‘Crimean Quagmire’ by Gregory Carleton review

The history of the Crimean War, at least from the British point of view, has been written many times, with full emphasis on the scandalous waste of life in futile cavalry charges against cannon, in military hospitals that ensured the death of more than half their patients and in the field where soldiers were left to die, if not of wounds, then of cold, heat, starvation or exhaustion. It was the first war in which an embedded journalist, William Howard Russell, and an authoritative newspaper, The Times, were able to report instantly and freely, by telegraph, the incompetence of the authorities and the desperation of the soldiers. Gregory Carleton adds to his study as a parallel Leo Tolstoy’s early Sevastopol Stories, which record equal callousness and even greater slaughter among the Russian defenders. Tolstoy was writing under censorship, albeit with friendly censors. As one of his fellow officers observed, Tolstoy was less interested in the fighting than in the reactions of soldiers and officers to death. (Tolstoy’s later work has at its core a contrast between the death agony of the sophisticated and the submissive acceptance of death by the simple peasant or soldier.)

Memoirs by British and Russian authors (the latter writing decades later when censorship slackened) fill in the gaps left by Russell and Tolstoy. Carleton describes the Crimean War as a quagmire, from which all sides emerge with no gains, territorial or political, only losses in human terms and in prestige. He also calls it the first modern war: true, shells and rifles were twice as deadly as in the Napoleonic wars, but modernity in war is better defined by the machine gun and tank, and today by the drone, warfare in which the aggressor risks far less than their target. As for quagmire, it is true that the Crimean War was a hopeless encounter between a supposedly irresistible naval force and a supposedly unmovable fortress (Sevastopol), provoked by a trivial dispute over an Orthodox church in Jerusalem, but fuelled by Russia’s wish to ‘liberate’ the Christian Balkans from the Turks, and Britain and France’s wish to stop the Black Sea being turned from an Ottoman to a Russian lake, which would give the tsar direct access to the Mediterranean.

In stressing the cruelty of both sides, Carleton, for all his careful research, overlooks the diversity of Russian public opinion (the philosopher Alexei Khomiakov, who loved the English as the lost Slav tribe of Uglichi, called on God to punish his corrupt homeland) and ignores the absence of animosity and the chivalry of the Russian authorities. As conflict loomed, Russia’s most liberal viceroy, Mikhail Vorontsov, brought up in London and closely related to British aristocrats, had his secretary write, in beautiful English, to his nephew Sidney Herbert, Minister of War, to argue that Britain’s help to Turkey would be dwarfed by the damage Russia could cause. The minister was later compelled to shell his uncle’s palace on the Crimean coast. During the war, British and French citizens were free to move about Russian territory. Anne Neilson Giray, the Scottish widow of the nephew of the last Crimean khan, was given protection in Crimea both by Russian defenders and British invaders. Above all, prisoners of war were treated more like guests than enemies. They had first to endure slow journeys by unsprung wagon to towns well away from the border (to prevent escape) or from Muslim areas (to prevent fraternisation with Ottoman prisoners), but were then given generous accommodation – in hotels, boarding schools, even palaces – food rations and even employment. No wonder so many officers surrendered their commissions (a euphemism for desertion) to enjoy comforts and life expectancy not available at the front. Even Muslim prisoners were well treated: a group of Kurds in Tula were publicly praised for their good manners and hard work firefighting, street cleaning, helping women to carry heavy loads, while French prisoners were guests of eager Russian ladies, and British officers partied all night in Odesa hotels. Ottoman PoWs who were Christian, or prepared to convert, and had desirable skills were offered citizenship with freedom from taxation and military service. Some were entertained by the tsar.

Information on the Ottoman army, the biggest contingent in Crimea, who suffered the highest casualties (after the Russian defenders) is not easy to find (Carleton devotes just two lines to the Ottoman majority in the invading army). The Turks published few reports, only the Egyptian soldiers wrote home – but Ibrahim Köremezli’s 2024 article in Belleten Türk Tarih Kurumu (from which Google translate gives a readable English version) uses sources from Russia, Europe and Turkey to survey the life of allied PoWs in Russia: it had nothing of a quagmire about it.

The heritage of the Crimean War is mixed. Both sides realised that doctors and nurses, not generals and sergeants, were needed. In Britain and Russia, there was energetic medical progress: chloroform was now offered not only to officers and gentlemen. Sanitation, nutrition and nursing were given the same priorities as shells and fortifications. In Russia a military-medical academy started training thousands of doctors, including women, so that in the next Balkan war, 20 years later, Russia could boast of having women doctors serving at the front.

Military lessons were learnt, too: Alexander II’s generals turned to the conquest of Central Asia and the Far East. As the world gradually conceded the Russians the freedom of the Black Sea, Alexander, the so-called liberator, began a genocidal deportation of hundreds of thousands of indigenous Caucasians and Crimean Tatars to Anatolia. The Crimean War, however, did initiate Russia’s most progressive era: serfs were freed, the arts flourished, a national health service was created. In Britain complacent aristocrats such as Lord Aberdeen yielded to energetic radicals such as Disraeli and Gladstone. Russians and Britons, but, alas, not the Ottomans, emerged wiser from their quagmire.

• Crimean Quagmire: Tolstoy, Russell and the Birth of Modern Warfare
  Gregory Carleton
  Hurst, 264pp, £27.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Donald Rayfield’s latest book is ‘A Seditious and Sinister Tribe’: The Crimean Tatars and Their Khanate (Reaktion, 2024).