ON DUTY AND DISCIPLINE

For, that helpful of disciplined soldiers rode forward like lions at the words 'Forward and charge' uttered by their Commander, though they were unprepared and ill-equipped. Every one of them knew that the order was untimely; venture, uncalled for; strategy, ill-planned, and operation, fatal. The general indeed blundered. He under-estimated the enemy's might. Nonetheless, they rode into the Jaws of death with matchless equanimity. The heavily weaponed and out-sized Russian artillery surrounded them on all sides and started storming with shot and shell unceasingly. With mere bare sabers, the Light Brigade stood against the heavy blast of cannons heroically to the astonishment of the whole world. Could the deafening thunder, or the blinding flashes of cannons drive them home? No! Nor even the thick battery of smoke that suffocated them there. Like Rudra, the Lord of Destruction, every one dashed across the field, brandishing his dazzling sabre and chopping off the enemies as many as he could come across. Their thundering roar and sabre clashes reverberated the field and seemed more dreadening than the cannon explosions. Their heroic encounter lasted for only a few hours, and the battle-field was strewn with the dead and presented a ghastly sight. In the end the Light Brigade returned light weight i.e., only a handful returned alive. To be sure their heroic venture is second to none, in any tense, for that matter.

Their sense of duty and spirit of fearlessness were versified in a masterly fashion by 'Tennyson, the Poet-laureate of the Victorian period. The Light Brigade became a byword for loyalty and discipline.

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