Light Brigade: the surviving order, the charge and the casualties
The Light Brigade rode into the Russian guns at Balaklava on 25 October 1854 under an order that survives in the National Army Museum. Written by Richard Airey and approved by Lord Raglan, it called for a rapid advance to stop the enemy carrying away captured guns. The museum estimates that around 260 of the brigade's 673 men were killed or wounded. The handwritten instruction and the statements left by participants expose the gap between the intended operation and the charge that followed.
The order is brief. It directs the cavalry to follow the enemy, allows troop horse artillery to accompany it, notes French cavalry on the left and ends with an instruction for immediate action. It does not name a redoubt or identify the guns by a numbered position. The operational purpose is preventing removal of guns, rather than simply attacking an artillery battery. That distinction is visible in the wording before any later argument over responsibility enters the picture. Its final urgency also matters: the cavalry was being told to act quickly while receiving only a compact description of its objective.
The museum's reconstruction explains the missing geography. Raglan could see the Russians preparing to remove guns captured from Ottoman positions. Lord Lucan, commanding the cavalry division below him, lacked that view. Captain Louis Nolan carried the fresh order to Lucan. According to the museum, Lucan requested clarification, and Nolan gestured toward the Russian battery at the end of the north valley rather than the captured guns on the Causeway Heights. The Light Brigade consequently faced a different target. This explanation belongs to the museum's later assessment of testimony; the surviving written order itself contains no record of Nolan's gesture.
The museum's battle history also preserves Cardigan's later account to Parliament in 1855. He described a long descent with batteries on both flanks and Russian riflemen between them. His statement identifies the exposed ground over which the cavalry advanced. It is a participant's description given after the event, alongside the museum's reconstruction of the misunderstood order. The written instruction and this account answer different questions: the order records what headquarters asked the Light Brigade to do, while Cardigan describes the fire encountered on the route his men actually took.
Nolan could leave no account of his own final movement. The National Army Museum's study of his journal leaves that purpose unresolved. The journal records his impatience with Lucan's earlier handling of cavalry at the Alma, but cannot explain an action undertaken immediately before his death. Frustration documented in an earlier entry supplies context; it does not establish whether his last movement was encouragement or an attempt to redirect the charge. Russell, who knew Nolan, similarly describes his confidence in cavalry's ability to take batteries and break enemy formations. That confidence forms part of Russell's portrait of the officer entrusted with the message.
William Howard Russell's battlefield reporting supplies a different vantage point. In The British Expedition to the Crimea, he times the advance at 11:10 a.m. and describes two lines accelerating toward the battery. At about 1,200 yards, he saw the Russian guns open fire and gaps appear among men and horses. He then saw sabres moving through the smoke between the guns, followed by returning riders, wounded men and dismounted troopers. His sequence includes both arrival at the battery and the struggle to withdraw. Reaching the guns was therefore one stage of the action, with no secure occupation behind it.
Russell places the retreat under the cover of the Heavy Cavalry and says that by 11:35 a.m. only the dead and dying remained before the Russian guns. He also describes a French cavalry attack against a battery on the British left. The contrast between a short interval on the clock and successive phases of movement is stark: approach, artillery fire, fighting among the guns and withdrawal all occurred within his 25-minute span. His observations make the return journey part of the battle's cost, rather than allowing the charge to end at the moment horsemen reached the artillery.
The National Army Museum's battle history gives the human loss as approximately 260 killed or wounded and lists 475 horses lost. Its separate Nolan study includes captured men in its description of the 260, so those summaries do not supply an identical casualty classification. The battle history's wording supports the approximate killed-or-wounded figure. It also records the larger result: the Russians retained the heights and road, while Balaklava remained in Allied hands. The Light Brigade's penetration of the battery did not recover the captured guns Raglan had wanted secured, and Russian control of the road complicated supply to the siege forces through the following winter.
- National Army Museum: Battle of Balaklava, casualty estimate and strategic result — www.nam.ac.uk
- National Army Museum: Captain Louis Nolan, journal extracts and assessment of his final movement — www.nam.ac.uk
- William Howard Russell, The British Expedition to the Crimea, 1877 revised edition, Book III — www.gutenberg.org