Empire: World History - 83. The Charge of the Light Brigade

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

The Crimean War continues to drag on. The allies' siege of Sevastopol is grinding to a stalemate. The Russians seek to counterattack to tip the balance back in their favour. As they make gains at Balaclava, the British cavalry undertake one of the most tragically heroic actions in British history: the Charge of the Light Brigade. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Orlando Figes to discuss the end of the Crimean War, the impact it had upon Russia, and the shadow it still casts today. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Half a league, half a league, half a league, half a league goneward. All in the Valley of Death, rode the 600. Forward the Light Brigade, charge for the guns, he said, into the Valley of Death, rode the 600. When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made. All the world wandered. Honor the charge they made. Honor the Light Brigade, Noble 600. Hello, welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arlen. And me, William Darryple. My Thespian friend, William Dalryble, frustrated actors both. Do you know what, William, and this is really an interesting poem. It's the charge of the Light Brigade. But it is one of the only poems that my mother, who was born and brought up in India, educated in India, knows off by heart.

And I have to say it's one of the few that I learned to prep school. This one in daffodils was a thing. So yes, she can recite it better than both of us, let me tell you. So look, the reason that we are starting with a poem is because the charge of the Light Brigade is where we are now.

We left you at the last episode. Our wonderful guest, Orlando Vigis, joins us again, eminent Russian historian and a man who's written a quite brilliant book on the Crimean, more prescient beyond belief at the time you wrote it. Can I actually just break in there and have a bit of a fanboy moment? Again, I'm afraid.

Sake! Orlando is one of my all-time. You love him. You really love him. You really, really, really love him. Come on, then. Well, I've got in my hands, the three that I love, Natasha's Dance, which is a book I would love to write an Indian equivalent of. It's the most brilliant analysis of Russian culture.

And it brings in all the things you clearly love, Russian novels, ballet, music and you've obviously had the most wonderful time writing it, Orlando. And it's just a wonderful thing. Then the book, which is the basis for this episode and the episode before it, now called Crimea, but originally called the Crimean War, niftyly retitled by all publishers to make it the link with the current mess in the Crimea all the more clear. And then the new book, which is everything that I think anyone who loves this series will enjoy. It's called The Story of Russia, and it is a fantastic summary of Russian history with a view to understanding what's going on now in the Ukraine.

That's my sort of fanboy moment. You may bathe in that for a moment. Can I just also point out, I'm still smarting from the B plus you gave me in the last episode. And if on the basis of that sycophancy gets a great than me, Orlando FIGs, there will be trouble and I'll be reporting you to the dean, the pair of you. Okay, so the last episode, the Siege of Asset, Sebastopol. Well, I mean, they held out. They did what, you know, the allied forces didn't think

they could. Yes, we were imagining this sort of mess of sort of vodka swilling Russian serfs with their own tailors having to make their own boots. And it doesn't sound a very promising premise. But as you say, Tolstoy describes the way that these troops pulled together, they build defenses, and they defend Sebastian. Yeah. And part of the reason why they held out so well in Sevastopol is that the defenders were mainly sailors. So they, they had. had been in units together at the naval fleet over years, and they had a certain, you know, espree as a result. And they weren't the sort of primitive infantry serf soldiers that one might imagine. I mean, they were there, for sure, on the battlefields. But the defense of Sevastopol

as a naval base was in the hands of saints. And when the guns stop bombarding them, the Russians actually start to make gains. I mean, tell us about this diversionary tactic that Menshikov convinces the Tsar to make, just to get him out of a jam and also just to divert some of these pounding guns away from him. It did. The Russians were trying to break the siege by attacking the Allied supply lines. Most importantly, at Balaclava, which was a small port where the British brought in their supplies. and they then had to haul the supplies up to the heights where they were fighting against Sevastopol. Rocky roads, most of it carried by their Turkish allies, who were treated not really as proper soldiers, but as sort of just sort of draft labour.

You have in your book a wonderful cartoon from Punch or one of the papers of the time, which reads to us as incredibly racist, where the Turks, who are meant to be the full allies, the great mighty Ottoman Empire, that's defied Europe for many centuries, is just depicted as a bunch of porters carrying the British kit. Indeed. And that image was reinforced by what was to happen on the Balaclava Heights in the so-called Charger of the Light Brigade as you started the programme. Because what essentially happened was that on 25th of October 1854,

the Russians tried to break through the siege by cutting off the British supply lines from Balaclava. A very intelligent move. It was the right move to make because the supply line was not secure. They hadn't built their railway at that point. They were dependent on basically Turkish porters bringing up artillery, munitions, all the rest of it, on rocky paths to the siege positions. And so they launched cavalry attacks on the redoubts that the British had built on the heights above Balaclava to protect the port. And they seized all six of these redouts. And the first, which had been defended by the Turks, was taken quite easily, which reinforced

this sense that the Turks were not really properly soldiers at all. In fact, the Turks, who were in fact Tunisians on that first redoubt had been starved of any ammunition or food for several days beforehand, so one can hardly blame them for running away when they were attacked by the Russians. and that exposed the 93rd Highland Regiment, which was the last remaining British force defending the port against the Russians. So if they lose this, you'll have these other fighters on the Heights completely cut off. They'll lose their ammunition. They'll lose their supplies.

And it's a catastrophe. Indeed. So at that point, Lord Raglan, who could see more or less what was happening from the Sapoon Heights, to the west of Balaclava, sent in the first division, an infantry division to help out the 93rd, who were described as the thin red line. Is that where that phrase comes from? It's where it comes from. In fact, it was a misquotation.

William Russell of the Times had described it as a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel. The minier rifles, they have. He was a good writer. Well, you've heard of myself, that's me. That became misquoted as the thin red line. So that was all that was now defending the British supply lines against the Russian cavalry attacking them. Now, at this point, Lord Raglan was very concerned about the defence

and particularly concerned when he saw the Russians taking away from the redoubt some of the British guns. He could have let the British guns go, probably, but the idea of British guns being paraded in Sevastopol was too much of a humiliation for one of Wellington's men to bear. And he sent an order, which was extremely ambiguous, to Lord Lucan. I've got it here. Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop of horse artillery may accompany. French cavalry is to your left immediately. And what was unclear about that was, well, whose guns? Was he concerned about the Russian guns or about the British guns? So it wasn't

clear in what direction the light cavalry divisions should attack. The only person who could tell Lord Lucan, the head of the cavalry division, what the order meant, was Captain Nolan, who was the man who had arrived on horse from Lord Raglan, with that order. And he explained to Lord Lucan, as far as we know. Captain Nolan is to be killed in the charge of the Light Brigade, but as far as we know from Lord Lucan's explanation of the catastrophe, what Nolan had said to him in reply was, and he replied in a rather gruff manner, to say, there is your enemy pointing towards the Russian guns.

I've got the quote here, there my lord is your enemy, there are your guns, and he points at the Russian cannons. Now, this order makes no sense at all. I mean, to save the British guns would have been relative. easy. The cavalry charges, the Russians, they get frightened off, they save the British guns. But the Russian guns were at the end of a long valley on the north side, where they were protected on three sides by artillery and infantry armed muskets.

Okay, and the person, I mean, they're basically, if that order is to be followed, they're sending British men into a mincer, because it feels like a suicide mission? Yes, that's how it was portrayed as famously in that poem by Tennyson. But probably the defenders of Raglam would say that even if he had meant that, and he didn't, it wasn't such a stupid tactic, because the idea of a cavalry charge is to disperse the enemy. And by sheer force of 600 men on horseback charging at you, there is a high likelihood that the artillery defenders will flee. Well, scatter. Well, scatter. And that is, in fact, what happened.

Tell us about, I mean, the man in charge of the Light Brigade, we've not mentioned him really yet, or drawn a picture of him. I'm fascinated by Lord Cardigan, who is the man who is leading the 600. It's actually more than 600, 661 in fact. But tell us about Lord Cardigan, what kind of man is he and what kind of men follow him? Ironically, and it's one of the telling details about the British military command, Lord Cardigan was actually the brother-in-law of Lord Lucan, his immediate boss. the head of the cavalry division. They hated each other. And that was often given as the reason for this misunderstanding or defiance by the light division of orders countermanded and confused. But Cardigan was up against it because he had, under his immediate command as head of the light division,

he had cavalry men who were itching for a fight. He had kept them out of any skirmishes on previous occasions, just before Alma, for example, because he wanted to save the cavalry for the crucial moments. And the cavalry, we should understand, is the more aristocratic, the more prestigious end of the British army. Absolutely. And they're the guys who want to show off.

The shiniest buttons. Yeah. I mean, to a certain extent, all the British army were like that. I mean, unlike the French who allowed their soldiers to dress for comfort and in the winter to dress for warmth, the British insisted that all their soldiers dressed like gentlemen as if they're about to go off to the club. And this was a particular problem with the men who, like Captain Nolan, they were ready for a fight. They weren't going to be held back for a third time from engaging in the battle and saving what they thought was their comrades under fire from the Russians. So Orlando, give us a kind of slow motion description of that charge.

So there are, as you say, 661 men of the Light Brigade. And they've taken on this order, whether it's the right order, confused, countermandated. They don't care anymore. They're going to make a charge on this North Valley position held by the Russians to seize their guns, running through bullet fire from three sides as they do so. So they know that it's almost a charge into almost certain death. It's two kilometers from their position to the Russian guns. And they start at a canter and then break into a gallop. And then as they come within range of the Russian guns, they meet crossfire and indeed artillery

fire from the end of the North Valley. Captain Nolan is killed. About 100 men overall are to be killed in this charge, three times as many horses to be killed. 362 apparently lost and killed the horses. But, you know, they do get to the end of the valley, and they manage to scatter the Russians in close combat who flee, and they do take some of the Russian guns. I mean, do we know how many? Was it worth it?

Clearly, the British press at the time did not think it was worth it, because they, I mean, I've read so many articles from the time that really depict Radcliffe. is an idiot and these men, lions following donkeys kind of aspect. And this is almost the first time you get that trope, which is such a feature of the First World War and so on, that you have aristocratic generals sending their men off to certain slaughter. This is the time that mythology begins. I mean, was it worth it? I mean, did they get, when you said they took some Russian guns, was it enough to justify that kind of sacrifice at all? No, no, I don't think so.

I think overall the mythical idea of the charge of the Light Brigade as a blunder is, correct. It's, you know, probably not as catastrophic in the sense that, you know, 113 men were killed. That's bad, but I mean, it's not exactly, you know, First World War levels of attrition. And in terms of tactics, there would be many military strategists who would say that that sort of charge can be quite effective. The problem is that it was the wrong order. The problem is that his order wasn't accurate enough and that he then tried later to justify it. the wrong words. I mean, I said, you know, the Brits made much of the heroism of their fighters compared to the stupidity of those who led them. On the Russian side, they do capture some British

guns too. And this is the thing that, you know, Raglan would not have wanted to happen at all, you know, parading British guns in front of the Russians saying, look, we have beaten them. We have destroyed, you know, the Light Brigade. Look at these guns. That does happen. And the Tsar, Nicholas I, is so happy about this victory. It's a very. It's that he falls to his knees with emotion in front of religious icons, there is powerful propaganda from this one episode on both sides. Well, indeed. I mean, look at the war now. I mean, a small victory taking back one village from Russian occupation is paraded as a great victory. This is what happens in wars. And I think the charge of the Light Brigade is one of these cases where it feeds

into just not only the Russian propaganda machine, but it feeds into the British sort of myth of war of sort of, you know, glorious defeat. Yes, this is just 10 years after the Gundamuck and that famous painting of the last of the 51st. It's the same time as Dr. Bryden and his donkey. And now we've got the famous picture of the Charles of Libergade, one of the most famous 19th century paintings of all. Indeed. And I suppose out of any war, governments, propagandists, ideologists will always try and salvage something noble out of defeat. Orlando, I've got to ask one question here. What is it with the Crimean, war and knitwear. How do we get both the cardigan and the balaclava out of this?

Yeah. Do you know, that did not actually strike me. This is normally awesome a question. This is normally my terrain. It's very, very good. Can you answer that, balaclavas? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, you know, the British, as we have already discussed, thought that this was going to be a very quick lightning victory and they all be back by Christmas. And they thought the Crimea was some sort of tropical paradise and the soldiers were not going to suffer. once the frost took effect, which, of course, they did. And by January, 1855, with fighting

more or less at a halt and soldiers living in awful conditions in the trenches or in tents above Balaclava waiting for their turn to go up to the trenches to do their part in the fighting, they were freezing to death. They were many of them in terrible conditions, just living on dry biscuit. The British hadn't even set up proper canteens to feed them in the way that the French had. What did the French have to eat? They had some of delicious sort of Mediterranean cuisine for their Mediterranean troops. Well, as Napoleon said, it's a soup that feil a soldier. It's the soup that makes the soldier. And that was very much their philosophy. And they'd organized it with armies of cantiniers.

They called them women who went out there to run soup kitchens and canteens for soldiers on the front line. In a way that the British hadn't. The British has sort of been sort of fairly lackadaisical about the whole thing. dry biscuit, they had dry supplies coming in through Balaclava. But they didn't get round to building suit kitchens until Alexis Sawyer, the great chef, came up with the idea of field kitchens in 1855. Now, the problem of the cold was extremely acute. It might be okay for the senior officers, but ordinary soldiers whose war experience was now coming home to the British. They didn't have cardigans of Belaclavas. Not at the first stage of the war, no. They said, certainly didn't. And their plight was brought home to the British public in a way that had never

really happened before in war. I mean, because of William Russell at the Times bringing home reports about conditions in the army, because of the explosion of letter writing, I mean, most of the British soldiers in the 1850s were able to write home. They were literate. And they kept diaries and they sent long letters in which they described their conditions. The officers didn't hold back from saying how bad the conditions of the soldiers were. And this really made a huge impact on the British middle classes in particular, reading their morning newspapers. And we should say very important for future episodes and what happens next

is that at this point we get the Indian Azimullah Khan turning up. Now, Azimullah Khan has been in London. He is an Indian nobleman. He's been having an affair with something called Lucy Duff Gordon. And on his way back to India, he'd go. and sees what's happening in the crime in. He sees this stalemate. He seals the British failing to feed their troops, failing to capture batteries, failing to capture Sebastian Paul. And he goes back to India at this point, having seen this, and tells the Indians and his allies

that the British Empire is falling. We can beat these guys. They're hopeless. Also, you know, Tolstoy. You know, Tolstoy is also saying this because if the British are doing badly, the Russians are doing worse. So, you know, they are suffering terribly. And, and those scenes, scenes that Tolstoy then writes about, you know, this great grand ballroom that is treating people with amputated arms and the freezing cold and people losing eyes and dying in their own pools of blood, is directly lifted from the experience of a lot of the Russian soldiers who are there left in the winter. Yes, indeed, and that was to have a major impact on Russian politics and to bring about a series reforms as a result of the Crimea War, which had exposed all of

these failings of the military establishment. In Britain, the failure of the British to supply their troops properly and the growing awareness of the public about the actual daily experience of the soldiers acted as a great catalyst for effectively middle-class voluntary initiatives to send out supplies, to provide warm knitwear, as you said, for the soldiers to survive the winter. So the balaclava came into existence as a result of that. Also, you know, if you have this propaganda being whipped up, you need heroes or rather heroines. And it's about this time. that people like Florence Nightingale, who are treating and bandaging and taking care of and giving nips of brandy,

and Mary Seacall, who, you know, not at the time, but more recently, is celebrated, these become figureheads for the British effort, the Lady of the Lamb, the one who, and we're going to have an episode, especially on Seacol and Florence Nightingale, so don't worry, that is coming. But it does, it transforms the way in which battle medicine is done in many ways, because they have to confront the weather and disease and injury can kill more men than war and battle can. Oh, yes, for sure. I mean, if I can put a sparrow in the works, I think that Florence Nightingale's significance is hugely exaggerated. I mean, she had learned some basic lessons about hospital hygiene and, you know, hospital corners and the role of the nurse giving Christian support to the suffering soldiers.

and she wanted a well-run ship in her wards. But she was catastrophically bad in deciding where the evacuated soldiers should be cared for. And the British military establishment was largely to blame for that, because whereas the French and the Russians were treating their soldiers in field hospitals, the British were putting them onto boats and evacuating them to Scutari, just outside Constantinople, where the hospital Florence Nightingale came to work in, it turned out, built on top of a cesspool.

Oh. There was all sorts of leakage into the water supply. So under her own care, many soldiers died unnecessarily. But yeah, as you say, her reputation... Her propaganda value. The propaganda value was high, and it was this idea... What was happening at this time, partly as a result of the governmental incompetence in the military campaign, was a new sort of professional identity was emerging in the middle

classes. And so just as people were organising to provide military help, you know, sending out warm knitwear and all the rest of it. So the professions, particularly the medical profession, was seeing in Florence Nightingale a heroic figure that could take power away from, you know, the old guard of aristocracy riding the country. Is this partly, again, the writing of William Howard Russell, does he write this up? And is it his dispatches that begin this process? To some extent, yeah, I think it's partly of Nightingale's own propagandists and the will of the British public to focus on anybody they could find as a heroic figure to come out of this war. And it's a professional identity which is being sort of superimposed onto the heroism of Nightingale. So Orlando, I mean, it's sort of shooting at heroes. And a lot of people are going to be very, very interested in our front was Nightingale, Mary Sequel episode. After that, you've really teed us up.

join us after the break when we hear about an allied breakthrough in the Crimean War. Welcome back. So just before the break, you heard our esteemed guest, Orlando Fiji's pinpricking the reputation of Florence Nightingale, sitting us up beautifully for a very special episode that we've got on the horizon about Florence Nightingale and Mary Seekle. And you wanted to actually bring to the forefront a Russian character much in that sort of mould. Tell us about your man. Absolutely, because just as I think that Florence Nightingale's reputation has been vastly overestimated, I believe that a figure called Nikolai Pirogov has been completely neglected by military historians and particularly historians of field medicine. Because Pirogov was a physician who came to the Crimean War, landed at Sevastopol, took charge of the Russian medical relief program, and very quickly worked out. The problem was that after a battle like Alma,

Incomen, the hospitals were inundated with wounded soldiers, and it was really Pirogov who introduced the modern system of triage. He worked out that the people who needed immediate relief, who were seriously wounded, in danger of dying, but could be saved, should be treated first. The people with minor wounds who could be saved should be treated second, given a ticket. And the people who couldn't be saved should just be comforted until they died. Harsh, but it's actually an effective method of military medicine. In an earlier life at the BBC, I was sent to quite dangerous places sometimes to cover stories. And they do something called the Hostile Environments course.

And that is exactly the lesson even now that they teach you on these courses, that what you need to do is not go to the person who's screaming the loudest because they're probably okay. If they can scream and shout, they're probably okay. So you triage immediately. You put them on one side. The hopeless cases, you have to put them to the right of vision, so you can't really see them because you can't do anything for them.

and it's the ones who are quiet that you need to intervene most quickly. I just thought I'd put that in. Absolutely. I also know how to go through a minefield with a Bick Byron, just in case anyone ever wants any kind of a dice on that. I know how to do those things. I never knew, Anita Allen, that you had these resources to draw on. I have many, many gifts and colors.

A good woman to be stuck in a minefield with. Go on Orlando. Well, the other thing that Piroga did was that he was the first military service, really to introduce anaesthetics. I mean, the British took the view that they just bite on something while they have their leg cut off. A bit of leather. Indeed, they had the fear that if they took some sort of anaesthetic, they would somehow give way and die under the knife. Whereas Pirogov had no hesitation about using anesthetic and was able to carry out as a result much more effective amputations. Are we talking about chloroform? Is that what was... We're talking about chloroform, yeah, absolutely.

So I love this. Why have we not heard of Pirogov? He sounds like that. hero? Is it because he's Russian? Is that because? Do the Russians put him on the banknotes? Yeah. We had Florida Sitingale? Yes, he has been on the banknotes and he was at least fated in Russia. I'm not sure if he is anymore. But he's generally recognized. But I think, you know, war creates mythical histories and narratives, doesn't it? And the British have their narrative of glorious failure and Florence Nightingale saving the day. The Russians have their own myths. And perhaps the only hero to come out of it on the Russian side is Pirov. So, Orlando, we now actually have an allied victory just to break this run of defeats. Tell us about the Battle of Incumbent on

the 5th of November 1854. It's another attempt by the Russians to break the siege on the heights above Sevastopol. The battle is literally shrouded in fog because come the morning when the attacks takes place and the British march their soldiers up with the French to resist the Russians, the battle takes place in close combat because literally nothing can be seen for other than 10 metres. And again, the Zawarves play the crucial role. With their mini-A rifles. With their mini-A rifles and with their experience of close combat. And the Russian attempt to break the siege is repulsed.

So it's a fairly simple battle and it's probably the last attempt. There was one more attempt at the Chenea River, but it's not really significant. Incomen was the last major attempt on the Russian side to break the siege. And the massive losses, 12,000 Russian losses, as opposed to about 2,500 British and 1,000 French. And this breaks the Russian spirit or not, Orlando? Good question. It doesn't probably only in so far as those figures don't get back to the Russian public. But by this stage, certainly there is growing doubts about the continuation of the war on the Russian public. side, and that is reinforced when in 1855 Nicholas I first dies.

Nicholas the first dies. Now, to me, that sounds like an important moment. He is the architect of all of this. He's been the one who's been rattling his saber louder than anything. Indeed. What does that do to the Russian consciousness and appetite for war and to the Allies resolve to either win or make peace with a new guy? Well, very good question because there'd be a lesson here.

Is it an A-plus question? I think you've gone out to an A-plus, Anita, definitely. Good, good, good, good. A-minus, A-bid. Well, the lesson for today is that, you know, if Putin were to die today, yeah, the war would probably go on, right? Because no one in the war party in the Kremlin would put their neck above the parapet and say, it's time to make peace. And the same happens when Nicholas dies in February 1855. He had been demoralized by Incomen and then demoralized by his attempts to again attack the allies at Yves Petoria

and an expedition which ended disastrously just before his death. And some people say he committed suicide. Some people say that he asked for poison or military or medical assistance to die from his doctor, Mant. But I don't think either of those is really plausible. But I think we can say that he died recognizing his own failure. And although that's created a change of attitudes in Russian society, generally speaking, the heir to the throne, Alexander, Alexander II, as he was to be known, was as committed to the war as his father was. Alexander II, despite his liberal inclinations politically, was something of a Russian nationalist, indeed much influenced by pan-slav thinkers who had been the ideologists behind the launching of the war in the first

place. I mean, they love their monikas, as we know, in Russia. So he is Alexander the Liberator. That's what he is known. He is. But, you know, although he is to become the emancipator of the serfs, and although he is to introduce a series of political and military reforms to modernise Russia on Western lines, he was a patriot. He was not going to sue for peace at this point when Russia could only come out badly, and none of his generals were advising him to make peace at this point. So they continued until the bitter end, holding out in Sevastopol for as long as they could. But you're still getting this classic sort of winter warfare of everyone freezing on the ground, particularly the British troops. There's one description of British soldiers having to stand up in their tents because they can't lie down because it's too cold. So both sides are having a horrendous time.

Oh, indeed, yeah. And it's a war to the point of exhaustion who can last the longest as I guess many stalemate wars end up becoming. I mean, we're sort of moving into March, April now of 1855. There are, as the siege continues and as, you know, these men are depleted, tired, probably angry, hungry, maybe in pain. But there are reports of atrocities now which are coming out on all sides. We've got the Kerch campaign where we hear of attacks on Russian property by Tartas and Turkish troops, looting shops, raping women, killing, mutilating hundreds of civilians. French and British troops are accused of engaging in looting and destruction of Kirch, several women claiming they'd been raped by British officers. I mean, did you, did you, get to the bottom of whether they're true or whether they're part of that propaganda machine?

Oh, no, that is true. And these atrocities, particularly on religious grounds, have been part of the war right from the start. When the Russians marched into Turkish Europe, the Turks, when they defeated the Russians, chased them out of a town, they would massacre some of the Christian population there. And that happened in all directions, all of these atrocities. There are lots of examples of of Russians shooting wounded soldiers and British and French soldiers shooting Russian wounded soldiers. These descriptions, they say, they emerge unexpectedly like demons. This is a description of the Russians, blessed by inhuman priests, promised to plunder any amount, drunk, maddened, every evil passion aroused. They rush wildly for our soldiers, beating out their brains, jumping like fiends upon the

lacerated bodies of the wounded allies. This is not just propaganda. This is the real thing. Well, it's certainly embellished, and a lot of the language is extremely... Hightened. Yeah, I mean, you know, the Russians have been presented as savages and fiends and somehow heathen people who commit all sorts of atrocities for some time. And that all became part of the discourse of the war for sure. But the atrocities on all sides were carried out, undoubtedly. Right. Always civilians who suffer.

So the winter has passed. The men are, you know, whatever is left of them, are tired. The summer it gets warmer. Does this mean that they're reinvigorated or are they just so knackered? Everybody wants to go home. To some extent, the coming of warmer temperatures reinvigorates the campaign. The Allies are now joined by the Sardinians who proved to be extremely good fighters. Piedmont Sardinia, the kingdom of under Kovor, was to be the driving force of Italian unification. And they saw diplomatic gains for their cause in joining the Allied war effort and took part in the Battle of Income and to great effect. And the polls also came in

with volunteer forces. So there was a growing sense that this was a European alliance fighting, depleted and largely demoralised Russian army. And by July, I think the Russians have lost 65,000 men without including those lost to illness and disease. So it's a massive loss. I mean, to be honest, it was always against the odds for the Russians to be able to defend Sevastopol. especially once the French and the British have got their military supplies industrialised and shipped out and steam ships to the front. So it was always against the odds that the Russians held out. Until finally in August 1855, the Allies have got it together with enough support logistics to launch the assault on the Malachov fortress and the Redan, the two most heavily fortified defensive positions.

defending Sevastopol, which it turns out they take without too much trouble, while the Russians seeing that the game is up are evacuating the city by throwing across a pontoon bridge over the harbour to evacuate the population from the north side of Sevastopol. The news are, Alexander, the second straight liberator, however you want to refer to him, has seen the writing on the wall even weeks before, because he's sort of trying desperately like a child with toy soldiers, trying to rearrange his troops, sort of shouting at Gorkachechoff, you know, do this, no, do something else. And there's a lovely quote from him, you know, where he's sort of ordering Gorkchchoff

into trying a new offensive, saying, otherwise, all the reinforcements I have sent you will be sucked into Sevastopol, that bottomless pit. So, you know, they know they're losing. And just to give an idea of the Allied bombardment, they are, again, we think this is a modern thing, but they're sending in 50,000 shells a day into Sebastopol. That's extraordinary, because that does sound like a, a modern warfare? Well, it is. It's the progenitor of World War I. And it's possible because British and French factories are producing munitions at industrial pace and getting them to the front quickly through steamships. And that ultimately is what enabled the Allies to win the war and force the Russians to the negotiating table. And we're talking about the 8th of September

midday when finally... That's the capitulation. All over. You're done. And there's horrible stuff just before that, when the Allies repeatedly stop firing so that the Russian defenders emerge from their foxes, then they fire again. 8,000 Russians lost in three days alone. Yeah. Yeah. So after the capitulation, what do the Russians call it? Do they call it the capitulation or the armistice? Or, you know, I think language is fascinating here. Is it peace or is humiliation? Well, in the long term, it is humiliation. Because at the Treaty of Paris in 1856, where the peace terms had really been agreed long before, and ironically, they weren't very different from the four points put forward by Austria as a way of averting the war in the first place.

Interesting. But the only really important additional factor to those four points, which effectively meant the internationalisation of the waters and the reaffirmation of international protections of the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire. The new factor in that was that the Russians had to demilitarise the Black Sea fleet, which meant that the Allies remained there while they destroyed the dry docks of Sevastopol. And that was seen by the Russians as a humiliation. It had never happened before.

I mean, even when Napoleon had been defeated, they hadn't forced the French to demilitarise. I'm really fascinated with the treaty. I mean, signing it from the Russian side is Count Orloff. And I see any relation at all to Catherine's Alloff, because we got quite... obsessed about him in a previous podcast. It'll be the same dynasty, yeah. I mean, I'm not quite sure of the exact relationship between the two, but Count Oloff will have been from the same family originally, yeah, absolutely.

Represented today by my cousins, the Oloff-Dabatov, Saddita. I hate to bring another connection. Not again. What a name drop, but get the basket out. Oh, God, Orlando, if only you knew. I mean, you don't need a basket, you need numerous receptacles with a kind of dropage. Okay, so the treaty is signed. And William, you had quite an interesting question about, you know, sort of this is unprecedented to demilitarize and destroy. How long does that demilitarization maintain itself? Well, effectively right up until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when France's need for a new ally against Germany took it to a reprosm with Russia. But before that, there had been several attempts. by the Russians to circumvent the treaty and to defy it, really.

For example, they took Serpent Island. Oh, the one that's in the news right now. The famous, exactly. Exactly. It's a little island off the mouth of the Danube, and the Russians took it as a way of basically sticking two fingers up at the Allies. Just remind people right now. I mean, we call it Snake Island in the news.

Yeah, they call it Serpent Island at that time. But is where the Ukrainians were kind of outgunned by the Russians. The Russians, the Russians start them to give up. This is in the present-day conflict that we're saying. I think this may be your first bleep for the series, Alita. Well, I'll just say bleep. And the Ukrainians, you know, are told, you know, give up, give up now. You're surrounded.

And they say, go bleep yourself. See what I did? Saving my producer, valuable time. Go bleep yourself, they say. So that is the same island. It's amazing. Honestly, plus Sanchange. This is so fascinating.

Can we talk about just the aftermath? And we look back at Crimea. the loss of human life is astonishing, actually. We've got the number of Russians killed in battle 450,000, French, 100,000, 70,000 of those to sickness. It wasn't even, you know, fighting. The British around 20,000, around 80% of those lost to sickness and disease. I mean, that's crazy. These are figures to compare with, you know, the level of loss with the First World War, for sure.

So the fact that Putin these days in modern politics talks about Crimea makes it, you know, sort of such an important part of this Russia that he says has always existed that nobody has any rights to. Is that, do you think, to answer the humiliations of the first Crimean War? Not directly, but I think that the humiliation which Russia felt it had been given by the West as a result of its defeat the Crimean War built up a huge sense of resentment among Russian nationalists. It had been there before. I mean, Nicholas had gone to war, largely influenced by Panzlaas thinkers who had told them that the West had double standards. It was all right for the English to conquer India. It was all right for the French to conquer Algeria. But as soon as the

Russians tried to defend their co-religionists in the Balkans, they were slapped down and told that this was a threat to the international system. And that sense of a double standard that the humiliation imposed on Russia was to treat it like an Asiatic power, was created a deep sense of resentment in Russia, which you can see in the radicalization of the Pan-Slav movement in the later 19th century. So writers like Dostoevsky, thinkers like Danilevsky, begin to argue, not just as earlier Slavophiles and Pan-Slavs are done, that Russia need not follow the example of the West, it can pursue its own path, began to argue Russia should not follow the part of the West because the West was hostile to Russia. The West wanted to destroy Russia. That was the

argument you begin to hear from the 1870s and 80s. And the immediate result of that in terms of Russian foreign policy was to turn to the East. If they couldn't secure their position in the Black Sea, if they were threatened by the West, they had to build their empire in Central Asia and threatened Britain by the route to India. And that is exactly what happened in the 1860s and 70s. Well, we're going there. Just finally, I mean, just again, project. to now. Do you ever see a time where Putin or Russia or whoever comes next will say, all right, you know, in some kind of settlement in peace, you can have Crimea back? No. Or is it just a non-negotiable thing now?

I think that's non-negotiable, partly because of all the history that we have been talking about. I mean, I think the real parallel that comes out from this Crimean War in terms of today's politics is that although Russia had been defeated, out of that defeat it built a nationalist myth of moral victory, because even though they'd been defeated by superior powers technologically, they had nobly fought for their beliefs. And they stood alone against everyone else ganging up. They had stood alone against the whole of the West to defend the rights of the Orthodox, the true religion in their view.

And that was taken up by Russian nationalists in the late 19th century. And it was taken up in the 2000s, when the Russian nationalist movement supported by Putin, began to commemorate the Crimean War we've been talking about by building new churches and monuments in the Crimea. So, you know, that parallel is incredibly important to understand. Orlando, you said earlier that at the time of the Crimean War, maybe 80% of the people of Crimea have tartar blood, when does that begin to change? In the decades after this? Indeed. After the defeat of the Russian army, the Orthodox Church under Bishop Iniquenti, who was a very extreme Russian nationalist, begin to Christianise the Crimean Peninsula and indeed

Christianize the Caucasus. So they force out of Crimea, the Tatar population by taxation, by persecution of one form another. And most of the Tartas are evacuated to the Ottoman Empire. To where in the Ottoman Empire? Oh, they go all over the place. I mean, to anywhere that will take them. And in the Caucasus too, the Sikassians are the first Muslim population to suffer. And then later the Abkhazians are to suffer. So there's a Christianisation of this Muslim Christian territory fault line that we've been talking about in favour of the Christians.

And that you get in Tolstoy's life a little bit, don't you? Because he then goes off to the Caucasus and you get Haji Murad and all that sort of stuff. Indeed. Yeah. Indeed. Just again, I mean, we're only, we've got seconds left of this. How is it all going to end, Orlando? How is it going to end? I mean, if Russia won't give up Crimea and the Ukrainians are insisting they want it back, it is theirs, what is going to happen? Well, I fear it will go on for years. It's a stalemate. It'll go on for as long as the NATO and Western allies are prepared to support the Ukrainians, which may not be too long if President Trump comes back. Putin very recently praising Trump again and saying how he's being persecuted by the rotten American system.

So very much working on divisions within America at the moment. But I think that the Crimea might end up being the crunch point. It might be the thing the Ukrainians have to sacrifice for a peace. My own view is pessimistic. I don't think the Ukrainians are going to be able to liberate the occupied territories. But Crimea is not negotiable for the Russians. I would go so far as to say that if Putin were to die or if you could wave a magic wand and have genuine democratic elections,

nobody would be elected into power in Russia who would be prepared to give back Crimea. Not after all this blood and coin. It means that much. It means that much to Russia. In your recent book, The Story of Russia, you have this wonderful phrase. You say it is a war born from myths. Well, it is indeed. and the myth associated with this war are stronger than any in Russia's history. Thank you so much for so deftly weaving together the past and the present

and even indulging us and looking into the future. It's been an absolute delight. Thank you. Orlando Faj is really good to talk to you. You've been great, thank you, and you both get an A star. But mine is slightly shinier than his. Just say it. Just say it.

Fellow Trinity historian, Al-Land solidarity here. Come on. All right. Well, listen, it's goodbye from us. That's boffins at Empire. Goodbye from me, Anita Arnhannan. And goodbye from me, William Drupu.