The interest of the Balaclava fight centres in the two historic cavalry charges.  Here again, from his position on the hill above, Kinglake witnessed both; the first, clear in smokeless air, the second lost in the volleying clouds which filled the valley of death.  He saw the enormous mass of Russian cavalry, 3,500 sabres, flooding like an avalanche down the hill with a momentum which Scarlett’s tiny squadron could not for a moment have resisted; their unexplained halt, the three hundred seizing the opportunity to strike, digging individually into the Russian ranks, the scarlet streaks visibly cleaving the dense grey columns.  Inwedged and surrounded, in their passionate blood frenzy, with ceaseless play of whirling sword, with impetus of human and equestrian weight and strength, the red atoms hewed their way to the Russian rear, turned, worked back, emerged, reformed; while the 4th and 5th Dragoons, the Royals, the 1st Inniskillings, dashed upon the amazed column right, left, front, till the close-locked mass headed slowly up the hill, ranks loosened, horsemen turned and galloped off, a beaten straggling herd.  Eight minutes elapsed from the time when Scarlett gave the word to charge, until the moment when the Russians broke:  we turn from the fifty describing pages, breathless as though we had ridden in the melley; if the episode has no historical parallel, the narrative is no less unique.  Our greatest contemporary poet tried to celebrate it; his lines are tame and unexciting beside Kinglake’s passionate pulsing rhapsody.  Its effect upon the Russian mind was lasting; out of all their vast array hardly a single squadron was ever after able to keep its ground against the approach of English cavalry; while but for Cathcart’s obstinacy and Lucan’s temper it would have issued in the immediate recapture of the Causeway Heights.

The Charge of the Light Brigade, on the other hand, while it stirred the imagination of the poet, shocked the military conscience of the historian.  He saw in it with agony, as Lord Raglan saw, as the French spectators saw, no act of heroic sacrifice, but a needless, fruitless massacre.  “You have lost the Light Brigade,” was his commander’s salutation to Lord Lucan.  “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre,” was the oft-quoted reproof of Bosquet.  The “someone’s blunder,” the sullen perversity in misconception which destroyed the flower of our cavalry, has faded from men’s memories; the splendour of the deed remains.  It is well to recover salvage from the irrevocable, to voice and to prolong the deep human interest attaching to death encountered at the call of duty; that is the poet’s task, and brilliantly it has been discharged.  Its other side, the paean of sorrow for a self-destructive exploit, the dirge on lives wantonly thrown away, the deep blame attaching to the untractableness which sent them to their doom, was the task of the historian, and that too has been faithfully and lastingly accomplished.