The Banner of Battle

by Alan Palmer

  Campbell, however, was so impressed by the Turkish spy’s account that he discussed it with the commander of the Cavalry Division, Lord Lucan, who also took the report seriously. George Charles Bingham, third Earl of Lucan, received a poor press for much of his life, and a worse one after his death. His chronic quarrel with his wife’s brother, Lord Cardigan (commander of the Light Brigade), was known throughout London society and was a persistent source of embarrassed irritation to Lord Raglan, both at Varna and since landing in the Crimea. Lucan, an unpopular parade-ground martinet who at the age of twenty-six bought command of the 17th Lancers in November 1826 for £25,000, became an ideal butt for would-be army reformers wishing to end aristocratic privilege: had not his own soldiery nicknamed him ‘Lord Look-On’? To his fellow officers in the Crimea Lucan was ‘the cautious ass’, as distinct from his brother-in-law, who was ‘the dangerous ass’.[272] But Look-On possessed one advantage over Raglan’s other divisional commanders: he had actually served as a volunteer with a Russian army fighting against the Turks. In 1828 Colonel George Bingham had taken temporary leave of absence from the Lancers and been attached to the staff of that same Prince Worontsoff whose Crimean estates were served by the road across the Causeway Heights. Twelve months in Nicholas I’s army won Lucan the Order of St Anne (Second Class) and the Tsar’s personal approbation for courage: it also gave him some insight into the Russian military mind; and, after talking to the Turkish spy on that Tuesday, Lucan did not doubt that a Russian attack was imminent.

  Before dawn on Wednesday, Lucan was in the saddle patrolling the Causeway Heights with two of his staff officers. They trotted past the Light Brigade: Cardigan did not join them; quite apart from the reluctance of the brothers-in-law to speak to each other, he was that night sleeping aboard his private yacht, Dryad, which had entered Balaclava Harbour a few days before. But the second-in-command of the Light Brigade, Lord George Paget, rode out to join Lucan, and it was Paget who, in the first clear light of day, noticed something different about the redoubt on Canrobert’s Hill. The Turks on that redoubt could see farther east than any other allied observers — and the redoubt was flying two flags, one above the other, the agreed signal that the enemy was advancing in a major assault on the allied positions. While Lucan and his companions were galloping back to turn out the cavalry, the sound of artillery echoed from the furthest heights above the valley: it was shortly after six o’clock, and the Russian attack on Canrobert’s Hill had begun.[273]

  To the British, that Wednesday was 25 October, St Crispin’s Day, the 439th anniversary of Henry V’s victory at Agincourt; but by the Julian Calendar it was 13 October, the 42nd anniversary of Maloyaroslavets, the battle celebrated in Russia as the beginning of Napoleon’rout and ruin’. On both counts it was a poor anniversary for Canrobert’s compatriots.

  Chapter Ten – The Day of Four Cavalry Charges

  For Lord Raglan’s staff, Wednesday, 25 October, began with an unusually exigent reveille. By now they were used to the regular boom of siege artillery on the plateau. But, alarmingly, on this morning the sound of a heavy cannonade came from the other direction three miles up the valley. Almost simultaneously Raglan received a report of Lucan’s cavalry reconnaissance and a warning, brought from French headquarters by Hugh Rose, that one of Bosquet’s patrols had sighted ‘a large Russian force threatening Balaclava’. There could be no doubt that, exactly five weeks after their drubbing on the Alma, the Russians had gone over to the offensive. As Henry Duberly scribbled in a note to his wife, ‘The battle of Balaclava has begun and promises to be a hot one.’[274]

  Lucan’s cavalry, ‘on parade as usual...an hour before daybreak’, were in the saddle soon after their divisional commander’s return from his reconnaissance. They cantered forward across the plain to within half a mile of the redoubt on Canrobert’s Hill, while Campbell’s Highlanders took up positions in South Valley, intent on guarding the route down to the harbour. But when Raglan discovered the ferocity of the Russian assault, he became uneasily conscious of his eastern flank’s exposed weaknesses. The Duke of Cambridge’s 1st Division and Cathcart’s 4th Division were ordered to leave their trenches facing Sebastopol and march to the plain so as to strengthen the shield around Balaclava. They could not, however, reach their new positions for another two hours and, as an immediate safeguard, Raglan brought Lucan’s cavalry back. They would help defend the western end of the South Valley, facing north-east towards the Causeway: Lord Cardigan’s Light Brigade was on the left; Brigadier-General Scarlett’s Heavy Brigade of dragoons were a hundred yards away, on the right. Raglan also approached Canrobert. But the French Commander-in-Chief, far from showing interest in the fate of the hill named after him, was militarily obsessed in the duel with the Sebastopol forts. Only with reluctance did he agree to spare some reserve battalions of infantry and the Chasseurs d’Afrique from General Bosquet’s 1st Division. It was after ten o’clock before Hugh Rose rode out to Raglan’s observation post on the edge of the Sapoune Heights to inform the British commander that Bosquet’s troops would soon be moving into positions immediately beneath him, between the Sapoune escarpment and the first slopes of the Fedioukine Heights.[275]

  No doubt tactically this defensive deployment of British and French troops was eminently sound. It was, however, demoralizing to the third ally, ‘Johnny Turk’. For over an hour the thousand Turkish defenders of Canrobert’s Hill kept the Russians resolutely at bay, half of them perishing in one of the unsung epics of the campaign. But when the Russians finally scaled the inner earthworks Turkish resistance crumbled ‘all along the range’. Russell of The Times arrived at the ridge which was to serve as his observation post for the battle too late to see the Turks’ heroic stand but in time to record, with ‘inexpressible disgust’, the flight of the survivors. The Sultan’s troops in the second, third and fourth redoubts — who were said to be Tunisians and not Anatolian Turks — did, indeed, take to their heels at the approach of ‘the Cossacks’, fleeing in the general direction of the harbour. ‘We were much annoyed at seeing the Turks come flying down past us crying, and calling upon “Allah”,’ Sergeant Mitchell of the 13th Hussars later recalled, with that endearing meiosis which runs throughout his reminiscences. ‘Our men called out “No Bono Johnny” but that made no impression on them, for soon they were off as fast as they could go to Balaclava.’ Mrs Fanny Duberly met them shortly afterwards. Alerted at eight o’clock by the message from her husband, she was riding up to a vantage point in the hills when, to her indignation, she ‘found the road blocked by Flying Turks’. ‘Had I known of their brutal cowardice,’ she wrote two days later to her sister Selina, ‘I should have ridden over them all.’ Such drastic action proved, however, unnecessary. Fanny reached her husband safely, only to find that he was ‘striking tent’ and that ‘mounted Cossacks...were making straight for where I stood’. She was witnessing, in the most alarming manner, the first of the four cavalry charges of that historic Wednesday.[276]

  Fortunately, between the tents and the Cossacks were Sir Colin Campbell’s ‘Highlanders’, defending Kadikoi. This famous body of men was, in fact, a scratch force of 550 Sutherland Highlanders from the 93rd Regiment, together with a leavening of Turks and 140 men from other British regiments, hastily rounded up in Balaclava base by Sir Colin’s aides that same morning. Two civilians, as well as Mrs Duberly, saw the Russian charge brought to a halt by the steady volleys of Campbell’s imperturbable infantry. Kinglake, myopically peering across the plain to follow the twists and turns of a fast-moving battle,was to recall the glory and tragedy of Balaclava in measured prose more than a quarter of a century later; but William Howard Russell had to write a despatch for The Times while the menace of enemy sabres was still vivid in his eyes; and on that day he first employed a phrase which, emasculated into ‘thin red line’, passed rapidly into patriotic folk cliche. ‘The Russians’, Russell’s readers saw in their newspaper columns twenty days later, ‘drew breath for a moment, and then in one grand line dashed
at the Highlanders. The ground flies beneath their horses’ feet; gathering speed at every stride, they dash on towards that thin red streak topped with a line of steel....But ere they come within 150 yards, another deadly volley flashes from the levelled rifle, and carries death and terror into the Russians.’ The attack was repelled; and for the remainder of the day General Liprandi’s troops stood on the defensive, eager to safeguard their commanding position on Canrobert’s Hill and save, if possible, the redoubts taken in that lightning thrust along the Worontsoff Road.[277]

  Liprandi was reluctant to credit ‘enemy rifle fire’ with driving off his horsemen. Next day he reported that the Russian cavalry charge — undertaken not solely by ‘Cossacks’, but by General Ryzhov’s fourteen squadrons of the Kievsky and Ingermanlandsky Hussars as well — was checked simultaneously by infantry on the flank and ‘English cavalry from the front’.[278] This, however, is a misleading version of events. General Scarlett’s dragoons were already heading westwards to protect the Turks when they sighted the glint of Cossack lanceheads above the ridge of the Causeway, as the main Russian cavalry force bore down on Kadikoi. Scarlett, who at fifty-five had never before fought in any battle, halted the advance; he was beginning to dress his three squadrons into line when Lord Lucan galloped up and ordered the Heavy Brigade at once to charge the Russians who had by then crossed the Worontsoff Road. Although Scarlett was reluctant to be hurried by an overexcited divisional commander, he seems to have ordered the trumpeter to sound the ‘Charge’ so suddenly that brigadier and aide-de-camp were well in front of the Greys and Inniskillings, who formed the first line of galloping horsemen. It chanced that at this moment Ryzhov’s cavalry were stationary, for their general was about to redeploy them after the frustrating check imposed by Campbell’s ‘thin red streak’. The Heavy Brigade therefore fell upon their enemy with all the ferocity of armoured knights in the Middle Ages, the second and third lines — the 4th and 5th Dragoon Guards and the Royals — soon adding their weight to the hand-to-hand fighting, which had taken the Russian Hussars by surprise. ‘In forty-two years of service and ten campaigns, among them Kulm, Leipzig and Paris, never before have I seen such action, with both sides cutting and thrusting at each other for so long,’ the veteran General Ryzhov was to recall in old age.[279]

  No doubt to General Ryzhov the action did, indeed, seem to last a long time; but to Raglan and Russell and Kinglake and Fanny Duberly, watching this second cavalry charge of the morning from their vantage points on the Sapoune Heights, only eight minutes elapsed between the braying trumpet call to ‘Charge’ and the cheers which ‘burst from every lip’ as the Russians were seen to retreat. Although casualties in the Heavy Brigade were light — eight killed outright and some seventy wounded — Scarlett’s squadrons were too disorganized to pursue the Russians. But Cardigan’s Light Brigade, deployed as neatly as on a parade ground a quarter of a mile up the valley, were eager and unscathed. ‘We all felt certain,’ writes Sergeant Mitchell, ‘that if we had been sent in pursuit of them we should have cut up many of them, besides capturing many prisoners.’ So, too, thought Captain Morris, the acting commander of the 17th Lancers. He asked his brigadier’s permission to charge the flying enemy. Cardigan, however, refused. He had convinced himself that ambiguously worded orders from Lucan required the brigade to remain inactive; and he would not risk yet another accusation of impetuosity. ‘Well done the Heavy Brigade,’ came a message from Raglan to Scarlett. No words either of reproach or instruction were as yet sent to the commander of the Light Brigade.[280]

  *

  For perhaps as long as half an hour the fighting seemed to have died away. In his talks with Menshikov two days before, General Liprandi had never rated highly his chances of breaking through to Balaclava itself, and after the rebuff to Ryzhov’s cavalry he was inclined to regard the battle as ended. While the Russian cavalry reformed in the shelter of the hills, Liprandi placed Colonel Prince Obolensky’s field battery, eight guns manned by Don Cossacks, in a commanding defensive position at the eastern end of North Valley. As it now seemed doubtful if the Russians could hold the string of ex-Turkish redoubts, the Odessky Regiment, with supporting ancillaries, was ordered forward to the most western redoubt, so as to neutralize the defences and remove the captured British naval 12-pounders.[281]

  This lull in the action was not, however, to Lord Raglan’s liking. Only now was Cathcart’s division moving into position beneath the Commander-in-Chief’s vantage point 600 feet up on the edge of the escarpment. Cambridge’s 1st Division was still not in sight, for the Duke was as methodically slow that morning as at the Alma. But Raglan had no doubt that he would shortly have enough troops to clear the Russians from the valley. General Canrobert, with his escort of Spahis, and General Bosquet had recently, joined Raglan at his post in the Sapoune Heights. So, too, had the British liaison ‘commissioner’ with the French army, Brigadier-General Rose; and it is Hugh Rose’s long-neglected diary, written up that evening in a hand still shaking with the impact of all that he had witnessed, which throws fresh light on a historically familiar day, helping to fit isolated happenings into a coherent pattern.[282]

  When Rose arrived at Raglan’s observation post he found the Commander-in-Chief concerned for the fate of the valiant defenders of Canrobert’s Hill, those Turkish allies for whom he had as yet done nothing. For Raglan did not share the arrogant contempt of so many of his countrymen for the Ottoman Empire’s regular army; he admired the fighting qualities of the infantry. ‘We must set the poor Turks right again, get the redoubt back,’ Rose heard Raglan say. An order was sent to Lord Lucan: the cavalry must take advantage of any opportunity to recover the Causeway Heights and would be supported by infantry advancing on two fronts. But nothing happened: Lucan could see no sign of infantry support and therefore decided that the ‘opportunity’ had not yet come. Through field-glasses, Raglan and his staff were watching, with mounting impatience, the first Russian attempts to remove the British 12-pounders. It was at this point, more than half an hour after his previous order to Lucan, that Raglan turned to his quartermaster-general, Sir Richard Airey, and gave verbal instructions which Airey wrote out in the famous order to Lucan: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front — follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns — Troops Horse Artillery may accompany — French cavalry is on yr. left — Immediate’.[283]

  Transmission of the order, signed by Airey, posed a minor problem. Should it be carried down to Lucan by the Commander-in-Chief’s duty aide, Captain Thomas Leslie, or by Airey’s aide-de-camp, that Irish-Italian hotspur, Captain Nolan? According to Hugh Rose, Raglan handed the ‘bit of paper to Nolan’. This was sensible, for Nolan was a good horseman who would not need to pick his way slowly down the steep and rough path to the plain. But, Rose adds, Nolan was ‘much excited’. He was, after all, a cavalry specialist. An hour earlier he had expressed deep contempt for Cardigan’s inactivity. Now it seemed as if there would he an even more impressive cavalry manoeuvre than the charge of the ‘Heavies’: Scarlett had moved at the gallop for little more than a hundred yards; to stop the guns being carried away, the cavalry would have to cover well over a mile before clashing with the Odessky Regiment around the Second and Third Redoubts. Yet Nolan seems to have feared that the brothers-in-law whom he so despised, Lord ‘Look-On’ and Lord Cardigan, would through caution or incompetence muff the assault. ‘I’ll lead them myself, I’ll lead them on,’ Rose reports Nolan as calling out when he began to spur his horse in a reckless descent to the plain.

  It seems improbable that if Nolan did use these words, he meant them to be taken seriously. He was, to some extent, still on sufferance in the expeditionary force, for, although General Airey might rate his abilities highly, Captain Nolan remained no more than a seconded squadron commander from a hussar regiment which was never called to serve in the Crimea. His duty was to return to the group of staff officers once he had delivered Airey’s message. There was no reason why
he should participate in the Charge, let alone attempt to upstage Cardigan as the Murat of Balaclava. Yet it is clear that he had no intention of riding back up the escarpment. Once he reached the plain, there followed the famous exchange with Lucan, in which the cavalry’s divisional commander showed perplexity over Airey’s written orders. Down in the valley, 600 feet below the line of vision of Raglan and Airev, he could not see the captured British guns. ‘What guns, sir? Where and what to do?’ he asked Nolan testily. And Nolan, with a casual gesture pointed vaguely westwards, in the direction where from the Heights he had seen the redoubts along the Causeway: ‘There, my Lord! There is your enemy! There are your guns,’ he said with fatal insolence. But Lucan was not only 600 feet lower than the observers on the escarpment; he was also facing slightly north of west whereas Raglan’s post faced slightly south of west. The only guns Lucan could see, with the sun glinting on their polished barrels, were the 6-pounders of Obolensky’s battery, facing down the valley. He assumed that these must he the cavalry’s objective. As Lucan and Cardigan conferred over the meaning of Airey’s message, Nolan asked Captain Morris if he might ride that day with his 17th Hussars. Cardigan, accepting his divisional commander’s assumption ‘that there was no choice but to obey’, was positioning his regiments in line for the Charge when he heard that ‘young fellow’ Nolan muttering disparaging remarks about the slowness of his preparations and he immediately threatened him with court-martial. Then Cardigan, resplendent in his blue and cherry-coloured uniform with gold trimmings across the chest and shoulder, took up his proper place ten yards ahead of the brigade, and ordered 673 men and horses to advance. It was, William Russell meticulously noted, ten minutes past eleven.[284]