The valley of death
Sir: Denis Brogan writes ('Table talk,' 25 July) that the Crimean War was the 'silliest war in the nineteenth century'. One could conceivably reply that his article is the silliest piece of writing in the twentieth. Not everybody condemned the conduct of the Crimean War. General Hamley, General MacMunn and Sir Julian Corbett examined it carefully and praised it. 'In our British way we have fostered a legend that that war was nothing but a collection of deterrent examples.' This comes from Corbett's book published in 1911. Russell's opinion cannot be uncritically accepted because he knew little about military matters,
Russia is not often defeated. To ridicule those who managed that feat at the cost of twenty thousand lives in rather under two years is, particularly today, unsound. There was, of course, no unconditional surrender, no overthrow of the enemy armed forces, no occupation of territory and capital. Those manifestations of glory we look for today were absent then—and a good thing too.
The popular opinion of the Crimean War cannot be taken uncritically as an objective assessment, because it sprang from different motives. First it came about because the popular press scared the pants off the British people—unnecessarily. Second and more im- portant, it reflected the turmoil of changing ideas, a fundamental revolution of orthodox martial attitude, from what might be called Wellingtonian sagacity to the 'blood and mud' doctrines of the First World War.
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