The Crimean War полностью

There was more cleanliness, comfort and attention; the beds were nicer and better arranged. The ventilation was excellent, and, as far as we could see or learn, there was no want of anything. The chief custody of some of the more dangerously wounded was confided to Sisters of Charity, of which an order (St Vincent de Paul) is founded here. The courage, energy and patience of these excellent women are said to be beyond all praise. At Scutari all was dull and silent. Grim and terrible would be almost still better words. Here I saw all was life and gaiety. These were my old friends the French soldiers, playing at dominoes by their bed-sides, and twisting paper cigarettes or disputing together … I liked also to listen to the agreeable manner in which the doctor spoke to them. ‘Mon garçon’ or ‘mon brave’ quite lit up when he came near.

Captain Herbé was evacuated to the hospital later in the year. He described its regime in a letter to his family:

Chocolate in the morning, lunch at 10 o’clock, and dinner at 5. The doctor comes before 10 o’clock, with another round at 4. Here is this morning’s lunch menu:

Très bon potage au tapioca

Côtelette de mouton jardinière

Volaille rotie

Pommes de terre roties

Vin de Bordeaux de bonne qualité en carafe

Raisins frais et biscuits

Seasoned by the sea wind that breezes through our large windows, this menu is, as you can imagine, very comforting, and should soon restore our health.¹⁸

French death rates from wounds and diseases were considerably lower than British rates during the first winter of the war (but not the second, when French losses from disease were horrendous). Apart from the cleanliness of the French hospitals, the key factor was having treatment centres near the front and medical auxiliaries in every regiment, soldiers with first-aid training (soldats panseurs) who could help their wounded comrades in the field. The great mistake of the British was to transport most of their sick and wounded from the Crimea to Scutari – a long and uncomfortable journey on overcrowded transport ships that seldom had more than a couple of medical officers on board. Raglan had decided on this policy on purely military grounds (‘not to have the wounded in the way’) and would not listen to protests that the wounded and the sick were in no state to make such a long journey and needed treatment as soon as possible. On one ship, Arthur the Great, 384 wounded were laid out on the decks, packed as close as possible, much as it was on the slave ships, the dead and dying lying side by side with the wounded and the sick, without bedding, pillows or blankets, water bowls or bedpans, food or medicines, except those in the ship’s chest, which the captain would not allow to be used. Fearing the spread of cholera, the navy’s principal agent of transports, Captain Peter Christie, ordered all the stricken men to be put on board a single ship, the Kangaroo, which was able to accommodate, at best, 250 men, but by the time it was ready to sail for Scutari, perhaps 500 were packed on board. ‘A frightful scene presented itself, with the dead and dying, the sick and convalescent lying all together on the deck piled higgledy-piggledy,’ in the words of Henry Sylvester, a 23-year-old assistant surgeon and one of just two medical officers on the ship. The captain refused to put to sea with such an overcrowded ship, but eventually the Kangaroo sailed with almost 800 patients on board, though without Sylvester, who sailed for Scutari aboard the Dunbar. The death toll on these ships was appalling: on the Kangaroo and Arthur the Great, there were forty-five deaths on board on each ship; on the Caduceus, one-third of the passengers died before they reached the hospitals of Scutari.¹⁹

The Russians, too, understood the need to treat the wounded as soon as possible, although conditions in their hospitals were far worse than anything that Florence Nightingale would find in Scutari. Indeed, it was a Russian, Nikolai Pirogov, who pioneered the system of field surgery that other nations came to only in the First World War. Although little known outside Russia, where he is considered a national hero, Pirogov’s contribution to battlefield medicine is as significant as anything achieved by Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, if not more so.

Nikolai Pirogov