From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickednesses in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men, to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be … . [Saying ‘no’ to a challenge to fight is] a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest.
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Here was the origin of the cult of ‘muscular Christianity’ – the notion of ‘Christian soldiers’ fighting righteous wars that came to define the Victorian imperial mission. This was a time when Britons began to sing in church:
Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle see His banners go! (1864)
The argument for ‘muscular Christianity’ was first made in a review of Kingsley’s novel
Two Years Ago
in 1857, a year when the idea of the ‘Christian soldier’ was reinforced by the actions of the British troops in putting down the Indian Mutiny. But the idea of training boys to fight for Christian causes was also prominent in Hughes’s sequel to
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
,
Tom Brown at Oxford
(1861), where athletic sport is extolled as a builder of manly character, teamwork, chivalry and moral fortitude – qualities that had made Britons good at war. ‘The least of the muscular Christians has hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief that a man’s body is given him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’
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At the heart of this ideal was a new concentration on physical training and the mastery of the body as a form of moral strengthening for the purposes of holy war. It was a quality associated with the hardiness of the suffering soldiers in the Crimea.
But that suffering, too, played a role in transforming the public image of the British troops. Before the war the respectable middle and upper classes had viewed the rank and file of the British army as little more than a dissolute rabble – heavy-drinking and ill-disciplined, brutal and profane – drawn from the poorest sections of society. But the agonies of the soldiers in the Crimea had revealed their Christian souls and turned them into objects of ‘good works’ and Evangelical devotion. Religious ministering to the rank and file dramatically increased during the war. The army doubled its number of chaplains and every man was given a Bible free of charge, courtesy of middle-class donations to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Naval and Military Bible Society.
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The soldiers were recast as saintly figures, martyrs of a holy cause, in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Among them was Catherine Marsh, whose lively and sentimental hagiography,
Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars, Ninety-Seventh Regiment
(1856), sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few years of publication and reappeared in numerous abridged and juvenile editions up until the First World War. Compiled from Vicars’s diary and his letters to his mother from the Crimea,
Memorials
was dedicated to the ‘noble ideal of the Christian soldier’ and offered to the public as a ‘fresh and ample refutation to those who, in the face of examples to the contrary, still maintain that entire devotion of the heart to God must withdraw a man from many of the active duties of life and … that in making a good Christian you may spoil a good soldier’. Vicars is portrayed as a soldier-saint, a selfless hero who bears the burdens of his fellow-men on the Sevastopol heights by sharing his food and tent, caring for them and reading them the Bible when they are sick. Vicars leads his men to ‘Holy War’ against the Russians, who are described as ‘heathens’, ‘infidels’ and ‘savages’. He is mortally wounded during the sortie of 22–3 March 1855, and his death is compared to the martyrdom of Christ in Marsh’s final chapter (‘Victory’), which is prefaced by Longfellow’s verse (a translation from the Spanish poet Jorge Manrique):
His soul to Him who gave it rose,
God led it to its long repose,
Its glorious rest!
And though the warrior’s sun has set,
Its light shall longer round us yet,
Bright, radiant, blest.
Vicars was buried in Sevastopol but in St George’s Church on Bromley Road in Beckenham, Kent, there is a white marble tablet carved in the shape of a scroll with a sheathed sword behind on which these words are inscribed:
TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF HEDLEY VICARS CAPTAIN 97TH REGIMENT WHO THROUGH FAITH IN THE WORD OF GOD THAT ‘THE BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST HIS SON CLEANSETH US ALL IN SIN’ PASSED FROM THE DEATH OF SIN TO THE LIFE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. HE FELL IN BATTLE, AND SLEPT IN JESUS, ON THE NIGHT OF 22ND OF MARCH, 1855. AND WAS BURIED BEFORE SEBASTOPOL AGED 28 YEARS.
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Beyond the sanctification of soldiers and the new manly ideal, the common effort of the war seemed to offer the possibility of national unity and reconciliation needed to end the class divisions and industrial strife of the 1830s and 1840s. In Dickens’s
Household Words
, alongside the serialization of Elizabeth Gaskell’s
North and South
(1855), a novel on the theme of ending the class conflict, there appeared a series of poems by Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, including ‘The Lesson of the War’.
The rulers of the nation,
The poor ones at their gate,
With the same eager wonder
The same great news await!
The poor man’s stay and comfort,
The rich man’s joy and pride,
Upon the bleak Crimean shore
Are fighting side by side.
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A similar idea can be found in Tennyson’s poetic monodrama
Maud
(1855), where a state of ‘civil war’ created by the ‘lust of gain’ at home gives way to an ending in which the narrator looks to war abroad as a higher and more godly cause:
Let it go or stay, so I wake to the higher aims
Of a land that has lost for a little her lust of gold,
And love of a peace that was full of wrongs and shames,
Horrible, hateful, monstrous, not to be told;
And hail once more to the banner of battle unroll’d!
Tho’ many a light shall darken, and many shall weep
For those that are crush’d in the clash of jarring claims,
Yet God’s just wrath shall be wreak’d on a giant liar;
And many a darkness into the light shall leap,
And shine in the sudden making of splendid names,
And noble thought be freer under the sun,
And the heart of a people beat with one desire;
For the peace, that I deem’d no peace, is over and done,
And now by the side of the Black and the Baltic deep,
And deathful-grinning mouths of the fortress, flames
The blood-red blossom of war with a heart of fire.
Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good, than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d.
Painters picked up the same theme. In John Gilbert’s
Her Majesty the Queen Inspecting the Wounded Coldstream Guards in the Hall of Buckingham Palace
(1856), a painting (sadly lost) that was popular enough to be reproduced as a coloured lithograph as late as 1903, there is a touching poignancy in the meeting between the Queen and the wounded heroes of the Crimea which suggests the prospect of post-war unity between the highest and the lowest of the land. Jerry Barrett’s large painting
Queen Victoria’s First Visit to Her Wounded Soldiers
(1856) played on this emotion too. This sentimental picture of the royal family visiting Crimean invalids at the Chatham army hospital was such a success when it was first shown at Thomas Agnew’s gallery in Piccadilly that several thousand prints were subsequently sold to the public in various editions costing between three and ten guineas.
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The Queen herself was a collector of photographic souvenirs of Crimean veterans. She commissioned commercial photographers like Joseph Cundall and Robert Howlett to make a series of commemorative portraits of maimed and wounded soldiers in various military hospitals, including Chatham, for the royal collection at Windsor. Cundall and Howlett’s striking photographs reached beyond their patroness’s hands. Through photographic exhibitions and their reproduction in the illustrated press, they brought home to the public in explicit terms the suffering of the soldiers and the human costs of war. These pioneering photographs were very different from Fenton’s genteel images. In Cundall and Howlett’s
Three Crimean Invalids
(1855), for example, the wounded infantrymen are seated on a hospital bed displaying their loss of limbs. There is no emotion in their expressions, no romanticism or sentimentality in their representation, only the documentary evidence in black and white of the impact made by iron shot and frostbite on the body. In their notes in the royal archives, Cundall and Howlett identified the men as William Young of the 23rd Regiment, wounded at the Redan on 18 June 1855; Henry Burland of the 34th, both legs lost to frostbite in the trenches before Sevastopol; and John Connery of the 49th, his left leg lost to frostbite in the trenches.
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Memories of the Crimean War continued to provide a winning subject for British artists well into the 1870s. The best known of these Crimean pictures was
Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea
(1874) by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So great were the crowds that came to see it that a policeman was put on guard to provide protection. Already known for her earlier paintings on military themes, Thompson had conceived
The Roll Call
(as it became popularly known) in the immediate aftermath of the Cardwell reforms, when army matters were prominent in public life. From detailed sketches of Crimean veterans, she created a striking composition, in which the remnants of the Grenadiers, wounded, cold and utterly exhausted, assemble after a battle to be counted by their mounted officer. The painting was completely different from conventional depictions of war that focused on the glorious deeds of gallant officers: apart from the mounted officer, the 2-metre-high canvas was entirely dominated by the suffering of the rank and file. It stripped away the heroics and let the viewer look into the face of war. After its showing at the Royal Academy
The Roll Call
went on national tour, drawing immense crowds. In Newcastle, it was advertised by men with sandwich boards which simply read ‘
The Roll Call
is Coming!’ In Liverpool, 20,000 people saw the picture in three weeks – a huge number for the time. People came away profoundly moved by the painting, which had clearly touched the nation’s heart. The Queen purchased
The Roll Call
from its original buyer, a Manchester industrialist, but a printing company retained the right to reproduce it in a popular edition of engravings. Thompson herself became a national heroine overnight. A quarter of a million cartes-de-visite photographs of the artist were sold to the public, who put her on a par with Florence Nightingale.
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What will they say in England
When the story there is told
Of deeds of might, on Alma’s height,
Done by the brave and bold?
Of Russia, proud at noontide,
Humbled ere set of sun?
They’ll say ‘’Twas like Old England!’
They’ll say ‘’Twas noble done!’
What will they say in England
When, hushed in awe and dread,
Fond hearts, through all our happy homes
Think of the mighty dead,
And muse, in speechless anguish,
On father – brother – son?
They’ll say in dear Old England
‘God’s holy will be done.’
What will they say in England?
Our names, both night and day
Are in their hearts and on their lips,
When they laugh, or weep, or pray.
They watch on earth, they plead with heaven,
Then, forward to the fight!
Who droops or fears, while England cheers,
And God defends the right?
Reverend J. S. B. Monsell in
The Girls’ Reading Book
(1875)
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