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The Charge: The Real Reason Why the Light Brigade was Lost
The charge of the Light Brigade is one of Britain's best-known glorious military disasters. On 25 October 1854, during the siege of Sebastopol, the Light Brigade attacked Russian gun positions at Balaclava. The charge lasted 7 minutes; of 673 officers and men who went into action, 247 men and 497 horses were lost. This book shatters many long-held conceptions of how and why it happened, and who was to blame. Mark Adkin, a former professional soldier, has combined military expertise and detailed research of participants' accounts with a careful examination of the actual ground. His story switches carefully from the strategic and tactical problems of the battlefield to what it was like for the trooper riding down the valley or a Russian gunner serving his cannon. Through the novel use of sketches the reader can, at every stage, look down on the battlefield from the same position as that used by the British commander-in-chief, Lord Raglan. He sees the situation as Raglan saw it when he gave his order that launched the Brigade down the valley of death. Raglan gave the order, Captain Nolan delivered it, Lord Lucan received it, and the Earl of Cardigan executed it. History has disagreed over the share of the blame. This book makes a masterly analysis of the probabilities and discusses factors previously overlooked. There is a cogent argument, never made before, that the blunder was deliberate. The result is a gripping and definitive study of a debacle that has never ceased to enthral the imagination.
366 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1996
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About the author
Mark Adkin
31 books12 followersMark Adkin became a professional soldier in 1956. After leaving the British Army he was one of the last British District officers (in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands) and as the Caribbean Operations Staff Officer he participated in the US invasion of Grenada in 1983. He has written several books on military subjects, including Urgent Fury, Goose Green, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads and The Charge.
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August 24, 2017Thursday, 26th October. - The brigade was almost destroyed by yesterday's affair. 300 men were killed, wounded and missing. 396 horses put hors de combat, and 24 officers killed and wounded (p217)
So wrote Lord Cardigan the day after the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade, an infamous military action during the Crimean War of 1853-55 Of the 664 men took part in the charge, 110 were killed in action, 130 wounded, and 58 captured while 362 horses were killed or on account of their wounds shot later. All to no advantage on the battlefield or the war as a whole.
The basic story that Adkin recounts here is broadly similar to Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1950s book The Reason Why, but much much less detailed on the background of Lords Lucan and Cardigan (after whose style of jacket the eponymous garment was named, the sartorial impact of the war went further as it also gave us the Balaclava, nor was the war's influence limited to fashion: it provided a young Lev Tolstoy with a literary success in his Sevastopol Sketches, innovations thanks to Florence Nightingale in the graphical presentation of data to tell a story and in war journalism).
The British Army from the end of the seventeenth century to deep into the nineteenth century ran an interesting experiment into the free market in that officers could purchase their rank. As a result of which Lucan and Cardigan ended up in charge of the entire cavalry and the Light Brigade respectively on this campaign despite having no combat experience.
There were officers with a wealth of combat experience, but they had served in India, and this was sufficient reason for anyone else to look down and sneer at them.
However Lucan and Cardigan successfully overcompensated for their lack of experience (although to be fair Cardigan had fought two duels) through the uniforms they designed for their own regiments (Cardigans' 11th Hussars were known as cherrybums on account of their bright red tight trousers), and also through their emphasis on discipline - over one six month period Cardigan held 54 court-marshals which is quite impressive considering that the typical strength of a cavalry regiment was only 600 men.
Lucan and Cardigan detested each other, with Lucan regularly infuriated by Cardigan's attempts to operate as an independent commander answering only to Lord Raglan who was in overall command of the British expeditionary force to the Crimea. In case this wasn't quite hopeless enough the then practise of keeping the cavalry sabre in a metal scabbard meant that their swords tended to rapidly become blunt, luckily the Russians were prone to the same practise.
The overall command of the expedition to the Crimea was placed in the hands of Lord Raglan. His last combat experience had been at the battle of Waterloo where he distinguished himself by the degree of stoicism he showed as his arm was sawn off. He was to die in the Crimea at the age of 66, I felt there was a touch of Beowulf in how his horse was led down in procession to the ship, painted black for the occasion, to bear him back to Britain for burial.
Woodham-Smith focused on the rivalry between Cardigan and Lucan. Adkin broadens out the story by looking with some sympathy at Raglan. Adkin stresses Raglan's gentlemanly tone of address, nicely exampled in the order which led to the charge of the Light Brigade: Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front-follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns-Troop Horse Artillery may accompany-French cavalry is on your left - Immediate.
This message was carried down to Lord Lucan by Captain Nolan. Lucan, confused asked Nolan which guns, Nolan gestured down a valley to a Russian position saying words to the effect of "there are your guns". Unfortunately it turned out those weren't the guns Raglan had in mind. Even if cavalry had been deployed against the guns Raglan, apparently, was worried about since they were in redoubts occupied by Russian infantry they would not have been vulnerable to cavalry attack.
Despite Raglan's failure to lay out a clear order specifying what he wanted, it is Nolan who attracts Adkin's fire. Adkin assumes that Nolan must have known Raglan's actual intentions and so, implicitly, Nolan misled Lucan. Adkin's argument is that some years previously, in conversation at Maidstone barracks where he was based, he had once sketched out a plan of attack by cavalry on an artillery battery. This is offered up as evidence that he was keen to try out the manoeuvre in practise.
The oddity to this argument to my mind is that had Nolan survived - as it happened he may have been the first to die in the charge of the Light Brigade -
deliberately misinterpreting an order would have surely put him at risk of being court-marshalled. One has to build a case that Nolan would have been prepared to deliberately misconstrue an order to a superior officer. Adkin doesn't demonstrate the forensic ability to do this or put beyond reasonable doubt that Nolan knew what Raglan wanted .
Perhaps the little I've read on leadership, project management, and Clausewitz has given me completely unreasonable expectations, but Raglan's inability to state clearly what he wanted continues to strike me as the core problem. Throughout the campaign Raglan had been eager to husband the few horsemen that he had, ordering the cavalry into an attack, and an immediate one at that, was curiously out of character for him.
Adkin is good on the business of the charge. He is keen to point out that it would have taken between seven and eight minutes for the Light Brigade to travel the length of the valley to reach the Russian position and to explain the difficulties for the Russian batteries in targeting the moving horsemen, it wasn't then in his view quite so suicidal a manoeuvre as one might think to gallop up a valley against an artillery battery passing en-route artillery positioned along the sides of the valley.
Still I don't find enough in Adkin's account to recommend it over the now venerable book by Cecil Woodham-Smith. Really if you are going to try as Adkin does and apportion blame then you need to be interrogating the sources, assessing their relative reliability and you certainly can't be seen to be making assumptions about what the participants 'must have' known. The problem maybe is Tennyson crystallising our unease over the story into words Someone had blunder'd tracing back in these books the threads of blunders there appears ultimately no end of them.
And purely because it is vaguely relevant here's a link to Tennyson reading his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade
So wrote Lord Cardigan the day after the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade, an infamous military action during the Crimean War of 1853-55 Of the 664 men took part in the charge, 110 were killed in action, 130 wounded, and 58 captured while 362 horses were killed or on account of their wounds shot later. All to no advantage on the battlefield or the war as a whole.
The basic story that Adkin recounts here is broadly similar to Cecil Woodham-Smith's 1950s book The Reason Why, but much much less detailed on the background of Lords Lucan and Cardigan (after whose style of jacket the eponymous garment was named, the sartorial impact of the war went further as it also gave us the Balaclava, nor was the war's influence limited to fashion: it provided a young Lev Tolstoy with a literary success in his Sevastopol Sketches, innovations thanks to Florence Nightingale in the graphical presentation of data to tell a story and in war journalism).
The British Army from the end of the seventeenth century to deep into the nineteenth century ran an interesting experiment into the free market in that officers could purchase their rank. As a result of which Lucan and Cardigan ended up in charge of the entire cavalry and the Light Brigade respectively on this campaign despite having no combat experience.
There were officers with a wealth of combat experience, but they had served in India, and this was sufficient reason for anyone else to look down and sneer at them.
However Lucan and Cardigan successfully overcompensated for their lack of experience (although to be fair Cardigan had fought two duels) through the uniforms they designed for their own regiments (Cardigans' 11th Hussars were known as cherrybums on account of their bright red tight trousers), and also through their emphasis on discipline - over one six month period Cardigan held 54 court-marshals which is quite impressive considering that the typical strength of a cavalry regiment was only 600 men.
Lucan and Cardigan detested each other, with Lucan regularly infuriated by Cardigan's attempts to operate as an independent commander answering only to Lord Raglan who was in overall command of the British expeditionary force to the Crimea. In case this wasn't quite hopeless enough the then practise of keeping the cavalry sabre in a metal scabbard meant that their swords tended to rapidly become blunt, luckily the Russians were prone to the same practise.
The overall command of the expedition to the Crimea was placed in the hands of Lord Raglan. His last combat experience had been at the battle of Waterloo where he distinguished himself by the degree of stoicism he showed as his arm was sawn off. He was to die in the Crimea at the age of 66, I felt there was a touch of Beowulf in how his horse was led down in procession to the ship, painted black for the occasion, to bear him back to Britain for burial.
Woodham-Smith focused on the rivalry between Cardigan and Lucan. Adkin broadens out the story by looking with some sympathy at Raglan. Adkin stresses Raglan's gentlemanly tone of address, nicely exampled in the order which led to the charge of the Light Brigade: Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front-follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns-Troop Horse Artillery may accompany-French cavalry is on your left - Immediate.
This message was carried down to Lord Lucan by Captain Nolan. Lucan, confused asked Nolan which guns, Nolan gestured down a valley to a Russian position saying words to the effect of "there are your guns". Unfortunately it turned out those weren't the guns Raglan had in mind. Even if cavalry had been deployed against the guns Raglan, apparently, was worried about since they were in redoubts occupied by Russian infantry they would not have been vulnerable to cavalry attack.
Despite Raglan's failure to lay out a clear order specifying what he wanted, it is Nolan who attracts Adkin's fire. Adkin assumes that Nolan must have known Raglan's actual intentions and so, implicitly, Nolan misled Lucan. Adkin's argument is that some years previously, in conversation at Maidstone barracks where he was based, he had once sketched out a plan of attack by cavalry on an artillery battery. This is offered up as evidence that he was keen to try out the manoeuvre in practise.
The oddity to this argument to my mind is that had Nolan survived - as it happened he may have been the first to die in the charge of the Light Brigade -
deliberately misinterpreting an order would have surely put him at risk of being court-marshalled. One has to build a case that Nolan would have been prepared to deliberately misconstrue an order to a superior officer. Adkin doesn't demonstrate the forensic ability to do this or put beyond reasonable doubt that Nolan knew what Raglan wanted .
Perhaps the little I've read on leadership, project management, and Clausewitz has given me completely unreasonable expectations, but Raglan's inability to state clearly what he wanted continues to strike me as the core problem. Throughout the campaign Raglan had been eager to husband the few horsemen that he had, ordering the cavalry into an attack, and an immediate one at that, was curiously out of character for him.
Adkin is good on the business of the charge. He is keen to point out that it would have taken between seven and eight minutes for the Light Brigade to travel the length of the valley to reach the Russian position and to explain the difficulties for the Russian batteries in targeting the moving horsemen, it wasn't then in his view quite so suicidal a manoeuvre as one might think to gallop up a valley against an artillery battery passing en-route artillery positioned along the sides of the valley.
Still I don't find enough in Adkin's account to recommend it over the now venerable book by Cecil Woodham-Smith. Really if you are going to try as Adkin does and apportion blame then you need to be interrogating the sources, assessing their relative reliability and you certainly can't be seen to be making assumptions about what the participants 'must have' known. The problem maybe is Tennyson crystallising our unease over the story into words Someone had blunder'd tracing back in these books the threads of blunders there appears ultimately no end of them.
And purely because it is vaguely relevant here's a link to Tennyson reading his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade
June 20, 2009
In this book, the author, Mark Adkin, has produced an excellent account of the Charge of the Light Brigade, which occurred on the 25th of October 1854 during the siege of Sebastopol. Utilising his in-depth research to provide answers to how, why and who, the narrative takes you along with the cavalrymen on their charge into the Russian gun positions. The book has a number of detailed drawings, maps, and photographs to assist you on this reckless advance into the mouth of the guns. The book is very readable and I think that the author attempts to answer the question `who' was to blame quite fairly and without malice. Overall a very good read for the student of military history or for anyone who just enjoys a good story.
April 27, 2013
Another account of the Charge of the Light Brigade by an ex-soldier/military historian. Adkin's to be commended on his detailed knowledge of firearms and artillery, which allows him to debunk some of the myths surrounding the Charge (eg., that the Light Brigade faced Russian fire from three fronts simultaneously). He's mostly good depicting the Charge itself, and ably sketches the four main protagonists. He's probably the most sympathetic author I've encountered towards Lord Lucan, viewing him as unfairly blamed for mistakes by Raglan and Cardigan. Where Adkin falters is blaming Captain Nolan for the Charge, claiming he deliberately misinterpreted Raglan's order and led the Light Brigade into the wrong valley to prove cavalry superiority. Talk about shooting the messenger! Put politely, it's hard to swallow this mendacious nonsense. Read Terry Brighton or Cecil Woodham-Smith instead.
April 15, 2021
A military history take on the Charge of the Light Brigade. Even those who normally don’t care for military history should find things of interest in this book. Now I finally know what a six pounder cannon is, and why, in the age of firearms, mid-19th century cavalry relied on the sabre and the lance.
Adkin’s quotes from survivors helps personalize his story. His detailed (perhaps over detailed) description makes the charge come alive for the reader.
The only problem with the Kindle edition is that you can’t make the maps large enough.
Adkin’s quotes from survivors helps personalize his story. His detailed (perhaps over detailed) description makes the charge come alive for the reader.
The only problem with the Kindle edition is that you can’t make the maps large enough.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews