The Crimean War and British Involvement

The Crimean War (1853–1856) was the first major European war in which Britain fought as a leading belligerent since the end of the Napoleonic Wars four decades earlier. The British expeditionary force of 1854, sent to support the Ottoman Empire against Russian expansion, was the largest British army to leave the United Kingdom for a generation. The campaign produced both the most famous British military disaster of the era — the Charge of the Light Brigade — and the most consequential British military reform of the nineteenth century. The war marked a return to active intervention in continental affairs that would shape British policy for the rest of the century.

The Crimean War is, in the judgment of the historian Orlando Figes, The Crimean War (2010), “the moment when the British Empire discovered itself as a global military power and discovered, at the same time, that it did not have the means to be one.” The dispatch of an expeditionary force of 28,000 to the Black Sea, the long siege, the freezing winters, the cholera, the public fury at the mismanagement: all of these were the conditions under which the mid-Victorian British state learned the limits of its own pretensions.

The British Expeditionary Force

The British force assembled for the Crimea in early 1854 was a motley collection of regiments, many of which had not served overseas in living memory. The army was commanded by Lord Raglan, a veteran of Waterloo who was now 65. The force numbered some 28,000 at the outset, growing to over 60,000 as the war progressed. Cavalry was disproportionately large and infantry disproportionately small — a legacy of Britain’s long reliance on naval supremacy and the need to project prestige on the plains of the Crimea. Most officers bought their commissions; most common soldiers were illiterate Irish or Englishmen from the urban poor. The medical department was administered separately from the army, with predictable consequences.

The Landings and the March to Sevastopol

The British and French landed at Kalamita Bay in September 1854 and advanced south on the Russian naval base of Sevastopol, on the western coast of the Crimea. The first major battle was the Alma on 20 September 1854, where the British and French stormed the Russian positions in a frontal assault. The British won, but the Russians were allowed to withdraw in good order, and the allies failed to follow up. A march on Sevastopol itself would have ended the war quickly. Instead, the allies settled in for a siege.

The Siege of Sevastopol

The siege of Sevastopol lasted from October 1854 until September 1855 and was the central operation of the war. British troops lived through a brutal Russian winter, the following spring cholera epidemic, and a near-constant bombardment. Supplies and reinforcements arrived slowly from the inadequate harbour at Balaclava, a few kilometres from the lines. The siege produced repeated British attacks, including at the Redan in June and September 1855, both of which failed. The Russians evacuated the city on 9 September 1855 under cover of darkness, blowing up their magazines and sinking their ships. The Times correspondent William Howard Russell, whose dispatches from the Crimea had done so much to make the war a national scandal, captured the moment: “the place is in flames — they have fired everything.”

The Charge of the Light Brigade

The most famous British military event of the war was the Charge of the Light Brigade on 25 October 1854. Triggered by a confused order from the overall British commander, Lord Raglan, delivered through a chain of command that included Lord Lucan and finally Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade of the Cavalry Division charged down a valley into prepared Russian artillery positions, suffering 272 casualties out of around 670 officers and men. The charge was militarily futile but the survivors’ discipline under fire became iconic. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” turned the episode into a national parable of obedience and sacrifice:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!” Was there a man dismay’d? Not tho’ the soldier knew Someone had blunder’d

Florence Nightingale and Military Nursing

The Crimean War is also remembered for the work of Florence Nightingale. Disturbed by reports in The Times of London, she arrived at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari in November 1854 with a team of 38 nurses. Scutari was the principal British hospital, and the mortality rate was running at over 40 percent of admissions. Nightingale’s administrative reforms — clean linen, proper diet, and a structured nursing service — helped bring the rate down dramatically. Her work led directly to the establishment of the Nightingale Training School at St Thomas’ Hospital in 1860, the foundation of professional nursing in Britain.

The Reforms of the British Military

The Crimean War exposed deep administrative failures: a commissariat that could not feed the army, a transport system dependent on private contractors, and a medical service split between the Army Medical Department and the Regimental system. The 1854 commission of inquiry led to the establishment of the Army Works Corps and eventually to the Army Medical Department reform of 1858. The most consequential change was the abolition in 1871 of the purchase of commissions, ending the system that had governed officer appointments for two centuries. These reforms, combined with the Cardwell reforms of the 1870s, produced the British Army that fought in the Anglo-Zulu War and the Boer Wars.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Crimean War was, for a long time, dominated by the late-Victorian British accounts — the work of the Royal Engineers’ historian Sir Edward Hamley and the more popular accounts of Alexander Kinglake. The post-Cold War revisionist literature, led by Orlando Figes, The Crimean War (2010), and the more recent work of Candan Badem and the contributors to the Oxford History of the Crimean War (2015), has produced a more international picture, in which the Ottoman, French, and Sardinian experiences are treated as serious subjects. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the contributors to War in History, is over how far the Crimean War was the consequence of mid-Victorian British strategic miscalculation and how far it should be read as the inevitable result of the long Eastern Question.

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