Cossacks who had jeered at them at the Bulganak for refusing to fight. One of their officers had several times demanded of Lord Cardigan to send in the brigade, and, when Cardigan refused, slapped his saluting sword against his leg in a show of disrespect. There were signs of disobedience. Private John Doyle of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars recalled:
The Light Brigade were not well pleased when they saw the Heavy Brigade and were not let go to their assistance. They stood up in their stirrups, and shouted ‘Why are we kept here?’ and at the same moment broke up and dashed back through our lines, for the purpose of following the Russian retreat, but they had got too far for us to overtake them.26
So when Lucan asked Nolan what Raglan’s order meant, there was a threat of insubordination in the air. In the account he later gave in a letter to Raglan, Lucan asked the aide-de-camp where he should attack, and Nolan had replied ‘in a most disrespectful but significant manner’, pointing to the further end of the valley, ‘“There, my lord, is your enemy; there are your guns.”’ According to Lucan, Nolan had not pointed to the British guns on the Causeway Heights, but towards the battery of twelve Russian cannon and the main force of the Cossack cavalry at the far end of the North Valley, on either side of which, on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights, the Russians had more cannon as well as riflemen. Lucan took the order to Cardigan, who pointed out the lunacy of charging down a valley against artillery and musket fire on three sides, but Lucan insisted that the order be obeyed. Cardigan and Lucan (who were brothers-in law) detested each other. This is usually the explanation given by historians as to why they failed to consult and find a way to circumvent the order they believed they had been given by Raglan (it would not be the first time that Raglan’s orders had been disobeyed). But there is also evidence that Lucan was afraid to disobey an order that was in fact welcomed by the men of the Light Brigade, eager for action against the Russian cavalry and in danger of losing discipline if they were prevented from attacking them. Lucan himself later wrote to Raglan that he had obeyed the order because not to do so would have ‘exposed me and the cavalry to aspersions against which we might have difficulty in defending ourselves’ – by which he surely meant aspersions from his men and the rest of the army.27
The 661 men of the Light Brigade advanced at a walk down the gently sloping North Valley, the 13th Light Dragoons and 17th Lancers in the first line, led by Cardigan, the 11th Hussars immediately behind, followed by the 8th Hussars together with the 4th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons. It was 2,000 metres to the enemy’s position at the end of the valley, and at regulation speeds it would take the Light Brigade about seven minutes to cover the distance – artillery and musket fire to the right of them, to the left of them and in front of them, along the way. As the first line broke into a trot, Nolan, who was riding with the 17th Lancers, galloped forward, waving his sword and, according to most versions, shouting to the men to hurry them along, although it has also been suggested that he realized the mistake and was attempting to redirect the Light Brigade towards the Causeway Heights and perhaps beyond to the South Valley, where they would be safe from the Russian guns. Either way, the first shell fired by the Russians exploded over Nolan and killed him. Whether it was Nolan’s example, their own eagerness, or because they wanted to get through the flanking fire as fast as possible, remains unclear, but the two regiments at the head of the charge broke into a gallop long before they were ordered to. ‘Come on,’ shouted one man from the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘don’t let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us.’28
As they galloped through the crossfire from the hills, cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket fire raining in like hail, men were shot and horses fell. ‘The reports from the guns and the bursting of shells were deafening,’ recalled Sergeant Bond of the 11th Hussars.
The smoke too was almost blinding. Horses and men were falling in every direction, and the horses that were not hurt were so upset that we could not keep them in a straight line for a time. A man named Allread who was riding on my left fell from his horse like a stone. I looked back and saw the poor fellow lying on his back, his right temple being cut away and his brain partly on the ground.
Trooper Wightman of the 17th Lancers saw his sergeant hit: ‘He had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards further the headless body kept in the saddle, the lance at the charge, firmly gripped under the right arm.’ So many men and horses from the first line were shot down that the second line, 100 metres behind, had to swerve and slow down to avoid the wounded bodies on the ground and the bewildered, frightened horses that galloped without riders in every direction.29
Within a few minutes, those that remained of the first line were in among the Russian gunners at the end of the valley. Cardigan, whose horse flinched from the guns’ last salvo at close range, was said to be the first man through. ‘The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces,’ recalled Corporal Thomas Morley of the 17th Lancers, who compared it to ‘riding into the mouth of a volcano’. Cutting down the gunners with their swords, the Light Brigade charged on with their sabres drawn to attack the Cossacks, who were ordered forward by Ryzhov to protect the guns, which some of the attackers were attempting to wheel away. Without time to form themselves before they were attacked, the Cossacks were ‘thrown into a panic by the disciplined order of the mass of cavalry bearing down on them’, recalled a Russian officer. They turned sharply to escape and, seeing that their way was blocked by the hussar regiments, began to fire their muskets point-blank at their own comrades, who fell back in panic, turned and charged into the other regiments behind. The whole of the Russian cavalry began a stampede towards Chorgun, some dragging the mounted guns behind them, while the advance riders of the Light Brigade, outnumbered five to one, pursued them all the way to the Chernaia river.
The panic flight of the Russian cavalry was watched from the heights above the river by Stepan Kozhukov, a junior artillery officer, who described the cavalry amassing in the area around the bridge, where the Ukrainsky Regiment and Kozhukov’s battery on the hill had been ordered to block off their retreat:
Here they were stampeding and all the time the confusion was getting worse. In a small space at the entrance of the Chorgun Ravine, where the dressing station was, were four hussar and Cossack regiments all crammed together, and inside this mass, in isolated spots, one could make out the red tunics of the English, probably no less surprised than ourselves how unexpectedly this had happened … . The enemy soon came to the conclusion that they had nothing to fear from the panicstricken hussars and Cossacks and, tired of slashing, decided to return the way they had come through another cannonade of artillery and rifle fire. It is difficult, if not impossible, to do justice to the feat of these mad cavalry. Having lost at least a quarter of their number during the attack, and being apparently impervious to new dangers and losses, they quickly re-formed their squadrons to return over the same ground littered with their dead and dying. With desperate courage these valiant lunatics set off again, and not one of the living, even the wounded, surrendered. It took a long time for the hussars and Cossacks to collect themselves. They were convinced that the entire enemy cavalry were pursing them, and angrily did not want to believe that they had been crushed by a relatively insignificant handful of daredevils.
The Cossacks were the first to come to their senses, but they would not return to the battlefield. Instead they ‘set themselves to new tasks in hand – taking prisoners, killing the wounded as they lay on the ground, and rounding up the English horses to offer them for sale’.30
As the Light Brigade rode back through the corridor of fire in the North Valley, Liprandi ordered the Polish Lancers on the Causeway Heights to cut off their retreat. But the Lancers had little stomach for a fight with the courageous Light Brigade, which they had just seen charge through the Russian guns and disperse the Cossacks in a panic flight, and the few attacks they made were against small groups of wounded men. Larger groups they left alone. When the retreating column of the 8th Hussars and 4th Regiment of Light Dragoons neared the Lancers, recalled Lord George Paget, the commander of the Light Dragoons, who had rallied them together before the retreat, ‘down [the Lancers] came upon us at a sort of trot’.
Then the Lancers stopped (‘halted’ is hardly the word) and evinced that same air of bewilderment (I know of no other word) that I had twice before remarked on this day. A few of the men on the right flank of their leading squadrons … came into momentary collision with the right flank of our fellows, but beyond this they did nothing, and actually allowed us to shuffle, to edge away, by them, at a distance of hardly a horse’s length. Well, we got by them without, I believe, the loss of a single man. How, I know not! It is a mystery to me! Had that force been composed of English
In fact, the English ladies were on the Sapoune Heights with all the other spectators who watched the remnants of the Light Brigade stagger back in ones and twos, many of them wounded, from the charge. Among them was Fanny Duberly, who not only watched the scene in horror but later on that afternoon rode out with her
