Written by Frederick Engels between 11 July and 10 August 1857 and published unsigned in The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, edited by George Ripley and Charles A. Dana, vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1858), p. 256. Text of the Cyclopaedia, from the public-domain scan in the Internet Archive (newamericancycl23danagoog), with the OCR corrected against the page images; collated paragraph by paragraph with the German version in Marx/Engels, Werke, vol. 14 (Berlin, 1961), p. 60, and found complete. Traducción al español
AIREY, Sir Richard, K. C. B., major-general, and, at present, quartermaster-general of the British army, entered the service in 1821 as ensign, was made a captain 1825, a lieutenant-colonel 1851, and as such took the command of a brigade in the army of the east in 1854. When the Crimean expedition was about to sail from Varna, he was made, Sept. 1854, quartermaster-general of the expeditionary force, and, as such, became one of the 6 or 8 officers who, under the command of Lord Raglan, have been charged with destroying the English army by dint of routine, ostensible fulfilment of duty, and want of common sense and energy. To Airey’s share, fell the fixing of the proportions in which the different articles of camp-equipage, tents, great-coats, blankets, boots, should be dealt out to the various regiments. According to his own admission (before the Chelsea commission of inquiry), “there never was a period after the first week in Dec. 1854, when there was not at Balaklava a considerable supply of warm clothing, and at that very time there were regiments engaged at the front in the trenches, which were suffering acutely from the want of these very articles, which lay in readiness for them at a distance of 7 or 8 miles.” This, he says, was not his fault; there never having been the slightest difficulty in getting his signature of approval to a requisition for such articles. On the contrary, he gives himself credit for having, as much as possible, abridged and simplified the routine process of approving, reducing, or disapproving the requisition sent to him by divisional and regimental officers.