2-913-571 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Sappers repairing the road between Schumla and Varna, 1854. British soldiers during the Crimean War. The fortified town of Schumla, now Shumen in Bulgaria, was strategically important, and was used as a headquarters by Ottoman Turkish forces. View of '...a party of Sappers repairing the road, between Schumla and Varna, preparatory to the march of the army. The march of the first division from the neighbourhood of Varna to Aladyn, with the thermometer from 80 to 90, must have given the troops a tolerably good sample of Turkish campaigning. The roads, even after all that had been done to them, by the Sappers and Miners, were in the most primitive state, so that it is not surprising that the journey should have occupied pretty nearly double the time ordinarily calculated for performing the same distance, in heavy marching order'. From "Illustrated London News", 1854.