Into the jaws of Death
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.”
All reverence to millions of others, who at the voice of command if not of duty, gave themselves up for an unholy cause and perished by thousands of hunger and cold and disease on the bleak shores of the Crimea.
Froude says “that the whole power of England and France supported passively by Austria, and actively by Sardinia and Turkey, succeeded with communications, secure and rapid with every advantage for procuring supplies, in partially conquering a single stronghold. It was a great victory but it was achieved at a cost to England alone of eighty millions (sterling) of money and perhaps fifty thousand lives.”
While Alexander writes (Manifesto 1856), “For eleven months Sebastopol was held against the allied aggressors: and in the whole empire from the shores of the Pacific to the Baltic, one thought, one resolution was dominant to fulfil duty, to protect the Fatherland at any cost of property and life. Husbandmen who had never left the fields they cultivated hastened to take up arms for the holy struggle and were not inferior to experienced warriors in bravery and renunciation.”
And this war was fought by France and England, not in the cause of freedom; not to redress the wrongs of the oppressed; not to help forward the wheels of progress. No, but to pave the way for the bloody atrocities which in 1876 called forth one long cry of horror and indignation throughout Christendom, while these in turn were to pale before the horrors of 1895–6 to which commercial England has turned a deaf ear, leaving Armenia helpless in the jaws of the wolf.
The Crimean War as fostered by England and France with the avowed purpose of upholding the power of the Turk really brought into action two new elements of weakness. First: up to 1856 Turkey had been free from foreign creditors, but the opening of the Dardanelles brought commerce and a foreign loan, and on the steps of indebtedness followed extravagance, speculation and national bankruptcy. The most wanton and unbridled extravagance reigned at the palace. The corruptions produced by the foreign loans found their way into every artery of the state and poisoned the very existence of the country. New loans could only be obtained by promises which it was impossible to fulfil and which were made without any intention of carrying them out.
The navy was improved, the soldiers were better armed; a large part of the money was squandered on absurd building projects; while vast sums were spent on precious stones and personal pleasures.
These loans were liberally subscribed in England, and Englishmen helped the Sultan to spend it lavishly. The origin of the troubles of 1876–7 in Bosnia and Herzegovina was said to be the heavy burden of the increased taxes imposed to pay the expenses of a visit to the Paris Exposition, and the European capitals in 1867 made by the Sultan accompanied by his son, two nephews and an expensive suite.