Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (27 page)

The Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade

As World War II in Europe entered its closing stages in 1945, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met in the town of Yalta, in the Crimea, to discuss the coming spoils. During a break in the talks Churchill asked Stalin if he might be allowed to visit a nearby battlefield. Stalin gave his permission and Churchill was taken to a valley near the harbor town of Balaclava on the Black Sea.

As recently as the previous year the area had been the scene of savage fighting, when the last of as many as 100,000 Soviet troops had died fighting uphill against heavily fortified German positions. The whole place was peppered with ordnance—both spent and unexploded. Between 1942 and 1944 something like 10 tons of high explosive were detonated for every square meter of ground there. Today the place is given over to vineyards that produce a good-quality sparkling white wine—and still the soil is thick with shell fragments, bullet cases and pulverized human bones.

It wasn’t the latest horror that interested Churchill, however. Instead he wanted to cast his historian’s eye over the site of a cavalry charge that had taken place over some of the same ground nearly a century before. Churchill was no stranger to the tactics of cavalrymen—as a 24-year-old he had taken part in the British Army’s last ever cavalry charge at a place called Omdurman, during the Sudan campaign of 1898—and believed he had conducted himself with all the sangfroid required of an Englishman. “I never felt the slightest nervousness,” young Winston told his mother afterward. “I felt as cool as I do now.”

With such experience under his belt, he wanted to look over terrain described by the poet Tennyson as “The Valley of Death.” For here near Balaclava were the scenes of two moments immortal in all the history of war—performed during the most famous few hours of chaos ever deliberately unleashed by fighting
men. Madness and heroism, futility and flair, quixotic dash and monumental stupidity—all of that and everything else besides was there, in the Thin Red Line and the Charge of the Light Brigade.

During the middle years of the 19th century, great European powers circled like vultures around the ailing Ottoman Empire. Left behind by the industrialization of Russia and the nations of the West, it had long since ceased to wield the power and influence of its glory days. Under the reign of Suleiman I, or Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66), its territory had stretched from Persia to Morocco and from the Austrian border to Yemen. But during the 18th century its control and influence had begun slowly and steadily to evaporate in the heat of industrial revolution elsewhere.

Already picking at the living flesh was Tsar Nicholas, who saw in the “sick man” an opportunity too tempting to resist. Russia’s southward expansion via the Bosphorus had always been blocked at Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul. By swallowing the right parts of the Ottoman Empire, he knew, his Black Sea Fleet could make its way through that narrow waterway, past the Dardanelles and out into the rich pickings of the Mediterranean. For as long as the old empire was in its weakened state, Europe’s back door was effectively open.

Britain and France had other ideas, however. The prospect of Russia making uncontested land-grabs on Europe’s eastern extreme—and then sending her ships south and west—was hardly one they relished. Subtle (some might say underhand) diplomacy by all parties eventually ran its course. The Russian Black Sea fleet surprised and destroyed the Turkish fleet at its base at Sinope and her troops were sent across the Danube. The time for talking had apparently passed, and Britain, France and Russia, together with their various allies, stumbled into what some historians have described as the first “world” war.

Of all the protagonists, Britain had the least business making war on a modern adversary. Since the final crushing of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, Britain had exercised her aggressive side only on tribal peoples in territories like India and southern Africa. The British Empire had begun to grow during this time—but as a by-product of trade. Not because Britain wanted to conquer, but out of a desire to harvest the riches of the wider world.

Fighting and conquest were really the least of it. As a result, in the years following the Napoleonic era Britain’s Army sank into the decline of neglect. In India the necessary fighting was conducted not by the British Army as such but by the privately maintained forces of the East India Company. In southern Africa, Britain’s adversaries came armed only with spears and shields. The British Army had a more clearly defined role as a police force than as a weapon for extending frontiers, and by the 1820s it numbered no more than 80,000 men. By the end of the 1840s the strength was up to 100,000, but when the need arose for a force capable of tackling Tsarist Russia, in 1854, it wasn’t just a question of numbers.

The six British divisions that boarded ships for transport to the Crimea—five of infantry and one of cavalry—were handicapped first and foremost by a lack of back-room organization. Since 1815 the whole infrastructure of the British Army had either been allowed to atrophy or been cut away altogether. Gone was the wagon train, the means of supplying an army fighting in far-off places. Gone too was the staff office, that part of the Army whose job it is to keep abreast of the whole nature of warfare—most crucially, what the other guys are doing. What was left of the organizational framework was hopelessly muddled. Control was spread across more than a dozen different government departments, whose various duties overlapped.

Just as bad was the perpetuation of the tradition that favored class over training and ability when it came to career advancement. The British Army of 1854 was one that still looked down its nose at the “intellectual” soldier who had bothered to study his craft and learn the lore of tactics and intelligent command. During the Napoleonic Wars, Sir John Moore and his ilk had begun the process of modernizing the Army to take account of ability, but during the peaceful years that followed Waterloo the momentum of change was lost. In the 1850s, therefore, rank was still something you bought and the upper classes knew, without having to think about it, that the ability to lead men to victory was a product of breeding, nothing more and nothing less.

To make matters worse, the Duke of Wellington, the Iron Duke who had destroyed Napoleon and freed Britain from decades of nightmare and fear of invasion—had been the antiquated system’s strongest supporter. He had died in 1852 but the shadow he cast over the Army was as persistent as it had been during his lifetime. The problem, of course, was that the Iron Duke had been one of the greatest military geniuses of his own or any other age. If there were deficiencies in the way the Army ran its affairs under his command, then it mattered not a jot. All the time he was in overall charge, his daring and vision had been enough to transcend any obstacle and disguise any shortcoming of the tools he used to get the jobs done.

But the Iron Duke was gone now, and the first question that had faced the government, as war with Russia loomed closer, was who to place in command of the British force. Europe had been at peace since 1815 and the Army’s senior figures had pursued their trade elsewhere, if at all. The commander-in-chief, Lord Hardinge, was nearly 70 and far too old for the job of leading an army in far-off, foreign climes. Several of the other tried and tested warhorses, veterans of India and elsewhere, were older still. In the end the top job went
to Lord Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan. Given his résumé, he had nearly been the obvious choice in any case.

At the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808, just five years after his father bought him a commission in a cavalry regiment at the age of 15, young Somerset was made aide-de-camp to one Arthur Wellesley. By the time Wellesley was created Duke of Wellington after his narrow but vital victory at the Battle of Talavera the following year, the pair were firm friends as well as colleagues. The relationship would remain close for the rest of the Duke’s life.

During the fighting at Waterloo, Raglan’s right elbow was shattered by a French musket ball. The arm had to be amputated below the shoulder—without anesthetic and with knife and saw—but he made not a sound until the surgeon tossed the severed limb into a basket.

“Hey, bring my arm back,” he said. “There’s a ring my wife gave me on the finger.”

The wife who had given him the ring was none other than the Iron Duke’s own niece, and Raglan was the Iron Duke’s man. He was 66 years old when Britain went to war with Russia—clearly getting on a bit himself—and was placed at the head of a set of divisional commanders that could hardly be said to inspire confidence.

Sir George de Lacy Evans, in charge of the 2nd Division, was the best of them. He was 67 years old, but a decorated soldier who had seen celebrated action in Spain, India and America. The Duke of Cambridge, the Queen’s own cousin, led the 1st Division. He was young—just 35 and one of only two of the divisional commanders aged under sixty at the start of the war—and had never taken battlefield command in his life. The 3rd Division was led by Sir Richard England, who up until that time had made no impact of note on the story of the British Army, and the 4th by
the unremarkable Sir George Cathcart. The 5th and last infantry division was commanded by Sir George Brown, whose reputation was primarily that of a vicious disciplinarian whose men feared rather than respected him.

The portents for disaster were most glaringly obvious in the Cavalry Division. Overall command was given to George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan. He had all the necessary pride and sense of grandeur required to carry off the role of commanding the Army’s mounted men—but little else. His birthright and wealth had enabled him to buy his way into the highest levels (he had once purchased the command of the 17th Lancers for the rumored sum of £25,000), but his active military experience was minimal. If the 54-year-old was known for anything at all, it was snobbish arrogance. Under his command, the 17th Lancers had become an over-dressed, over-disciplined and decidedly unhappy body of men. It did not bode well.

On the bright side, Brigadier General James Scarlett, a man respected and trusted by his men, commanded the Heavy Brigade. On the dark side, the Light Brigade had at its head a man even more comprehensively loathed than Lord Lucan. James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, was another strutting fop whose family name—and family money—had secured him a status he could never have obtained any other way. Though he was now in command of the Light Horse, he had no experience of leading men into battle. Rather more worrying than any of this, however, was the state of Cardigan’s personal relationship with his divisional commander. The two men were brothers-in-law but Lucan had split acrimoniously from his wife Anne, Cardigan’s sister. The separation had happened years before but Cardigan bore a seething grudge.

Weaknesses at the top of the pyramid of command hardly eased or improved the lot of the men at the bottom. In the middle years of the 19th century the enlisted men of the British Army were as
poorly regarded by their leaders as they had ever been. Life in the ranks still beckoned only to those who had nowhere else to go—the poor and the wretched, men routinely described as the dregs of humanity. They were brutally disciplined and poorly paid and yet in time of war they were the people depended upon by the very society that despised them. The Iron Duke himself once said: “I don’t know what they do to the enemy, but by God they frighten me!”

And yet for all the shortcomings and outright failings, these were the men—rich and poor, empowered and oppressed—of whom legends were about to be made. Immortality would be assigned to them not because of who or what they were, but because of what they were about to do.

A site on the Dardanelles peninsula was the base of operations originally proposed for the British, but an advance party concluded that the available site was poorly supplied with fresh water and, in any case, too far from the Black Sea. If you’re going to embark on a bit of good old-fashioned posturing, you want your opponent to be close enough to see you flexing your muscles. Scutari, across the Bosphorus from Istanbul, was chosen as the alternative.

It was here that the British forces came face to face for the first time with their French brothers-in-arms. Right away they saw that their allies were far better supplied with the accoutrements of war. In particular they noticed that the French medical supplies were wholly superior to anything on their own side.

Lord Raglan’s opposite number was the proud and ambitious Marshal Armand-Jacques Leroy de St. Arnaud, and almost at once the Frenchman sought to have himself placed in command of the Turkish forces as well as his own. Raglan demonstrated his talent for diplomacy by persuading St. Arnaud that all three armies should retain a degree of independence from one another, and it has to be said that despite their differences the French and British fighting
men at every level demonstrated a willingness to work together.