"The Reason Why" (Cecil Woodham-Smith, 1953)

Another book I saved from 15 years ago to reread "someday."  And well worth doing so, because it is a fascinating and well-written book.

"Some one had blunder'd   

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die: 

Into the valley of Death  

Rode the six hundred."   

                    --- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The passage above is basically all that I knew about the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War.   This book filled in the missing details.

The opening chapters present a devastating takedown of British command and control at the time of the Crimean War, thoroughly castigating the commanding officers for their utter lack of judgement.  She provides a surprisingly lucid discussion of the longstanding but outdated logic behind allowing commanding officers to buy their positions rather than qualify for them (basically a British fear that a powerful military might subvert the government and it would be better to have "quality" officers with a stake in the future of the country).  It had been seventeen years since Lord Lucan, for example, had managed a regiment, even on a parade ground, and the verbal orders had changed; he didn't know the new ones and required his cavalry to relearn the old ones.

In addition to battlefield ineptitude, the aristocratic military leadership showed a abysmal lack of understanding of logistics.  The British fleet sailed into the Black Sea to a hotbed of cholera with no preparations for such.

"Men who died of cholera were flung into the sea with weights at their feet, but the weights were too light; as the bodies decomposed they rose to the surface, the weights kept them upright, and they floated head and shoulders out of the water, hideous in the sun."

Men were packed into transport ships way too small, with no sanitary facilities.  Four thousand baggage animals were left behind (and starved to death), so the men had to transport their own tents and supplies to the battlefields.  There had been no reconnaissance of the battle sites; command was attempted from hilltops that had a half-an-hour lag time for transmission of messages to the battlefield by aide-de-camps.

The actual "charge of the light brigade" is presented in a chapter or two near the end. The charge was made toward a battery of cannons, with additional cannon fire from both flanks, as Tennyson described:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd & thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot & shell,
Boldly they rode & well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

And when they were forced to retreat...

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them...

Bruce Catton said of this book "Here is battle writing as good as the best."

I'll close with one caveat: the book will be difficult reading for anyone with a proper respect for horses.  Transport from England to Crimea was on ships not suited for horses, with inadequate restraints and supports ("only head ropes") resulting in a grievous morbidity and mortality in high seas; 43 horses on one side of the ship's hold would be dashed against their mangers and against the 43 on the other side "and this occurred every five minutes during the night."  Upon arrival there was inadequate grain for feed in the Black Sea ports.  At the battlefield...

"On Saturday, November 11, the horses had one handful of barley each as their day's food and the same the next day.  They were standing knee-deep in mud, with the bitter Crimean wind cutting their emaciated bodies.  They ate their straps, saddle flaps, and blankets, and gnawed each other's tails to stumps.  An order  had been issued that no horse was to be destroyed except for a broken limb or glanders, and horses, dying of starvation, lay in the mud in their death agony for three days, while no one dared shoot them."

I'll stop now and move on to some interesting words:

"He was very handsome, so handsome that it was feared his good looks would turn him into a coxcomb, and very gay, "the gayest of gay gallants," a contemporary calls him."  Or "cocks-comb," derived from the name of a cap worn by licensed professional fools.

"Parliament has never sought to attract to the command of the army men dependent on their pay... it was laid down that "the pay of an officer is an honorarium, not a merces..."  Pay, wages, from merx (related to merchandise, and of course mercenary).

"Though the 15th was a notably efficient regiment, the new commanding officer viewed it with disgust.  He demanded more glitter, more dash, and he set to work to drill, polish, pipeclay, reprimand, and discipline the 15th to within an inch of their lives."  A fine white clay used to make pipes, but in this sense, used to whiten leather.

"... a young officer of the Hussars who joined his regiment with a stud of blood-horses, three grooms, and two carriages, one of which carried his plate and linen."  From Old English stod ("herd of horses"), also obviously applied to horses individually and to the breeding process.

This book is the result of monumental research on Cecil Woodham-Smith's part.  She delved not only into public records and Parliamentary documents, but also into the private correspondence of the officers involved and their families.  There is frankly TMI to try to consume this in detail, but it can be skimmed to select out the best parts.

After finishing this reread, I've marked the author's other books for future reading.  She wrote an award-winning biography of Florence Nightingale, a biography of the early life of Queen Victoria, and more notably The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 about the "Celtic Holocaust" of the potato famine.