Memories of the Crimean War continued to provide a winning subject for British artists well into the 1870s. The best known of these Crimean pictures was Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (1874) by Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy. So great were the crowds that came to see it that a policeman was put on guard to provide protection. Already known for her earlier paintings on military themes, Thompson had conceived The Roll Call (as it became popularly known) in the immediate aftermath of the Cardwell reforms, when army matters were prominent in public life. From detailed sketches of Crimean veterans, she created a striking composition, in which the remnants of the Grenadiers, wounded, cold and utterly exhausted, assemble after a battle to be counted by their mounted officer. The painting was completely different from conventional depictions of war that focused on the glorious deeds of gallant officers: apart from the mounted officer, the 2-metre-high canvas was entirely dominated by the suffering of the rank and file. It stripped away the heroics and let the viewer look into the face of war. After its showing at the Royal Academy The Roll Call went on national tour, drawing immense crowds. In Newcastle, it was advertised by men with sandwich boards which simply read ‘The Roll Call is Coming!’ In Liverpool, 20,000 people saw the picture in three weeks – a huge number for the time. People came away profoundly moved by the painting, which had clearly touched the nation’s heart. The Queen purchased The Roll Call from its original buyer, a Manchester industrialist, but a printing company retained the right to reproduce it in a popular edition of engravings. Thompson herself became a national heroine overnight. A quarter of a million cartes-de-visite photographs of the artist were sold to the public, who put her on a par with Florence Nightingale.19
What will they say in England
When the story there is told
Of deeds of might, on Alma’s height,
Done by the brave and bold?
Of Russia, proud at noontide,
Humbled ere set of sun?
They’ll say ‘’Twas like Old England!’
They’ll say ‘’Twas noble done!’
What will they say in England
When, hushed in awe and dread,
Fond hearts, through all our happy homes
Think of the mighty dead,
And muse, in speechless anguish,
On father – brother – son?
They’ll say in dear Old England
‘God’s holy will be done.’
What will they say in England?
Our names, both night and day
Are in their hearts and on their lips,
When they laugh, or weep, or pray.
They watch on earth, they plead with heaven,
Then, forward to the fight!
Who droops or fears, while England cheers,
And God defends the right?
Reverend J. S. B. Monsell in
The Girls’ Reading Book (1875)20
The Crimean War left a deep impression on the English national identity. To schoolchildren, it was an example of England standing up against the Russian Bear to defend liberty – a simple fight between Right and Might, as Punch portrayed it at the time. The idea of John Bull coming to the aid of the weak against tyrants and bullies became part of Britain’s essential narrative. Many of the same emotive forces that took Britain to the Crimean War were again at work when Britain went to war against the Germans in defence of ‘little Belgium’ in 1914 and Poland in 1939.
Today, the names of Alma, Balaklava, Inkerman, Sebastopol, Cardigan and Raglan continue to inhabit the collective memory – mainly through the signs of streets and pubs. For decades after the Crimean War there was a fashion for naming girls Florence, Alma, Balaklava, and boys Inkerman. Veterans of the war took these names to every corner of the world: there is a town called Balaklava in South Australia and another in Queensland; there are Inkermans in West Virginia, South and West Australia, Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales in Australia, as well as Gloucester County, Canada; there are Sebastopols in California, Ontario, New South Wales and Victoria, and a Mount Sebastopol in New Zealand; there are four towns called Alma in Wisconsin, one in Colorado, two in Arkansas, and ten others in the United States; four Almas and a lake with the same name name in Canada; two towns called Alma in Australia, and a river by that name in New Zealand.
‘Right Against Wrong’ (Punch, 8 April 1854)
In France, too, the names of the Crimea are found everywhere, reminders of a war in which 310,000 Frenchmen were involved. One in three did not return home. Paris has an Alma Bridge, built in 1856 and rebuilt in the 1970s, which is now mainly famous for the scene of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash in 1997. Until then it was better known for its Zouave statue (the only one of four to be kept from the old bridge) by which water levels are still measured by Parisians (the river is declared unnavigable when the water passes the Zouave’s knees). Paris has a place de l’Alma, and a boulevard de Sébastopol, both with metro stations by those names. There is a whole suburb in the south of Paris, originally built as a separate town, with the name of Malakoff (Malakhov). Initially called ‘New California’, Malakoff was developed in the decade after the Crimean War on cheap quarry land in the Vanves valley by Alexandre Chauvelot, the most successful of the property developers in nineteenth-century France. Chauvelot cashed in on the brief French craze for commemorating the Crimean victory by building pleasure-gardens in the new suburb to increase its appeal to artisans and workers from the overcrowded centre of Paris. The main attraction of the gardens was the Malakoff Tower, a castle built in the image of the Russian bastion, set in a theme-park of ditches, hills, redoubts and grottoes, along with a bandstand and an outside theatre, where huge crowds gathered to watch the reenactments of Crimean battles or take in other entertainments in the summer months. It was with the imprimatur of Napoleon that New California was renamed Malakoff, in honour of his regime’s first great military victory, in 1858. Developed as private building plots, the suburb grew rapidly during the 1860s. But after the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870, the Malakoff Tower was destroyed on the orders of the Mayor of Vanves, who thought it was a cruel reminder of a more glorious past.
Malakoff towers were built in towns and villages throughout provincial France. Many of them survive to this day. There are Malakoff towers in Sivry-Courtry (Seine-et-Marne), Toury-Lurcy (Nièvre), Sermizelles (Yonne), Nantes and Saint-Arnaud-Montrond (Cher), as well as in Belgium (at Dison and Hasard-Cheratte near Liège), Luxembourg and Germany (Cologne, Bochum and Hanover), Algeria (Oran and Algiers) and Recife in Brazil, a city colonized by the French after the Crimean War. In France itself, nearly every town has its rue Malakoff. The French have given the name of Malakoff to public squares and parks, hotels, restaurants, cheeses, champagnes, roses and chansons.
But despite these allusions, the war left much less of a trace on the French national consciousness than it did on the British. The memory of the Crimean War in France was soon overshadowed by the war in Italy against the Austrians (1859), the French expedition to Mexico (1862–6) and, above all, the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Today the Crimean War is little known in France. It is a ‘forgotten war’.
In Italy and Turkey, as in France, the Crimean War was eclipsed by later wars and quickly dropped out of the nationalist myths and narratives that came to dominate the way these countries reconstructed their nineteenth-century history.