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. ‘We call Lucan the cautious ass, and Cardigan the dangerous ass.’

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Only from the squaddies, who had most reason to fear those head-bangers, there was an enormous silence as the vast majority could not write. When the few who could wrote there was a fatalism expressed in poignant misspellings. ‘Dear wife, I ham sorry to hear that my dear son his dead, but God knowes best.’ Or, failing fatalism, lunacy. ‘Now fizz, fizz, fizz, flies the bullets about our heads. Whack goes a shell in the ground …. Pop, bang, pop, bang, pop, we are at them.’

But then what use was literacy in a war conducted by those knitwear generals, Raglan and Cardigan? The first of these could create such ambiguity in three short sentences that his orders sent the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death, out of which trotted the other, placid and unscathed, having not engaged the enemy himself because he did not consider them his social equals.