charge of the Light Brigade--outstanding, reads like a novel

from Amazon.com: Woodham-Smith has taken a specific event from a rather obscure military campaign and created a classic historical work. Her flair for presenting the quaint, courageous and maddeningly obtuse character of the British military aristocracy from this period has no master. As a female historian writing within the traditionally male genre Woodham-Smith compares with the giants like Antonia Fraser and Elizabeth Longford. I re-read this book after several decades had passed and find that it is timeless, as moving today as when it was first published. ( )

an excellent book on the historical background behind the charge of the light brigade ( )

An unusually readable history book. I first read it for a class I took more than 30 years ago, and it was definitely the best thing about that class.

Points of interest:
Lord Hill in 1836 consented to the re-employment of Lord Cardigan, after he had been dismissed from his command, "because I am unable to endure the distress of this noble family".
Lord Cardigan was said to spend £10,000 p.a. from his own income on 11th Hussars.
Lord Cardigan would disregard letters from Lord Hill, and the latter apparently could do nothing.
172 duels are known to have been fought 1760-1820; 91 persons were killed, but death penalty was imposed only twice. It was imposed again in 1838 after a duel between two men not in high life.
"The Duke must observe that in the whole of his experience he has never known the time of the staff of the Army to be taken up in so useless a manner as in the present instance, that if any other Regiment in Her Majesty's Service gave such trouble and could not be commanded without such voluminous correspondence and such futile details an additional Staff would be necessary for conducting the affairs of the Regiment", Wellington to Cardigan, 1843.
in 1854 Lod Lucan had not commanded troops for 17 years and in the meantimes the words of command had been changed, and his attempts at drilling caused confusion. He solved the problem by making the troops return to the old system.
"...Lord Lucan's unpopular practice of turning out his division an hour before daybreak..."

There are three or four inaccuracies in the account of the irish famine, and the explanation of the outbreak of the Crimean War is unsatisfactory. The absence of references is sometimes irritating, though the source can usually be judged from the context. The bibliography is imposing, especially the section on manuscript sources, but the text suggests that a good mabny of the manuscript collections proved of little value.
The book amounts to a clear, vividly-written and withering condemnation of aristocratic mismanagement. It is shocking that such men as Cardigan and Lucan should have been allowed to retain high command, and still more so that they should have received subsequent promotion. But incompetent though they were, one wonders if they were quite as dangerous as they are painted here. Cardigan's regiment did after all attain a high reputation, and Lucan did think of having a dawn stand-to. Again, one wonders how representative they were. Lord Raglan was clearly no better, but many of the regimental officers seem to have been good and the stir that Cardigan's conduct as a Commanding Officer produced showed that it must have been unique. The book would be more convincing if there were more background against which the characters could be judged.