Americans are apt to know much about our Civil War and very little about the Crimean War, which took place only a few years earlier (1853-1856). Strikingly, the innovations of the Crimean War often predated those associated with the Civil War. For examples, trenches and the use of artillery that presaged more modern warfare; war photography; numerous letter and diary accounts by officers, private soldiers and civilians; organized nursing units; and canned food as rations. All of these things began not with the American Civil War but with the Crimean War.The Crimean War was also noteworthy for its odd alliances and adversaries. The war was precipitated by Russian aggression against Turkey. The Czar gravely miscalculated in thinking that the French and British would not side with a Muslim country against a fellow Christian nation. Thus an alliance of strange bedfellows amassed against Russia. The alliance between the French and British suddenly forced a change in old ways of thinking, because they had been seemingly perpetual enemies for so long. Further, their alliance with Turkey was also novel. Once, the Turks had threatened to conquer Europe. Now the western powers and the Turks were on the same side. It was not as if they liked each other any better. Indeed, the French and British lorded it over their Turkish allies.The British army was not as well prepared for the Crimean War as the French army, which had been fighting in Algeria for several years. I am always amused by those - particularly fellow Americans - who make fun of the French military. Up until 1871 - when they were crushed by the Germans - the French were considered to be one of the world's top militaries. The Crimean War happened before their precipitous downfall.The motivation for the alliance was a common enemy. Sensing the decline of Turkey, Czarist Russia pounced on the opportunity to control the Black Sea and the port of Constantinople. There were both strategic and symbolic reasons for this. Control of Constantinople meant control of the gateway between the Black and Mediterranean seas. That would give Russia year-round access to the world's oceans. Symbolically, the Russian monarch believed that he was getting back something that belonged to him. Constantinople had been the capital of Byzantium, the Greek-speaking remnant of the Roman empire in the eastern Mediterranean, which had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire (the Turks) exactly 400 years earlier. The czar had always considered himself to be the rightful heir to the last Roman Empire. This is why the Russian monarch was called czar - meaning Caesar, why the royal family is called the ROMANovs, why the Russians adopted a variety of Christianity more similar to Greek Orthodox than to Roman Catholicism, and why the Russian or Cyrillic alphabet bears a resemblance to Greek (St. Cyril was a missionary to the Slavs from Byzantium).As natural as the reconquest of Constantinople seemed to the Russians, it was intolerable to the British that the Russian navy should have a shot at becoming a major sea power. The French didn't like it either. Turkey, of course, did not agree that Constantinople or any place else on the southern shore of the Black Sea belonged to Russia. (Even Austria, while not committing to the war, actively discouraged Russia from pushing south of the Danube River as part of its war effort - a severe blow to the Russians.) Although the western allies tended to look down on the Turks, the initial attack on a Turkish port by the Russian navy was so brutal in its overkill (nearly every ship in the Turkish fleet was destroyed and civilians were deliberately targeted) that the British press reported it as a massacre and ginned up sympathy for the Turks.One of the great killers of the war was cholera. Whole armies, without ever having faced fire, were decimated or worse by the disease. Combat nevertheless took many lives. This was the war in which the Charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized by the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, took place. It was one of those moments when a traditional approach - in this case, a massive cavalry charge - was proven to be outmoded in the face of modern technology - in this case, artillery. The result was a suicidal massacre.This was also the war that made Florence Nightingale famous as the organizer of what would become a tradition of military nursing, though they were not yet formally part of the military. (America's Clara Barton would come a few years later, aware as she was of Nightingale's pioneering work.)On both sides, soldiers, soldiers' wives and journalists recorded their impressions of the war. Count Leo Tolstoy - future author of "War and Peace" - was an artillery officer in the war and, not surprisingly, kept a journal. Photographers took pictures (in one case, unfortunately, only a tiny fraction of a photographer's pictures survive) and some observers made drawings and even watercolor paintings.This three-part series is a very good survey of the Crimean War for those who know nothing about it or those who have forgotten what they once might have known. Billie Whitelaw's narration is crisp and intelligent without talking down to the viewer.