Book Reviewed by:![Florence Nightingale at Scutary [sic] Hospital](/images/ezines/nightingale.jpg "Miss Nightingale in the Hospital in Scutary [sic], 1856")
The Crimean War of 1853–1856 pitted the Russian Empire against an alliance of British, French, Turkish and Sardinian troops on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea. Britain entered the war in March 1854 to protect its trading interests with Turkey, while France saw an opportunity for revenge against the Russians after Napoleon's defeat in 1812. In military terms, according to naval historian Andrew Lambert, "it was a midway point between Waterloo and World War One."
The war foreshadowed the horrors of the American Civil War, employing Napoleonic tactics with improved weaponry. The human death toll was appalling—roughly 25,000 British, 100,000 French and up to a million Russians died. But the vast majorities of these deaths were not from battle wounds. The biggest killer in the Crimean War was disease.
As novelist Melissa Pritchard so hauntingly captures in Flight of the Wild Swan, the Crimean War would become Florence Nightingale's war: a fight ...
