"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
ALFRED TENNYSON
1854

INTRODUCTION

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" is one of the most frequently quoted and most controversial poems of the nineteenth century. The poem is the original source of the famous lines: "Their's not to make reply, / Their's not to reason why, / Their's but to do and die," and is often cited as the quintessential tribute to soldiers fighting in any war. The poem was inspired by an event that occurred on October 25, 1854, during the Crimean War: the attack by the British Light Cavalry Brigade—a force of fewer than seven hundred men—against more than twenty-five thousand Russian soldiers. This incident is commonly acknowledged as one of the most catastrophic moments in military history.

Some historians wonder why this event has become so famous. Tens of thousands of soldiers died during the Crimean War (most of them from disease), but fewer than two hundred were killed in the charge that the poem describes. However, both British and French civilians experienced the events of the war vicariously, through eyewitness accounts of battles published in their newspapers. War correspondent William Howard Russell, in particular, caught Tennyson's attention with his dramatic and sensational narrative of the charge of the Light Brigade, which moved Tennyson to write the legendary poem.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" is one of Tennyson's most famous poems, but it does not compare in terms of length or ambition to his more critically acclaimed works such as "In Memoriam, A. H. H." (1850), "Maud: A Monodrama" (1855), or the twelve poems that make up his Idylls of the King (1859–85). Still, however slight it may be, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" created a legend that would affect future poets and writers including Rudyard Kipling, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf. The popularity of the poem would lead to several visual dramatizations of the charge in the twentieth century, including films, documentaries, and reenactments of the event. Reports on the sesquicentennial commemoration of the charge on October 25, 2004, cited Tennyson's poem as the catalyst for people's cultural memory of the event.

Tennyson's poem has most often been read as a patriotic tribute to the military, but its context and content are much more ambiguous. The most famous lines quoted above celebrate military bravery while simultaneously suggesting that soldiers function as machines sent to fulfill orders and face inevitable death. In "The Historical Abuse of Literature: Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama and the Crimean War," literary historian James Bennett points out that we know "almost nothing" of what Tennyson thought of the war; thus our ideas regarding "what Tennyson thought about the Crimean War must be purely conjectural."

It took Tennyson less than an hour to write the poem on December 2, 1854. He sent it to The Examiner (London), where it was published the next week. He radically revised the poem when he published it a year later in July 1855 in a collection with the longer and more substantial poem "Maud: A Monodrama," a work in which the speaker expresses exaggerated admiration for the Crimean War. In the revised version of "The Charge of the Light Brigade," the crucial line "Someone had blunder'd" is omitted, leaving the second stanza unreservedly patriotic. In the collection Maud and Other Poems (1855), Tennyson completely rewrote the final stanza as an unambiguous celebration of the Brigade's sacrifice: "Honor the brave and bold! / Long shall the tale be told / Yea, when our babes are old—/ How they rode onward."

Many of the wounded soldiers at the military hospital in Scutari enjoyed the original version of the poem and their chaplain wrote a letter to Tennyson requesting copies for them. Tennyson responded with a note that praised the soldiers, and he sent copies of his original poem, restoring the critical line that assigned blame to their commanders. His note expresses unqualified admiration for the soldiers, but his revised poem criticizes the leaders for their poor judgment:

Having heard that the brave soldiers at Sevastopol, whom I am proud to call my countrymen, have a liking for my ballad on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, I have ordered a thousand copies of it to be printed for them. No writing of mine can add to the glory they have acquired in the Crimea; but if what I heard be true, they will not be displeased to receive these copies of the ballad from me, and to know that those who sit at home love and honour them (quoted in Cavendish).

Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" just four years after becoming Poet Laureate of Britain, a position that made him a member of the British royal household for life and that implicitly called for patriotic poems. These divergent versions of the poem, then, may illustrate the tension between his astonishment at the soldier's courage and his loyalty to the Queen. The ambiguity of the poem allows it to celebrate military heroism during war and encourage political compromise to avoid pointless massacre. It is remembered and repeated because it speaks to both perspectives.

POEM SUMMARY

Lines 1-4

The first four lines of the poem have the rhythm of a determined chant that sets the scene for a march into war. "Half a league" is the distance of about a mile and a half. The repetition of this phrase creates a predictable dactylic pattern in which one accented syllable is placed before two unaccented syllables, a pattern that structures the entire poem.

In the third line of the poem, the soldier's tragic fate appears imminent as they ride "in the valley of Death," a phrase that is repeated (with slight variation, as "in" becomes "into") twice in the first stanza, and once in the second. (A stanza is a division in a poem that is composed of several lines with common meter, rhythm, or rhyme.) Tennyson's contemporaries would have been very familiar with the scene he describes from the war reports in the Times (London). They would have associated the poem's "valley" with the unfortunate placement of the British troops in the North Valley in Balaclava, where they were surrounded by enemy troops.

Many readers would also recall the well-known phrase from Psalm 23 in the King James Version of the New Testament: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." The psalm is meant to encourage confidence and spiritual bravery, characteristics of the faithful that keep them safe and help them in their time of trouble. Tennyson's reference, of course, makes the idyllic "green pastures" and "safe waters" of that biblical scene ironic by juxtaposing, or comparing, them with the bloody battle. The benevolent shepherd whom the psalmist trusts unquestioningly stands in sharp contrast to the inept leader Tennyson mentions indirectly in the next section. Tennyson revises the biblical passage to suggest that his valley is inhabited by Death itself, not just its shadow, an ominous suggestion that is played out as Death becomes one of the major characters in the poem.

BIOGRAPHY
Alfred Tennyson

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born August 6, 1809, was the fourth of twelve children born to Elizabeth and George Tennyson. His father's alcoholism and horrible bouts of depression created a tumultuous family atmosphere and Alfred found solace in writing. His first poems were published in 1827 when he left home to attend Trinity College, Cambridge, with his brothers. In 1850, Tennyson married Emily Sellwood, a friend of his sisters, and was chosen Poet Laureate of England. As the official poet of the royal family, Tennyson was obliged to write patriotic poems for the public. In this capacity, he wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in 1854.

Though he wrote other, more ambitious poems that he considered superior to "The Charge of the Light Brigade", including "The Lady of Shallot" (1833) and "In Memoriam A. H. H." (1850), the fame of this poem would turn him into a national icon. In fact, it was considered so important among his works that it was one of the few poems selected when Thomas Edison arranged a recording of Tennyson reading his poetry in 1890. Tennyson died on October 6, 1892. His tribute to the troops at Balaclava was so admired by the soldiers that several of the veterans attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey.

Lines 5-8

The next four lines that complete the first stanza introduce the commands the soldiers hear as they march, commands given by an unnamed speaker. The voice behind these commands is never named, which implies that the blame for the misguided attack has never been confidently assigned. The anonymous commander could be Lord Raglan, who initiated the order; Captain Nolan, who delivered the order on horseback; George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan, who received the order from Nolan and commanded the Cavalry; or Thomas James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan, who commanded the troops directly. Because the commander is not named here, he can represent anyone in charge of a military assault, and the soldiers become timeless representatives of those who are sacrificed on the front lines of any military action. Both the fourth line and the eighth line end with the phrase, "Rode the six hundred." This phrase ends the second and third stanzas as well, and appears in altered form in the remaining three stanzas. To those familiar with the details of the battle, the repetition of the number of soldiers emphasizes the contrast between the size of the brigade and the size of their enemy.

Lines 9-12

The first four lines of the second stanza repeat the command and express what the soldiers were thinking as they rode into battle. These are perhaps the most crucial lines in the poem. They suggest criticism of the appalling mistake made by those in command, but they also matter because Tennyson omitted them when he republished his poem a year after writing it, though he subsequently restored them. He would later declare that the line "Some one had blunder'd" was the phrase around which the entire poem was based. Just as Tennyson does not name the "he" that shouts the command in the first stanza, here the agent of blame is an ambiguous "some one," a term that points toward the persistent mystery surrounding responsibility for the infamous military blunder. These lines also suggest that the soldiers were aware that the command was a mistake and bravely marched on in spite of what they knew. Whether the soldiers knew the details of their situation is uncertain, though they did question the abilities of their leaders. However, Tennyson's suggestion that they knew of the error magnifies their bravery and incites readers to be even more sympathetic to them as victims of inept leadership.

Lines 13-17

If the previous lines introduce the ambiguity of the poem and its stance toward war, the first three lines in this section amplify the duality of the poem as both celebration and critique. They emphasize the soldier's inability to alter their destinies. Perhaps less obvious is their reminder of the class division between the soldiers, who were common men not expected to speak or think for themselves, and their leaders, wealthy aristocrats who were often inept commanders. Here, the poem criticizes Victorian class prejudice, which made the soldiers expendable and left the aristocratic leaders blameless. Indeed, the periodical press that covered the war depicted the heroism of both the soldiers and their leaders, reinforcing the myth of aristocratic nobility through service to the country.

The phrase "Their's not to reason why" also highlights the senselessness of the charge. The absence of an explanation for the charge suggests that one cannot be provided. Both the cause of the military blunder and the reason for the war are invoked but not explained, hinting that reason is absent during political and military conflict.

Lines 18-21

This stanza depicts the atmosphere as the soldiers ride into battle. The first three lines of this section use two poetic devices: anaphora (the repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of consecutive lines) and onomatopoeia (the use of words to create sound effects, a device Tennyson uses throughout the poem). These literary devices combine to accentuate the sounds the soldiers hear as they march onward. In his recording of the poem, Tennyson pronounces the first word "cannon" emphatically and loudly, accentuating the word so strongly that the rest of each line trails off into silence. This passage illustrates Tennyson's preoccupation with rhythm, an element of his poetry that at times supersedes the importance of the poem's content. The line "Volley'd and thunder'd" reinforces and emphasizes the line it echoes from the previous stanza ("Someone had blunder'd") and calls attention to the soldier's precarious position.

Lines 22-26

In the next five lines of the third stanza, Tennyson personifies, or gives human attributes to, death, when he describes it as having jaws that will crush the men who advance. He similarly personifies Hell as having a mouth that will consume them. By portraying death and Hell, rather than the Russians, as the enemies, Tennyson suggests that there is no real human enemy. War itself is the true enemy here, depicted as lawless and boundless evil without a human identity.

The valley of death, with its biblical allusion to the pastoral representation of fear, becomes a horrifically brutal and violent scene that has only one outcome for many of the soldiers: certain death. The phrase "Boldly they rode and well" foregrounds the soldier's potential as accomplished fighters and would remind Tennyson's contemporary readers that the Light Brigade was one of the most skilled military units in the world. This reminder serves only to show the futility of their training and abilities, which were made useless by the commanders who sent them on a doomed mission.

Lines 27-38

The fourth stanza, consisting of twelve lines, is the longest in the poem. While the previous stanzas describe the brigade's preparation for battle and noble march into war, this stanza depicts the initial heroism of the soldiers and ends with a veiled allusion to the outcome of the battle. The term "bare" in the line "Flash'd all their sabres bare" performs a dual purpose, describing the aggression of the soldier's unsheathed weapons, but also hinting at the soldier's vulnerability. Tennyson describes the British cavalry's weapons as "sabres," heavy cavalry swords that could not match the cannons and gunfire that the soldiers faced. Though reloading the guns and cannons would have taken time, the overwhelming presence of heavily armed Russian soldiers would have made any delay immaterial. The phrase "Sabring the gunners there" highlights the difference in the two side's weapons, a difference that represents the distinction between the comparatively small Light Brigade and the enormous Russian army.

The phrase "All the world wonder'd" calls attention to the fact that the battle was show-cased in the newspapers for readers who were awed by the events as they were sensationalized in periodical reports. In spite of their exposure to the gunfire, the brigade heroically breaks the front line and effectively attacks both "Cossack and Russian." A Cossack is a Russian cavalry soldier under the Czar (the emperor who ruled Russia before the 1917 revolution), a term that would have described all of the soldiers fighting in this battle against the British cavalry. But Tennyson couples this term with "Russian"—a seemingly unnecessary term—to emphasize the humanity of those who fought for the enemy, soldiers who were loyal to their country just as the British were. By subtly humanizing both British and Russian soldiers, Tennyson suggests the inhumanity of a war that pits one patriotic soldier against another. The last two lines of this stanza stress the fact that though the cavalry rode in as a unit and broke the front line, they returned fragmented and wounded.

Lines 39-49

This stanza depicts the brigade's retreat. It is one line shorter than the previous stanza, just as the number of soldiers is reduced when the cavalry returns. The repetition of the anaphora used at the beginning of the third stanza recalls the earlier scene in reverse and stresses the tragic loss of both human and animal life that resulted from the battle. In fact, this stanza revises the third stanza, repeating with variations many of the phrases used in the earlier poetic unit. The line "While horse and hero fell," for example, echoes and revises the line "Boldly they rode and well" from the earlier stanza, an echo that accentuates their earlier heroism by emphasizing the sacrifice made by those who died. This stanza also celebrates those who would return from "the mouth of Hell," the veterans who survived the horrific event. If those who were killed during the battle are immortalized by the poem, those who returned from the battle are elevated to a sort of immortality as well, as soldiers who have died and come back to life.

Lines 50-55

The final stanza commemorates all the soldiers who fought in this battle. It seems to leave behind the ambiguity or critique suggested in earlier stanzas, and commands readers to remember forever the bravery and nobility both of the soldiers who sacrificed themselves and those who returned. Still, the repeated phrase "All the world wonder'd" recalls and highlights its rhymed parallel in line 12, the line that reminds readers that the battle was a result of an awful mistake, an unnecessary error that led to a senseless massacre. Though this poem was initially read as a patriotic tribute to the British military, the subtle critique that phrases such as these weave into the fabric of the poem has turned it into an anthem decrying the futility of war.

THEMES

Heroes and Leaders

At first glance, this poem seems to celebrate the heroic leaders and soldiers of the British military in their brave charge against a much larger Russian army force that would slaughter them in a matter of minutes. Certainly, the economic prosperity and optimism of the mid-Victorian age would have led readers to the interpretation that military commanders and soldiers fought together as a unit. A closer reading, however, reveals that the traditional idea of hero as leader is emphatically reconstructed in the poem. The heroes are most definitely not the leaders, but rather the soldiers. In fact, the unnamed leaders are actually those in the privileged position to "make reply" and to "reason why," but they do not and the heroic troops face the violent consequences of their irrational commands.

Tennyson emphasizes the irony that the soldiers, knowing that the command to "Charge for the guns!" is a mistake, cannot reply, while the military leaders are the only ones who speak in the poem. The true heroes are the soldiers who adhere to the mindlessly repeated command "Forward, the Light Brigade!" They are heroes because they bravely and patriotically follow their orders, because they charge an army of Russian soldiers armed with guns and cannons, and because they are such skilled fighters that they seem to have the overwhelmingly powerful enemy on the defensive, "Reel[ing] from the sabre stroke / Shatter'd and sunder'd." Tennyson grants those who return from the battle, who traveled "thro' the jaws of Death / Back from the mouth of Hell," with an even more elevated status, portraying them as supernatural beings who have died and come back to life. The initial military commands are echoed and corrected in the speaker's final commands to "Honor the charge they made," clearly a reference to the men on the front lines and not to the leaders who caused the catastrophe.

Timelessness of War

Though a specific event inspired Tennyson to write this poem, it is constructed in such a way that it speaks ably to readers unfamiliar with the Crimean War, the British military, or even nineteenth-century culture. Though certain terms such as "league" and "sabres" date the poem as a product of the nineteenth century, other terms, such as the repeated phrase "valley of Death," give the poem a mythical quality, as though the battle is one that will be played out forever until humanity finds an effective alternative to war.

The repeated phrase "All the world wonder'd" refers specifically to the reaction of newspaper readers in England and France, as well as the common reaction to the bravery of the small group of soldiers riding right into an overpoweringly enormous enemy force armed with guns and cannons. But the phrase also accurately predicts the way the war would be interpreted by future generations, who would wonder why such an event had to take place. Moreover, the repetition of phrases throughout the poem illustrates the circularity of the theme of war in history and the fact that it is a recurring element of civilization as mankind knows it.

War and Censorship

Certain elements of the poem and its context evoke the theme of censorship. This term literally refers to the practice, common in wartime, of editing out objectionable material, but psychologists also use it to describe the act of preventing disturbing thoughts or feelings from entering one's mind. These two meanings of censorship come together in the sense that Victorian society generally controlled the representation of anything offensive or horrifying, especially war. The only terms used to describe the massacre that resulted from the charge are vague phrases such as "the jaws of Death" and "the mouth of Hell." The only references to the actual fighting itself, "Storm'd at with shot and shell, / While horse and hero fell," pass quickly into declarations of praise: "They that had fought so well, / Came thro' the jaws of Death / Back from the mouth of Hell."

The fact that Tennyson repeatedly revised this poem, arguably censoring himself at times, shows his careful efforts of crafting the poem so that his conservative Victorian audiences would not be offended. Compared to the poetry of World War I, this poem appears remarkably clean, without any direct reference to the brutality or violence thatobviously took place during the charge. The literal censorship Tennyson employed while composing his poem encourages his readers to engage in a kind of psychological censorship regarding the horrors of war. Perhaps this is why the poem was initially read as a celebration of the military and is now read very differently in societies that are cynical about patriotic representations of war.

Death

Like many poems about war, this poem reflects on what it means to face death. Tennyson notably omits reference to an enemy, apart from when he describes "Cossack and Russian" being stabbed by the British soldier's sabers. These brutalized Russian soldiers are not enemies, but rather victims aligned with the British. Both fight and sacrifice themselves for their countries. The only enemy, then, is Death, personified with jaws and metaphorically linked to the "valley of the shadow of death," a biblical image from Psalm 23 that represents death as a fear that must be conquered.

If Death is a personified enemy against which any human must fight to save himself, war between two nations begins to look like a highly irrational act. The soldiers in the poem are praised for facing their own mortality and conquering their fear of death, not for conquering the enemy. Whether they lived or died, the soldiers earn eternal "glory," as the final stanza suggests. As a tribute to the military fighters in any war who must face and overcome their fear of death, this poem is itself an attempt to defeat death by immortalizing the soldiers in its final lines: "Honor the Light Brigade, / Noble six hundred."

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The Crimean War

The Crimean War (1854–56) was a conflict fought on and around the Crimean peninsula (part of modern-day Ukraine) between Russia and the alliance of Turkey, Britain, and France. The reasons for the war were complex, but can be most easily described on two levels. On a broad level, Russian Tsar Nicholas I (1796–1855) was anxious to claim Turkish land as quickly as possible, believing that the Ottoman Empire would soon collapse. The British, fearing that the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Russian power would threaten their imperial control over India, sought to stabilize Turkish rule.

On a more particular level, Nicholas I's decision to send troops into Turkish territory had to do with a religious conflict between Greek Orthodox Christians and Latin Catholic Christians regarding their claims to sacred sites in Israel (which was then known as Palestine). Greek Orthodox leaders held the keys to the main door of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the recognized birthplace of Christ. Latin Christians had similar symbolic control of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, as well as the Tomb of the Virgin Mary at Gethsemane. Each Christian group wanted the symbolic power the other possessed and fighting ensued, at one point resulting in a clash in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, with battling monks using candlesticks and crosses as weapons.

Supporting the Latin Catholic Christians, Napoleon III (1808–73) sent a warship to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople to recover the key to the Nativity and to demand that France replace Russia as the primary protector of Christians in the Holy Land. Nicholas I was a strong supporter of the Orthodox Christians, and in July 1853 he sent a Russian army to the Ottoman provinces and the Turks declared war. When the Russians sank a Turkish ship, the British and French intervened to defend the Ottomans. The United Kingdom and France officially declared war on Russia on March 27, 1854.

Some of the most famous figures of this war were not military leaders but nurses, most notably Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), who organized a group of nurses to tend to wounded British soldiers, and Mary Seacole (1805–81), a Jamaican nurse who opened a nursing facility for the allied soldiers. The most important event of the war is known as the Siege of Sevastopol, a battle that began September 25, 1854, and ended a year later in an allied victory that is recognized as effectively deciding the outcome of the war. The charge Tennyson's poem describes occurred in Balaclava on October 25, 1854, and was a relatively minor event in relation to the other battles that occurred during the Crimean War.

First Media War

The Crimean War is recognized as the first real media war, a conflict brought home in dramatic detail by photographers and eyewitness correspondents who were able to telegraph their reports to readers on the home front more quickly than ever before. The Light Brigade's charge was immortalized not only by Tennyson's poem but also by newspaperman William Howard Russell (1820–1907) in his vivid and sensational narratives in the Times (London). Writing one of the most famous accounts of the charge in the November 14, 1854, edition of the Times (London), Russell exclaims: "We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses! Surely that handful of men were not going to charge an army in position? Alas! it was but too true—their desperate valour knew no bounds." He concludes in awe: "Wounded men and dismounted troopers flying towards us told the sad tale—demi-gods could not have done what we had failed to do."

The next day, Russell reflects on the event with more detail, recounting that the charge was the "most disastrous in its consequences to that gallant and devoted band, for it seems that out of 700 who went into the fray only 130 answered their roll when it was over." Of course, historians would observe later that though only a small number of soldiers responded to the roll call, many more survived. But Russell's exaggerated estimate of the casualties in his theatrical descriptions—not the accurate count of the dead—would be the figure remembered for several decades.

The Crimean War was brought to life by these sensational newspaper narratives, but it was further enlivened by the visual images of British artist and photographer Roger Fenton (1819–69). Limited photographic technology and severe Victorian standards of taste prevented Fenton from capturing action and violent scenes. But one of his images—recognized as one of the world's first war photographs—presents a road dotted with cannonballs, which viewers interpreted as inanimate objects meant to symbolize the victims of the war. This photograph, entitled "Valley of the Shadow of Death," was displayed in London. Its grim image and title would have echoed the sentiment of Tennyson's poem, a connection late-nineteenth-century viewers would certainly have made.

As with any media war, the images and representations of the events on the battlefield are as important to audiences at home as the events themselves, tragic or not. The combination of Russell's critiques, Tennyson's poem, and Fenton's visual images contributed to a lasting sense among the British public that the allied victory during the Crimean War was marred by the incompetence of the British military leaders. From the media, moreover, the public learned not only of the botched charge, but also of the staggering number of British soldiers who died from disease caused by the poor conditions in British military camps. British war correspondent's media coverage was so powerful in shaping public opinion against the war that the British Prime Minister, Earl of Aberdeen (1784–1860), was voted out of office only ten months after the war began.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The overwhelming popularity of this brief poem surprised Tennyson, who, like his contemporary critics, thought it was stylistically inferior to his other works. He was very sensitive to criticism of his poetry and the fact that he revised the poem continually during his life shows his persistent dissatisfaction with this work.

When the original version of the poem appeared in The Examiner (London), some reviewers disapproved of the rhyming of "blunder'd" with "hundred." Tennyson would alter the poem considerably in different editions, most significantly omitting this line disliked in these early reviews. When he published his revised patriotic version of the poem in Maud and Other Poems in 1855, many critics condemned its excessive use of repetition and forced rhythm. Perhaps reviewers were biased by their own demanding expectations of the Poet Laureate. One reviewer, commenting on the volume as a whole in the August 25, 1855, edition of the Times (London) declares:

Coming from an unknown author, such a poem … would scarcely merit a lengthened criticism. Coming from Tennyson it rises into importance, and every poet and poetaster throughout the country—able to imitate his blemishes, but unable to imitate his beauties—will set up the Laureate as an example for prosy verse, for metaphysical sentiment, for affected imagery, for hysterical tears, and melodramatic rage.

To some extent, the review reveals more about the expectations of Tennyson's well-read Victorian audience than it does about the poetry itself.

Despite the critical censure, the original version of the poem was a favorite among British patriots and Crimean War veterans. When Tennyson published the final version of the poem (the version that appears in most texts today), he included an author's note regarding the troop's enthusiasm for his poem: "At the request of Lady Franklin I distributed copies among our soldiers in the Crimea and the hospital at Scutari." In 1890, veterans and citizens gathered at a tribute to the Light Brigade to hear Tennyson's poem recited at the Empire Theatre. A Times (London) reporter writes in the October 28, 1890, edition that "The veterans, who appeared in civil garb, were loudly cheered, and by way of response they waved their hats and shouted 'Hurrah!'"

During the early twentieth century, an age that generally rejected all things Victorian, the subtle critiques of war in the poem were high-lighted. As a result, it became emblematic of protest. This reading continued to be dominant in the early twenty-first century. Rudyard Kipling's response to the poem—and attack on the public's treatment of war veterans—in "The Last of the Light Brigade" (1891) foreshadows its evolution from a patriotic chant into a defense of the disadvantaged. The subjects of Kipling's poem, survivors of the charge described in Tennyson's poem, approach Tennyson to ask: "We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how? / You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."

World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon sarcastically invokes Tennyson's poem in his 1916 "Counter-Attack." Sassoon's poem foregrounds the horrors of World War I, describing soldiers commanded by bumbling officers: "An officer came blundering down the trench: / 'Stand-to and man the fire-step! […] Bombing on the right / Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left; / And stumbling figures looming out in front." Virginia Woolf refers to Tennyson's famous lines, "Someone had blunder'd" and "Boldly they rode and well" in her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. For her, these lines are examples of Victorian imperial arrogance, a patriotism that has since faded in the memory of the characters.

A century later, the poem has been revived as political critics suggest parallels between the charge and the American invasion of Iraq. George McGovern, former senator of South Dakota, begins "The Reason Why," his unequivocal critique of the Bush administration's actions during the war, with the poem's most famous lines ("Their's not to reason why / Their's but to do and die"). McGovern then quotes Lord Stanmore, who commented on the futility of the charge of the Light Brigade: "The symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been de-vised [sic] to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that 'was never threatened and probably never contemplated.'" McGovern's use of lines from Tennyson's poem nearly 150 years after it was written attests to the persistent power of "The Charge of the Light Brigade."

CRITICISM

Richard Barker

In the following excerpt, Barker looks beyond the celebration of soldiers in "Charge of the Light Brigade" to examine the historical circumstances of why the Light Brigade rode to their certain deaths at the Battle of Balaclava.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

In 1890, Thomas Edison arranged a recording of Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade". The recording is available online at www.bbc.co.uk/arts/poetry/outloud/tennyson.shtml and though it is distorted in quality, it is invaluable as it reveals Tennyson's passion for his subject. The most emotionally powerful lines are barely audible, and there is a knocking noise at times during the reading that may either be an imperfection or an intentional sound effect made by Tennyson.

The first visual dramatization of the charge is a short, silent, black-and-white film made in 1912 titled The Charge of the Light Brigade, starring James Gordon and Richard Neill. It is available as a bonus feature on the DVD edition of the 1968 film, from the British Film Institute.

A quarter of a century later, a film of the same name was made in Hollywood directed by Michael Curtiz, starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (Warner Brothers, 1936). It is available on VHS from Warner Studios.

In 1968, Tony Richardson produced a film based on the event, also titled The Charge of the Light Brigade starring Trevor Howard, Vanessa Redgrave, and John Gielgud. This film relies on Cecil Woodham-Smith's interpretation of the charge as presented in his book The Reason Why. It is available on DVD from MGM/UA Video.

The charge was dramatized using both live action and computer graphics in an hour-long television documentary called Charge of the Light Brigade. The program was produced by John Farren and Red Vision. It is currently unavailable.

The year 1854 serves as a defining moment in the history of the British army. On March 27, the British government joined France in declaring war on Russia to defend the beleaguered Ottoman empire, thereby committing British troops to a European theater of war for the first time since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The Crimean War would prove to be perhaps the most ineptly conducted campaign in British military history, as the high command stumbled from one disaster to another. Yet if 1854 was a defining moment for the British army as a whole—a fiasco that would hasten the implementation of widespread reforms—the events of October 25 represent a watershed in the illustrious history of the British cavalry. The Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava, launched against a seemingly impregnable position, was the last great assault of the British cavalry. Although the 17th Lancers would administer the last rites to the Zulu impi at Ulundi 25 years later, and the 21st Lancers would have its costly moment of glory against the Sudanese Mahdists at Omdurman in 1898, Balaclava outshone them both. Just as George Armstrong Custer's fatal miscalculation at the Little Bighorn has been popularly viewed as the classic example of the last stand genre, so can the Charge of the Light Brigade be regarded as the cavalry's legendary and infamous apotheosis.

Yet even while the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson dismissed the question with its celebration of the soldier's devotion to duty, ever since 1854 legions of military and civilian historians have pondered the reason why. Why did the Light Brigade ride against the Russian guns?

In the assault's aftermath Lord George Paget, who had rallied the Light Brigade at the Russian batteries, caustically reflected that "There is, or rather there was, an officer named Captain Nolan, who writes books, and was a great man in his own estimation … the principal cause of the disaster." Paget's criticism was directed at Captain Lewis Edward Nolan, widely regarded as the finest horseman in the British army. Notwithstanding a distinguished line of reckless cavaliers from Prince Rupert of the Rhine and King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, to Joachim Murat and Michel Ney, to say nothing of Custer and J.E.B. Stuart, Nolan is one of the most controversial figures in the history of mounted warfare. Certainly he is inextricably linked with the most controversial action in cavalry history.

Nolan came to prominence at a time when technological developments threatened to render cavalry obsolete. Born in 1818, Nolan had served in the 10th Imperial (Hungarian) Hussar Regiment and the 15th Hussars. He was obsessed with the flair and supremacy of mounted combat, writing two books extolling its virtues, including Cavalry: Its History and Tactics.

The British cavalry had traditionally been regarded as the finest horsemen yet the worst led in Europe. For every John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough and hero of Blenheim (1704) and Ramillies (1706), there was a score of Lucans and Cardigans, aristocrats with little concept of handling cavalry effectively. Such officers were concerned mostly with the appearance of their regiments (Cardigan spent 10,000 pounds sterling a year from his own pocket on the upkeep of his 11th Hussars), and singularly unable to differentiate between the requirements of fox hunting and the battlefield.

Matters came to a head at Balaclava on October 25. The Light Brigade's role in the battle began with Cardigan, inevitably, squandering another invitation to attack by failing to move in support of Brigadier Sir John Scarlett's Heavy Brigade. As it was, Scarlett's audacious uphill charge against heavy odds had miraculously succeeded in throwing the Russian cavalry back. Had Cardigan committed his brigade, the Russians might have been utterly routed. For once, such inactivity was not lost on Raglan. Increasingly perturbed by his cavalry's failure to respond to his previous three orders, and responding to Russian efforts to capture the guns on the Causeway Heights, Raglan dictated his notorious fourth order to his quartermaster general, Sir Richard Airey: "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."

Even the fourth order failed to clearly convey Raglan's wishes. Whose front? Which guns? The issue was further complicated by Raglan's additional verbal instructions to his galloper. "Tell Lord Lucan the cavalry is to attack immediately." The excited courier—Captain Lewis Nolan—rode away with the words, "I'll lead them myself. I'll lead them on."

The cavalry commander was unable to see the guns referred to in the order from the latter position, thus prompting one of the most infamous exchanges in military history.

"Attack, sir?" Lucan inquired, thoroughly bemused by his orders. "Attack what? What guns, sir?"

The 607 troopers of the Light Brigade rode on and finally did succeed in storming the batteries, at a cost of 109 men killed, 120 wounded and 58 taken prisoner.

The storming of the batteries at Balaclava was a throwback to the era of the cavalier, a last glorious and romantic assault before the onset of total war. General Pierre Joseph Fran÷ois Bosquet's famous remark, "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre," is a fitting tribute—and requiem—to its memory.

Source: Richard Barker, "Britain's Last Cavalier," in Military History, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2004, pp. 42-49.

Natalie M. Houston

In the following excerpt, Houston observes that sonnets such "Charge of the Light Brigade" became a bridge between historical events and individuals during the time of the Crimean War.

In response to the swell of public opinion, British poets and artists produced a great number of patriotic works dealing with the Crimea. Most of these are today forgotten, except perhaps for Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade." As public support for the war dwindled towards its conclusion and thereafter, Tennyson's, and other artists', enthusiasm for the war despite its horrors soon came to be seen as an embarrassment.

When news of the charge of the Light Cavalry Brigade on 25 October 1854 reached England two weeks later, patriotic observers of the war's progress were left to wonder at the "splendid self-sacrifice" with the leader in The Times on 13 November: "Two great armies, composed of four nations, saw from the slopes of a vast amphitheatre seven hundred British cavalry proceed at a rapid pace, and in perfect order, to certain destruction. Such a spectacle was never seen before, and we trust will never be repeated."

The theatrical qualities of the event were not lost on The Times, which asked: "There is something in the pomp and solemnity of this fatal exploit which takes it out of ordinary war, and makes it a grand national sacrifice … What is the meaning of a spectacle so strange, so terrific, so disastrous, and yet so grand?" These repeated invocations of the charge as an observed spectacle in need of interpretation self-consciously acknowledge its performance for the readers in England ten days later. The novelty and force of Russell's account could only be described in visual terms:

Small consolation as it is, survivors, friends, and the public will be thankful that the terrible scene of the 25th had spectators who could appreciate it, and an historian worthy to relate it. Few of our readers will hesitate to allow that they seldom read an incident of war described by so graphic a pen as that of our correspondent in the Crimea. The picture of those valleys and heights, the morning alarm, the enemy stealing onwards … are pictures that we are confident will never leave the memory of the least retentive reader.

After reading the accounts in The Times, Alfred Tennyson wrote his "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which was published in The Examiner on 9 December. This earliest published version of his galloping lyric followed Russell's account fairly closely:

    Into the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred,
    For up came an order which
    Some one had blundered.
    'Forward, the Light Brigade!
    Take the guns,' Nolan said:
    Into the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.

Tennyson also borrowed specific details from the newspaper, such as the phrases "the valley of death" and "sabr[ed] the gunners." Tennyson heavily revised the poem for Maud, and Other Poems, published in July 1855, writing a new conclusion and removing the phrase "someone had blundered" and Captain Nolan's name. When a chaplain at the front requested printed copies of the poem, because "It is the greatest favourite of the soldiers—half are singing it & all want to have on black & white—so as to read [it]—what has so taken them," Tennyson restored the poem's original ending and rewrote the second stanza to create "the soldier's version" which would remain essentially authoritative.

Tennyson arranged to have 2000 copies of this revised version of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" printed and sent to the soldiers, whose enthusiasm for it removed his doubts about his ability to write a war poem.

Tennyson made numerous changes to the poem and was sensitive (and susceptible) to criticism of it, in large part because it soon became clear that assigning responsibility for the disaster was a matter of some debate. Yet the poem represents the observers of the action as unified in their response: "All the world wondered." The repetition of the phrase in the last stanza aligns the awe of the event's actual spectators with that of the newspaper's readers, and the poem's readers. "Wonder" in this poem thus includes the oft-quoted astonishment expressed by the French general Bosquet ("C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre") as well as the poem's patriotic "O the wild charge they made." This transformation is achieved through the unacknowledged function of the newspaper in transmitting the spectacle of the event and in uniting its readers in their affective response. The "world" thus unified in Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" consists of those reader-observers who can recognize and celebrate the glory in the event. As Jerome McGann has shown, Tennyson's poem encourages this celebratory response by presenting the light cavalry brigade as an aesthetic object. Tennyson does this by presenting the cavaliers "as if they were cast in a tableau, or in a heroic painting … modelled upon a certain tradition of heroic military art." As Romantic painters like Gros and Géricault glorified Napoleon despite England's victory, at Waterloo, Tennyson reclaims an aesthetic heroism for the Light Cavalry despite their disastrous end. The compelling descriptions in Russell's journalistic report that The Times editorial found so "graphic" are thus transformed into art which encourages patriotic pride rather than questions or debate.

In doing this, Tennyson makes the act of observation transparent, removing the newspaper's repeated acknowledgment of the event's spectacular quality. In early drafts of the poem, stanza four began: "We saw their sabres bare/Flash all at once in air," drawing on Russell's first-hand account of the charge. In changing this anchored observation to a simple statement ("Flashed all their sabres bare"), not only are "the riders … made to assume the classic pose of the equestrian hero in action," as McGann notes, but the observers are removed from the scene. Tennyson's revised poem does not recognize the observers as part of the poem's subject and therefore does not specify who sees the charge or how this vision takes place. The cavalry charge is simply present in the poem, replayed in the inexorable move forward and back. The poem creates this aestheticized object by eliding an important historical aspect of the event namely its performance for observers both on the battlefield and at home in England.

The early version of the poem published in the first edition of Maud concluded with a stanza that self-consciously acknowledged the poem's memorializing activity:

    Honor the brave and bold!
    Long shall the tale be told,
    Yea, when our babes are old—
    How they rode onward.

Shannon and Ricks suggest that this alternate ending and Tennyson's other early revisions seem "to have been largely a function of misperceiving his audience and of revising his poem in terms of an elite metropolitan reader. Once galvanized to address the soldier in the Crimea, he moved confidently and unerringly to create an undying utterance of the English tongue." In removing this acknowledgement of the poem's function for the event's domestic audience, Tennyson created a self-enclosed text that exhorts the members of an unspecified and unified ideologic world ("all the world wondered"). That self-enclosed quality contributes to the aestheticization of death that Shannon and Ricks find transcendent and eternal. The final version of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" bears few traces of the discursive mediations of the Crimean conflict—its reporting in the newspapers and the perceived need for domestic voices to "tell the tale" in order to make sense of it—the very impulse that originally led Tennyson to compose his poem.

Source: Natalie M. Houston, "Reading the Victorian Souvenir: Sonnets and Photographs of the Crimean War," in Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 14, No. 2, 2001, pp. 353-83.

SOURCES

Bennett, James R., "The Historical Abuse of Literature: Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama and the Crimean War," in English Studies, Vol. 62, No. 1, 1981, pp. 34-45.

Cavendish, Richard, "Publication of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade," in History Today, December 2004, p. 53.

Kipling, Rudyard, "The Last of the Light Brigade," The Kipling Society, http://www.kipling.org.uk (August 31, 2005), originally published in 1891.

McGovern, George, "The Reason Why," in The Nation, April 21, 2003, p. 18.

Sassoon, Siegfried, "Counter-Attack," The Poetry Connection, http://www.poetryconnection.net (August 31, 2005), originally published in Counter-Attack and Other Poems, EP Dutton, 1918.

Tennyson, Alfred, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1855 version), Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina, www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/britlit/tenn/charge.html (August 2, 1999), originally published in Maud and Other Poems, Edward Moxon, 1855.

――――――, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1870 version) Representative Poetry Online, eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem2116.html (2003), originally published in Poems, ed. Hallam Lord Tennyson and annotated by Alfred Lord Tennyson, Macmillan, 1908.