Path of the Tiger

their left and right opened fire, and the sound was unlike anything William had ever heard. He had experienced the aural tempest of battle before, from a distance of course, and had been in the thick of mass musket fire during training, but none of that compared to the cataclysmic eruption that enveloped William as the Light Brigade advanced across the valley floor into the mouth of hell itself. To the front, left and right the Russian forces were amassed, their infantry stuffing, loading and aiming their thousands of firearms in utter disbelief at the forest of unmissable targets of horses and men, targets who were coming at them in an apparently suicidal manoeuvre across open ground – ground that was the very intersection of the Russians’ combined and focused fire.

‘Steady on boys!’ one of the captains shouted. ‘Steady on now!’

Every fibre of William’s being urged him to run, to escape, to wheel River King around and flee from the cataclysmic hurricane of cannons and muskets on all sides – yet he gritted his teeth through the feverish washes of terror and panic and held firm.

‘Hold this pace!’ Lord Cardigan bellowed from the front. ‘Hold this pace, all of you, hold it until I give the command to charge!’

A musket ball whizzed past William’s face, missing him by inches, and a cannonball rocketed into the ground just to his left, sending up a brown plume of sod and earth and grass that drenched him and River King. The stallion reared up in fear beneath him, but William was able to comfort and steady the frightened animal and prevent him from bolting.

‘Hold steady boy, hold steady!’ he heard his voice murmur, seeming almost as if it were that of a stranger, filtered through a sudden and shrill ringing in his ears, planted there after the cataclysmic boom of the cannonball.

Another barrage of firing exploded directly from in front of the Light Brigade, and a fresh hail of fiery lead whizzed past William. This time, however, he heard the projectiles thumping into bodies around him; the Russians had now found and dialled in their range. From just behind William came the blood-curdling cry of a dying man, ripping through the crashing of the guns. The immediacy and horrendous timbre of the man’s cry penetrated William’s brain with the same malevolent force of the shards of shrapnel that were shrieking through the air.

Through the unfolding Armageddon, a musket ball smashed into the top of William’s hat, tearing it off his head. With this sudden brush with death, something was ignited with the anarchic gluttony of a petrol fire inside William’s core; the battle-fury, of which he had heard so much yet never experienced, now came upon him. Adrenalin mixed with a beastly rage coursed through his veins, driving out fear and replacing it with a heady bravado that pulsed its giddying madness through his entire body, from his head to his toes. Through the red murk that now clouded his vision he heard himself roar, as if in the alternate dimension of a dream or a throttling nightmare, and he raised his lance up high above his head.

‘You bastards!’ he howled madly at the mass of steadily firing Russian troops ahead of him. ‘You fucking bastards!’

A darkness came over him then; not a creeping, cloying, suffocating darkness, but a vengeful electrical surge of vicious lightning that blistered the insides of his veins and boiled his innards with a murderous wrath. Orders and formation and obedience were stripped bare, flogged and flayed, and overpowering these was a deep and ancient insanity that blitzed madly through William’s very core. He gritted his teeth, growling with primal aggression, and lowered his lance. He aimed it at the centre of the Russian horde, the mass of troops who were now around half a mile across the valley – and then he spurred River King into a wild gallop.

‘William! What in all blazes are you doing?!’ he heard Captain Liversage shout behind him, but the sound came through only half-heard, filtered through the clumps of muddy sod churning beneath River King’s furiously drumming hooves and the raging aural gale of cannon and musket fire.

‘Trooper! Get back into formation, damn you!’ Lord Cardigan howled as William galloped out alone, ahead of the entire brigade, in a wild and suicidal charge at the fire-vomiting enemy mass.

Cardigan’s orders fell on deaf ears, and indeed were quickly crushed beneath the aural insanity of the Russian assault. William’s lone burst ahead was the single domino that collapsed the entire tower of order. With men and horses dropping and tumbling to the ground in swathes beneath the ceaseless Russian cannon and musket fire, a flash-flood of madness tore through the ranks of the Light Brigade. All through the brigade, men began to roar and howl and charge in wild bursts, breaking formation and tearing off toward the Russian forces.

Cardigan realised that there was no holding back the tide of battle-frenzied men now. With the magma of courage and bloodlust enveloping him in its deadly heat, he raised his sabre to the blackened sky, kicked his horse into a gallop and cried out in as loud a bellow as his lungs could expel, ‘Light Brigade, CHAAARRGGE!’

Ahead of them all, charging across the shell-torn earth like a knight of old, William stormed alone towards the tightly packed mass of Russian artillery, his lance aimed at their core, its pennant rippling wildly from the speed with which he was tearing through the sulphur-thick air. A billowing pallor of smoke from the cannons and muskets hung over the field ahead of them, and just as he and River King passed somehow unscathed through one more murderous volley of shot, they plunged into the thick of the dense grey gloom.

It was as if William had crashed through the crust of the earth and descended into hell itself. The acrid smoke that obscured his vision stank of sulphur and fire, and Russian soldiers, screaming and bellowing in their alien tongue,