As the Russians cut their losses and moved back to their base, Raglan and his staff on the Sapoune Heights noticed them removing the British guns from the redoubts. The Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, or so it was believed by the keepers of his cult in the British military establishment. The prospect of these guns being paraded as trophies in Sevastopol was unbearable for Raglan, who at once sent an order to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, to recover the Causeway Heights, assuring him of the support of the infantry that had just arrived. Lucan could not see the infantry, and could not believe that he was meant to act alone, with just the cavalry, against infantry and artillery, so for three-quarters of an hour he did nothing, while Raglan on the hill became more alarmed about the fate of the captured British guns. Eventually he dictated a second 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. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’
The order was not just unclear, it was absurd, and Lucan was completely at a loss as to what to make of it. From where he was standing, at the western end of the Causeway Heights, he could see, to his right, the British guns in the redoubts captured by the Russians from the Turks; to his left, at the end of the North Valley, where he knew the bulk of the Russian forces were located, he could see a second set of guns; and further to the left, on the lower slopes of the Fediukhin Heights, he could see that the Russians also had a battery of artillery. If Raglan’s order had been clearer and specified that it was the British guns on the Causeway Heights that Lucan was to take, the Charge of the Light Brigade would have ended very differently, but as it was, the order left unclear which guns the cavalry was to recover.
The only man who could tell him what it meant was the aide-de-camp who delivered it, Captain Nolan of the King’s Hussars. Like many cavalrymen in the Light Brigade, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated by Lucan’s failure to employ the cavalry in the sort of bold attack for which it had earned its reputation as the greatest in the world. At the Bulganak and the Alma, the cavalry had been stopped from pursuing the Russians in retreat; on the Mackenzie Heights, during the march to Balaklava, Lucan had prevented an attack on the Russian army marching east across their path; and only that morning, when the Heavy Brigade was outnumbered by the Russian cavalry, only a few minutes’ ride away, Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, declined to use them for a swift assault upon the routed enemy. The Light Brigade were made to watch while their comrades fought with the same Cossacks who had jeered at them at the Bulganak for refusing to fight. One of their officers had several times demanded of Lord Cardigan to send in the brigade, and, when Cardigan refused, slapped his saluting sword against his leg in a show of disrespect. There were signs of disobedience. Private John Doyle of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars recalled:
The Light Brigade were not well pleased when they saw the Heavy Brigade and were not let go to their assistance. They stood up in their stirrups, and shouted ‘Why are we kept here?’ and at the same moment broke up and dashed back through our lines, for the purpose of following the Russian retreat, but they had got too far for us to overtake them.26
So when Lucan asked Nolan what Raglan’s order meant, there was a threat of insubordination in the air. In the account he later gave in a letter to Raglan, Lucan asked the aide-de-camp where he should attack, and Nolan had replied ‘in a most disrespectful but significant manner’, pointing to the further end of the valley, ‘“There, my lord, is your enemy; there are your guns.”’ According to Lucan, Nolan had not pointed to the British guns on the Causeway Heights, but towards the battery of twelve Russian cannon and the main force of the Cossack cavalry at the far end of the North Valley, on either side of which, on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights, the Russians had more cannon as well as riflemen. Lucan took the order to Cardigan, who pointed out the lunacy of charging down a valley against artillery and musket fire on three sides, but Lucan insisted that the order be obeyed. Cardigan and Lucan (who were brothers-in law) detested each other. This is usually the explanation given by historians as to why they failed to consult and find a way to circumvent the order they believed they had been given by Raglan (it would not be the first time that Raglan’s orders had been disobeyed). But there is also evidence that Lucan was afraid to disobey an order that was in fact welcomed by the men of the Light Brigade, eager for action against the Russian cavalry and in danger of losing discipline if they were prevented from attacking them. Lucan himself later wrote to Raglan that he had obeyed the order because not to do so would have ‘exposed me and the cavalry to aspersions against which we might have difficulty in defending ourselves’ – by which he surely meant aspersions from his men and the rest of the army.27
The 661 men of the Light Brigade advanced at a walk down the gently sloping North Valley, the 13th Light Dragoons and 17th Lancers in the first line, led by Cardigan, the 11th Hussars immediately behind, followed by the 8th Hussars together with the 4th (Queen’s Own) Regiment of Light Dragoons. It was 2,000 metres to the enemy’s position at the end of the valley, and at regulation speeds it would take the Light Brigade about seven minutes to cover the distance – artillery and musket fire to the right of them, to the left of them and in front of them, along the way. As the first line broke into a trot, Nolan, who was riding with the 17th Lancers, galloped forward, waving his sword and, according to most versions, shouting to the men to hurry them along, although it has also been suggested that he realized the mistake and was attempting to redirect the Light Brigade towards the Causeway Heights and perhaps beyond to the South Valley, where they would be safe from the Russian guns. Either way, the first shell fired by the Russians exploded over Nolan and killed him. Whether it was Nolan’s example, their own eagerness, or because they wanted to get through the flanking fire as fast as possible, remains unclear, but the two regiments at the head of the charge broke into a gallop long before they were ordered to. ‘Come on,’ shouted one man from the 13th Light Dragoons, ‘don’t let those bastards [the 17th Lancers] get ahead of us.’28
As they galloped through the crossfire from the hills, cannonballs tearing the earth up and musket fire raining in like hail, men were shot and horses fell. ‘The reports from the guns and the bursting of shells were deafening,’ recalled Sergeant Bond of the 11th Hussars.
The smoke too was almost blinding. Horses and men were falling in every direction, and the horses that were not hurt were so upset that we could not keep them in a straight line for a time. A man named Allread who was riding on my left fell from his horse like a stone. I looked back and saw the poor fellow lying on his back, his right temple being cut away and his brain partly on the ground.
Trooper Wightman of the 17th Lancers saw his sergeant hit: ‘He had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards further the headless body kept in the saddle, the lance at the charge, firmly gripped under the right arm.’ So many men and horses from the first line were shot down that the second line, 100 metres behind, had to swerve and slow down to avoid the wounded bodies on the ground and the bewildered, frightened horses that galloped without riders in every direction.29
Within a few minutes, those that remained of the first line were in among the Russian gunners at the end of the valley. Cardigan, whose horse flinched from the guns’ last salvo at close range, was said to be the first man through. ‘The flame, the smoke, the roar were in our faces,’ recalled Corporal Thomas Morley of the 17th Lancers, who compared it to ‘riding into the mouth of a volcano’. Cutting down the gunners with their swords, the Light Brigade charged on with their sabres drawn to attack the Cossacks, who were ordered forward by Ryzhov to protect the guns, which some of the attackers were attempting to wheel away. Without time to form themselves before they were attacked, the Cossacks were ‘thrown into a panic by the disciplined order of the mass of cavalry bearing down on them’, recalled a Russian officer. They turned sharply to escape and, seeing that their way was blocked by the hussar regiments, began to fire their muskets point-blank at their own comrades, who fell back in panic, turned and charged into the other regiments behind. The whole of the Russian cavalry began a stampede towards Chorgun, some dragging the mounted guns behind them, while the advance riders of the Light Brigade, outnumbered five to one, pursued them all the way to the Chernaia river.