Who won the Battle of Balaclava?
The Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 was tactically inconclusive, with Russian and British-led Allied forces each holding key ground above the Crimean port. It is remembered above all for the Charge of the Light Brigade, one of the most famous and futile cavalry charges in military history. The charge itself began at about 11:10 that same morning, 25 October 1854.1
On the cold, misty morning of 25 October 1854, Russian columns rolled out of the hills above the little Crimean port of Balaclava, aiming to sever the lifeline of the Allied armies besieging Sevastopol. Within a few hours the ground north of the harbor would witness three episodes that passed straight into legend, one of them among the most famous and most futile cavalry charges in all of military history. Those armies had come within reach of Sevastopol a month earlier by beating Prince Menshikov's Russians at the Alma, the first great battle of the Crimean War.2
When was the Charge of the Light Brigade, and who led it?
The Charge of the Light Brigade took place on 25 October 1854, during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, and began at about 11:10 in the morning. Lord Raglan, the British commander, gave the order; Brigadier General Richard Airey wrote it down; Captain Louis Nolan carried it to Lord Lucan, commander of the cavalry division; and Lord Cardigan led the brigade down the valley.3
The written order, sent at about 10:45, opened with the words “Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front”, but it did not make clear which guns were meant. About 670 men rode in the charge: the National Army Museum gives 673, the muster figure, while William Howard Russell of The Times counted 607 sabers. Nolan was the first man killed, struck down at the head of the charge as it set off. In all, roughly 110 to 120 riders were killed and some 260 to 300 were killed, wounded or captured. The whole action, out to the Russian guns and back, was over by about midday. For how it compares with other famous mounted attacks, see our guide to the greatest cavalry charges in history.4
A supply base worth a battle
Balaclava was more than a fishing village; it was the small harbor through which the British army fed its siege of the great Russian naval fortress of Sevastopol. Every shell, biscuit and blanket for the troops on the heights came through its narrow inlet, so its loss would have been catastrophic. The Russian commander, General Pavel Liprandi, understood this perfectly, and at dawn he threw a large force against the thinly held outer defenses. His men quickly overran a line of redoubts on the Causeway Heights that were garrisoned by Ottoman troops, capturing several British naval guns and opening a path toward the port. Only a scattering of Allied units stood between the advancing Russians and the vulnerable base, and the day would turn on how those units, British, French and Ottoman, could improvise a defense.5
The Thin Red Line
As Russian cavalry surged toward the port, the last obstacle in their way was the 93rd Highlanders under the veteran Sir Colin Campbell. Convention held that infantry should form a dense square to survive a mounted charge, but Campbell had too few men, only around five hundred, and instead drew them up in a line just two ranks deep. He is said to have told them there would be no retreat, that they must die where they stood. The Highlanders held their fire until the horsemen were close, then loosed disciplined volleys that turned the Russian squadrons away. Watching from a nearby ridge, the Times correspondent William Howard Russell described a thin red streak topped with a line of steel, a phrase that soon hardened into the enduring image of the Thin Red Line.6
Who formed the Thin Red Line, and where does the phrase come from?
The Thin Red Line was formed by the 93rd (Sutherland) Highlanders under Sir Colin Campbell, around 500 men drawn up two deep across the approach to Balaclava on the morning of 25 October 1854. The Russian horsemen who rode at them are usually put at about 400, though some estimates run as high as 800. The National Army Museum's timeline places the stand at about 9:15.7
The phrase began with William Howard Russell of The Times, whose dispatch, printed in November 1854, pictured the Highlanders as a thin red streak tipped with a line of steel. Shortened in the retelling to “the thin red line”, it became the nickname of the 93rd and of the regiment it later joined, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and grew into a byword for the British Army as a whole; Rudyard Kipling's poem Tommy sings of the “thin red line of ’eroes”.8
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade
Almost at the same time, a far larger mass of Russian cavalry advanced across the valley and met the British Heavy Brigade led by Brigadier General James Scarlett. Outnumbered and charging uphill from a near standstill, the heavy dragoons and Scots Greys smashed into the dense Russian ranks and, after a furious swirling melee, broke them and drove them back in confusion. According to the National Army Museum, about 800 British heavy cavalrymen took on some 3,000 Russian horsemen; other estimates of the Russian force run from about 2,000 to 3,000, and the clash lasted no more than about ten minutes. It was a genuine feat of arms, disciplined, effective and comparatively cheap in lives, exactly the kind of success that cavalry was meant to achieve. Yet it would be almost forgotten within the hour, overshadowed by the catastrophe that followed on the very same field.9
Into the valley of Death
Wanting to stop the Russians from hauling away the captured guns, Lord Raglan sent an order to his cavalry. Carried down by the impetuous Captain Nolan to Lord Lucan, who passed it on to Lord Cardigan, the message was fatally vague, and the commanders could not see the guns Raglan meant. Instead the Light Brigade (the faster, lightly equipped arm described in our guide to heavy versus light cavalry), an estimated six hundred and seventy horsemen, was launched straight down a long valley toward Russian batteries at the far end, with more guns firing on their flanks from three sides. Cardigan led them at a trot that built to a gallop through a storm of shot. Astonishingly, they reached the guns and cut down their crews, but they could not hold the position and had to fall back through the same murderous fire. Around one hundred and ten men were killed and many more wounded or captured, and the brigade lost hundreds of horses. The charge was superbly brave and militarily pointless, and it was immortalized soon afterward by Alfred Tennyson in his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, with its refrain of riding into the valley of Death. The French general Pierre Bosquet is credited with the verdict that has followed it ever since: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre, “it is magnificent, but it is not war”. The battle itself ended inconclusively, with the Russians holding some captured ground but the port of Balaclava still safe. The vague order behind the charge has earned it a place among the greatest military blunders in history.10
