Military Memoirs: Letters Home From The Crimea - Philip Warner

Among the British troops bound for the Black Sea in May 1854 was a young officer in the 5th Dragoon Guards, Richard Temple Godman, who sent home throughout the entire Crimea campaign many detailed letters to his family at Park Hatch in Surrey. Temple Godman went out at the start of the war, took part in the successful Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaklava and in other engagements, and did not return to England until June 1856, after peace had been declared. He took three horses and despite all this adventures brought them back unscathed.;Godman's letters provide a picture of what is was really like to be in the Crimea. His dispatches from the fields of war reveal his wide interests and varied experiences - they range from the pleasures of riding in a foreign landscape, smoking Turkish tobacco, and overcoming boredom by donning comic dress and hunting wild dogs, to the pain of seeing many friends and horses die from battle, disease, deprivation and lack of medicines.;He writes scathinly about the rivalries and deficiencies of the generals in charge, inaccurate and "highly-coloured" newspapaer reports and, while critical of medial inefficiency regards women in hospitals as "a sort of fanaticism".