Victoria

by Julia Baird

  * * *

  * A cartoon in Punch showed a man standing horrified as a servant explained that his wife would be at the Crystal Palace until tea time. It was headed “Awful Result of Giving a Season Ticket to Your Wife.” (Another showed “Mama” going missing—sneaking off to a remote refreshment room with a handsome man.)

  CHAPTER 18

  The Crimea: “This Unsatisfactory War”

  We are and indeed the whole country is entirely engrossed with one idea, one anxious thought—the Crimea….I feel so proud of my dear noble Troops, who, they say, bear their privations, and the sad disease which still haunts them, with such courage and good humor.

  —QUEEN VICTORIA TO

  KING LEOPOLD OF THE BELGIANS

  Numbers have, I feel confident, died from sheer want of attention. I visited the field, and the groans of the wounded went through me.

  —YOUNG NAVAL OFFICER, 1854

  Early in the morning of February 28, 1854, Victoria stood at her drawing room window in Buckingham Palace as crowds cheered below, waving handkerchiefs tied on sticks. When the clock chimed seven, Victoria, who had hurriedly dressed at dawn in a dark green woolen dress with a matching shawl and bonnet, took a deep breath. She pushed the door open and stepped onto the balcony to a gust of noise from the crowds. With her opera glass, she stared proudly at the troops below—the last battalion of the Guards due to embark to the Crimea. She was surprised: unusually, not one soldier seemed to be drunk!

  A Scottish infantry regiment—the Scots Fusilier Guards—stood erect in crimson tunics, black trousers, and tall bearskin caps, rifles glinting in the sunshine. The British soldier was confident and unquestioned after the brilliant success ending the Napoleonic Wars. Victoria longed to be one herself. “On such an occasion” as war, wrote the thirty-four-year-old queen, “one feels wretched at being a woman.”

  The Guards, known for their height and courage, took off their headdresses and gave three massive cheers—which, Victoria wrote, “went straight to my heart.” She watched the hats twirl in the air as they threw them toward the balcony, yelling, “God Save the Queen!” The men then turned and marched, disappearing from sight down Pall Mall, along the Strand, and across Waterloo Bridge to the terminus of the South Western Railway. Dozens of wives were accompanying their men to war, walking alongside the troops. They preferred the uncertain fate of joining their husbands to the worry of staying behind.

  Back in Buckingham Palace, the young princes Bertie and Arthur played with a wind-up stuffed lion that stretched its jaws and swallowed toy Russian soldiers whole. Victoria went for a walk, received visitors, and saw a play. As she sat watching the actors struggle with their lines, her mind strayed to the soldiers. Later, she wrote: “I shall never forget the touching, beautiful sight I witnessed this morning.”

  —

  The Crimean War was, in many respects, an unnecessary one. “God forbid!” Victoria had cried, when she first mentioned the possibility of conflict. Few could fathom why Britain should rush to defend Turkey against Russia—they had little in common with either country and there had been peace in Europe for forty years, since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. But the Russian czar Nicholas I—a despot who ruled over a backward country populated by more than twenty-two million serfs—was now eyeing the weakening Ottoman Empire to his south. Over the past few decades, the Ottoman—or Turkish—Empire had stagnated economically, had been slow to modernize, and had endured a series of ineffective governments that too readily capitulated to the demands of European countries. Czar Nicholas called it the “sick man of Europe” and wanted to carve it up and distribute the spoils. It was a geographically crucial region: Constantinople linked Europe with Asia by land and sea; it was there that the Black Sea met the Mediterranean. If Russia were to edge south into Turkey, it could potentially block crucial chains of supply—especially Britain’s route to India—and expand its sea power through its naval base at Sevastopol. In 1853, as Russia moved troops south into the lower Danube (into the modern Romania), the rest of Europe—especially France, Britain, Austria, and Prussia—looked nervously to the east.

  The war began, ostensibly, with an argument over access to shrines in Palestine. But the real heart of the dispute was who would act as the protectors of the Christians in Muslim Turkey: Catholic France or Orthodox Russia. The Ottoman Empire, which at its height occupied large swaths of Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, was predominantly Islamic, but contained thirteen million Orthodox Christians out of a population of about thirty-five million. Russia had been the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church since the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. Czar Nicholas wanted to be the guardian of these Christians caught under Muslim rule in the Ottoman Empire and to shield them from persecution. This claim was his means to wedge further into an unstable region. When the Ottoman leaders decided to grant protectorship to France, Russia invaded Ottoman territories, now modern Romania and Moldova.

  Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who had been popularly elected as president in 1848 and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852, was keen to regain France’s status in Europe (and boost his domestic popularity by acting as the champion of Catholics). Britain, in turn—the greatest naval power in the world—needed to protect the trade routes into India through Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, which would be threatened if Russia controlled the Black Sea. Lord Palmerston campaigned for the need to fight, and he rallied the British public behind him. After weeks of clumsy, protracted diplomatic crossfire, a series of misunderstandings were taken as snubs from the Russians, and with the aid of belligerent press and politicians, the country found itself gradually maneuvered into war.

  Victoria fretted about leaving London for Scotland at the end of the summer of 1853 while talk of war simmered, but she was assured by Lord Aberdeen—who had been made prime minister in 1852—that she would not be excluded from crucial decisions. She was outraged, then, to discover in October that Lord Palmerston had persuaded the prime minister to send troops to the Black Sea in a defensive position of war, without seeking her consent. Albert was also urgently concerned about a drift toward conflict. He wanted the four neutral powers—Britain, France, Prussia, and Austria—to act in concert to avoid it. He also worried about the precariousness of an exclusive alliance with France. The couple left Balmoral immediately and returned to Windsor to demand an explanation from Lord Aberdeen.

  Victoria was increasingly concerned that England was assuming the risks of a European war, offering support to Turkey without having bound it to any conditions. She furiously lobbied her ministers, but she was unable to slow the momentum to fight. On October 23, Turkey declared war on Russia. On November 30, the slaughter of four hundred Turks at Sinope galvanized British support. Russia would not turn the Black Sea into a “Russian lake,” declared The Times.

  The winter of 1853 was raw, dark, and cold. The sun disappeared for days at a stretch, and with it Victoria’s hopes for peace. Five days before Christmas, she wrote: “It is an anxious state of things.” On the first day of the new year Victoria tried not to think of the looming conflict as she was pushed about in a chair on the frozen lake at Windsor, lined up with other ladies of the court. Vicky and Alice, now thirteen and ten, were learning to skate; Victoria watched them curiously and decided to try it herself, wobbling while holding on to someone’s arm. The children made snowmen as deer wandered past.

  On February 25, 1854, the Cabinet determined that England would send a summons to Russia to evacuate the Danube. If Russia refused or failed to reply, they would act. Lord Aberdeen, the prime minister, came to see Victoria afterward and complained that he had “terrible repugnance” to all forms of war. Victoria, finally convinced by the now inevitable, sat upright: “I told him this would never do, that it was to save more bloodshed & a more dreadful war, that it was necessary, it should take place now, for that a patch up would be very dangerous.” She was resigned. It was time to be calm and pray for a short, relatively bloodless war. And
England had a crucial ally: over the winter, France and England had inched closer together, overturning a deep-rooted enmity to fight together for the first time in two centuries.

  Russia refused to move, and Britain prepared to go to war. It had been a peculiar, inexorable drift, comprised of ultimatums, brinkmanship, and a populace perceiving insults from distant barbarians, all of it inflamed by interventionist politicians and newspapers. With defter diplomacy, the involvement of Britain and France could easily have been avoided. But public opinion had been whipped into a frenzy. The poet Arthur Hugh Clough wrote to the American author Charles Eliot Norton in Boston, “Well, here we are going to war, and really people after their long and dreary commercial period seem quite glad; the feeling of the war being just, of course, is a great thing.” Thomas Carlyle thought it was a “mad business,” but he wrote in his journal in the spring of 1854, “Never such enthusiasm seen among the population.” There was some resistance, from Lord Aberdeen and others, but Victoria’s mood mirrored her subjects’. On March 28 the war began.

  —

  Six months later, dead cats and dogs bobbed gently on the surface of the Scutari harbor in Turkey, grotesque in the sunlight. It would be some hours before the ship Colombo would arrive, carrying piles of corpses and soldiers wounded at the Battle of Alma on September 20, maggots squirming in untreated wounds. This was the first battle of the war, and while it was hailed as a victory for Britain and France, losses were heavy. The stench was so bad that the captain was sick for five days afterward. All the blankets were thrown overboard before the ship’s anchor was lowered through the flotsam drifting on the harbor.

  The inefficiency of the military was deadly. It had taken four days to remove the injured from the battlefield onto the ship, and several men died from cholera before it set sail on September 24. No stretcher bearers were provided for the wounded: an officer spoke of a man carrying his comrades as “a great brawny son of Neptune handling a poor wounded soldier the same as a careful nurse would a small baby.” Russian women stared down at their injured enemies from the cliffs above. A young naval officer described the battle’s aftermath:

  You can have no idea of their sufferings; men who had undergone amputation being carried down on men’s shoulders a distance of six miles….I never saw such want of arrangement. The military have made scarcely any. I met some officers who told me that until they got a little brandy-and-water from some naval doctors, they had not put a single thing between their lips for two days, and they had been 36 hours on the field without ever seeing a medical officer. Numbers have, I feel confident, died from sheer want of attention. I visited the field, and the groans of the wounded went through me.

  Of the 27 wounded officers, 422 wounded soldiers, and 104 Russian captives the Colombo was carrying, only half had been medically examined before boarding. There were only four doctors on the ship, and most men weren’t treated until almost a week after the battle. The Times’s correspondent described the upper decks as “a mass of putridity.” There were so many bodies lying motionless on the decks that the officers were unable to get below to their sextants for navigation and had to guess the way to Scutari. This delayed the trip a further twelve hours; thirty men died en route. The lucky ones were dragged slowly up the hill by the elderly pensioners who had been brought to work as an ambulance corps and who were, wrote the correspondent, “totally useless.”

  The lack of basic preparation was astonishing. The British military had sent troops into battle with virtually no forward planning for medical treatment. In the hospital at Scutari, there were no orderlies or nurses. There was not even material to make bandages to dress wounds. While twenty-three thousand British died in the two-and-a-half-year-long Crimean War, only four thousand of these were killed in action; the rest succumbed to disease, illness, and neglect (this was made worse by the fact that the Turkish barracks that had been lent to the British for use as a hospital were built over sewage pipes and overflowing cesspools, with poor ventilation). It was soon obvious—especially to the woman who would become an emblem of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale—that many of the fatalities could easily have been avoided.

  Back in England, The Times began a campaign for better care for the wounded and published accounts that differed dramatically from the official reports. The soldiers, they said, were being treated like savages. The Times’s Constantinople correspondent and future editor, Thomas Chenery, thundered:

  What will be said when it is known that there is not even lint to make bandages for the wounded? The greatest commiseration prevails for the sufferings of the unhappy inmates of Scutari, and every family is giving sheets, and old garments to supply their wants. But, why could not this clearly foreseen want have been supplied? Has not the expedition to the Crimea been the talk of the last four months?

  In October 1854, a scorching editorial in The Times called for citizens to donate money to provide basic supplies for the Crimean campaign. That winter, more than £20,000 poured into The Times’s fund. Every person employed by the Great Exhibition donated a day’s salary, and the Victoria Theatre donated one night’s ticket sales. And while in her family’s summer home at Derbyshire, Florence Nightingale devoured accounts of the war. Like Victoria, Florence had a longing to participate in the matter at hand—in this case, to impose order and efficiency on a morass made by underprepared men. She hated war but regarded it as a part of life. What she truly loathed was inefficiency, incompetence, and stupidity. On Tuesday, October 10, 1854, Florence traveled to London. On Thursday, she told Lord Palmerston, then the home secretary and a friend of the Nightingale family, that she would like to go to Turkey, with one other nurse, at her own expense. On Friday, she was given letters of authorization and introduction from Dr. Andrew Smith of the Army Medical Department. Her trip was quickly arranged. On October 21, Florence Nightingale set sail for Scutari, with a motley crowd of eager nurses, now forty in total. In one short week, the history of medical care in Britain—and the world—had been permanently altered.

  —

  Victoria was determined to be an involved monarch, and she told her uncle Leopold: “My whole soul and heart are in the Crimea.” She was constantly anxious as she waited for news of battles. The war had been immediately plagued by massive problems of disease and illness, which were easily spread in the humid Mediterranean summer. Thousands died from dysentery, diarrhea, and cholera before they had even cocked a gun at the enemy. William Howard Russell, the Times correspondent, saw dead bodies bobbing in the Scutari harbor.

  Victoria was infuriated by The Times’s reports—the treatment of the men was appalling, but it was also embarrassing to have their incompetence revealed to enemies and allies alike. Why let the Russians know where they had fallen short? In May 1855, a year after the war began, a Lieutenant Colonel Jeffreys told her that “the misery, the suffering, the total lack of everything, the sickness, &c.” had not been exaggerated. Victoria told him that the newspaper reports just encouraged the Russians. She wrote in her diary:

  He admitted that this was a great misfortune, but that on the other hand they felt certain things ought to be made known, else they would not be remedied, & the country must understand what has been going on….The trenches, badly drained, were full of water so that one had to lie up to one’s waist in it. This was even the case with the Officers, who hardly had had time to change their boots, being constantly obliged to turn out in the night. What must it then have been with the poor men? They had to lie down in their wet clothes, frequently being unable to change them for 1 or 2 nights. They froze & when they did pull off their boots, portions of their feet would come off with them! This Col: Jeffreys himself had seen, & could therefore declare to be no exaggeration of the newspapers.

  Victoria did everything she could: harangued her minister about the evident disorganization and negligence, argued for more troops, lobbied for medals to be made quickly to give to the returning men, tried to find employment for disabled veterans, visited returne
d wounded soldiers in the hospital, and agitated for better military hospitals. She told Lord Panmure, the war minister, that her “beloved” troops were constantly in her thoughts.

  Victoria’s natural empathy is most obvious in her detailed, careful accounts of meetings with wounded soldiers. Her journal for the year 1854 is crammed with stories of bullet wounds and ravaged faces, feet disfigured by frostbite, mouths emptied of teeth by scurvy, the sadness of empty sleeves and trouser legs. She visited soldiers in hospitals frequently, and she was always distressed at the sight of these “brave, noble” men. She tried to find reasons to be optimistic: their scalps had been torn apart by gunshot, but their faces looked good; they would survive, some even return to war. She wished she could visit them every day.

  A few things buoyed her: reports that her messages to the troops were encouraging them; the British military successes against the Russians; the avowals that her men were uncomplaining and noble in the most gruesome of circumstances. Much of this was propaganda fed to the queen by generals who did not wish to upset her. Victoria’s wartime diary reveals how frequently those around her spun even the worst news into something positive, how eager the generals were to assure her that their men did not mind suffering for their country. Sir John McNeill, who had been sent to investigate the Crimean hospitals as a sanitary commissioner, gave Victoria “most interesting, gratifying, & comforting accounts of the state of the brave Army” and downplayed the newspaper reports. He described the army camp as a kind of Eden: “The Camp was one of the happiest imaginable; singing, dancing, playing games went on, & there was an incredible disregard of danger: ‘the soldiers no more minded shot & bullets, than apples & pears.’…There is not ‘one man in that Army, who would not gladly give up his life to prove his devotion to Yr Majesty.’ ”