bravery: moed.

to bungle: verknoeien.

component: onderdeel.

Crimean War: De Krimoorlog (1853-1856). Engeland en Frankrijk gingen Turkije helpen in het conflict met de Russische tsaar. Die wilde enkele heilige plaatsen in Palestina onder zijn bescherming brengen waardoor hij tegelijk invloed zou krijgen in de Middellandse Zee. Daardoor zou die strategisch belangrijke verkeersader voor Engeland en Frankrijk verloren gaan.

De Krimoorlog werd vooral beroemd door de rol van Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) die als eerste vrouw frontsoldaten verzorgde en meteen de basis legde voor de moderne verpleging.

fondness: voorliefde.

light: licht bewapend.

to mark (hier): gedenken.

owing to: te wijten aan.

roll call: appel.

William Howard Russell (1821-1907): De eerste échte oorlogscorrespondent die via zijn ‘Letters’ niet enkel de oorlog zelf beschreef, maar ook de fouten van de legerleiding én de slechte verzorging van de gewonden aan het licht bracht. Hij versloeg de Krimoorlog, de oorlogen in (de Britse kolonie) India, de Amerikaanse burgeroorlog, de Frans-Duitse oorlog en de oorlogen in Zuid-Afrika.

supposedly: vermoedelijk.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892): Engels dichter die beschouwd wordt als de belangrijkste en invloedrijkste Victoriaanse dichter. The Charge of the Light Brigade dateert van 1855.

“Their’s not to reason why / Their’s but to do and die / Into the valley of death / Rode the six hundred”. These four lines are from The Charge of the Light Brigade by the 19th century poet Tennyson. They are lines which, a century ago, every schoolchild in Britain knew by heart. They refer to an incident in the Crimean War (Britain. France and Turkey versus Russia) when a component of the British, cavalry attacked a Russian gun emplacement.

In popular British imagination, this event is well-known as a heroic disaster. Supposedly, owing to a misunderstanding in the chain of command, fewer than 666 horsemen found themselves charging down a valley defended on three sides by 25,000 Russians and lots of cannons. At the end of the charge, so the story goes, almost all the British were dead or wounded. The event has been celebrated ever since, aided by two Hollywood films, as an example of military bungling, pointless bravery and glorious failure (something which the British and Irish both have a romantic fondness for).

This coming autumn marks the 150th anniversary of the charge. And to mark it, revisionism is in the air. A new book claims that it wasn’t a disaster at all, that in fact 85 % of the horsemen survived, which is a better rate than most cavalry charges of the 19th century. And they did capture the guns.

So where did the impression of near total annihilation come from? Where did Tennyson get the ‘data’ for his poem? From the press, of course! William Howard Russell, the pioneering war correspondent for The Times, filed his report back immediately after the charge, when a roll call was answered by only 195 men, most of them wounded. But hundreds of others who had had their horses shot from under them – and were not wounded – arrived back in camp hours afterwards.