Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
$17.00$17.00
FREE delivery: Saturday, April 20 on orders over $35.00 shipped by Amazon.
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Buy used: $10.79
Other Sellers on Amazon
FREE Shipping
77% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade Paperback – Illustrated, July 1, 1991
Purchase options and add-ons
Nothing in British campaign history has ever equaled the tragic farce that was the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War's Battle of Balaclava on October 25, 1854. In this fascinating study, Cecil Woodham-Smith shows that responsibility for the fatal mismanagement of the affair rested with the Earls of Cardigan and Lucan, brothers-in-law and sworn enemies for more than thirty years.
In revealing the combination of pride and obstinacy that was to prove so fatal, Woodham-Smith gives us a picture of a vanished world, in which heroism and military glory guaranteed an immortality impossible in a more cynical age.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Group
- Publication dateJuly 1, 1991
- Dimensions5.08 x 0.62 x 7.72 inches
- ISBN-109780140012781
- ISBN-13978-0140012781
Books with Buzz
Discover the latest buzz-worthy books, from mysteries and romance to humor and nonfiction. Explore more
Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0140012788
- Publisher : Penguin Group; Reprint edition (July 1, 1991)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780140012781
- ISBN-13 : 978-0140012781
- Item Weight : 8.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.08 x 0.62 x 7.72 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #603,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #642 in Intelligence & Espionage History
- #841 in England History
- #10,033 in Engineering (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
James Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan proves singularly representative of aristocratic shortcomings. The only son in a family of daughters, he grew spoiled by parental dotage, generating an egotism mixed with dreams of military glory. By adulthood Cardigan was an almost caricature nobleman: handsome and gallant, but arrogant, snobbish and short-tempered. Woodham-Smith's claim that Cardigan's "glorious golden head had nothing in it" (15) is unfair; biographer Saul David shows that Cardigan was both intelligent and a good student. However, Cardigan certainly lacked in other areas: common sense, tact and especially temperance.
Commanding first the 15th, and later the 11th Hussars, Cardigan proved harshly exacting. His stringent standards made the 11th Hussars England's premiere cavalry regiment, but they also engendered the loathing of his officers and men. He certainly kept England's press abuzz with sundry scandals. Minor breaches of etiquette sent him into apoplexy: he scandalized the Army by blackballing John Reynolds, a young captain who dared serve Moselle at a champagne dinner (the famous "black bottle" affair), and flogging a soldier on Easter Sunday. Cardigan himself violated societal mores through repeated duels and scandalous love affairs. He was publicly booed at theaters and public gatherings, becoming a perennial headache for his superiors. An exasperated Duke of Wellington proclaimed "he had never known the time of the staff... to be taken up in so useless a manner" (100).
Profiled in parallel is George Bingham, 3rd Earl of Lucan. Lucan easily bested Cardigan in sheer bloody-minded nastiness. He gained infamy for cruelly managing his Mayo estates during the Irish potato famine. Consolidating land holdings and evicting tenants en mass, he caused untold suffering among his subjects and intense hatred: "it is doubtful if he considered the Irish as human beings at all" (113). Like Cardigan, he was also a martinet of the worst sort, a brutal taskmaster "perpetually entangled in trifles" (33) in commanding his troops and often contemptuous of superiors. Lucan found increasingly petty and bizarre ways of exerting authority: at one point, he ordered his cavalry drilled in antiquated Napoleonic tactics against Raglan's express orders.
Not surprisingly, these men loathed each other. Lucan married Cardigan's sister and by all accounts mistreated her, igniting a personal feud. Naturally, when the Crimean War broke out Cardigan (heading the Light Brigade) found himself serving under division commander Lucan. Commanding general Lord Raglan exacerbated things by separating Cardigan from Lucan's main body, thus undermining Lucan's authority. Even in the field, the two men never missed an opportunity to spite or undermine each other, with disastrous results.
Woodham-Smith forcefully attacks the British military that spawned them. The purchase system, by which officers could literally buy a higher rank, had its benefits. It forestalled the establishment of a powerful, Prussian-style military class, and forced officers to take personal responsibility for their regiment's upkeep. In practice however, it populated the Army with dilettantes and adventurers, seeing military service as a stepping stone to easy prestige. Nominally officers could advance by merit; in practice men without experience or qualification leapfrogged over seasoned career soldiers. Lord Palmerston proclaimed that "it was very desirable to connect the higher classes of Society with the Army" (30), whether or not they were fit to lead.
The lack of a major war since 1815 ensured an antiquated senior staff. Commanding the Allied armies was Fitzroy Somerset, Baron Raglan. Wellington's longtime secretary, Raglan's bravery (he had lost an arm at Waterloo), amiability and organizational skills were unquestioned. His greatest achievement was ensuring smooth relations with his French and Turkish allies. Yet Raglan had never led troops in the field, and proved a spectacularly inept tactician. "Without the military trappings... one would never have guessed him to be a soldier," Woodham-Smith says (161). He proved frustratingly absent-minded, constantly confusing his French allies with the Russian enemy. An exasperated junior officer complained that "everything [is] old at the top. This makes everything sluggish."
The Crimean disaster becomes tragically predictable. Horses crowded into transport ships died en route to the Crimea. Raglan botched the Allied attack at the Alma, forcing British troops to take and retake the same ground repeatedly. Over-caution and mis-communicaton prevented a complete victory when Raglan refuses Lucan's request to launch a follow-up attack. Raglan ill-advisedly shifted the Allied supply base to Balaclava, a tiny village ill-suited for supplying two massive armies. Finally, administrative muddle ensures inadequate supplies and medical treatment, causing thousands of troops to die of disease and exposure.
In fairness, most officers shared many misfortunes with their men. Both Raglan and his French counterpart Marshall St. Arnaud ultimately succumbed to dysentery. Lucan was wounded at Balaclava and even his detractors granted him personal bravery. Cardigan however spent evenings on his yacht in Calamita Bay, entertaining civilian friends and distancing himself from his brigade's hardships. Lest this seem unduly extravagant, military buffs may remember American General George McClellan lunching while the Battle of Malvern Hill raged, Boer War commander Charles Warren stopping his division's advance for a bath, or Charles Townshend dining on plum duff at Kut while his troops starved. This mixture of sang froid and self-indulgence seems unfortunately prevalent.
Woodham-Smith hits her rhetorical stride with Balaclava. She recounts the stirring stand of Colin Campbell's "Thin Red Line," and the gallant Charge of the Heavy Brigade, where 300 cavalrymen under James Scarlett defeated 2,000 Cossacks in a wild uphill charge. Woodham-Smith captures the excitement and fleeting glory of these skirmishes. Against all odds, the British seemed poised to win a spectacular victory. Yet Cardigan stood by, using a discretionary order from Lucan as an excuse not to attack the routed Cossacks. Had Cardigan followed up on Scarlett's success, the third phase of the battle might never have occurred.
Instead, a classic example of mismanagement follows. Raglan dictates an unclear order to quartermaster Richard Airey, instructing Lucan to attack Russian troops taking capture guns away from the Causeway Heights. Captain Louis Nolan, Raglan's impulsive aide, delivers the message to an agitated Lucan, emphatically pointing at the nearest guns. Neither man recognizes Nolan's fatal mistake: that Lucan cannot see the Heights from his position. Nolan instead gestures towards a mass of Russians supported by artillery in the valley ahead. Stung by accusations of "looking on" in earlier engagements, Lucan does not ask Nolan to clarify his order, and Cardigan protests halfheartedly. Before anyone realizes it, the Light Brigade initiates its fateful charge.
Historians still dissect the Charge in hope of assigning blame, following the footsteps of Cardigan and Lucan's vicious postwar press feud. Woodham-Smith dodges the issue of individual guilt, viewing Balaclava instead as the logical conclusion of an entire system. For all their gallantry, the British cavalry could not achieve the impossible, and find themselves decimated by well-placed cannon and overwhelming numbers. With so many egotists and incompetents staffing the Army, the Light Brigade's fate seems inevitable. If the British Army was gradually reformed after Crimea, it came at great cost and only grudgingly. The purchase system was not abolished until the Cardwell reforms of 1868-1874, largely at the impetus of Crimean veteran Garnet Wolseley.
If The Reason Why isn't definitive, it's because of its limited portrayal of the Crimea (the book mostly ends at Balaclava) and its editorial tone. More recent works (Terry Brighton's Hell Riders , Saul David's The Homicidal Earl ) eschew Woodham-Smith's polemical approach for more balanced analysis. Still, Woodham-Smith's passionate anger and vivid prose make it the most readable account of the Light Brigade's sorry fate, and a classic account of military incompetence.
Top reviews from other countries
The title of the book is taken from the poem by Lord Tennyson which immortalised that charge, an act of enormous courage, great disicpline and utter stupidity. Tennyson had written
'Forward, the Light Brigade!'
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldiers knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
It is widely known that a french general who witnessed the charge said "C'est Magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre" (It's magnificent, but it is not war.) It is less well known that his complete comment continued with "C'est de la folie!" (It is madness!)
Woodham Smith, having honed her writing skills by publishing novels under the pen-name of Janet Gordon, then began to write serious history books. She only wrote four such works, of which this is the second, but those four books were of such high quality that she was described as one of the best historians of her generation, appointed a CBE and received honorary distinctions from three universities including Oxford, where she was made an honorary fellow of her old college, St Hilda's.
Her other historical works were " Florence Nightingale ," " The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849 " (a brilliant account of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s) and the first part of what had been intended to be a multi-volume biography of Queen Victoria .
This book charts the lives of two of the main actors in the drama of the light brigade, James Thomas Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan, who led the charge and his immediate superior, George Charles Bingham, Earl of Lucan, who told Cardigan to make the suicidal attack in the belief that he was carrying out the orders of the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan. Cardigan and Lucan were brothers-in-law and long-standing rivals, who bitterly hated each other.
Woodham-Smith explains the course of the Crimean war up to the battle of Balaclava a story of heroism and endurance on the part of British fighting men combined with utter incompetence on the part of the generals on both sides. It charts the increasing tension between Cardigan and Lucan, and between the Commander in Chief and both of them. Finally it explains how the battle of Balaclava developed, including how Raglan from the high altitude vantage point from which he was trying to direct the battle could see the whole battlefield, including a vulnerable Russian target which he wanted the Light Brigade to attack, while Lords Lucan and Cardigan at a much lower level could not see the target concerned.
Because Lucan couldn't see the Russian guns which Raglan actually wanted him to attack, he asked the ADC, Captain Nolan, who brought him the Commander in Chief's command for an immediate attack, to explain which enemy guns were his target. Captain Nolan had to this point distinguished himself as a brilliant expert and author on the use of cavalry, but unfortunately and understandably he is mainly remembered for the response he gave to that question, which doomed himself and a large number of other brave men: he threw out his arm in the general direction of an impregnable Russian position with the words "There, my Lord, are your enemy, there are your guns!"
There has been much debate over the following 160 years about whether these words were said because Captain Nolan had himself misunderstood Raglan's order as Woodham-Smith argues, were merely intended as an insult (in which case they were an astonishing breach of military discipline), or were said for some other reason. Nobody ever had the chance to find out because Nolan was killed in the first seconds of the charge.
For a more detailed discussion of why Nolan's words doomed the Light Brigade you will have to read the book: it is accessible, informative, and very well argued. It concludes with an account of the reforms of the army which followed the Crimean war and which the author describes as being "almost a happy ending" to the tragic story of a particularly unpleasant war.
Although with 21st century hindsight, if the descriptions of the author are to be considered accurate, it's difficult to comprehend how such a bunch of mal-adjusted bunglers built an Empire. As described, the characters involved could not be trusted to organise the proverbial gathering at the local beer manufacturer.
I found the book both entertaining and informative, with a cliff-hanging climax leading to the well-known disaster. However it left me with a desire for further research. I can't help but think that the author over-egged the pudding in her descriptions of the main protagonists as over-privileged hooray henrys.
Good read though, and recommended.




