The Crimean War is one of the most compelling subjects in British history. Everyone knows about the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, and men like Raglan and Cardigan became household names. The story of Florence Nightingale, 'the Lady with the Lamp', and the heroic reporting of William Russell, THE TIMES' intrepid correspondent, and the sonorous names of the battles, are ingrained deep within the British military consciousness - Sebastopol, Inkerman, Balaclava and the Alma.
Trevor Royle demonstrates how the Crimean War was a watershed in world history: coming between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the opening shots of the First World War in 1914 it pointed the way to what mass warfare would be like for soldiers in the twentieth century.
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Royle gives powerful accounts of the famous military engagements, the Charge of the Light Brigade and Thin Red Line at the Battle of Balaklava, the "ferocious hand-to-hand fighting" of the Battle of Inkerman. But he also places these flashes of military adventure in the larger context. This was a war fought in many places other than the Crimea--Royle's chapter on the fighting in Armenia, for instance, is entitled "the forgotten war", and there were also naval campaigns in the Baltic and Pacific. The British suffered casualties of 19,584 overall, but only one tenth of this number actually died on the battlefield; the rest died of disease. Royle's chapter on Florence Nightingale and her nurses recaptures the horror her contemporaries felt at hearing about the dreadful conditions of the Field Hospitals. Reading these accounts it is amazing that any wounded man survived at all: "Surgeons operated with unsterilised instruments, wounds were dressed with lint from discarded linen and operating tables were encrusted with the blood and detritus from previous patients." The whole book is a vivid and definitive read. --Adam Roberts
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