Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/261

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the East.

study of the official correspondence of that time. The papers of Lord Panmure indicate , page after page ,the constant hostility of the war office to The Times and to its special correspondent at the front, because of his criticism of the conduct of the Crimean

War, and a resentment of this criticism , - criticism that the very letters of Lord Panmure to Lord Raglan show was abundantly

justified .15 Russell was repeatedly accused of " hounding Lord

Raglan to death ” by his strictures on the conditions under which the war was carried on , although Kinglake who “ set out to write an epic with Lord Raglan for his Achilles ” put the ultimate onus on the owners of The Times for not restraining Delane to

whom he accorded more blame than to Russell. The critics of Russell have upheld the cause of Lord Raglan on the ground of

his popularity among his officers and also on the ground that the war correspondents were meddlers who should not have criticized military conditions.16 “ The king never dies," and the sensitiveness of the English

commanding general in the Crimea to the criticismsof The Times correspondent and his hostility to the press in general may, at

least in part, be explained by his having served on the staff of the Duke ofWellington and having married his niece.17 The tug of war between the Government and The Times during the period of the Crimean War ended for the time being in favor of the press. “ These were the golden days of The Times," Even more impressive is the volume of W . H . Russell, The Great War with Russia : A Personal Retrospect. It was published in 1895 and is a masterly

account of the difficulties of an early war correspondent as described behind the scenes.

15 The Panmure Papers, 2 vols., 1908.

16 The controversy in regard to the justice of the criticism of the war office and the management at the front can be found in A . W . Kinglake, The Invasion of the Crimea , IV, chap . ix ; J . B . Atkins, The Life of Sir William Howard Russell, Í, chap . XIX ; A . I. Dasent, John Thadeus

Delane, I, 154 -208 . Kinglake, iv, 360 - 365, gives under a veiled descrip tion of the Company a bitter description of the great power wielded by The Times at the time of the Crimean War. His chapter on “ The Demeanor of England ” is mainly a discussion of Russell's letters to The Times and

the effect of their disclosures on the English people. - IV , chap. IX . How prolonged and how bitter this controversy has been is indicated

by the articles of F . A . Maxse , “ Lord Raglan's Traducers,” National Review , March , 1899, 33: 62– 73, and “ The War Correspondent at Bay," National Review ,April, 1899, 33: 246 – 253. — W . H . Russell's version is given in The Army and Navy Gazette, February 11, 1899. 17 A . W . Kinglake, Invasion of the Crimea, IV , 169 .