Lot 1667
SIR WILLIAM HOWARD RUSSELL, CVO (1820-1907)
ON THE FIELD OF INKERMAN
Signed, inscribed upon the tombstone, watercolour with pen and ink
20.5 x 30cm.
* The tombstone is inscribed The/ 44th Regt./ Lieut. Col. Carpenter/ Capt. E. Richards/ Lieut. J. W. Swaby, T Tayler/ &/ J Stirling Killed 5. Nov/1854. On that day, the British army repulsed a Russian attack on Inkerman Ridge in a decisive victory in the War.
* In A. W. Kinglake's The Invasion of the Crimea (1899), he notes that `Four young officers of the 41st.. sprang forward, encouraging their men and then calling, they say, upon one another, rushed into the enemy's ranks, and not being followed by their men, were slain..` Russell was a war correspondent for the Times and his critically objective analysis of the conditions in which soldiers lived in the Crimea alarmed the authorities in Britain - his observation that over 80% of the deaths there arose from malnutrition and disease rather than the action of war led to the establishment of Florence Nightingale's pioneering hospital practices. As a journalist, Russell is credited with devising the phrase `the thin red line` to describe infantrymen on the battlefield.
