In this sort of fighting one side must eventually give way. It was the Russians who lost their nerve first. Shaken by the fighting, the hussars turned away and galloped back to the North Valley pursued by the British cavalry, until they withdrew under fire from the Russian batteries on the Causeway and Fediukhin Heights.
While the Russian cavalry withdrew, the British infantry descended from the heights of Sevastopol and marched across the South Valley to support the 93rd. The 1st Division arrived first, followed by the 4th, and then French reinforcements too – the 1st Division and two squadrons of Chasseurs d’Afrique. With the arrival of the allied infantry, it was not likely that the Russian cavalry would attack again. Balaklava had been saved.
As the Russians cut their losses and moved back to their base, Raglan and his staff on the Sapoune Heights noticed them removing the British guns from the redoubts. The Duke of Wellington had never lost a gun, or so it was believed by the keepers of his cult in the British military establishment. The prospect of these guns being paraded as trophies in Sevastopol was unbearable for Raglan, who at once sent an order to Lord Lucan, the commander of the Cavalry Division, to recover the Causeway Heights, assuring him of the support of the infantry that had just arrived. Lucan could not see the infantry, and could not believe that he was meant to act alone, with just the cavalry, against infantry and artillery, so for three-quarters of an hour he did nothing, while Raglan on the hill became more alarmed about the fate of the captured British guns. Eventually he dictated a second order to Lucan: ‘Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front – follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French cavalry is on your left. Immediate.’
The order was not just unclear, it was absurd, and Lucan was completely at a loss as to what to make of it. From where he was standing, at the western end of the Causeway Heights, he could see, to his right, the British guns in the redoubts captured by the Russians from the Turks; to his left, at the end of the North Valley, where he knew the bulk of the Russian forces were located, he could see a second set of guns; and further to the left, on the lower slopes of the Fediukhin Heights, he could see that the Russians also had a battery of artillery. If Raglan’s order had been clearer and specified that it was the British guns on the Causeway Heights that Lucan was to take, the Charge of the Light Brigade would have ended very differently, but as it was, the order left unclear which guns the cavalry was to recover.
The only man who could tell him what it meant was the aide-de-camp who delivered it, Captain Nolan of the King’s Hussars. Like many cavalrymen in the Light Brigade, Nolan had become increasingly frustrated by Lucan’s failure to employ the cavalry in the sort of bold attack for which it had earned its reputation as the greatest in the world. At the Bulganak and the Alma, the cavalry had been stopped from pursuing the Russians in retreat; on the Mackenzie Heights, during the march to Balaklava, Lucan had prevented an attack on the Russian army marching east across their path; and only that morning, when the Heavy Brigade was outnumbered by the Russian cavalry, only a few minutes’ ride away, Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade’s commander, declined to use them for a swift assault upon the routed enemy. The Light Brigade were made to watch while their comrades fought with the same Cossacks who had jeered at them at the Bulganak for refusing to fight. One of their officers had several times demanded of Lord Cardigan to send in the brigade, and, when Cardigan refused, slapped his saluting sword against his leg in a show of disrespect. There were signs of disobedience. Private John Doyle of the 8th King’s Royal Irish Hussars recalled:
The Light Brigade were not well pleased when they saw the Heavy Brigade and were not let go to their assistance. They stood up in their stirrups, and shouted ‘Why are we kept here?’ and at the same moment broke up and dashed back through our lines, for the purpose of following the Russian retreat, but they had got too far for us to overtake them.26
