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.