Death Or Glory: The Legacy Of The Crimean War

"The Crimean War," writes Robert Edgerton, "was a showcase for bad generalship, bureaucratic bungling, and inept medical care." Officers knowingly sent columns of soldiers to certain death, while diplomats ignored opportunities to make an honorable peace. The war cost more lives than any war in pre-20th-century history, with many times more men (and women) dead from illness, hunger, and cold than were killed in actual fighting. Yet for all its blood-soaked significance, the war remains little studied. Most of us can recall a catch phrase or two from Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade," but far fewer know the causes of the conflict, rooted in the great rivalry between England and Russia to control both the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Edgerton, an anthropologist, is interested in exploring cultural differences among the combatants--how a Sardinian soldier might have responded, for instance, to the smell of gunpowder differently from a Turkish or Russian or French trooper, or what soldiers on all sides thought as they prayed to their gods for safekeeping and deliverance. Those anthropological explorations, along with other intriguing asides (for instance, on the customary drunkenness of Florence Nightingale's nurses), add to the best part of Edgerton's narrative, which is a straightforward history of the Crimean War itself. He turns in a lively, well-researched account of a conflict that merits better understanding. --Gregory McNamee