“The Charge of the Light Brigade” called the event a “wild charge.” The word represents qualified praise because it betrays a certain uneasiness with the conduct of the cavalry, in keeping with the subtlety of Tennyson’s poem overall. It places the Light Brigade in a zone outside the comprehension of those who observed, wrote about, and read about the charge. This insistence on the madness of the Light Brigade subverts a wider discussion of whether the charge was suicidal and who should have been held accountable for the military debacle. Both the British and Russians who witnessed the charge suggested that, whilst brave, it could be viewed as lunacy and thus incomprehensible in rational terms. However, both British and Russian eyewitnesses also referred to the charge as an act of insanity as Markovits says, “madness and glory coalesce in Tennyson’s poem” ( Markovits para.
The British blend of mourning and pride in reaction to the Light Brigade’s charge is well documented in Stefanie Markovits’s The Crimean War in the British Imagination and her BRANCH entry on the charge. Thomas Rommel has characterized this response as “the discrepancy between chivalric heroism and military incompetence,” which he finds to be a hallmark of poetry on the charge (110). As a result, even monuments to the Crimean War such as that in Waterloo Place or those in Sevastopol attest to loss as much as victory, and like the charge of the Light Brigade itself represent heroic failure.Īlthough Alfred, Lord Tennyson claimed that “all the world wondered” in his poem on the bravery of the charge of the Light Brigade, the event has always produced an ambivalent response, eliciting reactions poised between admiration for the heroism of the cavalry and grief at the senseless waste of life. Both the British and Russians had difficulty in coming to terms with this incident, as they did with the Crimean War as a whole, because it was neither wholly a victory nor defeat for either side. Russian cavalry officers were convinced that their British counterparts were brave but deranged “valiant lunatics” after witnessing the charge.
Tennyson’s polyvocal term “wild” in particular holds in suspense both admiration and the suggestion that it was an insane act, which resonates with accounts by Russians on the receiving end of the charge. Even though he was writing at a remove of time and distance from the action, Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem echoes the conflicted reactions of both British and Russian witnesses who characterized the charge both as heroic and an act of insanity. The charge of the Light Brigade has always elicited ambivalent responses from eyewitnesses.
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