The Crimean War полностью

This didactic cult of manliness animated the two major British novels set against the background of the Crimean War: Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) and Henry Kingsley’s Ravenshoe (1861). It was also the pervading theme of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855), a New World adventure story set at the time of the Spanish Armada, which was inspired by the militarism and xenophobia of Britain during the Crimean War. Its author himself described it in 1854 as ‘a most ruthless and bloodthirsty book (just what the times want, I think)’.¹¹

The argument for war was also at the heart of Thomas Hughes’s hugely influential novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), whose most famous scene, the fight between Tom and the bully Slogger Williams, was clearly meant to be read by the public as a moral lesson on the recent war against Russia:

From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be … . [Saying ‘no’ to a challenge to fight is] a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest.¹²

Here was the origin of the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’ – the notion of ‘Christian soldiers’ fighting righteous wars that came to define the Victorian imperial mission. This was a time when Britons began to sing in church:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus going on before.

Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;

Forward into battle see His banners go! (1864)

The argument for ‘muscular Christianity’ was first made in a review of Kingsley’s novel Two Years Ago in 1857, a year when the idea of the ‘Christian soldier’ was reinforced by the actions of the British troops in putting down the Indian Mutiny. But the idea of training boys to fight for Christian causes was also prominent in Hughes’s sequel to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), where athletic sport is extolled as a builder of manly character, teamwork, chivalry and moral fortitude – qualities that had made Britons good at war. ‘The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’¹³ At the heart of this ideal was a new concentration on physical training and the mastery of the body as a form of moral strengthening for the purposes of holy war. It was a quality associated with the hardiness of the suffering soldiers in the Crimea.

But that suffering, too, played a role in transforming the public image of the British troops. Before the war the respectable middle and upper classes had viewed the rank and file of the British army as little more than a dissolute rabble – heavy-drinking and ill-disciplined, brutal and profane – drawn from the poorest sections of society. But the agonies of the soldiers in the Crimea had revealed their Christian souls and turned them into objects of ‘good works’ and Evangelical devotion. Religious ministering to the rank and file dramatically increased during the war. The army doubled its number of chaplains and every man was given a Bible free of charge, courtesy of middle-class donations to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Naval and Military Bible Society.¹⁴