Page:The invasion of the Crimea Vol. 5.djvu/228

 206 THE BATTLE OF BALACLAVA CHAP, it might have put him to the task of endeavour- _ ing to winnow the communication addressed to him, by calming the over-excited aide-de-camp, and bringing him to say, if he could, how much of the words he had uttered were words really entrusted to him as a message by the Commander- in-Chief. But Lord Raglan, as we saw, had pro- vided that his directions should be set down on paper ; and after Nolan's outbreak, it became more than ever the duty of Lord Lucan to bend his mind faithfully to the written words of the order, examining as well as he could the condition of things to which it applied, and not forgetting that he had, all the while, in his hands another order, hitherto unexecuted, which enjoined him to advance and try to recover those same heights on which the guns spoken of in the ' fourth order ' had been placed and lost by the Turks. Lord Lucan has since spoken and written as if his choice lay between the plan of sending the Light Cavalry down the North Valley, and the plan of not advancing at all ; but the truth is, that neither in the ' third order,' nor in the ' fourth ' order,' nor, lastly, in the taunting injunctions of the aide de-camp, was there left any room to set up a douWt upon the question whether our squad- rons should or should not advance ; for by all these three channels alike there had come down strong mandates enjoining our cavalry to move forward uud endeavour something against the enemy. I repeat that the fullest, the most gener- ous, allowance ought to be made for the anger and