The Crimean war in British literature: from nineteenth century poetry to twentieth century fiction

In his well-known book The Contemporary British Novel (2007) Philip Tew singles out several ‘dominant cultural themes’ that characterize ‘a ‘new wave’ of British writing emerging from the 1970s (Tew 2007:1). Relations between past and present are among these themes, what’s more, these relations are viewed as being complicated - they include myths, hybridity, “the nostalgia pervasive ... for the Victorian past” (Tew 2007:129) and metafiction. Having these components in mind, I would try to outline briefly the Crimean war image and its components in contemporary British novel.

The long period of peace that started in Britain after the Napoleonic wars, came to its end in the 1850-s, with two almost successive war campaigns (the Crimean War, 1853 - 1856, and the war in India against the rebellious sepoys, 1857 - 1859). According to S. Markovits, much had changed in Britain during the decades since Waterloo: the French were now friends instead of enemies, while, in a configuration of alliances that seems eerily to predict those of the twentieth century, Russia was the new foe. The glorious leaders of the earlier age were either dead or had become grizzled old men; developments in technology had the potential to alter radically the way in which war was fought; other changes, such as the arrival of the telegraph, would transform both how and how rapidly events in the East were viewed from the home front.’(Markovits)

There is little doubt that the two campaigns became important landmarks for the British history and selfidentification. What’s more, though both of them were victorious for Britain, their image in literature and in public memory seems to be different, even opposite. Initial enthusiasm for the Crimean war was rapidly followed by public disappointment and highly critical attitude, since the war progressed under the eyes of a nation that had been granted unprecedented access to events on the battlefield and in the camps through the emergent media culture of frontline war correspondents, artists, and photographers. (Ibid).

As a result, the fall of Lord Aberdeen ministry was caused by the general public outrage. On the contrary, the Indian war was glorified as a just and noble campaign, where the British military and civilian men and women demonstrated their best qualities against the cunning, cruel and treacherous mutineers.

In many respects, the Crimean War was the first British contemporary war - the first media war ‘typified by Times correspondent William Howard Russell, who sent first-hand dispatches from the front line. His reports, often exaggerated or partial, caught the attention of the public.’ (Ibid). Robert Fenton, a photographer, who went to the Crimea, became the first war photographer in history: his photographs ‘brought the Crimean battlefields to life, while the electric telegraph enabled news to travel across the continent in hours, not weeks. War became much more immediate’ (Ibid) and close, irrespective of geography. The situation with war reports changed drastically compared to all the previous campaigns - Vanity Fair by W. M. Thackeray can supply a good example. One of the central episodes of the novel depicts its characters’ breathless expectations of the Waterloo battle outcome that was crucial for them. On the contrary, Russell’s and Fenton’s war reports provided a good opportunity not only to follow the war operations almost online, but also revealed the war routine in its dreary nakedness for the public. Thus, it transpired that the war was full of suffering and hard work more than of gallantry; that the wounded died of terrible conditions more often than of their wounds. The whole war image became different. As a contemporary critic writes, not surprisingly, that of the named heroes to arise out of the Crimean campaign, the most famous are William Howard Russell of The Times, ... and Florence Nightingale, a pioneer of “professions for women.” One was a man who wielded a pen, the other a lady who carried a lamp: not a sword nor even a musket in sight. (Ibid)

Did the Crimean war find its way to literature? The answer is yes and no. Having become the first media war, the Crimean war also immediately came into poetry. According to P. Waddington, (Waddington 1995) 214 poems were written and published in the XIX century only; 214 poems more were published in Punch, there were 57 anonymous ballads as well. Most of the poems are interesting not as works of literature (their literary merits are dubious), but primarily as manifestation of the prevailing mood of the epoch. The following extract proves the point:

Says John Bull, Nick, do all you can,

The British boys will lead the van,

Л5 they have done in Inkerman,

On the fifth of last November.

You are a nasty Russian hog,

You stuff your men with rum and grog,

And send them on to us in a fog,

But they were soon defeated.

‘A Dialogue between John Bull and the Czar’ (English Ballads)

The most frequently used images of Britain and Russia are stereotypical, the authors do not go into details, and they do not go into deeper analysis or observation, either.

We have beat the foe so gloriously

By land and on the water.

We them did trick, we them did lick

And made them cry for quarter.

The Glorious Celebration of Peace’ (Ibid)

One of a very few exceptions from the general poetic trend was, undoubtedly, ‘ The Charge of the Light Brigade ’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1854). It is devoted to a Crimean war episode that became widely known and is still well remembered by the British public. The beautiful poem romanticizes and glorifies a tragic episode of the Balaklava battle. Though Tennyson described a concrete historic event, there are virtually no foes in his poem - only three lines (lines 34 - 36) out of 55 name ‘cossack and Russians’:

Cossack and Russian

Reel ’d from the sabre-stroke

Shatter ’d and sunder ’d

(Tessyson 1854)

The general mood of the poem is mourning, while its images, especially the image of the Valley of Death, are based on Psalm 23: ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for You are with me’.

Haifa league, half a league,

Haifa league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns! ” he said.

fnto the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

(Ibid)

The poet glorifies the heroes (‘Honor the charge they made! / Honor the Light Brigade,/ Noble six hundred’ ) and their readiness to go to the end, to fulfill an order irrespective of anything (‘ Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why ... ). Paradoxically, but this tragic episode has become the main Crimean war symbol in the British popular imagination. Tennyson’s poem contributed to the new image of a war hero and of heroism in general - not victorious, but stoical, glorious even under defeat, since it can be morally higher than a victory. That is why foes are not present in the poem: heroes are heroes, irrespective of circumstances, and they remain heroic even when defeated - sometimes even more so. Hence, they are immortal and are glorified: ‘When can their glory fade?’

The Crimean war hadn’t been seriously reflected in the British fiction until an outstanding novel by Beryl Bainbridge Master Georgie appeared in 1998. True, several popular novels appeared in the mid-19^th century (Ch. Kingsley’s WesrwardHo! 1855, G. Whyte-Melvile’s The Interpreter: a Tale of the War, 1858, and some others), but as S. Markovits writes, quoting Thackeray: ‘What can any novelist write so interesting as our awn correspondent?’ She summarizes in the following way: Tt is undoubtedly true that, while the Crimea prompted some of the greatest journalism of the time, it inspired much less memorable fiction.’ (Markovits 2009: 89)

To write her novel Bainbridge did a lot of research - she claimed she wanted the novel ‘to be accurate.’(Guppy 2000) What’s more, Bainbridge stated that at the very beginning of her work on the novel ‘all I knew about Crimea was Tennyson’s poem: Hnto the Valley of Death rode six Hundred ... ’ I couldn’t think of a plot.’(Guppy 2009) Just like in her other historic novels Birthday Boys, devoted to Captain R. Scott’s tragic expedition to the South Pole, and Every Man for Himself, where the Titanic catastrophe is described, she obviously tried to build up her historic narration around a generally known episode, but described it in a subjective and quite unexpected way.

Speculating on her work with historic material for the novel, Bainbridge claimed:

For Master Georgie I took out a video of Charles Wood’s film The Charge of the Light Brigade ... I saw the military paintings of Lady Butler about the Crimea, and of course Roger Fenton’s photographs, which I have blown up to see the details.” (Ibid)

The resulting novel was striking: on the one hand, it is extremely subjective, since the whole narrative is created by three distinctive voices of different characters, none of whom can be called a totally reliable narrator (Myrtle, Pompey Jones and Doctor Potter). Provocatively, the title character Master

Georgie (George Harris) is never given voice to and is viewed from different perspectives. However, on the other hand, the whole atmosphere of the novel, as well as its numerous details, are historically correct and recognizable.

The Charge of the Light Brigade episode is never directly depicted in the novel, but rather alluded to (I wrote about it in Footpath-6) (Sidorova 2013). Thus, Doctor Potter managed to buy a horse cheaply, because ‘three days ago over two hundred cavalry horses of the Light Brigade stampede into the camp, their riders having perished in a charge along the north valley’(Bainbridge 2009:177). We can also assume that the Light Brigade glorious image comes to the reader’s mind when he/she is reading Plate 3 of the novel where ‘a young man brilliantly attired in the uniform of Lord Cardigan’s 11^th Hussars’ (Bainbridge 2009: 122) takes a certain (quite unexpected, absolutely non-heroic and funny) role.

Photography as one of the main period innovations and its use makes a complex part of the text. George Hardy is an amateur photographer who uses his hobby for both facts fixation and their manipulation. In the final chapters, Pompey Jones is also a photographer’s apprentice who makes war pictures:

Two of the prints were all my own work and I considered them pretty fair examples of the photographer’s art. The first was a study of a heap of amputated limbs; arrayed against a white background, they had the gravity of a still-life. I was pleased with the tuft of grass spraying up from a clenched fist. (Bainbridge 2009: 199)

In the final episode, a war photo correspondent was taking photos after the battle:

What we want,’ - he said, ‘is a posed group of survivors to show the folks back home.’ He wantes ‘another soldier’ to make a compositional balance, so Pompey ‘propped’ George’s dead body between the soldiers.

He slumped forward and the soldier to his right supported him round the waist. ‘Smile, boys, smile,’ urged the photographer. (Bainbridge 2009: 212)

Photography also makes the principal composition device of the novel since every chapter is called a plate and is constructed around a certain photo.

In depicting the war Bainbridge obviously follows the pattern suggested by Tennyson: the focus of her analyses is not the concrete reasons, commanders or foes, but, rather, the nature of war, its antihuman character, the sufferings it brings and human reaction on it. ‘There is no more brutal species than man.’ (Bainbridge 2009: 173)

The Russians are often mentioned in the text, but from what the readers can see their war experience is just as horrible as the British one, so Pompey Jones describes the battle as ‘a horrid carnage’. What’s more, he is able to notice that Russian soldiers experience the same feelings and emotions as he does:

I engaged with a boy with a pimple at the corner of a mouth. He was clumsy with terror, flicking at me with his bayonet as though warding off bees. ...I wanted to spare him... (Bainbridge 2009: 208)

After the battle, Pompey helps to bury the dead in the same trench, which seems to be the only possible way to do so:

We found six men, comrades and foes, linked together, bayonets quivering in a daisy chain of steel. (Bainbridge 2009: 210)

Thus, the Crimean war depiction in the novel becomes a starting point for the nature of war analysis. The author also speculates on human nature and shows that although brutal, cruel, and destructive, human beings are also fragile, vulnerable and sometimes noble.

The same idea can be said to be prevailing in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), the Booker Prize-winning novel by J. G. Farrell. The novel is set in India in 1857 and is devoted to a famous episode of the Mutiny when the English cantonment was besieged in the city of Lucknow for several months. This episode aroused heightened interest of the XIX century literature, since several dozens of popular novels, plays and poems were written about it, including ‘The Defence of Lucknow’(1880) by Tennyson.

The Crimean war is recurrently mentioned in the novel: thus, one of its main female characters Miriam Lang is a widow of Captain Lang, who had been killed in Sebastopol. There are several Crimean veterans among the Krishnapur defenders. One of them, mortally wounded, sings the Crimean war songs in the hospital, where all the stereotypical images occur:

The Czar of Russia, a potentate grand,

Would help the poor Sultan to manage his land;

But Britannia stept in, in her lady-like way, To side with the weakest and fight for fair play. On Alma’s steep banks and on Inkermann ’s plain, On famed Balaklava, the foe tried in vain To wrest off the laurels that Britons long bore But always got whopped in eighteen fifty-four.

(Farrell 2002 : 163 - 164)

Not only popular ballads with their constantly repeated images and Tennyson’s poetry, but also photography - a new and fascinating invention - is played upon in J.G. Farrell’s novel to make the narration historically correct, but also to reconstruct the image of Victorian civilization in order to further deconstruct it in a metafictional way. Not incidentally, J.G.Farrell’s character who is an ardent photographer is an Indian Prince Hary, captivated by the British progress at the beginning of the novel and disillusioned with it at the end.

In conclusion, we can state that the Crimea war image in contemporary British novels by J.G. Farrell and Beryl Bainbridge is primarily based not only on the real historic events and episodes, but rather on some popular myths and literary imagination. Though highly selective and obviously incomplete (many war episodes are blurred and omitted), it has found its place in the nation’s memory and its literature in this way. What’s more, both J.G.Farrell and Beryl Bainbridge use this image to create complex metafictional novels questioning stereotypes and reflecting upon human nature in history.