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.
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