1854
ON A SUNNY MORNING LATE IN OCTOBER 1854, William Howard Russell, war correspondent of The Times, found himself sitting among the stones and thistles of a Russian hillside with a ringside view of an ongoing battle. ‘The silence is oppressive,’ he wrote. ‘Between the cannon bursts, one can hear the champing of bits and the clink of sabres in the valley below.’
To his right, Russell could see water sparkling in the harbour of Balaclava, ‘a patch of blue sea’ in a green landscape, and through this deceptively beautiful scenery rode the Light Cavalry Brigade of the British army, their swords unsheathed.
Looking through his field glasses, the reporter counted the British sabres – 607, he reckoned. ‘They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war.’ But Russell could also see the menacing guns of the enemy, the Russians, stretched out along both sides and, most formidably, across the end of the valley. ‘We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses!’ he wrote. ‘Surely that handful of men were not going to charge an army in position?’
There had been a dreadful misunderstanding. High on the hillside, not far from where Russell was sitting, the British commander Lord Raglan had seen the Russian cavalry making off with some captured British guns. Now they were proceeding over the hills to one side of the valley, and Raglan instructed his own cavalry ‘to advance rapidly to the front, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns’.
But down on the floor of the valley, Lord Lucan, commander of the British cavalry, had no sight of the guns to which Raglan was referring. The only guns he could see were the ones straight ahead, and it was towards those that he now directed the Light Brigade. ‘They advanced in two lines, quickening their pace as they closed towards the enemy,’ wrote the horrified reporter. ‘A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed than by those who, without the power to aid, beheld their heroic countrymen rushing to the arms of death.’
Russell was not then aware of the ambiguity of Raglan’s order, which might have been checked or better explained if the British chain of command had been communicating more clearly with each other. The upper crust of aristocratic officers – many of whom had purchased their promotions to the elevated ranks they held – had been feuding ever since their arrival in the Crimea,* and Lucan was a particularly stubborn and peppery character. The man from The Times described the consequences in dreadful detail.
At the distance of 1200 yards the whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame, through which hissed the deadly balls. Their flight was marked by instant gaps in our ranks, by dead men and horses, by steeds flying wounded or riderless across the plain . . . Through the clouds of smoke we could see their sabres flashing as they rode up to the guns and dashed between them, cutting down the gunners as they stood.
The Light Brigade’s heroism was in vain: ‘Wounded men and dismounted troopers flying towards us told the sad tale . . . At twenty-five to twelve not a British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in front of these bloody Muscovite guns.’
By Russell’s count, less than two hundred of the six hundred brave cavalrymen who headed off down the mile-long valley made it back – and he filed his report on ‘the melancholy loss’ in a long handwritten dispatch that was carried back to England by ship and horse-borne courier, to be published in The Times of 14 November 1854. Never before had such graphic eyewitness details of war been conveyed so rapidly to the nation at home – and they caught the attention of the poet Alfred Tennyson, who, as he read the Times coverage, was particularly struck by the phrase ‘hideous blunder’.
Tennyson had been working for months on a complicated love epic, Maud: A Monodrama, later famous for the refrain ‘Come into the garden, Maud’. But on 2 December he took a few minutes’ break to dash off what would become his most famous poem of all:
Half a league, half a league,*
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d ?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d . . .
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was published in the London Examiner on 9 December, less than seven weeks after the event it commemorated. Two years earlier the Victorians, as they were now calling themselves, had unquestioningly celebrated the discipline of the four hundred young recruits who stood to attention as the foundering Birkenhead took them to their deaths. Now Tennyson’s poem captured the more complicated mixture of emotions inspired by the Light Brigade’s blind obedience to orders – and this new perspective derived from the first-hand account of William Howard Russell watching from his Russian hillside among the stones and thistles.
In fact, The Times’s casualty figures were incorrect. While only 195 men got back on horseback, many staggered back to camp later on foot. Modern research has suggested that just 110 of the six hundred died in action – Tennyson’s poem, in other words, perpetuated a media mistake.
But Russell was the father of a new tradition. ‘In his hands,’ wrote his colleague Edwin Godkin of the Daily News, ‘correspondence from the field really became a power before which generals began to quail . . . I cannot help thinking that the appearance of the special correspondent in the Crimea . . . led to a real awakening of the official mind. It brought home to the War Office the fact that the public had something to say about the conduct of wars and that they are not the concern exclusively of sovereigns and statesmen.’