Crimean War Quotes

On the bastion and entrenchments white flags have been placed, the lowering valley is full of dead bodies, and the beautiful sun descends from the transparent sky to the undulating blue sea, which sparkles under the golden rays of the sun. Thousands of people crowd together, look at, speak to, and smile at each other. And these people, who are Christians, confessing one great law of love and self-sacrifice, looking at what they have done, do not suddenly fall with repentance on their knees before Him who has given them life, who has placed in the soul of each, together with the fear of death, the love of the good and beautiful. They do not embrace like brothers with tears of joy and happiness. No! The white flags are lowered, and again whistle the instruments of death and suffering, again flows innocent blood, and groans and curses are heard

Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred.

And even if I were alone, ... I should have the consolation ... to the last moment of my existence ... that no word of mine has tended to the squandering of my country's treasure or the spilling of one single drop of my country's blood.

In all the great wars of England, the war of the American Revolution, the war against the French Revolution, the Crimean War,, there were men who stood out against those ventures, and against a nation lashed to madness by the appeals and lies of its leaders. They were but a miserable minority, but history has triumphantly vindicated them.

The first time I saw nitroglycerine was in the beginning of the Crimean War. Professor Zinin in St. Petersburg exhibited some to my father and me, and struck some on an anvil to show that only the part touched by the hammer exploded without spreading.

My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad management, they could not get it.

As to the war, while it is always thought rash to have any strong military convictions, I have always believed that if they would go straight to Sebastopol early in the season they would take it with little difficulty.

The Crimean War is one of the bad jokes of history.

Russia is not angry. It is focusing.

Russia's first major intervention began in 1768, when Catherine the Great went to war with the Ottomans, and Count Alexei Orlov, the brother of her lover Grigory, sailed the Baltic fleet through the Strait of Gibraltar to rally rebellions in the Mediterranean.

I often compare Margaret Thatcher with Florence Nightingale. She stalks through the wards of our hospitals as a lady with a lamp. Unfortunately, it's a blowlamp.

The Tsar lives in twenty rooms, let him occupy no more than five and have only five heated in the winter. He is served six dishes at table; let them give him three or four. The Tsaritsa will wear only a black dress...she will seem lovelier and sweeter to us. Three lumps of sugar are put into their children's tea; let them sip it through a single lump ...and when they complain of its not being sweet, tell them it is because the French are in the Crimea and the English at Kronstadt

The tsar of War and Peace, especially in the BBC version, is a complete popinjay and a useless character. The real tsar, Alexander I, had an amazing career.

I left for Petersburg in August, 1871 and stayed there until 1879.

There has been no crime committed by statesmen of this character without those statesman appealing to the nations' honour. We fought the Crimean War because of our honour. We rushed to South Africa because of out honour. The Right Hon. Gentleman (Sir Edward Grey) is appealing to us today because of our honour. What is the use of talking about coming to the aid of Belgium, when, as a matter of fact, you are engaging in a whole European War which is now going to leave the map of Europe in the position it is in now?

In 1736, Bakhchisaray had been burned to the ground by the Russians, and when Catherine II's army completed the conquest of the peninsula in 1783, the last khan, Sahin Giray, took refuge in Turkey, where he was eventually executed.

In these days before antiseptics, doctors themselves also suffered high mortality rates. Florence Nightingale, a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-1856), watched one particularly inept surgeon cut both himself and, somehow, a bystander while blundering about during an amputation. Both men contracted an infection and died, as did the patient. Nightingale commented that it was the only surgery she'd ever seen with 300 percent mortality.

Crimea's history had made the region an inseparable part of Russia.

Historical fiction was not - and is not - meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote 'War and Peace' to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

I asked [my father] what there was to make doctoring more disgusting than nursing, which women were always doing, and which ladies had done publicly in the Crimea. He could not tell me.