This book is based on published correspondence. Thus it stands in debt to the scores of persons who have edited and selected the material referred to in the notes as well as to the authors of the letters themselves. Literal translation from the French has been this writer's responsibility. The research was done in library collections at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, and Harvard University. Personal thanks are due to Professor Emeritus Chester Penn Higby at Wisconsin who encouraged my early interest in the Crimean War and to Professor Chester V. Easum, also of Wisconsin, for under standing and assistance at a time when both were sorely needed. The typing of various stages of the manuscript was done by the secretarial staff of the Humanities Department at the Massa chusetts Institute of Technology, and also by my wife, Dorothy, whose patient efforts in this project have been considerable. While this book has something to say to the professional historian, I hope that the general reader may also find interest in these ambitious officers and their emperor.

This is a study of the British military intelligence operations during the Crimean War. It details the beginnings of the intelligence operations as a result of the British Commander, Lord Raglan's, need for information on the enemy, and traces the subsequent development of the system.

Please note that the maps available in the print edition do not appear in the ebook. From "the great storyteller of modern Russian historians," (Financial Times) the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale—these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empires—the British, French, Turkish, and Russian—in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation; from the ordinary soldiers and nurses on the battlefields to the women and children in towns under siege.. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force whose depiction of ethnic cleansing and the West's relations with the Muslim world resonates with contemporary overtones. At once a rigorous, original study and a sweeping, panoramic narrative, The Crimean War is the definitive account of the war that mapped the terrain for today's world..

The definitive history of the Crimean War from world-renowned historian Trevor Royle. The Crimean War is one of history's most compelling subjects. It encompassed human suffering, woeful leadership and maladministration on a grand scale. It created a heroic myth out of the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade and, in Florence Nightingale, it produced one of history's great heroes. New weapons were introduced; trench combat became a fact of daily warfare outside Sebastopol; medical innovation saved countless soldiers' lives that would otherwise have been lost. The war paved the way for the greater conflagration which broke out in 1914 and greatly prefigured the current situation in Eastern Europe.

Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics. With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores * The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War * The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States * The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved * The nature of the fighting itself The Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy. This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.

The Crimean War has been called ‘the last great war to be fought without the help of modern resources of science’. It was also the last great war to be fought by the British army in all its splendour of scarlet and gold, using weapons and tactics which would not have astonished the Prince Rupert or the Duke of Marlborough. Many who fought in the First, and not a few who fought in the Second, World War will have known personally those who took part in such battles and heard their accounts from their own lips. On the other hand no campaign should be more familiar, because none has been ‘covered’ more fully and more candidly. The historian of the Crimean battles has then (it would appear) only to make a synthesis of the innumerable letters and reports and his story is complete. Unfortunately this is not so. With smoke from the black powder then used drifting across the battlefield, lying heavily over batteries, the combatant could often see and report little more than what had happened in his vicinity; and even in this he is not necessarily reliable... As for those who recollected in tranquillity—and there were many—it is enough to record the remark of a contemporary Canadian military historian: ‘Memory can play tricks upon an officer after some lapse of time, especially when the officer’s own interest and prejudice are engaged.’ Beset by these difficulties the writer who surrounds every incident with reservations and qualifications will rapidly weary his readers. He must on matters of moment, such for example as Nolan’s responsibility for the Light Brigade charge, use his judgment on the evidence available and make up his own mind. This I have tried to do.”

The Crimean War (1853-56) between Russia, Turkey, Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia was a diplomatically preventable conflict for influence over an unstable Near and Middle East. It could have broken out in any decade between Napoleon and Wilhelm II; equally, it need never have occurred. In this masterly study, based on massive archival research, David Goldfrank argues that the European diplomatic roots of the war stretch far beyond the `Eastern Question' itself, and shows how the domestic concerns of the participants contributed to the outbreak of hostilities.