History book review

Look beyond the battlefields of the Crimean War through the searching eyes of Figes and you find a deep obsession with religious crusade, from the Holy Land to the Caucusus.

The Ottoman empire was dying and Tsarist Russia had ambitions, fuelled by clashes between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. After a particularly sinister campaign against the Turks, the Times thundered: “The Russian Emperor has thrown down the gauntlet to the Western powers.”

This might have been labelled a newspaper war, for the great British public was at last permitted a voice on world affairs, and of course the military would have its day. The folly that followed was unmatched in British history. The episode was a Valley of Death with rampant disease, frostbite and even starvation. Rising above all, however, was a tower of military blunders.

Figes’s gift is to go where others feared to tread — in the dark recesses of history that led to the Victorian campaign, stoked by nationalism and imperial rivalries. His is the wider view and it is a pleasure to ride along with him to find, in the famous phrase, the reason why. While the battles (the Alma, Inkerman, Sevastopol) are not neglected from either the Allied or Russian side, we get a deeper understanding of how Britain and France came to enter the war in support of the Turks Figes reckons some 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in a cauldron of tragedy, stirred by incompetent officers under a cloak of poor strategy and fostered by the new military technology that included steamships and railways. “Ah! These English,” a French officer is quoted. “They are men of undoubted courage but they know only how to get themselves killed.” Florence Nightingale was to testify to the truth of this in her Scutari hospital, where to enter was usually to cross the last threshold.

Orlando Figes is due to speak at the Oxford Literary Festival in April