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Tag Archives: St Helena

Light on Their Feet

02 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Literary History, Military History

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Tags

Alfred Tennyson, Austrian, Balaclava, British Cavalry, chasseurs a cheval, Crimean War, Errol Flynn, Flashman, French, Gallic, gendarmes, George Macdonald Fraser, Heavy Brigade, Hungarian, Hussars, jinetes, lancers, Light Brigade, Light Dragoons, Napoleonic, North Africans, Olivia deHavilland, Renaissance cavalry, Romans, Russian Artillery, Spanish, St Helena, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days

As ever, dear readers, welcome.

Recently, someone asked us about the Light Brigade—that is, the collection of regiments of British cavalry who fought in the Crimean War (1854-56).

image1ltbrig.jpg

These are the troopers who mistakenly charged Russian artillery in the series of battles fought on 25 October, 1854, called, collectively, Balaclava.

image2simkin.jpg

The question was, “Why was it called ‘the Light Brigade’?  Were the soldiers thin?  And was there a Heavy Brigade, where they were all fat?”

It seemed to us a very reasonable question and our answer began, “Over many centuries, cavalry has had a number of uses, but they could probably be broken down into two groups by those uses:  1. raids, skirmishes, scouting, and pursuit; 2. attacking enemy cavalry and infantry formations—and pursuit.  The former (#1) is the job of light cavalry, the latter (#2) of heavy cavalry.”

The Romans, who themselves only produced cavalry early in their history, quickly preferring to hire the job out, might, for example, use North Africans as light cavalry.

image3nub.jpg

If heavy cavalry were needed, then the task might go to Spanish or Gallic soldiers.

image4gallic.jpg

 

And this would be true throughout military history—Renaissance cavalry might have heavily-armored gendarmes

image5gendarme.jpg

to break up an enemy unit (or more) with the weight of its charge, but would also use lightly-armed jinetes

image6jinete

 

to find out the enemy’s positions, or attack their supply routes.

In the 18th century, most cavalry were heavy—although armor had almost disappeared.

image7heavy.jpg

The Austrians and then the French added to those heavies light cavalry originally from the Hungarian world, hussars.

image8bercheny.jpg

Not to be outdone, the English fleshed out their heavy cavalry

image9drag.jpg

not with hussars, but something they called “light dragoons”.

image10ld.jpg

Dragoons had originally been mounted infantrymen, who rode to battle on horseback, then dismounted to fight,

image11okey.jpg

but, by the mid-18th century, dragoons were just heavy cavalry—bigger men on bigger horses—and light dragoons were smaller men on smaller horses, with mostly different functions.

By the end of the century and just beyond, during the Napoleonic era, the French, in particular, had developed a whole series of light cavalry types—hussars,

image12hussars.jpg

chasseurs a cheval (literally, “hunters on horseback”),

image13chasseurs.jpg

and lancers, as well.

image14lancers.jpg

The English, to match the French, converted some regiments to hussars,

image15hussars.jpg

but only after 1820, when Napoleon was in his second and final exile on St. Helena, did they convert several other regiments to lancers.

image16lancer.jpg

(You can see that they borrowed their style of dress from that of Polish lancers in Napoleon’s armies.)

image17lancer.jpg

These lancers

image18lancers.jpg

along with hussars

image19hussars.jpg

and light dragoons

image20ld.jpg

made up the famous Light Brigade of Alfred Tennyson’s (1809-1892)

image21at

 

1854 poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.

image22charge.png

This, in turn, inspired one of our favorite adventure movies, the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade.

image23charge.jpg

(We wonder how different children must have been in 1936—we loved that movie as kids!)

And this film, in turn, inspired a 20th-century adventure writer, George Macdonald Fraser (1925-2008),

image24gmf.jpg

who wrote a series of 12 books detailing the life of one Harry Flashman, beginning with Flashman (1969).

image25flashman.jpg

In part, these are a parody of the life of a typical Victorian officer, who eventually becomes General Sir Harry Flashman.  He appears at many of the famous military events in mid-Victorian British history, from the First Afghan War (1839-1842) to the Zulu War (1879), along with appearances at later events, including a cameo appearance at the British declaration of war against Germany on 4 August, 1914.  The joke is, although he wins all sorts of honors, including that knighthood, he is, in fact, a complete coward and it’s only amazing luck that he manages to survive as long and as well as he does.  And there is a second joke within the first:  Flashman is actually the school bully in a very famous earlier novel, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857),

image26tbrown.PNG

by Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), a book which is the ancestor not only of many later such novels and short stories, but also of the Harry Potter books.

image27hughes.jpg

The fourth novel in the Flashman series, entitled Flashman at the Charge (1973),

image28charge.jpg

gives us Fraser’s hero as actually leading that famous attack by accident, an accident which leads to his capture by the Russians—and many further adventures.

So, our answer to the original question is:  “No.  The Light Brigade wasn’t skinny, but was called that because it was smaller men on smaller horses with very specific jobs which required rapid movement and greater flexibility than heavy cavalry.”

And, with that answer, we say thank you for reading and

MTCIDC

CD

ps

There was, in fact, a Heavy Brigade,

image29heavy.jpg

who made their own equally-heroic, but more successful, attack on the same day as the more famous Light Brigade charge.  Bigger men on bigger horses, they drove advancing Russian cavalry out of the Heavy Brigade camp.

image30charge.jpg

A Little Ring, the Least of Rings

02 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Tags

Aladdin, Alexandre Dumas, Barad-Dur, Chateau d'If, Edmond Dantes, Elba, French Revolution, Galadriel, Harad, Hitler, Jinghiz Khan, Louis XVI, Morannon, Mordor, Napoleon, Nazgul, Ring Wraiths, St Helena, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Toulon, Umbar, Waterloo

Welcome, readers, as always, and, if it’s part of your culture, Happy New Year!

We’ve recently been reading a book about Napoleon

image1nappy.jpg

and his first fall, in 1814.  He was forced to abdicate,

 

thereby losing the massive empire he had built up in the early 19th century.

image3napemp.jpg

His many enemies had a number of possibilities as to what to do with him.  They could, for example, have imprisoned him, as Edmond Dantes is in Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (serialized 1844-46), in a fortress like the Chateau d’If.

image4chateaudif.jpg

Or, more radically—but certainly very effectively—they could have permanently removed him by the same means by which revolutionary France removed his predecessor, Louis XVI.

image5louisheadless.jpg

Instead, they allowed him not only to live, but even to continue to be a kind of monarch—although only of a tiny island, Elba, off the west coast of Italy.

image6napelba.jpg

They thought they’d seen the last of him, leaving him to spend the rest of his life as a sovereign of a ragged collection of fishermen and farmers.

image7napelba.jpeg

For Napoleon, however, who always saw himself as destined for only the greatest things, being king of Elba must have felt to him rather like the way the genie in Disney’s Aladdin (1992) expresses the contrast in his life–

image8genie.png

That being the case, Napoleon lived on Elba for less that a year before he planned and accomplished his escape.

image9napescapes.jpg

Back in France, he was welcomed by the very soldiers sent to stop him,

image10fifth

 

raised new armies,

image11napog

 

marched north to deal with his nearest enemies, Prussia and England, and was finally—and permanently—defeated at Waterloo, 18 June, 1815.

image12waterloo

 

This time, his enemies, having learned their lesson, sent Napoleon as far away from Europe as they could and to a much less hospitable place, the island of St Helena, in the South Atlantic,

image13sthel.jpg

where he died in 1821.

image14napsthel.jpg

From his first success, at the siege of Toulon in 1793,

image15toulon.jpg

Napoleon had climbed and climbed until, by 1801, he was the real ruler of France (as “First Consul”)

image16first.jpg

and then, in 1804, Emperor.

image17emp.jpg

And yet, it was never enough, which reminds us of so many of the “great conquerors” of history, from Alexander,

image18al.jpg

image19emp.jpeg

to Jinghiz Khan and his successors,

image20khan.jpg

image21map.gif

to Hitler.

image22hit.jpg

image23map.jpg

In every case throughout history, no conqueror has ever had enough and, if we move out of this earth to Middle-earth, we find Sauron, a figure in many ways like all of these earthly conquerors, who, although defeated by an alliance of Elves and Men in the past, has returned and, in time, reacquired immense power.  To begin with, he has the entire realm of Mordor.

image24mordor.gif

He has also somehow gained the means to create giant fortifications (sometimes based upon older constructions), like the Barad-dur

image25bd.jpg

and the Morannon and all of the other inner and outer works of Mordor.

image26morannonimage27mordimage28cirithungol

He also controls the Nazgul,

image29nazgul.jpg

massive armies of orcs,

image30orcs.jpg

as well as allies from the Harads and Umbar.

image31harad.jpg

All of which he has done, it seems, by whatever innate powers he possesses—without the Ring.  And this made us wonder:  what is it that the Ring actually does for its wearer that Sauron wants it back?

Certainly, the only power Gollum appears to have gotten from the Ring is that of invisibility (and the side-effect of longevity).

image32gol.jpeg

This is true for Bilbo, as well,

image33bilgol.jpg

and for Frodo–

image34frogan.jpg

although, when Frodo puts on the Ring on Weathertop, he is plunged into a kind of alternate dimension, seeing the Nazgul as they really are

image35weather.jpg

and, again, on Ammon Hen, he is put into direct contact with the Ring’s real owner.

image36ammon.jpg

Does this suggest that the Ring’s power is only as powerful as the Ring’s current wearer? Galadriel confirms this when Frodo asks her about the other rings: “why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?”

To which she replies:

“Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor?”

(The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

This then accounts for Gandalf’s almost violent explanation when Frodo offers it to him:

“’No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book One, Chapter 2, “The Shadow of the Past”)

Or when Frodo offers it to Galadriel:

“You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 7, “The Mirror of Galadriel”)

image37gala.jpg

Sauron has been able to accomplish so much without the Ring—what would happen should he ever wear it again?  In “The Shadow of the Past”, Gandalf tells Frodo that it controls the other rings—even the three long-concealed from Sauron:

“The Three are hidden still.  But that no longer troubles him. He only needs the One; for he made that Ring himself, it is his, and he let a great part of his own former power pass into it, so that he could rule all the others.  If he recovers it, then he will command them all again, even the Three, and all that has been wrought with them will be laid bare, and he will be stronger than ever.”

And, just as important—maybe even more so—Sauron has based his place of power and refuge, his sure foundation in Middle-earth, upon it, as Elrond tells the council:

“Sauron was diminished, but not destroyed.  His Ring was lost but not unmade.  The Dark Tower was broken, but its foundations were not removed; for they were made with the power of the Ring, and while it remains they will endure.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 2, “The Council of Elrond”)

So, then, just as Napoleon, exiled on Elba, could plot and accomplish return, given the Ring, Sauron, defeated before, could return and, with a greed for conquest as insatiable as that of the French emperor, reappear again and again in Middle-earth, where there was no St Helena to keep him for good.

image38sthel.jpg

Thanks for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

 

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