![]() ![]() All the world wonder’d: Plunged in the battery-smoke. Sabring the gunners there, Charging an army, while. Flash’d all their sabres bare, Flash’d as they turn’d in air. The poem tells the story of the battle in chronological order, from the charge of the men in the first three stanzas, to the battle in the fourth and the retreat in the fifth. Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell. The overall lack of rhyme scheme hints at the chaos of the war Rhyming couplets and triplets drive the poem forwards, but the momentum is broken by unrhymed lines, which could mirror the horses stumbling and soldiers falling. ![]() The regular relentless rhythm creates a fast pace intimidating the cavalry’s advance and energy of the battle. The poem is narrated in third person making it seem like a story. ![]() This is used to reflect the military nature of the conflict in the poem. It has a very militant rhyme and can be similar to the sound of marching drums of horse hooves. Some of this is to show the different stages of battle but also gives it structure. The poem is divided into 6 stanzas and uses a lot of repetition. The drop in stress is perhaps to show the sudden charge and then collapse, or the sound of horses galloping So when there are six syllables you would read it one two three one two three. There are two stresses in each line which means there are two beats or syllables which are read with force. So when Nolan gestured vaguely (“There, my lord, is your enemy! There are your guns!”), it is easy to understand why Lucan mistook the Russian battery for Raglan’s true target.Written in dimeter and dactylic. From there Lucan’s view of the captured redoubts would have been obscured by rising ground. Just as revealing was my visit to the approximate location where Lucan had received Raglan’s orders, on a slight knoll of ground between the two valleys. He was not – as some commentators have suggested – ordering cavalry to attack fixed positions up a steep hillside but instead wanted Lucan to move the cavalry forward on both sides of a relatively gentle slope, and possibly even along it, to hasten the Russian withdrawal and encourage them to abandon the British guns. Does this explain why Raglan felt justified in issuing those two orders to Lucan and the cavalry: first to advance and take any opportunity to “recover the Heights” and then to “advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy from carrying away the guns ”? This is the famous Woronzow Road that, for much of its length, runs along the range of hills known to the British during the Crimean War as the Causeway Heights.įrom Raglan’s vantage point, the Heights appear to be little more than a slight rise in the ground and are dwarfed by the hills that fringe the plain to the north and east. When I visited it, I was struck by the panoramic view it afforded of the battlefield.ĭirectly below the platform is a large plain covered with vineyards and other crops – just as it was in 1854 – and bisected by a tarmac road that snakes from right to left. ![]() The site on the edge of the Sapouné Ridge, from where Raglan and his staff are said to have observed the battle of Balaklava, is today marked by a viewing platform. It is hard to comprehend how the Light Brigade could have been misdirected until you stand on the spots where the main actors were situated when they made their fatal decisions. The communication breakdown between Lord Raglan and his cavalry commander is perhaps explained by the topography of the Balaklava battlefield, says Saul David Within a month they were besieging the great naval base of Sevastopol from the Chersonese Plateau to its south. Determined to protect the Ottomans by neutralising Russian power in the Black Sea, the Allies had landed on the Crimean peninsula in early September 1854. Thus the charge was the last action of the battle of Balaklava which, though far from conclusive, was a Russian victory of sorts – their first of a war that had begun the previous March when the Russian tsar refused British and French ultimatums to withdraw his troops from Ottoman empire territory. He was dissuaded by General Canrobert, his French counterpart, on the grounds that troops could not be spared from the siege lines for their garrisons. What happened after the Charge of Light Brigade?Įven after the fatal charge, Lord Raglan was keen to use his infantry to retake the captured redoubts. The number of dead horses was almost 400. Even with the return of stragglers, the losses were crippling: 107 men killed, 187 wounded and 50 missing (most of them captured). When the battered remnant of the around 676 men of the Light Brigade formed up near the same ground they had charged from 25 minutes earlier, only 195 men were still mounted. How many of 'the 600' survived the charge of the Light Brigade? ![]()
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