Sunday Pages: "The Charge of the Light Brigade"

A poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Dear Reader,

Last week, a friend forwarded me a blog post that imagined the First World War as a bar fight. It begins:

• Germany, Austria and Italy are standing together in the middle of a pub when Serbia bumps into Austria and spills Austria’s pint.

• Austria demands Serbia buy it a complete new suit because there are splashes on its trouser leg.

• Germany expresses its support for Austria’s point of view.

• Britain recommends that everyone calm down a bit.

• Serbia points out that it can’t afford a whole suit, but offers to pay for the cleaning of Austria’s trousers.

• Russia and Serbia look at Austria.

• Austria asks Serbia who it’s looking at.

• Russia suggests that Austria should leave its little brother alone.

• Austria inquires as to whose army will assist Russia in compelling it to do so.

The penultimate—and cleverest—line is: “America waits till Germany is about to fall over from sustained punching from Britain and France, then walks over and smashes it with a barstool, then pretends it won the fight all by itself.”

The subject line of her email was “Why is this so funny?” And the answer is: because the First World War was inherently dumb. The causes of the war were dumb. The escalation of the war was dumb. The system of “entangling alliances” was dumb. The leaders of the countries involved were dumb. In a Bosnian city, a half-drunk anarchist¹ whacked a much-despised hereditary royal—not the first political assassination in the Balkans, or by the Black Hand—and this individual act of gun violence plunged an entire continent, and much of the world, into a horrible, bloody, four-year conflict for reasons that high school students still struggle to explicate on written exams—because any 15-year-old who spends half an hour learning about the Great War is like, “WTF? Why were these people so stupid?”

World War One was dumb in hindsight. It was probably dumb in the moment. And that makes the staggering losses—20 million dead and 21 million wounded; the collapse of three hoary European empires; the Spanish flu pandemic left in its wake; the birth of the Soviet Union; more horrific, Third Geneva Convention-inspiring battles than can quickly be counted—all the more awful and difficult to make sense of.

And if the First World War was dumb, the Crimean War of 1853-56—the former’s antecedent in many ways—was even dumber. The Great War, at least, can be imagined as a bar fight. The Crimean War resists colorful analogue. It began in Jerusalem, of all places, where, as I understand it, the Catholics were squabbling with the Russian Orthodox over who got to light the first candle on certain holy days. I mean, really, who gives a shit? Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire, then in the long twilight of its decline. The Catholics were backed by France, run by Napoleon III, an autocratic jerk. And the Russian Orthodox church was supported by Nicholas I, the “Iron Tsar,” whom Queen Victoria described as “stern and severe—with fixed principles of duty which nothing on earth will make him change.” (She then wrote these wonderfully understated words: “very clever I do not think him.”) That the leaders of all of these countries were insecure, arrogant, stubborn assholes—the British prime minister and his subordinates included; looking at you, George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen—would only make things worse.

The Ottomans were on the verge of the total collapse that would finally happen after the First World War. Russia wanted to take advantage of a weakened Constantinople and expand its sphere of influence over yet more territory, as Russia will. France and Great Britain wanted to prop up the Ottoman husk as a sort of buffer zone, to protect their own shipping interests in the Mediterranean. (Are you bored yet, Dear Reader?) The Sardinians were involved, for reasons not totally clear. Austria didn’t fight in the war but did take advantage by sliding into the DMs of some Ottoman territory in Wallachia. The Americans were rumored to be coming to help but, unlike in the First World War, never showed; they were too busy laying the groundwork for their own Civil War. And the Germans sat this one out, which is surprising until we remember that Germany did not exist until 1871.

The war proper took place in and around Crimea, and it was a disaster. The war deaths were on par with the U.S. Civil War, with over 600,000 human beings losing their lives. Here is what the (exquisite) Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (published 1910) has to say:

Thus Nicholas, the pillar of the European alliance, found himself isolated and at war, or potentially at war, with all of Europe. The invasion of Crimea followed, and with it a fresh revelation of the corruption and demoralization of the Russian system. At the outset Nicholas had grimly remarked that “Generals January and February” would prove his best allies. These acted, however, impartially; and if thousands of British and French soldiers perished of cold and disease in the trenches before Sevastopol, the tracks leading from the centre of Russia into the Crimea were marked by the bones of Russian dead. The revelation of his failure broke the spirit of the Iron Tsar, and on the 2nd of March 1855 he threw away the life which a little ordinary care would have saved.

The Crimean War was significant for reasons beyond its military clusterfucks. It was in Crimea where Florence Nightingale came to prominence, pioneering the modern field of nursing. Naval shells, telegraphs, and railroads were used for the first time in wartime. Leo Tolstoy became the first modern war correspondent, writing his Sevastopol Sketches about the siege of that Crimean port city (the war also helped establish his pacifism, channeled most famously by Gandhi). And, for the first time, there are actual photos of war. The photograph above, called “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” is one of the earliest and best-known war images (note the spent cannonballs).

And then there was the British war poetry, the best known being “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, then the poet laureate of Great Britain. The light brigade, as opposed to the heavy brigade, was a group of some six hundred men on unarmored horses, armed with sabres, and designed for speed, stealth, and spying. But during the Battle of Balaclava in 1854, a British commander idiotically ordered the light brigade to mount a frontal assault against a well-defended Russian artillery battery—an obvious suicide mission. The Russians picked them off like an easy level of an FPS video game. (It may be that the order was garbled, or that the men just took off on their own; all the key players died immediately after, so no one will ever know).

Tennyson wrote his poem two weeks after the battle, and it was published two months later; for decades after, these were among the best-known lines in English literature:

I

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

II

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
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.

III

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.

IV

Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.

V

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

VI

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

Which all seems very rah-rah. The doomed military action is viewed as heroic sacrifice, and not dunderheaded waste of human life for no good reason. As the poet and professor Mischa Willett notes:

Tennyson’s poem asks “When can their glory fade?” The answer is: it fades as soon as one finds out that 600 wasted their lives because a general was ineffectively in command of them, and/or their testosterone charge short-circuited their hearing and broke the chain of command. “Honour the Light Brigade,” we are therein commanded. It’s all one-sided.

Willett makes a good point. But I would argue that “Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die,” quite the best lines in the poem, can also be read not as praise for valor but as condemnation of the whole sordid enterprise. Can we not “honour the Light Brigade” by learning its dread lesson and not sending our soldiers off to certain death for no good reason? The Crimean War is basically shorthand for “no good reason.”

The historian Orlando Figes, probably the world’s foremost expert on the Crimean War, wrote of its impact on Russia:

The image many Russians had built up of their country—the biggest, richest and most powerful in the world—had suddenly been shattered. Russia’s backwardness had been exposed... The Crimean disaster had exposed the shortcomings of every institution in Russia—not just the corruption and incompetence of the military command, the technological backwardness of the army and navy, or the inadequate roads and lack of railways that accounted for the chronic problems of supply, but the poor condition and illiteracy of the serfs who made up the armed forces, the inability of the serf economy to sustain a state of war against industrial powers, and the failures of autocracy itself.

He may just as well be writing about Putin and Ukraine.

If the First World War was dumb and avoidable, the Second World War was a necessary fight against a genocidal autocratic madman. The first Crimean War was dumb and avoidable. The war happening in Crimea now is a necessary fight against a genocidal autocratic madman.

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ICYMI

Our guest—and my substitute co-host for the last hour of the show—was Cliff Schecter:

The PREVAIL podcast this week features Crimean native Elina Beketova:

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Photo credit: Roger Benton, “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” 1855, Crimea.

1. CORRECTION, from reader Bernard Cooper, who rightly questions my characterization of “Gavrilo Princip, and by association, the Black Hand, as anarchist. His father was close to anarchism and socialism, but the son was more swept up with the rising pan-Slavism and Serbian nationalism against Austria-Hungary. He was a militant for the shadowy Black Hand, which was rooted in the Serbian military and in govt officialdom, was strongly nationalist, had royalist patrons and some militants were republicans. Not the portrait of anarchism at all. Gavrilo had joined them and they trained him, so he was no longer an anarchist, had he ever been one at all. No, the bumbling anarchists didn’t trigger the Great War. Far better organised and placed killers in the Serbian nationalist scene killed the Archduke.”