Captain Nolan pointed with his finger to the mass of Russian cavalry, the six battalions of infantry, and the thirty guns that faced them, and said: “There are the enemy, sir, and there are the guns; it is your duty to take them.”
Don Quixote in his tilt against the windmill was not so rash and reckless as the gallant fellows who prepared thus to rush on almost certain death.
It is a maxim of war that “cavalry never act without a support,” that infantry should be close at hand. The only support our light cavalry had was the reserve of heavy cavalry a long way behind them.
As they swept proudly past, officers could scarcely believe the evidence of their senses. Surely that handful of men are not going to charge an army in position! At the distance of 1,200 yards from thirty iron mouths there belched forth a flood of smoke and flame. There were instant gaps in our ranks—dead men and horses, riderless horses starting aside—but the remnant rode on into the smoke of the batteries. You could see their sabres flashing as they cut down the gunners; you saw them return, break through a column of infantry, then, exposed to a flank fire from the battery on the hill, scattered, broken, wounded, dismounted, flying towards their base. But at this moment a large body of Lancers was hurled on their flank. They were cutting their way through this mass when there took place an act of atrocity without parallel in modern warfare. The Russian gunners had returned to their guns: they saw their own cavalry mingled with the troopers who had just ridden over them, and, to their eternal disgrace, poured in a murderous volley of grape and canister, thus mingling friend and foe in one common ruin.
All our operations in the trenches were lost sight of in the interest of this melancholy day, in which our Light Brigade was annihilated by their own rashness and by the brutality of a ferocious enemy.
“November 3.—There were many spies in our camp—sometimes dressed like French officers—and we not clever enough to detect the bad French. The other night the sentinel before the house of the Provost-Marshal in Balaklava was astonished to see a horse, with a sack of corn on his back, deliberately walking past him in the moonlight. He went over to seize the animal, when the sack of corn suddenly became changed into a full-grown Cossack, who drove the spurs into his horse and vanished!
“Our sentries often fraternized with the Russian sentries. A few nights ago our men saw some Russian soldiers coming towards them without arms, and they supposed them to be deserters; but, on coming nearer, they made signs that they wanted a light for their pipes, and then they stayed a few minutes, talking. First Russian: ‘Englise bono!’ First Englishman: ‘Ruskie bono!’ Second Russian: ‘Oslem no bono!’ Second Englishman: ‘Ah, Turk no bono!’ pretending to run away as if frightened, upon which all the party go into roars of laughter, and then, after shaking hands, they retire to their respective beats, ready for the bloody work of war.”
From Sir W. Howard Russell’s “Letters from the Crimea.” By kind permission of Messrs. George Routledge and Sons, Ltd.