Background to The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Author’s note : This poem (written at Farringford, and published in The Examiner, Dec. 9, 1854) was written after reading the first report of the Times correspondent, where only 607 sabres are mentioned as having taken part in this charge (Oct. 25, 1854). Drayton's Agincourt was not in my mind; my poem is dactylic, and founded on the phrase, ‘Some one had blundered’. At the request of Lady Franklin I distributed copies among our soldiers in the Crimea and the hospital at Scutari. The charge lasted only twenty-five minutes. I have heard that one of the men, with the blood streaming from his leg, as he was riding by his officer, said, `Those d--d heavies will never chaff us again,' and fell down dead.

The Charge of the Light Brigade : an eyewitness account of the carnage is included in The Light Cavalry Brigade in the Crimea Extracts from the Letters and Journal of General Lord George Paget (John Murray, 1881). Paget was in the second line : ‘There was no one, I believe, who, when he started on this advance, was insensible to the desperate undertaking in which he was about to be engaged; but I shall not easily forget the first incidents that confirmed what before was but surmise. Ere we had advanced half our distance, bewildered horses from the first line, riderless, rushed in upon our ranks, in every state of mutilation, intermingled soon with riders who had been unhorsed, some with a limping gait, that told too truly of their state. Anon, one was guiding one's own horse (as willing as oneself in such benevolent precautions) so as to avoid trampling on the bleeding objects in one's path -- sometimes a man, sometimes a horse -- and so we went on. "Right flank, keep up. Close in to your centre." The smoke, the noise, the cheers, the groans, the ‘ping, ping’ whizzing past one's head; the ‘whirr’ of the fragments of shells; the well-known ‘slush’ of that unwelcome intruder on one's ears! -- what a sublime confusion it was! The ‘din of battle!’ -- how expressive the term, and how entirely insusceptible of description!’

For more information about the military reality see: http://www.pinetreeweb.com/13th-balaclava2.htm