A garbled order sent 670 British cavalrymen galloping straight into enemy cannon

During the 1854 Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, a miscommunicated order sent Britain's Light Brigade charging down a valley lined on three sides with Russian artillery, not the nearby target its commanders intended. Nearly 110 men died and over 160 were wounded in the roughly 20-minute charge, though the brigade briefly reached the guns before retreating. The disaster became famous less for its military impact than for Tennyson's poem, written within weeks, turning blunder into legend.

— Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade — Constable, 1953
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