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Updated: May 17, 2025
From being near Balaclava, and from being supplied with tents and clothing and food from their ships, they had not the same dreadful hardships to endure as the soldiers; they yet sought out danger, and as readily exposed their lives on shore as they are accustomed to do at sea.
During the morning, while the Russians were taking the earthworks along the ridge, our two cavalry brigades, in the words of General Hamley, had been manoeuvring so as to threaten the flanks of any force which might approach Balaclava, without committing themselves to an action in which they would have been without the support of infantry.
He went down to Portsmouth and put the planks and fittings on board some collier boats, but not wishing to share their voyage, he started for Marseilles, and there took a steamer to Constantinople. He arrived in the harbour of Balaclava on January 1, 1855, and heard the guns of Sebastopol booming six miles away.
Even our heroisms at Alma "a terrible, almost horrible, operation" Balaclava, and Inkermann, failed to raise a glow in his mind, though he admitted the force of Tennyson's ringing lines. The alliance with the "scandalous copper captain," elected by the French, as the Jews chose Barabbas, an alliance at which many patriots winced was to him only an added disgrace.
'Yes, said De Blacquaire, 'that is the English officer's answer. And so saying, he put in spurs and rode away. Here we are, fifteen months later, with Balaclava and Inkerman behind us, and the world ringing with the story of our valour; and something here and there being said about the staring incapacity of our commanders and the crass dishonesty and stupidity of our contractors.
We remained on the heights of Balaclava that night, prepared to receive the Russians if they had returned; but they had had enough of us, and had retreated. We of the light division remained stationed at this place all the winter. There was another bloody battle fought not long after this on the 5th of November, called the battle of Inkerman.
A number of boats were already engaged in the humane object; but few of the people belonging to the vessels which had been wrecked in the immediate neighbourhood of Balaclava had escaped. Farther down the coast, however, two or three ships were seen on shore, from which it was possible the crews might have landed in safety.
One of them was a personal friend of Miss Nightingale's, others were Irish nuns working in Balaclava, and their graves were kept gay with flowers planted by the soldiers. Thus the Lady-in-Chief found them when in May 1855 she set out to inspect the hospitals in the Crimea.
There be those who say the assault was rash; the speed unauthorized; the whole effort mad as Lucan's launch of the Light Brigade at Balaclava; but once there in view of the fatal valley, the sight is one to fire the brain of any trooper.
Then the score of dragoons of whom one may truly say, in the words of Tennyson's "Balaclava Charge," that they are "all that are left of not the 'twelve' hundred" come trotting down the Corso from the Piazza del Popolo. With a quick shuffling march the French troops pass along the street, and form in file, pushing back the crowd to the pavements.
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