Part One covers the war's beginning, the Battles of Bomarsund, Alma and Balaklava and the Sieges of Silistra and Sebastopol.

The ineptitude of the British high command led to a large number of deaths in its own army, most famously in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Florence Nightingale and her nurses strove to improve the appalling conditions in which the sick and injured were being treated and when news of the troops' suffering reached home, it brought about the government's downfall.

Concluding the three-part documentary series about the 1853-6 war in the Crimea. The war ended shortly after the bloody battle of Tchernaya and, following over 300 days of siege, the fall of Sebastopol. It left one million dead, a victorious Britain building her global empire, the French army decimated and the defeated Russian tsar facing reform.