No Place for Ladies - The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War by Helen Rappaport

Aurum, £18.99

Mrs Duberly's War edited by Christine Kelly

OUP, £16.99

“IT HAS EVER BEEN A tradition among English women of the upper class to get as near to the war front as possible,” Lady Apsley wrote in Bridleways Through History (1936), a delightful book sadly out of print.

Florence Nightingale’s name is synonymous with the Crimea, and as well known to those with an interest in that war is the name of Fanny Duberly, who accompanied her husband, the paymaster of the 8th Hussars, and kept a diary that was a bestseller when it was published before the war had ended. More recently the Jamaican-born nurse Mary Seacole, who worked on the Crimean battle-fields, has been at centre stage.

So, is that it? By no means. According to Helen Rappaport’s fascinating No Place for Ladies as many as 1,200 women may have accompanied the British Army east in 1854, first to Turkey and then to the Crimea. By the end of the war another 250 had travelled out as nurses. “It is likely that a good three quarters of the army wives never returned,” she writes. A good many kept diaries and wrote letters, and the author, a historian of the period, has made excellent use of them.

But English (or more correctly British) women of the upper, or the lower, class were not the only female faces at the front. The French were our co-allies in the war with Russia, and French women added gaietéto General Pélissier’s encampments. The language is indicative: while the British had “camp followers”, or what a couple of generations later would be called NAAFI girls, the French had cantinièresand vivandières. And not washerwomen but blanchisseuses. So much more charming.

Indeed, says the author, whereas the British wives often inspired contempt among the officers, the cantinièresand vivandières were treated by their own troops “with marked respect and consideration”.

Perhaps in part it was because they wore bloomers. British Army women should be “bloomerised à la vivandière” wrote one officer, Sir James Alexander, in his memoirs: “Straw bonnets and draggling petticoats are absurd in the field”, although some officers were appalled that “wives” were wearing trousers – even criticising Fanny Duberly for wearing leather trousers underher riding habit.

The cantinièreswore modifications of the uniform of the regiment to which they were attached, those with the Zouaves, a regiment raised in Algeria and famed for its outlandish dress, sporting Turkish-style red trousers and a fez. “Right down to their well-polished boots and jingling spurs,” Rappaport writes, “the cantinières were thoroughly feminine, despite the military garb.” Finally there was the “gorgeously painted” tricolour brandy cask or bidon that the women attached to their belts and used to carry wine or brandy to weary troops. My God, no wonder the men fought!

Indeed, in an echo of the tendency for British soldiers today to envy the provisions of their allies, Rappaport records that “British men had no doubts when they saw them: the cantinières were the ‘best got-up’ women they had ever seen on campaign or were likely to see till war’s end”.

One group of Frenchwomen most certainly did not wear bloomers: the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. For 200 years the French took them on campaign as nurses “familiar in their traditional, 17th-century-style peasant dress of grey serge and their distinctive stiff white peasant caps”. They knew their business, were disciplined and were always ready to be sent to the theatre of war. The English sisters – Catholic and Anglican – who accompanied Nightingale when the shambles of our own medical system was revealed were not nearly so tractable, though the author does justice to their plight (and devotion).

In one account presaging Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland the nuns are shown huddled together aboard ship in a violent storm, praying aloud for a “speedy and Christian end”.

While it is easy to fall in love with French gayness, be moved by the practical piety of the Sisters, be impressed with Fanny Duberly’s appetite for gunfire, or admire the devotion of noble ladies such as Lady Jane Shaw Stewart, who ran the hospital at Balaklava, it is the wretched wives of the rank and file – often Irish – who truly inspire respect. Many married to be allowed to accompany their men, 30 or so per regiment, although they were given next to nothing in rations or shelter. Rappaport weaves their stories into the text without sentimentality; the facts speak for themselves.

Fanny Duberly’s diary sold well in 1855, but it has been out of print for 150 years. In Mrs Duberly’s War Christine Kelly provides useful notes and an introduction, although she does not always correct Fanny’s errors (there was no such regiment as the 15th Dragoons, and the 15th Light Dragoons were not in the Crimea).

The index is inadequate, being a mere list of people mentioned in the text, and the price – given that the copyright is long expired – is exorbitant. That said, it is a welcome edition to the growing library of a particularly sad, unnecessarily bloody and squalid war in which, as too often, the nation expected its army to prevail with little more than raw courage. These books show, however, that the toast should equally be to “the Ladies”.

Click here to buy these books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy