ABSTRACT

Today the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, fought by Great Britain, France, and Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) against Russia, is all but forgotten save for two things: the classic poetic description of military incompetence, and a nurse. The 1854 poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) still resonates as a “tribute” to misunderstood military orders and the sacred duty of obedience notwithstanding the stupidity of the orders: “Theirs was not to reason why, theirs was but to do and die.” Many generations of young men had this poem as their mantra as they traveled “into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell” when it became their duty to charge during the wars of the twentieth century.