A Good Book

I've just finished Hell Riders: the True Story of the Charge of the Light Brigade by Terry Brighton. Published in 2004, it is one of those military histories in which the professional historian who penned it realized that unless you have a trapped audience of college history majors, nobody is going to read your book if you publish it as a steaming mound of progressive/revisionist manure.

Brighton Tells the story of the disastrously magnificent cavalry action at the battle of Balaklava in 1854 by combining historical narrative with a critical analysis of every bit of written information by the survivors which he could lay hands on. After telling the complete story of the Light Brigade's involvement in the Crimean War, he devotes chapters to continuing questions such as "Who did goof up, anyway?"; "Could the charge be considered a success?" and "What was Florence Nightingale's real role in the Crimean War?"

Brighton does an excellent job of determining how the disastrous charge was ordered and which officers were responsible and to what degree. His conclusion, which is somewhat surprising, is that the British War Department got it exactly right when they ordered the overall cavalry commander (Lord Lucan, in charge of a division comprising the Heavy and Light Brigades) relieved of command.

Regarding the Charge itself, his conclusion, which is very surprising, is that the light cavalry did an outstanding job. By all rights, the five regiments making up the Light Brigade should have been wholly annihilated or forced to surrender. Despite heavy losses, they not only rode down and back under frontal, rear and enfilading fire, but broke an artillery battery and an enemy cavalry force at least four times their own strength. The Russians were left astounded not merely at the daring of the British horse soldiers, but at the fact that though badly chewed up, they refused to be defeated.

It was still a disaster, of course, and a horrid blunder. Although the Light Brigade bested the Russians whom they faced, the enemy horse and artillery remained intact, and the English force became combat ineffective for the remainder of the campaign. Further, no tactical gain resulted from the assault aside from a field littered with English and Russian corpses: sons, husbands, and fathers.

One wonders, however, what the esprit of the British Army would be today were it not for the tradition of courage under fire established and perpetuated by such outfits as the Eighth and Eleventh Hussars, the Fourth and Thirteenth Light Dragoons, and the Seventeenth Lancers? The attack they made, ill-conceived though it was, was the sort of thing of which national identities are made and preserved.