Product Description

On 25 October 1854, during the Crimean War, the Light Brigade of the British Cavalry Division made the most magnificent and most brutal charge in military history. Almost 700 men armed with sabre and lance, charged straight at the muzzles of Russian cannons. This vivid and extraordinarily detailed account of the charge and the bloody mêlée that followed, by an author with unique access to regimental archives, is told largely in the words of the survivors themselves. Terry Brighton takes the reader closer than ever before to the experience of charging down the Valley of Death.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #198363 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

The Times
'Written with humour and understanding...a masterly, moving and entertaining book'

The Spectator
'He writes with pace and precision, as an account of this episode his book will be hard to beat...excellent'

About the Author
For many years Terry Brighton has sourced and worked with unique survivor’s accounts of this battle. Terry Brighton is the Curator of The Queen's Royal Lancers Museum - the direct descendents of the 17th Lancers who led the charge. He is a member of the Crimean War Research Society and is an authority on The Crimean War. He has a degree in Politics and Philosophy and lives in Grantham.

Customer Reviews

One of the best military history texts on offer today.
Terry Brighton manages to encapsulate the reader into what is potentially a very dry subject, however, the text reads like a novel, and one that is hard to put down at that. The wider context of the Crimean campaign is described, including the politics between Cardigan, Lucan, Raglan and Nolan. As well as establishing the responsibility for the charge, in a reasoned logical argument, Brighton infuses the text with eye witness accounts. Many of these accounts are from the men who rode in the charge, this was interesting as these sources are all to often missed from texts on military history. The first section of the book also provides an interesting background to life in the Cavalry units that formed the light Brigade and the various deals that were carried out in buying and selling commissions. All in a all, an excellent read, by far one of the best military history texts on offer today.

A galloping masterpiece
Wonderful. A book that rattles along like a galloping thoroughbred. Mr Brighton stand up and take a bow.

The true mark of a great historical account is to whet the reader's appetite, to make them crave further knowledge. This book has done that and more. It is simply "unputdownable" so much so that I lost weight....it was the cause of me missing dinner!

Having gone on to read The Charge and The Reason Why this stands head and shoulders above these two works for the text and the eyewitness accounts are perfectly juxtaposed to leave the reader with the feeling that they are pounding down the North Valley with the likes of Wightman and Pennington.

Thank you Mr Brighton.

Dull battle, good book (but too long)
I wonder how many military actions there have been in the last couple of hundred years that lasted about 30 minutes and cost around 400 lives (around 200 British and presumably about the same on the Russian side)? Several hundred, I'd guess, maybe more, but The Charge of the Light Brigade (actually it was more of a trot until the last few yards) still holds the attention of the British public, and as I bought this book I can hardly stand above that! In my defence it is the first "Charge" book I have read, but how does an author make so little action last for 364 pages? That's nearly twelve pages per minute of actual action!

The answer is, by dividing the book into four parts.
The first part is probably the best and that is a very colourful and fast-moving account of the origins of the war, the politics involved, the preparations, voyage and landfall in Turkey, then Russia. If this sounds dull (it would have done to me) then don't be put off. The author writes with confidence but with a light touch; the level of detail is enough to understand and the colourful yet loathsome characters of Lucan and Cardigan give plenty of colour.
The second part of the book, bizarrely, is the actual charge/trot itself, told by editing together the first-hand accounts of the survivors and told minute-by-minute. This is ok, but the survivors' accounts are very similar to each other and I was left feeling if I had read one of them and maybe two I wouldn't have had to read the rest. Unlike, say, Waterloo, every man involved was on the same part of the field and experienced very similar things. I was also left slightly puzzled to be only halfway through the book with the main event already over.
The third part is a description of life for the cavalry after the charge and again for a novice like myself this was very interesting - although quite distressing if you have any love for horses (or humans, I suppose).
The final part of the book is devoted to a series of `controversies'. The most interesting is who was to blame (read it for yourself - I disagreed). Other `controversies' include whether Florence Nightingale was a better nurse than Mary Seacole, who sounded the charge, and murder. In other words it feels a lot like either self-indulgence on the part of the author or space-filling.

The maps were generally clear and helpful. Set against this I was really irritated by the title "Hell Riders" and the persistence with which the term "hell" was used, not because I am prudish or think it is blasphemous, but because the casualty rate really doesn't justify it. The pictures were fairly interesting but I would have been very interested to see some modern pictures of the ground. (There are one or two on the Flickr website, but nobody seems to quite know where the charge took place and it certainly looks very shallow for a valley.)