What's new in The Crimean War?

Hugh Small spent ten years researching and writing his new history of the Crimean War.  His goal was to make sense of this, the most destructive conflict of Queen Victoria's reign.  His earlier research into Florence Nightingale had left him with the feeling that there was much unexplained on the military and political side of the war.  He was encouraged by the work of Andrew Lambert and Winfried Baumgart, scholars who made important discoveries 140 years after the war in the fields of naval strategy and European cooperation during the conflict.  Small believed that many other issues had been unexplored, because of the "let sleeping dogs lie" policy of those in the know when the British public was so disappointed about the war's outcome.  He went back to basics, consulting all the primary sources; surprisingly, he found that some of the most important of them have been consistently misquoted since Victorian times.  For example, in 1863 Kinglake printed an expurgated version of the orders to attack Sebastopol, omitting paragraphs that laid down conditions that had to be satisfied for such an attack and the alternatives if they were not.  Amazingly, all other historians have used this doctored version even though the original became available by the 1920s.  They all concluded, as Kinglake intended them to, that the Army High Command had no choice but to attack Sebastopol, and therefore could not be blamed for the result.

The result of Hugh Small's work is a succinct and highly readable account which makes sense of the key players' actions in a way not achieved before.  If it wasn't for his meticulously documented sources and his acclaimed earlier research on Florence Nightingale, it might be thought that some of his conclusions were fantasies.  Examples of his new revelations:

• The Battle of the Alma was won for Britain and France "by a humble regiment of the line, left without orders, hiding in a ditch."

• The Charge of the Light Brigade was not caused by the errors and family quarrels of the Generals, it was reluctantly allowed by them to prevent a mutiny in the Brigade at being continually held back.  The Light Brigade did not attempt to obey the famous order - how could they when they were not even told what it was?  They created their own order: to charge the Russian cavalry, to drive them from the field, and to destroy their will ever to face British cavalry again.  Their Charge succeeded spectacularly. 

• The British and French attacked Sebastopol because a cholera epidemic made it impossible to stay where they were in the Balkans.  The only permitted alternative, a campaign to liberate the Caucasus, was politically unacceptable to conservative British commanders.

• The British High Command technically mutinied in May 1855, by disobeying orders to abandon its mistaken plan to take Sebastopol by bombardment and assault.  The two most senior officers pretended that they would obey direct orders from London to attack the Russian armies outside Sebastopol instead, but sabotaged the new strategy by ensuring that the French would not follow it either.

• The French withdrew from the war because of the refusal of their British allies to obey orders from the Minister of War in London.

• The war was not a French/British adventure, it was a concerted European attempt to stop and roll back the expansion of the tyrannical Russian Empire, which had swallowed up an area of Europe five times the size of France in the previous 100 years.  European leaders were agreed that unless checked this expansion would continue.  For 100 years after the failure of their Crimean project, they were proved right.

• Florence Nightingale ... no, we're not going to put that on the internet.  You'll have to read the book!

 Home or see The Crimean War at Amazon.co.uk (new window)