24 Hours at Balaclava
24 Hours at Balaclava, 25 OCTOBER 1854
The Charge of the Light Brigade
In 1854 Britain and France were at war to save ‘poor little Turkey’, the crumbling Ottoman Empire, against the menacing Russian bear. Tsar Nicholas I thought it his holy duty to extend the power of the Empire’s Orthodox Church as far as Constantinople and Jerusalem.
The Ottomans were ailing, and Imperial Russia, led by Nicholas these past 27 years knew it, and sensed opportunity. The British ostensibly defending Turkey against Russian bullying, were actually promoting rivalry against the Tsar in Asia while extracting free trade and preferential religious treatment from a crumbling Ottoman Empire. Revolutionary secularism motivated France, under Napoleon III, ironically promoting the Catholicism that underpinned his reign. He aimed to restore overseas influence and prestige squandered during Napoleon’s wars. Russian expansionism was a threat.
An intangible Russian menace to the allied rear had yet to materialize, despite frequent cries of ‘wolf’ from outlying pickets. So when the first cannon boomed out from the murk, way to the east and rear, senior Allied commanders were jerked into frenetic activity.
The unlikely had occurred. A Russian army was knocking on the back door of Sevastopol and on the cusp of severing the British umbilical supply line to its logistics base at ‘Little London’, Balaclava’s harbor, absolutely packed with shipping.
24 hours of high drama followed. Before mid-morning eight minutes of cut and slash saw 900 British heavy cavalry see off and scatter more than 2,000 Russian horse. At the same time 400 charging Russian cavalry were deflected away by a ‘thin red streak’ of Scottish infantry from entering Balaclava harbor. Then, within two hours of achieving near victory the British squandered it by recklessly sending 664 British light cavalry spurring down the ‘Valley of Death,’ as immortalized by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous poem. Half the British cavalry in the Crimea was destroyed. These epic clashes, which took up less than an hour of fighting, were to occupy a future iconic and reverential place in popular British psyche. The failed charge has inspired poetry and literature and is still portrayed in epic Hollywood movie recreations today.
War correspondent William Howard ‘Billy’ Russell witnessed the events from a grandstand viewpoint on the Sapoune Heights. Writing for the prestigious Times newspaper, Russell’s dramatic eyewitness coverage moved hearts and souls back home. Russell rode on the back of his influential newspaper in an era of steamship and telegraph and could get his dispatches back to England in three weeks. There was no censorship, so the facts were as accurate as Russell could see. Times readers were electrified by the accounts. Before, all that had been traditionally available to the public were official military dispatches. William Russell was the civilian eyewitness on the spot. His electrifying account of the events at Balaclava on 25th of October 1854 arrived at Victorian breakfast tables within 19 days.
Tennyson’s famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade was published in The Examiner on 9th December, way ahead of the arrival of the salient facts. Russell subsequently edited this dispatch, but when Tennyson wrote the poem, the Times reported 800 cavalry had been engaged and only 200 returned. The Illustrated London News claimed only 169 had got back. In fact, between 661 to 664 light cavalry charged, of which 299 fell, 103 of them mortally, but the myth was already set. ‘Someone had blunder’d’ was Tennyson’s not unreasonable assumption on reading the early dispatches, but it was too early to objectively assess recriminations at this stage.
Tennyson wrote classic Victorian poetry, inspired by Russell’s heroic prose. ‘The whole line of the enemy belched forth, from thirty iron mouths, a flood of smoke and flame’ Russell wrote, echoed by Tennyson’s ‘storm’d at with shot and shell’. Only with Russell’s subsequent edits did it become increasingly apparent that Tennyson’s ‘cannon to right of them, cannon to left of them, cannon in front of them’ had indeed been the case. Russell later wrote that the cavalry ‘were exposed to an oblique fire from the batteries on the hills on both sides as well as to a direct fire of musketry’.
When I walked the ground recently with local guide Tanya Zizak it became apparent that this was probably intermittent fire from three different directions, and unlikely to have been simultaneous. Both men viewed the spectacle at considerable distance: Russell from the Sapoune Heights two miles away and Tennyson from his study at Farringford on the Isle of Wight. Clinically removed from the visceral carnage by his position on the Heights, William Russell indulged in poetic license as: with a halo of flashing steel above their heads, and with a cheer which was many a noble fellow’s death cry, they flew into the smoke of the batteries. This flowery text is replicated by Tennyson, who immersed himself in a dramatic story of knightly figures on horseback. This was the noble six hundred, riding into the valley of death. Tennyson’s grandson Charles later remembered that the poem was written at a single sitting, after reading Russell’s dispatch, barely six weeks after the event.
24 Hours at Balaclava takes its readers down from the Heights, away from a different social perspective, where purchase, rather than meritocracy determined seniority of rank. Distance sanitized onlookers from the visceral gore, smells and sounds of the moment. The reader rides alongside the Light Brigade through the valley floor to view, feel and smell fear from the saddle from the perspective of the contemporary eyewitness letters, diaries and personal accounts that have flowed from the charge.
‘I could see what would be the result of it’ explained Private Thomas Williams with the 11th Hussars to his parents, ‘and so could all of us; but of course as we had got the order, it was our duty to obey’. One Sergeant with the 13th Light Dragoons later admitted ‘we continued on’ despite ‘every man feeling certainly we must be annihilated.’
Both the Russian and British perspectives reflect the intensity of the fighting. Russian Lt Yevgenni Arbuzov fighting against the Heavy Brigade in the melee recalled ‘I struck one dragoon in the shoulder, and my sabre bit so deep into him, that I only drew it out with difficulty’. Troop Sergeant Major Henry Franks remembered ‘a struggling mass of half frenzied and desperate men, doing our level best to kill each other,’ while Private James Prince with 5th Dragoon Guards saw: ‘There was some being with their heads half off, and some with their bowels out, and some with their legs shot off with cannon balls’.
One 8th Hussar trooper recalled at the beginning of the Light Brigade charge that ‘I felt my blood thicken and crawl, as if my heart grew still like a lumpy stone within me.’ Yet this fear was expunged by the merciless Russian fire. ‘My heart began to warm, to become hot, to dance again, and I had neither fear nor pity!’ he recalled. ‘I longed to be at the guns. I’m sure I set my teeth together as if I could have bitten a piece out of one’.
When they reached the Don battery a Russian artillery officer remembered how ‘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’.
Artillery Lieutenant Stefan Kozhukov recalled: ‘The English chose to do what we had not considered, because no one imagined it possible.’ ‘The men were mad sir!’ Russian Hussar officer Ivan Ivanovich exclaimed, ‘they dashed in among us, shouting, cheering and cursing. I never saw anything like it’.
‘The men were mad sir! They dashed in among us, shouting, cheering and cursing. I never saw anything like it’. Russian Officer.
There is a wealth of new material to peruse, much of it from junior officers, NCOs and soldiers. Research has also identified a number of Russian accounts, young artillery and cavalry officers, who offer vivid insights from the opposing side, including French and Turkish accounts.
Today, the sun-dried October grass on the uncultivated land on the Causeway Heights and Fedoukine Hills overlooking the ‘Valley of Death’, retain considerable historical resonance, but much has changed. It is still difficult to pick one’s way across the uneven ground between the Sapoune Heights and the valley below. This was the challenging route taken by Captain Louis Nolan, Raglan’s impetuous ‘galloper’ ADC on horseback, to deliver the fateful order to charge to Lord Lucan.
A petrol station has been built at the ‘Y’ intersection of the Balaclava and Yalta roads, which overlooks the position where the Light Brigade formed up to charge the Don Cossack Battery at the far end of North Valley. There are now trees, roads, tracks, vineyards and hillside gardens.
The urban areas of Balaclava and Kadikoi have merged, reaching as far as the low hillock upon which the 93rd (Sutherland) Highlanders epically stood as a ‘thin red line’ to bar Russian horsemen from Balaclava. Balaclava harbor is now a popular Russian tourist destination with many restaurants and apartments. There are now electric power lines traversing the area near the site of the charge of the Heavy Brigade, west of the old number four redoubt site. Despite the changes, an early morning or dusk walk in late October can still give a vivid perspective of what it looked like in 1854
24 Hours at Balaclava follows the day through the eyes of the onlookers and the four major instigators of the Light Brigade charge. Lord Raglan, the indecisive leader of an army little changed since Waterloo, gave the garbled order to charge, having never commanded a unit in action. Lord Lucan who disliked Raglan, received the order and misunderstood it and gave it to Lord Cardigan. Cardigan was the pompous and arrogant commander of the Light Brigade, more used to ornate Regent’s Park London parades than the field of battle. He had never been to war and Lucan instructed him to charge. Captain Louis Nolan, Raglan’s impetuous ‘galloper’ ADC, made it all happen by delivering the written order to trigger the charge.
The day is viewed through the eyes and opinions of ordinary cavalry troopers urged according to Tennyson, ‘but to do and die’. ‘When can their glory fade?’ Tennyson emotionally wrote. 24 Hours at Balaclava is more about the gritty soldier view, men who saw little, and knew even less about what was actually happening.
Letters and diary accounts lift the veil over confusing events. ‘It was a most unwise and mad act’ admitted an anonymous Sergeant in the 13th Light Dragoons before the charge of the Light Brigade, ‘every man’ felt ‘certainly that we must be annihilated’. Private Thomas Dudley with the 17th Lancers described the realities behind Tennyson’s ‘do and die’ stanza. ‘Every man’s features’ he subsequently recalled were ‘fixed, his teeth clenched, and as rigid as death’. ‘When we received the order, not a man could seem to believe it’ he claimed. But they charged, nevertheless.