The Crimean War
Page 57
But that suffering, too, played a role in transforming the public image of the British troops. Before the war the respectable middle and upper classes had viewed the rank and file of the British army as little more than a dissolute rabble – heavy-drinking and ill-disciplined, brutal and profane – drawn from the poorest sections of society. But the agonies of the soldiers in the Crimea had revealed their Christian souls and turned them into objects of ‘good works’ and Evangelical devotion. Religious ministering to the rank and file dramatically increased during the war. The army doubled its number of chaplains and every man was given a Bible free of charge, courtesy of middle-class donations to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Naval and Military Bible Society.14
The soldiers were recast as saintly figures, martyrs of a holy cause, in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Among them was Catherine Marsh, whose lively and sentimental hagiography, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment (1856), sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few years of publication and reappeared in numerous abridged and juvenile editions up until the First World War. Compiled from Vicars’s diary and his letters to his mother from the Crimea, Memorials was dedicated to the ‘noble ideal of the Christian soldier’ and offered to the public as a ‘fresh and ample refutation to those who, in the face of examples to the contrary, still maintain that entire devotion of the heart to God must withdraw a man from many of the active duties of life and … that in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier’. Vicars is portrayed as a soldier-saint, a selfless hero who bears the burdens of his fellow-men on the Sevastopol heights by sharing his food and tent, caring for them and reading them the Bible when they are sick. Vicars leads his men to ‘Holy War’ against the Russians, who are described as ‘heathens’, ‘infidels’ and ‘savages’. He is mortally wounded during the sortie of 22–3 March 1855, and his death is compared to the martyrdom of Christ in Marsh’s final chapter (‘Victory’), which is prefaced by Longfellow’s verse (a translation from the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique):
His soul to Him who gave it rose,
God led it to its long repose,
Its glorious rest!
And though the warrior’s sun has set,
Its light shall longer round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.
Vicars was buried in Sevastopol but in St George’s Church on Bromley Road in Beckenham, Kent, there is a white marble tablet carved in the shape of a scroll with a sheathed sword behind on which these words are inscribed:
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF HEDLEY VICARS CAPTAIN 97TH REGIMENT WHO THROUGH FAITH IN THE WORD OF GOD THAT ‘THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST HIS SON CLEANSETH US ALL IN SIN’ PASSED FROM THE DEATH OF SIN TO THE LIFE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. HE FELL IN BATTLE, AND SLEPT IN JESUS, ON THE NIGHT OF 22ND OF MARCH, 1855. AND WAS BURIED BEFORE SEBASTOPOL AGED 28 YEARS.15
Beyond the sanctification of soldiers and the new manly ideal, the common effort of the war seemed to offer the possibility of national unity and reconciliation needed to end the class divisions and industrial strife of the 1830s and 1840s. In Dickens’s Household Words, alongside the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), a novel on the theme of ending the class conflict, there appeared a series of poems by Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, including ‘The Lesson of the War’.
The rulers of the nation,
The poor ones at their gate,
With the same eager wonder
The same great news await!
The poor man’s stay and comfort,
The rich man’s joy and pride,
Upon the bleak Crimean shore
Are fighting side by side.16
A similar idea can be found in Tennyson’s poetic monodrama Maud (1855), where a state of ‘civil war’ created by the ‘lust of gain’ at home gives way to an ending in which the narrator looks to war abroad as a higher and more godly cause:
Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!
Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.
Painters picked up the same theme. In John Gilbert’s Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards in the Hall of Buckingham Palace (1856), a painting (sadly lost) that was popular enough to be reproduced as a coloured lithograph as late as 1903, there is a touching poignancy in the meeting between the Queen and the wounded heroes of the Crimea which suggests the prospect of post-war unity between the highest and the lowest of the land. Jerry Barrett’s large painting Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers (1856) played on this emotion too. This sentimental picture of the royal family visiting Crimean invalids at the Chatham army hospital was such a success when it was first shown at Thomas Agnew’s gallery in Piccadilly that several thousand prints were subsequently sold to the public in various editions costing between three and ten guineas.17
The Queen herself was a collector of photographic souvenirs of Crimean veterans. She commissioned commercial photographers like Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett to make a series of commemorative portraits of maimed and wounded soldiers in various military hospitals, including Chatham, for the royal collection at Windsor. Cundall and Howlett’s striking photographs reached beyond their patroness’s hands. Through photographic exhibitions and their reproduction in the illustrated press, they brought home to the public in explicit terms the suffering of the soldiers and the human costs of war. These pioneering photographs were very different from Fenton’s genteel images. In Cundall and Howlett’s Three Crimean Invalids (1855), for example, the wounded infantrymen are seated on a hospital bed displaying their loss of limbs. There is no emotion in their expressions, no romanticism or sentimentality in their representation, only the documentary evidence in black and white of the impact made by iron shot and frostbite on the body. In their notes in the royal archives, Cundall and Howlett identified the men as William Young of the 23rd Regiment, wounded at the Redan on 18 June 1855; Henry Burland of the 34th, both legs lost to frostbite in the trenches before Sevastopol; and John Connery of the 49th, his left leg lost to frostbite in the trenches.18
Memories of the Crimean War continued to provide a winning subject for British artists well into the 1870s. The best known of these Crimean pictures was Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (1874) by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So great were the crowds that came to see it that a policeman was put on guard to provide protection. Already known for her earlier paintings on military themes, Thompson had conceived The Roll Call (as it became popularly known) in the immediate aftermath of the Cardwell reforms, when army matters were prominent in p
ublic life. From detailed sketches of Crimean veterans, she created a striking composition, in which the remnants of the Grenadiers, wounded, cold and utterly exhausted, assemble after a battle to be counted by their mounted officer. The painting was completely different from conventional depictions of war that focused on the glorious deeds of gallant officers: apart from the mounted officer, the 2-metre-high canvas was entirely dominated by the suffering of the rank and file. It stripped away the heroics and let the viewer look into the face of war. After its showing at the Royal Academy The Roll Call went on national tour, drawing immense crowds. In Newcastle, it was advertised by men with sandwich boards which simply read ‘The Roll Call is Coming!’ In Liverpool, 20,000 people saw the picture in three weeks – a huge number for the time. People came away profoundly moved by the painting, which had clearly touched the nation’s heart. The Queen purchased The Roll Call from its original buyer, a Manchester industrialist, but a printing company retained the right to reproduce it in a popular edition of engravings. Thompson herself became a national heroine overnight. A quarter of a million cartes-de-visite photographs of the artist were sold to the public, who put her on a par with Florence Nightingale.19
What will they say in England
When the story there is told
Of deeds of might, on Alma’s height,
Done by the brave and bold?
Of Russia, proud at noontide,
Humbled ere set of sun?
They’ll say ‘’Twas like Old England!’
They’ll say ‘’Twas noble done!’
What will they say in England
When, hushed in awe and dread,
Fond hearts, through all our happy homes
Think of the mighty dead,
And muse, in speechless anguish,
On father – brother – son?
They’ll say in dear Old England
‘God’s holy will be done.’
What will they say in England?
Our names, both night and day
Are in their hearts and on their lips,
When they laugh, or weep, or pray.
They watch on earth, they plead with heaven,
Then, forward to the fight!
Who droops or fears, while England cheers,
And God defends the right?
Reverend J. S. B. Monsell in
The Girls’ Reading Book (1875)20
The Crimean War left a deep impression on the English national identity. To schoolchildren, it was an example of England standing up against the Russian Bear to defend liberty – a simple fight between Right and Might, as Punch portrayed it at the time. The idea of John Bull coming to the aid of the weak against tyrants and bullies became part of Britain’s essential narrative. Many of the same emotive forces that took Britain to the Crimean War were again at work when Britain went to war against the Germans in defence of ‘little Belgium’ in 1914 and Poland in 1939.
Today, the names of Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Cardigan and Raglan continue to inhabit the collective memory – mainly through the signs of streets and pubs. For decades after the Crimean War there was a fashion for naming girls Florence, Alma, Balaklava, and boys Inkerman. Veterans of the war took these names to every corner of the world: there is a town called Balaklava in South Australia and another in Queensland; there are Inkermans in West Virginia, South and West Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales in Australia, as well as Gloucester County, Canada; there are Sebastopols in California, Ontario, New South Wales and Victoria, and a Mount Sebastopol in New Zealand; there are four towns called Alma in Wisconsin, one in Colorado, two in Arkansas, and ten others in the United States; four Almas and a lake with the same name name in Canada; two towns called Alma in Australia, and a river by that name in New Zealand.
‘Right Against Wrong’ (Punch, 8 April 1854)
In France, too, the names of the Crimea are found everywhere, reminders of a war in which 310,000 Frenchmen were involved. One in three did not return home. Paris has an Alma Bridge, built in 1856 and rebuilt in the 1970s, which is now mainly famous for the scene of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997. Until then it was better known for its Zouave statue (the only one of four to be kept from the old bridge) by which water levels are still measured by Parisians (the river is declared unnavigable when the water passes the Zouave’s knees). Paris has a place de l’Alma, and a boulevard de Sébastopol, both with metro stations by those names. There is a whole suburb in the south of Paris, originally built as a separate town, with the name of Malakoff (Malakhov). Initially called ‘New California’, Malakoff was developed in the decade after the Crimean War on cheap quarry land in the Vanves valley by Alexandre Chauvelot, the most successful of the property developers in nineteenth-century France. Chauvelot cashed in on the brief French craze for commemorating the Crimean victory by building pleasure-gardens in the new suburb to increase its appeal to artisans and workers from the overcrowded centre of Paris. The main attraction of the gardens was the Malakoff Tower, a castle built in the image of the Russian bastion, set in a theme-park of ditches, hills, redoubts and grottoes, along with a bandstand and an outside theatre, where huge crowds gathered to watch the reenactments of Crimean battles or take in other entertainments in the summer months. It was with the imprimatur of Napoleon that New California was renamed Malakoff, in honour of his regime’s first great military victory, in 1858. Developed as private building plots, the suburb grew rapidly during the 1860s. But after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, the Malakoff Tower was destroyed on the orders of the Mayor of Vanves, who thought it was a cruel reminder of a more glorious past.
Malakoff towers were built in towns and villages throughout provincial France. Many of them survive to this day. There are Malakoff towers in Sivry-Courtry (Seine-et-Marne), Toury-Lurcy (Nièvre), Sermizelles (Yonne), Nantes and Saint-Arnaud-Montrond (Cher), as well as in Belgium (at Dison and Hasard-Cheratte near Liège), Luxembourg and Germany (Cologne, Bochum and Hanover), Algeria (Oran and Algiers) and Recife in Brazil, a city colonized by the French after the Crimean War. In France itself, nearly every town has its rue Malakoff. The French have given the name of Malakoff to public squares and parks, hotels, restaurants, cheeses, champagnes, roses and chansons.
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’.
In Italy and Turkey, as in France, the Crimean War was eclipsed by later wars and quickly dropped out of the nationalist myths and narratives that came to dominate the way these countries reconstructed their nineteenth-century history.
In Italy, there are very few landmarks to remind Italians of their country’s part in the Crimean War. Even in Piedmont, where one might expect to see the war remembered, there is very little to commemorate the 2,166 soldiers who were killed in the fighting or died from disease, according to official statistics, though the actual number was almost certainly higher. In Turin, there is a Corso Sebastopoli and a Via Cernaia, in memory of the only major battle in which the Italians took part. The nationalist painter Gerolamo Induno, who went with the Sardinian troops to the Crimea and made many sketches of the fighting there, painted several battle scenes on his return in 1855, including The Battle of the Chernaia, commissioned by Victor Emmanuel II, and The Capture of the Malakoff Tower, both of which excited patriotic sentiment for a few years in northern Italy. But the war of 1859 and everything that happened afterwards – the Garibaldi expedition to the south, the conquest of Naples, the annexation of Venetia from the Austrians during the war of 1866 and the final unification of Italy with the capture of Rome in 1870 – soon overshadowed the Crimean War. These were the defining events of the Risorgimento, the popular ‘resurrecti
on’ of the nation, by which Italians would come to see the making of modern Italy. As a foreign war led by Piedmont and Cavour, a problematic figure for the populist interpretation of the Risorgimento, the campaign in the Crimea had no great claim for commemoration by Italian nationalists. There were no public demonstrations for the war, no volunteer movements, no great victories or glorious defeats in the Crimea.
In Turkey the Crimean War has been not so much forgotten as obliterated from the nation’s historical memory, even though it was there that the war began and Turkish casualties were as many as 120,000 soldiers, almost half the troops involved, according to official statistics. In Istanbul, there are monuments to the allied soldiers who fought in the war, but none to the Turks. Until very recently the war was almost totally ignored by Turkish historiography. It did not fit the nationalist version of Turkish history, and fell between the earlier ‘golden age’ of the Ottoman Empire and the later history of Atatürk and the birth of the modern Turkish state. Indeed, if anything, despite its victorious conclusion for the Turks, the war has come to be seen as a shameful period in Ottoman history, a turning point in the decline of the empire, when the state fell into massive debt and became dependent on the Western powers, who turned out to be false friends. History textbooks in most Turkish schools charge the decline of Islamic traditions to the growing intervention of the West in Turkey as a result of the Crimean War.21 So do the official Turkish military histories, like this one, published by the General Staff in 1981, which contains this characteristic conclusion, reflecting many aspects of the deep resentments nationalists and Muslims in Turkey feel towards the West: