- История
- 18+

Table of Contents
Title Page
1 - Religious Wars
2 - Eastern Questions
3 - The Russian Menace
4 - The End of Peace in Europe
5 - Phoney War
6 - First Blood to the Turks
7 - Alma
8 - Sevastopol in the Autumn
9 - Generals January and February
10 - Cannon Fodder
11 - The Fall of Sevastopol
12 - Paris and the New Order
ALSO BY ORLANDO FIGES
Notes
Copyright Page
In the parish church of Witchampton in Dorset there is a memorial to commemorate five soldiers from this peaceful little village who fought and died in the Crimean War. The inscription reads:
DIED IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY.
THEIR BODIES ARE IN THE CRIMEA.
MAY THEIR SOULS REST IN PEACE. MDCCCLIV
In the communal cemetery of Héricourt in south-eastern France, there is a gravestone with the names of the nine men from the area who died in the Crimea:
ILS SONT MORTS POUR LA PATRIE.
AMIS, NOUS NOUS REVERRONS UN JOUR
At the base of the memorial somebody has placed two cannonballs, one with the name of the ‘Malakoff’ (Malakhov) Bastion, captured by the French during the siege of Sevastopol, the Russian naval base in the Crimea, the other with the name ‘Sebastopol’. Thousands of French and British soldiers lie in unmarked and long-neglected graves in the Crimea.
In Sevastopol itself there are hundreds of memorials, many of them in the military cemetery (
THEY DIED FOR THEIR FATHERLAND,
FOR TSAR AND FOR GOD
The Héricourt Memorial
Elsewhere in Sevastopol there are ‘eternal flames’ and monuments to the unknown and uncounted soldiers who died fighting for the town. It is estimated that a quarter of a million Russian soldiers, sailors and civilians are buried in mass graves in Sevastopol’s three military cemeteries.1
Two world wars have obscured the huge scale and enormous human cost of the Crimean War. Today it seems to us a relatively minor war; it is almost forgotten, like the plaques and gravestones in those churchyards. Even in the countries that took part in it (Russia, Britain, France, Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, including those territories that would later make up Romania and Bulgaria) there are not many people today who could say what the Crimean War was all about. But for our ancestors before the First World War the Crimea was the major conflict of the nineteenth century, the most important war of their lifetimes, just as the world wars of the twentieth century are the dominant historical landmarks of our lives.
The losses were immense – at least three-quarters of a million soldiers killed in battle or lost through illness and disease, two-thirds of them Russian. The French lost around 100,000 men, the British a small fraction of that number, about 20,000, because they sent far fewer troops (98,000 British soldiers and sailors were involved in the Crimea compared to 310,000 French). But even so, for a small agricultural community such as Witchampton the loss of five able-bodied men was felt as a heavy blow. In the parishes of Whitegate, Aghada and Farsid in County Cork in Ireland, where the British army recruited heavily, almost one-third of the male population died in the Crimean War.2
Nobody has counted the civilian casualties: victims of the shelling; people starved to death in besieged towns; populations devastated by disease spread by the armies; entire communities wiped out in the massacres and organized campaigns of ethnic cleansing that accompanied the fighting in the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea. This was the first ‘total war’, a nineteenth-century version of the wars of our own age, involving civilians and humanitarian crises.