["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 1, 2 January 1855]

London, 29 December.

"The meeting of Count Buol, M. de Bourqueney, and Prince Gorchakov at the residence of the Earl of Westmorland, the English envoy in Vienna, was designed merely to give the Emperor of Russia the desired information as to the meaning of the Triple Alliance of 2 December and the conditions under which the three Great Powers are prepared to open peace negotiations on the basis of the four points. Prince Gorchakov has immediately reported the communications received to St Petersburg. The acceptance or rejection of the preliminary conditions by the tsar must ensue within a few days. A decisive turning-point will mark the beginning of the new year."

Thus the Morning Post, Lord Palmerston's private moniteur.

"The Vienna negotiations," says the Tory Press, "are to provide Austria with a fresh pretext for postponing her definitive declaration to the Western Powers beyond the term fixed in the treaty of 2 December."

Decisive, perhaps, is the fact that, while the politicians of the daily and weekly press discuss the new Vienna conference in their leading articles with broad political wisdom, the businessmen, in the stock exchange articles of the same journals, declare it outright a "farce". Thus, for example, the business man in the money article <article on the money market> of today's Morning Post. In fact, the Vienna event appeared so indifferent to the London Stock Exchange that its announcement gave neither the "bears" nor the "bulls", neither the pessimists nor the optimists of the Stock Exchange <the exchange>, occasion for even the most insignificant operations. The slight fluctuations that have occurred in the quotation of government securities over the last three days were connected not with Viennese diplomacy, but with the Paris budget. It is conjectured that English capitalists are participating in the new Paris loan of 500 million francs, and will thus bring about a contraction of the money market, which in any case, in consequence of the repercussions of the North American crisis (more considerable in its dimensions than that of 1837), the latest unfavourable business news from East India, the rising corn prices, and some unexpectedly large bankruptcies in London and Liverpool, is assuming a more and more alarming physiognomy. If peace illusions do not reign on the side of the Emperor of Russia, they certainly do on the side of the English ministry. In the great war with France, which began in the last century, the English people was led by its oligarchy. In the present war with Russia, the English oligarchy has been forced by the people. Their diplomatic, military, and financial operations all reveal the reluctance with which they wage the war forced upon them. Even the ministry's latest measure – the Act for the raising of a Foreign Legion – was aimed above all at "putting the English off" the war. Exhaustion of recruiting power is out of the question in a country from which over 100,000 able-bodied men emigrate every year without this emigration having more than a transient effect on the level of wages. An extraordinary, sudden supply of auxiliary troops was equally out of the question, since the ministerial measure is calculated to help neither suddenly nor exceptionally. The Militia Bill passed in May enabled the ministry to call up 80,000 militiamen in England and Wales alone, and experience has shown that of all the regiments called up in the spring a full quarter volunteered for active service; but up to the beginning of this month the government had only embodied 18 militia regiments (approximately 13,500 men). It is known that the English have always protested – in the time of Charles I, under William III, under the first Georges, and finally during the great anti-Jacobin war – against the introduction of foreign mercenary soldiers into Great Britain. But it is new and unheard of in English annals that the use of foreign mercenaries outside British soil should provoke a storm of indignation. Precisely this fact proves the entirely different character of the present war from all previous English wars belonging to modern times. The ruling aristocracy therefore deliberately conjures up the spectre of the past, the routine of its old place-hunters, in which soldiers were bought on the cheapest market. It does so without – as Sidney Herbert confessed in the House of Commons – having any conviction whatever as to the success of the proposed measure. It does so, therefore, not to wage war, but to pave the way for peace. In order to form a sufficient English army nowadays, the government would be forced to raise pay, to abolish flogging, to hold out the prospect of promotion from the ranks, in short, to democratise the army and transform it from its own property into the property of the nation.

Up to now, says today's Times, "the army, in war as in peace, was only an organ of government for the advancement of the aristocracy and the support of the ministry of the day".

And here we come to the decisive point. A war with Russia means for the English aristocracy the loss of its monopoly of government. Since 1830, forced to conduct domestic policy exclusively in the interests of the industrial and commercial middle classes, the English aristocracy nevertheless maintained itself in possession of all government posts, because it preserved the monopoly of foreign policy and of the army. This monopoly, however, remained secure only so long as no people's war – and such a war was possible only with Russia – turned foreign policy into a people's cause. The whole of English diplomacy from 1830 to 1854 therefore reduces itself to the single principle: to avoid a war with Russia at any price. Hence the continual concessions made to Russia in Turkey, in Persia, in Afghanistan, in Denmark – made to her at every point of the globe for 24 years. That the aristocracy had calculated correctly is proved by the facts of the moment. Scarcely has the war with Russia broken out when even the Times itself declares:

"The aristocracy is incapable of conducting our wars. The oligarchic state machinery stands in the most glaring contradiction to our social machinery."

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 5, 4 January 1855]

London, 1 January.

"All departments of our military administration have collapsed under the weight of the present war."

Thus today's Times. In fact, when one examines the organisation of the military administration or of any other official administration in this country, it seems as if the so-called principle of the constitutional balance of powers was intended to be put on display. The various authorities are so coordinated that they hold one another completely in check, and thus the whole machinery is condemned to a standstill. Hence it could happen that during the present war the wounded were at Balaclava, the army surgeons at Constantinople, and the medical supplies at Scutari. Hence the revolt of the Crimean army against the system that sacrifices it; for must we not call it a revolt when all ranks, from the colonel down to the private, break through discipline, address thousands of letters weekly to the London press, and appeal loudly from their superiors to public opinion? Lord Raglan, however, is wrongly held responsible for conditions that are caused by the system. He is responsible for the military conduct.

If we take a retrospective glance at the Crimean campaign, we find that Lord Raglan committed his first mistake at the Battle of the Alma, in that he sought to turn the Russian army on the left wing, resting on the sea, instead of on the right. By the latter operation part of the Russians would have been driven to the sea, the other part towards the North Fort, whereas now they were actually thrown upon Simferopol, i.e. onto the line of retreat most favourable to them. While the Allies at the battle of the Alma took the bull by the horns uselessly and to no purpose, they shrank back from that step when it was dictated by the circumstances. The much-talked-of "flank march to Balaclava" was the abandonment of an attack on the northern face of the fortress. But this face is the commanding and therefore the decisive point; the North Fort is the key to Sevastopol. The Allies therefore abandoned the bolder, and for that very reason in fact the safer, offensive, in order to secure a defensively strong position. The same mistake that Omer Pasha made when he entrenched himself at Kalafat, instead of marching from Oltenitza on Bucharest and breaking through the enemy's long extended line. Then came the siege of Sevastopol, which at any rate proves that the art of war has declined from a long peace to the same extent that war matériel, thanks to industrial development, has increased. In no previous war have simple earthworks played so great a role. First at Oltenitza the Russians resorted to the old system of cannonading them for some hours and then storming them – but without success. At Kalafat earthworks held the Russians in check, and they dared not attack them. At Silistria a half-demolished earthwork thwarted all the efforts of the Russian army, and now at Sevastopol a line of earthworks is honoured with more extensive assault batteries and heavier artillery than have ever been used against the most regular fortress. Before, however, the siege train was set up, the open town had already been transformed into an entrenched camp of the first rank. It is known that on 25 October, at the battle of Balaclava, the English cavalry, uselessly and to no purpose and against all traditional rules

was sacrificed. We finally arrive at the Battle of Inkerman, the most significant military event of this campaign. Like the Prussians at Jena, the British troops were deployed before Inkerman on a series of heights that were accessible from the front only through a few defiles. Like the Prussians, the British had neglected to occupy a height on their extreme left flank, onto which at Jena Napoleon, at Inkerman Menshikov threw a part of his army and thus established himself in the enemy’s flank before daybreak. The Russians, no friends of originality in general, borrowed Napoleon’s plan of operations, but as soon as the strategic movement was completed and the tactical performance was to begin, the mask of Western civilisation is thrown off and the Tartar emerges. This splendid Russian army with its old troops – many of them 25 years under arms –, these paragons of parade-ground service, prove so awkward, so clumsy, so incapable of skirmishing and fighting in small detachments, that their officers know no other way to use them than to hurl their heavy mass all at once against the enemy. The purely brutal pressure of this mass was supposed to break the thin lines of the British, while on the one hand these deep columns of flesh ensured the certain and devastating effect of the English rifles and artillery, and on the other, where the Russians in overwhelming numbers made bayonet attacks, the British received them with the same superiority with which Napoleon’s squares received the Mamelukes at the Battle of the Pyramids. 14,000 Allies, with the loss of one-third of their total strength, defeated 30,000 Russians, although it is acknowledged that the Russians fought bravely individually and that their plan of attack was superior to that of the Allies. Not since the Battle of Narva has such a misfortune befallen Russian arms. And if we consider the extraordinary difference between the Russians of Narva and the Russians of Inkerman, the half-savage hordes of 1700 and the well-drilled army of 1854, the day of Narva appears brilliant compared with that of Inkerman. Narva was the first great mishap of a rising nation, which knew how to turn even defeats into means of victory. Inkerman appears almost as a certain indication of the decay of that hothouse development which Russia has undergone since Peter the Great. The artificially accelerated growth and the enormous effort of maintaining the semblance of a brilliant civilisation with half-barbarian material seems to have already exhausted the nation and to have brought upon it a kind of pulmonary consumption. The Battle of Inkerman is for the Russian infantry what the Battle of Rocroi was for the Spanish.