When Beauties Who Went To The Crimea Saw Battles

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18313, 3 February 1934, Page 10

When Beauties Who Went To The Crimea Saw Battles

TX the whole painful story of that A monument of muddled incompetence which was the Crimean War, nothing more starkly reveals the callousness of the times than the visits of fashionable beauties to the front to see the “fun.” • • Their “appetite for horrors is pictured with gently effective satire in the Dowager Countess ot Airlio s new.book. “With the Guards Ye Shall Go.” , _ Lntiy Airlie's great-uncle, btrango Jocelyn, was colonel in the Scots Fusilier Guards, and her vividlydrawn account of the campaigns is based on his letters. In one lie remarks how “odd” it seemed that, while men were dying in the trenches, he “took Lady Stratford and the young ladies yesterday to see Sevastopol from a height, and they went over the Field of Inkerman the day before. Lady Stratford drove iu Lord Raglan's carriage, and the young ladies rode.” Gaiety at Balaklava.

Another of the party was “ the beautiful Lady George Paget.” ‘The young Indies” were “the Miss Cannings. ” They brought an air of social gaiety to Bulaklav a, and Lacj George was the recipient of the most flattering attentions from the inflammable General de la Marmora, who ordered his band to play for her every night at dinner.” At the famous attack on the Mulakoff and the Redan, Lady George Paget watched the action on horseback beside the Commandor-in-Chief, Lord Raglan. Later in the day, says Lady Airlie, she was joined by Mrs Duberly, who, however, felt so ill from the heat “that she was unequal to riding any other horse but her ‘sweet pony.' ” Then the whole party learned that the Mamclon Vert was to be stormed the next day, so that night they “wont to sleep earlier than usual. ’ ’ Lady Airlie continues: .. “Next day they loft, at 4 for the front, finding a piquet house which afforded comfortable shelter for the ‘spectacle’ on the Mamclon A'crt. A round shot came bobbing up the hill, like a hare, almost to whore they sat; but only the heat of the summer sun could move them, half asleep at 10 o 'clock. ” ,

In the afternoon they inspected the storming party of 25,000 Frenchmen, and hoard General Bosquet address them. Then:

“Her tears drying on her cheeks in the breeze, Mrs Duberly galloped back to the piquet house, where a navvy had just had his head taken off by a round shot. Therefore she judged it wiser to go a little further back, where she could sit quietly on the grass, and the■ horses could graz^.” Emperor’s Own Chef.

Towards the end of the war there came a moment when the Emperor of the French, recalling suddenly his great predecessor’s remark about an army marching on its stomach, sent to the Crimea his own chef, the great Monsieur Soyer. “When first taken round the kitchens the famous chef’s horror was almost comic, especially over the gross wastefulness of the great cauldrons into which the ration beef was thrown to boil, in order that, when reducco by this process to a stringy and flavorless mass, it could bo served to sick and well men alike, all the nourishing broth and the delicious fragments extracted from the meat by boiling boing thrown away ! “Under Soyer's rule a new era began. From the small kitchen there now issued the most delicato messes made for tlio hospitals out of practically the same materials which the poor soldier cooks had so utterly failed to make either palatably or nutritious. ’ ’