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This history is a war story of astonishing courage and honour, of stupidity, of blood, death, agony — and waste. Nothing in British campaign history has ever equalled the tragic farce that was the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War’s Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1854. In this fascinating study, Cecil Woodham-Smith shows that responsibility for the fatal mismanagement of the affair rested with the Earls of Cardigan and Lucan, brothers-in-law and sworn enemies for more than thirty years. In revealing the combination of pride and obstinacy that was to prove so fatal, Woodham-Smith gives us a picture of a vanished world, in which heroism and military glory guaranteed an immortality impossible in a more cynical age.

Review: “The Reason Why” by Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (nee Fitzgerald), first published in 1953, is a powerful, well-argued, and accessible account of one of the most glorious cock-ups in military history, the Charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava during the Crimean war.

The title of the book is taken from the poem by Lord Tennyson which immortalised that charge, an act of enormous courage, great discipline and utter stupidity. Tennyson had written.

‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’

Was there a man dismay’d?

Not tho’ the soldiers knew

Some one had blunder’d:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley’d and thunder’d;

Storm’d at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

It is widely known that a French general who witnessed the charge said “C’est Magnifique mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (It’s magnificent, but it is not war.) It is less well known that his complete comment continued with “C’est de la folie!” (It is madness!)

Woodham Smith, having honed her writing skills by publishing novels under the penname of Janet Gordon, then began to write serious history books. She only wrote four such works, of which this is the second, but those four books were of such high quality that she was described as one of the best historians of her generation, appointed a CBE and received honorary distinctions from three universities including Oxford, where she was made an honorary fellow of her old college, St Hilda’s.

Her other historical works were ” Florence Nightingale ,” ” The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 ” (a brilliant account of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s) and the first part of what had been intended to be a multi-volume biography of Queen Victoria .

This book charts the lives of two of the main actors in the drama of the light brigade, James Thomas Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan, who led the charge and his immediate superior, George Charles Bingham, Earl of Lucan, who told Cardigan to make the suicidal attack in the belief that he was carrying out the orders of the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan. Cardigan and Lucan were brothers-in-law and long-standing rivals, who bitterly hated each other.

Woodham-Smith explains the course of the Crimean war up to the battle of Balaclava a story of heroism and endurance on the part of British fighting men combined with utter incompetence on the part of the generals on both sides. It charts the increasing tension between Cardigan and Lucan, and between the Commander in Chief and both of them. Finally it explains how the battle of Balaclava developed, including how Raglan from the high altitude vantage point from which he was trying to direct the battle could see the whole battlefield, including a vulnerable Russian target which he wanted the Light Brigade to attack, while Lords Lucan and Cardigan at a much lower level could not see the target concerned.

Because Lucan couldn’t see the Russian guns which Raglan actually wanted him to attack, he asked the ADC, Captain Nolan, who brought him the Commander in Chief’s command for an immediate attack, to explain which enemy guns were his target. Captain Nolan had to this point distinguished himself as a brilliant expert and author on the use of cavalry, but unfortunately and understandably he is mainly remembered for the response he gave to that question, which doomed himself and a large number of other brave men: he threw out his arm in the general direction of an impregnable Russian position with the words “There, my Lord, are your enemy, there are your guns!”

There has been much debate over the following 160 years about whether these words were said because Captain Nolan had himself misunderstood Raglan’s order as Woodham-Smith argues, were merely intended as an insult (in which case they were an astonishing breach of military discipline), or were said for some other reason. Nobody ever had the chance to find out because Nolan was killed in the first seconds of the charge.

For a more detailed discussion of why Nolan’s words doomed the Light Brigade you will have to read the book: it is accessible, informative, and very well argued. It concludes with an account of the reforms of the army which followed the Crimean war and which the author describes as being “almost a happy ending” to the tragic story of a particularly unpleasant war.

Cecil Blanche Woodman-Smith was a British historian and author of popular history books on the Victorian era, including The Great Hunger, Queen Victoria, The Reason Why, and Thin Men of Hadda. She was appointed CBE in 1960 and received honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and the University of St. Andrews. She died in 1977.