128 ENGLI5HSAGA

the British people would soon be as heartily sick of it as they
were now hot in its favour. They were an insignificant minority
and no one took the least notice of them.

The difficulty was to find a scene of operations. Despite
universal hatred of the Russians and intense detestation of the
Czar, the first six months of the war passed without any hostilities
worth mentioning. An Anglo-French naval expedition to the
Baltic accomplished next to nothing. A military force sent to
aid the Turk in the Balkans saw more of cholera than the enemy,
and it was not till the late autumn of 1854 that British and
French troops landed in .the Crimea peninsula and set siege to
the naval fortress of Sevastopol,

The battles that followed—Alma, Balaclava, Inkerman—and
the long siege in the trenches proved that the English had lost
nothing of their ancient valour. They also revealed their curious
inability to plan adequately ahead. The army command, which
had neither learnt nor endeavoured to learn anything since 1815,
might have been ready for the battle of Waterloo but was certainly
not for a winter campaign in the trenches of Russia.1 In the
first few months of the campaign everything failed: transport,.
commissariat, supply and hospitals. The Government and
public which had talked glibly of taking Sevastopol in a few
weeks were faced by the prospect of a long and hazardous cam-
paign thousands of miles from home against a superior and
apparently inexhaustible enemy fighting on his own ground

During that winter—even in England it was one of the
coldest in human memory—the losses of the little professional
army were appalling and the foolish boastings of the summer
soon turned to mourning. Tales of men fighting in the frozen
t trenches without greatcoats, or packed, filthy with dysentery and
gangrenous wounds, into unequipped hospitals built over
Scutari cesspits, aroused a wave of indignation which brought
dovg^the government and temporarily disgraced and even
imperilled the aristocratic system of the country. But the story
of their courage and endurance also thrilled England: the
charge of the Light Brigade in the valley of death was like
Thermopylae. ^ The national mood was reflected by Macaulay,
who told a friend in a letter how anxious he was about the
brave fellows in the Crimea, how proud for the country and

lThe British ComznaodeD-is-CEhief, Lord Raglan, an old Peninsula veteran, i
«Wyi«ferK^totheenemyasttt:h«FiciidL)' GrcmlkMemoirs,Part///,/,912.

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