The Anglo-French troops were still at Varna when, in the interests of peace, Austria brought such pressure upon the Czar that he recalled his armies from Turkish soil. But though the immediate danger to Constantinople was averted by this intervention, the governments of England and France agreed that there would be no safety for Turkey, and therefore no tranquillity in European politics, until the Russian fleet in the Black Sea had been captured or destroyed, and its base at Sebastopol levelled to the ground. When the demolition of this great naval station was thus determined on, the allies knew little of Sebastopol,[159] except that it was a fortress in the south of the Crimea, a peninsula jutting into the Black Sea from the mainland of Russia: and no soldier in western Europe had any conception of the difficulties awaiting the Anglo-French Expedition when it put to sea from Varna on September 7, 1854. Exclusive of the crews of the great fleet of warships by which the transports were escorted, the fighting men numbered about 63,000, of whom 28,000 were French, 7000 Turks, and 28,000 British. The French were under Marshal St Arnaud; Lord Raglan, who had served on Wellington’s staff in the Peninsular war, commanded the British troops. Neither of these officers lived to see the end of the campaign: St Arnaud died in September, 1854, and was succeeded by General Canrobert who, after a few months, resigned his post to General Pélissier: Lord Raglan fell a victim to cholera at the end of June, 1855, and was replaced by General Simpson. The Turks were commanded by Omar Pasha.
The effort to collect and equip for war the comparatively small body of men forming the British quota of the combined forces had greatly taxed the military resources of England. After the fall of the great Napoleon had restored peace to Europe, enormous reductions had been made in our military expenditure;[160] not only was the _personnel_ of the army cut down, but the _matériel_ was allowed to fall into decay. For more than thirty years every arm and every department of the service was systematically starved, with results well summed up by Lord Palmerston, who in 1846 bluntly informed his colleagues in the Cabinet that our military weakness was such that England existed “only by sufferance and by the forbearance of other Powers.” This opinion was endorsed by the highest authority in the British army, for Wellington himself acknowledged that our supply of guns, arms, ammunition, and all kinds of stores was inadequate. Nor were these grievous shortcomings atoned for by any high standard of efficiency amongst the troops, for though the drill and discipline of the army were alike excellent, neither the soldiers nor the departments vital to their existence in the field were trained in the slightest degree for active service; indeed, until 1853, when a few thousand men spent some weeks under canvas, no camp of exercise had been formed in England since the end of the Great War with France. Marksmanship was almost a lost art; and although the deadly volleys of the British infantry in the Peninsula had won for our troops the reputation of the best shots in Europe, musketry was so entirely neglected during the dead period after Waterloo, that the injunction “Fire low, and hit ’em in the legs, boys,” was the only instruction given to recruits. Even in the Foot Guards the men were considered to be masters of their weapon if, once in every three years, they fired thirty rounds of ball cartridge. The military education of the officers was no better than that of the rank and file; there was no attempt to teach them anything beyond barrack-square drill; the vast majority grew up ignorant of every detail of their profession, and as the Staff College at Camberley was not then in existence, the officers selected for employment on the staff proved in the majority of cases to be blind leaders of the blind. The few veterans of the Peninsula who were still to be found among the Generals had seen war on a grand scale; the officers who had served in eastern and colonial campaigns had acquired much useful knowledge in these distant operations, but with these exceptions the Staff and regimental officers were as untrained in the practice, as they were unversed in the theory of war.