The Crimean War полностью

The soldiers were recast as saintly figures, martyrs of a holy cause, in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Among them was Catherine Marsh, whose lively and sentimental hagiography, Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment (1856), sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few years of publication and reappeared in numerous abridged and juvenile editions up until the First World War. Compiled from Vicars’s diary and his letters to his mother from the Crimea, Memorials was dedicated to the ‘noble ideal of the Christian soldier’ and offered to the public as a ‘fresh and ample refutation to those who, in the face of examples to the contrary, still maintain that entire devotion of the heart to God must withdraw a man from many of the active duties of life and … that in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier’. Vicars is portrayed as a soldier-saint, a selfless hero who bears the burdens of his fellow-men on the Sevastopol heights by sharing his food and tent, caring for them and reading them the Bible when they are sick. Vicars leads his men to ‘Holy War’ against the Russians, who are described as ‘heathens’, ‘infidels’ and ‘savages’. He is mortally wounded during the sortie of 22–3 March 1855, and his death is compared to the martyrdom of Christ in Marsh’s final chapter (‘Victory’), which is prefaced by Longfellow’s verse (a translation from the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique):

His soul to Him who gave it rose,

God led it to its long repose,

Its glorious rest!

And though the warrior’s sun has set,

Its light shall longer round us yet,

Bright, radiant, blest.

Vicars was buried in Sevastopol but in St George’s Church on Bromley Road in Beckenham, Kent, there is a white marble tablet carved in the shape of a scroll with a sheathed sword behind on which these words are inscribed:

TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF HEDLEY VICARS CAPTAIN 97TH REGIMENT WHO THROUGH FAITH IN THE WORD OF GOD THAT ‘THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST HIS SON CLEANSETH US ALL IN SIN’ PASSED FROM THE DEATH OF SIN TO THE LIFE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. HE FELL IN BATTLE, AND SLEPT IN JESUS, ON THE NIGHT OF 22ND OF MARCH, 1855. AND WAS BURIED BEFORE SEBASTOPOL AGED 28 YEARS.¹⁵

Beyond the sanctification of soldiers and the new manly ideal, the common effort of the war seemed to offer the possibility of national unity and reconciliation needed to end the class divisions and industrial strife of the 1830s and 1840s. In Dickens’s Household Words, alongside the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), a novel on the theme of ending the class conflict, there appeared a series of poems by Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, including ‘The Lesson of the War’.

The rulers of the nation,

The poor ones at their gate,

With the same eager wonder

The same great news await!

The poor man’s stay and comfort,

The rich man’s joy and pride,

Upon the bleak Crimean shore

Are fighting side by side.¹⁶

A similar idea can be found in Tennyson’s poetic monodrama Maud (1855), where a state of ‘civil war’ created by the ‘lust of gain’ at home gives way to an ending in which the narrator looks to war abroad as a higher and more godly cause:

Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims

Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,

And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,

Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;

And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!

Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep

For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,

Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;

And many a darkness into the light shall leap,

And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,

And noble thought be freer under the sun,

And the heart of a people beat with one desire;

For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,

And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,

And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames

The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,

We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,

And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;

It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;

I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,

I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.