Hills and Valleys

The fate of the Light Brigade at Balaclava was sealed by the difference between what Lord Raglan could see from atop a hill and what Lords Lucan and Cardigan could see from the floor of a valley. Raglan, commanding the British, French, and Turkish troops, wanted the Light Brigade to make a charge to prevent the Russians from removing some captured guns from another hill. The guns that Lucan and Cardigan both thought were meant were a Russian battery at the other end of the "Valley of Death." Canrobert, Raglan's French ally, noted of the Charge of the Light Brigade that "It is magnificent, but it is not war." He was quite right, at least in the context of Victorian Britain and Second Empire France, about its magnificence, but quite wrong about it not being war.

Wars and battles are as much about perceptions as about any objective realities. The perceptions of the participants and of later observers are all we have to reconstruct some of the most memorable, influential, and complex events of the past. Too often we have mistaken what was thought to have happened with what did occur.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a dissertation that asked questions about how our ancestors described battles, what those descriptions could tell us about their mental processes, and about how the new technologies of the Renaissance were shaping their minds and their worldviews. I intended to delve more deeply into those and related topics and to expand my inquiries, but life intervened and that did not happen. Two decades have passed. I have continued to read and thing about these subjects. In this blog, I want to follow up on some of those insights. I believe these are important topics. We still study old battles in order to plan for new ones. We continue to have accounts published of recent combat. How we understand them shapes policy and can mean life and death for soldier and civilian alike.

I do not propose to write directly about the present, but I do have it in the back of my mind as I write of "old, far-off things" and the people who wrote about them. I am more likely to ask how the technologies that shaped battle accounts, and the accounts of other events, and which still shape them, are affecting our minds.

I do not promise anything profound, only my perceptions, which, in the final analysis, are all that any of us have.