Past the scene of the morning we rode slowly; round us were dead and dying horses, numberless; and near me lay a Russian soldier, very still, upon his face. In a vineyard a little to my right a Turkish soldier was also stretched out dead. The horses, mostly dead, were all unsaddled, and the attitudes of some betokened extreme pain … . And then the wounded soldiers crawling to the hills!32
Of the 661 men who set off on the charge, 113 were killed, 134 wounded, and 45 were taken prisoner; 362 horses were lost or killed. The casualties were not much higher than those suffered on the Russian side (180 killed and wounded – nearly all of them in the first two defensive lines) and far lower than the numbers reported in the British press.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldiers knew
Someone had blundered:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the Six Hundred.
But contrary to the myth of a ‘glorious disaster’, the charge was in some ways a success, despite the heavy casualties. The objective of a cavalry charge was to scatter the enemy’s lines and frighten him off the battlefield, and in this respect, as the Russians acknowledged, the Light Brigade had achieved its aim. The real blunder of the British at Balaklava was not so much the Charge of the Light Brigade as their failure to pursue the Russian cavalry once the Heavy Brigade had routed them and the Light Brigade had got them on the run and then finish off the rest of Liprandi’s army.33
The British blamed the Turks for their defeat at Balaklava, accusing them of cowardice for abandoning the redoubts. They also later claimed that they had looted property, not only from the British cavalry, but also from nearby settlements, where they were said to have ‘committed some cold-blooded cruelties upon the unfortunate villagers around Balaklava, cutting the throats of the men and stripping their cabins of everything’. Lucan’s Turkish interpreter, John Blunt, thought the accusations were unfair and that if any looting did take place, it was by the ‘nondescript crowds of camp followers who prowled about … the battlefield’. The Turks were treated appallingly for the rest of the campaign. They were routinely beaten, cursed, spat upon and jeered at by the British troops, who sometimes even used them ‘to carry them with their bundles on their backs across the pools and quagmires on the Balaklava road’, according to Blunt. Seen by the British as little more than slaves, the Turkish troops were used for digging trenches or transporting heavy loads between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights. Because their religion forbade them from eating most of the available British army rations, they never received enough food; in desperation some of them began to steal, for which they were flogged by their British masters well beyond the maximum of forty-five lashes allowed for the Queen’s own troops. Of the 4,000 Turkish soldiers who fought at Balaklava on 25 October, half would die from malnutrition by the end of 1854, and many of the rest would become too weak for active service. Yet the Turks behaved with dignity, and Blunt, for one, was ‘much struck by the forbearing manner in which they endured their bad treatment and long suffering’. Rustem Pasha, the Egyptian officer in charge of the Turkish troops at Balaklava, urged them to be ‘patient and resigned, and not to forget that the English troops were the guests of their Sultan and were fighting in defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’.34
The Russians celebrated Balaklava as a victory. The capture of the redoubts on the Causeway Heights was certainly a tactical success. The next day in Sevastopol it was marked by an Orthodox service as the British guns were paraded through the town. The Russians now had a commanding position from which to attack the British supply lines between Balaklava and the Sevastopol heights; the British were confined to their inner defence line on the hills around Kadikoi. Russian soldiers paraded through Sevastopol with trophies from the battlefield – British overcoats, swords, tunics, shakos, boots and cavalry horses. The morale of the Sevastopol garrison was immediately lifted by the victory. For the first time since the defeat at the Alma, the Russians sensed they were a match for the allied armies on the open battlefield.
