Twelve days later, on 26 April, the old religious rivalries began once again. Fights broke out between the Greeks and the Armenians during the ceremony of the Holy Fire in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For several days before the sacred ceremony, rival groups of pilgrims had smuggled various weapons into the church and concealed them there. Others were supplied with knives and iron spikes thrown from a window near the roof of the St Nicholas Convent. It was not clear how the fighting started, the British consul Finn, who witnessed it, reported three days afterwards, but ‘during the conflict the missiles were also flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps and tearing church pictures representing the most sacred subjects of faith – glass and oil pouring down upon their heads – and silver lamps on silver chains were beaten down and the materials have since vanished’. The Pasha left his place in the gallery and ordered up his guard to separate the fighters. But he was badly hurt by a blow to his head and had to be carried away on his men’s shoulders – the crowd in the church being too thick to allow a passage otherwise – while his secretary was also beaten up. Eventually, a squadron of the Pasha’s soldiers rounded up the rioters, the church attendants cleared up all the mess, and the ceremony of the Holy Fire proceeded as usual, the monks standing guard before the tomb of Christ, the congregation chanting ‘Lord have mercy’, until the patriarch emerged bearing lighted candles, and, as the church bells rang, the pilgrims pressed towards him to light their torches from the miraculous flames.54
The end of the Crimean War was marked by modest festivities in Britain. There was general disappointment that peace had come before the troops had scored a major victory to equal that of the French at Sevastopol and that they had failed to carry out a broader war against Russia. Mixed with this sense of failure was a feeling of outrage and national shame at the blunders of the government and military authorities. ‘I own that peace rather sticks in my throat,’ Queen Victoria noted in her journal on 11 March, ‘and so it does in that of the
But if there were no joyous celebrations, there were memorials – literally hundreds of commemorative plaques and monuments, paid for in the main by groups of private individuals and erected in memory of lost and fallen soldiers in church graveyards, regimental barracks, hospitals and schools, city halls and museums, on town squares and village greens across the land. Of the 98,000 British soldiers and sailors sent to the Crimea, more than one in five did not return: 20,813 men died in the campaign, 80 per cent of them from sickness or disease.2
Reflecting this public sense of loss and admiration for the suffering troops, the government commissioned a Guards Memorial to commemorate the heroes of the Crimean War. John Bell’s massive ensemble – three bronze Guardsmen (Coldstream, Fusilier and Grenadier) cast from captured Russian cannon and standing guard beneath the classical figure of Honour – was unveiled on Waterloo Place at the intersection of Lower Regent Street and Pall Mall in London in 1861. Opinion was divided on the monument’s artistic qualities. Londoners referred to the figure of Honour as the ‘quoits player’ because the oak-leaf coronels in her outstretched arms resembled the rings used in that game. Many thought the monument lacked the grace and beauty needed for a site of such significance (Count Gleichen later said that it looked best in the fog). But its symbolic impact was unprecedented. It was the first war memorial in Britain to raise to hero-status the ordinary troops.3
