5 - Living through Crisis

Summary

If The Efforts Of The affluent to meet their perceived moral duty to soldiers in the East proved contentious at times, so did the personas they created for soldiers’ wives, which often collided with reality. The women who struggled at home, those who experienced brutal hardships in the East during the Crimean War, and the wives who were caught up in the Indian Uprising of 1857–58, continued to embrace the cultural priorities and practices identified earlier. Their experiences during these conflicts will be explored in turn, beginning with the war in the East. As noted in the last chapter, the Crimean War was seen by many in the British Isles as a moral conflict; ‘there is an innate feeling in the hearts of Englishmen against the strong man, who seeks to damage or destroy his weak and unoffending neighbour’, as one newspaper put it. This being so, it seemed repugnant that the wives of soldiers willing to make the supreme sacrifice to uphold the nation's moral cause, should be left destitute in their absence. Soldiers’ wives responded to this intense and widespread concern in a number of ways. Before discussing these, however, a caveat is in order: soldiers’ wives who had to fend for themselves in the British Isles have left only a few first-hand accounts of their experiences. Thus, it is also necessary to interrogate soldiers’ correspondence, newspaper articles and letters to the editor, as well as charitable records in order to explore this issue. As a result, their voices are often mediated and refracted, but with due care much can still be learned about these women.

The personas assigned to soldiers and their wives by the public and press were often inadequate and problematic. In the letters enlisted men and NCOs sent home, it is clear that much of the patriotic persona of the soldier created in the newspapers did seem to be more or less true of most of these men early in the war: a number of letter-writers expressed their keenness to fight the nation's battles – especially in the first months of the conflict – and they thought the cause righteous.