Beyond Nightingale

Nursing on the Crimean War battlefields

Carol Helmstadter

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526140531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Beyond Nightingale is the first book to explore the inception of modern nursing from a transnational perspective, studying the development of the new military nursing in the five Crimean War armies. The story is told within the broader context of the different political, social and economic cultures from which modern nursing arose. Although the Russians were battling industrialised armies with their pre-industrial, agrarian economy it was they who developed the most innovative system of nursing. The book illustrates the barriers, some of which still exist today, which nurses had to overcome to gain recognition of the crucial role they played in the war. The significant contributions allied and Russian nurses made working directly under fire during the Russians' brilliant defence of Sevastopol make a wonderfully exciting story during which these mid-nineteenth century nurses proved their extraordinary competencies.

1

The wider context of military nursing in the Crimean War

Introduction

In many ways the Crimean War was the first of the new industrial wars, but it also retained many characteristics of the old ‘gentlemanly war.’ Diplomacy played a major role and prevented it from becoming a more generalized European war. ‘In contrast to the wars of the twentieth century, but in common with most European wars in modern history up to the nineteenth century,’ diplomatic historian Winfried Baumgart wrote, ‘the outbreak of the Crimean War did not stop the frantic and continuous diplomatic activities of the belligerent powers.’ The concept of unconditional surrender demanded in World War II, which leaves little room for compromise and makes diplomacy irrelevant, did not exist in the 1850s. Diplomats continued trying to find a means of making peace throughout the war. Moreover, all of the armies involved respected some of the old rules of warfare, and a certain sense of chivalry still remained.

There are numerous examples of this kind of gentlemanly war. Truces to clear the wounded and dead from the field were frequent. Count Osten-Sacken, latterly the commanding general in Sevastopol, expressed in the most flattering terms his great admiration for the courage of the French troops. He had French prisoners buried with all the honors which he said were owed to their exemplary bravery. The Baron de Bazancourt, the official French historian of the war, deemed Osten-Sacken ‘a true and knightly gentleman.’¹ The Russians treated prisoners well. A British colonel taken prisoner lived comfortably in a Russian general’s home,² and from time to time a British aide-de-camp went into Sevastopol under a flag of truce taking letters from Russian officers who were British prisoners and bringing money, letters, and baggage to British officers who were Russian prisoners.³ The French also took a chivalrous attitude toward the enemy. Major Jean François Herbé, a ten-year veteran and St. Cyr trained officer, admired the courage and valor of the Russian officers who led sorties into the French trenches. They fought ‘with a vigour and intrepidity to which we must render homage,’ he said. Two days after a major sortie, when an armistice was declared to collect the dead and those wounded who were still alive, French and Russian soldiers, subalterns, and officers all shook hands, congratulated each other on their fighting prowess, and exchanged tobacco and cigars. Herbé thought that no one would ever have guessed that these men, only a few minutes earlier, had been trying to kill each other.⁴

But if the Crimean War had elements of the old warfare, it also presaged twentieth-century total war. The siege of Sevastopol involved the trench warfare which characterized the western front of World War I. Many features of the Crimean War demonstrate the power of industrialization: global attacks on Russian naval bases, newspaper correspondents, photographers, the telegraph, the new Russian land and sea mines, massive bombardments of civilian homes and civilian participation in the building and constant maintenance of Sevastopol’s formidable defenses, and for our purposes, the introduction of secular female nurses, some of whom were trained. In the American Civil War a few years later, the Union’s technological and economic superiority led to its victory over the Confederacy. Similarly, despite the brilliant and innovative Russian defense, the far greater industrial capacities of the British and French were the decisive factors in achieving allied victory.

An agrarian society at war with industrialized countries

The Russian and Ottoman economies were essentially agrarian and pre-industrial. The Ottoman army played a small part in the siege of Sevastopol and the Piedmont-Sardinian army was actively involved for only a few months. However, unlike Turkey, Piedmont-Sardinia was an industrialized country. By contrast, Russian society was based on serf labor; significant industrialization would not begin until after the war. Captain Edouard Ivanovich Totleben, the brilliant young army engineer who designed the awesome defenses of Sevastopol, identified two major consequences of Russia’s backward economy: first, the allies had overwhelmingly greater sea power, and second, allied gunnery was much superior. In both allied navies about one third of the ships were steam powered, a much larger proportion than in the Russian navy. In the naval campaign in the Baltic in 1855–56 the British used only steamships as well as the new iron-clad ships that were then called ‘floating batteries.’ The French navy was somewhat smaller than the British – 300 warships as opposed to 385 – but equally modern. Anglo-French fleets burnt and pillaged Russian towns in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, in the Baltic and White Seas, and in the northern Pacific.⁵ After the fall of Sevastopol the French used their new iron-clad ships with great success during the bombardment of Kinburn. The Russians put up a gallant resistance, much admired by the enemy, but in the face of such devastating fire, overwhelming force, and the invulnerability of the iron ships to Russian shells, had to surrender.⁶ Recent historians have pointed out that the British expected their war effort to be primarily a war at sea. Anticipating that the French would be mainly responsible for the land war, they originally sent a small army of only 26,000 men to the Crimea. Very early on, beginning with the fierce fight the Russians put up in the face of overwhelming odds at the Battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854 and the failure of the allies’ First Bombardment of Sevastopol in October, it became clear that Sevastopol was not going to fall in three weeks as the allies had hoped. The French therefore doubled the size of their army during the fall of 1854. The British enlarged their army but could not keep it up to strength.⁷

Totleben identified the superior firepower, accuracy, and range of the allies’ new Minié rifles and bullets as the second element that placed the Russians at a catastrophic disadvantage. Almost all the British foot soldiers were armed with these new rifles, and in 1855 the British issued the Enfield rifle, which was lighter and even more lethal than the Minié.⁸ The Zouaves, the French elite troops, all had Minié rifles; the rest of the French infantry carried smooth-bore muskets but shot Minié bullets, which had a longer range than the old musket balls.⁹ The Minié’s range was 1,200 or more paces, while the Russian muskets had a range of no more than 300. Russian soldiers were therefore helpless until they were at close range, and even then were at a disadvantage because Russian muskets were old, top-heavy, and poorly made with stocks of light softwood that broke easily. The British soldiers could twist and break them with their hands.¹⁰ The Russian armourers were perfectly competent to make good arms, but because of the pervasive graft in the army, many colonels bought the cheapest possible weapons and kept the money the government gave them for supplying their men for themselves.¹¹

What do Enfield rifles and Minié bullets have to do with medical and nursing care? A very great deal: because they had longer range, greater accuracy, and far more intense power of penetration than the old musket ball, the Russian surgeons and their nurses had to deal with an exponentially increased number of more severe wounds.¹² One cannot speak too highly of the Minié rifle, Dr John Morton declared. Morton was an American doctor from Nashville, Tennessee who was working with the Russians. He pointed out that, with its greater power of penetration, when a Minié bullet struck a bone, a comminuted fracture necessitating amputation resulted.¹³ The Russians did have a few Minié-type rifles which they gave to their sharpshooters. They used a heavier bullet than those of the allies, which produced immense comminuted fractures.¹⁴ Although their artillerists were excellent,¹⁵ the Russian guns were also inferior to those of the allies. At the Alma, because the French guns were of heavier caliber and longer range, the French kept the Russian gunners at a distance where Russian shells could not reach them. Some of the Zouaves taunted the Russians by dancing a polka in front of their guns. The French made it a policy to avoid close combat where the Russians could give as good as they got; when the Russian battalions charged they retired beyond the reach of the Russian muskets and then poured a murderous fusillade into them. Furthermore, Russian troops were trained to rely on their bayonets, and marched and attacked in the old-fashioned oblong column. Therefore, only the men in the first two ranks could use their muskets, while the columns made an easy target for the allies with their Minié bullets – which at short range could go through two men and lodge in a third. The allies also used different tactics, fighting in lines only two deep, which made the most of their infinitely superior firepower.¹⁶

The Russians realized immediately that they had to get more rifles and, because they could not manufacture them themselves, they would have to buy them abroad. The Belgians produced excellent rifles but they were selling them to the British and agreed to sell only 13,900 to the Russians, and then at a very high price. Since the allied navies controlled the Baltic Sea, only about 3,000 of those 13,900 rifles reached Russia before the fighting ended. Of the 102½ battalions that the Russians put into action at the Battle of the Tchernaya in August 1855 only three were rifle battalions. There was only a small munitions industry in Russia and the army soon began to suffer from a shortage of gunpowder and projectiles. The Minister of War sent people all over Russia searching for gunpowder but the Russian powder factories had a limited output and their delivery was slow, with the result that by January 1855 the Russians were firing only half as many rounds as the allies.¹⁷ It speaks to their accuracy that Herbé, who was an experienced observer, thought the Russian cannonades were always stronger and more violent than those of the allies.¹⁸ The allies’ mortars and explosive shells devastated civilian buildings and hospitals as well as military objectives. As a res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Author’s notes
• Maps
• List of English names for Russian names
• Introduction
• 1 The wider context of military nursing in the Crimean War
• Part I Government-imposed nursing
• Part II Religious nursing
• Part III Doctor-directed nursing
• Glossary
• References
• Index