The Charge of the Light Brigade: History's Most Famous Cavalry Charge Told Through Eye Witness Accounts, Newspaper Reports, Memoirs and Diaries

By John Grehan

The most notorious, and most contentious, cavalry charge in history still remains an enigma. Though numerous books have been written about the charge, all claiming to reveal the truth or to understand the reason why; exactly what happened at Balaklava on 25 October 1854 continues to be fiercely debated. Voices from the Past, The Charge of the Light Brigade relives that fateful day not through the opinions of such historians but from the words of those that were there. This is the story of the charge told by the soldiers of both sides, in the most detailed description of the Battle of Balaklava yet written. Gallop with the light dragoons and lancers into the mouths of the Russian cannon as the shells and cannonballs decimate their ranks. Read of the desperate efforts to return down the Valley of Death as the enemy pressed around the remnants of the Light Brigade, and of the nine Victoria Crosses won that day.Possibly more significant are the accusations and counter-arguments that followed the loss of the Light Brigade. Just who was responsible for that terrible blunder? The leading figures all defended their own positions, leading to presentations in Parliament and legal action. Yet one of those senior figures made an astonishing admission immediately after the battle, only to change his story when the charge became headline news. Just who was it that made the fatal error that cost the British Army its Light Brigade?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781848329430

John Grehan

JOHN GREHAN has written, edited or contributed to more than 300 books and magazine articles covering a wide span of military history from the Iron Age to the recent conflict in Afghanistan. John has also appeared on local and national radio and television to advise on military history topics. He was employed as the Assistant Editor of Britain at War Magazine from its inception until 2014. John now devotes his time to writing and editing books.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Price of Glory

‘T he enemy, strongly posted on the highest point of the ridges, and with a gun to indicate the whereabouts of their artillery, kept up a steady fire upon the division as it approached,’ ran the words of a report in The Times :

While with his heavy cavalry the Duke [of Cambridge] occupied their attention on his left, his right was quickly thrown forward, so as to turn their position. First came England’s Brigade, and then, taking ground still further on, the brigade of Guards, each throwing out skirmishers and keeping up a steady fire supported by the batteries. At charging pace, and with fixed bayonets, a battalion of Sir Richard England’s Brigade, carried the heights. The other battalions, following quickly and deploying, extended their line to the right. Then came the Guards still farther on, and the batteries between the intervals. Lockyer’s Brigade, in the attempt to get forward to the extreme right behind the Guards, was so impeded by the ground that it could not execute the movement in time, but its place was supplied by the light cavalry regiments and the guns of the Horse Artillery.

The report was not, as might be thought, a description of an early engagement in the Crimea. This action, in fact, took place a little more than twelve months earlier than the opening shots of the Russian war and the difficult ground described by the journalist was the rolling heath land around Chobham in Surrey. What The Times was reporting on was the first large-scale manoeuvres undertaken by the British Army since the Napoleonic Wars.

In the intervening decades the nature of the operations undertaken by the Army had changed significantly. The large field force assembled by the Duke of Wellington, complete with its highly-sophisticated logistics and command structure, which had campaigned for six years in the Iberian Peninsula and then Belgium, had long been dissolved. Britain’s enemies were no longer to be found in Europe and its army fought its battles against African chieftains or the Indian princes. Once a territory had been conquered and added to the ever-expanding Empire, the troops settled down to garrison and police the new colony.

Few troops remained in the United Kingdom but with no threat to the nation’s stability other than internal ones, this was of no great concern. As it transpired, it was internal conflict that raised public awareness of the weakened state of Britain’s home defence. In 1843 antitaxation riots in Wales put such a severe strain upon the army that Lieutenant General Sir Henry Hardinge, the Secretary at State for War, was obliged to introduce a bill which allowed the Government to call the ‘out-pensioners’ from Chelsea Hospital to act in aid of the civil powers if required. If the Army could not put down a riot without the help of pensioners then the country was clearly in a highly vulnerable state.

This was highlighted when relations between Britain and France deteriorated just three years later over the possible union of the French and Spanish thrones. This dispute, known as ‘The Affair of the Spanish Marriages’ led to calls for the embodiment of the Militia but this was rejected on the grounds of cost.

Britain remained in this potentially dangerous state until 1848 when events in France mirrored those of an earlier generation when Britain stood alone against the might of Napoleon. A revolution in France led to the declaration of a Second French Republic. Preaching yet again the ideals of the First Republic, liberté, égalité, fraternité, it was once more a Bonaparte that led its revolutionary government. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was the nephew of Napoleon I and, like his uncle, he was not satisfied with merely being President of the Republic. In 1851 in a bizarre ‘self-coup’ he toppled his own regime to impose, the following year, a Second French Empire with himself as Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

This, finally, concentrated the minds of ministers in Britain. Calls were once again made for embodying the Militia and for an increase in the establishment of the Army by changing the criteria of enlistment. In the debate on this subject in the House of Commons on 29 March 1852, Mr. W. Williams, the Member for Lambeth, asked why there was a need for further spending on the armed forces when there was already some 160,000 men under arms, Spencer Walpole, the recently appointed Home Secretary, replied:

It is true you have a large Army; but that Army is not a quarter of the army of Russia; not half the army of Prussia, not a third of the army of France, and very little more than the army of Belgium: but your Empire is ruled over by a Queen who has under her dominion one-sixth of the population and one-eighth of the surface of the habitable globe. You have colonial possessions which exhaust a great part of your forces. Other Powers have more compact dominions, and can, therefore, more readily concentrate their forces. Their troops are not spread abroad in weak detachments, which cannot be withdrawn, like those belonging to this country. The very greatness of your Empire, therefore is, in one sense of the word, a source of weakness.¹

Walpole then set out the proposed changes to the terms of enlistment:

The House is aware that a recruit enlisting in the Army must not be more than 25 years of age, and that the standard of height is 5 feet 6 inches. We propose that the ages during which persons may volunteer or be balloted for, shall extend from 18 to 35 years. The consequence is, that with regard to those men who are upwards of 25 years of age, we shall not interfere with the recruiting for the Army, and as to those under that age, we shall not prevent them from enlisting if so disposed. With reference to the question of height, I may observe that the standard required by the present militia law is 5 feet 4 inches. The standard of height of the Russian infantry of the line is 5 feet 4 inches, in France it is 5 feet 1 inch English measure. [Laughter in the House.] Hon. Gentlemen may laugh at that; but, though I am speaking in the English House of Commons, we ought never to forgot that a nobler or more gallant soldiery never existed in the world than the French soldiery—and if we find that this people, who have fought throughout the length and breadth of Europe, have taken into their armies men of 5 feet 1 inch, we ought not to assume the military capacity is not to be found in men of 5 feet 2 inches.

Size, both in that of the men and in the total numbers of the Army, was not the British military’s only concern. Brigade and divisional structures, with all the support services, particularly the commissariat, had, under Wellington, evolved into remarkably efficient bodies. With so many regiments away from home for many years at a time garrisoning the Empire, those structures had long since been broken up. Britain no longer had the systems in place to enable it to campaign against a modern European army. Lord Panmure, a former Secretary-at-War, raised this point in the Commons in March 1852:

The system by which an army should be provisioned, moved, brought to action … is non-existent … We have no means of making general officers or of forming an efficient staff … For great operations we are inadequate.’²

It is the method, or lack of it, of ‘making of general officers’, which is generally considered to have been the prime reason for the mistakes that led to the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. It was not that the British Army lacked senior officers, the Army had plenty of those. What Pammure meant by ‘making’ was making them fit in terms of practise and experience in commanding large bodies of troops on campaign and in battle.

This was because it was possible for an officer to rise to senior rank without actually having any experience of battle due to the system by which commissions could be purchased. The prices of commissions were laid down in Army Regulations and ranged from £840 for an ensign in an ordinary infantry regiment to £9,000 (little short of £750,000 in today’s terms) for a lieutenant colonelcy in the Foot Guards. On promotion an officer sold his original commission, which meant that he only had to pay the additional sum for the next rank. So a captain in a cavalry regiment could sell his commission for £3,225 and would therefore only need to find £1,350 to be able to purchase a majority at the regulation price of £4.575. In peace time, when opportunities for promotion were limited, few commissions were sold for the regulation price. Often a ‘regimental value’ was added to each commissioned rank with the more prestigious regiments commanding up to twice the regulation price. This tended to disappear in wartime as casualties led to many more vacancies and supply and demand levelled out. Another factor that influenced the value of a commission was whether a regiment was due to go on overseas service or was returning from an overseas posting. Generally, when a regiment was ordered overseas, wealthy officers would sell their commissions and purchase another one in a regiment that was staying in the UK. Thus a rich officer could move through the ranks of the Army and never see service beyond Britain’s shores. Above the rank of lieutenant colonel promotion was usually dependent upon seniority.

The effect this had upon the Army in general was exemplified by the Duke of York’s Adjutant-General, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century:

There is not a young man in the Army that cares one farthing whether his commanding officer, the brigadier or the commander-in-chief approves his conduct or not. His promotion depends not on their smiles or frowns. His friends [or his family] can give him a thousand pounds which with to go to the auction rooms in Charles Street and in a fortnight he becomes a captain. Out of fifteen regiments of cavalry and twenty-six of infantry which we have here [in Flanders], twenty-one are commanded literally by boys or idiots.

The origins of the system of purchase date back to the days of Oliver Cromwell whose so-called ‘Commonwealth of England’ was nothing short of a military dictatorship enforced by his generals who were professional soldiers. After the Restoration of the monarchy it was the agreed policy of the state that the Army should never again be led by professional military men. To ensure this, not only was the pay for officers meagre but each commission and step in rank had to be purchased. This meant that only the wealthiest of individuals could afford to become senior officers and such men were the rich landowners, the very people who had the least, or nothing, to gain from a military revolution. As Lord Palmerston explained:

It was very desirable to connect the higher classes of Society with the Army … If the connection between the Army and the higher class of society were dissolved, then the Army would present a dangerous and unconstitutional appearance. It was only when the Army was unconnected with those whose property gave them an interest in the country, and was commanded by unprincipled military adventurers, that it ever became formidable to the liberties of the nation.³

The purchase system certainly ensured that there would never be a revolution in Britain as the Army was led, from top to bottom, by the aristocracy, the wealthy merchants and land owners; in other words, those that did not rely upon their pay and whose fortunes were dependent upon the continuance of the status quo. This led to a stability not seen in other countries and, in turn, allowed industry and trade to flourish. The purchase system contributed in no small measure to Britain becoming the most dominant nation of the nineteenth century.

Yet wealth and breeding does not necessarily equate to ability and many of the senior regimental ranks were filled with men of limited skill and little experience. Whilst officers could reach the rank of lieutenant colonel by purchase, they had to do so step by step, with a minimum period of time having to be spent at each grade. This was supposed to ensure they gained experience at every level of command but the speed at which an individual rose through the ranks depended upon how much money that person was able or willing to spend. Once the rank of lieutenant colonel had been attained, promotion through to full general was normally a matter of seniority, though the position of colonel was often an honorary one. It was possible for a deserving officer to be promoted on merit, but this was by far the exception.

Except in wartime, demand for first commissions usually outstripped supply, which of course pushed up prices, and limited the opportunities for the less wealthy. The Duke of York put in place one significant improvement, which was that those who had graduated from the recently-formed Royal Military College should be given priority for first commissions without purchase, though there was only ever a small number of such openings. Then, in 1849, it was necessary for new candidates to pass a qualifying examination before being placed on the list of potential new officers kept at the Horse Guards. The exam, though was only a formality, for it was almost unknown for anyone to fail, and being placed on the list did not mean obtaining a commission. For those without money or influence the chance of obtaining a commission was slight, as a report on the purchase system revealed:

[they] were told that their son’s names might be put down in the list, but that there was such a number before them that it was impossible that they would get commissions, and they did not get them. At that very time, a man with good interest [i.e. influence] would have got a commission at once.⁴

Notwithstanding the supposed requirement for commissions to be purchased, there were always free commissions to be had, not least because commissions were firmly ruled not to be heritable property and therefore the death of an officer automatically offered a free promotion to the most senior man below him and so on down, until ultimately creating a non-purchase vacancy for a new entrant as an ensign or second lieutenant. Where commissions were available with or without purchase within a regiment, such promotion was decided upon entirely by seniority – providing, in the case of purchased commissions, the eligible applicant had the necessary funds. Therefore, no officer was permitted to be promoted over the heads of more senior officers unless those ahead of him could not afford the asking price. Only if no officers in the regiment could afford the price of the next step in rank could that position be offered to someone from another regiment. This merely compounded the problem of entirely unsatisfactory, but wealthy, officers reaching high rank and of more deserving, but poor men, remaining in the junior ranks for decades.

Whilst it may seem clear that such a system of obtaining commissions, whether it be by purchase or seniority, was, by the mid-eighteenth century, an anachronism which had no place in the world’s leading industrial democracy, it still had many supporters. Sir Frederick Peel, the Member of Parliament for Bury, stood up in the House of Commons on 4 March 1856 to give his views on the subject:

Assuming it to be true that all men who entered the army did so with the desire of attaining as speedily as possible to the rank of colonel or general, or to some position of higher authority and greater responsibility than they were likely to reach in private life or in a civil profession, he could not understand how a system, the effect of which was to accelerate the accomplishment of such objects, could he viewed otherwise than with favour by those who had the means of bringing themselves within its operation by the purchase of commissions.⁵

This, then, was the accepted system of promotion in the British Army at the time of the Crimean War. When it became obvious that a war with Russia was unavoidable, the men at Horse Guards had to choose general officers to lead an expeditionary force from a pool of wealthy, influential men, many of whom had little or no combat experience, and who had purchased their way to the top, as a report after the war made clear:

Whenever the … advisors of the crown are obliged to … recommend Her Majesty to name a commander for her army in the field, they must necessarily select from among those who had obtained high rank in the army. The great majority of these officers, however, will have risen by purchase, obtaining their rank not from any acknowledged fitness, but from the current of promotion and the opportunities of buying advancement. This country will therefore commence the operations of war under a disadvantage compared with foreign states, where all the officers in the higher grades will have been subjected to general selections and may, therefore, if the power of selection has been honestly and wisely exercised, be all men of known efficiency and merit.

The first selection to be made for the expected operations against Russia was that of Commander-in-Chief. Of those officers considered most suitable, Lord Hardinge, Lord Gough, Lord Combermere and Lord Raglan, were all at the pinnacle of their professions. All, were either full generals or field marshals who had held high positions within the Army and had an enormous wealth of experience in the field. Unfortunately, only one, Lord Raglan, was under the age of seventy.

FitzRoy James Henry Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, had become the military secretary to Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, at the age of just twenty-two. He had proven to be extraordinarily brave, leading one of the assaulting parties that famously stormed the fortress of Badajoz in 1812. When his right arm was shattered towards the end of the Battle of Waterloo he simply walked to the rear to find a surgeon. When Somerset reached the makeshift operating theatre the surgeon told him to lie down on a table. He then removed Somerset’s arm between the shoulder and the elbow with a saw. FitzRoy Somerset did not make a sound. He continued as Wellington’s secretary when the Duke became Commander-in-Chief of the Army. The only problem with appointing Raglan was that he had never actually commanded any troops in battle, not even a battalion. Nothing could highlight the drawbacks of the purchase and seniority system more starkly. When his name was put forward for command of the expeditionary force destined for the Crimea to Queen Victoria, it came with the following recommendation:

General Lord Raglan during the Peninsular War filled a most important situation on the staff of the late Duke of Wellington, and since the close of that War, from the period of the Battle of Waterloo, where he lost an arm, he has given eminent proofs of unwearied zeal and great ability in Your Majesty’s Service, particularly during the many years he has conducted the arduous duties of Military Secretary since which Your Majesty has been most graciously pleased to confer upon him the appointment of Master-General of the Ordnance.⁶

Victoria actually knew Raglan very well and she was happy to agree to his appointment. He had served at Wellington’s side throughout most of his successful years so, it was assumed, he must have learnt much from Britain’s greatest soldier. His most notable qualities, on the other hand, seemed to be that he was a gentleman and was well liked and respected. Being an officer and a gentleman was qualification enough to command Britain’s field army.

When completed, the force that sailed to the Crimea consisted of five divisions of infantry and one cavalry division with associated artillery and engineers. Of this force, cavalry was the most expensive arm to train, equip and, most particularly transport to the theatre of operations. It was also a most useful asset for keeping the peace in the UK. As a consequence, cavalry regiments were rarely sent abroad and so its officers and men had very little, or no, experience of warfare. Command of this prestigious division was placed in the hands of fifty-four-year-old Lieutenant General George Charles Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan. His only field experience had been more than twenty-five years earlier as an officer, strangely, on the staff of Prince Menshikov with the Russian Army. Lucan reached the rank of Major General before retiring. The prospect of war brought him out of retirement to take charge of the cavalry, a decision which some saw as a potentially disastrous. Amongst those was Major William Charles Forrest of the 4th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Dragoon Guards:

Lord Lucan is no doubt a clever sharp fellow, but he has been so long on the shelf that he has no idea of moving cavalry, does not even know the words of command & is very self willed about it, thinks himself right … if he is shewn by the drill book that he is wrong, he says, ‘Ah I should like to know who wrote that book, some Farrier I suppose … if any mishap should occur to the cavalry, you may be able to form a correct idea how it happened.’⁷

The most detailed history of the war in the Crimea down to the death of Lord Raglan, is found in the eight-volume work by A.W. Kinglake. In his account of the opening stages of the Battle of Balaklava, he notes Lord Lucan had the opportunity to delay the advance of the Russians with his cavalry. The ground was relatively flat and open and ideal for cavalry action. According to Kinglake, Lucan could have repeatedly threatened to charge the enemy which would have caused them to halt to receive cavalry. This, though, was beyond Lucan’s ability and exemplifies one of the major drawbacks of the purchase system:

It may be that a cavalry officer fresh from war-service would have been able to check Liprandi [the Russian commander], and to check him, again and again, without sustaining grave loss; but if a man can so wield a body of cavalry as to make it the means of thus arresting for a time an attack of infantry and artillery without much committing his squadrons, he has attained ‘to high art’ in his calling; and to expect a peace-service general to achieve such a task, is much as though one should take a house-painter at hazard and bid him portray a Madonna.⁸

The Cavalry Division was to be composed of two brigades, one of heavy cavalry, the other of light cavalry. The light cavalry had, since the days of Napoleon, been seen as dashing and their dress flamboyant. Apart from the Brigade of Guards, command of the Light Cavalry Brigade was the most sought-after of the positions below that of divisional commander. This position was given to James Brudendell, the seventh Earl of Cardigan, whose rise to the rank of major general was possibly the most egregious example of the injustices and inadequacies of the purchase system, as ‘an old solder’ wrote to the Editor of The Times on 25 June 1832:

Lord Brudenell, one of the majors adverted to by you as having been allowed, on false pretences of economy, to exchange an active majority for an unattached Lieutenant-Colonelcy, was lately appointed to the command of the 15th Hussars. Lord Brudenell has not been ten years in the service, and perhaps never spent two years with his regiment, having been engaged either in attending his duty as a Tory in the House of Commons, hunting at Melton Mowbray, or running away with other men’s wives. He cannot, therefore, be qualified to command a regiment of Dragoons. Yet he has been sent to supersede half the officers of the regiment, who are his seniors in the army. As if this were not sufficient to disgust and ruin one of the finest regiments in the service, he carries with him his wife, a divorcee. Are Tory lords thus to trample for ever on their brothers?

This swipe at Cardigan having a divorcee wife was the subject of much scandal when, in 1823, Cardigan, or Brudenell as he still was at that time, met Elizabeth, the wife of a Captain (later Lieutenant Colonel) Christian Johnstone in Paris. The two eloped. After the divorce trial, as it was then, Cardigan, as the guilty party, offered to ‘give satisfaction’ to Johnstone, i.e. fight a duel. Johnstone replied that ‘he has already given me satisfaction: the satisfaction of having removed the most damned bad-tempered and extravagant bitch in the United Kingdom.’⁹

The problem with appointing Cardigan to the Light Brigade was that he detested his commanding officer, who happened to be his brother-in-law. He believed that Lucan treated his sister badly, ‘kept her short of money and deprived of suitable enjoyments.’¹⁰ Their antipathy was public knowledge and it is said that Raglan protested at the decision to place these two men together. His disapproval was noted but dismissed by the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary at State for War.¹¹

What those men whom Lucan and Cardigan would lead in the Crimea thought of the two generals was put into words by Captain Robert Portal of the 4th Light Dragoons:

We are commanded by one of the greatest old women in the British Army, called the Earl of Cardigan. He has as much brains as my boot. He is only equaled in want of intellect by his relation to the Earl of Lucan … without mincing matters two such fools could not be picked out of the British Army to take command. But they are both Earls.¹²

There, of course, was the problem. Both had risen to high rank and both had money and influence. Lucan at least had some experience of warfare and some knowledge of the Russian Army and a number of its commanders. This was far from being the case with Cardigan, as George Ryan wrote:

When the Earl of Cardigan was ordered to the East in command of a brigade of our light cavalry, from club to pot-house marveled how he would behave. Their remembrance of him satisfied all that he had a taste for gunpowder, but they had no experience of how he could wield a sword.¹³

Cardigan, though, had bought the right to lead men into battle in the time-honoured and accepted tradition of the Army. It is said that he spent £28,000 to rise from Cornet to Lieutenant Colonel in just six years. He was then rumored to have spent between £35,000 and £40,000 for command of the 15th Hussars, and later paid £48,000 (a staggering £3,500,000 or so today) for the colonelcy of the 11th Hussars.

Such was the price that the seventh Earl of Cardigan paid for the glory of leading the Light Brigade in the Crimea.

Chapter 2

Holy War

Tension had been mounting for months following the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s declaration of war against Russia in October 1853. Ostensibly the breach between St Petersburg and Constantinople had been over the rights of Christians in the Holy Land which was under Muslim Ottoman rule. More specifically it had been over the keys to the Church and Grotto of the Nativity in Bethlehem. As Czar Nicholas I saw himself as the defender of the Orthodox Church in the East, the religious dispute gave the Russian autocrat the opportunity, he believed, to interfere in Turkish affairs.

This was merely the latest manifestation of what was called the Eastern Question, and for decades no answer had been found to the puzzle. That question, so often asked, was what would happen to the disparate peoples of the Ottoman Empire when that ailing conglomerate finally fell apart. For more than 500 years the Ottoman Turks had dominated Eastern Europe and the Near East from their capital at Constantinople. At its peak their Empire had encompassed more than 5,000,000 square kilometres and by the mid-1850s embraced in excess of 350,000,000 souls in thirty provinces that stretched from Budapest to Bagdad and reached almost as far south as the Horn of Africa.

But many of the states within the Empire had sought independence from Constantinople, and some had achieved this whilst numbers of others had gained varying degrees of autonomy. Its break up seemed inevitable and if it did collapse there would be no single state strong enough to defy the territorially ambitious Russia. This was a worrying situation for the other great European Powers, in particular Great Britain, who saw Russia as a potential threat to its empire in the Indian sub-continent.

Considerable efforts were undertaken by Britain, France, Austria, and for a time Prussia, to ease the mounting tension between the Sublime Port and the Czar. The Russian autocrat, however, considered that the time was right to give the Ottoman Empire the final push that would see it topple and he believed that the other countries would not dare to stop him. As a consequence, on 26 June, the following proclamation was issued from St Petersburg:

Having exhausted all means of conviction, and having in vain tried all the means by which our just claims could be peaceably adjusted, we have deemed it indispensable to move our armies into the provinces on the Danube, in order that the Porte may see to what her stubbornness may lead.

To all intents and purposes this was a declaration of war on Turkey. In response the French Assemblée Nationale declared that this was the start of a conflict that would draw in more countries than just Russia and Turkey, or even the world’s most dominant Power, Great Britain:

If Russia and England were alone engaged in the discussion – if the war could be confined to those two Powers – we would be easily satisfied. It would even cause us some joy to see the two nations engaged, and it would not be for England that our prayers would be offered in that contest – for her mercantile asperity is more odious than the ambition by which Russia may be animated. But, once for all, itis not a private war that is in question. It is a general and interminable war. The peace of the world is at stake.¹

This realistic appreciation led to the most unlikely of alliances – between the perennial enemies Great Britain and France, and a combined Anglo-French fleet sailed for the Eastern Mediterranean seeking by its presence to curd Russian ambitions. The British and French warships found a spacious anchorage in Bashika Bay just outside the Dardanelles to await developments and instructions from the ambassadors of their respective governments in Constantinople.

As it transpired the Turkish force in the Danubian provinces, under Omar Pasha, had fought back, surprising everyone with a stunning victory at Olteniţa in October, in present-day Romania. This gave rise to fresh hopes that the Czar would be forced to climb down and pull back his forces. But Nicholas I was not so easily deterred and the Russians persisted with their offensive operations. As a consequence, on 22 October, the Allied fleet was ordered to enter the Dardanelles. Russia declared war on Turkey the next day.

Still, though, Britain and France hesitated. The most that they would commit to was to order the combined force of ten British and nine