The British Army Following The Crimea
Following the Crimean War, it was painfully clear to the War Office that, with half of the British Army distributed between garrisons around the globe it had insufficient forces available to quickly assemble and deploy an effective expeditionary force to a new area of conflict reducing unacceptably the British Isles' own defences.
What was painfully clear to the citizenry of those Isles, when (following an assassination attempt on Emperor Napoleon III)there was a threat of invasion by the much larger French Army in 1858, was that Britain's military defences had already been stretched invitingly thin, even without sending a third of the Army to another Crimea. This vulnerability to a potential European invasion continued to be underlined by subsequent events on the continent: on April 29, 1859, war broke out between France and the Austrian Empire (an outgrowth of the Second Italian War of Independence), and there were fears that Britain might be caught up in a wider European conflict. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71), and by the development of steamships, railroads, and of breech-loading and repeating rifles.
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