V. of remembrance. I speak of the moments when the CHAP. Russian column of horse, with all its vast weight, was moving down the hillside against Scarlett's few horsemen, then suddenly caught in their march, and hastening under great stress of time to prepare a front for the enemy. The admirable composure then evinced by our people of all ranks must have been seen by the enemy, and perhaps may have governed the issue, by inducing him to come to a halt. A commander of horse, in general, is accustomed to seek his victory by gathering a great momentum, and directing the force of his onset against some object more or less fragile-as, for example, against a body of infantry drawn up in a hollow square; but these were not the conditions under which Scarlett had to attack; and accordingly, his feat has hardly supplied a good instance of what men commonly mean when they speak of a cavalry charge. On the contrary, the physical impossibility of overthrowing the enemy by the mere shock of a cavalry charge was the very circumstance which gave to this fight its peculiar splendour. When Scarlett rode straight at the centre of a hanging thicket of sabres and lances which not only outflanked him enormously on his right hand as well as his left, but confronted him too with the blackness of squadrons upon squadrons in mass, he did not of course imagine that by any mere impact of his too scanty line he could shake the depths of a column extending far up the hillside; but he thought he might cleave his way in, and he knew that his people would follow him. He survived V. CHAP. the enterprise, and even proved to the world that close fighting under the conditions which he accepted might be a task less desperate than it seemed; but his hopefulness, if hopefulness he had when he drove. his horse into the column, could hardly have been warranted, at the time, by the then known teachings of human experience.* The time occupied by the fight. The means needed for upon the Russians the full By the judgment of Lord Lucan-not tested, however, by the hand of the watch-it has been computed that from the moment when General Scarlett commenced his charge, to the one when the Russian mass broke, the time was about eight minutes. In order that the Allies should be able to reap bringing from this fight of our Heavy Brigade any fruits at all proportioned to its brilliancy, it was necessary that they should have had on the ground some fresh and unbroken squadrons which would pursue the retreating mass, and convert its defeat into ruin, or at least into grievous disaster. Were no such squadrons at hand? consequences of their defeat. VI. Whilst this combat of Scarlett's was raging, people witnessed, hard by, a more tranquil scene, and one which indeed was so free from all the tumult of battle as to offer a kind of repose to eyes wearied with gazing at strife. Overlooking the flank of the Russian cavalry in its struggle with Scarlett's brigade, and at a distance from the combatants which * What is the closest historical parallel that can be found for the charge of Scarlett's three hundred ? V. has been computed at 400 or 500 yards, there CHAP. stood ranged in two lines, a body of near 700 men. They all of them bore arms; they all wore military uniforms; and each man was either mounted, or else had his charger beside him. They were troops of the same nation as Scarlett's combating regiments. In truth, they were nothing less than the famous Light Brigade of the English; but, strange to these superb horsemen were engaged for the as spectators, maintaining a rigid neutrality in war which they saw going on between Russia and trality. our Heavy Dragoons. The Light say, the time of time the Brigade at Scarlett's engagement. Its neu of the bri Of the impatience with which our Light Cavalry Impatience chafed when they found themselves withheld from the gade; fight, some idea perhaps may be formed by any one who recalls to his mind the far-famed exploit they were destined to be performing at a later hour of the same day. It was not without a grating sense of the contrast that, whilst thus condemned to inaction, they saw Scarlett hotly engaged; and although the commander of the Light Brigade, in giving vent to his mortification, used one of those cavalry forms of speech which express approval or endearment in words of imprecation, it is not for that the less true that the sentiment which really blended with his natural vexation was one of admiring and generous envy. Lord Cardigan was himself the public and of informant who adduced in a court of justice this Cardigan. picturesque proof of his feelings-'We were specta tors,' says one of his witnesses, 'of that encounter; and 'those who heard and saw Lord Cardigan during the Lord CHAP. ' time that was going on, will not easily forget the cha V. The sur prise with neutrality of the Light Brigade was observed. grin and disappointment he evinced when riding up ' and down our line. He constantly repeated, "Damn "those Heavies, they have the laugh of us this day."' As may well be supposed, this abstention of our which the Light Cavalry was observed by the Russians with surprise and thankfulness, by the Headquarters Staff of the English with surprise and vexation, by the French with surprise and curiosity. If Canrobert and those of his people who looked down upon the plain of Balaclava grew warm and enthusiastic in their admiration of Scarlett's exploit, they were all the more ready with questions, surmises, and reasonings when they saw that, during the fight thus maintained by one of our two cavalry brigades against a largely outnumbering force, the other brigade remained motionless-nay, even in part dismounted. French in regard to the English lie deposited for the most part in layers or strata, disclosing the periods of the several formations; and if the nature of the comments which were uttered could be inferred from known habits of thought and of speech, it might be found that the theory put forward by any French officer as serving to account for the phenomenon was adopted in general by his comrades of the same age, and repudiated by such of them as were either much older or much younger; but whether, with their greyheaded colonel, the more aged officers of a regiment made sure that the Count of Cardigan was a great feudal chief, with a brigade composed of his serfs and retainers, who, for some cause or other, had taken dire The impressions of the V. umbrage, and resolved, like Achilles, that his myrmi- CHAP. dons should be withheld from the fight; or whether, on the authority of the major-less aged, though equally confident they held that the feudal system in England had been recently mitigated, and that the true solution of the enigma was to be found in the law of 'Le box'-the law making it criminal for an Englishman to interrupt a good fight, and enjoining that singular formation which Albion called 'a ring;'-whatever, in short, might be the variety of special theories which these French observers adopted, there was one proposition at least in which all would be sure to agree. All, all would take part in the chorus which asserted that the English were a heap of 'originals.' Yet, amongst the French officers thus striving to solve the enigma, one at least was inclined to trace the neutrality of our Light Brigade to a cause of miscarriage which, far from being exclusively English, has often condemned the great cavalry forces of the Continent to the imputation of losing opportunities. No less clearly than any of his comrades the Vicomte de Nöé perceived the strange error which had been committed; but he traced it to a want of that initiative power which enables a general of cavalry to seize his occasion.* * 'Repulsed with loss,' says the Vicomte, 'it [the Russian cavalry] ' regained the heights, where it might have been annihilated if the 'English Light Cavalry, under the orders of Lord Cardigan, had charged it during its retreat. There was the occasion, there should ' have been exercised the initiative of the cavalry general, and later in 'the day it was made apparent that bravery is no sufficient substitute 'for initiative.' |