Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem about a suicidal cavalry charge during the Battle of Balaclava on October 25th, 1854.
In 1853, Britain, France and Turkey went to war with Russia. On October 25th, 1854, during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimea, Lord Raglan ordered a cavalry brigade to raid some small hill-top gun emplacements. Somehow the orders got garbled. What Lord Cardigan read was an order to lead 670 lightly-armed horsemen straight at the main body of the Russian army.
During the Battle of Inkerman in 1854, one of Lord Raglan’s hospital sergeants had a close encounter with a Russian cannonball.
Lord Calthorpe was aide-de-camp to Lord Raglan during the Crimean War of 1853-6 against Russia. The war was a bloody and costly mistake, but the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava on October 24th, 1854, was not the only moment of heroism. A few days after the Battle of Inkerman on November 5th, Calthorpe had this story to share.
Richard Cobden asked Parliament to make a better effort to understand the Russian mindset.
Back in 1801, Napoleon almost persuaded Tsar Paul I to invade India. Further lobbying fell on deaf ears but many in London still believed Russia was poised to invade India, and even Western Europe. After pre-emptive wars in Afghanistan (1838-42) and the Crimea (1853-56), Richard Cobden urged Westminster to get to know Russia better.
Florence used her logical mind and society connections to save thousands of lives in the Crimean War.
By the time she was twenty-one, well-to-do Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was sure that God wished her to exchange European society life for nursing. Her mother begged her to think again: her intellectual gifts and social position promised so much more. And in a way she was right.
Hoping to please opinion at home, the French Emperor pressured the Turks into new outrages against their Christian population, and Russia hit back.
The Crimean War of 1853-1856 cost over 600,000 lives, and in the short term changed very little for those involved. It all started because the French Emperor, Napoleon III, wanted to curry favour with Roman Catholic opinion in Europe, but in no time at all France, Russia and Britain had committed themselves to positions from which they could not back down.