![]() ![]() The effect of this is that the concept of individual men is dissolved, replaced by block movements of massed forces – war becomes something seen at a distance, Tennyson’s poem in effect mirroring the broad newspaper overtones the combat would have been dealt with in the Times article. This is added to the further use of numerical quantity in the repetition of the ‘rode the six hundred’ refrain itself – by closing each stanza with this line, Tennyson places the reader’s focus specifically on the number of soldiers fighting. ![]() The insistent opening repetition of ‘half a league, half a league’ highlights a desperately fought push for a parcel of land, human life traded to win the very soil beneath their feet as the brigade charge forward. And it is in the way the poem specifically engages with numerical values that it deals most obviously with the costs of war. It was, indeed, a Times article by reporter Howard Russell that first prompted Tennyson to write The Charge of the Light Brigade, a poem that in many ways has almost eclipsed the Crimean war itself. As a matter lying not just at the heart of the immediacy of battle itself, but the lingering after-effects and the memories of dead soldiers in the minds of those back home, the cost of warfare proved to a potent premise for poets of the era. It is amidst these changing times that the actual cost of war presented itself up for scrutiny – cost of life, literal monetary cost all aspects caught up within the chaotic, encompassing nature of mass warfare. As the first ‘media war’, news travelled quickly, hastened by the advent of telegraph technology, presenting the prospect for first-hand accounts of the front line to swiftly find themselves in newspaper headlines and discussed over the homely dinner table. Old tactics collided with improved weaponry in a bloody conflict that ultimately saw over 20,000 British soldiers losing their lives. ![]() The Crimean war represented a mid-point of sorts, a crux of change between the battle of Waterloo and World War I. ![]()
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