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The Charge of the Light Brigade is one of those well documented events from history that we are all fairly familiar with. Summed up in the immortal lines of Tennyson's Poem there resonating line of "Theirs not to reason why" seems to say it all. Six hundred ordinary cavalrymen ordered to charge over a mile of hostile ground into Russian cannon fire from which most never returned. The world has now accepted that these troops were the paragons of unswerving obedience sent to their deaths by blundering senior officers. Recent evidence shows a very different if no less virtuous story.

It was Lord Raglan, the Commander in Chief of the British forces at the battle of Balaclava in 1854, who, under the mistaken impression that the Russian forces were retreating from battle gave the order for the cavalry to attack, even in the face of the overwhelming artillery fire that faced them from the other end of the valley. His subordinate on the field was commander of the Cavalry Division, the Earl of Lucan who passed on the order to Light Brigade commander the Earl of Cardigan, both men were aware of the "uselessness of the attack" to quote Lucan himself, yet they obeyed the order none the less. Blind obedience in keeping with the British military "stiff upper lip", or was there other factors at work here. In later years battlefield communication was revolutionised with the heliograph, but for now battle field orders were vague and confusing being issued over long distances in confusing situations in very brief terms. So why didn't such erroneous orders lead to catastrophic results on a regular basis. The reason lies in our misunderstanding of the way command worked in those times. Far from being the strict and inflexible system we have come to expect, senior officers were expected to exercise wide discretion when implementing any orders that they received. An example of this is the fact that General Cathcart, who was ordered to bring his 4000 infantry to attack along side the Light Brigade, refused point blank, no reprimand was made after the event and the fact that he was allowed to go into action two weeks later shows that no court martial was ever called about the matter.

In recent times little attention has been paid to how the wishes of the men influenced decisions of leadership and if we look there we find a much more interesting story. Lucan and Cardigan knew that their men were not happy. A cholera epidemic had hit the brigade hard killing 4 per cent of the entire brigade.

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