The Gold Seekers (45 page)

they all did, William thought, Cardigan knew that for cavalry to attack guns in battery without infantry support was contrary to every accepted rule of war—and the North Valley was shut in by hills, which were the site of other batteries, besides those at its far end that the Light Brigade had now been ordered to charge.

Still obviously bewildered, Cardigan sent his own aide, FitzMaxse, to remonstrate with Lord Lucan before attempting to comply with the order.

Lucan rode over to him, the commander in chief’s original order in his hand. Coldly, he read its contents aloud to the indignant Cardigan and then instructed him to advance down the North Valley with the Light Brigade, while he himself followed in support with the Heavy Brigade.

Cardigan brought down his saber in formal salute and replied, with equal coldness, “Certainly, sir. But allow me to point out to you that the Russians have a battery in the valley at our front and batteries and riflemen on each flank. It will be a costly attack, sir.”

“I know it,” Lucan returned with bleak resignation. “But Lord Raglan will have it. We have no choice but to obey.”

Cardigan repeated his formal salute. “Advance very steadily,” his brother-in-law commanded. “Keep your men well in hand.”

There was the same icy acknowledgment. Then Cardigan wheeled his horse and, in a harsh undertone that could clearly be heard by those grouped about him, muttered to himself, “Well, here goes the last of the Brudenells!”

His throat tight, William watched him as, preserving an outward calm, he trotted across to Lord George Paget, who, with the second-in-command of his regiment, the 4th Light Dragoons, was dismounted and smoking a cigar.

“Lord George, we are ordered to make an attack to the front,” he announced without preamble. “You will take command of the second line, and I expect your best support. Mind—your best support!”

The last sentence was repeated, and Lord George reddened resentfully. He glanced at his companion, Major Halkett, and then responded gruffly, “Of course, my lord. You shall have my best support.”

Captain Nolan rode past, and William called out to him in anxious question. The aide-de-camp smiled. “Back to the upland? Oh, no, my dear fellow. I intend to charge with the Seventeenth.” His smile widened. “Death or glory, what? I trust I shall see you again.”

The trumpets were sounding now in shrill succession.

“Stand to your horses!”

“Mount!”

“Officers, take post!”

Watched by their commander, the Light Brigade formed up and wheeled into line. The first line, from right to left, consisted of the 13th Light Dragoons, the 17th Lancers, and, slightly to their rear, the 11th Hussars. The 4th Light Dragoons and the 8th Hussars formed the second line. With half a squadron of the 8th acting as Lord Raglan’s escort, the brigade had paraded that morning 675 strong. Lord Lucan, looking down the valley, apparently saw that their wide deployment would be too exposed for the coming attack and ordered Colonel Douglas to move the 11th back, so as to take position to the rear of the 17th Lancers, thus forming the second line, with the 4th and 8th now acting as the third.

Lord Cardigan rode forward, to take his place at the head of the right squadron of the 17th Lancers, his expression inscrutable, but his head, as always, carried arrogantly high. The dressing of their lines completed, the shouted commands of the troop officers died away, and once again there was a strangely pregnant silence. William, with Alex Dunn a few yards away to his left, waited tensely. Then Cardigan raised his voice and, exhibiting neither excitement nor apprehension, gave his orders, his saber raised.

“The brigade will advance. The first squadron of the Seventeenth Lancers will direct. Walk march!”

The three lines of the Light Brigade started to move slowly down the North Valley, followed several minutes later by the Heavy Brigade, led by Lord Lucan.

To the watchers high above them on the Sapoune Ridge there was, at first, no indication that Lord Raglan’s order had been misrepresented by the man entrusted to deliver it, It was not until the leading ranks had covered some two hundred yards and then, instead of inclining right, in the

direction of the captured Turkish redoubts on the causeway —as the commander in chief had intended them to—continued to advance at a trot straight on down the valley, that the terrible truth began at last to dawn. But by the time Lord Raglan realized how appalling was the error that had been made, it was too late—much, much too late to correct it. The order had been given; all unaware, the officers and men of the five regiments of light cavalry obeyed it.

Even the Russians occupying the redoubts had assumed, until that moment, that the naval guns they had captured were the objectives toward which the British cavalry was advancing. They hurriedly formed up to receive the expected charge, momentarily abandoning their efforts to dismantle the cumbersome iron cannon preparatory to removing them. Similarly, their gunners and sharpshooters across the narrow valley, on the Fediukine Hills, as well as those on the forward slopes of the causeway, did not at first divine the purpose of the steady advance of the brilliantly uniformed regiments of the Light Brigade. They held fire, expecting the line of horsemen to wheel and escape from the trap before its jaws closed on them … but they did not.

At an unhurried trot, with superb precision and in perfect alignment, the Light Brigade came on. Fifty or sixty yards separated their first line from the second; the third was about the same distance behind the second, the gap gradually widening. At their head, alone, rode the tall, striking figure of their brigadier general, the gold frogging on his blue and cherry-red hussar uniform glistening in the sunlight. He led them into the range of the enemy’s flanking guns as if he were either unaware of their presence or else supremely indifferent to the terrible threat they offered to himself and the men who followed him.

The Russian gunners stared at him in stunned surprise; the infantrymen sighted their rifles but did not fire. Then the first numbing shock of surprise passed. Officers bellowed frantic orders, and one after another the batteries on the Fediukine Hills opened up, hurling a deadly flanking fire of grape and round shot and canister upon the slowly moving horsemen below.

As the first battery started firing, a single rider detached himself from the 17th Lancers’ leading squadron and galloped frenziedly across its front toward Lord Cardigan. Captain Edward Nolan passed ahead of him—an unforgivable breach of military etiquette, which Cardigan observed with outraged astonishment.

Nolan was waving his saber and shouting at the pitch of his lungs, as if, at the eleventh hour, he had just realized Lord Lucan’s mistake—a mistake that had been prompted by his own careless taunt. Seeking desperately to halt the brigade’s advance toward the wrong objective, Nolan called out to Cardigan, but his voice was inaudible above the crash of gunfire and the drumming hoof beats of the Light Brigade’s horses, and the commander wrathfully waved him back. To Cardigan it seemed as if the young upstart aide-de-camp who fancied himself a cavalry tactician was dissatisfied with the speed of advance and was attempting to take over the leadership of his brigade, and this, quite properly, he could not allow.

Then a shell burst to Lord Cardigan’s right, and a splinter from it struck Nolan in the chest, killing him instantly, so that—by an ironic twist of fate—he who was the cause of the tragic misinterpretation of Lord Raglan’s order became the first to pay the price of it.

The saber fell from his hand, but the hand remained raised, high above his head, and a ghastly scream burst from him, echoing above the thunder of cannon fire and the crackle of musketry. Yet even in death, Edward Nolan did not fall from his horse. The animal wheeled around in terror, and although Nolan’s body slumped, it was still in the saddle as his charger passed through the ranks of the oncoming dragoons, slipping from it only after the last line of the Light Cavalry Brigade had passed by.

The advance continued, its pace quickening a little now as, from both sides, the awful hail of fire opened great gaps in the ranks, mowing down men and horses, who had no defense against it. William felt his heart turn to stone as the shells burst among the men of the 11th. Every man’s instinct was to end the unendurable ordeal by speeding up the advance, but Lord Cardigan sternly restrained them, aware that to do so now would be disastrous. They still had almost

three-quarters of a mile to cover before they reached the guns they had been ordered to charge, and to gain their objective on blown horses would be to court defeat.

They came, at last, within range of the guns at the valley’s end, and in a frenzy to come to grips with the gunners who were wreaking such havoc among them, the 17th Lancers began to press forward. Cardigan, without looking around, laid his saber across Captain Morris’s chest and called out, above the din, “Steady … steady, Seventeenth!” Abashed, William Morris dropped back.

“Close to your center! Look to your dressing there, men!” the troop commanders shouted. “Close in! Close in to the center!”

This was now the most frequently repeated order, and William instinctively shouted it, as the screams of the wounded men and horses all around him increased and the charging line narrowed, becoming more ragged and unevenly spaced. Riderless horses added to the confusion. Instinct and training impelled them to seek the familiar formation and to return to the squadron lines after their riders had been killed. Wounded men, too brave to seek safety in retreat, endeavored to keep up with their unwounded comrades and found that their bravery was just not enough … and they fell back, bringing further disorder to the line behind them.

It had not been like this against the Sikhs, William thought, a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach. This slow advance under such an inferno of fire was the greatest ordeal that he, and the men with him, had ever been called upon to endure. The Heavies’ charge had taken a scant ten minutes. It had been mercifully short, their casualties relatively few, for they had come instantly to grips with the enemy and had been able to meet that enemy on equal terms, man for man, if not in equal numbers. And they had won a significant victory.

But the Light Brigade could not achieve victory. They had no weapons with which to answer the ghastly hail of shot and shell that rained down upon them. Only courage and discipline kept the men from breaking ranks and dashing forward in disorder to attack the guns with their sabers and lances.

Theirs was a matchless courage, and as he watched the men about him fall and their horses go down, William felt a glow of heartbreaking pride in these soldiers who were his flesh and blood, if not his countrymen, and in whose company, it seemed, he was about to die.

For a fleeting moment, he let his thoughts stray to his homeland—to Sydney, to his father’s house, and to his family. To Jenny Broome and to the letter he had written to her the previous night, and he drew a rasping breath as, beside him, George Houghton slumped over his chestnut’s lathered neck, struck, as Nolan had been, by a bursting shell splinter, his young mouth open but no audible sound issuing from it.

Would Jenny Broome ever know how he had died, he wondered, or how much he had loved her and wanted her for his wife? He had a vision of her face, as it had come to him when he had read through his letter, and now it seemed to be floating ahead of him, just for a moment blotting out the straining blue-uniformed backs of the lancers riding into the swirling smoke from the Russian guns, now only twenty yards away.

The vision faded, a dream, William knew, existing only in his imagination, a long way from reality. Reality for him, and for the pitifully few survivors of the Light Brigade’s first two lines, were the Russian guns, shrouded in smoke and dust, belching forth flames.

The charge became a wild gallop. The Russian gunners fired their last salvo and then, in terror, fled or crawled beneath their guns. The 17th, just ahead, lances couched, were in among them now, William’s own regiment close on their heels. Conscious of neither fear nor pity, William tore through the battery, hacking and slashing at the enemy gunners as he went, with Alexander Dunn shouting madly at his side and Colonel Douglas’s broad, bluejacketed back glimpsed through the gun smoke ahead.

Behind the line of guns was ranged a daunting, motionless mass of Russian cavalry. A group of these, in lancer uniform, started to form up to their right, and Douglas, expecting reinforcements and having no orders to retire, flung over his shoulder an urgent command to rally to him and charge.

Wearily the eighty men of the 11th—all, it seemed, that were left—realigned themselves and charged. The Russians broke and retreated before them, and they galloped on, still in the belief that reinforcements from the Heavy Brigade must be following them.

But none came. They could not see that Lord Lucan had halted the Heavy Brigade when, coming under heavy fire from the Fediukine Hills, they had suffered severe casualties, with Lucan himself wounded in the leg. He ordered his trumpeter to sound the halt and withdrew out of range of the Russian guns, grimly prepared to cover the Light Brigade’s eventual and inevitable retreat when it came.

Unaware of this, the 11th drove the Russian lancers back until, realizing at last that the expected reinforcements had not appeared, the 11ths commanding officer decided that the time had come to break off the attack and retire. They had silenced the guns with their charge but had neither the men nor the means to capture and carry them off.

But now Cossacks dashed in to attack them on the flank, firing their pistols with deadly effect, and a second regiment of lancers loomed up on their left to harass their retreat. Joined by Lord George Paget, with the remnants of the 4th Light Dragoons, the 11th continued to fall back, until William heard Bubb’s voice yelling out a warning and, turning, saw that they were about to be taken in the rear.

“My lord!” he shouted at the pitch of his lungs, shocked at the feebleness of his cry, but Lord George heard it and called on his small, exhausted handful of men to make a stand.