Try this:

From the Duke of Newcastle, the War Office
Private and Confidential
6 January, 1855

To Lord Raglan
Field Marshall
Commander in Chief
The British Forces at War in the Crimea

My Lord,
Although your Lordship’s official despatches contain neither complaints of mismanagement nor of omissions occurring in the military department in your control, I have for some time been painfully apprehensive that there has either been a want of foresight or of ability on the part of some of your Lordship’s staff which has lead to an amount of suffering and sickness amongst the officers and men under arms which might and ought to have been avoided.

I readily admit that great allowance must be made for the peculiar and difficult position of many holding responsible authority under your orders, but the experience which has by this time been gained should have been sufficient to enable those officers to pursue a system of organization under which disorder and loss would have been of comparatively unfrequent occurrence.

I am grieved thus to address your Lordship in the spirit of complaint, but when reports reach me from time to time of some of the regiments under your command, and even of men in the trenches, being on half and in some instances on quarter rations for two and three days together, whilst there is no deficiency of food and stores at Balaklava, I cannot entirely attribute this state of things, if it exists, to the badness of roads or to the interruption occasioned by bad weather.

Care of horses and the due provision of inland transport are so essential to the very safety as well as the comfort of an army, that the heavy loss occurring amongst these animals is in itself a cause for much alarm; but hearing, as I do, that the deaths in many instances occur from starvation only, whilst there is abundance of grain and forage within reach, it affords additional reason for dissatisfaction that such a state of things should prevail.

The sad prevalence of sickness at this season amongst the newly arrived troops also requires explanation and especially when it is observed that the regiments best placed have in many instances suffered most. I cannot help thinking that due inquiry into the causes of this apparent mystery will bring to light that there has been a great want of proper precaution.

Numerous complaints are also made that the baggage of many regiments was left at Varna for several weeks after the army landed in the Crimea, whilst there was no deficiency of transport in the harbour at Balaklava, which could quite readily have conducted the shipment; and that both officers and men were using the same shirts and wearing apparel for weeks together, without the means of changing them. For such a state of things a remedy was urgently required, as without cleanliness it is impossible to maintain health.

It is impossible for those who are charged with the responsibility of the conduct of the war, and with the safety of our gallant army, to allow the continuance of any doubt upon subjects so grave as those which I have brought to your Lordship’s notice in this despatch.

If the army grows weak by disease not attendant upon warfare and is perilead by want, exposure and distresses which the care of your staff should have provided against, the people of England, painfully sensitive to the possibility of a disastrous future, will on behalf of the sufferers and of national honour, call upon your Lordship to correct the evils they deplore and ward off the dangers they deprecate.

…As regards the hospital at Scutari, there is reason to hope that much has been effected towards bringing that establishment into a state of greater efficiency. A laundry has been organized outside the building by the exertions and at the cost of those who, however, ought not to be burdened with any expenditure on this account. All the expenses connected with this establishment will therefore be defrayed by Her Majesty’s Government.

Dr Andrew Smith, the director general of the Army Medical department is sending out washing and wringing machines, and some persons who will undertake the washing either in conjunction with those actually engaged, or separately, as your Lordship may, after consulting the authorities of the hospital and Miss Nightingale, consider most advantageous to the efficiency of the service.

I am etc Newcastle

And while we're on great letters from the past, there is the classic of British diplomacy:

Lord Pembroke
The Foreign Office
London


6th April 1943

My Dear Reggie,

In these dark days man tends to look for little shafts of light that spill from Heaven. My days are probably darker than yours, and I need, my God I do, all the light I can get. But I am a decent fellow, and I do not want to be mean and selfish about what little brightness is shed upon me from time to time. So I propose to share with a tiny flash that has illuminated my sombre life and tell you that God has given me a new Turkish colleague whose card tells me that he is called Mustapha Kunt.

We all feel like that, Reggie, now and then, especially when spring is upon us, but few of us would dare to put it on our cards. It takes a Turk to do that.

Sir Archibald Clerk Kerr,
H.M. Ambassador.

Another British writer, but this one a woman, commenting on the United States in a hugely popular book, "One of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans . . . [is] their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them . . . Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation." Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832). No one writing on www.LoveUSHateUS.com is quite so articulate as Mrs Trollope, but there's plenty of comment to make us wince.