THE CRIMEAN WAR.
[Illustration: The Crystal Palace, 1851.]
The "Exhibition year," 1851, appears to our backward gaze almost like
a short day of splendid summer interposed between two stormy seasons;
but at the time men were more inclined to regard it as the first of a
long series of halcyon days. Indeed, the unexampled number and
success of the various efforts to redress injury and reform abuses,
which had signalised the new reign, might almost justify those
sanguine spirits, who now wrote and spoke as though wars and
oppression were well on their way to the limbo of ancient barbarisms,
and who looked to unfettered commerce as the peace-making civiliser,
under whose influence the golden age--in more senses than one might
revisit the earth.
[Illustration: Lord Ashley.]
We have already referred to certain of the new transforming forces
whose action tended to heighten such hopes; there are two reforms as
yet unnamed by us, distinguishing these early years, which are
particularly significant; though one at least was stoutly opposed by
a special class of reformers. We refer to the legislation dealing
with mines and factories and those employed therein, with which is
inseparably connected the venerable name of the late Lord
Shaftesbury; and to the abolition of duelling in the army, secured by
the untiring efforts of Prince Albert, who had enlisted on his side
the immense influence of the Duke of Wellington.
That peculiar modern survival of the ancient trial by combat, the
duel, was still blocking the way of English civilisation when Her
Majesty assumed the sceptre. A palpable anachronism, it yet seemed
impossible to make men act on their knowledge of its antiquated and
barbarous character; legislation was fruitless of good against a
practice consecrated by false sentiment and false ideas of honour;
but when dislodged from its chief stronghold, the army, it became
quickly discredited everywhere, with the happy result noted by a
contemporary historian, that _now_ "a duel in England would seem as
absurd and barbarous as an ordeal by touch or a witch-burning."
Militarism, that mischievous counterfeit of true soldierly spirit,
could not thrive where the duel was discountenanced; and the friends
of peace might rejoice with reason.
But those peaceful agitators, the sagacious, energetic Cobden and his
allies, resented rather sharply the interference of the Lord Ashley
of that day with the "natural laws" of the labour market--laws to
whose operation some of the party attributed the cruelly excessive
hours of work in factories, and the indiscriminate employment of all
kinds of labour, even that of the merest infants. Undeterred by
these objections, convinced that no law which sanctioned and promoted
cruelty did so with true authority, Lord Ashley persisted in the
struggle on which he had entered 1833; in 1842 he scored his first
great success in the passing of an Act that put an end to the
employment of women and children in mines and collieries; in 1844 the
Government carried their Factories Act, which lessened and limited
the hours of children's factory labour, and made other provisions for
their benefit. It was not all that he had striven for, but it was
much; he accepted the compromise, but did not slacken in his efforts
still further to improve the condition of the children. His career of
steady benevolence far outstretched this early period of battle and
endurance; but already his example and achievement were fruitful of
good, and his fellow-labourers were numerous. Nothing succeeds like
success: people had sneered at the mania for futile legislation that
possessed the "humanity-monger" who so embarrassed party leaders with
his crusade on behalf of mere mercy and justice; they now approved
the practical philanthropist who had taken away a great reproach from
his nation, and glorified the age in which they lived because of its
special humaneness, while they exulted not less in the brightening
prospects of the country. Sedition overcome, law and order
triumphant, the throne standing firm, prosperity returning--all
ministered to pride and hope.
In 1850 there had been some painful incidents; the death by an
unhappy accident of Sir Robert Peel, and the turbulent excitement of
what are known as the "No Popery" disturbances, being the most
notable: and of these again incomparably the most important was the
untimely loss to the country of the great and honest statesman who
might otherwise have rendered still more conspicuous services to the
Sovereign and the empire. The sudden violent outburst of popular
feeling, provoked by a piece of rash assumption on the part of the
reigning Pope, was significant, indeed, as evidencing how little
alteration the "Catholic revival" had worked in the temper of the
nation at large; otherwise its historic importance is small. At the
time, however, the current of agitation ran strongly, and swept into
immediate oblivion an event which three years before would have had a
European importance--the 'death of Louis Philippe, whose strangely
chequered life came to an end in the old palace of Claremont, just
before the "papal aggressions"--rash, impolitic, and mischievous, as
competent observers pronounced it, but powerless to injure English
Protestantism--had thrown all the country into a ferment, which took
some months to subside. We are told that Her Majesty, though
naturally interested by this affair, was more alive to the quarter
where the real peril lay than were some of her subjects; but in the
universal distress caused by the death of Peel none joined more
truly, none deplored that loss more deeply, than the Sovereign, who
would willingly have shown her value for the true servant she had
lost by conferring a peerage on his widow--an honour which Lady Peel,
faithful to the wishes and sharing the feeling of her husband, felt
it necessary to decline.
[Illustration: Earl of Derby.]
Amid these agitations, inferior far to many that had preceded them,
the year 1850 ran out, and 1851 opened--the year in which Prince
Albert's long-pursued project of a great International Exhibition of
Arts and Industries was at last successfully carried out. The idea,
as expounded by himself at a banquet given by the Lord Mayor, was
large and noble. "It was to give the world a true test, a living
picture, of the point of industrial development at which the whole of
mankind had arrived, and a new starting-point from which all nations
would be able to direct their further exertions." The magnificent
success, unflawed by any vexatious or dangerous incident, with which
the idea was carried out, had made it almost impossible for us to
understand the opposition with which the plan was greeted, the
ridicule that was heaped upon it, the foolish fears which it
inspired; while the many similar Exhibitions in this and other
countries that have followed and emulated, but never altogether
equalled, the first, have made us somewhat oblivious of the fact that
the scheme when first propounded was an absolute novelty. It was a
fascination, a wonder, a delight; it aroused enthusiasm that will
never be rekindled on a like occasion.
Paxton's fairy palace of glass and iron, erected in Hyde Park, and
canopying in its glittering spaces the untouched, majestic elms of
that national pleasure-ground as well as the varied treasures of
industrial and artistic achievement brought from every quarter of the
globe, divided the charmed astonishment of foreign spectators with
the absolute orderliness of the myriads who thronged it and crowded
all its approaches on the great opening day. Perhaps on that day the
Queen touched the summit of her rare happiness. It was the 1st of
May--her own month--and the birthday of her youngest son, the
godchild and namesake of the great Duke. She stood, the most justly
popular and beloved of living monarchy, amid thousands of her
rejoicing subjects, encompassed with loving friends and happy
children, at the side of the beloved husband whose plan was now
triumphantly realised; and she spoke the words which inaugurated that
triumph and invited the world to gaze on it.
"The sight was magical," she says, "so vast, so glorious, so
touching...God bless my dearest Albert! God bless my dearest country,
which has shown itself so great to-day! One felt so grateful to the
great God, Who seemed to pervade all and to bless all. The only event
it in the slightest degree reminded me of was the coronation, but
this day's festival was a thousand times superior. In fact, it is
unique, and can bear no comparison, from its peculiar beauty and
combination of such striking and different objects. I mean the slight
resemblance only as to its solemnity; the enthusiasm and cheering,
too, were much more touching, for in a church naturally all is
silent."
The Exhibition remained open from the 1st of May to the 11th of
October, continuing during all those months to attract many thousands
of visitors. It had charmed the world by the splendid embodiment of
peace and peaceful industries which it presented, and men willingly
took this festival as a sign bespeaking a yet longer reign of
world-tranquillity. It proved to be only a sort of rainbow, shining
in the black front of approaching tempest. When 1854 opened, the
third year from the Exhibition year, we were already committed to war
with Russia; and the forty years' peace with Europe, finally won at
Waterloo, was over and gone.
[Illustration: Duke of Wellington.]
In the interval another great spirit had passed away. The Duke of
Wellington died, very quietly and with little warning, at Walmer
Castle, on the 14th of September, 1852, "full of years and honours."
He was in his eighty-fourth year, and during the whole reign of Queen
Victoria he had occupied such a position as no English subject had
ever held before. At one time, before that reign began, his political
action had made him extraordinarily unpopular, in despite of the
splendid military services which no one could deny; now he was the
very idol of the nation, and at the same time was treated with the
utmost respect and reverent affection by the Sovereign--two
distinctions how seldom either attained or merited by one person! But
in Wellington's case there is no doubt that the popular adoration and
the royal regard were worthily bestowed and well earned. He had never
seemed stirred by the popular odium, he never seemed to prize the
popular praise, which he received; it was not for praise that he had
worked, but for simple duty; and his experience of the fickleness of
public favour might make him something scornful of it. To the honours
which his Sovereign delighted to shower on him--honours perhaps never
before bestowed on a subject by a monarch--he _was_ sensitive. The
Queen to him was the noblest personification of the country whose
good had ever been, not only the first, but the only object of his
public action: and with this patriotic loyalty there mingled
something of a personal feeling, more akin to romance in its paternal
tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn strength and
sternness of his general character. A thorough soldier, with a
soldier's contempt for fine-spun diplomacy, he had been led into many
a blunder when acting as a chief of party and of State; but his
absolute single-minded honesty had more than redeemed such errors;
"integrity and uprightness had preserved him," and through him the
land and its rulers, amid difficulties where the finest statecraft
might have made shipwreck of all.
He had his human failings; yet the moral grandeur of his whole career
cast such faults into the shade, and justified entirely the universal
grief at his not untimely death. The Queen deplored him as "our
immortal hero"--a servant of the Crown "devoted, loyal, and faithful"
beyond all example; the nation endeavoured by a funeral of
unprecedented sumptuousness to show its sense of loss; the poet
laureate devoted to his memory a majestic Ode, hardly surpassed by
any in the language for its stately, mournful music, and finely
faithful in its characterisation of the dead hero--
"The man of long-enduring blood,
The statesman-warrior, moderate, resolute,
Whole in himself, a common good;...
...The man of amplest influence,
Yet clearest of ambitious crime,
Our greatest yet with least pretence,
Great in council and great in war,
Foremost captain of his time,
Rich in saving common-sense.
And, as the greatest only are.
In his simplicity sublime;...
Who never sold the truth to serve the hour,
Nor paltered with Eternal God for power;
Who let the turbid streams of rumour flow
Through either babbling world of high and low;
Whose life was work, whose language rife
With rugged maxims hewn from life;
Who never spoke against a foe;
Whose eighty winters freeze with one rebuke
All great self-seekers trampling on the right:
Truth-teller was our England's Alfred named;
Truth-lover was our English Duke;
Whatever record leap to light
He never shall be shamed."
When, within so short a period after Wellington's death, the nation
once more found itself drawn into a European war, there were many
whose regret for his removal was quickened into greater keenness.
"Had we but the Duke to lead our armies!" was the common cry; but
even _his_ military genius might have found itself disastrously
fettered, had he occupied the position which his ancient subordinate
and comrade, Lord Raglan, was made to assume. It may be doubted if
Wellington could have been induced to assume it.
Whether there ever would have been a Crimean war if no special
friendliness had existed between France and England may be fair
matter for speculation. The quarrel issuing in that war was indeed
begun by France; but it would have been difficult for England to take
no part in it. The apple of discord was supplied by a long-standing
dispute between the Greek and Latin Churches as to the Holy Places
situated in Palestine--a dispute in which France posed as the champion
of the Latin and Russia of the Greek right to the guardianship of the
various shrines. The claim of France was based on a treaty between
Francis I and the then Sultan, and related to the Holy Places
merely; the Russian claim, founded on a treaty between Turkey and
Catherine II, was far wider, and embraced a protectorate over all
Christians of the Greek Church in Turkey, and therefore over a great
majority of the Sultan's European subjects. Such a construction of
the treaty in question, however, had always been refused by England
whenever Russia had stated it; and its assertion at this moment bore
an ominous aspect in conjunction with the views which the reigning
Czar Nicholas had made very plain to English statesmen, both when he
visited England in 1844 and subsequently to that visit. To use his
own well-known phrase, he regarded Turkey as "a sick man"--a
death-doomed man, indeed--and hoped to be the sick man's principal
heir. He had confidently reckoned on English co-operation when the
Turkish empire should at last be dismembered; he was now to find, not
only that co-operation would be withheld, but that strong opposition
would be offered to the execution of the plan, for which it had
seemed that a favourable moment was presenting itself. The delusion
under which he had acted was one that should have been dispelled by
plain English speech long before; but now that he found it to be a
delusion, he did not recede from his demands upon the Porte: he
rather multiplied them. The upshot of all this was war, in spite of
protracted diplomatic endeavours to the contrary; and into that war
French and English went side by side. Once before they had done so,
when Philip Augustus and Richard Coeur de Lion united their forces to
wrest the Holy Places from the Saracens; that enterprise had been
disgraced by particularly ugly scandals from which this was free; but
in respect to glory of generalship, or permanent results secured, the
Crimean campaign has little pre-eminence over the Fourth Crusade.
Recent disclosures, which have shown that Lord Aberdeen's Ministry
was not rightly reproached with "drifting" idly and recklessly into
this disastrous contest, have also helped to clear the English
commander's memory from the slur of inefficiency so liberally flung
on him at the time, while it has been shown that his action was
seriously hampered by the French generals with whom he had to
co-operate. From whatever cause, such glory as was gained in the
Crimea belongs more to the rank and file of the allied armies than to
those highest in command. The first success won on the heights of the
Alma was not followed up; the Charge of the Six Hundred, which has
made memorable for ever the Russian repulse at Balaklava, was a
splendid mistake, valuable chiefly for the spirit-stirring example it
has bequeathed to future generations of English soldiers, for its
illustration of death-defying, disciplined courage; the great fight
at Inkerman was only converted from a calamitous surprise into a
victory by sheer obstinate valour, not by able strategy; and the
operations that after Lord Raglan's death brought the unreasonably
protracted siege of Sebastopol to a close did but evince afresh how
grand were the soldierly qualities of both French and English, and
how indifferently they were generalled.
If the allies came out of the conflict with no great glory, they had
such satisfaction as could be derived from the severer losses and the
discomfiture at all points of the foe. The disasters of the war had
been fatal to the Czar Nicholas, who died on March 2nd, 1855, from
pulmonary apoplexy--an attack to which he had laid himself open, it
was said, in melancholy recklessness of his health. His was a
striking personality, which had much more impressed English
imaginations than that of Czar or Czarina since the time of Peter the
Great; and the Queen herself had regarded the autocrat, whose great
power made him so lonely, with an interest not untouched with
compassion at the remote period when he had visited her Court and had
talked with her statesmen about the imminent decay of Turkey. At that
time the austere majesty of his aspect, seen amid the finer and
softer lineaments of British courtiers, had been likened to the
half-savage grandeur of an emperor of old Rome who should have been
born a Thracian peasant. It proved that the contrast had gone much
deeper than outward appearance, and that his views and principles had
been as opposed to those of the English leaders, and as impossible of
participation by such men as though he had been an imperfectly
civilised contemporary of Constantine the Great. Since then he had
succeeded in making himself more heartily hated, by the bulk of the
English nation, than any sovereign since Napoleon I; for the war,
into which the Government had entered reluctantly, was regarded by
the people with great enthusiasm, and the foe was proportionately
detested.
Many anticipated that the death of the Czar would herald in a
triumphant peace; but in point of fact, peace was not signed until
the March of 1856. Its terms satisfied the diplomatists both of
France and England; they would probably have been less complacent
could they have foreseen the day when this hard-won treaty would be
torn up by the Power they seemed to be binding hand and foot with
sworn obligations of perdurable toughness; least of all would that
foresight have been agreeable to Lord Palmerston, Premier of England
when the peace was signed, and quite at one with the mass of the
people of England in their deep dislike and distrust of Russia and
its rulers.
The political advantages which can be clearly traced to this war are
not many. Privateers are no longer allowed to prey on the commerce of
belligerent nations, and neutral commerce in all articles not
contraband of war must be respected, while no blockade must be
regarded unless efficiently and thoroughly maintained. Such were the
principles with which the plenipotentiaries who signed the Treaty of
Paris in 1856 enriched the code of international law; and these
principles, which are in force still, alone remain of the advantages
supposed to have been secured by all the misery and all the
expenditure of the Crimean enterprise.
[Illustration: Florence Nightingale.]
But other benefits, not of a political nature, arose out of the
hideous mismanagement which had disgraced the earlier stages of the
war. It is a very lamentable fact that of the 24,000 good Englishmen
who left their bones in the Crimea, scarce 5,000 had fallen in fair
fight or died of wounds received therein. Bad and deficient food,
insufficient shelter and clothing, utter disorganisation and
confusion in the hospital department, accounted for the rest. These
evils, when exposed in the English newspapers, called forth a cry of
shame and wrath from all the nation, and stirred noble men and women
into the endeavour to mitigate at least the sufferings of the unhappy
wounded. Miss Florence Nightingale, the daughter of a wealthy English
gentleman, was known to take a deep and well-informed interest in
hospital management; and this lady was induced to superintend
personally the nursing of the wounded in our military hospitals in
the East. Entrusted with plenary powers over the nurses, and
accompanied by a trained staff of lady assistants, she went out to
wrestle with and overcome the crying evils which too truly existed,
and which were the despair of the army doctors. Her success in this
noble work, magnificently complete as it was, did indeed "multiply
the good," as Sidney Herbert had foretold: we may hope it will
continue so to multiply it "to all time." The horrors of war have
been mitigated to an incalculable extent by the exertions of the
noble men and women who, following in the path first trodden by the
Crimean heroines, formed the Geneva Convention, and have borne the
Red Cross, its most sacred badge, on many a bloody field, in many a
scene of terrible suffering--suffering touched with gleams of human
pity and human gratitude; for the courageous tenderness of many a
soft-handed and lion-hearted nursing sister, since the days of
Florence Nightingale, has aroused the same half-adoring thankfulness
which made helpless soldiers turn to kiss that lady's shadow, thrown
by her lamp on the hospital wall.
The horrors thus mitigated have become more than ever repugnant to
the educated perception of Christendom, because of the merciful
devotion which, ever toiling to lessen them, keeps them before the
world's eye. In every great war that has shaken the civilised world
since the strife in the Crimea broke out, the ambulance, its
patients, its attendants, have always been in the foreground of the
picture. Never have the inseparable miseries of warfare been so well
understood and so widely realised, thanks in part to that new
literary force of the Victorian age, the _war correspondent_, and
chiefly, perhaps, to the new position henceforth assumed by the
military medical and hospital service. To the same source we may
fairly attribute the great improvements wrought in the whole conduct
of that distinctively Christian charity, unknown to heathenism, the
hospital system: the opening of a new field of usefulness to educated
and devoted women of good position, as nurses in hospitals and out;
and the vast increase of public interest in and public support of
such agencies. Even the Female Medical Mission, now rising into such
importance in the jealous lands of the East, may be traced not very
indirectly to the same cause.
The Queen, whose enthusiasm for her beloved army and navy was very
earnest, and frankly shown, who had suffered with their sufferings
and exulted in their exploits, followed with a keen, personal,
unfaltering interest the efforts made for their relief. "Tell these
poor, noble wounded and sick men that _no one_ takes a warmer
interest, or feels more for their sufferings, or admires their
courage and heroism more than their Queen. So does the Prince," was
the impulsive, heart-warm message which Her Majesty sent for
transmission through Miss Nightingale to her soldier-patients. Her
deeds proved that these words were words of truth. Not content with
subscribing largely to the fund raised on behalf of those left
orphaned and widowed by the war, she took part in the work of
providing fitting clothing for the men exposed to all the terrors of
a Russian winter; and her daughters, enlisted to aid in this pious
work, began that career of beneficence which two of them were to
pursue afterwards to such good purpose, amid the ravages of wars
whose colossal awfulness dwarfed the Crimean campaign in the memories
of men.
Many of the injured being invalided home while the war was in
progress, Her Majesty embraced the opportunity to testify her
sympathy and admiration, giving to them in public with her own hands
the medals for service rendered at Alma, at Balaklava, and at
Inkerman. It would not be easy to say whether the Sovereign or the
soldiers were more deeply moved on this occasion. Conspicuous among
the maimed and feeble heroes was the gallant young Sir Thomas
Troubridge, who, lamed in both feet by a Russian shot at Inkerman,
had remained at his post, giving his orders, while the fight endured,
since there was none to fill his place. He appeared now, crippled for
life, but declared himself "amply repaid for everything," while the
Queen decorated him, and told him he should be one of her
aides-de-camp. Her own high courage and resolute sense of duty moved
her with special sympathy for heroism like this; and she obeyed the
natural dictates of her heart in conspicuously rewarding it. With a
similar impulse, on the return of the army, she made a welcoming
visit to the sick and wounded at Chatham, and testified the liveliest
appreciation of the humane services of Miss Nightingale, to whom a
jewel specially designed by the Prince was presented, in grateful
recognition of her inestimable work. The new decoration of the
Victoria Cross, given "for valour" conspicuously shown in deeds of
self-devotion in war time, further proved how keenly the Queen and
her consort appreciated soldierly virtue. It was the Prince who first
proposed that such a badge of merit should be introduced, the Queen
who warmly accepted the idea, and in person bestowed the Cross on its
first wearers, thereby giving it an unpurchasable value.