On the cold, misty morning of 25 October 1854, Russian columns rolled out of the hills above the little Crimean port of Balaclava, aiming to sever the lifeline of the Allied armies besieging Sevastopol. Within a few hours the ground north of the harbour would witness three episodes that passed straight into legend, one of them among the most famous and most futile cavalry charges in all of military history.
A supply base worth a battle
Balaclava was more than a fishing village; it was the small harbour through which the British army fed its siege of the great Russian naval fortress of Sevastopol. Every shell, biscuit and blanket for the troops on the heights came through its narrow inlet, so its loss would have been catastrophic. The Russian commander, General Pavel Liprandi, understood this perfectly, and at dawn he threw a large force against the thinly held outer defences. His men quickly overran a line of redoubts on the Causeway Heights that were garrisoned by Ottoman troops, capturing several British naval guns and opening a path toward the port. Only a scattering of Allied units stood between the advancing Russians and the vulnerable base, and the day would turn on how those units, British, French and Ottoman, could improvise a defence.
The Thin Red Line
As Russian cavalry surged toward the port, the last obstacle in their way was the 93rd Highlanders under the veteran Sir Colin Campbell. Convention held that infantry should form a dense square to survive a mounted charge, but Campbell had too few men, only around five hundred, and instead drew them up in a line just two ranks deep. He is said to have told them there would be no retreat, that they must die where they stood. The Highlanders held their fire until the horsemen were close, then loosed disciplined volleys that turned the Russian squadrons away. Watching from a nearby ridge, the Times correspondent William Howard Russell described a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel, a phrase that soon hardened into the enduring image of the Thin Red Line.
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade
Almost at the same time, a far larger mass of Russian cavalry advanced across the valley and met the British Heavy Brigade led by Brigadier General James Scarlett. Outnumbered and charging uphill from a near standstill, the heavy dragoons and Scots Greys smashed into the dense Russian ranks and, after a furious swirling melee, broke them and drove them back in confusion. It was a genuine feat of arms, disciplined, effective and comparatively cheap in lives, exactly the kind of success that cavalry was meant to achieve. Yet it would be almost forgotten within the hour, overshadowed by the catastrophe that followed on the very same field.
Into the valley of Death
Wanting to stop the Russians from hauling away the captured guns, Lord Raglan sent an order to his cavalry. Carried down by the impetuous Captain Nolan and read by Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, the message was fatally vague, and the commanders could not see the guns Raglan meant. Instead the Light Brigade, an estimated six hundred and seventy horsemen, was launched straight down a long valley toward Russian batteries at the far end, with more guns firing on their flanks from three sides. Cardigan led them at a trot that built to a gallop through a storm of shot. Astonishingly, they reached the guns and cut down their crews, but they could not hold the position and had to fall back through the same murderous fire. Around one hundred and ten men were killed and many more wounded or captured, and the brigade lost hundreds of horses. The charge was superbly brave and militarily pointless, and it was immortalised soon afterward by Alfred Tennyson in his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, with its refrain of riding into the valley of Death. The battle itself ended inconclusively, with the Russians holding some captured ground but the port of Balaclava still safe.