Karl Marx

[The Committee of Inquiry and Its Work]

["Neue Oder-Zeitung" No. 153, 31 March 1855]

London, 28 March. The Committee of Inquiry of the Commons has now held more than a dozen sittings, and the results of its investigation largely lie before the public. From the Duke of Cambridge down to Mr Macdonald of the Times, witnesses from the most diverse spheres of society have been examined, and seldom has an examination of witnesses been characterised by such unity of testimony. The various branches of the administration have passed review, and all have been found not only deficient, but in a shamefully scandalous condition. The Army Staff, the Medical Department, the Supply Department, the Commissariat, the Transport Service, the Hospital Administration, the sanitary police, the port police of Balaclava and Constantinople – all have been condemned without opposition. But bad as each department was when considered by itself, the full glory of the system developed only in the contact and interaction of all. The regulations were so nicely arranged that, as soon as they came into force, nobody knew where his authority began or where it ended, or to whom to turn. One should read the description of the state of the hospitals, of the infamous brutalities, committed through negligence or indolence, against the sick and wounded on board the transport ships and upon arrival at their destination. Nothing more horrible occurred on the retreat from Moscow. And these things happened at Scutari, in the face of Constantinople, a great city with manifold resources, not on a hasty retreat, the Cossacks on the heels of the fugitives, cutting off their supplies – but in consequence of a campaign successful up to then, in a place secure from any enemy attack, in the great central depot, where Great Britain had piled up its stores for its army. And the authors of all these horrors were not barbarians, but gentlemen, belonging to “the 10,000 Higher”, mild men in their way. Fiat <Long live> the Regulations, pereat <down with> the Army! “Apply to another authority; the matter does not fall within our competence.” “But to whom is one to apply?” “It is not within our competence to know which is the competent department, and even if it were, we should not be competent to tell you.” “But the sick need shirts, soap, bedding, shelter, medicine, arrowroot <a kind of starch flour (from the root of a South American plant)>, port wine. They are dying by hundreds.” “I am indeed very sorry that the best blood of England is drying up so fast, but we cannot help it. We can give nothing, even if we have it, without the proper requisitions, signed by half a dozen persons, two-thirds of whom are absent in the Crimea or elsewhere.” And like Tantalus, the soldiers had to die, in sight, nay, in smell of the comforts that could save their lives. No man on the spot possessed the energy to break through the network of routine, to act on his own responsibility as the needs of the moment demanded, and in defiance of the regulations. Only one person dared to do so, and that was a woman, Miss Nightingale. Once she had satisfied herself that the necessary things were in store, she selected a number of sturdy fellows and actually committed a burglary into Her Majesty’s stores. To the supply officer, paralysed with terror, she said:

“I now have what I needed. Go now and report home what you have seen. I take everything upon myself.”

The old women in authority at Constantinople and Scutari, far from being capable of such daring, were cowards to a degree that would seem incredible, had we not their own open admission. One of them, for example, a certain Dr. Andrew Smith, for a time chief of the hospitals, was asked by the Committee of Inquiry whether there were no funds available in Constantinople for purchases and no market for the procurement of the necessary goods. “Oh, certainly!” he answered. “But after 40 years’ routine and drudgery at home, I assure you I could scarcely for several months grasp the idea that I had in fact funds placed at my free disposal.” And to such old women was the British army handed over! In fact, the most vivid descriptions in the press and in Parliament appear colourless before the reality, as it unfolds itself in the witness examinations. And what shall we say of the Herberts, the Gladstones, the Newcastles, and tutti quanti, of Peel’s fashionable clerks, who repeatedly in Parliament gave the lie to all the now proven facts and repelled them with a passionate bitterness that one had not previously accredited to these “Right Honourable” gentlemen! These dandies of Exeter Hall, Puseyite elegants, to whom the distinction between “transubstantiation” and “real presence!” is a vital question, undertook, with that modest presumption which characterises them, the direction of the war and were so far successful in the “transubstantiation” of the British army that its “real presence” is nowhere. “Yes, it is somewhere,” retorts Gladstone. “On 1 January, the British army in the Crimea amounted to 32,000 men.” Unfortunately, we have the Duke of Cambridge’s testimony that after the battle of Inkerman, on 6 November, the British army numbered not 13,000 bayonets, and we know that it lost about 3,000 men during November and December.

Meanwhile, the news of the Commons’ revolt against the ministers, of Roebuck’s committee and the popular indignation in England, has reached the Crimea. Welcomed with rejoicing by the soldiers, it struck the generals and department heads with terror. A week later the news arrived that commissioners were on their way with full powers to investigate and negotiate. This worked like a galvanic battery on the paralytics. At the same time, the railway workers set to work, unfettered by precedents, regulations, and office habits. They secured a landing place, put the shovel in motion, erected wharves, huts, embankments, and before the amusing old gentlemen suspected it, the first rail was laid. Insignificant as the railway probably was for the siege – all its advantages could be had cheaper and more simply – it proved of the greatest use by its mere example, by the living contrast of modern industrial England with the helpless England of routine. The “forward” operations of the railway workers broke the spell that held the whole British army captive, the spell generated by the juggling illusion of fantastic impossibilities, which brought British officers and soldiers close to the dull fatalism of the Turks and led them calmly to look on sure ruin as if it were inevitable destiny. With the railway workers, there reappeared in the army the “Aide toi et le ciel t’aidera” <“Help yourself, and God helps you”>. Within six weeks, everything took on a different aspect. Raglan and his staff, divisional and brigade generals, are daily in the trenches, inspecting and directing. The Commissariat has discovered horses, carts, and drivers, and the troops the means of putting their sick, and partly themselves, under cover. The medical staff has removed the most crying horrors from the hospital tents and barracks. Ammunition, clothing, even fresh meat and vegetables are beginning to arrive. A certain degree of order is beginning to prevail, and however much of the old evil still remains to be healed, the improvement in conditions is undeniable and astonishing.