Published unsigned as a leading article in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 4305, February 5, 1855, p. 4; attributed to Friedrich Engels by MEGA² (I/14). Text from the original newspaper (Library of Congress, Chronicling America). Traducción al español.
The scandalous mismanagement and the fatal want of rational system which characterize the British War Office, and have ruined the British army in the Crimea, are familiar to our readers, but probably few of them ever peruse the great London Journals with sufficient attention to know that they exhibit a similar want of knowledge and judgment and an equally defective organization. Even the Jupiter Tonans of them all, The Times, is so ill-provided in its military department, that it often becomes the organ of gross blunders and delusions, which would necessarily be prevented by the presence in its numerous and well-paid editorial staff, of a competent writer on that class of subjects. A recent instance of the kind is so interesting and so strikingly illustrative of the general system of that journal, that we notice it in some detail.
Sir Howard Douglas, in his recently published essay on the Crimean campaign, with all his partiality for the commander-in-chief, and the care in expressing his opinions required by his official position, is yet compelled to come to the conclusion that the Expedition must turn out a complete failure. This was published at London about the middle of last month, and of course was written some two weeks earlier. Now before it was written, The Times had been making a vigorous and prolonged onslaught upon the administration of the army, the War Office and Lord Raglan, and stood before the public as the conqueror in a great public contest. Hereupon, it seems that the Government, to silence this sudden and untoward opposition, were actually cowardly enough to buy it off with a piece of news; Sevastopol was to be stormed after forty hours’ cannonade! When this startling announcement reached America, we could not but regard it as a groundless canard, and the veteran Douglas evidently had the same opinion, for he added no qualifying postscript to his criticism, as he must have done had he believed such an assault possible. But the “Thunderer” of London, the “leading journal of the universe,” took the bait greedily and without hesitation. The Times had it from a certain source that Sevastopol was to be stormed. The Times knew, in fact, all about it; only in order to keep its information from the Russians, it was not going to tell all it knew; still the great event was to take place about the time it published this information. The Times had no doubt that Sevastopol had fallen. Let whoever is curious refer to a file of that journal from the 26th to the 31st of December.
Now at that very time both the dispatches of the allied generals in the Crimea and the correspondence of the press, were amply sufficient to show that such an assault would have been a piece of madness. Raglan and Canrobert, seeing their armies melting away, despairing of timely reënforcements beyond a certain amount, may, at one time, have resolved that, under certain circumstances, the weather improving, and admitting of sufficient guns and ammunition being brought up, and other things being favorable, they might prefer the risk of an assault to the certainty of losing their men slowly but surely by disease. Such eventualities may have been considered; it has been done in former campaigns, although in most cases the intention was not carried out, from lack of the conditions of its execution. But to convert a mere intention, depending upon certain eventualities, into an actual plan of campaign, a thing resolved upon,—this was something that could only occur to the French Government, just then in want of money, and to the British Government, in want of support in any shape for its tottering structure. Both Governments simultaneously published the news of the imminent assault upon Sevastopol. It was to come off before the end of December. And The London Times was imprudent and ignorant enough to believe it, and to make its readers—or at least the mass of them—believe it too. It may be a principle with that journal to credit any news that it gets a day before its competitors, but in such a case as this it would have been quite as well to scrutinize the statement before making so much parade with it.