He Crimean War and the Light Brigade – With a Few Gaps

Gregory Blake’s 2025 book, Into the Valley of Death: the charge of the Light Brigade and the Crimean War, is one of a new ‘Shot of History’ series from Australian publisher Big Sky. It aims, as explained in its introduction, to give readers an overview of the origins and conduct of the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, and to examine the military personalities involved in the campaign and the famous charge of the Light Brigade.

There’s nothing wrong with a popular level history, and there’s a lot to like about this book. In just 304 pages of generously sized and spaced font, it does a fine job of explaining the origins of the war, the allied deployment and the lead up to the famous charge of the Light Brigade. It explains the different perspectives and interests of the Ottoman and British empires, as well of those of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia.

There are a few contemporary resonances of the political discussion. When contemplating the end of the Russia–Ukraine war, the Russian attachment to Crimea shouldn’t be underestimated. Russian forces there took substantial losses in the 19th century and again in the World War II. Extended sieges of Sevastopol in both loom large in Russian military history.

The rationale for the actions of other players is largely mysterious. The French officers are described only in passing and the Ottoman forces and their command barely appear. And, incredibly, the Russians are largely off-stage for much of the book.

Alfred Tennyson’s famous poem was published only six weeks after the event and, in the decades that followed, was probably the bulk of knowledge of this conflict for many people. It was hugely popular – I fondly recall my father frequently reciting it (with varying degrees of accuracy, I later discovered) – but also significantly romanticised. That the charge, and the Battle of Balaclava of which it formed part, was a disaster for the allied forces is unquestionable. But Blake’s book seems to fall into the same casualty accounting trap as the press of the day. We read that at the post battle muster ‘[t]here were 195 mounted men out of 670 who began the charge’, redolent of Tennyson’s famous fifth stanza:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of Hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.

But there were two major issues with that accounting. Firstly, the muster was done at 2:00 pm on the day, and stragglers continued to make their way back to camp for some time after. And, more importantly, it counted only the remaining mounted troops. The many soldiers who lost their horses weren’t counted. The now accepted casualty figures are 113 killed and 134 wounded – brutal by any measure, but substantially lower than the widely reported first impression.

There is a sense of anti-climax in the book after the charge. The remaining 74 pages cover both the remaining 17 months of the war (of a total of 29 months), the recriminations on the British side regarding responsibility for the charge, the eventual fates of the key players, and the publication and reception of the poem. The result is unsatisfactory, but at least the reading list gives some pointers regarding deeper examinations of the war.

I’d like to recommend this book to those who perhaps want a first look at a complex and now largely forgotten conflict. Unfortunately, the editing of this volume is so poor that I really can’t tell anyone to read it. The style is evidently intended to be more accessible than weightier histories, employing many short and to-the-point sentences. That’s fine, but the longer sentences are often problematic, and grammatical infelicities that would curl the toes of any past or present editor of The Strategist abound. To pick one at random, on page 130 we find: ‘… demonstrated his very laissez faire attitude towards how to fight a battle’. As well, frequent missing and extraneous commas caused constant misfiring in my reading. So, though I learned quite a bit about a conflict I was largely unfamiliar with, I did not enjoy reading this book.

Andrew Davies is a former director of ASPI’s Defence and Strategy Program and (a grumpy) executive editor of the Strategist.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).