Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
The War Against War
By Gordon A. Craig
Dunant's Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross
by Caroline Moorehead
Carroll and Graf, 780 pp., $38.00
The Good Listener: Helen Bamber, A Life Against Cruelty
by Neil Belton
Pantheon, 374 pp., $27.00
The military history of the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by a curious discrepancy between the heightened destructiveness of warfare and the lack of attention paid to means of controlling its human costs. As armies adopted infantry weapons like the breech-loading Dreyse needle gun and the French chassepot, whose range and rate of fire greatly exceeded those of previous models, casualties in the field increased in number. It was the rare army, however, that made ade-quate provision for the care of the wounded. In 1854, the British army went into the Crimean War without a field commissariat, an effective system of supply, a corps of service troops, or an ambulance corps or medical ser-vice. After the battle of the Alma it was discovered that there were no splints or bandages on hand, and, in the barracks hospital at Scutari, the spread of cholera, gangrene, and dysentery raged virtually uncontrolled until the Secretary of War persuaded Florence Nightingale, who had administered a sanitarium in London, to organize a corps of nurses and go to the Crimea to prevent a disaster.
Review, 4877 words
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