William Howard Russell witnessed the final re-capture of Lucknow (1858). In 1861 Russell went to Washington, returning to England in 1863. In July 1865 he sailed on the "Great Eastern" to document the laying of the Atlantic Cable and wrote a book about the voyage with color illustrations by Robert Dudley. He published diaries of his time in India, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, where he describes the warm welcome given him by English-speaking Prussian generals such as Leonhard Graf von Blumenthal. Russell later accused fellow war correspondent Nicholas Woods of the "Morning Herald" of lying in his articles about
Crimean War been beaten on the Crimean peninsula, and the military feared that it would inevitably be beaten again unless steps were taken to surmount its military weakness." The Crimean War marks the demise of the Concert of Europe, the balance-of-power system that had dominated Europe since the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and which had included France, Russia, Austria and the United Kingdom. According to historian Shepard Clough, the war: This view of 'diplomatic drift' as the cause of the war was first popularised by A. W. Kinglake, who portrayed the British as victims of newspaper sensationalism and duplicitous French and