They found cholera at Varna, too. They would have found it anywhere, for the whole of south-east Europe was struck by cholera in the summer of 1854. The French camp was infected first, followed shortly after by the British. A hot wind blew in from the land, covering the campsites with a white limestone powder and a blanket of dead flies. Men began to suffer from nausea and diarrhoea, and then lay down in their tents to die. Ignorant of the causes, soldiers went on drinking water in the summer heat, though some, like the Zouaves, who had come across the disease in Algeria, knew to stick to wine or to boil the water for coffee (of which the French drank enormous quantities). Cholera epidemics were a regular occurrence in London and other British cities in the 1830s and 1840s, but it was not until the 1880s that the link to sanitation was really understood. A London doctor by the name of John Snow had discovered that boiling drinking water could prevent cholera, but his findings were generally ignored. Instead, the disease was put down to miasmas from the lakes around Varna, excessive drinking, or the consumption of soft fruit. The elementary rules of sanitation were disregarded by the military authorities: latrines were allowed to overflow; carcasses were left to putrefy in the sun. The sick were carted off to a rat-infested barrack in Varna, where they were cared for by exhausted orderlies, who were joined in August by a small group of French nuns. The dead were wrapped in blankets and buried in mass graves (which were later dug up by the Turks to steal the blankets). By the second week of August, 500 British troops had died of the disease, and deaths among the French were spiralling to a rate of more than sixty every day.37
Then came the fire at Varna. It began in the evening of 10 August in the old trading quarters of the town and spread quickly to the neighbouring port, where the supplies of the allied armies were waiting to be loaded onto ships. The fire had almost certainly been started by Greek and Bulgarian arsonists sympathetic to the Russian cause (several men were apprehended with lucifer matches in the area where the fire had begun). Half the town was engulfed in flames by the time the French and British troops arrived with water pumps. Shops and wharfs loaded up with crates of rum and wine exploded in the flames, and alcoholic rivers ran through the streets, where firefighters gorged themselves from the gutters. By the time the fire was contained, the supply base of the allied armies was severely damaged. ‘Varna housed all the munitions, all the supplies and provisions needed by an army on campaign,’ Herbé wrote to his parents on 16 August. ‘The powder magazines of the French, the English and the Turks were at the centre of the conflagration. Much of the town disappeared, and with it the hopes of the soldiers encamped on the plain.’38
After the fire, there were only enough supplies in the town to feed the allied armies for eight days. It was clear that the soldiers needed to get out of the Varna area before they were totally destroyed by cholera and starvation.
With the Russians forced to retreat from the Danube, the British and the French could have gone home, claiming victory against Russia. It would have been feasible to end the war at this stage. The Austrians and the Turks could have occupied the principalities as a peacekeeping force (by mid-August they had drawn up separate zones of occupation and agreed to share control of Bucharest), while the Western powers could have used the threat of intervention to make the Russians promise not to invade Turkish soil again. So why did the allies not pursue a peace once the Russians had left the principalities? Why did they decide to invade Russia when the war against the Russians had been won? Why was there a Crimean War at all?
The allied commanders were frustrated by the retreat of the Russians. Having brought their armies all this way, they felt they had been ‘robbed of victory’, as Saint-Arnaud put it, and wanted to achieve a military goal to justify the efforts they had made. In the six months that had passed since their mobilization the allied troops had barely used their weapons against the enemy. They were mocked by the Turks and ridiculed at home. ‘There they are,’ wrote Karl Marx in an editorial in the
