Why the Crimean War Was the First Modern Mass War | A Brief History of Things

In the eyes of historians, no earlier war did as much as the Crimean War to shape Britain's identity as a nation.

The modern and the mass have never been separable. Besides the science and rationality that came with industrialization, "modern" also carries the sense of an attack on privilege and of mass mobilization. Both showed themselves in full for the first time in the Crimean War.

Europeans had known no quarrel between great powers since 1815, and on the Crimean battlefield they saw what the Industrial Revolution had done to war. The Russians, who had beaten Napoleon mainly by spending men and by the depth of their vast territory, found that their old smoothbore muskets and cannon could match neither the range nor the accuracy of the enemy's rifles and new guns, and that a supply system carried by horses and human muscle was less and less equal to fighting on this scale.

Soldiers holding what counted at the time as "weapons of mass destruction" showed large-scale killing power for the first time, a warning of the age of mass slaughter that would arrive on the battlefields of the First World War. The romance of war, once full of aristocratic color and chivalry, began with the Crimean War to give way to other questions: how to command in fine detail; how to organize transport so that supplies and ammunition kept coming; how to keep troops camped in the open through Sevastopol's bitter cold, with food and clean water; and, as Miss Nightingale's example showed, how to make the system for treating the wounded more efficient. Fighting a war, in other words, was starting to look like running a factory. Courage and morale still counted for a great deal, but without the cold support of industrial production, transport and organization behind them, spirit alone could rarely win a war.

Of course, what most gave the Crimean War its modern, mass character was the war of modern media and public opinion. Thanks to the near-live reporting that modern communications allowed, it was the first war in any real sense to be fought in full public view. More than that, modern mass media mattered from the first mobilization of opinion onward: public feeling, like military and financial strength, largely set the pace of the war and even the direction it took.

The arrival of modern media meant that starting a war, fighting it and ending it could no longer be managed by princes and nobles in closed rooms, as they once had been. As the British historian Orlando Figes points out in The Crimean War: A History, you cannot understand the origins of the Crimean War by studying the motives of political leaders and diplomats alone. Figes calls it the first war in history brought on by the pressure of press coverage and public opinion. With the rise of the railways, national newspapers appeared in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, and public opinion became a powerful force in British politics — in some respects, one could say, more powerful than Parliament and the Cabinet.

Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister Chinese readers know as "Bamaizun," saw early how much public support mattered, and he is regarded as the first truly modern politician: to win the public over, he understood, he had to cultivate the press and put his ideas to people in plain, simple language. Publicity was the means by which he won opinion to his side in the war with Russia, and he could win hearts because, as the newspapers packaged it, his foreign policy merged in the British public's mind with the defense of "British values." In the end, anyone who tried to keep Britain out of the war was smeared and attacked by papers waving the flag of patriotism. It was a rehearsal for the propaganda campaigns of the First World War — except that by the eve of that war the Russian Empire had become the great ally, and Germany the evil empire under attack.

During the war, the public in Britain, France and Russia followed the fighting day by day; newspaper reports and the photographs and pictures in the journals brought them the latest news quickly. Compared with any earlier conflict, people knew far more about what the war was really like. Public reaction to war news became one of the main things the military authorities weighed in making decisions, because military decisions were now open to public criticism as they never had been in earlier wars. As Figes says, the Crimean War was the first war in history in which opinion played a decisive part: the British command's poor showing at the siege of Sevastopol brought down the Aberdeen government in disgrace, and Palmerston got the chance he wanted to form one of his own.

Among these "onlookers," the British took a particularly keen interest in war news. After the newspaper stamp duty was abolished in 1855, cheap papers poured out, priced within reach even of manual laborers. Besides printing large numbers of letters from officers and men, the Crimean War produced a new trade — the war correspondent — men who carried events from the battlefield to the middle-class breakfast table. In earlier wars, papers had relied on amateur "correspondents": diplomats, or officers the army appointed. Their reports were usually written up from military dispatches, had to pass military censorship, and seldom added anything the "correspondents" had seen for themselves.

This began to change between the 1840s and the early 1850s. Some papers started hiring correspondents abroad in important places, and steamships and the telegraph gave newsrooms the means to send reporters into war zones, with their reports in print a few days later. As telegraph lines went up between Crimea and the cities of Europe, war news traveled faster still. At the start of the war, the fastest news took five days to reach London; by the end of April 1855, once the British army had laid the undersea cable, news from the Crimean front reached London in a few hours.

For a public that chased war news every day, what mattered was not only the speed of the reporting but its frankness and detail. There was no censorship, so the war correspondents in Crimea sent back a mass of detailed reports, describing in vivid strokes the fighting, the appalling conditions and the suffering of the soldiers, and carrying the war into every household. Later, censorship of military news became routine, even in democracies that made a boast of press and speech freedom.

News of what the soldiers endured, and of the wretched state of the sick and wounded, created an anxious mood throughout Britain. When The Times opened its fund for the sick and wounded of the Crimea, and the Royal Patriotic Fund appealed for help for soldiers' families, the response was immediate and huge: people from every class gave money, sent food parcels, or knitted warm clothes for the troops. More of the public still threw themselves into the great argument over how the war should be won. The Times had never received so many letters from readers, nearly all of them offering their own observations and ideas for improving the conduct of the war. The English poet Edmund Gosse recalled: "Never had the English middle class been so engaged with politics. Even remote villages suddenly found themselves aware of world affairs." In the eyes of historians, no earlier war did as much as the Crimean War to shape Britain's identity as a nation.

The Crimean War changed the British public's attitude to its privileged classes completely. Before the war, the aristocracy decided military honor; qualities like courage and fearlessness belonged to commanders of noble birth, and military paintings showed the heroic deeds of dashing aristocratic officers while the ordinary soldier went unnoticed. But aristocratic officers made so many mistakes in the Crimean War, and the mass media displayed them so fully, that a whole class lost its good name. If the typical British military hero had once been a gentleman resplendent in medals and plumes, after the Crimean War he was a common soldier. In the public mind, these ordinary men fought bravely and won Britain its victory even as the generals committed one folly after another. As the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne put it in his English Notebooks, in the business of pulling the aristocracy off its pedestal, 1854 achieved "more than fifty years of ordinary times."

Beyond that, the army's failures of command and supply gave the British middle class a new confidence. Unlike the aristocracy with its privileges of birth, the middle class prized professional skill, hard work, advancement by merit and self-reliance. The Crimean War gave it example after example of professional talent rescuing a badly run campaign: Florence Nightingale's field nursing; Alexis Soyer's cooking, which finally got a few hot meals into cold and hungry soldiers; Samuel Peto's Balaclava railway, which greatly improved the movement of supplies. There were also the ordinary building workers sent out to Crimea, who put up timber huts on the heights outside Sevastopol and gave the army somewhere to shelter through its second winter.

By the later stages of the war the British army had at last begun to run its operations on professional principles, which made the middle class the real political victor. In the decades after the war ended, whichever party was in power — Whig, Conservative or Liberal — passed reforms that carried middle-class ideas forward: extending the vote to the professional and artisan classes, widening the freedom of the press, making government more transparent and more open to scrutiny, promoting advancement by merit, enlarging religious tolerance, spreading public education.

Concern for the laboring classes and for the "deserving poor" also gained ground strongly, and one root of that attitude was the care shown for the suffering soldiers of the Crimean War. It also foreshadowed the rapid, large-scale building of Britain's welfare state after the First World War: every sacrifice made by the masses, after all, demands something in return.

As the confidence and the sense of ownership of the British middle class grew, so did its sense of a stake in the expansion of the British Empire — so much so that some historians have argued the empire was largely "the achievement of the middle class."

Recommended reading: The Crimean War: A History

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