ABSTRACT
In spite of the anger and recriminations concerning the appalling conditions British soldiers had to endure in the Crimean winter of 1854–55, no sustained programme of army reform immediately emanated from it. While it seemed to many by early 1855, that aristocratic senior officers were no longer competent to run the army, and that a fundamental reordering of its organisation and practices was needed, the reforms which were enacted in the immediate aftermath of this war were modest and piecemeal, simplifying some parts of the army’s bureaucracy, but not eradicating many of the serious problems. In part, the public indignation, which had been based on emotional outrage, was difficult to sustain once the immediate problems in the Crimea had been addressed, as they had been by late winter. 1 Also contributing to lessening the calls for reform, was the fact that the war dragged on for another year, and while it did end in a victory of sorts, the role of the British army in it, had not been very glorious. In early September, the French army succeeded in taking the Malakhov, the key to Sevastopol’s defences, thus ensuring the lifting of the siege and the fall of the city. The British army, on the other hand, had been tasked with taking the Redan on 8 September, and had failed. Thus, the fighting for the British ended without a climactic victory, much to the disappointment of the public at home. Finally, hard on the heels of this war came the uprising in India, which began in May 1857. This latter was a conflict in which the army was thought to have acquitted itself well, a fact which seemed further to blunt the perceived need for wide ranging military reform. While the shortcomings of the army in the Crimean War, the first major conflict it had fought in almost forty years, did not result in an immediate thorough-going reform programme, fallout from the conflict nevertheless helped to formulate the terms of later reform attempts, with the declared suspicion of aristocratic competence, and the critique of the army’s convoluted administrative organisation remaining as central causes for concern. As Edward Spiers has noted, while the state of the army attracted considerable attention throughout the 1850s, it did so “in a periodic and somewhat desultory fashion”, 2 an approach which was not conducive to a sustained reform programme.
