From the heights above Balaclava on the morning of 25 October 1854, Lord Raglan could see everything. Far below, Russian soldiers were hauling away captured guns from the redoubts his Turkish allies had abandoned on the Causeway Heights — trophies of the day, about to be carried off in triumph. Raglan, commanding Britain's army in the Crimea, dictated his fourth cavalry order of the morning, scribbled in pencil by his quartermaster-general, General Airey: the cavalry was to "advance rapidly to the front" and "try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns". Down on the valley floor, where Lord Lucan sat with his cavalry divisions, none of those guns could be seen at all. The only guns visible were a massed Russian battery a mile away at the far end of the North Valley, with more artillery and riflemen lining the hills on either side.
The order was carried down the escarpment by Captain Louis Nolan, a brilliant, impatient cavalry theorist who openly despised Lucan's caution. When Lucan protested that he could see no guns, Nolan is said to have flung out his arm — towards the wrong valley — with words reported as "There, my lord, is your enemy! There are your guns!" Lucan passed the order to his brother-in-law Lord Cardigan, commander of the Light Brigade; the two men loathed each other so thoroughly that they barely spoke. Cardigan pointed out that the valley was flanked by batteries on both sides, was told the order stood, and replied, in effect, that there was nothing for it but to obey. Roughly 670 horsemen of the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, the 8th and 11th Hussars and the 17th Lancers moved off down the valley at a steady trot.
What followed took about twenty-five minutes. Nolan himself was the first man killed, cut down by a shell splinter as he galloped across the front of the brigade — many historians believe he had realised the mistake and was trying to redirect the charge, though he died before anyone could ask. The brigade rode the full mile under fire from three sides, sabred the gunners at the end of the valley, tangled with Russian cavalry beyond, and then rode back through the same crossfire. Around 110 men were killed and a similar number wounded or taken prisoner, and some 375 horses were lost; when the survivors mustered, only about 195 men were still mounted. The watching French general Pierre Bosquet delivered the verdict that outlived the battle: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre" — it is magnificent, but it is not war. Cardigan, astonishingly, rode through the guns and back almost unscathed, and by his own account returned that evening to his yacht in Balaclava harbour and dined with champagne.
The battle everyone confuses
Balaclava was in fact a day of three famous actions, and quiz setters love the confusion. Earlier that morning the 93rd Highlanders, standing two-deep rather than forming square, repulsed Russian cavalry in the stand The Times correspondent described as a "thin red streak tipped with a line of steel" — remembered ever since as the Thin Red Line. Minutes later the Heavy Brigade under General Scarlett charged uphill into a far larger Russian cavalry force and scattered it — a genuine success, forever overshadowed by the disaster that followed. The war also left its mark on the wardrobe: the balaclava took its name from the battle, the knitted cardigan from the earl who led the charge, and the raglan sleeve from the one-armed field marshal whose ambiguous order caused it.
Six hundred, six weeks later
The disaster became literature at extraordinary speed. William Howard Russell of The Times — often called the first modern war correspondent — filed a dispatch whose account of a "hideous blunder" electrified Britain. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, read the reports and wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in early December, reportedly in a matter of minutes; it was published in The Examiner on 9 December 1854, barely six weeks after the charge itself. Its galloping metre — "Half a league, half a league" — its "valley of Death" and its unblinking line "Someone had blunder'd" fixed the event in English memory, and his round number, "the six hundred", became more famous than the true figure. In 1890 the elderly Tennyson recited the poem into a wax cylinder, and the recording survives: a Victorian voice, crackling across time, still asking why. The guns were never saved and the valley won nothing — the charge became immortal precisely because it was a mistake.
Quiz nuggets
- The Charge of the Light Brigade took place at the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War.
- Captain Louis Nolan carried Lord Raglan's ambiguous order and was the first man killed in the charge.
- Lords Lucan and Cardigan, the cavalry commanders, were brothers-in-law who detested each other.
- French general Bosquet said of the charge: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."
- Tennyson's poem appeared in The Examiner on 9 December 1854 — about six weeks after the charge — with the line "Someone had blunder'd".