Remember the Crimea. Look after the Army (1)

The scandalous underequipping of soldiers in Afghanistan has uncomfortable echoes of 150 years ago

There is a moment in every war when it becomes necessary to wheel out the big guns, the heaviest weapons in the armoury. In the continuing war in Afghanistan, it is time to deploy the moral firepower of William Howard Russell, the greatest Times war reporter of them all.

In 1854 the 34-year-old Irishman began reporting on the Crimean War for this newspaper. Nearly two years later he returned home, having survived three fierce battles, witnessed the siege of Sebastopol, and penned the enduringly vivid description of the Charge of the Light Brigade that inspired Tennyson’s poem.

More than that, Billy Russell changed the way war itself was perceived, and would in future be fought. He provoked a scandal back in Britain with his pungent criticism of the hopeless administration of the British Army, his descriptions of the suffering of the wounded and sick, the inadequate equipment and the lack of organisation and supplies.

“Am I to tell these things, or hold my tongue?” he wondered, as Lord Raglan, Britain’s Commander in the Crimea, tried to shut him up: “It is too probable that he will forbid our accompanying the troops.” Russell’s reports provoked the disdain of royalty (Prince Albert called him a “miserable scribbler”) but stoked real anger among the general public, prompting a surge of sympathy for the poor bloody infantry.

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Notes:

This is interesting because Canada was present in that war also.