In 1916, certain film-goers in Russia’s big cities had the privilege of watching dozens of amputees and maimed men hustle and bustle on the screen for almost an hour.1 We know nothing about these anonymous figures, who represented both victims of war and a narrative of resurrection. We know nothing and no one saw anything but these shots of them as they are getting treated, examined, fitted with prosthetic devices, and professionally retrained. Reborn to Life was certainly a silent movie, as were all the films of the time, but what is most significant in this case is that it did not let these veterans speak: we can only attentively follow their attitudes, gestures, and looks, then guess at their thoughts and emotions. The disabled veterans were objectified: they merely stood as a symbol of the war’s cruelty; these were victims, the living dead far more conspicuous than the millions of corpses buried at the western margins of the empire.

The state’s military engagement created the impossibility of returning to a normal civilian life, thus requiring the invention of a new social status. Whereas society was divided on the basis of residential location and professional activity, the war cut across social classes, making certain categories of victims permanent recipients of support. The Law of 23 June 1912, first aimed at veterans of the war against Japan, was adapted over the course of the two following conflicts: it established the definition of a wounded soldier, then of a disabled veteran, and finally of a disabled person in general. The law set thresholds that were constantly debated, pensions that were endlessly disputed, and rights (to clothing, housing, food, education) that remained mainly theoretical. The vast majority of disabled ex-servicemen remained passive, only existing on the basis of lists drawn up by hospitals or administrative offices. But a minority of individuals sought to understand their rights, take advantage of possibilities open to them, and secure concrete recognition of the state’s moral debt. With their demands, they fortified their legal status and improved the plight of their group by forcing experts to be more rigorous and precise. In this way, the state of war thus furthered the rule of law in Russia.

The year 2020 provides evidence of the Crimea’s continued relevance in troubled times. In Britain, 2020 marks the moment that Brexit was finally done. Several critics found resonance in the Charge of the Light Brigade and the cult around it, which valorized heroic failure. Like the officers of the Light Brigade, the Tory leadership blundered as it led the nation into the abyss. In Britain and beyond, 2020 will be remembered as the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic. Like the battle against the cholera in the Crimea, the British struggle against the virus was marred by mismanagement. In response, the names of Nightingale and Seacole found their ways onto makeshift hospitals and rehabilitation centers. And, as in the Crimea, military men – here, centenarians whose youths overlapped with the longest-lived of the Victorian generation – captured the hearts of the public. Most notable was Captain Tom Moore, whose compassion and particular variety of courage spurred him, at the age of 100, to raise money for the NHS before dying a celebrity in 2021. Even now, the Crimean War’s long afterlife provides touchstones for success, failure, and hope.

The culmination of the Battle of Balaklava, the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred over fifteen minutes of tragic and action-packed drama during October 1854. In the Crimean moment and beyond, the occasion has epitomized the war’s tragedy and blunder. Its persistence in national memory derives especially from the poem that immortalized it: Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Celebrating the Chargers as the paragons of duty, Tennyson’s verses gave them a corporate identity across their lifetimes, as they sought glory and fended off poverty. Long after the Victorian era, patriotic Britons clung to the Charge, using it as a tool for military recruiting, taking pride in its relics, and finding consolation in its lessons. Its persistence notwithstanding, the Charge had a changing meaning: the duty that it epitomized became an antiquated value in the twentieth century, as antiwar crusades, comic parodies, and even epic films suggest. Moreover, Tennyson’s verses were no static monument: their complexity has allowed, time and again, for the event’s reworking so that it does not anymore suggest glorious duty as much as it symbolizes heroic failure.

From 1904 on, the question of disabled veterans was in no way neutral on the political level. It fostered health care and social welfare policy, impelled an interpretation of the ongoing war, and reconfigured notions of heroism, sacrifice, and patriotism. The period 1915–1919 was marked by the disabled veterans’ remarkable political activism under three successive regimes, two revolutions, and two wars. As the only large-scale association of First World War veterans in Russia, the All-Russian Union of Maimed Soldiers managed to rally together men linked only by a common fate. They exerted a visible influence on the solution for the ‘disabled veterans’ question’ in 1917 and put out publicity for their own cause thanks to democratisation. They did not, however, manage to unify a group suffering a host of divisions stemming from the era’s political turbulence, nor did they succeed in consolidating a common identity distinct from that of all war veterans or all disabled persons. Their rapid, forced political demobilisation during the civil war made them veterans who had experienced both the Great War and the revolution and who were durably stigmatised by the Bolshevik regime. They suffered discrimination that benefited the disabled veterans of the Red Army, the only ones deemed legitimate under the Soviet regime. The political repression only doubled the punishment of their handicap.

The amputations and bodily harm inflicted on Russian society prompted a revolution on the medical and legal levels. An unprecedented right to both collective and individual health care arose out of a military necessity (of sending the greatest possible number of men back to battle) and international scientific competition. As a vast field of experimentation on the soldiers’ bodies and minds, the war led to the medicalisation not only of the army, but also of society. Medical specialisations appeared in Russia or were bolstered on the state level, and access to these cutting-edge therapies was rapidly made widely available. That made it possible to achieve decisive progress in treating veterans suffering from psychoneuroses: their institutionalisation, which became the norm, henceforth meant they would be cared for and not abandoned. The revolution in prosthetics likewise embodied efforts on the national level. The war prompted innovation and the organisation of nationwide production. It also made it imperative to guarantee that every amputee would receive an artificial limb. The prevalence of a utilitarian conception of the body and the quantification of its socio-economic contribution changed the perception of handicaps, which were now referred to in scientific rather than moral terms.

Death is a shared experience across wars, but the cultures of mourning and conditions of burial that accompany it vary across conflicts. Combatants in the Crimea held to a Victorian ideal of death that imagined a peaceful passing and a proper burial. War at a distance made the good death impossible. Yet, priests and medical men, as well as soldiers and officers, ensured that their brethren passed away as comfortably as possible. Men of compassion and feeling, they expressed grief among themselves and with loved ones at home. They buried the war dead in scattershot graves and in organized cemeteries like Cathcart’s Hill. When the war was over, the graves remained a concern on the home front. The wars of the twentieth century and the Cold War, too, followed on the neglect of the nineteenth century. A twenty-first-century campaign to restore British graves in the Crimea reinvigorated Victorian sentimentality, yet ended abruptly with Russia’s 2014 invasion. Across decades and centuries, the poor upkeep of Crimean graves was an emotional flashpoint. It served as a referendum on the War itself and on the place of the mid-Victorian conflict in British history and consciousness.

The study begins with the formation mechanisms of a social group that were created almost ex nihilo by the war. Men became disabled by suffering an irremediable loss over the course of three conflicts of varying intensity between 1904 and 1921. We must first assess the scope of the loss, which is difficult to do, for in Russia, and then in the USSR, the tallies always provided approximate totals that were never definitive. This incredibly massive number was in fact a compilation of individual cases. In order to adopt the best way of approaching this experience, we have to detail the physical and moral ordeals that the soldiers endured from the time they were wounded until they ended up as disabled veterans: this process of transition weighed heavily on their ability to cope successfully. The army lost fighting forces, the men lost a part of themselves along with certain physical or mental capacities, and society lost its future workforce. The rhetoric of defeat, decline, and deficit heavily influenced the conception of the strikingly sudden, widespread phenomenon that exposed the moral fragility of the Russian nation. During the war, attitudes toward repairing bodies were polarised, torn between moralising suspicion (of self-inflicted wounds or simulation) and scientific uncertainties, military verifications and independent assessments of experts.

The Crimean War bequeathed to Great Britain the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster, and Florence Nightingale, a long-adored heroine. These epitomes of the conflict are not static emblems of Victorian England. They are lodestones for writing the nation’s past, forging its future, and assessing its annals. Other innovations and personages to emerge from the War also continue to exert their hold on ordinary Britons. The War inspired the Victoria Cross, a military award for valor, which holds its allure even today. More recently, Mary Seacole, a Caribbean-born hotelier and healer, has come to the fore as a Crimean heroine. Beyond the names of battles, heroes, and institutions, the Crimean War offered immaterial legacies. It engendered forms of masculinity and models of femininity, as well as practices of burial and structures of feeling. The notion of afterlife allows us to apprehend the longstanding, varied, and elusive effects of this mid-Victorian conflict. The six chapters of this book trace facets of the war and its legacies as they demonstrate the persistence of an overlooked conflict in the making of modern Britain.

With the First World War came a militarisation of society as well as the politicisation of war. While the conflict was on everybody’s minds and everybody’s lips, dictating its own pace and organisation of the national effort, its meaning was subject to debate within all sectors of Russian society. The Romanov dynasty and the military command used men who were fit for combat in order to achieve their imperialist aims. In return, these combatants, their families, and all the medical, economic, and social activists used the fact of being at war to force the state to acknowledge its social debt and force the autocracy to admit to the necessity of change. Now the Great War constituted a frontal assault on the body of the nation. While on the Russian scale of things, losses remained at acceptable levels in absolute numbers, they were striking down a specific segment of the population: the future pillars of the economy and pivotal figures for local communities. Among them stood out a group of men who, although they had not fallen on the battlefield, nor died or disappeared, gave rise to a singular, intimate grief.

The newest addition to the pantheon of Crimean worthies is the Caribbean healer and hotelier Mary Seacole, who ministered to the troops at the war front. In 1857, Seacole released her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. The book was an effort to safeguard her livelihood and secure her place in Crimean history. The latter goal was realized with the rediscovery of the autobiography in the later twentieth century. Black British activists and health care providers found an inspiration in Seacole’s story, sharing it in their communities and building on its legacy. By the millennium, their labors had transformed Seacole into a national icon, with a place in the National Curriculum and the National Gallery. A magisterial statue of Seacole now stands on the South Bank of the Thames, where Florence Nightingale spearheaded efforts in nursing education. Touted in the past as the “Black Nightingale,” Seacole was another unconventional woman with a long legacy. Yet, she is a Crimean protagonist in her own right, known for warmth, humor, and ingenuity. An embodiment of distinctive virtues, Seacole has become a Crimean role model for the twenty-first century.