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Tennyson’s immortal lines on the Charge of the Light Brigade provide the title of Cecil Woodham-Smith’s classic 1953 book on the extraordinary saga of incompetence and aristocratic arrogance that led to one of our most infamous military disasters.
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do or die;
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
For Woodham-Smith, a social historian by specialism, the backstory was crucial, and half the book traces the careers of Lord Lucan and Lord Cardigan, and how Britain’s ‘purchase system’ catapulted touchy, egotistical amateurs into senior military rank, bypassing in the process officers with decades of proven experience in the field. In compiling this history, she accessed family papers from the modern descendants of Lucan and Cardigan, as well as dispatches and War Office correspondence, law reports, and newspaper archives.
The purchase system allowed a rich man to buy his first commission, and then immediately go on half-pay, seeing no actual military service. He could then buy each successive step up the promotion ladder, at enormous cost. By this process, George Bingham (later Lord Lucan) became major of the 17th Lancers at 25, having appeared on the books of nine different regiments over a nine-year period. In a similar manner, his brother-in-law Lord Brudenell (later Cardigan) bought the lieutenant-colonelcy of the 15th Hussars at the then-astronomical cost of £40,000 (more than £3m in today’s money).
Ridiculous though this system sounds, it safeguarded the country (so it was argued) from military dictatorship at the hands of professional soldiers, such as those deployed by Cromwell after the Civil War. It could also, surprisingly, produce military geniuses, such as the Duke of Wellington.
Acrimony and incompetence
By the time of the Crimean War, the British Army was dominated by amateurs with virtually no professional training, and an obsession with spit and polish, drill, and regimental protocol. A huge reservoir of talent, the battle-hardened Indian Army, was ignored, with experienced officers totally sidelined.
Much of the book chronicles the growing acrimony between Lucan and Cardigan, and their common tendency to pick fights with fellow officers, often pursued through the columns of national newspapers. Cardigan had an appalling reputation for imprisoning and court-martialling his own officers for trivial infringements, such as refusing to accept expensive new stable jackets for their men or bringing the wrong drink to the officers’ mess.
The Crimean War of 1854 saw Lucan appointed to command of the cavalry division, and Cardigan given the leadership of the Light Brigade in that division. The cavalry officers had an enormous sense of superiority and privilege, but Woodham-Smith sees this as a fatal flaw:
The unpleasant truth was that they were completely ignorant of the art of war, had no experience, no education, and no ability. Throughout the British Expeditionary Army which sailed to war in the spring of 1854 the qualifications for command were rank, influence, and privilege.
In particular, observers saw from the first that putting Lucan and Cardigan together was a recipe for disaster: they were both notoriously hard to get on with, and their personal animosity was common knowledge. Cardigan saw his brigade as an independent command and acted accordingly. Lucan, growing increasingly frustrated at this perceived insubordination, responded by micromanaging the brigade through constant instructions on trivia such as facial hair and the correct alignment of tents.
The overall commander, Lord Raglan, had been wounded serving with Wellington, but famously at 65 he was so past it that he referred to the enemy as ‘the French’, even though the latter were now serving alongside the British.
‘There are your guns!’
One of the strengths of the book is the way the author conveys a sense of impending tragedy through the interplay of these flawed characters. The Crimean invasion itself is described as an act of extreme recklessness: ‘The British Army, riddled with cholera, deficient in transport, in baggage animals, in supplies of all kinds, was to be landed on a hostile coast, in an unknown country.’
Astonishingly, this army managed to defeat a superior Russian force in a near-impregnable position on the banks of the Alma, a battle graphically described by Woodham-Smith. She stresses that this was an engagement won by a combination of the discipline and fortitude of the British infantry, and the fact that Russian commanders blundered even more than allied ones.
This advantage was immediately frittered away, first by the cavalry division sitting impotent throughout the battle and failing to pursue a broken enemy, then by the allies failing immediately to storm the thinly garrisoned Sevastopol, the target of the campaign. It was reinforced and a lengthy siege ensued, in which the poorly supplied allies had all the disadvantages.
The Battle of Balaklava is seen as a classic example of the ‘fog of war’, with confusion on both sides. In theory that did not apply, as Lord Raglan was perched 600ft above the battlefield on a hill with a commanding view of all the action. But this led to fatal miscalculations, as he failed to realise that forces which he could see were invisible to each other because of intervening ridges and valleys.
Woodham-Smith analyses the infamous order that launched the catastrophe, scribbled in pencil on flimsy paper: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’
Raglan referred to what was in plain sight for him: retreating Russian infantry on the Causeway Heights removing captured British guns. But for the cavalry at the head of the valley the most obvious guns were the fully manned Russian guns straight ahead at the foot of the valley, on the same level.
The account of the following exchange between Lucan, Cardigan, and Captain Nolan (who volunteered to dash down the hill bearing the order) is dramatic and detailed. Famously, when a baffled Lucan queried the order, Nolan gestured shouting: ‘There, my lord, is your enemy, there are your guns!’ Witnesses recalled him pointing down the valley instead of up to the heights.
Unfortunately, the excitable Nolan, who had been furious at what he saw as the poor handling of the cavalry during the campaign, was the very last person one would want to have transmitting a badly worded order. Cardigan (sensibly, for once) also queried what he saw as an insane instruction, but Lucan said, ‘I know it, but Lord Raglan will have it. We have no choice but to obey’.
The tragic outcome for the men of the Light Division is well known. The recriminations went on for many years to come. Cardigan was lauded as a hero, because he rode right through the Russian guns and back again. Lucan, who held back the Heavy Brigade, was vilified as ‘Lord Look-on’. In time, both men plus Lord Raglan became seen as examples of an ossified class system that rendered the British Army unfit for modern war. The purchase system was abolished in 1871, but some would argue that class has never ceased to be a significant factor in our military.
Led by donkeys?
Nowadays it is questioned whether Woodham-Smith really did establish ‘the reason why’. By settling the issue on the feud between Cardigan and Lucan, she gives the book the dramatic build-up of a novel, leading to a graphic denouement at Balaklava, but she neglects the role played by Lord Raglan, who wrote the fatal order, and by the headstrong, unreliable Captain Nolan, who delivered it in such a peremptory and misleading fashion.
Due in no small part to The Reason Why, the subject of military incompetence became quite popular around the time. Eight years later, Alan Clark’s 1961 book The Donkeys brought harsh criticism of the World War I commanders, and in 1976 British generals were again put under the spotlight by Norman F Dixon in his book On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, exposing them as privileged, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, and traditionalist. While not all will agree with Cecil Woodham-Smith, she certainly triggered a debate.
Cecil Woodham-Smith
Born: 29 April 1896 – Died: 16 March 1977
Nationality: British
The daughter of a military officer, Cecil Woodham-Smith (née Fitzgerald) was an amateur historian from an early age, although she did not begin writing seriously until her mid-40s. After graduating from St Hilda’s College, Oxford, in 1917, she married George Woodham-Smith, a solicitor, and began raising a family. This left little time for scholarship, and only a chance conversation with a London publisher during World War II got her into researching Florence Nightingale. Woodham-Smith’s first book, a biography of the pioneering nurse, won the 1950 James Tait Black Memorial Award. As well as The Reason Why, her books include a 1963 study of the Irish famine and the first instalment of a two-volume biography of Queen Victoria. Woodham-Smith died in 1977 before completing the second volume.
