Marking Time 341The only bright spot was the presence of several dozen. volunteer female
nurses, who toiled heroically, cheering the men and acting as a check on cor-
rupt officials.^111 Some of them accompanied wounded who were evacuated to
the rear on long journeys over appalling roads in uncovered ox-drawn carts.^112
in rhe eight monihs from Mart.:h i.u Odubt:r l 855 nu h:ss i.han 88,000 wounded
or sick were transported from Sevastopol' to base hospitals in the interior, and
another 113,000 got as far as Simferopol'.^113 This was a considerable feat,
even if conditions in the latter city were appalling: water was short and relief
funds were misappropriated by hospital staff, two of whom were subsequently
put on trial.^114 In 1855 23 per cent of hospital patients there died.^115 At
Nikolayev the mortality rate that year stood at 14 per cent, but in the first
months of 1856 it soared to 43 per cent, largely because of overcrowding, poor
food, and inadequate sanitation. t 16 In besieged Sevastopol' itself the medical
services had almost completely broken down by the end of^1855 as typhus,
scurvy, and other infections took their toll-of doctors and nurses as well as of
the exhausted troops.
Contemporary writers, and later historians too, have been prone to blame
the catastrophe wholly on administrative short-comings, underestimating the
'objective' difficulties stemming from the necessity to wage war in such a loca-
tion. Nevertheless there was a good deal of bureaucratic incompetence,
intrigue, and corruption. Too many senior officers held to the view that
soldiers were bound to suffer anyway and that concern on their behalf was a
mark of weakness. Pirogov came up against bigoted functionaries who
pestered him with requests for data on the number of cures he had effected
while ignoring material deficiencies for which they themselves were largely
responsible. 'Is this a time for establishing mortality rates,' he exclaimed,
'when patients are crowded together like sardines and no one cared about their
shelter when they fell sick or were wounded?,.^17 Unfortunately a preoccupa-
tion with paper formalities while disregarding reality was characteristic of
Nicholas l's administration, in the army as elsewhere. Many of the successes
achieved in health care were the result less of the system than of those who
found ways of bypassing it.
Leo Tolstoy, an artillery subaltern during the Crimean campaign, captivated
the literary public, and officers in particular, with his Sevastopol' Sketches, in
111 Curtiss, 'Sisters of Mercy', gives an excellent accounl of I heir work. The organization which
despatched them stood under the pa1ronage of 1he enligh1ened Grand Duchess Helen and was the
forerunner of the Russian Red Cross. Previously care had been provided by male nurses: Yezersky
(SVM iii(ii)) p. 20; cf. II PSZ iii. 1888 (21 Mar. 1828).
112 Curtiss, 'Sisters of Mercy', p. 98.
113 Zatler, Opisaniye rasporyazheniy, i. 2-3 n.
114 I. S. Lebedev, • Ranenyy Sevastopolets o poryadkakh v Simferopol' skom gospitale 1855-6',
RA L912, 2, 256.
115 Yezersky (SVM iii(ii) ) p. 38 n.
116 Ibid.; Curtiss, Crimean War, p. 468.
111 Pirogov, Sevast. pis'ma, p. 99; cf. p. 113.