Book Review: The Reason Why

Title: The Reason Why

Author: Cecil Woodham-Smith

Date: 1953

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

ISBN: none

Quote: “Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die...”

Everyone has read Tennyson’s famous poem about the “Charge of the Light Brigade” in the Crimean War, in 1854. “The soldiers knew / Someone had blundered.” The “someones” probably most to blame were two officers, brothers-in-law and hostile rivals for every position, George Charles Bingham (Lord Lucan) and James Brudenell (Lord Cardigan), and their superior, Lord Raglan. Woodham-Smith revisits their personalities, their blunder of 1854, and the historical effects of the suicidal charge.

Well....we still wear cardigans, sometimes with raglan sleeves, but there’s no fashion item that commemorates Lord Lucan. He was blamed most of all. On the other had he lived much longer than the others. Raglan died, some said of a broken heart, in 1855, before public opinion had turned against him. Cardigan might have kept his reputation as a hero if he hadn’t been drawn into a public feud with Raglan’s nephew, Somerset Calthorpe; proving in court that one of Calthorpe’s statements gave a wrong impression gave Calthorpe the opportunity to call attention to all the things Cardigan had done wrong. Nevertheless Cardigan lived past age 70, and Lucan lived to the age of 88, apparently healthy to the end.

Woodham-Smith finds consolation for the grandchildren of the Light Brigade in the changes the incident made in military policy throughout the English-speaking world, and concludes that the improvements made after their disastrous charge “might almost be called a happy ending.”