CADOGAN'S CRIMEA by Cadogan, Gen.Sir George & Lt Col S J G Calthorpe

New York, 1980, Atheneum, US first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 7x10, Fine/Fine condition, glossy page stock, 288 pages, illus in B&W and color, appendices,index-----------------------------------------------------If all conflicts of arms were to lie regarded as pointless bloodletting, then the war in the Crimea might be the most likely event to head a long list.Colonel the Hon. George Cadogan saw the war as a participant, and recorded his observations in pictures while on the battlefield. His superb watercolors, carefully arranged in a large album which has been kept and treasured by his family, present the Crimean War from a soldier's point of view, sometimes horrifying, sometimes whimsical, sometimes sentimental, but at all tines true to the prevailing atmosphere and events of the period.----------------------------------------------------------------------The text is an abridged version of Lifers front !Headquarters by Lt. Col. S. J. G. Calthorpe, an officer on the headquarters Staff, which was first published in two volumes in 1856 by .John Murray and had two further editions in 1857 and 1858. Cadogan's fellow officer had published his impressions of the war primarily in defense of the one man for whom lie declared a boundless admiration, the much-maligned leader of the Expeditionary Force, Lord Raglan. The writer's powers of observation combine the horror and dignity of war with charm and humor, witness the story of the spy who was to be "comfortably" hanged in the morning, or the occasion when Lord Raglan ordered up a troop of horse artillery and battery to fire on the Russians. The author records: "If one had not seen the cannon-halls coming along at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, and hounding like cricket-balls, one would have thought it only a little cavalry review.