‘At 35 minutes past eleven,’ reported war correspondent William Russell, ‘not a British soldier except the dead and dying, was left in front of these Muscovite guns.’ Ten minutes later he watched as seven of the nine captured British cannon – the whole point of the charge – were taken away. ‘There is no concealing the thing,’ concluded a 17th Lancer officer. ‘The Light Brigade was greatly damaged, and for nothing!’1
Captain William Morris’s group of twenty or so 17th Lancers, that attacked beyond the guns, was virtually annihilated. Hacked about the head to the bone, Morris managed to grab a passing saddle when he blindly stumbled into thick smoke. The horse dragged him along some distance before he lost his grip. Picking himself up he mounted another loose horse and managed to elude predatory Cossacks in the smoke and confusion. When he cleared the smoke, he came under tremendous crossfire in the open and his horse was felled again, pinning him beneath, where he lost consciousness. Later, after considerable effort, he freed his leg and wobbled off on foot. Sergeant Major Loy Smith briefly glimpsed him passing by, recalling, ‘his face was covered in blood and he had a very wild appearance.’ Smith did not rate his survival chances at all. Morris exhausted himself by his efforts and sank to the ground. Nearby was the body of his friend Captain Nolan, signifying he had almost made it back. Captain Ewart, Raglan’s ADC, came across him, having been warned by survivors that there was a severely wounded officer lying further back. Morris was ‘almost insensible’, he remembered, bespattered in blood still flowing from his grievous head wounds. Surgeon James Mowatt came up and roughly bound Morris’s head, over-watched by Sergeant Charles Wooden. Between them, they managed to keep the Cossacks at bay, for which both were awarded the Victoria Cross.
Captain Nolan’s body was recovered by artillery Captain Brandling, who, with five accompanying gunners, rolled him into a hastily scraped shallow grave. It was a hurried affair, conducted under fire. Nolan had been one of the first to be killed in the charge. One of the bombardiers observed ‘the poor fellow’s chest had been quite broken away’, torn apart with his heart exposed. The gold lace and cloth on his jacket was ‘very much burnt by the shell which killed him, and which must have burst close by’. Lucan was unsympathetic. ‘He met his deserts [sic] – a dog’s death,’ he insisted, ‘and like a dog let him be buried in a ditch.’ Nolan and Morris had been close friends; Nolan’s letter to his mother was found on Morris, and a letter written by Morris to his wife Amelia was discovered in Nolan’s sabretache. Both letters were sent on to England because it was assumed Morris was unlikely to survive. Nolan’s pauper’s grave was probably near redoubt number 4, but his remains were never recovered.
Lord Raglan was white with anger when he confronted Cardigan. ‘What do you mean, sir, by attacking a battery in front, contrary to all the usages of warfare?’ he demanded. Russell noticed that‘he shook his head as he spoke, and jerked the armless sleeve of his coat.’ Cardigan, unperturbed, blandly responded, ‘My Lord, I hope you will not blame me,’ disingenuously remarking, ‘I received the order to attack from my superior officer in front of the troops.’ Lucan later attempted to explain, but was met with the cold, and not unexpected accusation, that ‘you have lost the Light Brigade!’2
There is some controversy about the numbers who rode, varying between 666 to 676 and casualties. The most reliable figures based on returns made the following day reveal 271 killed and wounded with 32 taken prisoner. Remarkably, and contrary to Tennyson’s later epic verse, 395 men, or 60 per cent of the brigade, made the epic ride 1¼ miles down the valley unscathed. They were fired at from three sides, attacked and pursued superior numbers of Russian cavalry and retired under fire again, losing just 17 per cent of their men. The brigade was rendered ineffective because they lost 375 horses or 56 per cent of their mounted strength. In all, 75 per cent of the officers and men that rode were untouched or recovered from their wounds. Cardigan had 195 men still mounted just after the charge. The ensuing winter, not Russians, destroyed the brigade’s irreplaceable mounts, more difficult to replace than men.3
The Light Brigade was, however, badly mauled, with even deeper psychological and emotional damage. Wounded men were left behind. Robert Duke with the 13th Light Dragoons was wounded fourteen times, in the head, two sword cuts to the knee, a gunshot wound to his right wrist and ten lance stab wounds on his arms and torso. Fragmentary survivor reports give some clue how traumatic the experience on the valley floor must have been. Nurse Sarah Anne Terrot at Scutari was so affected by the experiences she heard that she wrote some down. Nearly all were young men and mostly hit by cannon fire. One provided a snapshot of his experience:
Ward in front of me was blown to pieces. Turner on my left had his right arm blown off, and afterwards died, and Young on my right also had his right arm blown off. Just then my right arm was shattered to pieces. I gathered it together as well I could, and laid it across my knees.4
When Lieutenant Seager with the 8th Hussars got back, he ‘found the remains of the regiment collecting gradually and counting over the missing’. They had lost twenty-seven killed, seventeen wounded and thirty-eight horses killed. ‘The Light Brigade is now a skeleton,’ he recalled, ‘as all the regiments suffered more or less.’ Survivors ‘shook hands and congratulated each other on escaping’. He sat with five men on the grass ‘and fared sumptuously on salt pork and biscuits, washed down by rations of rum’. Many men had not eaten for twenty-seven hours. Albert Mitchell got his blind companion back and into the back of a wagon. He was discharged blind, with a shilling per day pension, and unexpectedly later regained his sight. Mitchell found his tent and ‘soon dived into the biscuit bag’, chewing his way back to the start line where the regiment was gathering. Only thirteen of them were still mounted.
Psychological post-combat stress disorder soon set in. Sergeant Major George Smith got back to his tent and shook hands with the orderly room clerk he shared it with. ‘How glad I am you have escaped George,’ the clerk said. Smith told him, ‘I had lost my beautiful horse’; they had been inseparable for three years. ‘What is this on your busby and jacket?’ the clerk asked him while he was explaining ‘how fearfully the regiment had been cut up’. They found he was peppered with small pieces of meat. ‘On picking it off I found it to be small pieces of flesh that had flown over me when Private Young’s arm had been shot off.’ Smith sat down, admitting that the ‘feelings that came over me are not easy to describe’ and as memories of what he had endured in the valley came flooding back, he wept.5
One 5th Dragoon bandsman acting as a medical assistant wrote down snatched survivor conversations from the men that returned – ‘all of them wounded, little or more,’ he recalled, ‘others cut and mutilated in a shocking manner.’ Some came in without horses and often horses without riders. Dead men toppled from the saddle while other horses sank to the ground and expired on arrival in the midst of the survivors. The bandsman remembered men reminiscing about lucky escapes:
Bill, did you see my poor mare shot? Ah poor beast, I was so sorry. My poor horse had [its belly] shot right away by a cannon ball, but I saw Jack so-and-so shot dead, so I took his horse and I mounted him, when both its hind legs were taken away by another shot.
Men unloaded distress among friends with like experiences, a common occurrence among veterans after a hard-fought engagement. Combat stress was neither recognised nor acknowledged at the time. Distant Napoleonic war memories evinced a certain ‘craziness’ and odd behaviour after battles, which remained untreated.
The bandsman, in aprons covered with dirt and gore, treated ‘frightful looking articles’ on their stretchers. ‘Oh it was dreadful to look on,’ another witness recalled. ‘It was our turn next to attack them – there they stood and there we stood facing them.’ All were agreed: ‘great damage’ would have been inflicted on them if the Russians had reacted differently on reaching the guns, ‘but their soft hearts failed them’. ‘Damned Cossacks got around me,’ described another survivor:
But I managed to send two of them to pay their reckoning with the loss of their heads. At least one, the **** made a slapping cut at me, and took away my trotters, so I must hop to old England with a wooden leg. No matter doctor, I shall soon be well.
There would be future difficulties for these men, unemployment and the workhouse beckoned for the unfortunate, and social rejection for others unable to fend for themselves. ‘That was the sort of conversation,’ the bandsman explained, ‘these brave fellows were using in front of death.’
Fanny Duberly recalled ‘many had a sad tale to tell’ when she rode down with her husband to see how the regiment had fared. Although the 8th Hussars had been in the second line, ‘all had been struck with the exception of Colonel Shewell, either themselves or their horses.’ Some of the men thought her morbid fascination with death to be a little vulture-like for their liking; they had lost twenty-eight killed and nineteen wounded.
Poor Lord Fitzgibbon was dead. Of Captain Lockwood no tidings had been heard; none had seen him fall, and none had seen him since the action. Mr Clutterbuck was wounded in the foot; Mr Seager in the hand. Captain Tomkinson’s horse had been shot under him; Major De Salis’s horse wounded. Mr Musenden showed me a grapeshot which had ‘killed my poor mare’. Mr Clawes was a prisoner. Poor Captain Goad, of the 13th, is dead. Ah what a [catalogue]!
These were friends and acquaintances of seven years’ standing in the Duberly regimental family community. Her maid, Mrs Letitia Finnegan, lost her husband Francis, serving in the regiment.6
Private Christopher Fox, the inveterate hardcase with the 4th Light Dragoons, got safely back but was re-arrested for leaving his post without orders. He was sentenced to fifty lashes.
‘Butcher Jack’ Vahey dropped off the wounded 11th Hussar man he saved and gave the detention tent a wide berth when he got back, and fortunately ‘there was no notice taken of me,’ he recalled. He too was re-arrested for breaking out of the guard tent. Vahey and his butcher’s-axe exploits were to become something of a legend, but the cleaver may well have been a colourful exaggeration. Private Anthony Sheridan in later years certainly claimed to have seen him wearing a ‘blood bespattered smock front’, but Vahey’s personal account likely played fast and loose with alleged facts. Sergeant Joseph Pardoe with the 1st Dragoons saw him briefly with the Heavy Brigade but does not recall an axe, claiming ‘he had one sword in his hand, one in a scabbard buckled around his waist’. He did, however, look like a butcher with his rolled-up shirt sleeves.
Pardoe also heard from a 17th Lancer colleague that contrary to Vahey’s account he ‘was not seen or heard of for three days’ after the charge and was assumed killed, before being discovered and arrested. ‘When he found out by some means that he would be pardoned for breaking his arrest, he turned up.’ Vahey, unlike Fox, was considered a bit of a character by the officers and well-liked, as well as being useful when sober. Lucan told him, ‘he had a good mind to try me by court martial,’ and deservedly so, ‘but he would let me off this time, in consideration of the use I had made of the liberty I had taken.’ The incorrigible Vahey was let off and promised by Lucan that ‘perhaps he would do more for me if I kept sober’; in fact, he received a Distinguished Conduct Medal.7
Major General Cathcart’s 4th Infantry Division came up on the British right moving south of the Causeway Heights. Afterwards, it began to advance steadily on the Russian-occupied former Turkish redoubts. Redoubt number 5 was found to be empty. It was only when they moved on that they discovered the cavalry had already conducted a charge on the other, blind side of the Causeway ridge. This was their first intimation of the tragedy. Lucan had been told to await the infantry, but Cathcart had not been informed by Raglan that he was supposed to support the cavalry. Massive thumps and bulbous clouds of smoke rising over redoubts 2 and 3 signified the Russians had blown the powder magazines as they retired further along the North Valley. On the other side of the valley the Duke of Cambridge’s 1st Division was told to lie down to avoid the shot and shell being fired at them from the occupied redoubts further along the Causeway Heights. Three British scarlet lines remained along the Woronzov road. After the events of the hour before, both sides warily regarded each other as they decided what to do next.
At 12.28 p.m. Russell, observing from the Sapoune Heights, discerned a general Allied forward move, with the 4th Division edging along the Causeway Heights to the right and the 1st Division moving in echelon against the Fedioukine Heights on the left. Russian infantry slowly retired towards the gorge end of the North Valley and redoubt number 1 on Canrobert’s Hill. This posturing by both sides was accompanied by intermittent exchanges of artillery fire. ‘I cannot conceive a more splendid sight than what was witnessed during this afternoon,’ remembered a Scots Greys officer: ‘the two armies, the Russians being enormously strong, and our own, waiting for one or the other to advance, with an occasional shell by way of invitation or challenge.’ He watched rifle-brigade sharpshooters creeping to within 300 yards of the Russian positions, where they lay ‘on their bellies till a chance offers, when crack! goes a Minié, and down falls a Russian’.
There was a feeling the battle was over. The Russians held the more strategically important redoubts 1 to 3 and Cathcart’s infantry, up all night in the trenches, and having to march down to the plain, were exhausted. He had no intention of mounting a costly assault on the remaining redoubts, some distance away, unless he was specifically ordered to do so. Raglan wanted to, but was dissuaded by the French, who considered further action to recapture the overextended line a diversion of experienced troops away from the greater imperative, which was to capture Sevastopol.
Russian artillery Lieutenant Kozhukhov, observing from the high ground near the gorge, also suspected the battle was over. The Cossacks on the valley floor below certainly did; ‘when all this madness ended’ he recalled, they had begun horse-trading and selling loot. ‘They rounded up the English horses and right there opened up a horse market’, attracting considerable interest. ‘Valuable pure-blooded horses sold then for 3½ imperials, many for 4, and some could be had for even 2 or 1.’ Now and again cannon boomed out across the desolate valley. ‘We of course paid them back with the same coin,’ a 5th Dragoon bandsman recalled, ‘shot after shot; and there we stood, balls flying over our heads, as firm as if we feared no death.’
The Russians clearly hoped to attract British infantry assaults against the furthest three redoubts they held in force. ‘We expected to have to storm them that night, but little did we know the extent of the reverse which had befallen our cavalry,’ remembered a 4th Division infantry officer, ‘which made our chiefs tired of fighting for the moment.’ Despite losing the only metalled road between Balaclava and Sevastopol, the secondary track that led across the southern col to the Sapoune Heights was deemed sufficient for the moment. After all, Sevastopol would soon be ready to assault. The subsequent winter proved this premise false. Cannon fire petered out at 1.15 p.m., Russell reported, ‘and the two armies retained their respective positions’. The battle was as good as over. ‘Our men and horses alike tired and hungry,’ he remembered, ‘and the French were no better.’ It was an impasse.8
Fifty-eight British cavalrymen were captured by the Russians in the valley, of which twenty-one would die of their wounds. Private John Dryden was surrounded by twenty Russian lancers and dragoons and repeatedly stabbed, and when he fell off his horse was stuck again and again and left for dead. About an hour later Cossacks on foot searching for loot found him and speared him again. Dryden ‘made signs of life’ but to no avail, ‘they would not desist’. At nightfall he was picked up and slung on the back of a bullock cart. Remarkably, he survived capture. When examined by British surgeons on return he was found to have six sword wounds about the face and head and twenty-four lance thrusts, of which fifteen were in the trunk and spinal region. The equanimity with which men endured wounds is striking by modern standards. ‘I had a pretty narrow escape,’ Cornet George Clowes wrote to his father from Russian confinement, ‘being hit hard in the back by a grape shot, but it only skimmed across, taking a few splinters of bone off my right shoulder blade.’ ‘However,’ he reassured his parents, ‘I am nearly all right now.’9
Private James Wightman with the 17th Lancers offers the only fully documented account of the experience of capture on the valley floor to eventual release a year later. Beaten while wounded and dragged by Cossacks, he was carried to safety on the back of mortally wounded Private Fletcher: ‘When we reached the Chernya [River, at the end of the North Valley] the Russians were as kind to us as the Cossacks had been brutal before.’ A Russian surgeon extracted a bullet from his knee and placed it on a window ledge. When his Russian guard picked it up, having been informed by sign language where it had come from, he spat on it and hurled it out of the window, exclaiming ‘Sukin sin!’ (‘Son of a bitch!’).
The moment of capture is humiliating for the soldier, who is acutely vulnerable and from that moment on completely at the whim and mercy of his captors, for survival. Tension arose when a wounded Russian cavalryman sitting opposite Wightman, nursing two severe sword cuts across the head and minus three fingers, recognised Private John Bevin from the 8th Hussars as being responsible for the mess of his face. Bevin cheerfully owned up and pointing to the grisly fragment of the Russian’s right ear, led him to understand ‘it was he who had played the part of Saint Peter’. Thereupon, the two got on famously, with the embarrassed Bevin having ‘to resort to much artifice to avoid being kissed by the battered Muscovite’.
General Liprandi put in an appearance according to Wightman, convinced these mad cavalrymen had to have been drunk, to attempt such a charge. Private William Kirk, an unwounded 17th Lancer who ‘had been punishing the vodka a bit’, assured him that ‘if we had so much as smelt a barrel, we would have taken half Russia by this time!’ Liprandi smiled at this apparent confirmation of his theory, until Sergeant Major Fowler of the 4th Light Dragoons rose in considerable pain from a corner. He ‘had been run in the back by a Cossack lance’ and admonished Kirk for his ‘impertinent forwardness’. Coming to attention, the sergeant major assured Liprandi, ‘except for the vodka that your men have given to some of them, there is not a man of us who had tasted food or drink this day.’ Adding, they got ‘a mouthful’ of rum with the ration per day ‘and, believe me, sir, we don’t hoard it’. Wightman thought Fowler ‘a fine dignified soldier, a gentleman born I believe, and one of the handsomest men in the Light Brigade’. Liprandi was left with food for thought. Fowler was much admired, and later walked every step of the 50 miles to Simferopol, the capital of the Crimea, to make more room for the seriously wounded in the carts. The effort virtually killed him; he was dead within a week.
There was a bleak side to Wightman’s first afternoon in captivity. When Liprandi left, the surgeons came in and ‘set about amputating a leg of each of four men’. Chloroform was not available, they ‘simply sprinkled cold water on the poor fellows’ faces’, Wightman recalled. ‘It seemed a butcherly job, and certainly was a sickening sight,’ adding to the collective depression of captivity. ‘Nor was any good purpose served,’ he remembered, ‘for each of the sufferers died immediately on the removal of the limb.’ Fletcher, his mortally wounded saviour, was also dead within days. ‘I can write this,’ the visibly moved Wightman explained, ‘but I could not tell of it in a speech, because I know I should play the woman.’ Thirty-seven of them would eventually survive to be repatriated to their regiments.10
The Light Brigade wounded received their first treatment in the small Orthodox church at Kadikoi, employed as a field hospital. Serious cases were transported by cart to the general hospital at Balaclava. Unable to cope with the number and severity of wounds, the troopship Australia was dispatched the next day with over 100 of the worse cases on the four-day journey across the Black Sea to the barrack hospital at Scutari, in the suburbs of Constantinople. Private Albert Mitchell managed to locate his friend Nicholson before he was taken on board. ‘He had a lance wound in the side, and had received a blow in the mouth from the butt of a lance.’ He did not consider himself seriously wounded ‘and did not want to be sent away’. Men instinctively knew from experience that hospital could be every bit as lethal as the battlefield. Private James Cameron with the same regiment was loaded on board ship to Scutari without even first being attended to by a surgeon. Surgeon Scott with the 57th Foot treating the wounded explained conditions were not as bad as salacious press accounts alleged. High rates of subsequent mortality was due less to incompetent medical staff, more because the sick were ‘already dead’. They were ‘mere skeletons’ from exposure and starvation before they went aboard, victims of commissariat incompetence in the ‘Crimea – that land of death’. Lieutenant Colonel John Yorke from the Heavy Brigade was taken on board after writing to his sister Ethel that he ‘feared the voyage would do one last injury’, but he survived the ordeal.11
Sunset was at about 6.20 p.m. with last light twenty minutes later. Lord Raglan stayed on the Sapoune Heights for the rest of the day. At dusk Cathcart’s 4th Infantry Division and the Brigade of Guards began to thread their way back to the camp and the trenches on the plateau. ‘With the last gleam of day we could see the sheen of the enemy’s lances in their old position in the valley,’ Russell reported. Russian infantry still held the key high ground at redoubt 1 on Canrobert’s Hill. Campbell’s 93rd Regiment of Highlanders, the ‘thin red line’ that morning pulled back 500 yards to their rear, near the British battery positions, holding a reduced perimeter around Balaclava with the 42nd and 79th regiments. Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Sterling heard melancholy rumours that ‘the abandonment of Balaclava is mooted’. ‘We may, indeed, abandon the harbour, and occupy the heights on its west side, nearer the besieging [Allied] armies,’ he recalled.
The British were unsettled. Russian General Liprandi may have failed to take the harbour, but by hanging onto the easterly former Turkish redoubts, he controlled the Woronzov road. From now on all logistic traffic would have to use the non-metalled Col track running between Balaclava and over the Sapoune Heights. It would become virtually impassable that winter. Losing the outer defence ring was a blow to the Allies. The Russian army outside Sevastopol was now closer and more numerous, restricting the British to a very narrow area between Balaclava and Sevastopol. Russell described the pre-occupied Raglan’s return to headquarters: ‘all our operations in the trenches were lost sight of in the interest of this melancholy day’. Colonel Sterling felt obliged to quickly post his mail home ‘because I know not if it will be possible to write up to the moment of post, as we may be attacked in an hour for what I know.’12
On balance General Liprandi had a good day and began composing a dispatch to Prince Menshikov and the Tsar. It would offer the first glimmer of success since the British had landed in the Crimea. There was great rejoicing inside Sevastopol’s walls that night when the captured English cannon were triumphantly paraded through the streets. Russian morale rose, a tremendous cannonade was opened on the British lines at 9 p.m. and a glorious Te Deum chanted in the city. Much bolstered by this success, Russian infantry moved forward during the night to be ready for a major sortie against the British trenches the next day. Liprandi made the most of the opportunity to curry favour with the Tsar, writing eight guns were captured compared to seven the Allies admitted lost. The underwhelming performance of the Russian cavalry was glossed over, aided by Major General Ryzhov’s spirited declarations of success in subsequent written accounts. The insane charge by the Light Brigade, which Liprandi concluded was ‘impetuous’ rather than alcohol-driven, was magnified to a force of 2,000 strong. British cavalry was notoriously unpredictable and seemed composed of reckless fanatics. The Russian scoresheet undisputedly showed success, even if at an underestimated cost of 300 men and perhaps only partial.
The exuberance that spilled over from the walls of Sevastopol was not matched by the atmosphere around Russian campfires outside the city that night. Artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukhov, who had witnessed the entire battle from the high ground outside Kamara, felt uneasy about inflated reports, which did not reflect what he had clearly seen. He found it incomprehensible that the British cavalry, caught between two fires, pursued by Russian cavalry and enveloped by Cossacks from the flanks, could possibly have escaped. It led him to conclude ‘there was no effective pursuit on the part of the hussars and lancers.’ ‘This is how the affair appeared to us,’ watching from the slopes, ‘who were calm and objective observers.’
‘When we gathered around the campfires that evening, there was no end to the stories,’ remembered lancer Lieutenant Koribut Kubitovich. ‘Everyone interrupted each other in trying to tell the deeds they had witnessed.’ All this was in stark contrast to the innocent banter they had exchanged the night before, prior to setting off. ‘This evening was not so noisy and jolly as the preceding one,’ Kubitovich reflected. His cavalry recruits had been severely bloodied in the ill-directed attempts to head off the remnants of the escaping Light Brigade. The ‘many frightening brushes with death’ had proved chastening and had ‘left a heavy feeling in the heart’. He summed up the prevailing atmosphere as men bonded after haunting experiences: ‘Many of us were no longer present. Some were maimed, the bodies of the dead lay everywhere – all this together worked to depress all of us and we fell asleep in the most sombre mood.’
Russian cavalry were deployed to support cordons of infantry positioned around the newly captured redoubts. It was dark and ‘we ourselves, who had hardly been off our horses for almost 24 hours, were completely exhausted and settled down to rest,’ recalled Ingermanland Hussar Yevgenii Arbuzov. The respite did not last long, because at 10 p.m., in the midst of preparing Kasha porridge, ‘the command “saddle up!” was shouted through our camp’. They heard the rumble of cavalry in the distance and heavy cannon started to bang out from the Fedioukine and Causeway Heights, both sides of the North Valley. But they could not see a thing. It was a false alarm, a box crashing to the ground in the Kargopol Dragoon Regiment lines had set off a stampede of ten squadrons’ worth of horses. ‘The enemy in turn, thinking that this was an attack from our side, also opened up with a very heavy bombardment from the Sapoune Heights,’ Arbuzov remembered. The horses penetrated as far as the Sevastopol trench lines, lashed by heavy artillery fire to their right, which brought down 250 stampeding horses. The Kargopol Dragoons lost two and a half squadrons of horse without even being in action.
The events of that day magnified the fearsome reputation of the English cavalry. ‘We did not expect this night to be a quiet one,’ Lieutenant Kozhukhov explained. They were already much ‘subdued’ by what had happened and the ‘dull roar of gunfire’ the celebratory cannonade that had spat out from Sevastopol ‘made us take care to be vigilant’. ‘In truth, the enemy was in front and the pitch-black night, with saddled horses, and guns loaded with canister, were an uncomfortable reminder of the recent mad attack by the English.’13
For the British it had been a roller-coaster of a day, full of contradictions. At first the senior British commanders had been completely surprised by the dawn Russian attack. Iconic high points at the ‘thin red line’ and the stirling success of the Heavy Brigade rout of the Russian cavalry that recaptured the initiative were eclipsed by the reckless charge by the Light Brigade. Ironically, this epic disaster was to endure generations after the success of the Heavy Brigade was long forgotten.
Recriminations were just beginning in the small hours leading up to midnight. Cardigan was uncharacteristically checking on the health of his wounded aide Lieutenant Maxse, before wrapping himself in his cloak beside Maxse’s campfire. He was not at all phased by Raglan’s admonishment for losing his brigade, insisting he clearly followed orders. Raglan, accepting that guilt could not reasonably be pinned to the brigade commander, went for Lucan, with whom he had a more difficult relationship. Cardigan’s proximity to the campfire was likely a combination of exhaustion and stress, coupled with a defensive appreciation of the murmurings in the ranks about his precipitate return from the guns. Some troopers alleged, but not publicly, that he had not even reached them. If he had, then afterwards he abandoned his men. Lord George Paget never forgave him. ‘Holloa, Lord Cardigan!’ he had involuntarily called out on his return, ‘were not you there?’ Cardigan grandly responded, ‘Oh, wasn’t I, though!’ turning to one of his men, ‘Here Jenyns, did you see me at the guns?’ Paget confided to his journal that night that the day ‘will be the cause of much ill-blood and accusation, I promise you’. Cardigan, unlike his more Spartan superior Lucan, did not usually share the discomforts with his men, but he felt the need to bond with their emotional pain that night. Many allege that he later took himself off to his yacht in Balaclava harbour.
Bickering came to the fore between Raglan and Lucan that night. Raglan as commander had some explaining to do. The army had been caught napping that morning. He had also composed the fateful order to the Light Brigade. Even its intended meaning, an uphill advance over rough ground unsupported by artillery or infantry, was questionable. It is conceivable that after the moral success of the Heavy Brigade episode, he anticipated the Russians would beat a precipitate retreat. The unclear order, in both written and oral form, demanded immediate action. Raglan was already irritated with Lucan for ignoring the previous – also imprecise – order, and wanted swift action. Raglan’s later carefully composed official written dispatch suggested Lucan had ‘some misconception of the order to advance’ and ‘fancied he had no discretion to exercise’ but ‘was bound to attack at all hazards’. Lucan immediately saw this to be disingenuous. If Cardigan was not to be blamed for obeying an order why should Lucan be? Raglan never allowed any discretion over orders with any of his division commanders in the Crimea. Indeed, slavish adherence to instructions was expected in the Victorian army.
Although Raglan blamed Lucan, he had no intention of taking it any further beyond this loose reprimand. Lucan was convinced he had a case and wrote in his tent that night that: ‘I do not intend to bear the smallest particle of responsibility. I gave the order to charge under what I considered a most imperious necessity, and I will not bear one particle of the blame.’
In the obsequious world of the Victorian military, this would be an uphill climb. ‘Lucan is much cut up,’ Paget observed that night, ‘and with tears in his eyes this morning he said how infamous it was to lay the blame on him.’ Both Lucan and Raglan spent an uneasy night.14
Night fell on the British cavalry camp against a backdrop of flickering artillery fire silhouetting the western skyline. An order was issued forbidding fires and noise as further attacks from the Russians were considered possible. The exhausted and overwrought survivors of the Light Brigade stood about in groups, discussing the dead, wounded and missing, and the events of the day. It was bitterly cold. The Heavy Brigade had attacked over their tent lines that morning and soldiers were prevented from returning until 5 p.m., despite their camp being only 500 yards away. ‘None of the men or horses had anything to eat since the night before,’ Paget recalled. The camp area was in chaos. ‘We have lost a good deal of property,’ Paget observed. The perennial answer to account for losses was ‘Oh, it was knocked over in the attack – I cannot find it’ or ‘the Turks must have stolen it’ – conceivable, because they had fled through the camp.
Colonel Edward ‘Little’ Hodge commanding the Heavy Brigade’s 4th Dragoon Guards saw the camp was completely disorganised when he got back in the dark. ‘Both my servants got brutally drunk,’ he remembered, ‘and I found them lying on their backs, and with difficulty I was enabled to save my baggage.’ They had helped themselves to officer’s stores, which added insult to injury, and his tent was gone. ‘I only wonder that I have any kit left,’ he recalled. Hodge hated drunkenness. ‘I am most uncomfortable,’ he complained, ‘with blackguards as these about me.’
An emotional reaction to the horrors of the day now began to set in. ‘Well, we have had a fearful day’s work,’ Paget confided to his journal, ‘out of which it has pleased God to bring me harmless.’ But they were surrounded by ghosts; ‘not an officer of the 4th escaped without himself or his horse being wounded,’ Paget remembered.
Poor Halkett, we believe killed. He was struck down in the advance, Sparke missing, supposed to have been sabred in the melee at the end, and Hutton shot in both thighs and his horse wounded in eleven places; my horse was grazed in three or four places, and I had a shot through my holster. My poor orderly was knocked over, as well as my trumpeter, both by my side. Every trumpeter in the regiment and two Sergeant Majors out of three knocked over.
Paget’s voice had gone from shouting himself hoarse throughout the action; ‘it is like an old crow,’ he remarked. Corporal James Nunnerly finally returned to his 17th Lancer tent that he normally shared with nine others; that night he slept alone.15
Private Albert Mitchell remembered, ‘we did not take our tents that night, but were ordered to let them remain to deceive the enemy.’ It was an uncomfortable night for the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘for I had nothing but what I stood upright in’. His equipment, jacket, overalls, cloak and blanket were attached to his dead horse lying on the battlefield. He did not get another cloak until after the worst of the winter, at the end of February.
With time to reflect, men pondered on their tenuous mortality. Major William Gray with the 8th Hussars recovered his pipe from his overall pocket, ‘broken in a hundred pieces, and the ball left there in my pocket’. Another ball had gone through his horseshoe case and ‘took part of my sword belts away from my sword and only left part of my sword remaining’. Private Thomas Williams in the 11th Hussars found his sword scabbard severely dented by shot and very nearly cut cleanly in two at the centre.
‘Several men on unrolling their cloaks,’ Mitchell recalled, ‘found grapeshot and pieces of shell drop from them.’ He faced a bitterly cold night and ‘laid down with my back against another man for warmth’. He woke several times to find he was covered in white frost, but despite the discomforts continued ‘thanking God for His great mercies towards me this day’.
James Wightman, experiencing his first night in Russian captivity, was just as cold. There were no blankets, but the Russians handed out the greatcoats the Turks had abandoned at the redoubts. ‘They swarmed with vermin,’ he remembered, ‘but the night was bitterly cold, and we found them very acceptable.’ They were alive, too. Later that night they were put in one-horse carts, ‘two men in a cart lying on straw’ and departed for Simferopol, 50 miles away. It took four marches with brief halts. When they arrived at the hospital ‘most of our uniforms were so stiff with blood that they could have stood on end themselves.’16
Fanny Duberly made ‘the dreary ride’ back to her ship in Balaclava harbour, escorted by Henry, her husband. Her maid Letitia Finnegan was still ‘in deep anxiety and distress’. ‘When I left last night, her husband had not been seen,’ she remembered. Private Finnegan had not returned; ‘one man told me he thought he saw him fall but, of course, I would give her no information but facts.’ At first the rumours suggested he had been wounded, but when her maid checked the hospital ‘all she heard was tidings of his death’. Characteristically, Fanny had hardly ever mentioned her maid before in her journal, despite having accompanied her before and after her journey to Balaclava. There is more information about her horse ‘Bobs’ travels than Mrs Finnegan. To lose a husband when accompanied on active service was little short of disastrous. Finnegan was indeed killed during the charge. There would be no provider unless Letitia quickly developed an intimate relationship with another ‘protector’.
‘It is a novel office for me to be comforter to the poor broken-hearted woman who is with me,’ Mrs Duberly recalled. ‘She will not leave me for a moment.’ Whether or not she realised it, her maid’s physical security and sustenance was at stake. In the short term she was totally reliant on her employer. ‘Oh Ma’am it’s my heart that’s bad,’ her maid insisted. ‘You seem to give me strength.’ ‘Fancy me,’ was Fanny’s reaction, ‘from my weakness dealing out strength.’ Once on board, with time to reflect, she too felt vulnerable. There were false alarms that night: ‘steamers getting up their steam, anchors being weighed’. She slept fitfully; there were fears about the Russians and ‘even my closed eyelids were filled with the ruddy glow of blood.’17
Sergeant Timothy Gowing’s Royal Fusilier fatigue group finally reached Balaclava harbour, to pick up their ‘priceless blankets’. As the stores were closed the assistant quartermaster general sent them down to the plain to assist with the recovery of the wounded. On arrival they met with Light Brigade survivors, with whom they patriotically offered ‘a warm shake of the hand’. The unasked question, hinted and remarked upon in many veteran accounts was what had happened?
Lord George Paget wrote in his journal ‘the fact is, we can fight better than any other nation, but we have no organisation.’ It had obviously gone wrong with the Light Brigade. ‘I have always anticipated a disaster when the cavalry came to be engaged,’ he later admitted, ‘though I kept it to myself.’ Many of the officers did so, but war correspondent William Russell was composing a newspaper report that would electrify Victorian London back home. He hinted at poor decisions but remained circumspect, the facts were speaking for themselves. It was a later Times newspaper editorial that coined the phrase ‘some hideous blunder’ which was to be taken up by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘some one had blunder’d’, reworded to achieve the rhythmic beat that powered short pithy stanzas of verse to echo the pace of the ride.
Sergeant Timothy Gowing recalled asking the:
Sergeant of the old Cherry Pickers [11th Hussars], as he gripped him by the hand amid a group of survivors, ‘Has there not been some mistake?’ ‘It cannot be helped now – we have tried to do our part,’ was his response. ‘It will all come out some day.’18