Charge of the Light Brigade 1854: Nolan's Fatal Gesture at Balaklava

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On October 25, 1854, during the Battle of Balaklava in the Crimean War, Lord Raglan watched from a high ridge as Russian troops tried to haul away captured Turkish guns from redoubts on the Causeway Heights. He dictated an order, written down by Richard Airey, for the cavalry to advance rapidly and stop them, and sent it with Captain Louis Nolan plus a spoken instruction to attack immediately. Down in the valley, Lord Lucan could see none of it. When he asked which guns, Nolan swept his arm toward the entrenched Russian battery at the far end of a mile-long valley. Lucan passed the order to his hated brother-in-law, Lord Cardigan, who led about 670 light cavalrymen into fire from three sides.

Nolan was killed by a shell fragment in the opening minute, possibly while trying to redirect the charge. Cardigan reached the guns, fought briefly, then rode back alone and dined on his private yacht in Balaklava Harbor. Lucan held back the Heavy Brigade, and only the French Chasseurs d'Afrique silenced the guns on the Fedyukhin Heights. Nearly half the brigade was killed, wounded or captured. Raglan blamed Lucan, Lucan blamed Raglan and the dead Nolan, and Cardigan came home a hero, while Tennyson's poem turned a blunder into a legend of obedience.

• The Heavy Brigade had made a successful charge against a larger Russian cavalry force earlier that same morning.
• The battery at the end of the valley had an estimated 30 to 40 guns backed by 25,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry.
• At the first muster after the charge, only 195 men still had horses.
• French Marshal Pierre Bosquet called the charge magnificent but not war, and the Russians reportedly assumed the British riders were drunk.
• A modern combat model suggests Raglan's intended attack uphill on the Causeway Heights might have cost even more lives than the charge down the valley.