![]() ![]() And without Tennyson's poem, would Richard Caton Woodville, the pre-eminent Victorian painter of battle scenes, have been moved to produce not one but two iconic images of the charge: the first depicting the 17th lancers raked by gunfire and the second showing the 11th hussars, having reached the enemy cannon, cutting down the Russian gunners? Without the extraordinary vividness of Russell's journalistic prose,Īlfred, Lord Tennyson, would not have been inspired to write his poem 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', its perfectly pitched rhythms destined to be recited by generations of schoolchildren to come. But Chilianwala had not had its William Howard Russell to report what happened for the benefit of The Times newspaper's mass readership. And there had been military disasters before: Chilianwala, a battle fought in India five years earlier during the Anglo-Sikh wars, had seen an even worse cavalry débâcle. ![]() Why should this be? Although a setback, the charge involved only 673 horsemen, in continental terms little more than the strength of a cavalry regiment. But for the public of today, one event above all has come to represent the incompetence and folly of the Crimean War: the charge of the light brigade. Indeed, revelation of the war's mismanagement was sufficient to bring down the government and set in train a hurried process of reform. ![]() Its participation in what became known as the Crimean War, fought against the only European opponent that Britain faced in the hundred years between Waterloo and the outbreak of the First World War, proved a traumatic experience. One hundred and fifty years ago, on 28 March 1854, Great Britain declared war on Russia. ![]()
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