Tolstoy, trenches, and tragedy

Crimean Quagmire argues that the war fought by Britain, France, and Turkey against Russia around Sevastopol and Balaklava in the mid-1850s represented a first in many ways.

It was the first modern war – where grievous casualties were caused to both civilians and members of the armed forces through the use of unprecedented modern weapons. It was the first war where coverage – through the reporting of Irish-born journalist William Howard Russell for The Times of London and the prose stories of Russian nobleman (and serving officer in the Czar’s army) Lev Tolstoy – sought to relate the horrific reality of the war to readers at home, rather than echoing millennia of heroic, poetic portrayals of death and destruction. And it was the first to be recognised as a ‘quagmire’ – literally and figuratively- where the opposing armies struggled to take a few yards this way or that in appalling mud, trenches, disease and despair. It was the first war that cost so many lives – an estimated 650,000 (almost certainly an underestimate), of which three-quarters were Russians.

Men, women and children died from shells and mortars torn apart by canister or grape shots (bundles of shrapnel fired in cases or balls from cannons). They succumbed to dysentery, cholera, frostbite, sepsis, and lack of modern medical facilities (even though medical science had advanced well beyond that understood just a few decades earlier, during the Napoleonic Wars, when chloroform to allow pain-free operations was unknown.)

The Crimean War, fought between 1854 and 1856 over a trifling cause (a dispute over the transfer of the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem from the Orthodox Church to the Roman Catholic Church, orchestrated by France through the Ottoman Turk rulers of the Holy Land), eventually brought about the collapse of the British government, the death of the Russian Czar, and arguably set up the geopolitical conditions in Europe for the First World War, 60 years later. That war became a quagmire on an even grander scale and produced some of the finest war literature (principally from British, German and French authors) the world has ever seen.

All the conditions that appeared in the Crimean War have been repeated in many similar wars that followed; even the war launched by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin against Ukraine in February 2022 bears all the hallmarks of a quagmire: epic failures of strategy (think Russia’s initial assault, and failed, assault on Kyiv); logistical incompetence (in the Crimean War a few kilometers separated supplies in harbour from the frontlines, but food rotted and winter clothing was lost due to a mixture of poor roads and bureaucracy; during Russia’s invasion, troops were sent in armoured columns down one narrow highway and were destroyed by simple partisan attacks); a resort to trench warfare, and the introduction of cheap and simple new technologies, such as drones, that have fundamentally changed the balance of power on a battlefield (in Crimea it was the British army’s new Minié ball rifles, firing a hefty 1.14 ounce/32 gram, lead bullet, that wrought havoc in Russians armed only with much weaker muskets firing lead balls. The new ammunition caused grievous wounds that shattered bones and usually resulted in death, unlike musket ball wounds.)

Given the importance and relevance of the first modern war to be reported in near contemporary time (Russell’s reports reached the readers of The Times within a couple of weeks; Tolstoy’s fact-based stories, readers of the periodical The Contemporary, founded by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, within a few months), Carleton – a professor of Russian Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts – draws upon his extensive scholarship to present an engagingly-written, entertaining book that never shies from the brutal history it reveals.

Quagmire, Carleton writes, «As we see times and again in history, can break nations, bring down governments or lead to revolutions, both social and political…. Russell’s reporting and Tolstoy’s stories drove the idea of the quagmire into the public mainstream like never before…[with their] honest treatment of death, the veritable sine qua non of all conflicts.»

The state of the Russian army in Crimea – a vast body of armed men drawn from the illiterate and literally enslaved serfs – is comparable, in some ways, to the Russian army of today, where contract soldiers (and some conscripts, although officials they are not supposed to serve in Crimea) are drawn from the poorest regions and lowest-educated classes. Today, like then, the troops are ill-treated by their officers who steal from them, beat them, and send them on suicidal missions.

«As chattel, the conscripted serf was typically treated by offers as an animal or even worse. Beatings and other kinds of corporal punishment were part of the daily norm…Tolstoy learned to his disgust.»

Although Carleton does not specifically refer to this comparison, newspaper reports show how similar things are in today’s Russian army: «We were called dogs and treated badly,» one former member of the Wagner Group, captured by Ukrainians, told reporters in February 2024. «My elder brother was killed by his commanding officer.»

Russell, sent to Crimea with the British army, is the first example of a reporter «embedded» with the military. And like those who followed him (notably during the Vietnam War), embedded reporters usually end up having an awkward relationship with the top brass, even if they get on well with the frontline troops. Lord Raglan, the British commander who died while suffering dysentery and depression in Crimea, dubbed Russell a nuisance and made his dislike of him public. Few Western reporters have been allowed to cover the current war in Ukraine from the Russian side, but when they have, they have been under even tighter control than those covering the war from the other side with Ukrainian Armed Forced press credentials (which are relatively easy to apply for and receive.)

If Russians suffered during the Crimean War from their enemy’s advanced weapons, they excelled at building fortifications—which the British, French, and their Turkish allies found all but impossible to breach during the siege of Sevastopol. Nearly two hundred years later, Russian defensive lines have prevented Ukraine from retaking territory; the recent Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region took advantage of one area with weak defences.

The Russian’s «interconnected, multi-layered systems [of siege defences] was seen as a technological feat in its own right,» writes Carleton.

The propaganda of the Crimean War also laid the ground for later attempts to make heroic death and destruction: the British made heroes out of the cavalry charge of the Light Brigade – a suicidal attack sparked by a blundered order that resulted in the decimation a brigade armed with lances and swords against cannon. That attack was immortalised by Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetic lines, remembered in England to this day:

Theirs not to reason why

Theirs but to do and die

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

And the Russians glorified the stubborn and stoical defence of the siege of Sevastopol – which was drawn upon to bolster morale during the dreadful siege of Leningrad during World War Two, which lasted almost three times as long.

Carleton argues that the Crimean War both established truth as the aim of war reporting and the understanding of the power of words (and lies) to create war, death and destruction. It established the script with which to understand ‘quagmire’ conflicts. The degree to which it remains relevant seems evidenced by the current conflict in Ukraine, he suggests in his concluding comments:

«This conflict again gives us the standard recipe for a quagmire: a war of choice yields to a bloody, chaotic stalemate best with gross falsehoods and constantly changing storylines. What remains to be seen is the nature of the blowback that Russia will suffer after inflicting on Ukraine and its people crimes against humanity with genocidal implications.»