Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys

by Neil Oliver

  It was an astonishing victory—first the defiance of the Highlanders, then the uphill charge by the Heavy Horse. While Raglan dispatched a rider with the three-word message of congratulation “Well done, Scarlett,” elsewhere on the field the unfolding wonder had been watched by less charitable eyes. Waiting with his Light Horse, still denied any chance to show his own mettle, Lord Cardigan could only look on with envy at the exploits of Scarlett and his men. When would his moment come?

  As things turned out, he didn’t have to wait for long. From his position on high ground, Raglan could see the charge by the Heavy Horse had caused disarray among the Russian forces—but the enemy were still in possession of the Causeway Heights. When he saw Russian soldiers moving forward to try to drag away the abandoned British guns, he resolved to throw the Light Horse into the fray.

  A junior officer had already pleaded with Cardigan to order a charge toward the rattled enemy horse on the Heights. But Cardigan refused, and would later claim his orders from Lucan were to hold his position until infantry had been brought into position to support any mounted advance.

  Raglan was beside himself with impatience at the apparent failure of the Light Horse to follow up the success of the Heavies. A new order was scribbled down. It read:

  Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front—follow the enemy and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French Cavalry is on your left. Immediate.

  The note was handed to the hot-headed and arrogant Captain Louis Nolan—an officer known to dislike both Lucan and Cardigan. A rash decision it may have been, to entrust such a message to such a contrary figure, but it was widely understood that Nolan was the best horseman and best able to reach Lord Lucan in the shortest time.

  In any event, it took Nolan just a quarter of an hour to deliver the note. Lucan was horrified by it. While Raglan’s more elevated position enabled him to see the enemy and the guns on the Causeway Heights, Lucan and Cardigan were on lower ground and had no such view. The only guns they could see were those of a heavily manned battery at the head of the valley, to the north. To make matters worse, those guns were protected by batteries of riflemen on both sides of the valley.

  When Lucan suggested that such a move made no sense and would serve no function, Captain Nolan shouted out: “Lord Raglan’s orders are that the cavalry should attack immediately!”

  “Attack, sir?” said Lucan. “Attack what? What guns, sir? Where and what to do?”

  Dripping with contempt, Nolan made a vague gesture out toward the valley.

  “There, my lord! There is your enemy! There are your guns!”

  It seems unbelievable that a junior officer would talk to his superior in this way—or that Lucan would accept what he was being told without seeking clarification. But so it was, and now he issued orders to Cardigan to attack the Russian guns at the head of the valley. Just to make sure no one was in any doubt, he trotted over to Cardigan himself and made clear what was expected.

  The two implacable foes considered one another for a moment. Here toward them came a moment greater than anything that had divided them in their lives so far. Cardigan accepted the order but pointed out to his commander that the Russians had a defended battery across the valley floor and rifle batteries on both flanks.

  “I know it,” said Lucan. “But Lord Raglan will have it.”

  More to himself than to anyone listening, Cardigan murmured, “Here goes the last of the Brudenells.”

  Then he turned to his men and gave the order to advance. As the 676 men of the Light Brigade began to trot toward the guns, Captain Nolan reappeared and galloped across their front, shouting something at Cardigan. Rather than returning to Raglan as he should have done, Nolan had apparently stayed behind to join the attack—a clear breach of protocol. No one is quite sure what inspired him to try to tell Cardigan something new. Had he finally understood that Lucan had issued orders to attack the wrong guns—and that he must do something to avert disaster? Or was he intent simply on urging the Light Brigade forward? We will never know. Many yards before reaching Cardigan, a Russian shell burst close to Nolan and a shard of steel ripped into his chest, killing him instantly.

  High above, Raglan looked on in mounting horror as he realized what his Light Brigade was about to attempt. Instead of pursuing the retreating Russian cavalry away from the Causeway Heights as he wanted them to do, they were trotting toward certain destruction in a valley Tennyson would later describe as “the jaws of hell.”

  In parade ground order, the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, the 17th Lancers and the 8th and 11th Hussars, all resplendent in their toy soldiers’ colors, began to pick up the pace. None wavered, none held back. As they came into range of the Russian riflemen on either side of the valley, all hell was let loose upon them. The defenders could not believe what they were seeing and assumed the British cavalrymen were drunk. But drunk or sober, they became the targets for a withering hail of fire. On they came, at a steady trot, while the heavy guns to the front opened up on them as well. By the time they approached the gun battery itself they were entirely surrounded by fire. Men and horses were being cut to pieces all around. Survivors would report being splattered with the blood and brains of comrades, horses disemboweled beneath them. One rider was seen to be decapitated by an artillery round but his body stayed upright in the saddle, his lance still held level for the charge for many yards before he was finally unhorsed.

  Perhaps the Russian gun battery and the riflemen were so taken by surprise that they were slow in getting into action—maybe lingering disbelief at what they were seeing slowed their reactions. In any case, the charge succeeded in reaching the guns. Once in among the gunners, the cavalrymen did as they had been trained with lance and with saber. Then with nothing more to do—and with the massed Russian cavalry waiting to receive them behind the guns—the Light Brigade wheeled around and faced the return trip. Astonishingly, by the end of it there were 195 men still in their saddles. Of the rest, 107 were killed outright, 187 were wounded and 50 were unaccounted for. Somewhere between 400 and 500 horses were dead or had to be destroyed. Cardigan survived—and would later give an account of the event to the House of Commons. For now he was content to leave the field, returning to his yacht in the harbor at Balaclava to drink a bottle of champagne before going back to bed.

  The Light Brigade, however, was destroyed. They had raised the reputation of the British cavalry to the highest possible levels, but their sacrifice had done nothing to further the Allied cause in the Crimean War.

  With all hope of outright victory now squandered, the British and French soldiers had to settle down for a winter siege. Winter gave way to spring and then summer, and all around were dead and dying. The British forces in the Crimea would lose over 18,000 men before the end—1,700 or more to the fighting and the rest to disease.

  In September 1855 the Russians evacuated the city and began negotiations for peace. The Treaty of Paris that ended it all was signed in February 1856. The fighting and the dying amid the stink of corpses had made no difference. The bright uniforms of the British and French were sullied in a way that would never come clean again.

  What would be remembered, though, above all else, was that insane charge into the Valley of Death by the Six Hundred.

  The French General Pierre-François Bosquet had been among the startled witnesses.

  “C’est magnifique,” he said. “Mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

  It was magnificent, but it was not war.

  We’re following the leader

  Duty and patriotism were woven through every fiber of Captain Scott’s character—that much has never been doubted. But it’s worth remembering that he was only human as well. News was soon circulating that Ernest Shackleton had been making noises about heading south once more. In December 1906 he wrote to a friend:

  What I would not give to be out there again doing the job, and this time really on the road to the Pole.
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br />   By early the following year the newspapers were reporting that Shackleton was definitely planning another attempt—what would eventually become the Nimrod expedition, which won him a knighthood—and it’s easy to imagine that it was this as much as anything else that got Scott moving again. Another alpha dog sniffing around his territory—and Scott certainly believed he had made his proprietary mark on the continent—was bound to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. From then on, the game was afoot.

  But 1907 brought Scott a distraction of a quite different sort. From his first meeting with Kathleen Bruce, he had been besotted. She was the girl for him, and he was soon writing letters to his mother telling her so. Though slower off the mark than her suitor, Kathleen was eventually convinced that Scott was a man in possession of an honors degree in Manliness. She had found the father of her children. They were married on September 2, 1908, in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court.

  By January 1909 she was pregnant, and utterly convinced she would have a boy. She wrote to her husband saying he should throw up his cap and shout triumphantly.

  But there in the background for Scott was the presence of Shackleton. Neither of the men ever publicly acknowledged the great rivalry between them, but it was there just the same. The Americans were getting in on the act (Commander Robert Peary would make his controversial claim to have reached the North Pole in April 1909), so too the Norwegians, but it was Shackleton’s efforts and ambitions that drove Scott hardest.

  In March of that year the newspapers were full of the younger man’s achievement of reaching to within 100 miles of the South Pole. The threat posed to Scott’s pride by the possibility of being usurped in a domain he considered his by right was finally too great. By September he had published his plans to reach the South Pole and claim it as a prize for Great Britain. On September 14, Kathleen gave birth to the son she had always wanted. They named him Peter Markham Scott.

  For the return to Antarctica, Scott originally wanted the Discovery. She was unavailable, however, having been chartered by the Hudson Bay Company, and a replacement vessel would have to be found. In the end he settled on the Terra Nova, the 187-foot-long Norwegian whaling ship that had been one of the two relief vessels sent to recall Scott from his Discovery expedition in 1904.

  There was also the question of funds to pay for it all. For Scott, the necessary round of public speaking and thinly disguised begging was as hard to swallow as it had been the first time around. He needed about £40,000, around $3 million in today’s money, and in the end more than half of it came from the British government. As before, much of the balance was made up by public subscriptions great and small. Young Oxford graduate Apsley Cherry-Garrard joined the team after donating £1,000 to the cause. The same sum was received from a captain of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons by the name of Lawrence E. G. “Titus” Oates.

  Even before he went public with his intention to head south for the second time—and this time to make the Pole his target—veterans of the Discovery expedition were drawing close to Scott once more. Not just those from “officer class,” like Edward “Teddy” Evans, his second-in-command, and Dr. Edward Wilson, head of the scientific staff, but also men from “below decks” like chief stoker William Lashly, Tom Crean and Edgar “Taff” Evans felt bound to serve with him again. There was no shortage of fresh volunteers either. Scott established an expedition headquarters in London’s Victoria Street and within days of the advertisements going out, the first of about 8,000 applications duly arrived.

  Scott lacked Shackleton’s showmanship and confidence in front of the general public, but men were drawn to his side nonetheless. Those who came to know this quiet, generally good-natured man also came to love him. In that way of all great leaders, he inspired loyalty just by being himself.

  He was, of course, from a long and illustrious tradition of inspirational Navy men.

  The Battle of Trafalgar

  Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the island of St. Helena, in the South Atlantic, on May 5, 1821. A coffin was made for him from the timber of a mahogany dining table and lined with scavenged lead. It was carried on the shoulders of men of the 66th Regiment and laid in a stone-lined grave cut into the side of a peaceful valley beside a spring he had loved, beneath a willow tree.

  When in 1840 his countrymen were granted permission to exhume the remains for a second burial in Paris, they found it a difficult job. As much effort had been put into imprisoning the late Emperor in death as in life. It took a team of laborers more than 10 hours to return the coffin to the light of day, but when it was opened all were amazed to find the body so well preserved it was as though he was still lying in state. The face was instantly recognizable and peaceful, the hands beautiful. He was taken home then, surrounded by much pomp and ceremony, and lies now in an elaborate sarcophagus beneath the dome of Les Invalides.

  Napoleon had surrendered to the British on July 15, 1815, after final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo just a month before. The Duke of Wellington had called his victory “the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life,” but it ended the career of the greatest warrior Europe had yet seen. And so when Napoleon climbed aboard the British warship Bellerophon—a warship that had itself taken part in two legendary encounters of those Napoleonic Wars—her sailors were dumbstruck. Here among them at last was the tyrant, the monster they had learned to fear in childhood. What they saw was a plump little man who smiled at them and tipped his small cocked hat as he addressed their captain: “I have come to throw myself on the protection of your Prince and laws,” he said politely.

  The Emperor had been the most formidable foe imaginable. He had placed the shadow of his hand right across Europe and his ambitions—not to mention his abilities—had seemed without limit. But by the time his dreams were finally brought to an end on the field of Waterloo, in modern-day Belgium, less than eight miles from the city of Brussels, he had already been taught the limits of his aspirations. What he had been made to learn, above all else, was that he was landlocked. Whatever he might achieve with his armies on mainland Europe, he knew that he and they would never be going anywhere else.

  “If it had not been for you English, I would have been Emperor of the East,” he told the Bellerophon’s captain, Frederick Maitland, over dinner that evening. “But wherever there is water to float a ship, we are sure to find you in our way.”

  Napoleon had finally been beaten at Waterloo—that much is certainly true—but his ambitions had been hobbled 10 years before. England’s greatest hero, Lord Horatio Nelson, had completed that particular job on the afternoon of October 21, 1805, in the sea off the southwest coast of Spain, not far from the city of Cadiz, at a place called Cape Trafalgar.

  Nelson was born in 1758, three miles from the sea in the Norfolk village of Burnham Thorpe. His father Edmund was the local parson—a man of modest means but occupying that particular stratum of society that traditionally sent its sons to be trained as naval officers. When at the age of 11 young Horatio—or Horace as he preferred to be known—said he wanted to go to sea, it was easily arranged. His uncle, Maurice Suckling, brother to his mother Catherine, was already a captain in His Majesty’s Navy and more than happy to take his nephew with him.

  Horace had been a sickly baby—so frail, in fact, his parents had had him baptized when he was only 10 days old, just to be on the safe side—and then hardly the sturdiest of boys. But despite all that, he showed promise as an officer right from the start. By 17 he was an acting lieutenant and by 20 had been promoted to captain—first of the brig Badger and then of the 32-gun frigate the Hinchingbrooke. He saw active service in the Americas during the Revolutionary war, before being put on patrol duty in the West Indies. During that time he met and married the widow Fanny Nisbet, but the letters exchanged between the pair suggest it was a relationship of mutual respect rather than passion.

  By the end of the 1780s they were back in Norfolk, living a quiet life while Nelson awaited his next ship. In 1793 he was made captain of t
he 64-gun Agamemnon—the vessel he would ever after describe as his favorite. War with France broke out again within weeks of his new assignment and for the next 12 years until his death, Nelson’s star was usually in the ascendant—and his eagerness to fight put him in harm’s way again and again.

  In 1794, during a siege of French fortifications at Calvi, on the island of Corsica, he was blinded in his right eye. In February 1797 he was commanding the Captain as part of a fleet led by Lord Jervis when they encountered the Spanish fleet off Cape St. Vincent. The battle that ensued was a sensational victory for the British, and at the height of it Nelson elevated himself to stardom by personally leading boarding parties to capture two Spanish warships in quick succession. In July of the same year, during a disastrous attack on the island of Tenerife, a musket ball smashed his right arm and elbow. He suffered the amputation with all the equanimity expected of a gentleman.

  By 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte had declared that Europe was too small to provide him with enough glory—and Nelson was put in command of the fleet to find out precisely what the great general had in mind. The expedition culminated in the Battle of the Nile, a masterstroke choreographed by the British commander, in which the French were comprehensively crushed and Napoleon had to abandon his army to its fate in Egypt.

  Hero though he already was both to the Navy and, increasingly, to the British people, Nelson was always able to put himself in jeopardy—and not always aboard warships or in the shadow of enemy forts. During 1798, still married to Fanny, he embarked upon his affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, herself a married woman. Having infuriated his superiors, he was briefly recalled to England. But he was already a personality too large in the imagination of the public to be kept out of action, or the limelight, for long.