New accounts emerge of Charge of the Light Brigade

[dipsydoodle]

Immortalised in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem about the “valley of death”, the Charge of the Light Brigade is remembered as one of the most glorious defeats in British history.

Now, 160 years on, a series of dramatic, new accounts from survivors of the doomed assault have shed new light on what was the country’s greatest ever military blunder and shows clearly where those involved thought blame should lie.

A new project has uncovered dozens of first-hand testimonies, written in the days after the attack, by those who made it out of the valley alive. The documents overturn much of the established wisdom of the battle and provide clues as to how the calamitous attack, during the Battle of Balaclava, in the Crimean War, came to be accidentally launched.

The charge saw the light cavalry mount an assault into a valley flanked, on three sides, by Russians. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to pursue and harry a separate, retreating Russian battery, but due to a breakdown in communications, the unit headed off on the near suicidal mission – attacked from all sides by artillery, infantry and cavalry. Of the 600 who set off, more than 100 were killed, with a similar number wounded.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10776275/New-accounts-emerge-of-Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade.html

[malthaussen]

1. I rely on Flashman's testimony.

If you can't trust Flashy, who can you trust?

-- Mal

[DavidDvorkin]

2. Although his central role in everything

makes me a bit suspicious of his veracity.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. The implication is that historians haven't examined these documents before

That's astonishing, if true.

[JayhawkSD]

4. Well, it's worse than that.

The writer begins by saying that "The documents overturn much of the established wisdom of the battle..."

He does not, however, describe anything that refutes existing historical description of the attack, and provides nothing to show what wisdom has been "overturned." What is the fact that was untrue, and what is the new fact that replaces it? He does not say. He merely cites soldiers saying that the order came and that they thought it was a mistake and followed it anyway, but we already knew that.

It never fails to amaze me that garbage writing like this gets published. Even The Telegraph should have editors, for heaven's sake.

[DavidDvorkin]

5. True.

[MisterP]

6. "Are you crazy?! Don't go between them!" "Go between them?! Are you crazy?!"

[struggle4progress]

7. I wonder what poem Tennyson might have written of the battle of the Somme --

or even its first day, with 20000 UK troops dead and perhaps twice as many wounded or missing

[Rhiannon12866]

8. K&R! Fascinating!

Thanks so much for posting this!