Karl Marx  
Retrospect

_Neue Oder-Zeitung._  
Nr. 1, 2 January 1855.  
_Mittagblatt_

X. London, 29 December. (Retrospect.) “The meeting of Count Buoi, M. de Bourqueney and Prince Gortchakoff at the house of the Earl of Westmoreland, the English ambassador at Vienna, had no other aim than to give the Emperor of Russia the desired information as to the meaning of the Triple Alliance of 2 December and as to the conditions under which the three Great Powers are prepared to open peace negotiations on the basis of the four points. Prince Gortchakoff has immediately reported to Petersburg on the information received. The acceptance or rejection of the preliminary conditions by the Czar must take place in a few days. A decisive turning-point will mark the beginning of the new year.” So the _Morning Post_, the private monitor of Lord Palmerston. “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 laid down in the treaty of 2 December.” What is perhaps decisive is the fact that, while the politicians of the daily and weekly press discuss the new Vienna conference in their leading articles with broad statesmanlike wisdom, the businessmen in the money articles of the same journals declare it outright a “farce”. Thus, for example, the businessman in the money-article of today’s _Morning Post_. Indeed, the Vienna event appeared so indifferent to the London Stock Exchange that its becoming known gave neither the “bears” nor the “bulls”, neither the pessimists nor the optimists of the stock exchange occasion for even the most insignificant operations. The slight fluctuations which have taken place in the quotation of government securities over the last three days were connected not with Viennese diplomacy but with the Paris budget. It is presumed that English capitalists will participate in the new Paris loan of 500 million francs and thus bring about a contraction of the money market, which, in consequence of the repercussion of the North American crisis – more serious in its dimensions than that of 1837 – of the latest unfavourable business news from the East Indies, of the rising corn prices, and of some unexpectedly large bankruptcies in London and Liverpool, is anyway assuming a more and more alarming physiognomy. If not on the part of the Emperor of Russia, peace illusions reign at any rate on the part of the English ministry. In the great war with France, which began in the last century, the English people were led by its oligarchy. In the present war with Russia, the English oligarchy has been forced by the people. In all their diplomatic, military and financial operations, the reluctance to wage the war forced upon them is evident. Even the last measure of the ministry – the act for the recruitment of a Foreign Legion – was aimed above all at making the war “distasteful” to the English. There could be no question of an exhaustion of the recruiting power in a country from which over 100,000 able-bodied men emigrate annually, without this emigration having produced more than a temporary effect on the level of wages. There was just as little question of an extraordinary, sudden supply of auxiliary troops, since the ministerial measure is calculated to help neither suddenly nor exceptionally. By the Militia Bill passed in May, the ministry was empowered to call up 80,000 militiamen in England and Wales alone, and the results have shown that of all the regiments called up in the spring a full quarter went over as volunteers for active service; but up to the beginning of this month the government had embodied only 18 militia regiments (approximately 13,500 men). It is well 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 history that the employment of foreign mercenaries outside English soil should have provoked a storm of indignation. Precisely this fact proves the entirely different character of the present war from all earlier English wars, in so far as they belong to modern times. The ruling aristocracy therefore deliberately conjures up again the spectre of the past, the routine of its old men of business, in which soldiers were bought on the cheapest market. It does so without – as Sidney Herbert admitted in the House of Commons – being in any way convinced of the success of the proposed measure. It does so, therefore, not in order to wage war, but in order to prepare peace. In order to form an adequate English army, the government would nowadays be obliged to raise the pay, to abolish flogging, to hold out the prospect of advancement from the ranks, in short, to democratise the army and to transform it from their property into that of the nation. Hitherto, says today’s _Times_, “the army, in war as in peace, has been only a governmental organ 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 is for the English aristocracy synonymous with the loss of its governmental monopoly. Since 1830 forced to conduct domestic politics exclusively in the interest of the industrial and commercial middle classes, the English aristocracy maintained itself none the less in possession of all governmental posts, because it retained the monopoly of foreign policy and the army.  
This monopoly, however, remained secure only as long as no people’s war – and such a war was only possible with Russia – turned foreign policy into a popular cause. The whole of English diplomacy from 1830 to 1854 therefore reduces itself to one single principle: to avoid war with Russia at any price. Hence the continual concessions that have been made to Russia in Turkey, in Persia, in Afghanistan, in Denmark, on every point of the globe over the last 24 years. That the aristocracy had calculated correctly is proved by the facts of the moment. The war with Russia has hardly broken out, and already the _Times_ itself declares: “The aristocracy is incapable of waging our wars. The oligarchic state machinery stands in the most glaring contradiction to our social machinery.”

_Neue Oder Zeitung._  
Nr. 5, 4 January 1855.  
_Mittagblatt_

X London, 1 January. (Retrospect.) “Several departments of our military administration have broken down under the weight of the present war.” Thus today’s _Times_. In fact, if one looks at 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 has been meant to be brought to its ultimate conclusion. The various authorities are so co-ordinated that they keep each other completely in check, and the whole machinery is thus condemned to a standstill. Hence it could happen that during the present war the wounded were situated at Balaklava, the army doctors at Constantinople, and the drugs at Scutari. Hence the revolt of the Crimean army against the system which 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 publicly from their superiors to public opinion? Lord Raglan, however, is unjustly held responsible for conditions that are conditioned by the system. He is responsible for the military conduct.

If we cast a retrospective glance at the Crimean campaign, we find that Lord Raglan committed his first mistake at the Battle of the Alma, when he had the Russian army turned on the left wing, which rested on the sea, instead of on the right. By the latter operation one part of the Russians would have been driven to the sea, the other to the North Fort, whereas they were now actually thrown towards Simferopol, i.e. on the line of retreat most favourable to them. While the Allies at the battle of the Alma seized the bull uselessly and aimlessly by the horns, they recoiled from that step when it was demanded by circumstances. The much-vaunted “flank march to Balaklava” was the resignation of an attack on the northern front of the fortress. This front, however, is the commanding and hence the decisive point; the North Fort is the key to Sevastopol. The Allies therefore gave up the bolder and thus in reality the surer offensive, in order to secure a defensively strong position.

The same mistake that Omer Pasha committed when he entrenched himself at Kalafat, instead of marching from Oltenitza to Bucharest and breaking through the extended line of the enemy. Then came the siege of Sevastopol, which in any case proves that, in consequence of a long peace, the art of war has declined in the same measure as the material of war, thanks to industrial development, has increased. In no earlier war do simple earthworks play so great a role. First, at Oltenitza, the Russians took refuge in the old system of cannonading them for a few hours and then storming them. But without success. At Kalafat, earthworks held the Russians in check, and they did not dare to attack them. At Silistria, a half-demolished earthwork frustrated all the efforts of the Russian army, and now at Sevastopol a line of earthworks was honoured with extended storm batteries and heavier artillery than ever used against the most regular fortress. However, before the siege train had been 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 Balaklava, the English cavalry was sacrificed uselessly and aimlessly and against all established rules. We finally come to the battle of Inkerman, the most significant military event of this campaign.

Retrospect

Like the Prussians at Jena, the British troops were posted before Inkerman on a series of heights that were accessible in front only through a few narrow defiles. Like the Prussians, the British had neglected to occupy a height on their extreme left flank, where at Jena Napoleon, and at Inkerman Menzikoff, threw a part of his army and thus established himself before daybreak in the enemy’s flank. The Russians, generally no friends of originality, borrowed Napoleon’s plan of organisation, but as soon as the strategic movement was completed and the tactical performance was to begin, the mask of Western civilisation is cast off and the Tartar comes to light. This splendid Russian army with its old troops – many of them twenty-five years under arms – these paragons of parade service, shows itself so clumsy, so ponderous, so incapable of skirmishing and fighting in small detachments, that its officers know nothing else to do with it than to fling its heavy mass in one body at 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 hand, where the Russians made bayonet attacks in overwhelming numbers, the British received them with the same superiority as Napoleon’s squares 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 individually fight bravely, and that their plan of attack was superior to that of the Allies. Never since the battle of Narva has such a misfortune befallen the 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 that knew how to turn even defeats into means of victory. Inkerman appears almost as a certain indication of the decline of that hothouse development which Russia has taken since Peter the Great. The artificially accelerated growth and the enormous exertion, with half-barbarous material, to maintain the semblance of a brilliant civilisation, seems already to have exhausted the nation and to have inflicted upon it a kind of pulmonary consumption. The battle of Inkerman is for the Russian infantry what the battle of Rocroy was for the Spanish.