Of the Seventeenth Lancers Captain Winter, Lieutenant Thomson, twenty-two men, and ninety-nine horses were killed. Captain Morris, desperately wounded, finding himself deserted by the Russian officer to whom he had surrendered and left to the tender mercies of the Cossacks, contrived to catch a loose horse, and, when this had been killed under him, made shift to stagger back to the place where Captain Nolan had fallen. There he dropped, but was tended under fire by Surgeon Mouat and by Sergeant Wooden of the Seventeenth, both of whom received the Victoria Cross for the service. Captain Robert White was badly wounded before reaching the battery, and Captain Webb wounded to the death. Sir William Gordon, who had passed through the battery unharmed, came back from pursuing the Russian cavalry with five sabre wounds in the head. So terribly had he been hacked that the doctors said that on the 25th October he was “their only patient with his head off.” Hardly able to keep himself in the saddle he lay on his horse’s neck, trying to keep the blood out of his eyes, and rode back down the valley at a walk. Being intercepted by a body of Russian cavalry he made for the squadron interval, followed by two or three men, and when the Russians, in their endeavour to bar his passage, left an opening in the squadron, he managed to canter through it and in spite of pursuit to finally complete his escape. His horse, which was shot through the shoulders, managed to carry him out of action, but died, poor gallant beast, very soon after. 1854—25th Oct. Thirty-three men and almost every surviving horse were also wounded; Trumpeter Brittain, who had acted as Lord Cardigan’s trumpeter on that day, dying of his hurts in hospital. Lieutenant Chadwick, and thirteen more men, all of them wounded, were taken prisoners. Lieutenant Wombwell, being like Captain Morris abandoned by his captors to the Cossacks, escaped, after having two horses killed under him.
So ended the work of the Seventeenth on the 25th October 1854. It is customary to look upon the attack of the Light Brigade as a mere desperate ride into the Russian battery. It was far more than this. The advance down the valley through the murderous fire from front and both flanks was but the prelude to a brilliant attack. Discipline never failed even among the scattered fragments of the first line. Where their own officers were still alive with them, the men of the Seventeenth, however trifling in numbers, rallied, as under Captain Morris, and followed them to the attack on the Russian cavalry. Where an officer of another corps rallied them, they followed him with the same devotion and intrepidity. The little knot with Major Mayow, under his leadership attacked ten or fifteen times their number of Russians, defeated them, pursued them, halted, rallied on the 8th Hussars, attacked with them successfully once more, and stood ready to renew the attack yet again if supports should come. Where, again, no officer was present, the non-commissioned officers, true to regimental tradition, readily took command; and Sergeant O’Hara and Corporal Morley proved themselves worthy successors of Tucker and Stephenson.
Had the attack of the Light Brigade been supported there is reason to suppose that it would have been brilliantly successful; for the Russian cavalry had been thoroughly scared, and even the infantry had been formed into squares to resist the onslaught of the few score of men who had passed the battery. Lord Lucan had indeed every intention of supporting it with the Heavy Brigade, and actually brought that brigade within destructive fire; 1854. but seeing from his advanced position up the valley the frightful losses of the Light Brigade, he could not bring himself to sacrifice the Heavies also. Pulling up under the cross-fire of the batteries, his horse wounded in two places, and his own thigh injured by a musket ball, he took his resolution and ordered the Heavy Brigade to retire. What his feelings may have been when he saw the wreck of his old regiment return to him we can only guess. Yet this was not the first occasion on which the Seventeenth had charged ten times their number of cavalry; they had done it once before at Cowpens against a far more dangerous and resolute enemy.
After Balaclava the Seventeenth, like the other four regiments of the Light Brigade, had almost ceased to exist in the Crimea, from the extent of its loss both in men and horses. A supply of remounts was, however, obtained by the capture of about 100 Russian troop-horses which stampeded into the British camp on the night of the 26th October.
5th Nov.
The next great action of the war was the battle of Inkermann on the 5th November. In this engagement the brunt of the work fell, from the nature of the case, upon the infantry. The Light Brigade was, however, brought under fire late in the day in support of some French reinforcements; Lord George Paget, who was in command that day, having received instructions, and also a particularly urgent request from the Commander-in-Chief of the French, to keep his men, a bare 200 all told, within supporting distance of the French cavalry. The losses of the Light Brigade amounted to an officer and five men killed, and five men wounded, of whom the officer and another of the killed and one of the wounded belonged to the Seventeenth. Cornet Cleveland, who had escaped at Balaclava where so many fell, was the only English cavalry officer who was touched at Inkermann. His death reduced the number of unwounded officers of the regiment to three.
25th Nov.
Three weeks later the establishment of the Seventeenth was raised to eight troops—a curious reflection for the handful of men who represented it in the Crimea. 1854.Some months were yet to pass before the Seventeenth at Sebastopol could make any show as a regiment, and those months were those of the Crimean winter. So much has been written of that terrible time that it would be out of place to say much of it here. Suffice it that between bad luck and bad management both men and horses suffered very severely. Probably there never was a time excepting the winter of 1854 when the troop-horses of a British cavalry division were almost without exception hog-maned and rat-tailed, the poor creatures having eaten each other’s hair in the extremity of hunger. As to the men of the Seventeenth, it is enough to say that they shared the misery and hardship which was borne by the rest of the army, which was cruel enough. But hard as was the Crimean winter, it must not be treated, simply because a British war-correspondent was present and a British Parliament was busy, as an unique trial of endurance. A regiment which had fought through the Carolina campaigns and the deadly war in the West Indies had little new to learn of misery, sickness, and death.
1855.
In the months of April and June of the following year the regiment received large drafts from England, and by the 21st July was enabled to detach a squadron of 100 men and horses, under the command of Captain Learmonth, to join a force of British cavalry which was employed in collecting forage and supporting the French in the Baidar Valley. This squadron rejoined headquarters on the 19th August, in time to be present together with the rest of the regiment at the battle of the Tchernaya. 20th Aug.> 8th Sept. Three weeks later Sebastopol was evacuated, and the war was practically over.