The Wrong Valley: Twenty Minutes at Balaclava

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On one morning the British cavalry astonished everyone twice on the same plain: first a thin red line halted the Russian horse, then the Heavy Brigade charged uphill and won. That afternoon, four lines on a piece of paper drove six hundred and seventy riders at a gallop into the mouths of the guns. The man who wrote the order, the man who carried it, and the man who obeyed it each insisted to the end of his life that the guilty party was someone else.

On the northern shore of the Black Sea, at the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula, there is a narrow inlet that looks as if it had been cut into the rock with a knife. Its mouth is so tight that anyone passing by from the sea would barely notice it; but once you are inside, the water suddenly deepens, steep slopes rise on either hand, and the wind drops away. In the autumn of 1854 the name of this inlet began to be spoken in the same breath as the fate of the British army: Balaclava.

The war had not in fact begun here. The conflict that broke out in 1853 between Russia and the Ottoman Empire was still being fought along the Danube and in the Caucasus when the Russian navy destroyed the Ottoman squadron at Sinop and upset the balance of Europe. In the spring of 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia. After long argument, the allied staffs settled on a single objective: Sevastopol. If the great naval base that sheltered Russia's Black Sea fleet could be taken, that fleet would never come south again.

In September the allied armies landed on the western coast of the Crimea, broke the Russian positions on the river Alma, and swung round to the south of Sevastopol. But instead of taking the city by assault they decided to besiege it, and that decision turned a campaign everyone expected to last a few weeks into something close to a year of trench warfare. A besieging army also needs a harbour. The French took the inlets to the west; Balaclava fell to the British.

Balaclava was small. This inlet, where only a handful of ships could tie up at any one time, had to carry the bread, the powder, the tents, the medicine, and the nosebags of more than 30 thousand men. The road from the harbour up to the siege lines climbed in curves between the hills. The entire British army was fed through a single artery, and that artery ran through here. The Russians knew it.

Understanding the ground that stretches inland to the north of the harbour is the key to understanding everything I am about to describe. Picture a flat plain with a low, long ridge running across the middle of it from east to west. A cart track called the Woronzoff Road runs along the top of that ridge; the British named the ridge itself the Causeway Heights. The Causeway Heights cut the plain in two. The hollow ground to the south is the South Valley, and it looks down towards the harbour. The long corridor to the north is the North Valley. On the far side of the North Valley, this time from the north, rise the Fedyukhin Heights. So the North Valley is a corridor squeezed between two walls: the Causeway Heights on the right, the Fedyukhin Heights on the left. Keep that corridor in mind.

Six earth redoubts had been dug along the Causeway Heights to protect the road to the harbour. Their defence was given to Ottoman soldiers. The easternmost, Number 1, the one nearest the enemy, stood on a rise the British called Canrobert's Hill after the French commander, and it held a garrison of about 600 men, among them Tunisian troops. The other three redoubts held 300 apiece. As for guns, there were nine 12-pounders landed from the British fleet: three in Number 1, two in each of the others. A single British artillery sergeant who knew how to work the guns had been left with each detachment. That was all. The most critical line on the plain was held by light earthworks and a few old guns.

The morning of 25 October 1854 was misty and cold. The Russian commander Pavel Liprandi, with a force of roughly 25 thousand men and 78 guns, had advanced in darkness and was drawn up in front of the redoubts as day broke. Towards 6 o'clock the guns in Number 1 opened fire. The Battle of Balaclava had begun.

The Russian artillery bore down on the redoubt. Under heavy round shot the earth parapets turned into clouds of dust. The men inside held on for nearly an hour and a half, which was longer than anyone had expected of them, since they had neither adequate guns nor a line to fall back on. Towards half past seven the Russian infantry came into the works with the bayonet. About 170 of the garrison were killed; the rest went over the back wall and ran down into the South Valley, towards the harbour. Cossack horsemen followed after them.

Once Number 1 had fallen, the others could not be held. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 were abandoned in turn. As the men withdrew they tried to hammer spikes into the touch holes of the guns, but the Russians still carried off seven pieces as trophies and took them to Sevastopol. This was a far more important detail than it looks; in that age, for an army to lose its guns to the enemy was very nearly the same disgrace as losing its colours. For a reader with a newspaper in London, the phrase losing guns carried exactly the weight it carried for an officer at the front.

At half past eight the situation was this. The Causeway Heights were in Russian hands. The Woronzoff Road was cut. There was no defensive line in the middle of the plain. And between the harbour of Balaclava and the Russian cavalry there stood nothing but a few hundred metres of open ground and a single regiment.

That regiment was the 93rd Highlanders, under the command of Sir Colin Campbell. Campbell was 62, not an aristocrat, a soldier who had earned his promotions slowly and on battlefields. His regiment was posted on a low hummock a little beyond the small settlement of Kadikoi, in front of the harbour. He had under his hand some 550 Highlanders, about a hundred lightly wounded men who had joined them, a few dozen guardsmen, and a portion of the Ottoman soldiers who had come back from the redoubts.

About 400 horsemen detached themselves from the Russian cavalry, crossed the Causeway Heights, came down into the South Valley and made straight for the harbour. What infantry were supposed to do in the face of a cavalry charge was written plainly in the drill books of the day: form square. Closed in on itself in four ranks, infantry became a kind of thorn wall that horses would not ride into. Campbell did not form square. He left his regiment in two ranks, as a long thin line. The reason was simple: in square his frontage would shrink, with a shorter frontage his firepower would drop, and with less firepower the road to the harbour behind him would be open. He took the risk.

The words he spoke to his men as he rode along the line became one of the most often repeated sentences in British military memory: there was no retreat from here, they would die where they stood.

The Russian horsemen came on at a trot. The first volley was fired at long range and did little. The second came at closer range; horses stumbled, the line broke up. At that very moment a part of the Highlanders made as if to spring forward and chase the enemy. What Campbell shouted at them also went into the record: 93rd, damn all that eagerness. The men stayed where they were, fired a third volley, and the Russian cavalry turned aside and withdrew. The whole thing took a few minutes.

There was a civilian watching those few minutes from the slope of the Sapoune Ridge, from a point that commanded the entire battlefield: William Howard Russell, correspondent of the London newspaper The Times. Russell was one of the first war correspondents in the modern sense, and he wrote what he saw independently of the army's official dispatches. Describing the sight of that morning, he spoke of a thin red streak topped with a line of steel. Over the years the phrase shortened into the thin red line, and it is still used today for a minority holding its ground before a more numerous enemy.

But the real cavalry achievement of the day had not yet come. The main body of the Russian cavalry, some 3 thousand horsemen, began to cross the Causeway Heights and descend into the South Valley. Just at that moment the British Heavy Brigade was on the march at the foot of the ridge. The Heavy Brigade was made up of cavalry on big horses, in breastplates or heavy uniforms, trained for the work of breaking and crushing. Its commander, Major General James Scarlett, was 55 and had never been in a battle in his life.

When Scarlett saw the mass coming down at him he did what very few commanders would have done. He did not fall back and he did not try to take up a position. He gave his men the order to turn right, waited for them to dress their ranks, and charged uphill. At that first moment he had only about 300 horsemen with him. In a cavalry charge the advantage lies almost always in speed and in the slope; Scarlett had neither. He drove into the Russian mass all the same.

There followed a struggle of eight or ten minutes. It was a crowd on horseback, sabres locked together, horses screaming, nobody able to see where anyone else was. When the British squadrons coming up behind struck the mass in the flank, the Russian line came apart and the cavalry pulled back to the north of the Causeway Heights. British losses were 10 dead and 98 wounded. It was the best planned, coolest and least talked about piece of soldiering of that day.

While all this was happening, about a kilometre to the north-west of the Heavy Brigade, the Light Brigade stood without moving. As the Russian cavalry broke up and withdrew, these five fresh, rested regiments on their flank were ideally placed to pursue them; pursuit was precisely what light cavalry existed for. Their commander, Lord Cardigan, did not stir from his place. He said he had been ordered to hold his position. Discontented murmurs went round among his officers. And for one staff officer watching it all from headquarters, the sight was more than he could bear.

It was coming up to 10 o'clock. The Russians were sitting on the Causeway Heights, hooking up the captured guns and preparing to draw them off.

The commander in chief, Lord Raglan, stood on the crest of the Sapoune Ridge, some 200 metres above the floor of the valley. He was 66, he had lost his right arm at Waterloo, and in his youth he had served as Wellington's aide de camp; so much so that throughout this war he was said now and then to refer absent-mindedly to the enemy as the French, although the French were now his allies.

From where Raglan stood the battlefield looked like a table. He could see the movement along the Causeway Heights, the Russians in the redoubts making ready to remove the guns, both valleys at once. Down below, on the flat, the commander of the Cavalry Division, Lord Lucan, could not see behind the ridge. A commander who cannot see what lies beyond a low hill and a commander looking down on the top of that hill from above do not understand the same thing when they read the same order. The whole tragedy of that morning is hidden in that one sentence.

Raglan first sent an order: the cavalry was to advance when infantry support arrived and retake the redoubts. The infantry divisions were marching up from kilometres behind, and they were late. Raglan looked down, watched the Russians putting ropes on the guns, and saw the minutes running away. He had his chief of staff, Brigadier General Richard Airey, write out another order in pencil, resting it on his knee. It was four lines.

The order said this: Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, to 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.

There is not a single place name in that text. It does not say which enemy, which guns, which direction. Raglan had no need of any of it, because he was looking at the guns; he meant the British naval guns being dragged away from the redoubts on the Causeway Heights. The man the paper was going to could not see them.

The task of carrying the order was given to Captain Louis Edward Nolan. Nolan was a cavalry officer of the 15th Hussars who had grown up in India and had written two books on cavalry tactics. He believed passionately that cavalry, properly used, could win a battle; and he took the way the British cavalry had been constantly held back in the Crimean campaign as something close to a personal insult. He did not trouble to hide his opinions of Lucan and Cardigan. He came down the slope by a steep path, almost sliding his horse down it.

Lucan took the order, read it, and looked at the ground in front of him. Before him lay the North Valley: an open corridor two kilometres long, a Russian battery at the end of it, Russian positions on either side. It was the worst piece of ground imaginable for cavalry. He asked which guns were meant.

Nolan's answer, together with the sweep of his arm, went into history. He flung out his arm in a wide arc and said that there was the enemy, and there were the guns. To this day nobody knows exactly what his arm was pointing at. The direction he indicated was the far end of the North Valley. But perhaps he meant the redoubts along the ridge, and the arm he threw out in anger was misread.

Lucan did not object. The paper said immediate, and the order came from the commander in chief. He rode over to the head of the Light Brigade and passed the order to Cardigan.

That these two men had to speak to each other at all is a matter in itself. Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan were brothers in law; Cardigan's sister was Lucan's wife. The marriage had gone badly, the family tie had turned into enmity, and for years the two men had barely spoken. Now one was a division commander and the other a brigade commander under him, and in the middle of a battle they addressed one another with formal coldness.

Cardigan was 57, a man who had spent much of his fortune on his regiment's uniforms and who was known for his notion of discipline. He listened to the order and saluted in the saddle. Then he spoke, saying that with permission he wished to point something out to his brother in law: there was a battery at the foot of the valley, and on the hills on either side there were riflemen and guns.

Lucan knew it. His reply passed on the weight of the sentence on the paper exactly as it stood: there was no choice, the order came from Lord Raglan.

Cardigan muttered something to himself and turned his horse. He rode to the front of the brigade, drew his sword, and signalled to the trumpeter.

It was about 11:10. The Light Brigade numbered 673 horsemen in five regiments: the 17th Lancers, the 13th Light Dragoons, the 11th Hussars, the 4th Light Dragoons and the 8th Hussars. The lancers and light dragoons were in the first line, with a second and a third line behind them. Cardigan rode ahead of his regiments, alone, two horse lengths in front; he wore the dark blue, gold laced uniform of the 11th Hussars, and the whole brigade had his back in view.

The brigade set off at a trot. At the entrance to the valley everything still looked like a parade: the ranks even, the intervals measured, the hoofbeats falling into a single rhythm.

About 200 metres on, a horseman broke out from the right of the line. It was Nolan. Having delivered the order, he had attached himself to the 17th Lancers to ride in the charge alongside his old comrades. Now he was cutting across in front of the brigade, in front of Cardigan, his sword raised, shouting something and pointing to the right. Cardigan took it for insolence, an attempt to force the pace, and was furious. Nobody could hear what Nolan was saying, because at that instant the first Russian shell from the right burst near him. A fragment tore his chest open. His sword stayed up in his hand, his body stayed bolt upright in the saddle, and the horse carried its dead rider back through the advancing line and away. The first casualty of the charge was the man who had brought the order that launched it. Whatever he had been trying to point out was buried with him.

What followed lasted 20 minutes.

On the right were the Causeway Heights, with the redoubts along them in Russian hands, and fire came in from that flank. On the left were the Fedyukhin Heights, where Russian guns and riflemen could take comfortable aim at a target inside the corridor. Ahead, at the foot of the valley, were 8 guns under Prince Obolensky, served by a detachment of 200 artillerymen. The fire coming from three directions was like three walls closing in on a moving box.

The first round shot tore gaps in the lines. The most basic reflex of cavalry training took over: close the gap, close up, keep the dressing. Men edged inwards to fill the places of the comrades who had fallen, the line narrowed, straightened again, and kept going. The trot became a gallop. Cardigan rode on without altering his distance in front; as he would later say, he never looked behind him.

When they reached the end of the valley the Russian battery fired its last salvo from very close range, from perhaps 50 metres. A curtain of smoke shut out everything at once. The riders of the first line went into the smoke and in among the guns. What happened there was no longer a charge but a struggle around the gun carriages, between the wheels, with sabres and artillery handspikes. Some of the Russian gunners left their pieces and ran; some fought where they stood.

But behind the battery the main body of the Russian cavalry was waiting. The British horsemen who had reached the foot of the valley were now scattered, exhausted, a few hundred at most, and there was no longer any such thing as a brigade. What was left of the 17th Lancers and the 11th Hussars pressed on a little further, pushed back the mass of cavalry in front of them, and then, as the danger of being surrounded appeared, had to turn back in small groups.

The way back was worse than the way in. They would come back down the same corridor, this time in disorder, their horses wounded, some of them on foot, and the guns on both sides were still there.

What silenced the fire on the left was an intervention that was no part of any plan. The 4th Chasseurs d'Afrique, the French African light horse, under General d'Allonville, made a flank attack on the Fedyukhin Heights. This unit, seasoned in the fighting in Algeria, drove two half batteries and two infantry battalions off their positions on the slope. That quieted the left wall of the North Valley for a few critical minutes and opened a corridor through which the returning British cavalry could pass. It was this that saved a substantial part of the Light Brigade's survivors.

The French marshal Pierre Bosquet watched all of it from a height alongside. The sentence he spoke became almost the second name of this charge: it was magnificent, but it was not war. The rarely quoted continuation was harder still: it was madness.

Those who came back took the flanking fire from the Causeway Heights once more. Some of the wounded scattered across the valley floor were hunted by Cossack horsemen; some were carried out by comrades who took them up behind their saddles. Men who had lost their horses walked the two kilometres back.

Cardigan had reached the battery, had been briefly engaged, and had ridden back alone. He did not gather his men and did not try to find out what had happened behind him. He left the battlefield and returned to his yacht in the harbour.

When the trumpet sounded to assemble, out of a brigade that had set off with 673 horsemen, 195 were able to form up still mounted. Close to 110 men had been killed, about 130 were wounded, and some had been taken prisoner wounded. 375 horses had been lost. Not a gun had been captured; the battery at the foot of the valley was back in Russian hands within minutes. The Causeway Heights were not retaken that day either.

20 minutes. About as long as it takes a man to drink a cup of coffee.

The second battle, the one that began after the fighting, lasted far longer than the first, and nobody died in it; only reputations died.

In his official dispatch reporting the affair to London, Lord Raglan laid the responsibility squarely on Lucan: he wrote that what had been done did not correspond to what the order said, and that the division commander had grossly misinterpreted it. The dispatch was published in the official gazette in London, which meant that Lucan read the document accusing him at the same moment as the public did. He wrote a defence, exchanged further letters, and in March 1855 he was relieved of his command and recalled to England. On 2 March 1855 he rose in the House of Lords and defended himself; he read out the text of the order he had been given and explained that no other conclusion could be drawn from it. His career did not end that day; he went on being promoted over the years and rose in the end to the rank of field marshal. But his name never got free of those 20 minutes.

Lord Cardigan, for his part, went home to England a hero. Crowds greeted him, he was made inspector general of cavalry, and he gave speeches describing the charge. Years later, in a book by an officer who had been in the battle, it was alleged that Cardigan had never in fact reached the Russian guns and had abandoned his men early. Cardigan took the matter to court in 1863. The case did not end in the clear vindication he had expected, and the argument over the accusation continued after his death.

The easiest man to blame was Nolan, because Nolan was dead. A dead officer can answer none of the claims made against him. We will never know what his arm was pointing at, what the last sentence out of his mouth was, or whether, when he rode out in front in the middle of the charge, he was trying to hurry the brigade along or shouting that it was going the wrong way and trying to correct it. The story that blamed him settled comfortably into precisely that empty space.

The same mechanism worked on another group of men that morning. In the British press and in memoirs, the Ottoman soldiers who had defended the redoubts on the Causeway Heights were quickly reduced to the cliché of the Turks who ran away; they became the cheap and convenient culprits of the story. And yet the documents of that same story also recorded how long the foremost redoubt had held out under Russian artillery and how much of its garrison it had lost; it was simply that nobody wanted to read that part. Historians working on the battle corrected the picture over the course of the twentieth century, but correcting a cliché takes much longer than creating one.

The turning of the story into poetry happened very fast. Russell's detailed report from the Crimea appeared in The Times in the middle of November; to read of a disaster on the battlefield not from the government's mouth but from the pen of a journalist who had watched it was a new experience for the British public. One of those who read that report was Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate of the day. On 2 December 1854 he wrote a poem in a few minutes, and on 9 December it was published in the weekly paper The Examiner. Its title was The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The poem did not debate the causes of the affair. It said that an order had been given, that someone had blundered, but that the soldier's business was not to question but to do and to die; and then it gave the corridor they rode down a name: the valley of Death. The following year, on the initiative of a clergyman, thousands of copies of the poem were printed and distributed to the soldiers in the Crimea. Within a few months a defeat had turned into a text people learned by heart.

That transformation had its price. The poem made the event unforgettable, but it also covered over the real question the event raised. The real question was not courage; nobody doubted anyone's courage. The real question was this: how do you write, in four lines, an order describing ground you cannot see as though the man receiving it saw what you see? Should a commander tell his subordinate what to do, or what he is trying to achieve? This is why Balaclava is still taught in modern staff training; every one of those rules that look ordinary today, that intent should be stated plainly in orders, that the objective should be named, that the vantage point of the recipient should be taken into account, was written out of the bill for mornings like this one.

One other strange legacy remained. Three words from that war outlived the men they came from. The knitted headgear sent from home in the freezing Crimean winter, leaving openings only for the eyes and mouth, was given the name of the harbour: balaclava. The sleeve cut from the shoulder down to the neckline so that Raglan's single arm would be comfortable entered the vocabulary of tailoring as the raglan sleeve. And the knitted jacket buttoned down the front, worn in Cardigan's regiment, took his name; today millions of people wear a cardigan knowing nothing whatever about that morning.

The survivors met every 25 October for many years; in 1877 a society was founded for these gatherings, and at the annual dinners the tables emptied a little more each year. One of the last to go was Edwin Hughes, who had ridden in the charge as a private in the 13th Light Dragoons and who had been left in the valley with his leg pinned when his horse was killed under him. In the town where he lived they called him Balaclava Ned. He died on 18 May 1927, 72 years after the charge. With him went the last human being who had seen that valley with his own eyes; and there remained only the lines everyone had memorised, and a question nobody has ever quite been able to answer.

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