The Crimean War

This really is exceptional. The Crimean War, which took place largely on an isolated peninsula in southern Russia in 1855, isn't a popular subject in America but it's hard to know why. We can see echoes of it in the American Civil War that followed a few years later. American troops copied the ballooning red pantaloons of the French zouaves, for instance. And one American observer, George McClellan, twice appointed General of the Army of the Potomac, learned the lesson of siege warfare all too well. The town of Sebastopol, California, was given its name during the siege of the Russian city.

It was one of the first wars to be covered internationally by journalists, artists, and photographers. Longfellow wrote a famous poem, "The Lady With the Lamp," about Florence Nightingale, who established nursing as a profession in the Crimea. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the still-more famous "The Charge of the Light Brigade," celebrating British heroism while admitting that "someone had blundered." The reports from the battlefield carried the same shock as Mathew Brady's photographs of the Confederate dead at Antietam. Not that the shock was sufficient to prevent any similar wars later.

The viewer gets to hear some of the reports and letters from the journalists and soldiers, much like Ken Burns' magnificent "The Civil War." Some of the reporters and officers did evocative sketches and water colors. There are still photos, and even movie footage of survivors of the war in Britain, France, and Russia, parading awkwardly but proudly before the rolling cameras. The man -- a boy at the time -- who blew the bugle sounding the cavalry charge at "the valley of death" gets to blow the call again on a scratchy old recording. Some of the material is amazing.

Of the war itself, it can be said that it changed the map of Europe, but not much for the better. The Ottoman Empire centered in Turkey was losing is grip and becoming weak. Defenselessness is a condition that other countries will not allow. Like a vacuum, it tends to be filled by someone else. The invitation was open.

And so Czarist Russia sent an army south to occupy Constantinople, now Istanbul. The Turks were offended, and the British and French were irritated, so the European powers opposed the Russian expedition with their own armed forces. And so began what was unquestionably one of the most mismanaged wars of the century. Wars in general are stupid. Not any war in particular but war in the abstract. From an evolutionary point of view, it's a hell of a way to promote the species -- by killing each other off for ephemeral reasons like natural resources or, far worse, for national honor.

Everybody except the Turks seemed to get something out of this bloody conflict. The Brits now had an empire on which the sun didn't set for more than another half century. The French were able to feed their chauvinism and were encouraged to preserve their own colonies. The Russians learned that they needed to modernize and build up industrial might to keep their geopolitical position. (The Czar was prompted to free the serfs as a result.) Only the Turks lost. The Balkan part of the Ottoman Empire was broken up into a jigsaw puzzle of small states (Serbia, Montenegro, and so on) whose ethnic and religious animosities we're still dealing with today.

The narrative is thorough, well written, and gripping. The reports and letters elicit the usual emotions. They make us wonder why such wars are ever waged, while we set about getting ready for the next one.

Americans are apt to know much about our Civil War and very little about the Crimean War, which took place only a few years earlier (1853-1856). Strikingly, the innovations of the Crimean War often predated those associated with the Civil War. For examples, trenches and the use of artillery that presaged more modern warfare; war photography; numerous letter and diary accounts by officers, private soldiers and civilians; organized nursing units; and canned food as rations. All of these things began not with the American Civil War but with the Crimean War. The Crimean War was also noteworthy for its odd alliances and adversaries. The war was precipitated by Russian aggression against Turkey. The Czar gravely miscalculated in thinking that the French and British would not side with a Muslim country against a fellow Christian nation. Thus an alliance of strange bedfellows amassed against Russia. The alliance between the French and British suddenly forced a change in old ways of thinking, because they had been seemingly perpetual enemies for so long. Further, their alliance with Turkey was also novel. Once, the Turks had threatened to conquer Europe. Now the western powers and the Turks were on the same side. It was not as if they liked each other any better. Indeed, the French and British lorded it over their Turkish allies. The British army was not as well prepared for the Crimean War as the French army, which had been fighting in Algeria for several years. I am always amused by those - particularly fellow Americans - who make fun of the French military. Up until 1871 - when they were crushed by the Germans - the French were considered to be one of the world's top militaries. The Crimean War happened before their precipitous downfall. The motivation for the alliance was a common enemy. Sensing the decline of Turkey, Czarist Russia pounced on the opportunity to control the Black Sea and the port of Constantinople. There were both strategic and symbolic reasons for this. Control of Constantinople meant control of the gateway between the Black and Mediterranean seas. That would give Russia year-round access to the world's oceans. Symbolically, the Russian monarch believed that he was getting back something that belonged to him. Constantinople had been the capital of Byzantium, the Greek-speaking remnant of the Roman empire in the eastern Mediterranean, which had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire (the Turks) exactly 400 years earlier. The czar had always considered himself to be the rightful heir to the last Roman Empire. This is why the Russian monarch was called czar - meaning Caesar, why the royal family is called the ROMANovs, why the Russians adopted a variety of Christianity more similar to Greek Orthodox than to Roman Catholicism, and why the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet bears a resemblance to Greek (St. Cyril was a missionary to the Slavs from Byzantium). As natural as the reconquest of Constantinople seemed to the Russians, it was intolerable to the British that the Russian navy should have a shot at becoming a major sea power. The French didn't like it either. Turkey, of course, did not agree that Constantinople or any place else on the southern shore of the Black Sea belonged to Russia. (Even Austria, while not committing to the war, actively discouraged Russia from pushing south of the Danube River as part of its war effort - a severe blow to the Russians.) Although the western allies tended to look down on the Turks, the initial attack on a Turkish port by the Russian navy was so brutal in its overkill (nearly every ship in the Turkish fleet was destroyed and civilians were deliberately targeted) that the British press reported it as a massacre and ginned up sympathy for the Turks. One of the great killers of the war was cholera. Whole armies, without ever having faced fire, were decimated or worse by the disease. Combat nevertheless took many lives. This was the war in which the Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, took place. It was one of those moments when a traditional approach - in this case, a massive cavalry charge - was proven to be outmoded in the face of modern technology - in this case, artillery. The result was a suicidal massacre. This was also the war that made Florence Nightingale famous as the organizer of what would become a tradition of military nursing, though they were not yet formally part of the military. (America's Clara Barton would come a few years later, aware as she was of Nightingale's pioneering work.) On both sides, soldiers, soldiers' wives and journalists recorded their impressions of the war. Count Leo Tolstoy - future author of "War and Peace" - was an artillery officer in the war and, not surprisingly, kept a journal. Photographers took pictures (in one case, unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of a photographer's pictures survive) and some observers made drawings and even watercolor paintings. This three-part series is a very good survey of the Crimean War for those who know nothing about it or those who have forgotten what they once might have known. Billie Whitelaw's narration is crisp and intelligent without talking down to the viewer.