The Crimean War spelt the end of hymns to heroism and glory

Leo Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer in the defence of the great Russian naval base of Sevastopol against British and French invaders in the middle of the 19th century. The first of his three short stories, collected as Sevastopol Sketches, came out as the siege was still in progress. In it he spelled out as no writer had done before the way people died in shattered trenches, their bodies shredded by shell fire and left to rot in the mud; or in filthy, overcrowded hospitals, where overwhelmed doctors hacked off limbs without anaesthetic. He wrote not about the generals but about the ordinary soldiers, the men and women caught up in the fighting, the Russian people themselves. His stories were far from the traditional hymns to heroism and glory which had accompanied previous wars. They discomfited the patriots; but they made Tolstoy’s reputation as one of the greatest war writers of all time.

His efforts were mirrored on the other side of the line. William Howard Russell, the special correspondent of the London Times, was writing precisely and passionately about a war which increasingly seemed to him to have no meaning. The British soldiers, like the Russians, lived and died miserably in a sea of filth strewn with carcasses torn by dogs, starved of ammunition, clothing, food and shelter, thanks to the incompetence, negligence and corruption of their superiors. Russell may not have had Tolstoy’s literary genius. But, unlike Russia, Britain was already something of a democracy, and his writing had a more immediate effect. Backed by his editor John Delane, the two of them aroused such popular fury that the government was compelled to resign. Its successor finally began a scandalously delayed reform of Britain’s military affairs.