CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE, The, a remarkable military movement made by nearly 700 British soldiers at Balaclava, 25 Oct. 1854. At the attack on Balaclava the Russians had been forced back by the 93d Highlanders. Major-General Airy then sent down Captain Nolan, his aide-de-camp, with an order that the light brigade of cavalry, commanded by Lord Cardigan, was to charge along the southern line of heights and drive the Russians from the Turkish batteries. The order was not in itself difficult of interpretation; but Cardigan, to whom it was transmitted by Lord Lucan, his immediate superior, could see nothing from where he was stationed, and believed he was to advance down the valley in front of him. Lucan must have perceived the proper line of advance; but he did not inform Cardigan of his error, and Nolan was killed just as he per ceived the wrong direction the brigade was tak ing and was endeavoring to set it right. Car
digan headed straight for the Russian guns, "into thejaws of death"; and the result was that the brigade of 673 mounted men was reduced in a few minutes to 195. "Some one had blundered" "It was magnificent, but it was not war." Lord Raglan, the British com mander-in-chief, was wroth at this error and the grave losses sustained, and Lucan was re called. On his return to England in January 1855 Cardigan was treated as a national hero and ever after he regarded himself as a man who had done great things. The poem under this title by Tennyson, written to the metre of Drayton's