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Soldiers, Strategy and Sebastopol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Hew Strachan
Hew Strachan
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
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Extract

The Crimean war has been the victim of much conceptualization. For modern historians, drawn to the phenomenon of a European conflict conveniently sited in the middle of a century of comparative peace, much can be made to hang on it. Whether it is an aberration, or the expression of suppressed feelings, or indeed the beginning of a current that is to grow stronger until 1914, diplomats, soldiers, politicians and economists have taken it as a dividing line. It is simultaneously the continuance of the Peninsular tradition in warfare and an array of technological novelties tempting the variously applied title, ‘the first modern war’. But while its impact on domestic politics and European diplomacy has been scrutinized, and while Captain Nolan has failed to convey his breathless order to the Light Brigade correctly on innumerable occasions, the bridge between the two, between – at its most banal – politics and tactics, has not been so closely examined.

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Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 303 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

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