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 1854, following up on the Russian retreat, the French staged an expedition against the Russian forces still in Dobruja, but this was a failure. By then, the Russian withdrawal was complete, except for the fortress towns of northern Dobruja, while their place in the Principalities was taken by the Austrians, as a neutral peacekeeping force. There was little further action on this front after late 1854, and in September the allied force boarded ships at Varna to invade the Crimean Peninsula. The naval operations of the Crimean War commenced with the dispatch, in mid-1853, of the French and British fleets