The Charge of the Light Brigade: who blundered in the Valley of Death?

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As Raglan fumed at Lucan’s inactivity, a staff officer alerted him to activity in the redoubts. Peering through his naval telescope – specially modified so he could use it with his one remaining hand (he had lost his right arm at the battle of Waterloo) – Raglan could see the Russians bringing forward horses and lasso tackle to remove the British 12-pounder naval guns that had been sited in the earthworks. He assumed the Russians were about to withdraw and take the captured guns with them. His mentor the Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, and Raglan was anxious to retain the same proud record. Turning to his senior staff officer, he dictated the following momentous order: “Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy from carrying away the guns.”

Why did the Charge of the Light Brigade happen?

The pencil-written order was handed to Captain Louis Nolan, the finest horseman on the staff. It was an unfortunate choice: no officer had more contempt for the cavalry commanders, Lucan and his deputy Lord Cardigan, than the quick-tempered Nolan. He felt they were far too timid.

Within 15 minutes, Nolan had reached the valley floor and located Lucan on rising ground at the near end of the Causeway Heights. He handed over the order, which Lucan read with alarm. Now he was being asked to recover the guns without infantry support. He complained to Nolan about the “uselessness” and “dangers” of such an operation.

“Lord Raglan’s orders,” retorted Nolan, “are that the cavalry should attack immediately.”

If, as seems likely, Nolan used the word “attack” on his own authority, it was a fatal intervention. The order had made no mention of an attack. So did Lord Raglan perhaps have a different objective in mind?

“Attack, sir!” said Lucan. “Attack what? What guns, sir?”

Waving his hand vaguely eastwards in the direction of the redoubts, Nolan said contemptuously: “There, my lord, is your enemy! There are your guns!”

Lucan claimed later that from his position he could see “neither enemy nor guns”, and that Nolan’s gesture was towards “the further end of the [north] valley”. There, clearly visible, was a Russian battery of eight cannon, the sun glinting off their polished barrels.

At this critical moment, according to one eyewitness, Lucan “appeared to be surprised and irritated at the impetuous and disrespectful attitude and tone of Captain Nolan”. He “looked at him sternly but made no answer, and after some hesitation proceeded to give orders to Lord Cardigan to charge the enemy with the Light Brigade”.

If Lucan had only questioned Nolan further, he must surely have discovered that his objective was to recover the captured naval guns on the Causeway Heights, rather than seize the battery of Russian guns in the north valley. But so irritated was he by the taunting tone in Nolan’s voice that he chose not to continue the conversation.

What was the Charge of the Light Brigade?

Stung into action, Lucan made his final plans: Cardigan’s Light Brigade of Cavalry would lead the attack down the north valley, with the Heavy Brigade in support. The message was taken to Cardigan by Nolan who, when the Light Brigade commander voiced his objections, asked if he and his men were afraid. “By God!” responded a furious Cardigan. “If I come through this alive, I’ll have you court-martialled for speaking to me in that manner.”

Instead of returning to Raglan, Nolan rode over to his old friend Captain William Morris, commanding one of the Light Brigade’s lead regiments, and got his permission to accompany the attack.

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Cardigan, meanwhile, had sent one of his aide-de-camps to query Lucan’s order. This caused Lucan to return in person. “Lord Cardigan,” he said, “you will attack the Russians in the valley.”

“Certainly, my lord,” replied Cardigan, “but allow me to point out to you that there is a battery in front, a battery on each flank, and the ground is covered with Russian riflemen.” In other words, the north valley was a death trap from which they were unlikely to escape.

“I cannot help that,” responded Lucan. “It is Lord Raglan’s positive order that the Light Brigade is to attack the enemy.”

Into the Valley of Death

At 11.10am, stationed with his two staff officers at the head of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan turned to his trumpeter: “Sound the advance!”

As one, the men and horses of the Light Brigade of Cavalry – which numbered around 676 – moved forward at the walk. Leading the way were the 17th Lancers and 13th Light Dragoons, deployed side by side in two lines, followed 100 yards further back by the 11th Hussars, and with a similar gap to the 8th Hussars and the 4th Light Dragoons.

The brigade had just accelerated to a trot when Captain Nolan surged ahead of the first line, shouting and waving his sword. He may have realised that Cardigan was not going to wheel to the right to attack the redoubts, and was trying to correct the error; or he may simply have been urging the brigade on. We will never know. With just 50 yards separating him from Cardigan, a shell burst between them. Nolan gave a ghastly shriek and dropped his sword. A twitch of his bridle hand caused his horse to turn and gallop back through the advancing squadrons. He then fell to the ground. A fragment of shell had pierced his heart, killing him instantly.

Onward the brigade rode into that terrible crossfire. “Hell had opened upon us from front and either flank,” recalled a private in the 17th, “and it kept upon us during the minutes – they seemed like hours – which passed while we traversed the mile and a quarter at the end of which was the enemy. The broken and fast-thinning ranks raised rugged peals of wild, fierce cheering that only swelled the louder as the shot and shell from the battery tore gaps through us…”

The private continued: “‘Close in! Close in!’ was the constant command of the squadron and troop officers… But the order was scarcely needed, for of their own instance and, as it seemed, mechanically, men and horses alike sought to regain touch.”

Onward the brigade rode into that terrible crossfire. “Hell had opened upon us from front and either flank,” recalled a private in the 17th

A corporal of the 13th was “struck by a shot or shell full in the face, completely smashing it, his blood and brains spattering us who rode near”. A sergeant of the 17th had his head taken off by roundshot, “yet for about 30 yards further the headless body kept the saddle, the lance at the charge firmly gripped under the right arm”.

With the front rank just 80 yards from the battery, the Russians fired a point-blank salvo of grapeshot that brought down men and horses in heaps. Five officers were among the dead, but Cardigan rode on unscathed. As he approached the bank of white smoke that masked the battery, he shouted: “Steady! Steady! Close in!”

Seconds later the front rank swept into and around the battery, sabring and spearing Russian gunners as they tried to tow the guns to safety. In the smoke and confusion, Cardigan became separated from his men and made his own way back to the British lines. The remnants of the brigade were rallied by the surviving officers and led in a desperate attack against a mass of Russian cavalry beyond the guns.

“It was the maddest thing that was ever done,” noted a Russian officer. “They broke through our lines, took our artillery, and then, instead of capturing our guns and making off with them, they went for us… They dashed in amongst us, shouting, cheering and cursing. I never saw anything like it. They seemed perfectly irresistible, and our fellows were quite demoralised.” Having driven the Russian cavalry back on the Chernaya river, at the top of the north valley, the survivors fought their way back to the British lines.

What happened after the Charge of Light Brigade?

Even after the fatal charge, Lord Raglan was keen to use his infantry to retake the captured redoubts. He was dissuaded by General Canrobert, his French counterpart, on the grounds that troops could not be spared from the siege lines for their garrisons. Thus the charge was the last action of the battle of Balaklava which, though far from conclusive, was a Russian victory of sorts – their first of a war that had begun the previous March when the Russian tsar refused British and French ultimatums to withdraw his troops from Ottoman empire territory. Determined to protect the Ottomans by neutralising Russian power in the Black Sea, the Allies had landed on the Crimean peninsula in early September 1854. Within a month they were besieging the great naval base of Sevastopol from the Chersonese Plateau to its south.

Though the Russian attack of 25 October had fallen short of its original objective – to capture the British-held port of Balaklava and sever the supply line to Raglan’s troops on the plateau – it still had severe consequences for Raglan’s army. By taking the Causeway Heights, the Russians denied the British the use of their main supply route from Balaklava to the plateau via the Woronzow Road. In fine weather this was not a problem as a shorter route known as the Col was just as good. But as winter set in, and the road up the Col disintegrated, it became impossible to get enough supplies to the troops in the trenches.

The immortal status of all who took part in the Charge of the Light Brigade was guaranteed when Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate, wrote his eponymous verse

By the end of November, so overwhelmed was the Commissariat (the department in charge of resupply), and so poor the single road up to the plateau, that many of the goods that did reach Balaklava were left to rot on the quays. “The English,” wrote a French officer, “will actually exchange their boots for something to eat… It’s pitiful to see such superb men asking permission to gorge themselves on the dregs in our mess tins.”

With no fuel, inadequate shelter and insufficient food, the British troops fell easy prey to disease, particularly cholera and typhus. “The noblest army England ever sent from these shores,” wrote the editor of The Times, “has been sacrificed to the grossest mismanagement. Incompetence, lethargy, aristocratic hauteur, official indifference, favour, routine, perverseness, and stupidity reign, revel and riot in the camp before Sevastopol, in the harbour at Balaklava… and how much nearer to home we do not venture to say.”

By the time the war ended – following the fall of Sevastopol – with a qualified Allied victory in March 1856, 21,000 British soldiers had lost their lives, only a quarter from enemy action. Most died of disease and malnutrition during the terrible winter of 1854/55.

Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade poem

The immortal status of all who took part in the Charge of the Light Brigade was guaranteed when Alfred Lord Tennyson, poet laureate, wrote his eponymous verse of the famous action in late 1854, three weeks after reading a report of the battle in The Times. The second stanza begins:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldiers knew

Some one had blundered”

So who had blundered? Writing three days after the battle, Lord Raglan blamed Lucan. “From some misconception of the order to advance,” he wrote in his official dispatch, “[Lucan] considered that he was bound to attack at all hazards.”

Lucan was duly recalled to London where he tried – and failed – to clear his name. Did he deserve to shoulder the blame? Lord Cardigan, his former brother-in-law, was not in any doubt. “[Lucan] ought,” wrote Cardigan, “to have had the moral courage to disobey the order till further instructions were issued.”

Who was to blame for the Charge of the Light Brigade?

In truth, all three principals – Raglan, Lucan and Nolan – bear some responsibility. Even if it had been interpreted accurately, Raglan’s final order to Lucan was probably unnecessary. After all, the naval guns had been spiked and could not be fired, the infantry had nearly arrived, and even a “demonstration” by cavalry along the Causeway Heights would have incurred casualties. He should, moreover, have taken into account the fact that Lucan’s view of the battlefield was much more limited than his and made the final order more precise (by mentioning the ‘Heights’, for example).

Lucan should have insisted on clarification from Nolan. But he allowed his pride to get the better of him. As for Nolan, so contemptuous was he of Lucan’s ability, so desperate for the cavalry to show its worth, that he failed in the one essential duty of a staff galloper: to provide the officer in receipt of the message with the necessary clarification. If the written order was imprecise, then how much more was Nolan’s insolent gesture: “There, my lord, is your enemy! There are your guns!”

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It seems, moreover, that he used the word ‘attack’ when Raglan had intended a mere show of force. If so, Nolan bears the chief responsibility for what followed. Such was the opinion of most cavalrymen, according to Lieutenant Frederick Maxse RN who was serving on Raglan’s staff, and whose papers have only recently come to light. After the charge, Maxse inspected the ground and, “on looking to the left, saw poor Nolan lying dead who 10 minutes before I had seen eager & full of life, galloping down to Lord Lucan, anxious & determined to make him do something with the cavalry (of which he is a member, he was always very indignant at the little they had done in this campaign & bitter against Lord L). All the cavalry lay this disastrous charge on his shoulders & say that he left no option to Lord L to whom they say his tone was almost taunting on delivering the message – if he was to blame he has paid the penalty.”

Nigel Kingscote, another staff officer, agreed. If Nolan had lived, he told Raglan’s son, he “would no doubt have been broke by court martial”.

This article was first published in the Christmas 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine