Waterloo 1815 and Balaclava 1854: leadership, technology and reporting

Two Battles, Forty Years Apart

Waterloo (18 June 1815) and Balaclava (25 October 1854) frame an extraordinary period of change. Waterloo was the climax of the Napoleonic Wars, fought with smoothbore muskets and disciplined squares of red-coated infantry. Balaclava was an early action of the Crimean War, fought as rifling, the telegraph and the camera were entering the battlefield. The two battles let us trace continuity (the bravery of the British soldier, the importance of leadership) and change (long-range weapons, public scrutiny, the rise of the war reporter).

Waterloo, 18 June 1815 — Wellington’s Defensive Masterpiece

Wellington positioned around 68,000 British, Dutch, Belgian and German troops along the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean, screened by walled farms (Hougoumont, La Haye Sainte and Papelotte). His plan was defensive: hold the ridge until the Prussians under Blücher could march from Wavre to attack Napoleon’s right flank. He used reverse-slope tactics — placing infantry just behind the crest so that French artillery could not easily target them, and so that French troops could not see the British until they crossed the ridge themselves.

It was here that the British infantry square was tested. Massed French cavalry attacked uphill across boggy ground; the squares held under repeated charges, the cavalry could not break the bayonet wall, and French casualties mounted as British and KGL infantry kept up controlled volley fire. Wellington committed his last reserves only when the Imperial Guard finally advanced; the Guard, until that day undefeated, was thrown back at point-blank musket range. By dusk the Prussians had arrived in force on the French right and the army of Napoleon disintegrated.

The battle showed combined arms at maturity in the smoothbore era: infantry squares to defeat cavalry, cavalry counter-charges to break enemy infantry, and artillery to soften both. Wellington’s personal presence on the line, riding among his men under fire, mattered for morale at least as much as the formations themselves.

Balaclava, 25 October 1854 — Confusion and the Light Brigade

Forty years later British soldiers were still wearing red and obeying officers who had bought their commissions, but the battlefield itself had moved on. At Balaclava the Russians attacked the British supply port. The action produced three episodes that Britain remembers: the ‘Thin Red Line’ of the 93rd Highlanders, who repelled Russian cavalry without forming square; the Charge of the Heavy Brigade, which broke a much larger Russian cavalry force; and the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade.

The Light Brigade charge has become a case study in command failure. From his hilltop position Lord Raglan could see Russian infantry beginning to drag away captured British guns from the Causeway Heights. He sent Captain Nolan with a written order to recover the guns. Down on the valley floor, neither the cavalry commander Lord Lucan nor the brigade commander Lord Cardigan could see the same guns. When Lucan asked ‘What guns?’, Nolan made a sweeping gesture in the direction of the Russian artillery battery at the far end of the North Valley. The Light Brigade obeyed and rode straight at it. Nearly 700 horsemen rode more than a mile down the valley into Russian cannon fire, with batteries on three sides. Around 110 were killed and many more wounded; the brigade was effectively destroyed in twenty minutes.

Why Outcomes Differed: Leadership and Technology

Comparing the two battles makes leadership the most visible variable. Wellington wrote orders that left no room for interpretation; he supervised key sectors personally. Raglan was at fault on multiple counts: from his hilltop he saw a different battlefield from the cavalry on the valley floor, his order was ambiguous, and Captain Nolan’s gesture made the misreading worse. The Russian commander Prince Menshikov was little better, but it was the British failures that mattered for the Light Brigade.

Technology had also moved. By 1854 the British infantry carried the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle, accurate to 600 yards. Russian guns at Balaclava, however, were still smoothbore muzzle-loaders: rifled breech-loading field artillery only entered British service in 1858. What destroyed the Light Brigade was where the guns were, not how they were made — riding more than a mile down a valley with batteries on three sides would have been ruinous in any period. The Crimean War foreshadowed the killing power of industrialised weapons that would dominate the second half of the nineteenth century.

A New Public: Russell, Fenton and the Reading Nation

What made Balaclava different from any earlier British battle was that the public knew. William Howard Russell filed dispatches for The Times via the new electric telegraph, often within days of events. His report on the Light Brigade (‘some hideous blunder’) reached London while the wounded were still being treated. The photographer Roger Fenton was sent out under government sponsorship in 1855 to take posed photographs of officers and camp life; technical limits meant he could not photograph battle, but his images circulated as engravings in newspapers. Within months, ordinary middle-class Britons were reading and looking at war as an ongoing news event — not a finished story.

The result was a permanent change in the relationship between army and public. Florence Nightingale’s nursing mission was launched in direct response to Russell’s reporting on hospital conditions at Scutari. Parliament debated supply failures while the war was still being fought. By the Boer War of 1899–1902, war reporting was an established profession, photographs accompanied articles and concentration-camp policy became a national scandal. The press did not just describe wars: it began to shape them.