The Crimean War

the Secretary at War who had sent her to the Crimea.⁸ It was belated public recognition for a man who had been hounded out of office during the Crimea War partly on account of his family connections to Russia.

On a sunny Friday morning, 26 June 1857, the Queen and Prince Albert attended a parade of Crimean veterans in Hyde Park. By a royal warrant the previous January, the Queen had instituted a new medal, the Victoria Cross, to reward bravery by servicemen regardless of their class or rank. Other European countries had long had such awards – the French, the Legion d’honneur, since 1802; the Dutch, the Military Order of William, and even the Russians had a merit medal before 1812. In Britain, however, there was no system of military honours to recognize the bravery of the troops on the basis of merit, only one to reward officers. The war reports by Russell of The Times and other journalists had brought to the attention of the British public many acts of bravery by ordinary troops; they had portrayed the suffering of the soldiers in heroic terms, giving rise to a widespread feeling that a new award was needed to recognize their deeds. Sixty-two Crimean veterans were chosen to receive the first Victoria Crosses – a small bronze medal supposed to be cast from the captured Russian cannon of Sevastopol.^bk At the ceremony in Hyde Park, each one took his turn to bow before the Queen as Lord Panmure, Secretary of State for War, read out his name and gave the citation for gallantry. Among these first recipients of Britain’s highest military honour were sixteen privates from the army, four gunners and one sapper, two seamen and three boatswains.⁹

The institution of the Victoria Cross not only confirmed the change in the idea of heroism; it also marked a new reverence for war and warriors. The troops who had received the Victoria Cross found their deeds commemorated in a multitude of post-war books that exalted the bravery of men at arms. The most popular, Our Soldiers and the Victoria Cross, was brought out by Samuel Beeton, best known as the publisher of his wife’s book, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, in 1861. Written to inspire and teach boys, the preface of Our Soldiers claimed:

Boys – worthy to be called boys – are naturally brave. What visions are those which rise up before the young – what brave words to speak, what brave actions to do – how bravely – if need be – to suffer! … This is the leading thought in this book about Soldiers – it is meant to keep alive the bravery of youth in the experience of manhood.¹⁰

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

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