There are certain territories that seem destined to be the scene of invasions and endless wars. Afghanistan is one of them; others are Crimea and Palestine. In 1787, Tsarina Catherine the Great, on the occasion of her silver jubilee, decided to tour the recently conquered Crimean peninsula, the cradle of the very Christian Russian culture, and she did so in style, thanks to the good offices of her valet. Prince Potemkin.
The visit included a cruise along the Dnieper River followed by a kind of safari through the steppes by carriage. For the Tsarina's added amusement, the imposing imperial procession was accompanied by thousands of Don Cossacks, Tatar cavalry and even a regiment of “Amazons”, that is, local women disguised as written warriors, just as Herodotus described them. So that the tsarina would not believe that this was nothing more than a desert, the ingenious Potemkin invented fake removable canvas towns that looked real from a distance.
After Catherine, the Russians would occupy territories that the moribund Ottoman Empire could no longer control or defend, an extremely unacceptable situation in the eyes of the English and French who believed themselves to be the kings of mambo, until, in 1854, the Crimean War finally broke out. . In addition to being abominable, like all wars, this one was particularly stupid, ridiculous, absurd.
The joyous sacrifice of young human lives was horrifying; the incompetence of the officers of all participating armies, criminal; the lack of logistical support, deadly; the absence of a single reason that justified such barbarity, total. And, on top of that, those who did not fall on the battlefield died like flies, victims of cholera.
As a backdrop, the desire of the Europeans to wrest control of Palestine from the Ottomans. In other words, an element of religious motivation - not justification - was not lacking in the conflict. But in the end what Europe was really interested in was nothing more than stopping the Russian advance in its weak east.
After 170 years and after the fall of all the empires that fought in the Crimean War fought between 1854 and 1856, everything is still in place: the battlefields are the same; the reasons, identical; the loss of human life just as horrifying.
The generals at the head of the fighting armies wore striking uniforms and showed gestures more typical of characters in an opera or operetta. Without going any further, Omar Pasha, a general of the Turkish Army, was a Serbian born in Croatia who was accompanied throughout the war campaign by his private harem, in addition to an orchestra composed of German musicians, who often filled the starry nights. in the middle of the steppe with a beautiful performance of Il trovatore, which at that time was sweeping theaters around the world. You could say that General Pasha was a precursor to that crazy American lieutenant in Coppola's Apocalypse Now!, who bombed Vietnamese villages to the sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
In addition to giving birth to the Red Cross, this war gave birth to a journalistic novelty at the hands of William Howard Russell, whose chronicles in The Times, which arrived in record time thanks to recent technological advances, caused a sensation among its readers. The articles of this first war correspondent made the hair stand on end, since they were not subjected to any type of censorship; He described in detail the atrocities that he witnessed, and what he described was anything but pretty.
As if this were not enough to warn the British against the war, a new section was launched in the newspaper that published a selection of letters that desperate soldiers sent from the front to their families, friends or wives. Once again, uncensored. Needless to say, the tsar, an avid reader of The Times, delighted in reading those shocking letters, if nothing else because it was how he learned about the enemy's positions and their almost absolute lack of logistical means.
No one won that absurd war, no matter how much the British and French declared themselves victors, as will happen at the end of the wars of our days. The scavenger oligarchs wait in the wings for the signal to come on stage. “Ah! “Che la morte ognora” (Il trovatore, Verdi)
