Loyalty

The soldiers of the Light Brigade are not portrayed in this poem as having any illusions that their attack made sense: in the second stanza we see that they were aware of the fact that their charge was not the result of sound strategy, but of a blunder. But what is a soldier to do when commands do not seem correct? For officers, military training is about developing strategies, but the soldier is trained to follow the strategies that are given to him. Often, the actions that soldiers are required to perform will not seem to them to serve any useful function: soldiers do not have full intelligence about what is going on at other places at the same time, and they are not informed about what the army's overall intention is, or where one order might fit into the overall plan. Sometimes soldiers will be called upon...