Crimea: The Last 'Gentleman's War'

When British photographer Roger Fenton stepped off his ship in the port of Balaklava in March 1855, he was confronted with a scene that revealed 'a terrible story of bad management.'

The harbor in Balaklava

Among an 'immense quantity of putrefying matter,' wrote Fenton, stood horses so emaciated they were like 'mere skeletons with drooping heads and sunken eyes.' Out in the harbor the bloated corpses of oxe