Black Myth

Ten years ago the BBC conducted a poll on the 100 greatest Britons.  Those who notice this sort of thing noticed that no black people made it on to the list, so a black list was produced.  Sorry; how else am I to describe it?!  If I tell you that it features the Labour MP Diane Abbot that might give you a measure of the quality of ‘greatness.’ 

The whole thing is really quite ridiculous, risibly so at points.  I have no problem at all with black people looking for positive role models, but who really needs this kind of silly condescension?  These is also a kind of desperation, it seems to me, in the search for the century.  Philipa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III, is on the list.  Why?  Because she was the mother of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales!  You know, and I know and anyone with any wit knows this had nothing at all to do with the colour of his skin! 

Mary Seacole is also there.  In fact she tops the list, this supposed black heroine of the Crimean War.  She’s rather the flavour of the day, this woman, even replacing Florence Nightingale as the true Lady of the Lamp.  This is not just a result of black elevation, but white guilt, as Lynne McDonald suggests in a brilliant, eye-opening piece in the latest issue of History Today (Nursing’s Bitter Rivalry).  I almost passed over this because, quite frankly, the subject does not really interest me that much.  I’m so glad I didn’t.  The Seacole story, I know now, is a lot of black propaganda. (Sorry; I couldn’t resist that either!)  It’s only fair to add that it’s not of the lady’s devising. 

I give you Jamaican-born Mary Seacole, an hotelier and herbalist by profession.  So far as the quality of ‘blackness’ is concerned black people would be well-advised to stay well clear of the truth; the myth is much more comforting.  She was three-quarters white and, as she explains in her journals, proud of her ‘Scotch blood’.  Her writing, moreover, is full of the usual nineteenth century stereotypes.  She refers to black people as ‘negroes’ and ‘niggers.’  It’s never a self-reference.  No, she took considerable pains to distance herself from what she called the ‘lazy Creole’ image, evidenced in her “good for nothing black cooks.”

But the myth has wings.  I understand that a massive statue is to be erected to this ‘Pioneer Nurse’ at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, the place where Florence Nightingale was based for forty years.  The monument, McDonald says, will even be visible from the House of Commons, taller both than that of Florence Nightingale at Waterloo Place and Edith Cavell in St Martin’s Lane.

I suppose I have to congratulate the fundraisers on fighting such a brilliant campaign, brilliant enough for the hospital trustees to grant permission on a foundation of evidentiary quicksand.  The statue will show ‘Britain’s black heroine’, with medals won for bravery, walking on to a Crimean battlefield to treat the wounded.  There is only one problem: it’s a lie.    

Here are the inconvenient facts.  Unlike Nightingale, Seacole never nursed, never trained as a nurse and never worked in a hospital.  In the Crimea she ran a hotel, catering specifically for officers, a thing she remarks on with a snobbish sense of delight.  She never won any medals, and never claimed to have won any medals, though that did nor stop her from wearing medals. 

Even the Nursing Standard, a magazine owned by the Royal College of Nursing, which supports the Seacole statue campaign, has contributed to the mythology. Over the past ten years it has published more than seventy articles lauding her ‘achievements’, even though they give not a single concrete example of Seacole’s contribution to the profession. 

The media has taken up the angel Seacole and devil Nightingale campaign.  In Mary Seacole: a Hidden History, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in 2005, it was claimed on no evidence at all that Seacole had “saved thousands of lives.”  The fakery, for fakery it is, has even made it into children’s literature.  In The Life of Mary Seacole by Emma Lynch she is described as nursing soldiers from 5am until midday before going on to the battlefield, presumably to look for more.

It never happened.  She was present at only two engagements, the Redan assault in June and Tchernya in August 1855.  In her journal she gives no details, other than to say that it was ‘pleasant enough’ and a source of ‘strange excitement’.’  Yes, I suppose it was.  Meanwhile it was back to the British Hotel, where lightly wounded officers (the serious cases were sent to Nightingale in Turkey) could feast on such delights as lobster, oysters, wild fowl and game, all items well beyond the means of ordinary soldiers. 

If you really want to know about Seacole it’s best to ignore the saccharine-sweet hagiography.  Go instead to The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, her own account originally published in 1857, a reasonably honest testament, unlike so much of the present dishonesty surrounding her memory.  We are all ill-served by this sort of nonsense, black people most of all, treated by a certain shade of white liberal opinion as though they were children to be indulged in a state of innocence.  It’s just a mirror image of the old racism. 

The valley of death

It’s Good Friday, April 10, 1846. Jerusalem is packed with pilgrims on an Easter weekend that happened to fall on the same date in both the Latin and Orthodox calendars. The mood is tense. The two religious communities had been arguing over who has the right to be first to carry out the rituals at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the holiest places in Christendom, standing on the spot where Jesus is said to have been crucified.

That Friday was to be anything but good. The Catholics arrived only to find that the Greeks were there first. A fight broke out, priest against priest, soon to be joined by monks and pilgrims from the respective camps. People fought not just with fists but anything they could get a hold of – crucifixes, candlesticks, chalices, lamps and incense burners. Wood was torn from the sacred shrines and used as clubs. Knives and pistols were smuggled into the church. By the time the Mehemet Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, had restored order forty people lay dead.

This dreadful incident, all in the name of a shared belief, marks the departure for Orlando Figes’ Crimea, the Last Crusade, the first full account of the Crimean War that I have read. I know Figes well, one of the best specialists on Russian history in the English-speaking world, the author of the superlative A People’s Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924. Although his history of the Crimean War lacks the range and power of the latter book, he has done a tremendous service, placing the conflict firmly within the context of the Eastern Question – the issues arising from the continuing decline of the Ottoman Empire – and European power politics as a whole.

I’m not completely convinced by his ‘crusading hook’, I have to say. Yes the war did begin with a conflict over who had the best claim to protect the holy places within the Turkish empire, the Catholic French or the Orthodox Russians, and again, yes, Tsar Nicholas I was strong in his conviction that he was a defender of the ‘true’ faith, a defender of the Orthodox faithful in all the Turkish lands. But almost immediately, when the fighting started, the religious issue was obscured by more general issues arising from European geopolitics. Besides, a war which involved Turkish Muslims, British Protestants and French Catholics, on one side, against Orthodox Russians, on the other, does not look much like a ‘crusade.’ The Tsar may have begun with crusading thoughts, but before his death in March 1855 he was more preoccupied by the decline in Russian power.

Figes' greatest service has been to rescue the conflict from fragmentation and partiality, the preserve, at best, of amateur military historians, more interested in the clash of arms than the reason for the clash of arms. The war may have been tragic and ‘unnecessary' but it still marks and important stage in the development of European politics and diplomacy. It marks the end of the Concert of Europe, the arrangement between the powers to police the settlement of 1815 emerging from the Napoleonic Wars. It marks the break in the informal alliance between Russia and Austria that helped preserved that settlement in aspic, allowing for the rise of new nations like Italy and Germany. So, in all, it was so much more than the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Thin Red Line and the Lady with the Lamp.

So far as the conflict itself is concerned there was really no need, as the author shows, for the Crimean War ever to have been the Crimean War. There was no need, in other words, for the landing on the Crimean peninsula, followed by the lengthy, and bloody, siege of the port of Sevastopol, for the simple reason that the Russians had suffered a serious tactical and strategic reverse in early 1854.

They had previously occupied the semi-autonomous Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia, now Romania, with a view to pushing south of the Danube in a march on Constantinople. But unexpectedly tough resistance by the Turks at the fortress of Silistria prevented any further advance. When this was coupled with the landings of the French and British at Varna, in what is now Bulgaria, and the threat of Austrian intervention, the Russians had no choice but to withdraw from the occupied provinces. But the blood was up; the war had to run its course, Russia had to be humbled; Sevastopol had to fall.

Crimea marks a vital stage in the development of warfare, combining elements of the old and the new, combining the Napoleonic Wars at one remove and the First World War at the other. It was the last of the old wars, if you like, containing the seeds of the new. Although it may come as a surprise, the campaign on the Crimea itself, and its eventual outcome, was far more a French than a British affair. The French contributed many more troops. It was their capture of the Malakhov redoubt in September 1855 that led to the fall of Sevastopol and the end of the war.

Diplomatically their role was also decisive. Palmerston, who succeeded the far less militant Aberdeen as prime minister in 1855, rather took on the role of Cato the Elder. Cartago delenda est was his war cry. His Carthage was Russia, which he intended to remove forever as a threat to the British Empire. If he had had his way the Russian borders would have returned to those of 1709, before Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes at Poltava. The press was behind his war-drive, the people were behind him, even the Queen was behind him; the French were not. He did not have his way because Napoleon III had other visions. Britain may have had the fleet, but the French had the army.

This is a good story, an important story told with verve and style, told in a wholly compelling fashion with plenty of balance and nuance, placing the Crimean War in proper context. The author is to be commended for his industry and his scholarship, for writing a first-class account of an important passage in European history.

Theirs not to Reason Why-the Charge of the Light Brigade

But, you see, theirs was to reason why, and there is, indeed, another possible perspective on the famous charge, which tends to be completely overlooked: namely, that of the troopers themselves. It was not a question of blind obedience to an impossible order. Lord Cardigan, commanding the Light Brigade, could very well have refused to obey for the simple reason that senior officers were expected to exercise wide discretion in interpreting orders that might have been based on out-of-date information. However, both Cardigan and Lord Lucan, his superior officer, were aware of serious discontent among the ranks, which could very well have had a direct bearing on their conduct that day.

There were two things uppermost in the troopers mind on the day of the Battle of Balaclava: cholera and Cossacks. Since September cholera had been cutting its way through the ranks, to such an extent that disease had become the main enemy, not the Russians. According to one officer:

...the men and officers are getting daily more disgusted with their fate. They do nothing but bury their comrades. They say loudly that they have not been brought out to fight, but to waste away and die in this country of cholera and fever.

Those who died of disease could not, of course, expect any pensions to be paid to their dependants. The war, moreover, was beginning to settle down to one of siege and entrenchment, with little prospect for further cavalry action. In the end, far more men of the Light Brigade were to die of disease than in the Charge.

Unlike the men of the Heavy Brigade, the Light Brigade had seen no action. As a result they had been insulted both by the enemy Cossacks, and their own infantry, accused of being afraid of the Russian cavalry. One the day of the charge itself the Brigade had been close to mutiny because they had been ordered to hold back while the Cossacks killed Turkish soldiers attempting to surrender. It was the same Cossack units that had taken shelter behind the guns that Lord Raglan, the army commander, had ordered them to attack.

What is remarkable about that day is the number of men who disobediently joined the ranks after Lucan approved the order to attack, including one who was flogged for this afterwards. Also, if it was a question of merely obeying orders the men would have ridden at the regulation pace, but they did not; they rode too fast, and Cardigan was even placed in danger of being ridden down as he tried to slow the pace. One man in the 13th Light Dragoons even shouted to a comrade "Come on; don't let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us." Some 500 of the Brigade galloped through the guns right into the Cossacks, who fled in panic, even shooting through their own ranks in their attempt to get to the rear. The whole of the Russian cavalry, 2000 strong, broke and fled. Raglans’ order had been to hold some guns, effectively disobeyed by the Light Brigade in their eagerness to close with the Russians. It was magnificent; and it was war. Honour the Light Brigade/Noble six hundred!