From the chronicle – own translation – sent from the Crimea by the correspondent William Howard Russell (Dublin, 1820 – London, 1907) to The Times (14-XI-1854) twenty days after the charge of the Light Brigade, an episode that happened 170 years ago today. Mythified mainly by cinema. Russell and photographer Roger Fenton were the first journalists to cover an armed conflict of that magnitude. Russell, sent by his newspaper, and Fenton by the British government as a professional embedded in the army. It was forbidden, however, to photograph the horrors of the war in order not to demoralize the relatives of the soldiers and the public in general.
When Lord Lucan (Chief of the Cavalry Division) read Lord Raglan’s (Senior Chief of the Army) order from Captain Nolan (Raglan’s aide-de-camp), he asked: “Whither shall we advance? “. Nolan pointed to the Russian line and said, “There’s the enemy, and there’s the guns, sir. It is a duty to take them”. A reluctant Lord Lucan ordered Lord Cardigan (head of the Light Cavalry Brigade) to advance towards the guns. He did not cower, but he saw the terrible odds against him. (…) At 11:10 the Light Brigade went into combat. It was a brigade that barely formed a regiment. When he went to the front, the Russians opened fire from cannons, musketry and rifles. The British marched proudly, shining in the morning sun with all the pride and splendor of war. We could hardly believe the evidence. Surely that handful of men would charge an army in position? Unfortunately, it was all too true: his brazen courage knew no bounds. They advanced in two lines, accelerating as they neared the enemy. Never did those who, unable to help, witness their heroic countrymen throw themselves into the arms of death, witnessed a more frightful spectacle. At a distance of 1,200 yards, the enemy troop activated the eruption of thirty iron mouths, a terrifying torrent of smoke and flame through which the deadly bullets roared. The mounts galloped over dead men and horses, between mounts flying wounded or riderless through the air of the plain. The first line breaks, mixes with the second, but they do not stop or slow down their frantic race. With thinned ranks, thinned by the deadly guns which the Russians had placed with the most evil precision, with a halo of steel flashing over their heads, and with shouts of fury from some enraged combatants, they leapt into the smoke of the batteries But before we lost sight of them, the plain was already strewn with inert bodies and the gutted corpses of horses. They were exposed to the oblique fire of the batteries on the hills on both sides, as well as to the direct fire of the musketry. Through the clouds we could see the sabers flashing as they rode towards the guns and surrounded them, knocking down gunners. We saw them galloping back after breaking through a column of Russian infantry and scattering like straw as the fire from the battery from a hill swept them to nothing. With admirable courage they made their way through the columns that encircled them when suddenly it became a cruel act unparalleled in the modern warfare of civilized nations. When the cavalry storm had already passed, some Russian gunners returned to the guns. They saw their own cavalry mingled with the soldiers who had just passed over them, and to the eternal misfortune of the Russian word, those wretches threw a murderous discharge upon the mass of fighting men, decimating both friend and foe. By 11:35 not a single British soldier, except the dead and dying, was left in the face of the bloodthirsty Muscovite guns.
Source: www.ara.cat
