The next day the Russians attempted to capitalise on the euphoria accompanying the capture of the guns with a major sortie to the right of the British trench lines. Three columns of Russian infantry, numbering about 4,000 strong, were shot to pieces by cannon and musket fire in the ‘Little Inkerman’ action. Russian losses were between 500 and 600, with 130 dead left lying in front of the British trenches and some 80 prisoners taken. Two days after the charge Lord Raglan visited the Light Brigade camp to coordinate its move to the Heights by the Inkerman windmill, right of the line, because the French had felt exposed by the sortie. Men rushed out in their shirtsleeves to cheer him, but true to his Wellington demeanour, Raglan remained aloof, giving no indication of being pleased. ‘How I longed for him to do so,’ Paget subsequently wrote to his wife. ‘One little word. “Well my boys, you have done well!” or something of the sort, would have cheered us all up.’1
The move to the new camp exposed the badly battered brigade to the bitter winds that swept across the Crimean Peninsula. Within two days the first snow fell. Cardigan continued to dine and sleep evenings on his yacht, appearing each day dressed in an unconventional woollen jacket buttoned down the front, which the men labelled a ‘cardigan’.
Forage arrived by ship at Balaclava and was transported by a daily train of cavalry mounts to carry it up the 14 miles to the Heights. Giving up the Woronzov road had not initially been considered significant, after all it was felt the campaign would be over by the end of the year. ‘I think they will funk to cross swords with us after their licking,’ thought Richard Temple Godman with the 5th Dragoon Guards. ‘They have never licked the English yet.’ The condition of the rutted track deteriorated daily as did the horses. What happened on 5 November was to change everything, when an estimated 60,000 Russians made yet another surprise attack at Inkerman in mist and fog.
Inkerman was the infantry soldier’s battle as much as Balaclava had been the cavalry one. British command and control broke down in the misty conditions of a ferocious close-quarter battle during which landmarks were lost and won in dense fog several times. The British bore the brunt, losing 3,300 men, although it was Bosquet’s French Division that finally tipped the balance. Menshikov, having wrong-footed the Allied rear yet again, broke off the action having lost 12,000 men. It was a pyrrhic victory because Raglan appreciated his army was no longer strong enough to storm Sevastopol. The campaign would have to be maintained through the winter.
The depressing sequence of events continued with a hurricane on 14 November that sank twenty-one ships waiting to enter Balaclava harbour, alongside much needed winter clothing, fuel and forage for the animals. The rutted track from the harbour to the Heights became a quagmire, virtually impassable and lined with dead animals. By 3 December constant rain and plunging temperatures reduced the Light Brigade to just 10 per cent of the mounts they had brought out from England. The 13th Light Dragoons was down to twelve of its original 250 horses. In January 1855 the British Army numbered 12,000 effectives alongside 135,000 French; a weak brigade within a French army. Serious operations were delayed until the spring, when improved logistics enabled sustained artillery bombardments to commence in April. A series of bombardments were followed by a succession of failed mass assaults in June, August and September. On 8 September the previously impregnable Malakov feature was taken and the Russians abandoned the city the next day. An armistice was not signed until February 1856. One in five British soldiers who had embarked so confidently in the spring of 1854 failed to return.
William Russell’s first report in the Times newspaper about Balaclava took three weeks to arrive on Victorian breakfast tables. It was implicitly critical but did not directly label the action a blunder. ‘Our Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness,’ he wrote, attacking too far without infantry or artillery support. The term ‘some hideous blunder’ came from a Times editorial, not Russell’s dispatch. The Morning Chronicle labelled the event ‘brilliant but unfortunate’ launched ‘by an imbecile command’, commenting ‘it was not an ambush’ because batteries on three sides ‘were visible to the dullest eye’. It was an emotional accusatory article that claimed ‘never was more wilful murder committed than in ordering an advance against such fearful odds and certain destruction.’2
Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson had watched the fleet gathering at Portsmouth in spring 1854, from his home on the Isle of Wight. He read Russell’s newspaper report appearing on Tuesday, 14 November and claimed he wrote his famous poem about The Charge of the Light Brigade ‘in a few minutes’. It was based on incomplete information. The first Times report spoke of 607 sabres instead of the 664 that painstaking research since suggests actually rode. ‘Some one had blunder’d’ rhymed with ‘six hundred’, more than the numbers originally reported. This would have compromised the galloping metre of the poem, which was published in The Examiner on 9 December. It captured the imagination of the public and quickly became popular with the troops at the hospital at Scutari and in the Crimea. Lord Cardigan arrived back in England the following month and was received with immediate acclamation, a contrast to the normal opprobrium he attracted in the press. Pictures of him were displayed in shop windows and he was invited to dine with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He showed up on horseback at a London Mansion House banquet held in his honour, on his charger Roland, wearing the very uniform worn at the charge. Souvenir hunters plucked hairs from Roland’s tail. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Walker, who rode with the Heavy Brigade staff in the charge, had already sent a cautionary note home on 2 November: ‘Don’t believe any bosh you hear about Lord Cardigan. He showed no head, and beyond riding with his brigade, no greater pluck than others.’ ‘Old Scarlett,’ he insisted, the Heavy Brigade Commander, ‘is worth two of him.’3
Tennyson’s vivid and dramatically paced poem has spawned a large number of narrative and feature film accounts of the charge since. ‘Some one had blunder’d’ most certainly, but who? The dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved over sixteen or more decades. Nothing new has emerged.
Lord Raglan bore responsibility for the content of the order that was obscurely composed. Ensconced on the Olympian Sapoune Heights, scientifically based topographical surveys have since revealed how much his three-dimensional view from the top differed from the two-dimensional scene seen by Lucan and Cardigan in the valley below. Captain Nolan was the only officer in the orders chain who had viewed the situation from both perspectives. Raglan had never commanded troops in action before and was separated by time and space from the action on the valley floor. Passage of written or oral information took an average of thirty minutes to deliver each way, during a series of fast-moving cavalry actions that waited for no man. If Raglan had acted upon the intelligence reports ignored the previous evening, his infantry could have been in place to offer support. ‘Cry wolf’ had happened many times before, and he appreciated overreactions were exhausting his men. If Captain Nolan had survived, more information would have been forthcoming, but not necessarily answers. Alleged insubordination at the point of delivery, prompted by an earnest desire to be included in the coming action, raised the emotional ante on the valley floor. Yet Raglan’s order, in both its written and oral form, demanded immediate action. Evidence suggests that Nolan, an experienced staff officer, was neither excitable nor overbearing when dealing with superiors, when obsequious behaviour in the Victorian military hierarchy was more the norm. If Lucan had paused to question Raglan’s order, Nolan would have been merely a footnote in history. His influence can be measured in minutes.
Responsibility within the hierarchical military chain of command starts at the top. Raglan composed the command and expressed it badly. Lucan, as the senior cavalry commander, felt unable to question it because he had been intimidated by a whole series of misinterpretations of Raglan’s unclear orders in the past. The ire this attracted lessened his confidence. He was indecisive and honour-bound not to question orders in a fast-moving situation, visibly developing by the minute, for which he would be blamed if it went wrong. So at two stages in the command chain, full responsibility was not accepted. Was sacrificing the Light Brigade worth the loss of just seven or eight guns?
Cardigan, with a narcissistic belief in his own infallibility, had no practical field experience at all. He conducted the charge like it was a Hyde Park drill, covering himself by doing what he was simply told. Lacking common sense, but not physical courage, his adversarial relationship with his detested ex-brother-in-law enabled him to revel in a little Schadenfreude over what even he realised was a stupid decision. The satisfaction was that Lucan would have to take it, and not himself.
Definitive answers are unlikely ever to be forthcoming. Contemporary comment is tainted with preference for or dislike of all these men. There has been no shortage of revisionist interpretations since, often based on topographical or behavioural theories of what likely happened. One fair comment was raised by Major Forrest with the 4th Dragoon Guards, who despite his prejudices claimed:
Captain Nolan may have been, and I believe was, somewhat to blame about that Light Brigade tragedy, but I think my Lord Lucan the most to blame. If a Lieutenant General will not take any responsibility upon himself, a lance corporal might fill his place. He should have waited until the infantry on their way up had arrived, or sent to inquire whether that was not Lord Raglan’s intention.
William Russell mercilessly castigated Raglan after Inkerman, claiming he ‘is utterly incompetent to lead an army through any arduous task’. Russell was not necessarily infallible as a military commentator himself, according to Private James Auchinloss, with the 4th Dragoon Guards. He wrote home how ‘highly amused’ he was about Russell’s account of the Heavy Brigade action. The ‘Special Correspondent,’ he teased, claims ‘he was an “eye” witness of the heavy cavalry charge; but I much doubt whether he has an “eye” or not, for he says the Greys and Inniskillings Dragoons charged in the first line.’ The press, he was insinuating, are not necessarily the purveyors of the universal truth.4
Raglan died after the failure of the much-hyped infantry assault on Sevastopol that occurred with heavy losses on 18 June 1855, some said of a broken heart. ‘I could never return to England now,’ he was alleged to have commented, ‘they would stone me to death.’ Lieutenant Colonel ‘Little’ Hodge wrote in his diary that he died ‘of exhaustion and dysentery, added to I hear, by worry of mind’. Lucan, publicly obsessed to the last over his innocence for the charge decision, had already been recalled to London the previous January. Despite being disliked, most of the cavalry sided with him and felt he was badly handled. He was later exonerated and outlived Cardigan by twenty years and was promoted to Field Marshal in 1887, the year before his death.5
Cardigan got back to England before Lucan, ostensibly for reasons of ill health, benefitting from the huge public acclaim that came from Tennyson’s epic poem. Hodge, still in the Crimea, heard ‘Lord Cardigan has been received in triumph in England, and all the shops are full of prints of him jumping a gun, and sticking a Russian en passant in mid air.’ He was not missed. ‘I do not think that he ever intends returning here, and better that he should not.’ In December 1856 Captain Somerset Calthorpe, one of Raglan’s nephews and his ADC, wrote a series of letters highly critical of Cardigan and suggesting he did not even reach the Russian guns. A contentious legal action followed that dragged on, not appearing before the Queen’s Bench until June 1863. Cardigan, meanwhile, was appointed Inspector General of Cavalry and Colonel of the 11th Hussars. The courts proved he reached the guns but the detail of the case revealed his complete indifference to his men, the neglect of his brigade and a callous lack of responsibility. His second marriage had also become a spectacular public scandal when his popularity bubble burst. Five years later he died in a fall from his horse, probably the result of a stroke.6
Nolan’s body was never recovered from the hurriedly scraped ditch into which it was tumbled near redoubt 4. He was the last male family member of his line. The contemporary press coverage of his life and death was kinder than history, which has over dramatised his role. The Illustrated London News obituary commented ‘the rash movement’ of the charge ‘was so opposed to his own published theory’ on cavalry tactics, ‘that he could never have willingly countenanced, much less directed it, even under an excess of zeal’. His fellow officers paid for a marble plaque to be erected in his memory on the wall of Holy Trinity Church in Maidstone, next to the place where the cavalry depot officers habitually sat. He was also honoured by the Army and Navy Club in London, alongside other members who fell in the charge, hardly the actions of men who considered him guilty of any offence.7
William Russell regarded Nolan a friend and ‘God forbid I should cast a shade on the brightness of his honour’. Even so, he felt ‘bound to state what I am told occurred when he reached his Lordship [Lucan]’. What he reported has been laboriously pored over since. Russell’s sharp eye for a good story was to take him to record the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the American Civil War and the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. He is regarded as one of the first modern war correspondents and was knighted in 1895 and died in 1907.
Fanny Duberly returned to Ireland after the Crimea and accompanied her husband Henry when the 8th Hussars joined in the repression of the Indian mutiny. She covered 1,800 miles on horseback during the campaign, writing at age 29 on its conclusion ‘my youth is gone and Henry is grievously changed’. They served on in England, Scotland and Ireland until Henry retired from the army, as a lieutenant colonel in 1881. He died in 1891 while she lived on at Cheltenham a further twelve years, passing away in January 1903 aged 71.
Lord George Paget, foreseeing no further action for the cavalry after Inkerman, returned to England to join his bride, left days after marriage in the spring of 1854. It had been a point of patriotic honour to accompany the expedition, because he had already announced his intention to leave the army. Nobody was surprised in the Crimea; they had seen enough death and a young bride promised life. But Paget ‘was greatly snubbed at home’ recalled an 8th Hussar subaltern: ‘Everyone here thought him a most sensible man for leaving when he was tired of it; but the English people are such fools.’
Weight of public opinion forced Paget to return, but this time he took his young wife with him. He was reappointed to command the Light Brigade and completed the campaign, going on to become Inspector General of Cavalry and a Major General. His bride, Agnes, only lived for two years after the Crimea, and he married a second time in 1861 before dying unexpectedly in 1880.8
In September 1855 the first medals arrived in the Crimea and because the three clasps for the Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman looked like decanter labels, they were promptly christened ‘Port’, ‘Sherry’ and ‘Claret’. Jemmy the terrier, who survived the charge and went on to India with the 8th Hussars, was presented with a dog collar with five medal clasps on return to England, including Sebastopol and Central India. The collar is still in the 8th Hussars Officer’s mess today.9
Much less is known about the Russian participants at Balaclava after the events of these fateful 24 hours were over. General Liprandi was moved by the heroism of the Light Brigade, appreciating they were ‘noble fellows’ once he reconciled himself to accept they were probably not drunk. His force remained based around the village of Chorgun north-east of Balaclava, posing a continued threat to the Balaclava line of communication to the Sapoune Heights. He took part in the battles of Inkerman and led the attack on the Sardinians at Tchernaya in August 1855. Prince Obolensky’s Don Battery, overrun by the Light Brigade at the end of the valley, was refitted nearby with replacements of men and horses. It was the first Russian battery to open fire at the Inkerman on 5 November. Crossing the Chernya River bridge once again, the battery formed part of a sixty-gun force supporting the Russian infantry attacks through dense fog. The action was ‘fought with such ferocity,’ one of its officers recalled, ‘that gun crews had to be replaced three times’ and ‘losses in horses so great, that the batteries could not move out of their positions’.
Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich’s Composite Lancer Regiment was dissolved after the campaign. Artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov and Ingermanland Hussar Yevgenii Arbuzov both survived the war to engage in a vociferous post-conflict literary debate in the 1870s, over the competence of the Russian cavalry that day. Arbuzov tended to support the inflated claims of Russian Major General Ryzhov’s 1870 account of Balaclava. Kozhukhov always maintained Ryhzov’s ‘rabbit hunt’ pursuit of the British from the guns was fiction. General Liprandi glossed over Ryzhov’s shortcomings in his official dispatch to Prince Menshikov and the Tsar, but it was interesting to see Ryzhov only qualified for the Order of St Vladimir 2nd Class for his ‘attack on the enemy park’ during the Battle of Balaclava. His sideways appointment to command the 2nd Brigade of a Reserve Light Cavalry Division appears to implicitly reflect shortcomings not just voiced by Kozhukhov.10
The Turks got the blame for the setbacks at Balaclava and were accused of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign, routinely beaten, spat on and jeered by British troops. Their interpreter John Blunt watched British soldiers treat them like slaves, using them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaclava road’, as humorously portrayed in a Punch cartoon. Turkish troops were set to digging trenches or transporting heavy loads up the rutted Col track from Balaclava to the British trench lines on the plateau. ‘No one seemed to care for them,’ remembered an American commanding one of the ship transports. ‘I have actually seen a mule and a Turk harnessed together in a cart, and a Frenchman riding upon it and whipping up the team.’ Religion forbade them from eating most of the available British rations so their only recourse was to steal. If caught, their British masters flogged them, often well beyond the forty-five lashes allowed for British troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers that fought at Balaclava on 25 October, half were dead from malnutrition by the end of the year. The Russians were especially casual about burying Turkish dead, their Christian Orthodox faith applying the same pitiless indifference as their Christian Allied opponents.11
Private Albert Mitchell watched seventeen wounded horses paraded in the lines the day after the charge when all but one was shot. It survived the winter he remembered ‘and was in the regiment when I left in 1862’. He became a police constable with the Kent County Constabulary and retired in 1887. Sergeant Timothy Gowing, the Royal Fusilier who had watched the entire action from the Sapoune Heights, went on to serve in India during the 1857 Mutiny. He completed twenty-two years’ service, eighteen of them in India where he lost seven of eight children in a single day from cholera. On retirement he became a pastor for twenty-four years, married three times and had a further nineteen children, but only one had outlived him when he died in 1908, aged 74.
Private Christopher Fox with the 4th Light Dragoons received fifty lashes for absconding to join the charge. At the halfway point, when a new man with a fresh cat-of-nine-tails normally stepped in, the punishment paused. ‘Hold!’ his colonel ordered, ‘I will forgive you the other 25.’ Fox, a known hardcase, begged to differ, ‘Oh, don’t. Please Colonel, I don’t want to be beholden to you for anything,’ adding insolently, ‘I’ll take the other 25.’ His punishment had not been popular in the ranks among the remnants of the 4th, and his colonel likely appreciated this. ‘Silence, sir,’ he admonished, and had him marched off to the hospital marquee. The balance was never given. Remarkably, he received another twenty-five lashes a year later for ‘insolence to a superior officer’. Fox went on to serve in India and was discharged in 1872, by which time he had ironically accumulated five Good Conduct Badges. Doubtless as canny as he was independent minded, Fox’s News of the World newspaper obituary on 14 October 1900 records that apart from riding in the charge, he had been a police inspector.12
The British military system was as uncompromising as it was unjust. Private James Wightman, after numerous adventures in Russian captivity, including a fist fight with his captors, was released after a year to the Royal Navy aboard HMS Agamemnon. Of twelve 17th Lancer men taken prisoner only three came back alive; all the wounded perished under the Russian surgeon’s knife. ‘A few days after rejoining,’ he remembered, ‘we three were tried by Court Martial for being absent without leave for 12 months.’ This applied to all the repatriated thirty-seven prisoners returned to their regiments; twenty-one of fifty-eight had died in captivity. The onus was on the survivors to prove they had not been captured due to ‘negligence’. Wightman and his comrades ‘were honourably acquitted’. ‘My comrades and I saw some tough scenes in the Indian mutiny,’ Wightman later remembered and he discharged himself in 1868, by which time he had been promoted to ensign. He attended official charge commemorations with ‘my two steadfast chums Marsh and Mustard’ who settled near him. He can be seen in a commemorative group photograph in 1890. ‘We three old comrades fight our battles o’er again, and thank God that we are alive to do so!’ remembered Wightman, who died in February 1907.13
Tennyson’s poem meant the spectacular success of Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade charge was soon eclipsed in the public mind by the inspirational failure of the charge of the Light Brigade. The first major reunion was held twenty-one years after the event on 25 October 1875. Interestingly more than twice the total known to have survived turned up, so it appeared there were as many imposters as heroes seeking to celebrate the event. Annual reunion dinners continued beyond Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 and an 1890 photograph records thirty-six survivors present. Eleven charge survivors can be seen in a Buffalo Bill Wild West Show photograph in July 1891. A final Holborn Restaurant Dinner was held on 25 October 1913 attended by six survivors. Private Edwin Hughes from the 13th Light Dragoons outlived every other survivor, when he died in 1927 aged 96 years.
There was another aspect beyond the public adulation. Private Richard Palframan with the 8th Hussars survived the charge and was taken prisoner only to lose his leg in a threshing machine accident twenty-seven years later, which threatened destitution. The Illustrated London News commentary on the 21st reunion banquet reported that ‘to a man they were dressed respectably’ and ‘seemed to be occupying comfortable positions’. Not all were there. Trumpeter William Perkins with the 11th Hussars, with several medals, was working as an attendant at a public London toilet. ‘James the crossing sweeper’ as he was called was an elderly gentleman who swept mud and horse manure while on crutches from a London street. He was Private James Watts from the 17th Lancers. He generally received a penny, halfpenny or farthing from pedestrians if he mentioned he had ridden the charge. His story mentioned his leg was amputated, after his horse was hit before reaching the guns. Although recorded ‘severely wounded’ at Balaclava, he went on to serve with the 17th Lancers in India, which he could not have done minus a leg. Such men at least managed a meagre income, others such as Troop Sergeant Major John Linkon with the 13th Light Dragoons, Private John Smith, 17th Lancers and Privates John Richardson and Richard Brown from the 11th Hussars, ended up in the workhouse.14
Richardson was interviewed by H. Yeo in 1890, the publisher of the popular penny Spy newspaper. He was 63 and destitute at the time. ‘The gorgeous uniform of the noble 11th Hussars with its bright crested buttons’ had been ‘replaced by the workhouse cordways with their bright un-crested buttons,’ Yeo wrote: ‘Oh, Englishmen! Blush with shame! This man methought, is one of the Light Brigade whose heroism is lauded in every household in the land! There stood the old soldier paying deep respect to the workhouse master and to me.’
Lieutenant Percy Smith with the 13th Light Dragoons deliberately charged the guns with a completely maimed right hand. All he could usefully do was encourage his men. He survived virtually unscathed, and his horse was only one of two in the regiment that was unwounded. He subsequently married after selling his commission in 1858 and had one son. In 1913 he was one of only two officers still living who had ridden in the charge and passed away on 8 February 1917. He was buried five days later in Southampton cemetery completely unnoticed: the First World War was at its height and Smith’s grave was sadly unmarked.
There is a petrol station at the intersection of the Balaclava–Yalta main road, which overlooks the position where the charge of the Light Brigade started, an incongruous setting for such an epic event. Given the right light and time of day, walking the line of the charge towards the Russian gun positions through present-day vineyards out of sight of the petrol station can resurrect ghosts. These appear on the shadowy outline of the Causeway Heights to the right and the Fedioukine Heights to the left. One cannot help but wonder what those fearful 664 men riding off 150 years ago must have been thinking.