The Crimean War полностью

It was not just a question of poor organization. The British troops were not accustomed to foraging for food or fending for themselves. Recruited mainly from the landless and the urban poor, they had none of the peasant know-how or resourcefulness of the French soldiers, who could hunt for animals, fish in the rivers and the sea, and turn almost anything into food. ‘It has become the habit of the British soldier’, concluded Louis Noir, ‘that every meal should be served up to him, wherever he may find himself at war. With the stubbornness which is the foundation of their character, the English would prefer to die of hunger than change any of their ways.’ Unable to look after themselves, the British troops depended heavily on their regimental wives to procure and cook their food and do their laundry and any number of other menial chores that the French did for themselves – a factor that accounts for the relatively large number of women in the British army compared to the French (where there were no army wives but only cantinières). Marianne Young of the 28th Infantry Regiment complained that the English soldier was ‘half starved upon his rations, because he could not, with three stones and a tin pot, convert them into palatable food’, whereas there was ‘virtually nothing the French would turn their noses up at if it could be converted into food’. They caught frogs and tortoises, which ‘they cooked up to their own tastes’, dug up tortoise eggs, and made a delicacy out of eating rats. The surgeon George Lawson saw a soldier cutting off the legs of a frog alive and remonstrated with him for his cruelty, but the Frenchman ‘quietly smiled – I suppose at my ignorance – and patting his stomach said they were for the cuisine’.¹⁵

Compared to the French, the British ate badly, although – to begin with – there were plentiful supplies of meat and rum. ‘Dear wife,’ wrote Charles Branton, a semi-literate gunner in the 12th Battalion Royal Artillery on 21 October, ‘we have lost many lives through the Corora they are dying like rotten sheep but we have plenty to eat and drink. We have two Gills of rum a day plenty of salt por and a pound and a ½ of biskit and I can ashore you that if we had 4 Gills of rum it would be a godsend.’ As autumn gave way to winter, the supply system struggled to keep going on the muddy track from Balaklava to the British camp, and the rations steadily declined. By mid-December there was no fruit or vegetable in any form – only sometimes lemon or lime juice, which the men added to their tea and rum to prevent scurvy – although officers with private means could purchase cheese and hams, chocolates and cigars, wines, champagnes, in fact almost anything, including hampers by Fortnum & Mason, from the shops of Balaklava and Kadikoi. Thousands of soldiers became sick and died from illnesses, including cholera, which resurfaced with a vengeance. By January the British army could muster only 11,000 able-bodied men, less than half the number it had under arms two months before. Private John Pine of the Rifle Brigade had been suffering for several weeks from scurvy, dysentery and diarrhoea when he wrote to his father on 8 January:

We have been living on biscuit and salt rations the greater part of the time we have been in the field, now and then we get fresh beef and once or twice we have had mutton but it is wretched stuff not fit to throw to an English dog, but it is the best that is to be got out here so we must be thankful to God for that. Miriam [his sister] tells me there is a lot of German Sausages coming out for the troops. I wish they would make haste and send them for I really think I could manage a couple of pound at the present minute … . I have been literally starved this last 5 or six weeks … If my dear father you could manage to send me in the form of a letter a few anti-scorbutic powders I should be obliged to you for I am rather troubled with the scurvy and I will settle with you some other time please God spares me.

Pine’s condition worsened and he was shipped to the military hospital at Kulali near Constantinople, where he died within a month. Such was the chaos of the administration that there was no record of his death, and it was a year before his family found out what had happened from one his comrades.¹⁶

It was not long before the British troops became thoroughly demoralized and began to criticize the military authorities. ‘Those out here are much in hope that peace will soon be proclaimed,’ Lieutenant Colonel Mundy of the 33rd Regiment wrote to his mother on 4 February. ‘It is all very fine for people at home talking of martial order and the like but everyone of us out here has had quite enough of hardship, of seeing our men dying by thousand from sheer neglect.’ Private Thomas Hagger, who arrived in late November with the reinforcements of the 23rd, wrote to his family: