Friedrich Engels

Written around 23 March 1855.  
From the English.

[“New-York Daily Tribune” No. 4358, April 7, 1855, leading article]

“When Croesus crosses the Halys, he will destroy a great realm!” This answer of the Oracle of Delphi to the Lydian king could now be given with equal justification to Louis Bonaparte for his excursion to the Crimea. It is not the Russian Empire but his own empire that is destined to be destroyed by this journey.

An extraordinary, anomalous situation calls forth anomalous necessities. Anyone else in his place would be considered a fool were he to undertake this excursion, with the odds ten to one against him. Louis Bonaparte must be fully aware of this fact and is forced nevertheless to go. He is the originator of the whole expedition, he has brought the allied armies into their present unenviable position and is obliged, before all Europe, to extricate them again. It is his first military act, and upon its outcome his reputation as a general will depend, at least for some time. For the success of the campaign he pledges no less a forfeit than his crown.

There are, moreover, less important reasons which likewise conspire to make this daring journey a state necessity. The soldiers in the East have on more than one occasion shown that they were bitterly disappointed in their hopes of military glory for the new Empire. At Varna and Bazardschik, the paladins of the aped Charlemagne were greeted by their own troops with the epithet “monkeys”. “À bas les singes! Vive Lamoricière!” [“Down with the monkeys! Long live Lamoricière!”] was the cry of the Zouaves when they were sent by St-Arnaud and Espinasse into the Bulgarian desert to die of cholera and fever. Now the troops no longer merely contrast the glory and popularity of the banished generals with the commanders of dubious reputation who now lead the French army. The singular conduct of young Napoleon-Jérôme while in the East has recalled to the old Algerian soldiers the quite different behaviour of the princes of Orléans in Africa, who, whatever else might be said against them, always stood at the head of the troops and did their duty as soldiers. The contrast between young Aumale and young Napoleon was certainly strong enough to prompt the soldiers to say: If the Orléans were still in power, the princes would be with us in the trenches, sharing dangers and hardships; and yet they did not bear the name of Napoleon! Thus speak the soldiers, and what can be done to silence them? The man who “is allowed to wear the uniform of a division general” has contrived to stain the military traditions connected with the name of Napoleon; the other members of the family are all very quiet civilians, naturalists, priests, or downright adventurers; old Jérôme cannot be considered on account of his age, and since his earlier warlike deeds cast no great halo about his head, Louis-Napoleon must go himself. Then too, the rumour of the Crimean journey was known in the most remote corners of France and was enthusiastically welcomed by the peasantry; and it was the peasantry that had made Louis-Napoleon emperor. The peasantry is convinced that an emperor whom they themselves set upon the throne and who bears the name of Napoleon must indeed be a Napoleon redivivus (a resurrected Napoleon). In their eyes, his place is at the head of the troops, who, led by him, will vie with the legions of the Great Army. If Sevastopol is not yet taken, it is only because the Emperor has not yet gone there; let him but be on the spot, and the ramparts of the Russian fortress will crumble to dust like the walls of Jericho. Louis-Napoleon, therefore, cannot now retract his promise, even if he wished to, since the rumour of his journey has once been spread.

Consequently, everything is being prepared. The ten divisions now in the Crimea will be followed by four new ones, two of which are to form a reserve army at Constantinople at the opening of the campaign. One of these divisions will consist of the Imperial Guard, another of the combined élite companies, or the grenadiers and voltigeurs (light infantry) of the Paris army. The two other divisions (11th and 12th) are already being shipped or concentrated at Toulon and Algiers. These fresh reinforcements will bring the French strength in the Crimea to about 100,000 or 110,000 men, while towards the end of April the 15,000 Piedmontese and numerous British reinforcements will arrive. Yet it is scarcely to be expected that the Allies will be able to open the campaign in May with an army of 150,000 men. The condition of the Heraclean Chersonese, which has been turned into a vast and utterly desolate burial-ground, is such that with the onset of hot and damp weather the whole place must become a breeding-ground for all manner of epidemics. And however many troops may be stationed there, they will be exposed to far more terrible losses from sickness and death than ever before. There is no chance of the Allies pushing forward from their position with an active army before all their reinforcements have arrived, and that will be sometime about the middle of May, when the epidemic will already have broken out.

In the most favourable case, the Allies must leave 40,000 men before the south side of Sevastopol and will have 90,000–100,000 men available for an expedition against the Russian field army. Unless they manoeuvre very well and the Russians commit no serious errors, this army, when it advances from the Chersonese, will first have to beat the Russians and drive them back from Simferopol before it can unite with the Turks at Eupatoria. Let us assume, however, that this junction will be effected without difficulty; the reinforcement that the Turks can give, at most, to this motley corps of Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Piedmontese will be 20,000 men, hardly fit for a battle in the open field. All together, that would make an army of about 120,000 men. It is hard to imagine how such an army is to live in a country that has been laid waste by the Russians themselves, is poor in grain, and whose chief wealth, the cattle, the Russians will strive to drive towards Perekop. The slightest advance would require extensive foraging and numerous detachments to secure the flanks and the lines of communication by sea. The Russian irregular cavalry, which has so far had no opportunity to intervene, will then begin to wear them down with its operations. In the meantime, the Russians will also have received their reinforcements. The openness with which the French armaments have been conducted during the last six weeks has enabled the Russians to take their measures in time. There can be no doubt that at present two or three Russian divisions, either from the Volhynian and Bessarabian armies or from the newly formed reserves, are on the march to maintain the balance there.

However, the largest detachment that the allied army will have to furnish must be the forces required to invest Sevastopol from the north side. For this purpose, 20,000 men will have to be detached, and it is very doubtful whether the remainder of their forces, tied down by supply difficulties and encumbered by endless lines of carts with war materials and provisions, will be sufficient to drive the Russian field army out of the Crimea.

So much is certain: the laurels by which Louis Bonaparte intends to earn for himself the name of a Napoleon of the Crimea hang rather high and will not be so easy to pluck. Yet all the difficulties mentioned so far are of a purely local character. The main objection to this mode of waging war in the Crimea is, at bottom, that it throws a quarter of the available forces of France onto a minor theatre of war, where even the greatest successes decide nothing. It is this absurd obstinacy with regard to Sevastopol, degenerating into a kind of superstition, attaching a fictitious value to successes, but also to reverses, that constitutes the great fundamental error of this whole plan. And it is this fictitious value assigned to the events in the Crimea that rebounds with redoubled force upon the unlucky originator of this plan. To Alexander, Sevastopol is by no means Russia, but for Louis Bonaparte, the impossibility of taking Sevastopol means the loss of France.