By the time the French and British armies, on a mission to
rescue the Ottomans from Russian invasion, had arrived in the eastern Mediterranean
theater, the Russians had retreated from the Danube valley. The Allies were disappointed.
The British had hoped to chastise the Russians; Napoleon III sought
a brilliant victory to bolster his shaky domestic standing. Casting about for
something to do, they decided to capture the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s base in
Sevastopol. That’s why they went to the Crimea.
Over the years I read a number of books about the Crimean
War, all Anglo-centric. And I wondered why the Russians had fallen back. My
first book, The Destruction of Lord Raglan, by Christopher Hibbert,
named the various problems facing the Russian commander. One item on the list
of woe was “threatened by an ungrateful Austria”. Was this threat a strong
letter to the Times? More on this later. The various problems afflicting
commanders of the time were also listed, strong enemy resistance, supply
problems, sickness endemic to armies before the discovery of germs, etc. The vague
reference to an Austrian threat never got my attention. The plucky British,
aided a little by the excitable French, dealt withering blows to the stolid,
unimaginative masses of Russians. Fine writing, biased history.
Later, The Battle of the Alma, by Peter Gibbs, merely
notes that the siege of Silistria (an Ottoman Danube fortress), was raised
before any but a few adventurous British officers could arrive. Apparently, the
besieging army just floated away. I wasn’t expecting much detail on the raising
of the siege, and got none.
A third book whose title I have forgotten declared that
those early British officers had led irregulars on raids of the Russian supply
lines, causing the siege to be lifted. This was obvious hogwash. 60,000+ strong
armies are not forced to retire by hit-and-run raids. A force seizing and
holding a choke point on the supply line would be another story.
Then I found The Banner of Battle: the Crimean War Story,
by Alan Palmer. This is less Anglo-centric than the previous three, and
devoid of jingoism. It is primarily about diplomatic history. In it, I discovered
that the Austrians, upset by Russian forces in the Danube valley, mobilized
100,000 troops, threatening the Russian flank. Ah, now there’s a reason
for a large army to withdraw; a flank threat and yet another nation possibly entering
the war against them. Finally, a credible reason the Russians retreated from the Danube.
The book tells of Florence Nightingale. Her humane
modifications to hospital care didn’t reduce mortality at the hospital, as the
water source was compromised. She learned from this and later greatly reduced mortality
in London by cleaning up the water supply. Palmer does overstate the range
advantage of Minie rifles over the smoothbore muskets that almost all Russian infantry
carried. More on this in a bit.
More recently I finally came upon a copy of The Crimean War
by Orlando Figes. He is a scholar of Russian History, and includes the Russian point
of view, missing from the previous works. He notes the extremely bad blood between Eastern Orthodox Christians
and Catholics, not to mention Protestants. Blood had flowed before at the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. As self-declared protector of Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Tsar Nicholas I seized upon the
latest brawl to expand Russian territory at the expense of the declining Ottoman
Empire. An absolute ruler for the last 29 years, unused to hearing things he
didn’t like, he seems to have been flirting with pan-Slavism. The grand goal of
this would see all the Slavic nations of the Balkans and Middle Europe bending
the knee to Moscow, and the Orthodox Greeks too, who would be back in Constantinople.
Over a prostrate Ottoman remanent. Heady stuff, no doubt.
The Austrian (Habsburg) Empire and the Russian (Romanov)
Empire had been the backbone of the conservative Concert of Europe since 1815,
being the two most conservative and economically backward states in Europe, bar
the Ottomans. There had been the revolutionary upheaval of 1848-9, when the
Habsburg dynasty had a near-death experience. The Hungarians had been
successfully fighting for their independence when huge Russian armies invaded
from Russian Poland, quashing Hungarian hopes. Nicholas assumed the
Austrians owed him big-time for this.
But when the Russians invaded the Danube in 1853, Kaiser Franz
Joseph was not pleased. He didn’t want expanded Russian power in his back yard
and certainly didn’t want his Slavic subjects getting ideas about throwing off
Habsburg rule. He not only mobilized a lot of troops, he gave Nicholas an
ultimatum, threatening to join Britain, France and the Ottomans in the war. Now there’s a truly
viable reason for that large Russian army to tuck tail and run. The “threat by an
ungrateful Austria” was not a stern letter to the Times. The rupture between the two empires would still be in effect in 1914, one of the many things leading to the outbreak of war.
Figes also overstates the range advantage of Minie rifles
over Russian smoothbores, quoting ranges over 1,000 yards. Current research by
Paddy Griffith, Brent Nosworthy and Earl Hess maintains that in the hands of
most soldiers, Minie rifles were effective at about 150 yards, still a serious
advantage over the 75 yards of smoothbores. One of the 4 British infantry
divisions was armed with smoothbores. Most of the French infantry save the
Zouaves were armed with smoothbore muskets. I do believe that the standard
Russian field formation of battalion columns 8 to 12 ranks deep was the wrong
formation to meet Minie rifles in. Most soldiers fired high. The curved Minie trajectories made a number of
those high shots come down in the rear ranks. I think that’s one reason the
Russian losses were so high in field battles. Shots that normally missed found targets. Specialist elite troops like the
British Rifle Brigade or Berdan’s Sharpshooters of the later American Civil War
were better prepared to take advantage of the longer ranges of Minie rifles.
But the average 19th century soldier was not.
Figes has the Light Brigade defeat the Russian cavalry
behind the Russian artillery at the end of the Valley of Death, although at too
high a cost. The British bungled their supply arrangements at the siege of Sevastopol,
while the French were moderately professional, shown by the different death rates. The
Russians died in job lots under bombardment. But the Allies never cut the city’s
supply lines, so fresh troops kept coming in.
The British cherished memories of the Thin Red Line, the Charge
of the Light Brigade and the much more successful Charge of the Heavy Brigade. The
French, after finally storming the city in 1855, got to name various streets,
bridges and such in Paris (and subsequent Metro stops) after their battle
places, Alma, Crimee, Sevastopol, Malakoff, etc. The Russians claimed Sevastopol
as a secular icon, a shrine to Russian bravery, a place it occupies in their mythology
today.
Figes explains how the sewage plumbing of the Scutari
hospital leaked into the water source, defeating Florence Nightingale’s best
efforts. A sorry thing.
The war lasted longer than any involved foresaw and was much too costly in blood and treasure. Bismarck’s wars of German Unification took
center stage, putting Russian encroachment in the back seat. When France was
humiliated in 1870-71, Russia disavowed the Crimean peace treaty and re-armed Sevastopol.
When Russia next went to war against the Ottomans in 1877, Britain’s
attention was fixed on the new German Empire, France was still reeling from
their recent defeat, as were the Austrians, who were assuming their position as
Germany’s lap dog. The newly unified Italy had gained much of what they wanted
from their alliances, first with France and then with Prussia.
Franz Joseph helmed Austria through the humiliating defeat
of 1866 and into World War One before exiting the world stage.
Nicholas died during the war, largely un-mourned. A long-time
autocrat, with a rather mystical attachment to pan-Slavism, he got into an unsuccessful war against 4 nations (Piedmont/Sardinia later joined up in
the hope of later French assistance in Italy) and suffered a costly defeat. That
is pretty much how he was remembered until recently.
His reputation has been dusted
off and freshened up. His portrait hangs in the antechamber of Putin’s Kremlin
office.
