Lord Cardigan later recalled with satisfaction, ‘we reached the battery in a very good line, and at the regular charging pace.’ He had done his duty, having virtually conducted a rulebook advance in ‘revue order’, but did add that ‘here, many officers and men were killed.’ Cardigan at this point appeared to hand over command of the brigade to his subordinates. Out of his tactical depth, he had focused solely on the execution of the advance up to the charge. On arrival his mind was somewhat blank, possibly a reaction to combat stress. Like Private Wightman with the 17th Lancers, he was totally alone when he emerged out of the smoke surrounding the Don battery. Immediately to his front were masses of steadily retiring grey-clad horsemen. By the time he brought his charger Ronald to a halt, also miraculously unscathed, the Russian cavalry ahead had turned and fronted up. They menacingly regarded this lone horseman. Cardigan had never crossed swords with a live opponent in his life.
When two Cossacks approached to take him prisoner, Captain Percy Smith with the 13th Light Dragoons, nursing his maimed right arm, also emerged from the smoke. He saw Cardigan kept his ‘sword at the slope and did not seem to take trouble to defend himself’. More and more British horsemen arrived at the scene. Lieutenant Johnson and Private Keely, also with the 13th, rode up to help, but their horses were badly injured. When he refused to surrender, the Cossacks jabbed at Cardigan with their lances. Johnson thought one thrust went home, but it snagged on Cardigan’s pelisse and nearly jerked him from the saddle. This was their last effort to apprehend him because they fell back when more Light Brigade remnants burst through the smoke. Johnston watched as Cardigan, ‘cantering quietly’, made off in the opposite direction.
Private James Wightman, looking for survivors, nearly rode over Cardigan’s badly wounded aide Lieutenant Maxse. ‘For God’s sake, lancer, don’t ride over me!’ he appealed. ‘See where Lord Cardigan is’, he said, pointing at him. ‘Rally on him!’ But Cardigan was nowhere to be found.1
The scene inside the smoke around the battery presented a version of Dante’s vision of hell. ‘I cut clean off the hand of a Russian gunner who was holding his sponge [staff] against me,’ recalled an 8th Hussar trooper. ‘He fell, glaring savagely, but I cared little for that.’ Pent-up emotion and adrenalin consumed survivors with a berserker desire to exact revenge for their suffering and fallen comrades. ‘Bodies and limbs scattered in fragments,’ the trooper recalled, ‘and blood splashed into my face were now no novelty.’ ‘Butcher Jack’ Vahey rode into the battery and ‘what with the drink in me and the wild excitement of the headlong charge, I went stark mad’. He was lucky to be alive. ‘The hot air of the cannon’s mouth’ had scorched one side cheek on entry, he remembered, and ‘half a dozen of us leaped in among the guns at once’. He brained a Russian gunner with his axe and ‘split open the head of an officer who was trying to rally the artillery detachments in the rear; and then what of us were left went smack through the stragglers cutting and slashing like fiends’.
Private Edward Woodham smashed into the guns with the second 11th Hussar wave. His friend Wootten, who had assured him that the reckless charge order would never be executed, did not make it. ‘As soon as we reached the guns, the men [Russians] began dodging by getting under them,’ he recalled, ‘and for a time they defended with rammers.’ ‘But it was no contest,’ their blood was up. ‘They had no chance with us, and we cut them down like ninepins’.2
The first man accosted, Joseph Grigg with the 4th Light Dragoons, was a mounted gun carriage driver:
He cut me across the eyes with his whip, which almost blinded me, but as my horse flew past him, I made a cut at him and caught him in the mouth so that his teeth rattled together as he fell from his horse. I can fancy I hear the horrible sound now.
He hacked and slashed away at the back of the neck of the second driver until he also fell off.
‘Clash! And oh God! What a scene!’ Private Thomas Dudley described when he got into the battery with the 17th Lancers. ‘I know it is not to your taste, what we did,’ he later wrote home, ‘but we were Englishmen, and that is enough.’ He went berserk. ‘I believe I was as strong as six men,’ he claimed. ‘At least I felt so; for I know I had chopped two Russian lances in twos as if they had been reeds.’ James Olley with the 4th Light Dragoons cut down a Russian gunner but ‘received a severe wound on my forehead, which went through the skull bone’; he continued hacking and cutting until ‘a bullet from the enemy took away my left eye’. William Spring with the 11th Hussars saw his friend Tom pinned beneath his fallen horse repeatedly shot by a Russian officer, who ‘in the most dastardly manner fired every chamber of his revolver at the prostrate and helpless Hussar’. Remarkably he survived and, months later, ‘Tom showed me the deep indentation from these bullets directed at his breast.’ He was saved by the thick woollen padding of his Hussar jacket.3
Most troopers in the excitement of the melee cut and slashed at their opponents, inflicting disabling injuries, but not fatal. Captain Alexander Low with the 4th Light Dragoons was, however, an exceptional swordsman and used the point. The Homeric-proportioned 15-stone warrior was an imposing fighter and dispatched eleven Russians ‘at the point’ in the battery with Achilles-like intensity. On arrival at the gun line he was attacked by three Cossacks, two of whom he shot from the saddle with his revolver and sabred the third. Private Robert Grant with the same regiment recalled the effectiveness of the officer’s revolvers. ‘Many of the Cossacks got shot foolishly, for after a discharge, they thought it was all over, but the revolver had several barrels.’ Low ‘became afflicted, if so one may speak, with what has been called the blood frenzy’, one witness alleged; ‘much gore besmeared him’. He ‘raged wildly against human life, cutting down, it was said, very many of the obstinate Russians with his own reeking hand’. Low was not only aggressively lethal in a fight, he was also a tactically adept thinking officer. Lieutenant Henry Adlington, a regimental contemporary, thought him ‘perhaps the best cavalry officer in the service’. When the blood-bespattered Low paused, during a brief respite, an emotional reaction set in and he wept.4
It was the eighth minute since the charge began. Two more waves crashed into the battery, the overspills completely enveloping the guns, with some men completely missing the battery in the smoke. ‘We were all higgledy-piggledy’ when they hit the guns, recalled Corporal John Buckton with the 11th Hussars, ‘fighting more like devils than men’. Lieutenant Percy Smith with his crippled right hand could do little more than encourage his men. Three Russian Cossacks surrounded him on three sides but he managed to save himself by swerving horsemanship, receiving a slight flesh wound. His only recourse to avoid being lanced from the front was to jump his hunting horse on top of his slighter Cossack adversary. The lance tip glanced off his bone before a group of 11th Hussars intervened.5
The Don battery stood its ground, firing double shot and canister to the last, but was unable to stop the mad British charge. Its gunners now faced the consequences of failure. Some guns managed to get attached to limbers, recalled a battery officer, but many were mired in confusion. Gun trails ploughed the ground on the order ‘pull back’ instead of ‘limbers back’. ‘Surrounded by the English, the battery defended itself as best it could,’ he remembered. One intrepid gunner, Cossack Studenikin, felled some horsemen with his ramrod as gun teams tried to resolutely disengage from the melee. The rear driver of one gun, Cossack Nikulin, was impaled through the throat with a lance; ‘he lost his voice,’ the officer explained, ‘but is still alive today.’ Gunners attempted to cower beneath their limbers where they were repeatedly stabbed with lances. Gun number five’s horses became entangled with their harnesses. ‘I was with the gun,’ the officer recalled, which managed to make 100 yards before being ‘surrounded by enemy cuirassiers’. He described the desperate fighting to get away: ‘A ramrod number wounded my attackers in the arm with a pistol shot. I picked up the wounded man’s sword and struck his horse’s nose so hard it reared up and threw its rider onto the ground, where the Cossacks ran him through.’
The official battery account dwells on successes rather than failures and is inaccurate in many respects, claiming that Cardigan was killed for example. Clearly many battery men were killed on the move trying to extricate the guns and ‘a desperate hand to hand fight ensued’ the officer claimed, admitting it ‘was at great cost’. His report records ‘one officer, 32 crew numbers and many riding and draft artillery horses’ were lost.6
Lancer Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich had watched the seemingly irresistible progress of the British cavalry from the Kadikoi Heights with increasing anxiety. ‘Nothing could stop the Englishmen,’ he recalled:
Not canister fire that wiped out entire files of soldiers, nor the bullets that flew about them like flies. The Don Cossack gunners saw that there was no time to save their guns, and withdrew in order to save themselves. But the enemy rode on at their backs and cut them down without mercy.
Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov with the guns of the 12th Artillery Brigade, on the high ground near the Tractir bridge, covering the far end of the North Valley gorge, had a grandstand view: ‘Once through the guns the enemy moved quickly and bravely at a gallop towards our cavalry.’ After the debacle at the hands of the Heavy Brigade that morning, there was reluctance to confront these new mad Englishmen. Swarms of British cavalry emerging from the smoke covering the Don battery ‘was so unexpected,’ Kozhukhov admitted, ‘that before anyone realised it, our cavalry had broken’.7
When Captain William Morris leading the remnants of the 17th Lancers emerged from the battery smoke at the head of about twenty men, he found himself confronted by two squadrons of motionless Russian cavalry. The Russians were just as surprised at their abrupt appearance, assuming no man could have survived a head-on rush against an artillery battery. ‘Remember what I have told you,’ the veteran cavalry commander shouted at his men, ‘and keep together,’ whereupon they launched themselves at the enemy. The Russians were psychologically unprepared for such a reaction. ‘What happened then, say you?’ asked ‘Butcher Jack’ Vahey rhetorically: ‘They were round us like a swarm of bees, and we, not more seemingly than a couple of dozen of us to the fore, were hacking and hewing away our hardest!’
Morris transfixed the lead Russian squadron commander riding full tilt at ‘the point’. The sword blade protruded halfway beyond the man’s back. Locked in muscle and bone, the Russian’s body weight pulled Morris from his horse, dragging him down to almost ground level. As he sought to extricate the blade, a Russian sabre cut sliced away a substantial piece of bone above the left ear; the next slash dug into the top of his head, penetrating both skull plates and splitting his forage cap in half at the peak. He fell momentarily senseless from the saddle, which released his sword. Several Russians jabbed at him with lances, but he kept them at bay by whirling his sword about, cutting some in the thigh. A lance point stuck in his temple, splintering bone, and only the actions of a chivalrous Russian officer, striking up Cossack lances, saved him from further injury and induced him to surrender. Once the officer rode off the Cossacks plundered his possessions, clearly intending to finish him off. Somehow in all the confusion Morris managed to lose them in the smoke cloud. Nobody pursued, his wounds looked mortal.8
Vahey remembered each man at ‘the centre of a separate melee’. His whirling butcher’s axe bit flesh here and there and intimidated ‘the Russkies’ who ‘gave ground a bit, only to crush denser round me a minute after’. He had a charmed life: ‘They dursn’t come to close quarters with the sword for the axe had a devil of a long reach; and they dursn’t use pistols, for they were too thick themselves.’
Two groups of English cavalry had charged beyond the battery smoke, straight into the assembled but unprepared Russian cavalry. ‘Beyond the guns,’ Private Joseph Grigg remembered, ‘the Russian cavalry, who should have come out to prevent our getting near the gunners, were coming down upon us howling wildly, and we went at them with a rush.’9
‘It was the maddest thing that was ever done,’ Russian Hussar officer Ivan Ivanovich, who had been wounded in the Heavy Brigade charge that morning, remembered. ‘They broke through our lines, took our artillery, and then, instead of capturing our guns and making off with them, they went for us.’ It was an intimidating charge; ‘they came on magnificently,’ he recalled, thinking they had to be drunk because they were even brandishing lances in the air like spears in their frenzy. ‘The men were mad sir,’ he explained, ‘they dashed in among us, shouting, cheering and cursing. I never saw anything like it.’ Lieutenant Kubitovich watched the Russian cavalry squadrons behind the guns unravel:
They panicked and wheeled to their left to escape. Some of the men fired on their own comrades to clear a passage for themselves. In their flight the Cossacks rode straight into the regiment that was supporting the guns, and caused great mayhem, and this regiment fell back on the next.
It was hysteria. ‘Chaos’, artillery Lieutenant Kozhukhov agreed: ‘our cavalry outnumbered the enemy five times over, and yet it fell back in total disorder to the [River] Chernya, with the English coming hotly forward at the hooves of our horses.’ 11th Hussar Troop Sergeant Major George Smith even recalled seeing ‘one of their leading Cossacks fall from the bridge, there being no parapet’. The mass of cavalry was so compressed in front of the narrow Tractir bridge that both bodies of horsemen came to an involuntary halt. ‘Here and there inside this great mass, were the English,’ Kozhukhov recalled, ‘probably as surprised as ourselves at this unexpected circumstance.’ ‘Our fellows were quite demoralised,’ Ivanovich remembered, but the pause signalled the impasse was over. The face-off revealed the gross disparity of English numbers in the puny pursuing force. Russian officers reasserted control; there could now only be one outcome. Vahey, in the thick of the congestion at the end of the North Valley, heard ‘above the din a trumpet somewhere far in the rear sound Threes About’. The hunters were about to become the hunted.10
Onlookers, clinically detached from the viscera in the valley below, realised they had witnessed a remarkable event. Less than 600 British cavalry had charged the length of the North Valley and bottled up an apparent mass of Russian cavalry at the far end. ‘We could scarcely believe in the evidence of our senses!’ war correspondent ‘Billy’ Russell on the Sapoune Heights remembered. ‘Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an army in position.’ But they had. The Light Brigade had been subjected to withering artillery and musket fire from three directions, for seven minutes, charging headlong into an eight-gun battery. Artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov was deeply impressed: ‘The English chose to do what we had not considered, because no one imagined it possible,’ and had put the Russian cavalry to flight again. ‘These mad cavalrymen were intent on doing what no one thought could be done,’ he concluded. ‘A more fearful spectacle was never witnessed,’ Russell claimed in his subsequent dispatch. The Russian commander General Liprandi described it as ‘a most obstinate charge’, only explicable, he suspected, because the English had been plied with drink; a view shared by Russian cavalry commander Ryzhov, who sought to justify the dismal performance of his men.
‘Every man’s heart on that hill side beat high,’ recalled Sergeant Timothy Gowing, watching from the Heights. It was an iconic spectacle that would stand in history. ‘The excitement was beyond my pen to express,’ he admitted. Cavalry stock among the infantry was high again: ‘Big briny tears gushed down more than one man’s face that had resolutely stormed the Alma. To see their countrymen rushing at a fearful pace right into the jaw’s death was a most exciting scene to stand and witness!’
Russell’s claims of ‘a halo of flashing steel above their heads’ as they reached the battery are inflated. Such detail was not visible at that distance, but it was clear the British cavalry had ridden through and gone beyond the guns. This epic in the making had yet to be immortalised in Tennyson’s verse. However, apart from it being remarkable, nobody on the Heights or in the chaos of the valley below could really work out what was happening.11
As Lord George Paget’s third wave hit the Don battery he remembered ‘the first objects that caught my eyes were some of these guns, in the act of endeavouring to get away from us.’ He had nearly caught up with the 11th Hussars in the second wave, of whom forty to sixty had passed to the left of the guns without even engaging them. Colonel Douglas, their commander, spotted Russian cavalry beyond and bore down on them, following Captain Morris’s small 17th Lancer group of about twenty up ahead. Another band to their right under Colonel Mayow, the brigade second in command, was also pursuing the Russian cavalry with thirty or so men from the first wave. Two groups of British survivors were coalescing at the far end of North Valley. One group was mauling the gun battery while the second had taken up the pursuit of the Russian cavalry beyond. Paget, still intent on closely supporting Lord Cardigan, was looking for him, as were the regimental commanders. ‘We are in a desperate scrape,’ Paget remarked to an embattled Captain Low fighting alongside; ‘What the devil shall we do? Has anyone seen Lord Cardigan?’
As the second and third waves were crashing into the battery, one officer and six soldiers from the 8th Hussars and 4th Light Dragoons saw him cantering back, even before they had reached the guns. Private Albert Mitchell had gone down with the 13th just short of the battery, narrowly escaping being trampled by subsequent waves. Mitchell was accosted by Cardigan as he made his way back on foot. ‘Where is your horse?’ he was sternly asked. ‘Killed, my Lord,’ he responded. ‘You had better make the best of your way back as fast as you can go, or you will be taken prisoner,’ he said as he rode off, leaving him to his fate. Cardigan made no attempt to rally his men or tell them what to do on reaching the guns.12
Wellington had time and again been frustrated by the ‘derring-do’ of his cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars. They had often overreached themselves on blown horses, such as at the celebrated charge of his Heavy Brigades at Waterloo, and then suffered the consequences. Raglan had carefully husbanded his cavalry throughout the Crimean campaign thus far, and now the Light Brigade appeared to have dashed itself to pieces at the end of the North Valley. The charge had overextended itself, with remarkable results. The rush at the Russian cavalry at the gorge end of the valley was not totally impetuous. The men had every reason to anticipate they were closely supported by the Heavy Brigade, whose arrival was anticipated at any moment. Then ‘to our horror’ Captain Edwin Cook with the second 11th Hussar wave realised, ‘the Heavy Brigade had not followed’. It was a psychological tipping point. ‘Seeing there were so few of us, and without supports,’ Troop Sergeant Smith facing the Russian cavalry at the end of the valley recalled, ‘they turned about.’ It was a tense stand-off, because ‘we sat face to face, our horse’s heads close to theirs.’ There was a lot of involuntary counting. ‘The stillness and suspense during those moments was terrible,’ Smith remembered. It was broken by Russian officers urging their men forward with pistol shots as ‘the Cossacks began to double round our flanks and get in the rear’. The moment had passed. ‘Had a few more of our squadrons came up at this time, I am of the opinion that this body of cavalry would have surrendered to us,’ Smith claimed. Another 17th Lancer officer echoed Smith’s opinion: ‘It was a bitter moment after we broke through the line of cavalry in rear of their guns, when I looked round and saw there was no support beyond our own brigade.’
Backward-looking troopers could only see the debris of their advance and bedraggled groups of wounded making their way back on foot, amid riderless horses and dispersing smoke. ‘When I saw them form four deep,’ the officer admitted, ‘I knew it was all up.’ He called upon his men to rally.13
A withdrawal in contact with the enemy is the most difficult phase of war. Private Edward Firkins with the 13th ‘could not see three men of our regiment’ and in breaking clean ‘saw two Russian lancers coming towards me with clenched teeth and staring like savages’. He struck down one heavy Cossack lance, following up with a thrust ‘through the fellow’s neck’. ‘He fell from his horse with a groan,’ but the shock of the momentum ‘nearly brought me from my saddle’. As the other Cossack wheeled around his dying comrade and thrust at him with his lance, ‘I had not the strength to strike down the blow.’ His sword slipped from his grasp just as a British lancer ‘thrust his lance clean through the fellow’s body’. Private James Wightman saw Corporal Morley, long hair streaming in the wind, rallying 17th Lancers still inside the battery. ‘Coom ’ere! coom’ere!’ he shouted with his broad accent, ‘Fall in, lads, fall in!’ Twenty or so troopers attracted to the stream of invective and oaths rallied around him and they went through a body of encircling Russian hussars ‘as if they were made of tinsel paper’.14
Four British groups were now rallying left and right of the valley. On the west side were two groups led by Colonel Paget and Douglas, while to the east there were remnants led by Colonel Mayow and Shewell. ‘Halt, front,’ Paget had shouted. ‘If you don’t boys, we are done.’ This was the genesis of his group, momentarily checking Russians trying to recover the battery from the north. He then heard a cry: ‘they are attacking us, my Lord, in our rear!’ A large body of Russian lancers was forming across their direct line of retreat. ‘Threes about,’ he ordered, adding, ‘we must do the best we can for ourselves.’ Pursued by Russians in their rear, ‘helter-skelter then we went at these lancers,’ Paget recalled. With blown horses, they had now to run the gauntlet through the ‘Valley of Death’ again in reverse. As the four groups headed home, they found the valley filling with increasing numbers of Russian horse. In between the four bands were other smaller parties of men and knots of desperate stragglers, all part of a developing epic odyssey to get back to the British lines.
Only a few of Corporal Morley’s small contingent made it back. James Wightman’s injured horse finally went down ‘riddled with bullets’; he was shot in the forehead and through the top of his shoulder. Pinned beneath the horse, Cossacks closed in to finish him off. ‘Those vermin are always prowling about and act independently,’ remembered one soldier. The retreating remnants were an attractive target for the irregular Russian cavalry, on the lookout for loot. Private William Pennington with the 11th had already seen them ‘lancing our dismounted men’. ‘The demons,’ he recalled with some venom, ‘give no quarter when you are down.’ Anybody unhorsed was exposed. Private William Cullen with the same unit recalled going ‘through the crossfire to reach our lines, and on my way I saw poor Bob Lazell lying wounded with his horse beside him and several Cossacks murdering him’. The helpless Wightman had few illusions about what to expect: ‘While struggling out from under my dead horse a Cossack standing over me stabbed me with his lance once in the neck near the jugular, again above the collar bone, several times in the back, and once under the short rib.’
He was still alive, taken prisoner and ‘very roughly used’. The Cossacks dragged him along by the tail of his coat until he gained his feet, and then brutally prodded him along with lance butts. With his shattered knee, numerous wounds and a bullet to the shin, ‘I could barely limp.’ His friend Fletcher, unhorsed at the same time, managed to save him. ‘Get on my back chum!’ Wightman was urged, only to find when he climbed aboard that Fletcher had a gaping bullet wound at the back of his head. ‘Oh never mind that,’ he assured him, ‘it’s not much, I don’t think.’ Wightman was immensely moved by his unselfish behaviour, suspecting the hideous wound was probably fatal. ‘Here he was,’ he recalled with admiration, ‘a doomed man himself, making light of a mortal wound, and carrying a chance comrade of another regiment on his back.’15
Russian Lieutenant Yevgenii Arbuzov’s regiment of Ingermanland Hussars had been worsted twice that morning by British cavalry: first by the Heavy Brigade, and again by the impetuous Light Brigade attack beyond the guns. ‘We were overturned since we were standing with an extended front,’ he explained, ‘and so forced to retreat to the canal [Tractir bridge] whether we wanted to or not.’ Looking up the valley: ‘With no breeze blowing at all, between the hills there was a dense cloud of gunpowder smoke and dust raised by the galloping cavalry, so impenetrable that nothing could be observed even at close distances to oneself.’
On the high ground to his left between redoubts 2 and 3 he saw with mounting satisfaction Colonel Yeropkin’s Composite Lancer Regiment emerging from the brush-covered slopes to attack the withdrawing British cavalry in the right flank. On the valley floor ‘the Ural men and Hussars turned around and charged the English to the front.’ English survivors would have to re-run the gauntlet of Russian fire back the way they had come. ‘Almost all were hit,’ he claimed, ‘and no more than ten or twelve men were able to return back and save themselves.’
The order to attack the withdrawing enemy ‘made us happy’ remembered Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich, commanding Yeropkin’s 2nd Squadron. His newly trained recruits had been itching to get into action all day, after being checked earlier that morning from intervening in the Heavy Brigade fight. ‘We were finally getting our turn,’ he recalled; ‘from being just onlookers we were active participants.’ It was not an auspicious start, because they were fired upon by a battalion square of nervous Odessa infantry. ‘We cried out with all our might,’ he recalled with frustration, ‘so that they would see their mistake, but they did not stop shooting.’ The Odessa regiments had witnessed many unexpected cavalry actions that day and were taking no chances. Three of Kubitovich’s horses went down with two men wounded; nevertheless, they reached the valley floor and began to deploy to block it in extended line. They were nervous. ‘Justice must be done to the Englishmen,’ he admitted. ‘This was not a flying retreat’; they may have been wounded, but they could still bite. When the English approached, they exuded ‘the peak of perfection at a trot and in good order, as if on an exercise’. The new recruits felt queasy.
Lieutenant Colonel Shewell heading the approaching 8th Hussar survivors was still the dispassionate and intense disciplinarian. On the order ‘form threes’ to break through, Sergeant Reilly was chewed out for being out of place. But according to one of the other troopers, Reilly’s ‘eyes were fixed and staring, and his face as rigid and white as a flagstone’. Reilly was dead in the saddle, unnoticed by the others, when his horse tagged alongside and joined the formation. His fate paralleled the hapless Sergeant Williams, whom Shewell had arrested at the start line for smoking. Having been disarmed he was caught up in the charge and defenceless when he reached the battery, where he was promptly surrounded and cut down by Russian gunners. ‘Threes about!’ Shewell shouted in response to the new threat, ‘and the 8th responded as if on home parade’, recalled William Pennington. The colonel was no swordsman; he simply put his head down, gripped both reins and rode directly at the Russian commander ahead.16
Captain Verzhbitskii’s squadron hit the British first, followed successively by Kubitovich and then the 3rd Squadron under Major Lavrenius. One lone Russian, Cornet Astaf’ ev, recklessly tore into the British line ahead and was cut down. ‘The enemy was stunned by our appearance,’ Kubitovich claimed, as they plunged into their flank, ‘which was completely unexpected by them, and a desperate slashing fight ensued.’ ‘Of course with our handful, it was life or death,’ Private Pennington recalled, ‘so we rushed at them to break through.’ One trooper likened the desperate slashing and hacking to ‘cutting through a thickset hedge with a billhook’. Pennington fought ‘with the determination of one who would not lose his life’, snapping off lances and ‘occasionally catching one a slap with the sword across his teeth, and giving another the point on his arm or breast’. Lieutenant Edward Seager with the group, with his wife and child’s portrait in his sabretache, severely cut a Russian over the head and then narrowly escaped a massive lance thrust that snagged against the bars of his sword hilt. It took the skin off the top of the knuckle of his second finger, which was the only wound he suffered in the battle.
The group burst clear of the Russians and emerged in the open where it was ‘severely peppered in grand style’ by Russian artillery again, losing a great number of men and horses. They dispersed ‘in a scattered manner’, Seager recalled, ‘so as not to give them so great a chance of killing us’. Jemmy the terrier kept up, panting alongside, despite a slight neck wound. On riding to the right, they benefitted from the neutralised fire zone that the audacious French Chasseur attack against the Fedioukine Heights had created. ‘Through all this fire I returned,’ Seager remembered, ‘sometimes galloping and sometimes walking my horse.’17
Part of their luck, Kubitovich pointed out, came from Russian artillery and infantry fire from the Causeway Heights, which was indiscriminately sweeping the valley floor below, ‘so that a large part of our own horses were wounded and killed by our own bullets’. It had not been easy, but the British column ‘was almost completely destroyed, and there were only a few of the enemy who returned to their camp’. His own recruits were chastened: ‘The Englishmen fought with amazing bravery, and even the unhorsed and wounded did not want to surrender and continued to fight back, as they say, to the last drop of blood.’
His men were relieved it was over and they remained ‘stood in extended line’ across the valley, ‘awaiting the order to dismount, supposing that we were all done with the enemy.’
‘I say Colonel,’ one of Lord George Paget’s retreating group of lancers asked him, ‘are you sure those are not the 17th?’ They were the next group of Englishmen to ride up. ‘Look at the colour of their flags,’ Paget responded dismissively. ‘When we first saw them, the formation of the lancers in our rear appeared to be that of a contiguous column,’ he remembered. To their front was a compact body of Russians, two to three squadrons deep. The only option was to attack and break through, ‘we being little more than a rabble of 60 to 70 men’. Paget ordered his men to ‘front to the left’ but his voice did not carry across the din of artillery and musket fire, so the best they managed was to ‘edge away to the left’. Bizarrely, the Russians appeared not to decisively react. As Paget’s group closed ‘they came down on us at a sort of trot’, not purposefully, and then paused, ‘evincing that same air of bewilderment’ he had seen opposite the Heavy Brigade that morning. Paget did not hesitate.
Yeropkin’s lancers appreciated the approaching dust cloud signified ‘a mass of cavalry’ but ‘it was too far back to be able to make out whether it was our own or the enemy’. Kubitovich saw they were ‘hussars in black pelisses’ looking ‘just like our Leuchtenbergers’, confirmed by a Russian staff officer, who had just rode up. He agreed that they were reinforcements. It was only when the horsemen were upon them that ‘we saw our suppositions were mistaken,’ Kubitovich admitted; ‘it was another enemy column retreating in the footsteps of the first.’
Paget bulldozed ahead, bouncing off the Russian right flank, as they sought to edge past. The Russians ‘did nothing’, he recalled, which was totally unexpected. They ‘actually allowed us to shuffle, to edge away, by them, at a distance of hardly a horse’s length’. There was no check in the pace, the British simply flowed on. ‘I can only say,’ Paget remembered, ‘if the point of my sword crossed the ends of three or four of their lances, it was as much as I did … Well, we got by them without I believe, the loss of a single man – how, I know not!’
The Russians were nonplussed. ‘The loss of the right instant is absolutely irrecoverable’ during a fast-moving cavalry engagement, Kubitovich recalled, and ‘we lost such a favourable moment’. If they had charged they could have driven the English into the path of the pursuing Russian Hussars. ‘Now it was already too late’. They had been completely wrong-footed.
Private James Herbert with the 4th Dragoons group saw Russian officers waving swords to get the lancers to hem them in from the flanks,‘but they seemed to me either to be afraid to move, or not to know what their officers were driving at.’ They were thankful; ‘it was of course a disgraceful thing that they allowed a single man of us’ on ‘utterly winded, and distressed horses’ to ‘get back again down the valley’. The British took no chances and as Herbert recalled, ‘rushed in amongst them, cutting, slashing, pointing, and parrying’. ‘There was no fancy work,’ he commented, ‘just hard useful business.’ Nothing was going to stop them getting home. Paget was as contemptuous as he was incredulous: ‘It is a mystery to me! Had that force been composed of English ladies, I don’t think one of us could have escaped.’18
Contrary to the Russian claims of a desperate fight, there was no immediate pursuit. ‘They knew too well the sort of reception they would share with us,’ Paget claimed. The first engagement for Yeropkin’s recently trained recruits had been painful. They felt intimidated at the second British approach and were placed on the back foot with a maldeployment by unalert or inexperienced officers. The opportunity was missed.
The British ordeal was still far from over because as Paget appreciated, ‘they had a ride of a mile or more before us,’ picking their way across the Via Dolorosa of the original advance:
And what a scene of havoc was this last mile, strewn with the dead and dying, and all friends! Some running, some limping, some crawling; horses in every position of agony struggling to get up, then floundering again on their mutilated riders!
Private Edward Woodham with the 11th had been unhorsed and was running back when he heard a plaintive cry from an 8th Hussar trooper pinned beneath his horse. ‘For God’s sake man, don’t leave me here,’ he appealed. Woodham recalled they were still under ‘murderous’ fire, because ‘at this time the firing from the guns was incessant’. He pulled and tugged but could not release the man from under the dead weight. He saw ‘the enemy at this time coming up the valley, and killing the wounded on their march’. Reluctantly he decided to leave him. ‘The poor fellow said something in reply, but I don’t recollect it now.’ He would probably not wish to. He caught a free-running 17th Lancer horse and made his way out of the valley, which ‘presented a fearful scene at this time. Our poor fellows lay moaning and groaning everywhere.’ ‘It’s no use my stopping here,’ he appealed to the trooper he abandoned. ‘We shall both be killed.’
Cornet Edward Phillips with the 8th had been unhorsed. Delirious and exhausted as he moved back, he came upon another mount standing by his dead or dying master. The saddle, however, was upside down and ‘what with the excitement and running for one’s life, I was so done, that I had not the strength to right it.’ He released the girths and standing on the discarded saddle managed to mount bare-back; ‘never was I so happy as when I felt a horse under me again.’ He remembered, ‘I passed lots of poor fellows wounded or dying, and after an anxious gallop of nearly a mile, at last got out of fire.’
Paget overtook Captain Thomas Hutton, who had been shot through the thigh before reaching the guns. His squadron commander Captain Low had told him: ‘If you can sit on your horse, you had better come on with us, there’s no use going back now, you’ll only be killed.’
Hutton reached the guns and in the melee was shot through the other thigh while his horse was hit eleven times. Paget saw he was hurt and faint and passed over his rum flask. ‘I have been wounded Colonel,’ Hutton quietly informed him; ‘would you have any objection to my going to the doctor when I get in?’ Hutton did get back but his horse had to be destroyed on arrival.19
After Cardigan left him, Albert Mitchell trudged on through a recently cultivated strip of farmland, which made very heavy going. He felt that everyone else seemed to be getting rescued by retreating stray horsemen except for him. Whenever a group of stragglers banded together, Russian batteries on the Causeway Heights sent a shell their way. Mitchell eventually came across an abandoned trooper, standing alone. ‘Is that an Englishman?’ came a plaintive appeal. The man, bleeding profusely from the head, had been blinded by shrapnel, which had hit him between the eyes. Mitchell bound him up with a handkerchief and took him along. Before long they came across a man that had been shot out of his saddle on his left during the charge. He lay on his back, ‘labouring very hard for breath’, with a wound that appeared terminal: ‘Every breath he drew brought up a quantity of blood, which as he lay on his back, he could not clear from his mouth, and was almost choking.’
He turned him over and placed his arm beneath his forehead to clear the blood from his airway. ‘I could see death in his countenance,’ Mitchell observed, so they left him. When they came level with redoubt 4, to their relief, a British infantry officer from the 68th Light Regiment appeared. ‘Have you a drop of water, sir, if you please, you can give this man?’ he respectfully asked him. They did better, and readily offered a cup of half water and rum. His wounded companion greedily downed ‘a good half’, with Mitchell noticing how much his ‘moustache and mouth being covered with blood had dipped into it’. But he was not squeamish; ‘I emptied the cup,’ he recalled.
Cornet Denzil Chamberlayne with the 13th walked almost the entire length of the valley with his saddle on his head. His beloved horse Pimento had been killed during the charge and Lieutenant Percy Smith found him sitting beside the carcass. Chamberlayne asked what he should do. ‘Another horse you can get,’ Smith told him, ‘but you will not get another saddle and bridle so easily.’ At this the young cornet hefted the equipment onto his head and walked back. He was ignored by Cossacks looting and murdering the wounded on the way, because he looked like another one of them.20
Lord Cardigan was among the first to get back, and rode in alone. He studiously ignored Lord Lucan, who watched him pass 200 yards away. Later Captain Lockwood, Cardigan’s Aide-de-Camp, rode up to the staff group and asked, ‘My Lord, can you tell me where is Lord Cardigan?’ Lucan replied he had just passed but Lockwood misinterpreted the direction, assuming he meant he was still down the valley at the guns. He rode off urgently to locate him and was never seen again.
Exhausted and bleeding men stumbled in, each group greeted with cheers and handshakes. On the Sapoune Heights Fanny Duberly, having lost sight of what was going on in all the smoke and dust, noticed the small groups coming back. ‘What can those skirmishers be doing?’ she asked, ‘see they form up together again.’ ‘Good God!’ she exclaimed when the realisation dawned, ‘it is the Light Brigade!’ The unhappy ‘Heavies’, racked with guilt at having denied their support, gloomily watched them pass by. They came ‘by one’s and two’s’ recalled a witness; ‘such a smash was never seen.’ A wounded horse cantered by, adding to the poignant scene, with its broken hind leg swinging round and round.21
Cardigan, on hearing the ‘Heavies’ cheer the return of Mayow’s and Shewell’s groups, positioned himself at the front of the rally line, so as to lead them in at the walk. Behind his back Mayow was seen shaking his head and indicating Cardigan, clearly disgusted. Many troopers in the second and third waves of the charge had seen him heading back alone into the smoke around the guns, getting back well before them. Men pointed him out making jeering signs to the Heavies with muttered oaths that suggested the Brigade Commander may not even had been at the guns. Cardigan self-importantly smiled and waved his sword, blissfully unaware of the ridicule behind, acknowledging cheers that were actually for the benefit of the 8th survivors. All this was acutely embarrassing to the onlookers. Trumpeter James Donoghue with the 8th remembered that ‘after the battle I heard of the fact of Lord Cardigan going back much spoken of and commented upon by the men in the regiment.’ There was elation they survived and indignation that the Heavy Brigade had not supported them. ‘And who, I ask, was answerable for all this?’ reminisced Troop Sergeant Major George Smith with the 11th Hussars. They were a ‘forlorn hope’ left to fend for themselves after taking the guns: ‘We cut their army completely in two, taking their principal battery, driving their cavalry far to the rear. What more could 670 men do?’
All Cardigan had to say when he eventually deigned to approach Lord Lucan was to admonish Captain Nolan ‘in a very vehement manner’ for ‘insubordination’ for placing himself in front of his squadrons, ‘and his gross misconduct in shrieking and turning away’. Perplexed, Lucan recalled having ‘difficulty in making him understand’ that Nolan’s screams ‘had been occasioned by his being shot through the heart’. Dissatisfied, Cardigan rode across to Brigadier General Scarlett, his fellow Heavy Brigade commander, and continued the tirade, still in Lucan’s hearing, of what Scarlett thought of Nolan ‘riding to the rear and screaming like a woman’. ‘Do not say any more,’ Scarlett hushed him, ‘for I have ridden over his body.’22
Lord George Paget finally rode up on his wounded horse recalling ‘the shouts of welcome’ that greeted every returning officer or group, struggling up the incline, ‘telling us of our safety’. He reported to Cardigan that he could not account for any survivors of the first wave, until with relief he saw a cluster of 13th and 17th troopers ‘standing by their horses, on the brow of the hill, in my front’. Cardigan ordered the first count by the Brigade Major, who reported 195 mounted men out of about 670. His men managed to raise three cheers. ‘This is a great blunder,’ Cardigan responded defensively, ‘but no fault of mine.’ ‘My Lord,’ replied one of the troopers, ‘we are ready to go back again.’ Cornet George Wombwell’s letter home that night was more honest: ‘I want to see no more fighting, it has pleased God to keep me safe through what I have seen, and I am now anxious to get home.’23
The whole affair had lasted little more than twenty minutes.