A Short History of the Crimean War

Trudi Tate

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786725554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Crimean War (1853-1856) was the first modern war. A vicious struggle between imperial Russia and an alliance of the British, French and Ottoman Empires, it was the first conflict to be reported first-hand in newspapers, painted by official war artists, recorded by telegraph and photographed by camera. In her new short history, Trudi Tate discusses the ways in which this novel representation itself became part of the modern war machine. She tells forgotten stories about the war experience of individual soldiers and civilians, including journalists, nurses, doctors, war tourists and other witnesses. At the same time, the war was a retrograde one, fought with the mentality, and some of the equipment, of Napoleonic times. Tate argues that the Crimean War was both modern and old-fashioned, looking backwards and forwards, and generating optimism and despair among those who lived through it. She explores this paradox while giving full coverage to the bloody battles (Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman), the siege of Sebastopol, the much-derided strategies of the commanders, conditions in the field and the cultural impact of the anti-Russian alliance.

1

THE DRIFT TO WAR AND THE BATTLE OF THE ALMA

As the Ottoman Empire became weaker and continued to lose parts of its vast territory, what would take its place? Would the various peoples living under Turkish rule find independence, or would they be absorbed into another empire or sphere of influence? Russia had a long history of interest in the Eastern Question and by the middle of the nineteenth century had secured a considerable amount of former Ottoman lands, including the Crimea, which had been annexed in 1783 by Catherine the Great. The retreat of Ottoman power began at the end of the seventeenth century. More than 100 years later, by the 1820s, the Eastern Question had become a matter of interest to all the European Great Powers. In 1844, the Tsar made a state visit to Britain, received a warm welcome from Queen Victoria and discussed the future of the Ottoman Empire with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Aberdeen. He and Aberdeen agreed that Britain and Russia would always consult before taking action in relation to Turkey.

Early in 1853, when Aberdeen was now Prime Minister, Tsar Nicholas raised the Eastern Question with the British envoy, Sir George Hamilton Seymour. In a famous phrase, he suggested that the ‘sick man of Europe’ was nearly dead, and his inheritance ought to be shared out, with Britain and Russia taking significant portions of the spoils. He expected Britain to agree, but British leaders were quite worried about Russian expansion. The official British response was vague, and the Tsar felt this meant some kind of agreement. He was surprised and disappointed to find that within a year, Britain had turned against him. A number of influential British leaders, notably Lord Palmerston (1784–1865, who became Prime Minister during the war), felt strongly that Russia was a threat to British interests and to European stability, and had for many years expected – and planned – that one day the two nations would go to war. This wasn’t a particularly widespread view, but it had some influential adherents, including Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty. Opposed to Palmerston, but very critical of Russia, was David Urquhart, who argued for closer trade and relations with Turkey.¹ Expressions of Russophobia were familiar in the press, and could be mobilized if a conflict developed.

Punch, for example, criticized the ‘wily Czar’ in the early 1850s, calling him ‘the worst Sovereign’; ‘o’erweening’, full of ‘wicked wit’; ‘like a base marauder / Threatening force’.² In December 1853, Punch published ‘The Autocrat’s Anthem’: ‘For Law and Ruth, and Faith and Truth, / With my jackboot’s heel I’ll spurn ’em!’ In January 1854, it suggested that the ‘Russian Bear’ needed his nails cut.³ Punch, like other papers, frequently criticized the Russian autocratic system, and sometimes suggested that the Tsar was mad.⁴ Similarly, the Illustrated London News described the Tsar as ‘insane’ from too much power. It argued that, as a tyrant, he was, paradoxically, also a slave: ‘He is the slave of those evil passions which tyranny invariably fosters in the hearts of tyrants. He is the slave, also, of the traditional policy of his family. He is the slave of Peter the Great and the Empress Catherine […].’ Russia’s autocratic system was a ‘public nuisance’ in Europe, and must be opposed.⁵

All this helped to make war seem like a reasonable, necessary response to an intolerable situation. Russia was presented as a bully, menacing Turkey and threatening the stability of Europe and the Middle East.

DISPUTES OVER THE HOLY PLACES

Palestine had been under Ottoman Muslim control for hundreds of years, but other religions had access to their sacred sites. Different groups claimed rights over certain holy places, and complex arrangements had been agreed with the Ottoman authorities over the years. There were struggles between Catholic Christians and Orthodox Christians over control of particular holy sites in Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Who should be allowed to restore the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and which group should hold the keys to a disputed church in Bethlehem?⁶ In the early 1850s, the arguments became bitter. Punch complained that ‘It is absurd, and yet awful to think, that all Europe should be kept on the qui vive about a key of no real value, which, in fact, nobody cares about.’⁷ The squabble was an excuse rather than a real cause for war, but the French and Russian leaders behaved as if these disputes really mattered, and undoubtedly some adherents took them very seriously.⁸ And the disputes did stand for legitimate concerns over religious rights and respect for others, alongside the prestige of the great powers. The religious quarrels were both real and a fiction, used quite cynically to manipulate and exploit. The French appealed to the Sultan to support the Catholics; the Russians argued in support of the Orthodox Christians. Within the churches, tempers flared and blows were exchanged. The Sultan attempted to placate both sides, but this made the situation worse.

In February 1853, the Tsar sent a mission to Constantinople led by Prince Menshikov, a military veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, very experienced in war and administration but inflexible and lacking in tact. He had served in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812 and in the Turkish Wars in 1828–9, in which a war injury left him castrated and very hostile to Turkey. He seemed a provocative choice of ambassador, more likely to stir up conflict than keep the peace. Menshikov put a series of unreasonable demands to the Sultan, demanding a Russian right of intervention on behalf of the 10 million or so Orthodox Christian subjects in the Ottoman Empire. The demands were refused and Menshikov departed on bad terms in May 1853. Now Russia and Turkey were on the road to another open conflict. They had been at war at regular intervals, every 20 years or so, for more than a century. This dispute could arguably have been defused by diplomacy, and diplomacy continued throughout the war, eventually helping to shape the settlement. But not enough was done to address the crisis as it unfolded. Each power worked for its own concerns, rather than for the larger good. And some were not averse to war. Britain felt it had no choice but to support Turkey. Britain and France, long-standing enemies in the past, allied themselves against Russia, though their war aims were quite different.

After the Napoleonic Wars had ended in 1815, Britain was the most powerful country in the world. Russia was seen as a real threat to that power. Russia had been expanding over the previous two centuries, taking in adjoining lands. It was regularly at war with the Ottoman Empire, usually acquiring Ottoman territory as a result. Palmerston wanted not just to halt Russian expansion, but to push back the boundaries of the huge Russian Empire: Finland would return to Sweden, for example; Crimea and Georgia to Turkey; and the Baltic provinces would go to Prussia. The aim was to keep the Ottoman Empire intact for a few more decades. Palmerston argued that he did not care about preserving Turkey so much as keeping Russia out of Turkey, and out of Norway and Sweden, too.⁹ Palmerston had further grand plans to contain Russian power, but when the war ended these were never realized. As well as preserving the balance of power in Europe, Britain was concerned to protect its large empire and the sea routes, especially to India.

When Turkey declared war against Russia, Lord Aberdeen was prime minister of Britain. He was keen to maintain the peace and did not support Palmerston’s plans against Russia. The press exerted enormous pressure in favour of war and against Aberdeen, who felt unable to resist the pressure to go to war. (Further pressure would later lead him to resign as prime minister. In January 1855 he was replaced by Palmerston.)

Louis Napoleon, who had been elected president of France in 1848 before proclaiming himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852, was looking to overturn the Vienna Treaty of 1815, signed in the wake of the final defeat of the previous Emperor Napoleon. He also sought to improve his standing within France by winning favour with the Catholic Church, hence his active support for the Catholic cause in Palestine. He saw the war with Russia as providing opportunities to change the balance of power in Europe, weakening the reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia and Austria, reclaiming Polish independence from Russia and making substantial changes in Italy and the Balkans. He envisaged the war as moving beyond the Crimea into Central Europe.

Russia originally hoped that going to war would further weaken the Ottoman Empire and give Russia better access to warm water ports in the south. The Tsar also wanted to encourage an uprising against Turkey among the Balkan Christians. He hoped Austria would join the war, suggesting that Austria might acquire Serbia and Herzegovina as the Ottoman Empire retreated. But Austria’s ruler, the Emperor Franz Joseph, feared revolution and did not support the Tsar’s war plans. Austria never joined the war but played an important role in the diplomatic negotiations. Nor did Prussia support Russia, and the Tsar soon found himself in a defensive war rather than on the attack against Turkey.

On 31 May 1853, Russia issued an ultimatum to Turkey, threatening to occupy the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (now Romania and Moldova). Meanwhile, the French and British were starting to mobilize their fleets in support of Turkey. In mid-June, both fleets arrived at Besika Bay at the entrance to the Dardanelles. Russia moved into the principalities in July. Despite these movements, diplomacy was continuing and war was by no means inevitable. But then, on 5 October 1853, Turkey declared war against Russia. The Turkish army crossed the Danube river at Kalafat in late October and, on 4 November, defeated the Russians at Otenitza. Meanwhile, the allied fleets entered the Bosphorus on 30 October. This action violated the 1841 Treaty of London which closed the Dardanelles to all warships. This was another step towards war.

SINOPE

In November a small Turkish flotilla anchored at Sinope (on the Black Sea, on Turkey’s northern coast), where it was destroyed by a much larger Russian fleet on 30 November. Some 3,000 Turkish sailors were killed and their wooden ships destroyed by the Russians’ explosive shells. The Russians also destroyed the harbour and bombarded the town. The event was in fact a legal act of war, but it was presented in Britain as a massacre.¹⁰ The Illustrated London News reported on 31 December:

This was a fearful moment! The sea of fire, the roaring of the artillery, the continual explosions, and the fragments of human bodies which were hurled about in all directions in the air formed one of the most fearful spectacles man ever beheld.¹¹

Its editorial took an even stronger view:

The odious and treacherous butchery committed by the Russians at Sinope is far more than sufficient to justify the Turkish Government in refusing any terms of compromise, or of listening to any negotiation, until the outrage shall have been avenged. But Mahomedan Turkey shows itself far more Christian in its conduct than the so-called Christian Emperor of the Russians.¹²

Many newspapers took a similar view, increasing the pressure upon the British government to make a formal declaration of war. Punch wrote indignantly of the ‘Russian butcher’, ‘Russian slaughtering’ and the ‘Tragedy of Sinope’.¹³ The Lady’s Newspaper commented that ‘The disaster at Sinope has been terrible […] The Russians behaved with great cruelty […] The Turks fought with the energy of despair.’¹⁴ For The Times, Sinope was a ‘catastrophe’, a ‘deplorable event’, a scene of ‘havoc and destruction’ and a ‘disgrace’, in which the Russians used ‘an enormous disproportion of force’ against the Turks, who fought with ‘the greatest courage and spirit’.¹⁵

Was it peace or war? As Lord Clarendon told Parliament, ‘we are drifting towards war’. On 27 February 1854, the Tsar was warned by France and Britain that Russia must leave the principalities. He did not respond, and, in late March, France and Britain declared war on Russia. This was greeted with dismay in some newspapers, and with enthusiasm in others, particularly The Times. For the Illustrated London News, war came as a curious kind of relief. It acknowledged that many people were very frightened of war. They knew how earlier generations had suffered in the Napoleonic conflicts, and had been paying for those wars for many years.

Nations and generations born and nurtured in peace, that know nothing of war but the burdens which it has entailed upon them, and the miseries which it inflicted upon their forefathers, cannot but look with dread upon its renewal in their time and in their own persons.

‘But,’ it argues, ‘these feelings seldom last beyond the hour when war is known to be inevitable.’ Once war is declared, there is relief. Worry is replaced with ‘positive satisfaction’. ‘The anxiety is no longer to prevent war, but to go into it manfully, and fight it out heroically.’ Curiously, the effort to prevent war is seen here as more distressing than actual warfare.¹⁶

Meanwhile, in January–February 1854, a delegation of Quakers made a journey to St Petersburg to try to persuade the Tsar to maintain the peace. The Tsar assured them he was committed to peace, and hoped the Quakers might be able to influence the British government. But they had no official standing or influence with the government and were much mocked in the British press.

THE FOUR POINTS

After many months of discussion, official war aims were agreed between Britain, France and Austria, summed up as Four Points in August 1854:

1. The Russian guarantee of the Danubian Principalities was to be replaced by a European Guarantee.

2. The Danube was to be a free river.

3. The Five Power Treaty of 1841 was to be revised in the interests of the balance of power.

4. The Christian subjects of the Sultan were to be placed under European and not Russian protection.¹⁷

The war aims were vague, but their implications were complex, as all the interested parties tried to protect their different concerns: Austria wanted to preserve the conservative order, while France hoped to change the E...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Timeline
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Drift to War and the Battle of the Alma
• Chapter 2: The Siege Established and the Battle of Balaklava
• Chapter 3: Scutari, Inkerman and the Siege
• Chapter 4: Sebastopol: The Fallen City
• Chapter 5: The Baltic Campaign
• Chapter 6: The End of the War
• Further Reading
• Notes