

  The defeat of France and the preoccupation of the European Powers with the German Question gave Russia the chance to cast off the shackles of the Paris Settlement. Early in November 1870 the Tsar sent a circular note to his embassies abroad instructing them to let it be known that Russia no longer considered herself bound by the Black Sea clauses of the Treaty of Paris. This unilateral abrogation of solemn commitments provoked protests in London and Vienna, with new outbursts against the Russian menace in the British press and with peppery speeches in Parliament. The Tsar agreed to suspend action on the circular and send delegates to a conference in London which would consider revising the Treaty of Paris. In March 1871 the Great Powers concluded the London Convention: full sovereign rights in the Black Sea were restored to the Russians, although Turkey was authorized to open the Dardanelles and Bosphorus to foreign warships, even in time of peace, should the Sultan’s Government consider the remaining clauses of the Treaty of Paris at risk.

  The Tsar and Alexander Gorchakov, who had succeeded Nesselrode at the Foreign Ministry in April 1856, regarded the London Convention as a diplomatic triumph. But since Russia was too impoverished to refortify Sebastopol or build up a Black Sea fleet until well into the eighteen-eighties, it was a less effective victory than they claimed. However, the recovery of full sovereignty mattered greatly to Alexander II’s imperial conscience. From St Petersburg the British ambassador reported that the Tsar ‘prayed with signs of deep emotion’ at his father’s grave, telling his attendants as he emerged from the cathedral in the fortress of St Peter and St Paul that ‘the shade of the Emperor Nicholas would now be appeased’.[560]

  By the winter of 1873-4 the Crimean War lay twenty years into history, far enough away for Queen Victoria to welcome the first direct marriage joining the British and Russian royal families. Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh — the baby whom Victoria was expecting during Nicholas I’s visit in 1844 — married Grand Duchess Marie, Nicholas’s granddaughter, at St Petersburg in January 1874; and four months later Tsar Alexander II himself came to London on a state visit. But the close dynastic contacts of the next half-century owed more to British and Russian links with the Danish and Greek Royal House and to the family of Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse. It was through these Greco-Danish and Hessian connections that, a century after the Crimean War, the heir to the British throne (Prince Charles) came to be a great-great-great-grandson not only of Victoria but of her enemy, Nicholas I, as well.

  After 1856 the British and Russian Empires, between them encompassing one-third of the land surface of the globe, were never again at war with each other. On several occasions peace seemed at risk — most notably in 1878 when, in another war with Turkey, Alexander II’s army reached the outskirts of Constantinople and a wave of British ‘Jingoism’ matched in folly the self-confident warmongering of a quarter of a century before. But statesmen at home and abroad had learned from the errors of their recent past; and in the Congress of Berlin a peaceful settlement was reached which ensured that Eastern Europe was free from any major conflict for over a third of a century.[561]

  Russia’s war with Turkey in 1877-8 enabled one famous soldier to add fresh distinction to his career: Totleben secured the surrender of the fortress of Plevna after two other generals had failed. Apart from Totleben, only three senior officers from the Crimean War later enhanced their military reputations: Sir Hugh Rose and Sir Colin Campbell in India; and Adolphe Niel who, during the two years before his premature death in 1869, proved to he France’s ablest minister of war for over half a century. MacMahon, although victorious at Magenta in Napoleon III’s brief Italian campaign of 1859, was defeated at Worth in 1870 and discredited as a crypto-royalist President of the Third French Republic. La Marmora, Italy’s Prime Minister from 1864 to 1866, suffered a bad military defeat against the Austrians at Custozza. Two junior officers of Raglan’s army are remembered as Victorian heroes: Garnet Wolseley, who as a company commander took part in the two assaults on the Redan, was an archetypal ‘Soldier Who Made The Empire’, renowned for expeditions against King Kofi of the Ashanti, King Cetewayo of the Zulus, and the Egyptian nationalist colonel, Arabi Pasha; and Charles Gordon, who travelled out to Balaclava in January 1855 as a sapper subaltern, was to become ‘Chinese Gordon’ eight years later and to win posthumous fame in 1885 as ‘Gordon of Khartoum’.[562]

  The most famous woman veteran from the Crimean War was, of course, Florence Nightingale. She came back to England broken in health, but was long able to continue her fight for an efficient nursing service. In 1907, three years before her death, she became the first woman recipient of the Order of Merit. Sister Sarah Anne Terrot, who lived until 1902, also suffered poor health after her return from Scutari; she was able to nurse in St Thomas’s Hospital at Lambeth and in Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year she travelled to Balmoral to receive the Royal Red Cross from the Queen.[563] Poor Mrs Seacole did not survive so long. She appeared in the London Bankruptcy Court in November, 1856, but her cause was taken up by The Times and Punch and has a happy ending. In recognition of her ‘disinterested services’ to ‘the Army, Navy and British Nation’ a �
��Seacole Fund’ was established, with the Queen’s ‘approbation’ and under the patronage of the Prince of Wales and two royal dukes; she was encouraged to write her Wonderful Adventures and was able to visit Jamaica and live in London in reasonable comfort until 1881; but Mary Seacole’s achievements were then largely forgotten until the centenary of her death.[564] Fanny Duberly, on the other hand, has enjoyed a good press. She was with the 8th Hussars in India from 1857 until 1864: her Campaigning Experiences in Central India and Rajputana during the Suppression of the Mutiny was published in London in 1859, but is less vivid than her Crimean recollections. Her husband — stolid, dull and reliable Henry — retired as a lieutenant-colonel and settled (predictably) in Cheltenham, where he died in 1891. Fanny outlived the Queen who had snubbed her at Portsmouth by almost exactly two years.[565]

  Survivors of the war lingered on well into the twentieth century. As late as June 1918 the pink and white Crimean War ribbon could be seen alongside the blue of a naval vc on the chest of a serving officer at the Admiralty, Sir Arthur Wilson, once an outstanding fleet commander and in his later years a consultant on almost every naval enterprise of the First World War. Yet another Crimean midshipman was still alive when the Second World War began: Colonel Rookes Crompton, founder of an electrical engineering company at Chelmsford, brought to the committee responsible for developing ‘land ships’ (tanks) in 1914-15 an experience of trench warfare which went back sixty years to the days when, as a cadet aboard HMS Dragon, he had gone ashore to visit his soldier brother before the assault on the Redan. He could recall the sound of the ‘whistling Dicks’ (the shells fired from the Lancaster rifle guns) and of the ‘Carcasses’ (flare shells) lighting the battlefield at night, and how after the end of the fighting what appeared to be ‘a bluish sort of gravel’ in front of the trenches was ‘the remains of countless lead bullets’.[566] Colonel Crompton died in February 1940, less than three and a half years after the last surviving officer who had fought throughout the war against Russia, Sir Fitzroy Maclean. On the eve of Inkerman Maclean became aide-de-camp to Sir George Brown, but he had already seen service with the Light Dragoons at Varna and during the battle of the Alma. He was well into his hundred and second year when he died, late in November 1936.

  Eighty-four years after the Treaty of Paris was signed, the pride of the Crimean troopships at last became a casualty of war: the screw-propelled Himalaya, which had transported thousands of soldiers during the years when she was the largest vessel in the world, was sunk by German bombers while serving as a storeship moored in Portland Harbour.[567] Within a few months of the old troopship’s sinking, the German thrust into Soviet Russia brought familiar place-names back into the headlines, as war returned to the Crimea. For 248 days — from 30 October 1941 until 4 July 1942 — Sebastopol endured a far tighter siege than during the 349 days of battle in the Crimean War. Anti-tank ditches, stretching from Balaclava to the mouth of the Belbec, kept out Hitler’s Roumanian allies as they advanced southwards from Simferopol as well as German armoured divisions thrusting westwards from Yalta along the Chernaya towards Inkerman. In the end, the city was beaten into surrender by dive bombing and shelling far more terrible than anything envisaged by Totleben. In February 1945, nine months after the Red Army liberated Sebastopol, a British prime minister walked for the first time in the streets of Balaclava, scrutinizing with interest the Russians whom he met. ‘There is pride in their looks,’ Churchill remarked to his personal doctor, adding, on reflection, ‘They have a right to feel proud.’[568]

  During the 1920s and 1930s the Crimean War seemed as remote and irrelevant as Minden or Dettingen. A reading public filled with revulsion at the slaughter of the Ypres salient, Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli found little of interest — or surprise — in the record of a mismanaged expedition on the outer fringe of Europe. They did not look for the first warning signs of the future warfare, with its poisonous gas, tanks, submarines and minefields. Even for military specialists, the Crimea appeared an unrewarding study: the allied victories owed nothing to good generalship; they were tributes to a resilient soldiery engaged in a succession of close combats, like the battle scenes of a Shakespeare history. In Britain only two enduring legends — the Charge of the Light Brigade and ‘The Lady with the Lamp’ — differentiated this campaign from a dozen others over the last century and a half. The political and social significance of the war was largely ignored by the historians. G. M. Young’s highly perceptive Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, for example, mentioned the Crimea only in passing. It was, Young wrote in 1936, an ‘event abroad’ which, like ‘the Australian gold discoveries and India’, gave ‘the nation an aggressive, imperial self-consciousness’. A few years later Philip Guedalla, outlining Bazaine’s military career, aptly described Raglan’s troops as ‘Wellington’s army without Wellington’, but he could not resist the irreverent temptation to dismiss the Crimean War itself as ‘one of the bad jokes of history’.[569]

  The second siege of Sebastopol in 1942, and the westward advance of the Red Army two and a half years later, rekindled interest in the Crimean War. For, with the collapse of Hitler’s ‘New Order’, what had seemed during the years of German primacy a succession of senseless battles fell into new historical perspective. It became clear that, even if much of the Treaty of Paris was torn up in 1870, the Crimean War formed the true watershed of nineteenth-century diplomacy. Before 1854 conservative statesmen — survivors like Nesselrode, Aberdeen and, for most of the period, Metternich — were convinced that a great European conflict would unleash ‘Jacobinism’ and violent social change; they therefore avoided war by upholding an ideal of collective responsibility, the so-called ‘Concert of Europe’. The Forty Years Peace ended in 1853-4 because the Great Powers, shaken by the revolutions of 1848, sought to affirm their international prestige by resort to a peremptory diplomacy. Without conscious intent — for they had in mind only limited expeditions to attain particular objectives — they abandoned embryonic concepts of a public law between the nations and reverted to older practices which assumed that armies and navies were the natural instruments of external policy. Hence the contrast between the period before 1853 and that after 1856, when there were in fifteen years four separate conflicts on European soil, each involving at least two of the Great Powers.

  The chief beneficiary from what John Morley called ‘this vast subversion of the whole system of European States’ was not, however, one of the participants in the Crimean War; it was neutral Prussia, given new political purpose by that one-time ambassador in St Petersburg and Paris, Otto von Bismarck. Britain’s interests during these years of ‘subversion’ lay in more distant continents; defeated Russia was, as Alexander Gorchakov enigmatically remarked, ‘communing with herself’; Buol’s diplomatic pirouettes (and a threat of bankruptcy) left Francis Joseph’s Austria militarily weak and politically isolated; and the grandiose schemes of Napoleon III were wrecked on the Emperor’s poor health and the ruthless ability of Prussia’s chief minister to explode his fantasies. Berlin, rather than Paris or Vienna, thus emerged as Europe’s central capital; and it was only with the division of Germany in 1945 that the post-Crimean era came to an end.[570]

  The creation of a Prussian-dominated Germany had, of course, entered into none of the allied statesmen’s calculations during the Crimean War. Their war aim was basically a simple one: they hoped that their fleets and armies could destroy Russia’s capacity for aggression. Yet, even while the Congress of Paris was in session, they recognized the need to be content with lesser gains. With Russian troops encamped along the shores of the Sea of Marmora in Alexander II’s second war against Turkey, less than a quarter of a century later, it seemed as if all the sacrifice and suffering of the allied soldiers and sailors had been in vain. But with the passage of the years the victory in the Crimea acquired a new significance. After the Bolshevik Revolution destroyed the old Russian State, certain dates from the Tsarist past began to stand out as milestones beside the road to disaste
r. For forty years after 1814, when Tsar Alexander I had led the triumphant Russian and Prussian armies into Paris, the empire of the Tsars was respected as the strongest power on the European mainland. That reputation was lost in September 1855 when the Russian troops fell back across the bridge of boats from the devastated fortress beside the Black Sea. For another sixty years Imperial Russia continued to cast the shadow of a colossus over the Balkans, central Asia and the Far East. But never again did the ruler in St Petersburg seek to dominate the continent of Europe, from the Seine to the Urals, as had that ‘crowned gendarme’, Nicholas I, in the eighteen-thirties and eighteen-forties. The legend of an all-powerful Tsardom was dissolved in the battle-smoke of Sebastopol.

  Abbreviations Used in the Footnotes

  Add. MSS. Additional Manuscripts in the British Library.

  Airlie: Airlie, Mabel, Countess of, (ed), With the Guards We Shall Go (Letters of Colonel Strange Jocelyn).

  Bod.Lib.: Papers deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Cal. Lett.: S. J. Gough Calthorpe, Letters from Headquarters.

  Clar. MSS.: Clarendon Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Cliff. Lett.: Henry Clifford V. C., his letters and sketches from the Crimea.

  EHR: English Historical Review (London).

  FO: Foreign Office papers, Public Record Office, Kew.

  Gr. Pap.: Microfilm of Graham Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  Hansard: Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Third Series.

  HJ: Historical Journal (Cambridge).

  ILN: Illustrated London News.

  Ist.Vk. : Istoricheski Vestnik (St Petersburg).

  JRUSI : Journal of the Royal United Services Institution (London).

  JSAHR: Journal of the Society of Army Historical Research (London).