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The charge of the light brigade, the most lethal costume party in history

BBC:

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Thanks in no small part to the lines of Tennyson's poem - "Into the Valley of Death/Rode the six hundred... Cannon to the right of them/ Cannon to the left of them" - the Charge of the Light Brigade has long held its place in the public imagination. It is a symbol of heroic failure, a high-Victorian icon of self-sacrifice and devotion to duty.

This week the National Army Museum is commemorating the 150th anniversary of the charge, as part of a wider exhibition about the Crimean War.

"The British have always loved their defeats as much as their victories," says the exhibition's curator Alastair Massie. And the ill-fated cavalry charge appeals to our appetite for "glorious failure".

It was also an event that caught a world about to change - showing that chivalric cavalry charges and officers in full-dress uniforms were no match for modern fire-power.

"It was the most lethal costume party in history," he says.

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But it was the news reporting of William Howard Russell which had set the story in motion. Confusion over cavalry orders in battle was not unique - but at Balaclava, for the first time, a journalist was there as an eye-witness to record soldiers "rushing to the arms of sudden death".

"They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war. We could scarcely believe the evidence of our senses! Surely that handful of men were not going to charge an army in position?

"Alas, it was but too true - their desperate valour knew no bounds, and far indeed was it removed from its so-called better part - discretion."

Public opinion was now part of the war - and from the outset this desperate attack was seen as a blunder.

But it was a gloriously executed blunder - and the men who took part in the charge acquired a kind of celebrity status, part of what William Howard Russell called a "band of heroes".

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In numerical terms, the event would not have registered significantly on the casualty figures. There were 673 men in the charge - of which probably fewer than 200 died.

In contrast, during the Crimean War more than 16,000 soldiers died of diseases such as dysentery.

Like Picket's charge in the US Civil War, the charge of the Light Brigade demonstrated how the machinery of warfare had eliminated the "shock" value of mounted warriors. It was not until the tank was introduced in World War I and refined in World War II that the calvary again had a substantial role in warfare. The machinery of war had driven men into the trenches.