Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That’s clear enough; although

He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown.1

In war, it is easier, perhaps, to fire the gun or to release the shell, to press a button (or a series of buttons), when one imagines the faces of one’s own people. This, for my mother, my father, my children, my…my….my…..The droning on and on in a whole blurry procession of beloved figures that makes it all feel less like….violence. After all, isn’t it love, not hate, that has always been one of war’s most useful servants?2 But sometimes, more often than we admit, the imagination wanders across the line when the other side is allowed to be a mother too, a child too. What of them? Does the hand, hovering over the button, pause just a little in these instances?

For Mary Seacole, we see a glimpse of what it means to think more deeply about the other side. She traveled from Jamaica to the Crimea as a nurse of Creole descent, entering a warfront where suffering was abundant and help was desperately needed. In her writing, she documented her time in Balaclava, the main British supply port in Crimea. She says she remained there for six weeks, spending days ashore and nights on board ship, while sick and wounded men were carried down by mule trains and ambulances to be lifted into boats. Here is what she had to write about the misery she witnessed there and what it revealed about human nature:

“I have often heard men talk and preach very learnedly and conclusively about the great wickedness and selfishness of the human heart; I used to wonder whether they would have modified those opinions if they had been my companions for one day of the six weeks I spent upon that wharf, and seen but one day’s experience of the Christian sympathy and brotherly love shown by the strong to the weak. The task was a trying one, and familiarity, you might think, would have worn down their keener feelings of pity and sympathy; but it was not so.”3

She wrote of her experiences, examining the ordinary human heart under extreme duress. The ordinary human heart, in her view, did not necessarily become smaller or numb to misery’s consistent presence. It might, under such pressure, reveal some stubborn and inconvenient, but real tenderness. The first tenderness of war: the tenderness for one’s own.

In war, we are very accustomed to thinking of our own. Are we fighting for just and righteous reasons? Are our soldiers fed, clothed, tended to? Have our men suffered at all, but if they have, was it nobly? How many of ours have been lost, and how shall we count or honor them? These are very natural, human questions. Under the name of both grand ideals and logistics, they are not entirely wrong. Some may even call it loyalty “to the cause”, that finicky and dishonest phrase. After the Battle of the Tchernaya, fought on Aug 16 1855, when Russian forces made a major attack against the Allied position near the Chernaya River, Mrs. Seacole continues to help as much as she can:

“I attended another Russian, a handsome fellow, and an officer, shot in the side, who bore his cruel suffering with a firmness that was very noble. In return for the little use I was to him, he took a ring off his finger and gave it to me, and after I had helped to lift him into the ambulance he kissed my hand and smiled far more thanks than I had earned. I do not know whether he survived his wounds, but I fear not. Many others, on that day, gave me thanks in words the meaning of which was lost upon me, and all of them in that one common language of the whole world – smiles.”4

It is an altogether different task to find this tenderness for the “other side.” To think of the enemy as human requires a more exposed kind of vulnerability, because it seems, at first, to threaten the home front of feeling. If they also suffer from real and private agony, then what becomes of our own mourning? Does it become smaller? Does sympathy for them weaken the care we owe to our own?

The fear that humanity is a limited ration, and to spend any of it on the enemy is to rob the wounded at home, is a false one. But Seacole’s writing does not offer any easy fantasy in which everyone is equally innocent or absolved in any meaningful way. The Russian officer remains the enemy and, as always, war remains brutal (and we always rush to war knowing this fact). The British, French and Turkish wounded still remain in her charge.

In another scene, Sergeant Timothy Gowing, a British soldier of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, brings forward the less palatable aspect of the matter, where tenderness toward the “other side” gets contaminated and ugly. In his account of the Battle of the Alma, fought on Sep 20 1854, the first major battle after the Allied landing in Crimea, he describes a brutal uphill assault under heavy Russian artillery fire; the Fusiliers suffered badly, and the field afterward was filled with dead and wounded. The Russian wounded, in his telling, did not always lie before the British as injured men awaiting pity. They could make the generous soldier feel like a fool, and there are few injuries which men resent more bitterly than having been made fools by their own better impulses.

“The Russian wounded behaved in a most barbarous manner; they made signs for a drink, and then shot the man who gave it them. My attention was drawn to one nasty case. A young officer of the 95th gave a wounded Russian a little brandy out of his flask, and was turning to walk away, when the fellow shot him mortally; I would have settled with him for his brutish conduct, but one of our men, who happened to be close to him, at once gave him his bayonet, and despatched him. I went up to the young officer, and finding he was still alive, placed him in as comfortable a position as I could, and then left him, to look for my comrade.”5

It is impossible to know, from the distance at which we stand, whether the event occurred in precisely this manner, or whether one cruel moment, heated by fear and recollection, grew in Gowing’s mind into an indictment of “the Russian wounded” altogether. This uncertainty does not weaken the passage, since memory, after battle, is rarely a modest servant of fact, but this uncertainty is a distressed author of meaning, taking the unimaginable horrors, some confusion or fear and arranging them into forms the heart can bear to despise. “Barbarous,” “nasty,” “brutish” these are harsh words from a man who is still angry remembering all those years later.

But the more important point here is that the wounded Russian is no longer just some “wounded” enemy. He becomes a mirror held up to a British officer’s pity at the moment it is most vulnerable. Mercy is soft and therefore exposed; dangerously slow to defend itself. The shot that killed the young officer wounds the confidence that mercy and tenderness can be had in a place where every humane impulse may be mistaken for weakness. It lets the soldier say, with some relief and even some disgust, that pity for the other side was the error, not war. It is easy enough, or at least easier, to pity the enemy when he is handsome, grateful, noble in his suffering, and safely incapable of harming us. It is another thing entirely to think of his humanity after he has behaved badly, cruelly, treacherously.

Then comes cholera, that invisible sovereign of the camps. Gowing writes:

“There were all sorts of sports got up in the camp to keep up the men’s spirits, which was much needed; we had an unseen enemy in the midst of us—cholera—that was daily finding and carrying off its victims.”6

Disease killed more Allied soldiers than battle; of roughly 155,000 Allied dead, more than 95,000 are believed to have died from disease. In the British medical returns, cholera produced 7,574 hospital admissions and 4,512 deaths, a death rate of nearly sixty percent among those admitted7. It was only a fraction of total disease admissions, and yet it accounted for more than a quarter of disease deaths. The Russian enemy could be watched and pursued, but disease like Cholera gave its enemy no such satisfaction of a face to strike. Disease makes nonsense of the fine separations men construct. British, French, Turkish, Russian seized by the sudden terror of discovering that his own flesh, not another, has betrayed him. Against such an enemy, hatred has little power. You can pity, loathe, even find tenderness on the other side, but one cannot loathe cholera into feeling ashamed of itself or to act differently. Sometimes it’s you and the “other side” fighting against a third side.

This is where Leo Tolstoy’s depiction of the war is so beautiful, because he sees that both sides rest on the shared knowledge that they are surrounded by the same foe, that of death and disease and exhaustive all-encompassing suffering, even while they remain enemies. Nothing is forgiven and nothing is solved (and most importantly the dead remain dead) but in a little human exchange, thinking of the other side did matter. In one of those truces typical of siege warfare, where a pause allowed the dead and wounded to be gathered from the space between the Russian bastion and the French trenches at Sevastopol, he describes a scene:

“Then a bold [Russian] infantryman, in a pink shirt, with his cloak thrown over his shoulders, accompanied by two other soldiers, who, with their hands behind their backs, were standing behind him, with merry, curious countenances, stepped up to a Frenchman, and requested a light for his pipe. The Frenchman brightened his fire, stirred up his short pipe, and shook out a light for the Russian.”

___

“‘Tobacco good!’ said the soldier in the pink shirt; and the spectators smile.
‘Yes, good tobacco, Turkish tobacco,’ says the Frenchman. ‘And your tobacco—Russian?—good?’
‘Russian, good,’ says the soldier in the pink shirt: whereupon those present shake with laughter.”8

Tolstoy describes this weird juxtaposition between enemy and friend in this very ordinary, human exchange:

“Where is the expression of evil which should be avoided? Where is the expression of good which should be imitated in this sketch? Who is the villain, who the hero? All are good, and all are evil.”9

And then, with disappointing cruelty, the next day arrives and the men who laughed over traded tobacco, who recognized one another for one brief, ridiculous, luminous interval as creatures of appetite and manners and breath, return to their places and they become enemies again. The little human exchange remains evident that recognition is possible, and still insufficient. Maybe this is war’s cruelest basis: the other side can become human to us, fully and unmistakably, and still that recognition may save neither them nor us.

(the Church of the Holy Sepulchre)1

Haste in the History Aisle

I was sweating through my tee. The public library’s A/C had failed and because Southern California is deep in one of its hot March spells, my elbow pits were slick as I held up five books using pure forearm strength. The sweat was mostly heat-related, but there was a bit of anxiety as well. Book check-out was closing in fifteen minutes and I was greedily combing through titles in the ambitiously labeled “History” aisle. I was skimming titles I would, with more time, have given proper attention to instead of pawing over in haste. I call this chapter of my life Hasty in the History Aisle. Haste2, panic, greed for more and more information without settling into ideas. What’s new?

I had, some time back, decided to critically analyze the Crimean War. I still plan to, but my expectations have shifted entirely. My plan is to use a framework for critical analysis (i.e. The US Army Principles of War) to critique and understand the war. However, rather than getting through each principle in a contained and scheduled fashion through a mini-research project and then a trite Substack article, I have managed to produce a 30 page document with haphazard ideas and thoughts and research on the principle called The Objective which is merely the first principle of eight. This could take up my remaining coherent adult life (should I just get the PhD?).

All this to say, that I am happy to continue down this path of taking things seriously and with respect to the subject rather than rush through it. Of course, when I came upon a book in the library (with five desperate minutes to go) called the Crimean Blunder by Philip Gibb, I hunched to the floor where it lay on the bottom shelf and surrounded it like Gollum to the ring. My precious. The greed for more and more information on the Crimean War! I checked out this precious thing and hurriedly sat myself on a creaky white lawn chair in the library’s Community Room (which was luckily being cooled mercifully by a large grilled fan) and read through the first few chapters with awe and some humility.

I realized that I rushed so much into analyzing the war and in haste thought so much of The Objectives in the real determination to understand why the state powers involved told themselves why they were fighting that I, in many respects, couldn’t appreciate what caused the war in the first place so I feel like I have to take a step back. Chill baby.

Now, I want to preface that you can continuously find causes for events going back farther and farther in time. But there has to be a reasonable connection between two events to claim cause and effect and, in the case of the Crimean War, this is quite complex and the causes are many interconnected nodes that require an understanding of many things (geography, economic trade, Russia/Ottoman relations, Roman Catholic/Greek Orthodox Church schisms, diplomacy, British interests in India and more). That is why, as far as wars go, I love learning about it. None of the interesting things in life are easy I suppose.

P. Gibb in the Crimean Blunder makes a very interesting claim: that the Crimean War started because….of keys. When I read this I got so excited I stood up at the table, quite suddenly, and was ready to pace and mull this incredulosity over before I realized I was in the library’s Community Room with members of the community in it. So in embarrassment and thinking of nothing else (sitting back down was the logical choice but one I couldn’t think of at the moment), I went out into the hallway and gulped down water from the fountain, swallowing mouthfuls of hard metallic water pulled up through old city pipes. I wiped my mouth. Ugh. A walk of shame back to the table, to P. Gibb,

…And back to the keys.

A Key is Not Just a Key

I was going to title this article something like Did Keys Start the Crimean War? But that would be clickbait nonsense. They didn’t start it but there was a bit of a spat involving these keys that was a culmination of a lot of different things that went into why the war was fought in the first place: religious schisms, the Ottoman capitulation system, firmans.3

When I told a friend about the keys, he said “[...] like symbolic keys?” No, sweetie. I’m talking about physical keys.The idea is Effing Fantastic and Frickin’ Unbelievable, and would be so wonderfully beautiful and humorous if it wasn’t a signal or potential cause of something so terrible. P. Gibb starts off strong with this claim:

“The chain of events which by 1854 had induced Britain and France to embark, with no small degree of enthusiasm, on a full-scale war with Russia had started with a dispute between a handful of monks in Jerusalem about the keys to certain doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It seems that three keys were involved; the key of the main church door and one for each of the two doors leading to the sacred manger. There was also some dissension over the powers of the main doorkeepers to exercise a right of admission to the church.”

We know that Britain and France, in a very odd reversal of historical feuding (with the Napoleonic Wars a distant memory), entered an alliance with each other against Russia in the Crimean War in 1854 with the first battle fought in September of that year. And of course, voices of opposition to a hastily entered war echoed through Parliament, led by MP Austen Henry Layard:

“Any proposal, however ridiculous, any invention, however absurd, is taken up. I verily believe, that if a man were to propose to make cannon out of green cheese his offer would at once be entertained. But this is not the way to carry on a great war. Is there to be no statesmanship, no forethought, no precaution?”4

So it’s fair to say that, at least for Britain, all the enthusiasm was there with little preparation or even much forethought. Professor Trevelyan, a British historian of the Cambridge persuasion, said it starkly, “It was merely a foolish expedition to the Black Sea, made for no sufficient reason, because the English people were bored by peace.”5 We know that bored and powerful states are a danger indeed.

Okay, pause before I let my feelings run away with me. Before Britain and France and Russia I want to begin with the Ottoman Empire. Let’s go through what we know so far and think through this more carefully. What was the spat about the keys?

The spat itself was not one clean incident but a cluster of disputes. P Gibb describes this most likely in a representative scene:

“To add insult to the injury complained of by the Latins, the porter who sat at the main doorway of the church was a Mohammedan, an infidel, and they accused him of showing an unworthy favoritism by restraining Christians of their denomination from entering the church except at certain hours, and allowing the Greeks right of access at any time of the day. That was one of the reasons why they wanted a key for themselves.”

And in continuation:

“The Mohammedan porter was quite entitled to his authority. He was appointed by the Governor of Jerusalem, who was a loyal pasha to the Sultan of Turkey.”

Gibb’s characterization of the porter is clearly derogatory so we have to be careful here. There seems to be no direct evidence that a porter of the Islamic faith ever favoured the Greek Orthodoxs over Roman Catholics in this regard (and I could not find it among the works listed in Gibb’s bibliography). Gibb seems to be echoing a connection made that because the porter was appointed by the sultan, and because of the Ottoman Empire’s deep ties with the Greek Orthodox Church (and deep enmity with the Roman Catholic church) that favoritism was a direct result. It’s possible, but again no direct evidence of this being the case.

However, we do know that, even today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has long been controlled by Muslim custodial families, with the Joudeh family holding the key and the Nuseibeh family opening and closing the door. That gives solid support to Gibbs’s basic picture of a Muslim porter/doorkeeper exercising authority at the entrance.

Wajeeh Nuseibeh explains the logic very plainly:

“If the key would be in the hands of the Greek Orthodox, then that would signify they are the owners of the church. If it is the hands of the Catholics, then it would be a Catholic Church … So Muslims are neutral people to open and close the door.”6

The evidence suggests that the Muslim keyholder arrangement existed because the Holy Sepulchre was treated as a sacred site under sovereign Muslim custody and because entrusting the key to a Muslim family prevented any one Christian denomination from turning physical possession of the door into a claim of full ownership.

Since the 16th-century, Jerusalem was under the jurisdiction and territorial control of the Ottoman Empire. To put it maybe too simply, the Ottoman Empire’s Christian population numbered in the millions belonging to the Greek Orthodox Church while a smaller minority of Roman Catholics also lived in the empire. We must remember that back in 1054 C.E. a Great Schism occurred in the Christian church that resulted into two sects; Roman Catholicism that answered to the pope in Rome and the Greek Orthodox church that answered to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. There were other differences debated that resulted in the Great East-West schism that I will not go into, but just know that for centuries these two Christian churches shared sacred space in Jerusalem, but because there were major liturgical differences in the way that they saw and used these sacred spaces, the sharing was not always peaceful.

James Finn, the British consul to Jerusalem during this time, writes in his work Stirring Times that there had been “a bodily conflict in the church,” that Greek monks had thrown up “a temporary wall” to keep the Latin procession from the sanctuary of the Manger, and that the silver star at the Nativity had been found torn at because of its Latin inscription. Then came the scene that made the whole quarrel feel larger than stone and clergy: three days before Christmas, the Ottoman commissioner handed the keys of the great church and the Crypt of the Holy Manger to the Latins “with much ceremony,” and Finn says the anger of the Orthodox in Syria and Russia was extreme.

In February of 1852, the sultan published a decree called a firman that deals directly with all these various disputes:

“The disputes which from time to time arise between the Greek and Latin nations, respecting certain Holy Places which exist both within and without the City of Jerusalem, have now been again revived.”7

I can see the sultan rolling his eyes at Christians. Here they go again. The decree goes on to order that the contested places remain in their “present state,” records that “a key of the two gates of the Great Church of Bethlehem and of the Holy Manger was given to each of the Greek, Latin, and Armenian nations,” and adds that “No change shall be made in the present state of the gates of the Church of Bethlehem.”

But why were Russia and Syria so upset with all of these disputes happening in Jerusalem, a fairly remote location?

Turns out this can be answered, in part, by the Ottoman Empire’s capitulation system.

The Ottoman Empire had for centuries granted foreign powers privileges inside its borders through the capitulatory system. These were legal arrangements, commercial concessions, consular immunities, and habits of protection that grew out of strong Islamic ideas of aman and ahdname8 and out of the empire’s need to manage commerce and foreign relations on favorable terms. The Ottomans wanted foreign merchants in their ports, wanted customs revenue, wanted shipping networks to keep moving, and wanted diplomatic tools they could hand out selectively. Early ahdnames to Venice and other trading powers helped regularize commerce and define how foreigners could live, trade, litigate, and travel inside Ottoman territory.

There was also a strategic reason. The famous French capitulations under Süleyman I were useful because they strengthened ties with France against the Habsburgs, while also drawing commerce into Ottoman domains. Britannica’s overview says the 1536 arrangement became the model for later treaties and gave French subjects freedom to travel and trade in the sultan’s dominions; in practice, these grants were a way for the sultan to turn access into leverage in Europe.

However, France possessed the firmer, older hand in this business. A Cambridge history chapter states that the French capitulations of 1673 codified France’s role as protector of the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem and of Catholic clergy in the Levant. That role gave France standing, and standing gave France a delusional sense of its own role in Ottoman affairs. And in 19th century France after the Revolution, (multiple) Restorations, and Revolt, a ruler short on legitimacy at home can develop a sudden tenderness for sacred property abroad. Louis-Napoléon had reason enough to find Catholic prestige useful in this regard.

Russia wanted its own share of this sanctified jurisdiction. It liked to speak as the guardian of the Orthodox under Ottoman rule. There were millions of Orthodox Christians in the empire, and Russian diplomacy had a long habit of presenting their condition as a matter in which Petersburg possessed a natural and solemn interest (although the schism in the Orthodox Church between Greek and Russian Orthodoxy soured some of the relations between Russian and the Ottoman Empire). Roderic Davison’s classic study of Küçük Kaynarca makes the point clear: the very question is whether Russia had any protectorate right over Ottoman Christians at all, and that question remained disputed. Ambiguity is a wonderful fuel for empire. A clear right has edges and can be measured. A vague right can be pulled and worried and stretched until it begins to resemble dominion.

Ottoman observers later complained that these were originally unilateral favors, not sacred rights. By the nineteenth century France and Russia could take old commercial-religious privileges from this system and stretch them into political claims over people and institutions inside the empire. Unfortunately, a tactic for Mediterranean-Levantine trade became a tool of intrusion.

All this is to say that by the time “the governing folks of Jerusalem” granted special access to one side or seemed to deny it to another, the Roman Catholic minority were never going to experience that as a simple inconvenience. And because France had already felt itself the voice of Catholic protection, and Russia had already learned to do the same for Orthodoxy, a church door in Ottoman Palestine had become a place where empires could feel insulted by proxy. Powerful, imperialistic and empire-minded states are forever borrowing the injuries of other people and then using those injuries to enlarge themselves.

The Holy Places dispute as a proxy for power dispute was one object with four different uses: French EMPIRE, British EMPIRE, Russian EMPIRE, and Ottoman EMPIRE (see a theme?). We will go into each of these empires, and why their fixation on keys led them each to enter the Crimea in upcoming Substack articles….more to come!

Some Major Concerns

My only concern in looking at all of this is the utter lack of Ottoman primary sources without the westernized biased view coming from France and England. Maybe this is where my Substack community can help me?

Works Cited

Cust, L. G. A. The Status Quo in the Holy Places. Government of Palestine, 1929, https://content.ecf.org.il/files/M00109_CustReport1929English.pdf. Accessed 15 Feb. 2026.

Davison, Roderic H. “‘Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility’: The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji Reconsidered.” Slavic Review, vol. 35, no. 3, 1976, pp. 463–83. Cambridge Core, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/russian-skill-and-turkish-imbecility-the-treaty-of-kuchuk-kainardji-reconsidered/8BB994FBDE3F721E6A852B073D7F0998. Accessed 3 Mar. 2026.

Fairey, Jack. The Great Powers and Orthodox Christendom: The Crisis over the Eastern Church in the Era of the Crimean War. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137508461. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026 (let me know if you need access).

Finn, James. Stirring Times; or, Records from Jerusalem Consular Chronicles of 1853 to 1856. C. Kegan Paul, 1878. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/stirringtimesor01finngoog/page/n27/mode/2up. Accessed 12 Mar. 2026.

Gibb, Philip. The Crimean Blunder. Dodd, Mead, 1960. (my first public library checkout in 20+ years!!).

“Imperial Firman of February 1852, Concerning the Christian Holy Places.” Appendix 3 in The Status Quo in the Holy Places, by L. G. A. Cust, Government of Palestine, 1929, pp. 178–79, https://content.ecf.org.il/files/M00952_Firman1852English.pdf. Accessed 12 Mar. 2026.

Russell, Lord John. “War with Russia—The Queen’s Message.” Hansard, HC Deb 31 Mar. 1854, vol. 132, cols. 198–308, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1854/mar/31/war-with-russia-the-queens-message. Accessed 12 Nov. 2025.

Schmitt, Bernadotte E. “The Diplomatic Preliminaries of the Crimean War.” The American Historical Review, vol. 25, no. 1, 1919, pp. 36–67. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1836373. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026.

van den Boogert, Maurits H. “The Ottoman Encounter and the Law of Nations in the Old Regime.” The Cambridge History of International Law, edited by Randall Lesaffer, Cambridge UP, 2025, pp. 711–737. doi:10.1017/9781108757355.025.

Panaite, Viorel. “Ottoman Peace Agreements.” Ottoman Law of War and Peace: The Ottoman Empire and Its Tribute-Payers from the North of the Danube. 2nd rev. ed., Brill, 2019. doi:10.1163/9789004411104_008

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(A. Forster, “Faith and Courage in Death: An Allegory of Edith Cavell,” Illustrated London News, 30 Oct. 1915, p. 547)

In a cowardly attempt to entrench myself in the lives of others far away from time and place, I pried my eyes away from social media/the news/current events in search of some historical adventure. The very specific urge to escape from one cesspool of an era to another equally cessy cesspool is a bit of a conundrum1. Maybe I am seeking some reassurance that answers to currently complicated questions can be found in the National Archives UK (at least in the digitally available version of it) where I can explore these questions at a “safe distance.” All that being said, in seeking something meaningful and sentimental but with the reassurance of an ending we already know even if it is a bad one, I chanced upon some documents regarding a Miss Edith Cavell2.

(photos labeled: tombe des martyrs and lieu d’exécution au tir national à Bruxelles)3

Some of these documents contained blurry sepia-toned shots of a patch of ground outside Brussels. Rough grass, a shoddy fence, and then in another photo: a dozen or so wooden crosses in view and knocked together in a hurry. Someone had taken a pen and jabbed an arrow into the paper then added a “Edith Cavell” in very precise and emotionally-removed penmanship, which would have passed for “pretty” if it wasn’t so grossly juxtaposed next to graves of others condemned by the Germans4.

Mrs. Cavell sat one morning in her home in Norwich and received these photographs. French authorities had it sent to the British War Office who then passed it along to the mother of Edith Cavell, hoping that photos of where her daughter was buried after being executed by German authorities in 1915, at the height of WWI and German occupation of Belgium, would provide some solace to a grieving mother. This being the first bits of information of her daughter’s death, two years since the execution, we can scarcely imagine what it would have been like for Mrs. Cavell to receive such photographs. A letter gives us a glimpse at Mrs. Cavell’s response and provides a modicum of evidence that maybe there was some relief in seeing a grave, or relief in a government that cared enough to acknowledge the assassination at all.

Dear Sir,

I thank you very much for sending us the photographs which upon (being ?) received for that purposes (and to the?) French Authorities also for having copies made of them which I will send to my other daughters keeping the original for myself. I very much appreciate your kind expressions of sympathy with (us in our?) very great loss.

Believe us to be yours very truly,

L.S Cavell

So who was Edith Cavell and what happened to her? Edith Cavell was an English nurse running a training school in Brussels, tending to sick and wounded Belgians and then Germans during occupation and in the first years of the war. That alone, keeping a hospital functioning under occupation, would have been a lifetime’s work. And a very noble one that very possibly would have spared her life (although this puts us in the land of conjecture and “what-ifs” and we have no business entertaining this thought further). But then she took on a second job. With local resisters and aristocrats like Prince and Princess de Croÿ, she joined an escape route that moved Allied soldiers and young Allied soldiers, Belgian, French and British, out of occupied Belgium toward the Dutch border5. For nearly a year that line sheltered and escorted roughly two hundred people to neutral Holland and, from there, to Britain. One corporal later wrote to Mrs. Cavell that Edith had “kept us in hiding…for fifteen days” before sending them on through Holland6.

Things came crashing down when a Frenchman named Georges Gaston Quien, serving time in a German-occupied jail, offered his services to the occupiers in exchange for his freedom7. He walked out, posed as an Allied soldier seeking help, slid into the Brussels escape network and took stock of all the route’s details. Almost everyone who dealt with him was arrested shortly afterward, including Edith. She was picked up on 6 August 1915 and imprisoned in Saint-Gilles. In three depositions to German police she admitted that she had shepherded dozens of soldiers and civilians to the frontier and sheltered them in her clinic. In the House of Lords, one peer later summarised the charge without ornament: she had “assisted her fellow-countrymen and subjects of our Allies in distress to conceal themselves from the Germans and to escape from German control.”8 From the German point of view there was nothing ambiguous about it. A British subject, in occupied territory, knowingly assisting enemy combatants to escape and, potentially, fight again was treason and needed to be punished appropriately9.

Back in July 1915 Count Camille de Borchgrave, a Belgian aristocrat on the management committee of Cavell’s school, called at Edith’s clinic. German police were there with an English-speaking man: reddish face, short military moustache, “a real Cockney accent,” claiming to own a florist’s shop in Forest Hill, London10. He boasted that he could cross to England whenever he liked and visit Cavell’s mother in Norwich. This was presumably said in passing but the Count clocked it as a threat. We know where your family is; we can reach them. The Count left convinced Edith was in serious danger. Trapped in occupied Belgium, he did what he could from a distance. Through his wife, Ruth, now in England, he sent a warning to Mrs. Cavell in Norwich, telling her “not to speak to anyone of your daughter there” and to beware a man with “a reddish face, short military moustache and a real Cockney accent.” The warning moved dutifully through British hands and worried the war office that German spies were running rampant in England….which of course they were.

When the Germans finally rolled up the network, Cavell told them exactly what she had done and refused to barter her way out by naming others. The German military court condemned her to death. Diplomats ran around Brussels at midnight, begging for a stay of execution; local officials shrugged behind the phrase “orders are orders.”11 At dawn on 12 October 1915 she was taken to the Tir national rifle range and shot. Rumours later circulated that the firing squad had aimed badly on purpose, that the officer in charge was sickened by executing a woman and had to finish her with a revolver in a closer shot.

Whether true or not is immaterial. That is, whether the German executioners felt guilty doing what their government felt needed to be done, they still acted. Whether we are active in bad deeds or simply complacent, we are complicit.

The German Under-Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs treated the death as a demonstration. From the German point of view she had crossed the line from neutral caregiver to irregular combatant. The message: we don’t care whether you are a man or woman, this is what will happen to you if we catch you.

Timeline for Reference

This timeline is based on what I gathered from documents available at the National Archives UK and other sources compiled in the Further Reading section below.

• 4 December 1865 – Edith Louisa Cavell is born in Swardeston, Norfolk, daughter of the local Anglican vicar.

• 1907 – Cavell moves to Brussels to become matron of a new nursing school and clinic, training Belgian nurses in modern methods.

• August 1914 – Germany invades Belgium. Cavell, briefly back in England, chooses to return to occupied Brussels to continue her work, treating wounded soldiers of all nationalities.

• Late 1914 – early 1915 – A clandestine escape route forms. With figures including Prince and Princess de Croÿ, Cavell begins sheltering stranded British and French soldiers and young Belgian and French men of military age in her clinic, then sending them north through a chain of safe houses to the Dutch frontier.

• 22 February 1915 – Corporal J. Doman of the 9th Lancers writes from Stourbridge to Mrs. Louisa Cavell, explaining that Edith “kept us in hiding from the Germans for 15 days” in Brussels and then obtained a guide to conduct them through Holland. The letter leaves her mother in no doubt that her daughter is engaged in illegal escape work.

• By mid-1915 – Cavell has helped to move around 60 British and 15 French soldiers, plus approximately 100 French and Belgian civilians of military age, to the frontier, sheltering most of them first in her house. Later estimates place the total number of people assisted by the wider network at roughly 200.

• June–July 1915 – A French prisoner, Georges Gaston Quien, secures his release from a German-occupied jail by offering his services to the occupiers. Disguised as an Allied soldier seeking escape, he infiltrates the Brussels line, gaining the confidence of Cavell’s associates and mapping the network. Many of those who help him are later arrested.

• 20 July 1915 – Cavell’s colleague, Count Camille de Borchgrave, visits her clinic in the Rue de la Culture. He is met by an English-speaking German plain clothes policeman with “a reddish face, fair, short military moustache and a very Cockney accent,” who claims to be a florist from Forest Hill, London; German police are searching the clinic for incriminating documents.

• Late July 1915 – From Brussels, the Count has a warning sent via his wife, Ruth de Borchgrave, now in England, to Mrs. Cavell in Norwich: she is advised “not to speak to anyone” about her daughter and to beware a man with “a reddish face, short military moustache and a real Cockney accent.” The letter is passed to the Norwich police and then to British intelligence, which fails to identify any such florist-spy in Forest Hill. (The warning reaches Norwich effectively too late to change events; wartime communications were notoriously slowed in and out of Belgium in 1915)

• 31 July 1915 – Belgian architect Philippe Baucq, a key member of the escape route, is arrested; incriminating letters found in his possession point to Cavell.

• 5–6 August 1915 – German authorities enter the Clinique and arrest Cavell. She is taken to Saint-Gilles prison in Brussels, where she will be held for ten weeks, the last two in solitary confinement.

• 8, 18 and 22 August 1915 – Cavell makes three depositions to German police, admitting she has been instrumental in conveying Allied soldiers and Belgian and French civilians of military age to the frontier and in sheltering them in her house, and acknowledging that some wrote to thank her from Britain. Her statements squarely place her under paragraph 58 of the German Military Code, which makes aiding enemy troops in wartime a capital offence.

• 7 October 1915 – Cavell is tried by German court-martial in Brussels along with 34 others connected to the escape line. She is prosecuted for aiding British and French soldiers and young Belgian men to cross the Dutch border and eventually enter Britain. She signs a statement the day before admitting her guilt.

• 11 October 1915 (evening) – The court sentences Cavell and several co-defendants to death. From his sickbed, U.S. ambassador Brand Whitlock sends a personal appeal to Governor-General Moritz von Bissing; a midnight deputation of Whitlock’s staff and the Spanish minister, the Marquis de Villalobar, begs Baron von der Lancken for clemency or at least postponement. The German authorities refuse.

• Night of 11–12 October 1915 – Anglican chaplain Rev. H. Stirling Gahan is allowed into Saint-Gilles. Cavell tells him she has been “kindly treated” and says: “I expected my sentence and I believe it was just. Standing as I do in view of God and Eternity, I realise that patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

• 12 October 1915, 7:00 a.m.ish – Sixteen German soldiers, in two firing squads, execute Edith Cavell and Philippe Baucq at the Tir national rifle range in Schaerbeek, Brussels. She is 49.

• Post-war, 1918–1919 – In France, Georges Gaston Quien is tried by court martial for treasonable dealings with the enemy and for betraying Cavell’s organisation. He is sentenced to death, later commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment; he serves about 15 years.

• 15 May 1919 – Cavell’s body is exhumed from Belgium, brought back to England, and given a state-like funeral at Westminster Abbey before re-burial near Norwich Cathedral, where she is memorialized as both nurse and martyr.

For Further Reading

Arthur, Terri. “Edith Cavell: The Other Nightingale.” OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing, vol. 25, no. 2, 31 May 2020, doi:10.3912/OJIN.Vol25No02Man02

“Edith Cavell.” 1914–1918-online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, edited by Ute Daniel et al., 24 Jan 2017, encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/cavell-edith-louisa-1-1/

“Edith Cavell’s Life & Legacy.” EdithCavell.org.uk, Edith Cavell Commemoration Group, edithcavell.org.uk/edith-cavells-life/

Edith Cavell: The Foreign Office. The National Archives (UK), https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/medicine-on-the-western-front-part-two/edith-cavell/

My favorite line from a source: “So far as the Foreign office are aware, no charge of espionage was brought against her. The Foreign Office desire to state that in this country no woman convicted of the assisting the King’s enemies, even when found guilty of espionage has hitherto been subjected to a greater penalty than a term of penal servitude.” zing!

“Private Papers of Edith Cavell.” Imperial War Museums Collections, IWM, https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030002043

“Who Was Edith Cavell?” Imperial War Museums, www.iwm.org.uk/history/who-was-edith-cavell

Protheroe, Ernest. A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell. Project Gutenberg, 26 Jan. 2011, www.gutenberg.org/files/35075/35075-h/35075-h.htm12

Other Footnotes & Sources

Charlotte Brontë, Letter to Ellen Nussey, Aug. 9, 1846.1

On a Recent Visit to the Huntington Library

I visited the former estate of Henry E. Huntington, a man who made his fortune in railroads2. As was fashionable among self-made California magnates of the 20th century, Huntington attempted to pound a square block of legitimacy into a very small round hole with art and books3. Like many of his kind, he developed a fixation on British culture, which seems to be a gilded-age symptom of too much capital and a lot of insecurities (or simply: insecurities as a result of capital acquired very quickly).

He collected/hoarded his home with all the little things that scream “power” and “status.” Maybe we can call it an obsession. His library is studded with classics and first editions of books and speeches, most notably here from British prime ministers and scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries. The former dining room is lined with wall panels that were imported from abroad and decidedly in the “English-not-French” fashion. The rest of the home-turned-museum is a collection of 18th-century British portraiture that is one of “the most important collection of British grand manner portraiture outside the United Kingdom”4. And the tea room, just across from the home, serves its tea with a side of milk without you explicitly asking for it, which is not something a lot of us here in southern California see often. I don’t mean to judge here. I am someone who also willingly paid money to see all of this borrowed Britishness5.

Especially, since it afforded me the ability to see a Brontë letter without actually spending the very expensive airplane ticket to Heathrow (and from Heathrow to Kew)6. Seeing a Brontë letter is a bit of an experience. This one in particular sits in a glass case in the former library as part of an exhibit called “Stories from the Library”7.

The writing was the first thing that stood out to me. In the letter, Charlotte writes horizontally then vertically. At first, I thought this was a bastardization of the original primary source, but it turns out many people including Charlotte did this as a technique to save on paper in trying times8. The letter was written in August of 1846 to a life-long friend Ellen Nussey, and in it Charlotte writes:

It’s clear that Charlotte at this time was going through some things, partially as a result of it purely being 1846 in England. What does that mean? Let me try to contextualize.

On Women of England in 1846

When Brontë wrote her “who holds the purse will wish to be the master,” a woman’s prospects in marriage were shaped by statute and customs. A lot of us may know this through the works of Jane Austen. And 30 years after Austen, life in England was no different for the Brontë sisters.

At the time, a woman’s legal and social identity remained entirely relational. She was a daughter, a wife, a widow but never just a person in her own right.

Under coverture, an English common law doctrine that persisted until reforms in the late 19th century, a married woman was legally subsumed into her husband’s personhood. As William Blackstone put it in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69):

“By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.”9

A married woman could not own property, enter contracts, or even claim custody of her own children. Any wages she earned became her husband’s. She had no access to divorce unless she could prove aggravated cruelty, adultery, AND abandonment, which was an almost impossible trifecta.

In 1846, there was no Married Women’s Property Act yet10. That wouldn’t come until 1870 and even then, only in limited form. Until then, to marry was to cede independence.

Marriage was the happening destination for middle-class women, but it offered few guarantees. A woman’s economic future rested on her ability to secure a husband. For middle-class daughters like Charlotte and her sisters, without dowries/inheritance, this meant marrying “well” or not at all.

Brontë understood this very well. Her friend Ellen Nussey’s own life would be shaped by such constraints: remaining single and financially dependent on family. Charlotte’s warning that “affection makes you partial” is a direct rebuke of this idea that love alone could counterbalance a power/economic imbalance.

The Victorian domestic ideal was built around separate spheres (simply put: man in public world of work, woman in private world of home).

Brontë’s line:

“Who provides the cash will now and then value himself (or herself) upon it…”11

exposes the emotional toll of financial inequality in a marriage in regards to autonomy. A woman who relied on a husband for shelter, food, and social standing was not a partner. She was, legally and economically, a dependent.

warning: next section contains Jane Eyre spoilers.12

On Jane Eyre

It’s no wonder that Charlotte Brontë started writing Jane Eyre just weeks after penning this letter. We can argue that one of the themes of her book is the refusal to be bought or “saved” by a man who holds a lot of power (i.e. financial independence). When Jane inherits her own fortune near the end of the novel, only then can she return, equal and free.

I tend to think of her novel as a financial and moral thought piece couched in a love story (because who doesn’t love a good love story?).

Jane rejects Mr. Rochester because without equality, feeling isn’t enough. When Rochester offers her love without legal status, mainly without freedom, she walks away. Poor and alone but at least with her standing intact.

Only later, when she unexpectedly inherits a fortune of her own, enough to make her independently secure, does she return to him. Of course, this gives her the opportunity to return to Mr. Rochester as, in some sense, his equal (although I wholeheartedly believe Jane was too good for him, I would have taken the money and ran).

On Doddling

As I was thinking through coverture, Jane Eyre, women in 19th century England and autonomy, my family called me over saying that I was “doddling” and that we were late for our tea reservation. And off I went.

(The Sick Man of Europe Is Being Doctored At Last)1

Flu season is going around, and with it some sizable probability that You. Will. Be. Next.

Of course, there is denial at first. The slight itch at the back of your throat is a simple strain. The sniffles have to be all this cold, dry (in my case, polluted) air. A headache means you need water and nothing more. Why are we like this? Why do we forego facing reality even when it means we delay help, which is the very thing that would make us better off?

Instead, we negotiate with symptoms. We minimize them. We instruct ourselves to be sensible and carry on. And then, when the illness has taken advantage of our mind, when the fever has run away from us, we find ourselves in bed, quaking and furious: if only I had listened to my body earlier; if only I had acted sooner.

What we are doing is a performance. Its a signal to others we’re fine, everything’s fine when in reality we need to be in bed and away from others. It can shift power dynamics, at least temporarily, and strip freedom away.

Which is precisely what I imagine the Ottoman Empire was thinking when Russia decided to edge closer to it borders in 1853. Why didn’t we act sooner when we had the chance in 1774, when the Treaty of Peace (Küçük Kaynarca) was signed? * shivers *2

By the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire was a contested, reforming, imperial state and running the Tanzimat experiment, trying to modernize law, taxation, and administration while European powers hovered around3. The Reform Edict of 1856, for instance, explicitly promises equal civil standing and religious freedom which was an internal reform, but also a document written with Britain, France, Austria, and Russia looking over its shoulder after The Crimean War.

Tsar Nicholas I spoke of the Ottoman Empire as a body in decline or simply something that might “slip away” if the great powers did not prepare in time. According to the British ambassador to Russia, Lord Seymour, the tsar gave his “diagnosis” in a confidential conversation:

“we have on our hands a sick man, a very sick man…”4

Once you call a country a patient, you have already implied a need for a doctor. And once you imply a doctor, you have smuggled in the right to save, treat and of course the Ottoman Empire, and rightfully so, said don’t touch! keep you’re filthy paws off of me! for much of The Crimean War.

In 1858, one MP remarks Britain ought to act as “the family physician and the family solicitor,” preserving the patient if possible, and if not, ensuring the “inheritance” passes correctly5.

But what the “sick man” trope really reveals more than the condition of the patient, is the character of the diagnostician.

It’s a claim of standing/authority: I can name your weakness; therefore I have the authority to save you from yourself. And once that’s granted, the next move arrives in the guise of: “treatment,” “stabilization,” “arrangements,” all the terms used euphemistically for “intrusion.”

“…it is the part of the generous and strong to treat with gentleness the sick and feeble man.”6

Which is why my ears perked up when President Trump claimed that Colombia was being “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States” just yesterday7. This is on the tail of the capture of Maduro in Venezuela and precisely what Jack Nicas of the NYTimes had in mind when he wrote back in November8 about the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” where the US takes more control over the Western Hemisphere. Of course, there is a lot of chatter about how Russia will use this as a precedent in Europe and China in Asia9. And a lot of how the Venezuelans actually feel about it all.10 And how the US will actually work with Venezuela to enforce a change in Venezuelan policies that are more US-friendly.11

As I work through a critical analysis of The Crimean War, one thing stands out at the outset: be suspicious the moment a great power starts talking like a doctor. It’s almost never about doing good for the patient; usually it’s about some right to decide what counts as “treatment” and how much the patient has to endure in the process.

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An MP in Westminster

(“The Young Disraeli—Mr. Disraeli Addressing the Electors in the County Hall, Wycombe.” The Illustrated London News, 1847.)1

On Dec 12th, 1854 the House of Commons, through an Act of Parliament, was called into session two days earlier than expected. This irked some of the members (MPs) who had country estates and hunting and claret to attend to2. Thousands of British soldiers were already dead or maimed at the Alma (September 1854) and Inkerman (November 1854), and the Treasury was bleeding alongside them3. Now imagine you are a person of some consequence with a vote and a conscience. What would you do? What would you say? Would you stand by your convictions? Or kow-tow to the powers-that-be, in this case Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen’s government coalition? MP Austen Henry Layard bravely stood up in Parliament on this day and voiced his concerns:

“But it is, at the same time, my conviction that the capture of Sebastopol, however gigantic that undertaking may be, is only the first link in the chain—only the first step in that great war in which we are now engaged. I believe that whether Sebastopol fall or not, we shall have to choose between a hollow— I might almost say disgraceful—peace, utterly inconsistent with the great sacrifice of blood and treasure that this country has been called upon to make; or a struggle which, for its severity and the magnitude of its results, has, perhaps, been unequalled in the history of the world. Such being my conviction, how can I after that which has passed, by words express, or by silence infer, any confidence in Her Majesty’s Government?”4

He questioned the government and by extension the Queen herself. Which is daring and dangerous, politically suicidal but morally necessary. And there were many concerns that any criticism of the war might signal to Russia that Britain was divided and weak. Unity, Layard implies, is charming in principle, but a poor bargain when it is purchased with several thousand corpses and no clear objective explaining the why.

Layard accuses Ministers of waging war with “a want of principle in the conduct of the war, a want of definite policy,” the inevitable product of a Cabinet so divisive and mixed in its views that it can only produce “half-and-half policy and half-and-half measures.”5 The tactically advantageous win at Sebastopol becomes the convenient substitute for an objective: one fortress standing in for an entire grand strategy.

He asks the government to confront “this gigantic Power,” Russia, stretching “from Kamschatka to the Baltic Sea,” and to decide whether the war is in fact being fought “on behalf of the liberties and independence of Europe,” or merely to avoid the embarrassment of backing down.6

Layard most likely had Lord Stuart’s ominously warning from March 1854 in mind regarding the costs of a war with no objective:

“[...] increased taxation, the loss of trade and commerce, and probably a great loss of life… were to be submitted to without our experiencing a return equivalent to the sacrifices we made.”7

By the end of his speech, Layard’s verdict on the government’s management of the war, and its absent objective, is richly scathing one:

“Any proposal, however ridiculous, any invention, however absurd, is taken up. I verily believe, that if a man were to propose to make cannon out of green cheese his offer would at once be entertained. But this is not the way to carry on a great war. Is there to be no statesmanship, no forethought, no precaution?”8

In public, Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Clarendon, told the House of Lords that the object of the war was “to maintain the integrity and independence of the Ottoman Empire.”9 However, in private letters between Lord Aberdeen and Lord Clarendon there was discussion of something rather less majestic: “We are drifting into war without any precise object except to resist Russia.”10 The word “drifting” should, in any sane strategic culture, set off bells loud enough to be heard up and down the Black Sea.

An Artillery Officer in Sevastopol

(Young officer during the Crimean War, 1854).11

Britain clearly struggled with finding a cohesive objective worth fighting for, but it was complicated all the more by the existence of the Russian “will.” What were these allied forces up against?

An artillery officer in the Russian army arrived in Sevastopol. The soldiers around him, he noticed, were peasants in coarse grey, men dragged from villages with a loaf of black bread and an icon of St Nicholas12. Their lives before the war had already contained winter, hunger, arbitrary authority, and long, unfledging obedience. War arrived as an extension of the lives they had already previously lived.

The artillery officer noted that the average Russian soldier

“[…] stood his ground, absolutely without knowing where he was, or why he was there, and, with restrained breath, and with a cold chill running down his spine, he had stared stupidly straight ahead into the dark beyond, […]”13

These men did not ask for noble ideals or creeds, but wanted simply to survive to the next day.

By 1854, the bulk of the Imperial Russian Army consisted of conscripts drawn from the peasant estate, bound by twenty‑five years of service. This was a force animated by national rhetoric and a lifetime of hardship and in a state that could mobilize close to 900,000 men, most of them village conscripts, hardship functioned as basic training14. A Russian private could quite reasonably have said: I am accustomed to suffering. This is normal.

In the Assembly Hall for the wounded, the artillery officer noted that the air was thick with iodine and rotting bandages. He walked between rows of men who had left pieces of themselves on the bastions: arms, legs, eyes. The groans rose and fell like a tide.

On one cot lay a soldier who had lost his leg to a misfired cannon. The stump was wrapped; the sheet beneath him was stiff with dried blood. The officer, with most likely the embarrassed gentleness of someone who has no idea what kindness looks like here, asked what the man had felt the moment the leg was torn away.

The soldier considered. “Like someone poured boiling water over it,” he said. “And then—nothing; only the skin began to draw, as though it had been rubbed hard.”15

The officer, surprised by the straightforwardness of this statement and trying to understand what the pain felt like, asked how the soldier dealt with this so calmly. The soldier answered,

“The first thing of all, Your Excellency, is not to think at all. If you don’t think about a thing, it amounts to nothing. Men suffer from thinking more than from anything else.”16

Here, in one exhausted man’s philosophy, was the essence of the Russian “will”: no ideology, no romantic devotion to the throne, only a trained numbness, a refusal to give pain the dignity of attention. If you never let yourself think, nothing truly happens to you.

The officer left the hall later and stepped back into the cold. The air hit him with shocking clarity.

“On emerging from this house of pain,” he would write, “you will infallibly experience a sensation of pleasure, you will inhale the fresh air more fully, you will feel satisfaction in the consciousness of your health, but, at the same time, you will draw from the sight of these sufferings a consciousness of your nothingness, and you will go calmly and without any indecision to the bastion.”17

After some time ruminating on these events at Sevastopol and the “consciousness of nothingness,” the officer carried his conclusions into the vast, crowded pages of his later book, War and Peace:

“He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together.”18

The officer walking through that assembly hall of mangled Russian soldiers was seeing, at close range, the human raw material of a century-long project that began in 1774. You see, this wasn’t the first skirmish between the Russian and Ottoman Empires; they were duking it out while Britain and France were distracted by their own rebellious citizens in the 1770s. Once the Russians and Ottomans finished the war, they drew up and signed the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. Within the treaty sits a small time-bomb of a sentence:

“The Sublime Porte promises to protect constantly the Christian religion and its churches, and it also allows the Ministers of the Imperial Court of Russia to make, upon all occasions, representations in favour of the new church at Constantinople.”19

This essentially handed the Tsar a standing excuse to pry open Ottoman affairs whenever he pleased, since every quarrel over an Orthodox church in the Balkans could now arrive on his desk as a matter of sacred duty and according to the rules of the treaty. This clause created a “legal alibi” for Russia to interfere in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire in the name of protecting Orthodox believers.20

Over the next 80 years, each squirmish with the Porte pushed Russian lines closer to the Straits. After another bruising conflict, the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829 confirmed Russian influence over the Danubian Principalities and gave St Petersburg new reach along the Black Sea coast, including at the mouth of the Danube21.

In 1853, Sir George Hamilton Seymour walks into the Winter Palace as Her Majesty’s thoroughly respectable British ambassador to Russia and discovers he has wandered into the middle of a murder briefing. Nicholas I leans in with the calm of a man stroking a white cat and remarks that the Ottoman Empire is “a sick man, a very sick man,” then begins to speculate, almost idly, about what will happen “when one of these days he slips through our hands.” 22 All this, when Seymour has come to discuss stability and treaties. The Russian objectives arrange themselves with unnerving clarity: secure warm-water access to the Black Sea, keep watch over the Straits, remain at the bedside of the dying neighbor until the will becomes conveniently available.

Why is the Black Sea so important, you ask? It holds a peninsula called the Crimea, today internationally recognized as part of Ukraine, currently occupied and controlled by Russia23. The Crimea sits like a stone in the throat of the Black Sea and for that very reason carries immense strategic weight, economic and military alike. More than Orthodox theology, Russia in 1854 wanted deep-water port leverage at Sevastopol. Control over this port meant near unrestricted access to the wider Black Sea region, the eastern Mediterranean, and trade routes to India and the rest of Asia. At this point England and France wake the fuck up. It seemed that the Allied objective from Britain and France was certainly something like:

Preserve the European balance of power, as it was arranged to the satisfaction of those who arranged it (besides, change is such an exhausting business).

Preserve the European balance of power, as arranged to the satisfaction of those who arranged it; or, in Lord Palmerston’s more dignified phrasing, the “independence and integrity of the Turkish empire is an essential condition for the maintenance of the peace of Europe,” and Britain with her allies must “combine to maintain the independence and integrity of the Turkish Empire.”24

An Irishman on the War Front

(“Punch’s Fancy Portraits.—No. 52: W. H. Russell, Esq., LL.D. Our Own Correspondent—The Man for The Times.” Punch Magazine, 1874.)25

When Britain declared war on Russia in March 1854, ministers wrapped the whole thing in a soothing sentence: this was a limited, principled war, undertaken to preserve the “independence and integrity” of the Ottoman Empire and the peace of Europe. In debate after debate, MPs repeated the line with the reassuring rhythm of a lullaby: Russia had behaved badly, the Sultan required support, the balance of power must remain steady and beautifully symmetrical.

Early newspapers obliged. Leading articles in The Times and provincial papers presented the conflict as a brisk moral necessity, a sort of armed sermon in which Britain and France would “protect the weak,” check Russian ambition, and then go home. The “Eastern Question” turned into a narrative where the Turk appeared mainly as a plot device: a slightly shabby landlord whose property, if seized by the northern neighbor, might ruin the whole street. To object to this tidy objective felt ungenerous, almost rude.

The objective would seem to be straightforward: uphold treaties, shield the Sultan, restrain the Tsar. The press translated this into something emotionally workable for readers who had never seen the Danube but cared a great deal about English honor. Papers explained that a Russia at Constantinople would threaten trade, routes to India, even “civilization” itself. The Ottoman Empire became the last line between Europe and an imagined Slavic flood.

Then the war front began to arrive in the post.

William Howard Russell was, seemingly, a perfectly ordinary Irish reporter for The Times, dispatched on what his editor airily described as a “short excursion” with the Guards to Malta and expected back by Easter; instead he found himself spending twenty-two months in the Crimea, trudging from the camp before Sevastopol to the fetid harbor of Balaklava, where he watched stores pile up while men starved and recorded the town’s “filthy, revolting state.”26

He was The Times man on the spot, which meant that after a breakfast which sometimes existed and sometimes did not, he climbed onto a tired horse and picked his way through mud, dead mules, and men in uniforms dissolving into rags, riding from the lines before Sevastopol down toward Balaklava or across to the hospitals at Scutari. There he watched soldiers “dying in their tents and in the open air,” and noted the “squalor” and “neglect” in which the wounded lay, then went back to whatever corner of canvas or wooden hut currently passed for an office and wrote it all down27. By the first winter in the Crimea his reports described regiments with “no proper shelter,” men in rags, horses dying in heaps, and hospitals where the wounded lay in filth. Readers who had been promised a brisk campaign for the “independence of Turkey” woke up to columns of detail about men freezing within sight of their own supplies.

At that point the “objective” began to split in two.

Officially, Britain still fought for the Ottoman Empire and the balance of power. Unofficially, large portions of the public shifted to a far more urgent aim: save the army from its own government. Middle-class readers wrote furious letters, quoted Russell at their MPs28, and used the language of duty the government had kindly supplied. If this war existed for honor and civilization, why did honor smell of rotting horseflesh and why did civilization forget to pack winter coats?29

Russell’s dispatches turned the press into something closer to an extra arm of Parliament. One contemporary later called newspapers a “fourth arm of the State,” an institution that could make or unmake ministries by the ferocity of its leading articles and the images it printed30.In the winter of 1854–55, that arm pointed directly at Lord Aberdeen’s coalition and squeezed. Night after night, families read about soldiers “dying of disease” in tents that never arrived and rations that mouldered in harbours, while ministers reassured the House that everything in the Crimea “stood in a satisfactory position.”

Aberdeen’s coalition fell in January 1855, and Palmerston glided in to replace him, borne on a wave of newspaper outrage and patriotic anxiety31. Palmerston’s government treated the war aim with a firmer hand. If Britain had already spent thousands of lives and millions of pounds, then the objective must expand until the sacrifice appeared meaningful. Protecting the Sultan no longer sufficed. The press increasingly spoke of the need to “humble” Russia, to secure Europe against future aggression, to obtain guarantees that would justify the dead. The mission had grown from defending Ottoman territory to reshaping the strategic map of the Black Sea.

The coverage also revealed an objective that no one wrote into official documents: the need to manage feeling at home. Reports of disaster could erode support; reports of glorious charges and plucky recovery could stabilize it. War correspondents and editors found themselves performing emotional triage on a national scale. Russell might describe the “melancholy spectacle” of mismanagement in one column and the “unconquerable spirit” of the rank and file in the next, so readers could rage at the government yet still love the war.32

Other voices joined in. Memoirs and letters by officers and rankers, later collected in volumes like Russell’s Despatches from the Crimea and Voice from the Ranks, offered additional proof that the official objective had drifted far from the lived reality of the trenches33. The more testimony appeared in print, the more the press could insist that any settlement which left Russia free to resume pressure on the Ottomans would betray those experiences. A flimsy peace, acceptable perhaps in 1853, became almost obscene in 1855 when stacked against statistics that estimated some twenty-two thousand British dead, over seventeen thousand from disease alone34.

By the end of the war, the story that emerged in newspapers bore only family resemblance (think second cousins) to the one that had launched the expedition. The official objective had begun as a neat sentence about Ottoman integrity and European equilibrium. Under the sustained glare of the press, it turned into something heavier and harder to satisfy: a demand that the map of the Black Sea, the terms of Russian naval power, and the fate of future Ottomans all somehow redeem the sight of men starving in a British camp.

Whether that redemption truly occurred is another question. What matters here is that the press kept changing the terms on which the war could be called “worth it.” It sold the war at the beginning, nearly broke the government in the middle, and helped stitch together a narrative of necessary sacrifice at the end. If the Objective Principle requires a clear answer to “Why are we fighting?”, then in the Crimea the clearest answers sat, uneasily, between advertisements for patent medicines and reports from the theatre.

So where does this leave the Ottoman and French Empires? More in Part III.

Footnotes & Sources

The Objective Principle

Some will argue that having an objective for war is quite possibly the most important thing about a war. Why are we fighting? Why are we dying? And, more practically, by what measure can we consider a war/battle and all the awful business associated with it finished? The why is the only thing that separates civilization from mass, recreational homicide. Ignore the why and we might as well flail mighty swords in the wayward wind. In the most venerable of words: without objective “you got no pull, no power, no nothin’.”1

Which brings me to the reason I am writing this post in the first place. I promised a critical war analysis using the US Army Principles of War on The Crimean War for reasons discussed here. And because I am trying to be a better person and begin this thing called “following through on promises”, well here we are. I think it’s important to start this post with the first principle itself: The Objective (if you’re already muttering “spit it out” and itching to skip the semantics and dive straight into the Crimean War at the end of this post, I understand…but I strongly discourage it).

According to the US Army Principles of War2, the principle of objective is as follows:

Every military operation should be directed towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.

The ultimate military objective of war is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight. The objective of each operation must contribute to this ultimate objective. Each intermediate objective must be such that its attainment will most directly, quickly and economically contribute to the purpose of the operation. The selection of an objective is based upon consideration of the means available, the enemy, and the area of the operations. Every commander must understand and clearly define his objective and consider each contemplated action in light thereof.

I am going to be honest with you. I hate this principle (jury still out on the others). It lives at the tactical level, where everything is “operations” and “intermediate objectives” which is completely fine if you are a military strategist or tactician (general, officer, etc) needing to making arrangements of bodies/guns/ships/supply lines (all instruments of war) for the express purpose of making other people do things (or stop doing them) by force. Cool. You do you boo. But for the statesmen and the soldiers on the ground, noble ideals/loftier purposes and clean one-liners make for better “objectives.” Let’s break this principle down and see how it’s worth using for the exercise of analyzing The Crimean War.

What The Principle (kind of) Gets Right

As far as principles go, it’s a complicated one and it, rightfully, sets the bar pretty high. If we’re going to be reckless as a human species, we may as well do it with a collar on and the leash pulled as tight as possible. This maxim sounds pretty crude, but what I mean to say is, we should not enter into war lightly and principles like these should deter rather than encourage (I get tired just looking at it). Of course, there are the powers-that-be that take one look at this and go pish posh, hog wash, nonsense, we go forth and make violence! without much thought to principles.

What the principle does give us are some key words we can define and use.

Take “clearly defined.”
On paper, this means an objective you can write in one sentence without huffing and puffing (but extra points if you can say it while running at 60%+ of your VO2 max). In war, “maintain peace,” “check aggression,” “uphold prestige,” and “stand up for our values on the world stage” are not clearly defined objectives; they are feelings (I’m imagining a government mood board at the Kremlin or in Westminster). “Prevent Russia from establishing permanent naval dominance in the Black Sea” is closer. “Ensure the Ottoman Empire survives the next twenty years as a buffer state” is closer still.

Then we have “decisive.”
Decisive means that when the objective is achieved, the situation changes in a way that cannot easily be undone by the enemy over a long weekend. Taking a random hill because it looks easy to climb is not decisive. Destroying the enemy’s only railway into the front might be. Decisiveness in war is brutally dull: does this objective alter the enemy’s ability to continue the fight in a meaningful, durable way? If the answer is “no, but it will look marvellous in the papers” what we’ve got is public relations attached to a body count.

“Attainable” is the word that ought to have war planners waking up at three in the morning as this seems the most difficult and nightmarish to think about.

It means achievable with the forces, logistics, political will, and time you actually have. Not the army you wish you had, not the allies you hope will stop sulking and show up for you, and not the budget that exists only in your dreams. An objective that requires three armies when you only have one is delusional and simply unattainable which won’t do. In the context of war, “attainable” asks: Can you do this before your troops, your money, or your voters give up on you? If the honest answer is “probably not,” then it is not an objective, it’s a hieroglyphics on the wall written in the blood of others.

Now the little chorus of adverbs: “directly, quickly, and economically contribute.”
“Directly” means there should be a short, visible line between the operation and the ultimate aim. Seizing a port that controls the enemy’s supply lines is directly relevant. Attacking something far away because it makes you feel better about last week’s embarrassing tactical failures is not. War is full of operations that are emotionally satisfying (to the psychopaths of this world) and strategically pointless; “directly” is meant to keep those thoughts hidden in the bottom sock drawer.

“Quickly” is about limiting the time your soldiers, civilians, and institutions are exposed to the corrosive effects of war. The longer a conflict drags on, the more everything frays: morale, economies, governments, the patience of people who used to think this was a good idea. So “quickly” here means: do not choose objectives that require three winters in a trench if a sane alternative exists.

“Economically” is the most cynical and honest of the lot.
It doesn’t mean “cheap,” it means least wasteful, where “waste” includes lives, matériel, time, political capital, and whatever is left of your international reputation. An operation can be a tactical success and still be economically obscene if it burns through men and resources for minimal strategic gain. In war, “economical” is the unpleasant question: Is this worth what it will cost us to do and to sustain? If the answer is “no, but we’re too proud to stop now,” then congratulations: you’ve left the realm of economy and entered the realm of ego.

And then there is “purpose.”
This is the one word that sounds as if it doesn’t belong in the same paragraph as “intermediate objective.” Purpose is the reason behind the whole miserable enterprise: the political end-state, the condition you want the world to be in when you finally stop killing people and go home. Secure the independence of X state, prevent Y from controlling Z region, ensure our own survival as a regime these are purposes. They can be noble, self-serving, or both, but they must exist. You cannot “contribute to the purpose of the operation” if no one has had the courage to say out loud what that purpose is.

And this is where the principle accidentally incriminates half of modern war-making. It assumes that somewhere, someone has written down a real, coherent purpose, and that every operation is measured against it. In reality, purposes are often split: the one you tell the people you govern, the one you whisper to your allies to gain a foothold, and the one you admit to yourself at…well, three in the morning. Purpose. But that tiny word is still the crack in the wall: the place where politics, ideals, fear, vanity, and survival leak into all the tidy talk of “operations” and “intermediate objectives.”

And that, of course, is exactly where the trouble starts.

What The Principle Misses

The political theatre of war means that there are varying degrees of Purpose: stated objectives for the purposes of gaining support. After all, war requires resources and funds that are footed by the taxpayers. And then there are the real objectives , those which truly motivate a power to join, move through, and exit a war but are never stated in the moment behind ulterior motives and hidden in secret intel (that just so happen to surface much later). The US Army’s Principles of War does not distinguish between these two types of objectives, and stated and real objectives may at times overlap but in the case of the Crimean War they were more oftentimes very different (see Britain below). This is where the framework fails because it is important to look at what distinguishes stated and real objectives.

Additionally, the principle also misses something else entirely. Let me explain.

“The ultimate military objective of war is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight.”

This is where the principle permits itself a moment of poetry: a single ruffle on an otherwise starchy white and ironclad paragraph. It might have stopped quite respectably at destruction of armed forces and called it a day, but someone, somewhere stood up, pointed their finger in the air dramatically and said “Yes, yes, of course, we’ll break their bodies and disrupt their supply lines, but I feel we should also squash their spirit, like really get into the soft chewy centre of despair.”

It is a terrible ambition to wish not only for triumph but for outright submission. To borrow Rousseau’s language, it is to destroy not just the body politic, but the inner man/the civic self, the one who dares to believe his suffering has purpose. And what is war, if not the grandest stage for such illusions of purpose?

But the phrasing can get a little confusing. Whose will are we talking about really?

His will to fight.

The principle frames this as an exercise in dismantling the will of the other. We act, he cracks. We remain a kind of disembodied machine, serenely intact, but bending over while the enemy psyche does all the interesting collapsing. This assumes nothing about how the “we” more or less tolerates all the trauma that “our” government/state puts the “us” through. Feelings are all safely located on the other side of the line. In other words, any war objective is required to take tender account of the will of the other, while treating the will of the self as an inexhaustible resource. We are fine. Everything is fine (we drone on and on).

The Crimean War Objectives

Using the stated vs read objectives approach for each state involved in The Crimean War, I list out what these are below.

Russian Empire

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Defend the rights/privileges of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire; resolve the dispute over protection of holy places and religious communities.

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Expand Russian influence over Ottoman decision-making (and the Danubian principalities), strengthen Russia’s position in the Black Sea/Straits system, and reassert imperial prestige after earlier diplomatic constraints using “protection” language as the respectable wrapper for leverage.

Ottoman Empire

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Preserve sovereignty over its territories and religious governance; resist foreign “protector” claims and punish Russian violations of Ottoman authority (especially after Russian moves into Ottoman-aligned principalities).

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Essentially survival: keep the empire intact long enough to remain a state with choices. Maintain control of the Straits regime and prevent the precedent that a great power can carve out permanent supervisory rights inside Ottoman borders. This is also the state with the most unforgiving of objectives and in this respect the objectives where the stated and real most closely align with each other.

Britain

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Support the Ottoman Empire and uphold the European balance; respond to Russian aggression and protect lawful order in the region.

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Prevent Russia from achieving dominance in the Black Sea and from converting Ottoman weakness into Russian control; defend British strategic pathways and influence in the eastern Mediterranean system; preserve “credibility” (which, in practice, means making sure Russia cannot rewrite the rules by force).

France (Second Empire)

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Defend Catholic interests and prestige tied to the Holy Places question; support the Ottoman Empire against Russian pressure in the name of European stability.

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Combine containment of Russia with regime prestige: a foreign war that consolidates authority at home, restores France’s great-power stage presence, and binds Britain into a coalition that makes France look indispensable rather than merely decorative.

Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont-Sardinia)

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Join the coalition as a principled participant in the European settlement; contribute troops to the common cause against Russian aggression.

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Buy a seat at the adult table: essentially gain diplomatic access and leverage for the Italian question using the war as currency to pull attention toward unification and away from Austrian gatekeeping.

Austria (not a belligerent, but a decisive diplomatic actor)

Stated objectives (public rationale)

Preserve stability in Central/Eastern Europe; prevent the war from spilling into Austrian-adjacent territories; pressure Russia to withdraw from the Danubian principalities.

Real objectives (strategic/political drivers)

Keep Russia from becoming too strong in the Balkans and keep the Ottoman collapse from destabilizing Austria’s own multi-ethnic empire while avoiding a full commitment that could ignite revolution, bankrupt Vienna, or hand rivals a pretext to rearrange Europe without Austrian consent.

Upcoming: The Objective Analysis

As part of the second part of this The Object Analysis, I will be looking at

• how these objectives formed and evolved over the length of the war

• whether they properly met the criteria of clearly defined, decisive, and attainable in context of The Crimean War

• and whether the US Army Principles War, The Object Principle passes “The Crimean War” stress test

I will be using some of the following sources in the analysis.

Primary Sources.

1. Hansard. Access to British parliamentary speeches, notably from Dec of 1854, that showcase spectacular moments from the likes of MP Benjamin Disraeli.

2. Private letters. Access to personal narratives from soldiers on the ground with a heavy focus on British soldiers.

3. Tolstoy’s Svestapol Sketches. He wrote his thoughts as an officer in the Russian army highlighting what I will be referring to as the “Russian will” of the Russian peasants/serfs that made up much of the Russian armed forces.

4. William Russell’s correspondence. Arguably one of the first war correspondents, this is an interesting look at British soldier’s on the front.

5. Parliament Committee. In January 1855, John Arthur Roebuck stands up in the House of Commons and proposes a Select Committee to investigate “the condition of the British Army before Sebastopol, and into the conduct of those Departments of the Government whose duty it has been to minister to the wants of that Army.” That is Victorian for: what on earth are you people doing to our soldiers??

6. Parliament Russia and the Porte.

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“The Valley of the Shadow of Death,” photographed by Roger Fenton in 1855.1

A Half-Apology

I promised my Substack subscribers English history. Specifically, English history of the Middle Ages. But I’ve been sidetracked lately. Maybe it’s the shift in weather or maybe it’s because I feel claustrophobic when I box myself in.2 What I can say is that I will be talking and writing a little bit about everything that I think is interesting and that I have some foundation for discussing (most of which will be English history). By way of contrast, I have a great interest in saltwater taffy but I have not read a single primary source, if those exist, on saltwater taffy so I will not be including it in this Substack.3

On the Moral Ambiguity of Critically Analyzing Wars

Unlike with saltwater taffy, what I do have a more solid footing in is military intelligence, particularly Security. I write that not with pride, and certainly not as someone who supports war in any form (domestic, international, electronic, cyber, etc.4), but as a matter of professional fact. War exists, and I hate that it does.

That said, military strategy frameworks, like the one developed by the U.S. Army after World War I and later applied by Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. in his critical analysis of the Vietnam War5, are important, even if it is tiptoeing the line between responsible and irresponsible.

Let me try to explain the “irresponsible” part of this a bit more: frameworks like the US Army’s Principles of War6 build into it an inherent need for public support of war. For Summers, this was first clear in the American Constitution in rebellion against those rat bastards7 sitting in the English Parliament and on the throne:

“Implicit in this rule was the rejection of an 18th century-type army answerable only to the Executive. The American Army would be a people’s Army to be committed only by the will of the people.” (Summers, p.22-23)8

Part of the problem of applying the Principles of War retroactively (built from this American people’s army construct) to a war fought in Europe, and between many different and shifting allegiances among European powers, despite the argument for the universality of its application, is that the powers-that-be were not necessarily thinking about public support or the people at all. It can be argued that this retroactive application is revisionist and opaques the history.

My counter-argument is that frameworks that are used for political and military purposes for future events require constant “stress testing” from events where cause and effect have already occurred. Rather than use the framework to pass a moral judgement on wars in history, we should be using wars in history to identify gaps in the framework. This should be the proper application of the Principles of War on…say…the Crimean War.

Despite this argument, we have to also acknowledge some more concerning moral issues. There’s something intellectually impressive about trying to structure the chaos of war. Building a framework to make sense of war, to impose logic on something so inherently irrational, is an achievement. BUT there is a high likelihood of reducing human lives to data points and abstractions.

In the words of Sir John Keegan in his The Face of Battle:

“[...] how very much superior to Caesar’s is Thucydides’ style of battle narrative. Where Caesar’s soldiers are automatons, Thucydides’ are human beings; where their actions depend on his presence of absence, Thucydides’ are motivated by self-concern.[...] where Caesar can only introduce the position of the standards as an external influence on their behavior, Thucydides mentions the appeals of music, [...], patriotism, xenophobia, professional pride [...]” (Keegan, p. 66)9

It is clear that Keegan’s philosophy of critical historiography is to frame historical events with those human elements that get lost in the technical details.

In the spirit of Sir Keegan and some of the moral ambiguities understood, I have decided to put together a little Substack series where I critically analyze the Crimean War with the hope of offsetting dehumanizing generalizations/patterns with some of the humanity that analyses like these typically eliminate AND with the acknowledgement that the exercise of applying this framework retroactively to the Crimean War will undoubtedly paint it in a bad light. *phew*

The only thing I can, with any honesty, vow to deliver (though God help you if you hold me to it) is that each Substack post shall tackle one of the hallowed Principles of War, leaving you, I hope, incrementally more informed and proportionately more despondent. Knowledge is Power, but it is more often a well-lit tunnel to Despair.

What is a Critical Analysis of War?

So what is a critical analysis of war? The straightforward, textbook definition goes something like:

Critical analysis of war is the natural intersection of military history and critical historiography. So things get complicated very quickly without some perspective. But I don’t want to talk about taxonomies.

The more dramatic part of me believes it’s the act of taking a war and holding it up for closer inspection. It is Sir Isaac Newton lifting a prism to a beam of white light, fracturing it to distill all the various colors (in this case the colors being the composite parts of war: strategy, tactical and everything in between). A critical analysis of war seeks to dissect in order to dispel any illusions.

The optimistic part of me believes this is a sure-fire way to prevent wars, but the realist knows that these frameworks are often co-opted for continued violence and oppression. As a collective, I propose we stop doing this.

There are a few approaches of critical analysis independent of the framework used that also need to be highlighted.

Two Camps in Critical Historiography

Let’s begin here, as most things do in war, with a man in uniform who took himself way too seriously. Carl von Clausewitz was a Prussian officer and Napoleonic war veteran. His magnum opus, On War (Vom Kriege)10, is dense to say the least.

And because Clausewitz was Prussian he naturally11 concluded that war was an extension of rational statecraft and the function of state logic (not just a series of battles and decisions), “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.”12

We can consider this the “top-down” view of war. That is, the variable of war being state-level systems. Furthermore, the approach stays at a “bird’s-eye view”. Meaning, not much emphasis is placed on the individual experience of war. The con of this approach might be obvious; that of sanitizing events from the human experience.

This sounds completely unhinged, and maybe it is. But we have to remember that he lived at the turn of the 19th century and hit on some strategic points that would be later used, as Summers argued, by the North Vietnamese in the 1960s to their advantage. Clausewitz wasn’t a total abstraction junkie. In Book VI, he thought through the importance of what we now call “asymmetric warfare.” This is the idea that small powers can, and perhaps should, go on the offensive if they control the political tempo. He writes:

“Suppose a small power is at war with a great one, [...], if the political initiative lies with the smaller power, it should take the military offensive.”13

But this isn’t exactly: Clausewitz never set foot in a battlefield where the line between life and death was measured in footsteps and seconds.14

Which leads us to the second camp under Sir John Keegan, an English military historian, a man who regarded Clausewitz’s theory as deeply unhelpful and certainly not based on the human realities and costs of war.

Keegan rejected the “war-as-politics” model wholesale:

“War is not the continuation of politics by other means. It is an entirely separate activity, grimly distinct, and irreducible to logic.”15

Where Clausewitz surveyed from on high, Keegan waded below. His was a “bottom-up” model: the war of privates and soldiers on the ground. Treaties and strategy were of little interest to Keegan. His research and approach was to scour diaries and personal accounts from men who lived through battle.

Keegan gave us what he called the face of battle, a more honest, if less tidy, understanding of conflict. His methodology was grounded in first-hand accounts, battlefield archaeology, and deep (almost indecent)16 curiosity about what it actually felt like to kill or be killed.

Of course, this model has its flaws. Chief among them: emotional overfitting. You get bogged down in the personal and forget to zoom out. It’s the academic equivalent of reading all the love letters and forgetting to mention the divorce. Or, to borrow a metaphor from machine learning (because I have to make use of my career somehow), optimizing parameters of a model on a few datasets is a great way to make sense of those few datasets, but introduce it to new datasets (aka a new and future war) and the model will be entirely useless (i.e. no predictive power).

Both Clausewitz and Keegan will be thought of as the critical analysis gets underway. And if we’re serious about preventing wars, and not just poeticizing them post-mortem, then we need to use both approaches. If you’ve ever find yourself needing to construct a foreign or military policy you’ll find out that probably both matter.

So WHY The Crimean War?

First and foremost: the Crimean War is a perfect exemplar of what happens when those at the top haven’t a clue what they’re doing. Part of the issues included bureaucratic challenges and miscommunication between coalitions, especially within the British government. There the mismanagement was practically institutional. The war became, in effect, a study in strategic incompetence from the heights of power, which still deserves our scrutiny.

Second: the Crimean War is one of the first conflicts that began to feel like what we now recognise as a “modern war,” not least because mass media began to shape it. Correspondents, newspapers, and photographs turned it into a spectacle: something that could be seen from home and debated in clubs. As one historian argued, the Crimean War marked the advent of war as mass‑media event, with reportage and imagery creating a “cultural genealogy” of conflict that endured long after the cannons ceased.17

Third: it’s a devastating case study in what happens when no clear, shared objectives exist. Wars with shifting justifications are uniquely horrifying. The coalition’s aims were muddled, shifting between strategic, religious, and political rationales. When you have muddled objectives, confusion and catastrophe rush in to fill the void. And that is a story worth dissecting especially in a nuclear age, where miscommunication or misjudgement can scale up from mud‑soaked trenches to long‑range missiles.

Lastly, this gives me an excuse to read more about Florence Nightingale because, frankly, I have a weakness for iron-willed women.

The Framework: Principles of War

A quick note on the framework that will be used. The US Army calls it “Principles of War” which was developed in response to the atrocities of World War I and was used by Summers to critically analyze the Vietnam War. In his own words,

“The principles of war, thus derived, are therefore part of the art rather than the science of war. They are neither immutable nor causal, and they do not provide a precise mathematical formula for success in battle. Their value lies in their utility as a frame of reference for analysis of strategic and tactical issues.“

That of course is the spirit in capturing and applying these principles to any war, not just the Vietnam War.

Let’s get into what these principles are.

1. Objective - Every military operation should be directed towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective.

2. Offensive - Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative

3. Mass - Concentrate combat power at the decisive place and time

4. Economy of Force – Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts

5. Maneuver - Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power

6. Unity of Command - For every objective, there should be unity of effort under one responsible commander

7. Security - Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage

8. Surprise - Strike the enemy at a time and/or place in a manner for which is unprepared

9. Simplicity - Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to insure thorough understanding.

Footnotes & Sources

One day, I happened to be wandering the windy streets of the town of Bath, England (I probably should use the word “lost” here, but getting lost in Bath is like getting politely escorted around by one architectural/historical “show-off” after the next. Besides, it is near impossible to get lost there although I somehow managed to that day. When you find yourself walking directly from the Jane Austen Centre to the Pret a Manger in a manner of minutes it’s your clue that you’ve decidedly gone the wrong way). So when I say that I “stumbled” upon the old Abbey Cemetery about fifteen minutes from the city centre, please know that I had already walked for over two hours, highly overstimulated and undercaffeinated (my high tea reservation was only an hour away so I held out, but my mind was gutted). Of course what happened next will seem pretty mundane and I want this to come out more nonchalant than it will (although I feel like nonchalance is over-rated and am going to be committed to more chalance going forward). BUT, the visit to the Abbey Cemetery will forever be a memory burned into my brain.

Maybe it’s forever because in a matter of seconds two different emotions had wholly consumed me. Let me explain more.

First, I sauntered (skipped up) to the Abbey Cemetery because the whole thing appealed to my Anglican aspirations and this being Bath, I thought I could find some interesting people in the cemetery (if you’re interested, you can do a grave search here). I initially was like, cool maybe I can find some of Jane Austen’s relatives here and I let this curiosity guide me into a verdantly overgrown cemetery out overlooking the rolling hills around Bath (also I acknowledge that this is one-dimensional thinking so please know that as much as you or I love Jane Austen, Bath existed thousands of years before Austen and that there is more history here than her. It pains me to acknowledge this but sometimes truths are pretty painful). The beauty of course humbled me almost immediately and my writing will never do this view justice (so you get a few photos, which also will never live up to the real thing but it does get closer).

Exhibit A of “Skipping”

A View of the Cemetery

As I was walking around alone in a cemetery with hundreds of people buried beneath the earth, things got a little eerie. Now, I don’t necessarily believe in the paranormal, too many of my neurons are committed to deductive reasoning and science, but there is always an undercurrent of superstition at the base layer (maybe I should call this intuition rather than superstition). At the time, I thought I was just hungry (thinking about those little cucumber tea sandwiches was not helping), but I did follow what I can only describe as a “pull.”

The “pull” took me to the “front” of the cemetery, if cemeteries can be said to have a front, near the old stone wall and the sweeping view over the English countryside. And in this front stood an elm tree. It wasn’t a particularly sunny day, but I immediately thought how lovely it would be to be buried beneath it, for those rare afternoons when the sun did break through heavily. I imagined that whoever lay here must have been well loved: placed in the best corner, under a gracious tree, facing the most generous of views in England.

View of the Twin Gravestones

Lower side of picture.

And, of course, in my very Western, mildly unhinged capitalist brain, where (the thought goes that) the “best” people always get the “best” views, I assumed that real estate here must be rationed according to social rank. That whoever claimed this scenic corner of the dead had either impeccable lineage and/or deep pockets. I thought, Ah, these must be important people. Someone’s ancestors with numerals after their names. But when I looked down, I saw something else entirely. Humble graves side by side, nearly identical headstones.

When I inspected more closely I saw the name of one with the date of 1917. I remember thinking how odd that was because the ones that were catching my eye were the older gravestones where people had died in the 1700s/1800s. Then of course, my next thought was of course a sad one. 1917 the peak of English casualties in World War I. When I looked at the other gravestone I saw a a date of 1918 and the same last name. Then another little plaque from a grief-stricken mother who was saddened beyond belief of her two sons dying within a year apart. Now the memory is fuzzy and because I wanted to respect the graves by not taking a close-up picture I am now in a bit of a conundrum as I cannot recall the names (although a call or email to the abbey is on my list of things I must do even though it seems scary. I can always wait for my trip in February, but patience is not my strong-suit).

Then, of course, the next thing that happened really shocked me. I started to cry. The tears welled up uncontrollably. When I came to some realization that this was probably the first time someone cried this much over these graves in a hundred years, I cried even more. To be honest, it was cathartic and it was the most peaceful cry I think I ever had. I put a hand on each of their stones as if giving them a pat on the back (although later when I was in full control of emotions the thought did cross my mind that a pat on the back has got to be the lamest way to honor dead soldiers who fought so hard in battle. Well-done laddie *pats back*).

When I thought I was near done crying, I heard some crackle of leaves to my right. Shit, people. But to my relief, it was a little Norwich Terrier (or some other furry adjacent) that had the coloring of slightly burnt toast and perky ears. He looked at me with cute curiosity for a good five seconds around a little hedge that sat parallel to the cemetery wall. The most adorable dog, scampering around a cemetery hopping around the gravestones, seemed to me to be the most endearing English thing I ever observed and I felt at home.

His head was a little cocked to the side as if he knew that I was sad (or maybe he was wondering if I was a threat or a potential playmate). We continued to stare at each other, when I heard some shouts from the other end of the cemetery. “Wilbur! Come here Wilbur!” The little lad trotted off with some determined grunts.

It was then that I started laughing (startling myself) A minute earlier I’d been crying, and now here I was giggling in front of gravestones which felt wildly inappropriate. I was really glad to be “alone.”

What moved me most was how deeply these two brothers were honored. Standing there, I found I could hold both things at once: sadness and joy. Both were there, unforced. I wasn’t trying to resolve them; they simply existed alongside each other.

A Poem

I wrote a poem to hopefully honor as much as I could these brave brothers. (Note: AI generated video was created to supplement the poem; this might be something I will not do again).