Today in History: The Battle of Balaclava (The Charge of the Light Brigade), 1854 (Ukraine)
With Balaclava now safe, Lord Fitzroy Somerset Raglan, the British commander-in-chief in Crimea, turned his attention back to the Causeway Heights, where he believed the Russians were attempting to make off with some of his artillery guns. He ordered the cavalry, consisting of both the Heavy and Light brigades, to advance with infantry support “and take advantage of any opportunity to recover” the lost ground. Lord Raglan expected the cavalrymen to move immediately, with the infantry to come later. But George Bingham, the earl of Lucan, who commanded the cavalry, thought he wanted them to attack together. As a result, Lucan’s men sat around for 45 minutes waiting for the infantry to arrive. At that point, Raglan issued a new order, telling the cavalry to “advance rapidly to the front … and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns.” From his vantage point, however, Lucan could not see any guns being removed. Confused, he asked Raglan’s aide-de-camp where to attack, but instead of pointing to the Causeway Heights, the aide allegedly waved his arm in the direction of a Russian artillery battery at the far end of an exposed valley.
Lucan next approached his brother-in-law James Brudenell, the earl of Cardigan, who commanded the Light Brigade. The two men loathed each other so much they were barely on speaking terms. And neither was apparently respected by the troops. One officer in the Light Brigade went so far as to call them both “fools.” Cardigan, he wrote in a letter home, “has as much brains as my boot. He is only equaled in want of intellect by his relation the earl of Lucan.” Though perturbed by Raglan’s order, Lucan and Cardigan obeyed it without first checking back in to make sure they understood it correctly. At their bidding, the roughly 670 members of the Light Brigade drew their sabres and lances and began their infamous mile-and-a-quarter-long charge with Russians shooting at them from three directions (though never from all three at once). The first man to fall was Raglan’s aide-de-camp. Another soldier then had “his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about 30 yards further the headless body kept in the saddle,” according to a survivor. Other survivors spoke of being splattered with horse blood, of watching their companions lose limbs, of seeing brains on the ground and of going through smoke so thick it was like “riding into the mouth of a volcano.”
The Heavy Brigade, which, its name notwithstanding, resembled the Light Brigade except with regard to uniform color, was supposed to follow in support but only went a short way down the valley before Lucan directed it to turn back. Somehow, the Light Brigade reached its destination anyway, crashing into the enemy lines with a vengeance. A few Russians even shot at their own comrades in a desperate bid to clear an escape route. The Light Brigade’s members didn’t hold the ground for long, though, before being forced to stagger back from whence they came. En route, Russian artillery pounded away again from the Causeway Heights—but not from the other two sides, as the Light Brigade had taken out one battery itself and the French had taken out another—while Russian cavalrymen attempted to entrap them. In the end, of the roughly 670 Light Brigade soldiers, about 110 were killed and 160 were wounded, a 40 percent casualty rate. They also lost approximately 375 horses.
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