“The Siege of Sebastopol. Part of Captain Wodehouse's Battery” from the “Illustrated London News”

The Late Marshall St. Arnaud, Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies

Composite woodblock engraving

16 by 11 inches

Illustrated London News 25 (October 14, 1854): 377

See commentary below.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Scanned image and commentary by Philip V. Allingham.

Image courtesy of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the person who scanned the image and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Article accompanying the portrait

The full details of the heroic battle of Alma have, ere this, been read with the intensest interest in every country in Europe. To thousands of homes in Great Britain and France the glorious news has brought sorrow and lamentation; but in every home in both nations, even in those of the mourners themselves, it has excited, at the same time, the warmest feelings of pride and patriotism. Not only Great Britain and France, but every civilized nation in the world, to which the recital has penetrated, has shared the exultation of the victors, and formed prayers for the final and irretrievable downfall of the sanguinary despot upon whose head lies the guilt of all the blood that has been, and is to be shed. Last week the victory of Alma was, to some extent, overshadowed by the vague but splendid fiction of still greater victories at Sebastopol. [377-78]

Commentary

The paper's lead story featured an almost full-page portrait of General St. Arnaud of the French expeditionary forces sent to the Crimea by Napoleon III. On 19 September 1854 at the River Alma near Sebastopol on Kalimita Bay Russian and Allied forces fought the first major battle of the Crimean campaign. Despite a widespread cholera outbreak in their allied encampments, the Anglo-French force jointly commanded by the French General St. Arnaud and the English FitzRoy James Henry Somerset (Lord Raglan, 1788-1855) defeated General Menshikov's Russian army, which lost some 6,000 troops.

The decision to run a picture of the French rather than the English commander must certainly have been intended to cement the grand alliance and signal to English readers the important role that French troops played in this decisive victory.

Last modified 9 May 2014