Led by donkeys

The National Army Museum of the Crimean War
by Alastair Massie
Sidgwick & Jackson, £25, pp. 379, ISBN 070113904

The most extraordinary single detail about the Crimean war occurs in Alastair Massie’s book. It is this: the dim lordlings who commanded on the British side had forgotten to impose censorship on private mail, just as they had forgotten other things, like supplies, equipment and medical care. The difference was that the one efficient agency was a cheap and quick postal service collecting mail by steamship. Out of the Crimea the letters poured. The result was that more was known about conditions at the front, not afterwards but at the time, than in any war before or since.

There were not just letters home, but letters to newspapers, letters of criticism, anger, recrimination, which in any other war would have their writers on a charge. Most were from officers appalled by their superiors, especially the cavalry generals.