![]() ![]() As the battalions rode “back from the mouth of hell,” military men and horses started to collapse few managed to remain to continue the journey back. Then they decided to head back from the attack, but they had sacrificed many men and were no longer “the six hundred.”Ĭanons behind and from both sides of the military men now violently attacked them with shots and artillery rounds. They rode through the smoke of artillery and burst through the opposing line, annihilating their Cossack and Russian foes. While the rest of humanity watched in awe, the troops hit the opposing raiders with their extremely sharp swords and charged at the enemy army. Nonetheless, they rode bravely toward their own deaths. The 600 men were attacked by cannon shells fired directly ahead and on all sides of them. The instruction to rush forward did not dissuade or disturb a single soldier, despite the fact that everyone knew their superior had made a horrible mistake: “Someone had blundered.” The soldier’s responsibility is to obey and “not to make a reply…not to reason why,” so they obeyed and galloped into the “valley of death.” The poem relates the account of a brigade of 600 men that went on horseback for half a league into the “valley of death.” They were following orders to rush the opposing soldiers who were snatching their firearms. Long afterwards, in 1890, when the aged poet was persuaded to bawl bits of his verse down a tube for primitive gramophone recordings, ‘ The Charge of the Light Brigade’ was among the selections, and when he was buried in solemn state in Westminster Abbey two years later, veterans of Balaclava lined the aisle.Noble six hundred! Summary of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ The ‘ Maud’ volume sold so well that the Tennysons were able to buy Farringford, while the Light Brigade ballad remained the most widely familiar and admired of all Tennyson’s works. No writing of mine can add to the glory they have acquired in the Crimea but if what I heard be true, they will not be displeased to receive these copies of the ballad from me, and to know that those who sit at home love and honour them.’ This was issued with a note from Tennyson: ‘Having heard that the brave soldiers at Sebastopol, whom I am proud to call my country-men, have a liking for my ballad on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, I have ordered a thousand copies of it to be printed for them. Early in August the poet restored ‘Some one had blundered’ in what became the final version. A letter from a chaplain at the Scutari military hospital told him that the ballad was a tremendous favourite with the men and that the best thing Tennyson could do would be to send copies out to the Crimea for them. He was even less easy about the deletion, however. Critics had spoken reprovingly of rhyming ‘blundered’ with ‘hundred’ and Tennyson was uneasy about it. Tennyson had mainly been busy in 1854 writing ‘ Maud’, his own favourite among his poems, which he completed in April 1855 and published in July in a slender volume along with the Wellington ode and an altered version of the Light Brigade ballad, which left out ‘Some one had blundered’. He dashed the poem off in only a few minutes on December 2nd and sent it to the London Examiner, which printed it a week later. In Tennyson’s mind this turned into the crucial line ‘Some one had blundered’. ![]() In November he read the account of the Light Brigade’s gallant charge in The Times which spoke of ‘a hideous blunder’. ![]() It was written at Farringford, the villa on the Isle of Wight, which Tennyson and his wife Emily, enchanted by the sea views, had rented before the outbreak of the war. To the poet’s chagrin, it was far more popular than his earlier ode on the death of the Duke of Wellington, which he considered a much better piece of work. Alfred Tennyson had been Poet Laureate since 1850, but it was the Balaclava poem which carried his reputation far beyond literary and intellectual circles, turned him into the nation’s poet and made an indelible impression on what his own and subsequent generations felt about the Crimean War. ![]()
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