Three Garments and Half a Million Men
Somewhere in your wardrobe there is a war.
The cardigan is named after the seventh Earl of Cardigan, who wore a knitted waistcoat under his tunic and who is otherwise remembered for leading the Light Brigade up the wrong valley. The raglan sleeve—cut in one piece from the collar, with no shoulder seam—was devised for Lord Raglan, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo and commanded the British forces in the Crimea until dysentery removed him in June 1855. And the balaclava is named after the harbour where the British spent their first winter, freezing in tents, wrapped in whatever their families could knit and post. Three articles of clothing from a single campaign, and the war that produced them is the same war that produced the field hospital, the weather forecast and the cigarette.
It is generally called the Crimean War, which flatters the Crimea considerably.
A friendship, and how it ended
Twenty years earlier the two empires had been on excellent terms. When Mehmed Ali, the Sultan’s over-mighty viceroy in Egypt, marched on Constantinople in 1833, it was Russia that saved him: a squadron in the Bosphorus, a landing at Hünkâr İskelesi, and the Egyptian advance stopped short of the capital. Gratitude took the form of a treaty of mutual defence, to which was attached a secret article obliging the Porte, on Russian demand, to close the Dardanelles to the warships of every other power.
The elegance of the arrangement deserves a moment. The Dardanelles were to be shut; the Bosphorus was to stay open. The Black Sea was thus locked from the outside, and St Petersburg held the key. It held it for eight years. When Mehmed Ali rose again in 1839 the whole of Europe took the matter in hand, and when the treaty came up for renewal in 1841 the powers insisted on a general convention. The key was confiscated.
What followed was a quarrel over doorkeys of another kind. The dispute concerned the holy places in Palestine—the keys of the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem, precedence at the Holy Sepulchre—but behind the Orthodox stood Nicholas I, who regarded himself as protector of every Eastern Christian, and behind the Catholics stood Napoleon III, who required a protectorate for domestic purposes. Russia occupied the Danubian Principalities to underline the point; in October 1853 the Ottomans declared war. Britain and France waited until the following spring, and what decided them was not Bethlehem but Sinope, where Admiral Nakhimov destroyed a Turkish squadron at anchor—a brilliant victory, and the most expensive one Russia won, since it delivered two Western fleets to the other side. Sardinia joined in 1855. Austria, whom Nicholas had counted a debtor since he put down the Hungarians for her, confined herself to a hostile neutrality and eventually ended the war with an ultimatum, which is one way of repaying a favour.
The geography of a Crimean war
Very little of it was Crimean.
In the Baltic the allied fleet bombarded Sveaborg and took Bomarsund. In the White Sea it plundered merchantmen and shelled the Solovetsky monastery, an establishment of monks some six hundred miles from the nearest strategic object. In the Caucasus the Russians besieged Kars, a basalt fortress that had been stormed by most of the region’s occupants and had never been cheap; the September assault broke against a redoubt the Turks call Kanlı Tabya, the Bloody Redoubt, and cost six and a half thousand men, after which the besiegers simply sat down and waited for the garrison to starve, which it did in November. On their own Black Sea coast the Russians blew up their forts and walked away from Anapa, Novorossiysk and Gelendzhik; the allies occupied the rubble, and had to fight for Kerch alone.
And in the Pacific an Anglo-French squadron attempted Petropavlovsk, on Kamchatka, and was beaten off—the only Russian victory of the war fought on Russian soil, won at the furthest possible remove from anyone who might have profited by it. The Russians abandoned Kamchatka the following spring anyway, having decided not to wait for a second and larger visit.
At Paris in 1856 Kars was traded back for Sevastopol, Balaclava, Kerch, Yevpatoria and Kinburn. The Black Sea was neutralised, which meant that neither empire might keep a fleet or an arsenal upon it. The Danube was opened, a slice of Bessarabia went to Moldavia, the delta returned to the Ottomans, and Russia lost both her protectorate over the Principalities and that exclusive guardianship of the Sultan’s Christians for which the whole thing had ostensibly been undertaken.
A war of firsts
It was an unusually inventive war, in the way that expensive failures often are.
Naval minefields worked for the first time: Jacobi had been developing his galvanic mines since the forties, but ships first blew up on them in the Gulf of Finland in 1855. It was the first war fought in the newspapers as well as in the field—Russell of The Times reported the shambles of the commissariat and brought a government down—and the first to be photographed, though photographs could not yet be printed, so engravings were made from them and the plates themselves sold to the public like views of Italy. It was the first war to produce a weather service, Le Verrier having been set to the problem after the storm of November 1854 destroyed a fleet’s worth of shipping off Balaclava. And it introduced the British soldier to the Turkish habit of rolling tobacco in paper—not, whatever the story says, a Turkish invention, since Spanish papelate go back to the eighteenth century and the word cigarette is a French diminutive of cigare; but it came home in British kitbags and went from there into the factories.
Medicine did best of all, which is what happens when the material is abundant. Florence Nightingale went to Scutari and returned with the nursing profession and a talent for statistics that killed more arguments than her lamp ever lit; hospital trains appeared; and on the other side Pirogov put the plaster cast into mass use at Sevastopol—the cast itself had been introduced four years earlier by a Dutchman named Mathijsen, but a clinic and a bombardment are not the same laboratory. Out of the same siege came Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches, after which writing about war in the older manner became difficult to do with a straight face.
Two Bays, Two Readings
The harbour that gave the world a knitted hood is probably Turkic in origin: Balıklava, a fish-nest, a quiet inlet where the fish came in. The Greeks saw the same water rather differently. In the tenth book of the Odyssey the ships put into a harbour ringed by sheer cliffs, its entrance so narrow that two vessels cannot pass, and there the Laestrygonians eat the crews and sink the fleet with boulders; ancient commentators placed that harbour here, and the description is uncomfortably apt, since the entrance to Balaclava Bay is nearly invisible from the sea. One party saw fish in it, the other a trap. The war settled the argument in favour of the second.
The second bay is Sinope. A Milesian colony older than Rome, it is called after a nymph whom Zeus pursued; he promised, as usual, to grant her any wish she named, and she wished to remain a virgin, and did. It is very nearly the only recorded case of an Olympian being held to terms, and it ended, twenty-five centuries later, with her harbour burning to the waterline.
Sinope was also the birthplace of Diogenes, who was expelled from it for defacing the coinage—he struck through the die, which is to say he announced that the value of things had been wrongly assigned. He would not have accepted this war’s valuation either. The keys of a door in Bethlehem, and the right to protect other men’s subjects, came to half a million lives, of which disease took three for every one taken by the guns. Set against that: field surgery, the weather forecast, and a cardigan.
