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Title: Reason Why/the Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade by Cecil Woodham-Smith ISBN: 0-14-001278-8 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.77 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An excellent introduction to a fascinating topic.
Comment: The Charge of the Light Brigade on the 25th October 1854 was one of the three famous engagements that formed the Battle of Balaklava. The Charge, the most famous of all military blunders, was barely over before the process of transforming it into myth began. Accusations, counter-accusations, legal actions and patriotic poetry created more obscuring smoke and dust than the infamous Russian guns. Cecil Woodham Smith traces the careers of two of the major players: Lords Lucan and Cardigan, the brothers-in-law from hell, whose vanity, arrogance and (at least in the case of Cardigan) incompetence, inexperience and crass stupidity, contributed to the fatal Charge. Almost 40 years of peace, and the reactionary influence of the Duke of Wellington, had left the British army in a parlous state of unreadiness and bureaucratic confusion when the call came to defend Turkey against the Russians. The choice of the aged, gentle, inexperienced and unassertive Raglan, as leader of the expeditionary army, only made a bad situation worse. (For a rather more sympathetic portrayal of Raglan, as victim of an inefficient military system, criminally disorganised commissariat and unreasonable government, see "The Destruction of Lord Raglan" by Christopher Hibbert.) A more recent study, "The Charge" by Mark Adkin, provides a detailed and well-illustrated account of the events leading to the Charge of the Light Brigade. Adkin challenges traditional views , including parts of Cecil Woodham Smith's account. Particular attention is given to the role played by Captain Nolan (the messenger). Adkin suggests that Nolan may have deliberately misled Lucan and Cardigan as to Raglan's real intention. Whatever the truth, which is of course unknowable, "The Reason Why" is a genuine classic and an excellent introduction to a fascinating subject.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Price of Aristocratic Obsession
Comment: Woodham-Smith presents, in minute detail, the wages of placing social rank over experience, and even competence. British military history follows a disturbing trend. War starts, Brits get trounced upon, influx of fresh talent and new ideas comes (along with, sometimes, timely intercession by allies), British return to triumph. Woodham-Smith attributes this pattern to the notion in the higher ranks of the army (a notion espoused by the Duke of Wellington himself, pip pip!), that nobility ensures, if not competence, at least loyalty.
The price of this notion, is, of course, massive death, but because the massive death does not happen to the nobility, nobody important really minds. This is one reason the Charge of the Light Brigade, with which _the Reason Why_ primarily deals, was so different, and worthy of eulogizing in prose and song (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, by the way, appears absolutely nowhere in this text)--those dying, those paying the price for the Army's obsession with aristocracy, were aristocrats themselves.
Woodham-Smith manages to trace the careers of two utterly unsympathetic characters--Cardigan and Lucan--in a fascinating manner. This is no small feat, considering the reader will probably want, by the end of _the Reason Why_ to reach back in time and shake both of them, and maybe smack them around a bit.
Again, Cecil Woodham-Smith proves herself a master of the historian's craft, and produces a well-researched, thorough and driving account of what is probably the stupidest incident in modern military history.
The Crimean War changed so much about how war is waged--the treatment of prisoners and wounded being tops on the list of reforms brought about in the wake of the debacle. _The Reason Why_ is an excellent account, and should be required reading for anybody with even a remote interest in military history, or European history in general.
Rating: 4
Summary: Arrogance and stupidity...
Comment: Cecil Woodham-Smith's story of the Charge of the Light Brigade is the biography of two men: Lords Lucan and Cardigan; brothers-in-law whose hatred for each other was surpassed only by arrogance and ineptitude as officers. Woodham-Smith's book is the story of two men cradled by an absurd system of rank and class, who came together as two of the highest-ranking officers in one of the worst-run campaigns in British military history, which resulted in one of the most legendary blunders in all of military history.
In the lifetimes of Lucan and Cardigan (the late eighteenth and early nineteeth century), the best way to get ahead in the British Army was to purchase your rank. The purchase system, as it was called, was basically a way for England's wealthy classes to keep the most powerful positions in the army for themselves, and exclude those individuals who were not of the same social stratum. This system was supported by Britain's greatest military mind, the Duke of Wellington, who, it is explained, somehow managed to hide the deficiencies of the system behind his military brilliance. However, by the time Lucan and Cardigan came into a position of authority, Wellington had long since passed away, none of the high officers involved in the Crimean campaign had heard a shot fired in anger, and the only combat-experienced officers in the British Army (those who had served in India) were unwanted.
The biography portion of the book gets a little bit cumbersome at times, especially for those of us who aren't entirely familiar with the British nobility system, but it provides an interesting backstory to the disaster in the Crimea. How two men so completely arrogant and inept came to a position of power in the British Army is shocking, especially when one considers that it was widely known that neither man was fit to command cavalry squadrons, let alone brigades and divisions.
Ultimately, Woodham-Smith's argument is effective: the purchase system, coupled with the British class system, was ripe for a disaster. By allowing incompetency to buy its way up the ranks while more competent solders were bypassed and more experienced soldiers were shunned, it was only a matter of time until the British experienced a debacle such as Balaclava and the entire Crimean Campaign. Unfortunately for the British, it took two spectaculary arrogant and stupid men to breed such a disaster, and when it finally happened, it happened in spectacular fashion.
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Title: The Charge of the Light Brigade by John Sweetman ISBN: 1841761303 Publisher: Osprey Publishing (UK) Pub. Date: 01 July, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-1849 by Cecil Blanche Fitz Gerald Woodham Smith, Cecil Woodham-Smith ISBN: 014014515X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title:The Charge of the Light Brigade ASIN: B000062XEW Publisher: MGM/UA Video Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $13.46 |
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Title: The Sebastopol Sketches (Penguin Classics) by Leo Tolstoy ISBN: 0140444688 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Spanish War: An American Epic--1898 by G.J.A. O'Toole ISBN: 0393303047 Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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