April 2, 2021 • 33 mins
Why were soldiers on horseback told to ride straight into a valley full of enemy cannon? The disastrous "Charge of the Light Brigade" is usually blamed on blundering generals. But the confusing orders issued on that awful day in 1854 reveal a common human trait - we often wrongly assume that everyone knows what we know and can easily comprehend our meaning.
Starring Helena Bonham Carter as Florence Nightingale.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin eighteen fifty four. A gently sloping valley near the
village of Balaklava in Crimea. On one side of the valley,
Russian troops with cannons. On the other side of the valley.
(00:37):
Russian troops with cannons at the far end of the valley. Yes,
you've guessed it. Russian troops with cannons. This is the
Crimean War, the same grim conflict we heard about earlier
this season when Florence Nightingale treated six British soldiers. The
war was the global standoff of its day. The British, French,
(01:00):
and Turks were all worried about Russia's growing influence. Balaklava
is just outside Sevastopol, a strategic port on the Black Sea,
and the situation is delicately poised. With all their cannons,
the Russians are firmly in control of the valley. They've
just captured a bit more land and a few British cannons.
(01:21):
But now the commander of the British forces, General Raglan,
has ordered his cavalry to take those cannons back. General
Raglan watches to a telescope from his viewpoint on a
distant hilltop as his men on horseback ride towards the valley.
So far, so good. Now they should turn and climb
(01:41):
the slope to surprise the small band of Russians who
are hauling off the heavy British guns. But they don't.
They keep on going further and further down the valley
between the Russians on both sides, towards the Russians at
the end. What on earth are they thinking? Cannon to
the right of them, cannon to the left of them.
(02:05):
That's how the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson famously scribed the
Charge of the Light Brigade. Generations of British school children
learned from his poem about the six hundred horsemen and
their suicidal charge into a valley full of guns, into
the Valley of death rode the six hundred. Tennyson based
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his poem on a breathless first hand account in The Times.
The Times, his war correspondent, was watching from the hilltop
alongside the horrified General Raglan. As it turned out, in
his rush to file the story, he had miscounted there
were nearer seven hundred men and the light Brigade. Tennyson
was annoyed when he got this fact check seven hundred
(02:49):
would ruin the meter of his poem. He decided to
leave it as it was. Boldly they rode and well
into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell,
rode the six hundred. But why were six or seven
hundred of Britain's finest cavalrymen charging suicidely straight at Russian cannons?
(03:12):
Tennyson got this bit right. The soldier knew someone had blundered. Indeed,
someone had blundered. But who and why? I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales. The infamous crimean blunder
(03:55):
involved three men, an impatient young captain, a frustrated bullying lord,
and an amiable old general. That's General Raglan. Let's take
a moment to get to know the general first. The Times,
his war correspondent, describes Ragland's personal charm, sweet smile, kindly glance, courteous, gracious,
(04:18):
gentle manner. And how about a character reference from Florence Nightingale.
It was impossible not to love him. He was not
a very great general, but he was a very good man.
Not a very great general. Raglan had spent most of
his long career as a number two, well into his sixties.
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Now he was still new to the top job. He
might have been a very great administrator in peace time,
but it was forty years since he'd been on a battlefield,
let alone commanded any troops. Now General Raglan is hundreds
of feet up on top of a hill, the Sapoon Heights.
He lifts his telescope to his eye. He's got a
(05:02):
commanding view of the British soldiers down below. It's like
watching from a box in a theater. In the distance,
he can see the valley the Russian troops are defending
with cannons on the slopes on both sides, and at
the end it's eight o'clock in the morning. General Raglan
will send four fateful orders to the cavalry over the
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course of that morning. He clears his throat and dictates
the first cavalry to take ground to the left of
the second line of readouts occupied by tucks. To get
the order to the cavalry, Raglan has to send a
messenger to ride the steep and winding path down the
Sappoon Heights, then gallop across the plain. It takes twenty minutes.
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The recipient of the message is a man named Lord Lucan.
He's in charge of the cavalry, which includes the Light Brigade.
He reads the message cavalry to take Wait. This makes
no sense. Why are communications some times hard to understand?
(06:11):
The psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker reckons the single biggest
reason is the curse of knowledge. That's a curious cousin
of the Dunning Kruger effect. With Dunning Krueger, we don't
know what we don't know. With the curse of knowledge,
we don't notice when we know something others don't. The
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curse of knowledge was ingeniously demonstrated in an experiment by
a Stanford University psychology student called Elizabeth Newton. She put
volunteers into pairs and gave one of each pair a
list of well known songs. Choose a song, she said,
and tap it out with your finger on the desk
like this. The job of the second volunteer was simple.
(07:00):
Listen to the taps and then guess the tune. Did
you get that one? No, try another. If you don't
recognize the tunes, don't feel bad. Very few of the
listeners among Elizabeth Newton's experimental subjects managed to They guessed
correctly just two and a half percent of the time.
(07:22):
But here's the part that demonstrates the curse of knowledge.
She asked the people who'd done the tapping, if we
played your tapping to lots of listeners, how many would
correctly guess the tune the tappers reckoned. Around half of
the listeners would get it right. But remember, hardly any
of the listeners actually did. The tappers were wildly over
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confident in their ability to convey music using only taps.
Why because in their heads they weren't just hearing the taps,
they were hearing this or this. The people doing the
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tapping simply couldn't imagine what it be like to hear
only the taps without the knowledge of which tune the
taps were intended to convey. Much the same thing happens
when an expert gives a talk full of confusing jargon.
They don't realize it's jargon. To them, it's a bunch
of very familiar words with perfectly clear meanings. They can't
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conceive of what it's like to be someone who doesn't
understand the curse of knowledge is a devilish curse, says
Stephen Pinker. We do not notice the curse. Because the
curse prevents us from noticing it. We sometimes forget that
the person we're talking to might not have the context
to make sense of what we're saying. We mean one thing,
(08:52):
they hear something else entirely Down at the mouth of
the valley, Lord Lucan reads General Raglan's message again, cavalry
to take ground to the left to the second line
of redoubts occupied by Turks. It still makes no sense
(09:15):
redoubts occupied by Turks. There aren't any redoubts are temporary fortifications.
That's where the British cannons had been guarded by their allies,
the Turkish army. The Russians had captured them already that morning,
so the Turks weren't occupying the redoubts anymore. Still must
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be what Ragland meant second line of redoubts. Isn't there
only one line? Yes? Can't help you there, Take ground
to the lift. Who's lift? Lift? Of what my lift?
Raglands lived? Who is he looking from anyway? There's the
curse of knowledge. Ragland had a perfect view from high
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on a hilltop. He knew exactly what he meant by
to the left. He forgot that Lucan down below had
a different point of view. A more experienced commander might
have made sure to write something his troops couldn't possibly
misinterpret east or west, not right or left, as you
might have guessed. The puzzled Lord Lucan is the second
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of our three main characters. He's the frustrated, bullying lord.
Unlike the amiable old general, Lord Lucan is not a
popular man. Lord Lucan had risen quickly through the ranks
of the British Army, a lieutenant colonel in his twenties.
Was this because of his military genius. No, if you
(10:40):
were good at your job, you might hope to get promoted,
but the only sure way to the top was money.
The British military sold off its top ranks to the
highest bidders. Lucan was a lieutenant colonel because he'd paid
to be one millions of dollars in today's money. Lord
Lucan soon got a reputation as a harsh, vindictive leader.
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He'd had soldiers flogged for trivial misdemeanors. But then Lucan
stepped back from the army. It spent most of the
last two decades running his family estate in Ireland's County Mayo.
The smallholders who farmed his vast tracts of land were
struggling to pay their rent, and Lucan decided to modernize.
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He had merged their small plots of land into bigger
farms that would be more productive. But to do that
he first had to force out his existing tenants. Lucan
was pitiless. He hired crowbar brigades of fifty men to
demolish his tenants houses. When the potato famine hit, he
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kept going. Here's one survivor's account of the winter of
eighteen forty six in County Mayo. Sick and aged, little
children and women with child were alike thrust forth into
the cold snows of winter, and to prevent their return,
their cabins were leveled to the ground. The majority, rendered
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penniless by the years of famine, wandered aimlessly about the
roads and bogs till they found refuge in the workhouse
or the grave. Lord Lucan, as I said, was not
a popular man. Now he was back in the army.
He'd swapped the crowbar brigades for the cavalry, and he
was struggling to work out exactly where General Raglan wanted
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him to position his troops. He asked Ragland's messenger to
stay with him while he finished the maneuver, just to
make sure he'd understood what the general had in mind,
and this time he had. But there were three more
messages to come. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.
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Why would the British Army sell ranks to the highest bidder?
It seems to make no sense. Wouldn't you want your
army to be run by the people who were best
at running an army. But the purchase system did have
some logic behind it, at least if you were a
part of Britain's ruling class. This was a time of
revolutions in Europe. If your army was run by capable
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soldiers from the middle or lower classes, well that was risky.
The army might side with the people against the elite.
By selling off ranks to the highest bidders, you made
sure that could never happen, because only the landed gentry
could afford to be in charge. There was, of course,
a downside to this arrangement. Capable soldiers had to take
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orders from incompetent aristocrats like the amiable old General Raglan
or the frustrated bullying Lord Lucan. Not surprisingly, the capable
soldiers sometimes resented this. It's time to meet the third
and final man who'll play a pivotal role in the blunder.
The impatient young Captain Louis Nolan is up on the
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Sapoon Heights with General Raglan, waiting for his chance to shine.
He wasn't the son of a lord. His father was
a soldier and diplomat. The sons of lords went to
expensive private schools and studied ancient Greek. Nolan's school taught
him more practical subjects, engineering, military history, fencing, horsemanship. He
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quickly gained a reputation as the army's most brilliant horseman,
and he quickly developed strong opinions on everything the army
was doing wrong. Still, just in his early thirties, he
wrote a book Cavalry, Its History and Tactics, and he
couldn't resist the odd swipe at the posh buffoons in
charge right up in golden letters. In every riding school
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and in every stable, horses are taught not by harshness
but by gentleness. Where the officers are classical, the golden
rule may be given in Greek as well as in English.
This kind of snyde remark didn't endear him to the
higher ranks. Yes, they saw Captain Nolan's skills, but they
(15:13):
also thought he was far too young to be publishing
his opinions A great man, said one in his own estimation.
In the weeks before the Battle at Balaclava, the British
army made its way through Crimea, and the higher ups
made decision after decision that had infuriated Captain Nolan. Twice
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the cavalry came across an unexpected chance to attack Russian troops,
and twice Lord Lucan held them back. There were one
thousand British cavalry looking on at a beaten army retreating
within a ten minutes gallop of them enough to drive
one mad. The decision to be cautious wasn't Lord Lucan's fault.
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The orders came from General Raglan. Lucan was frustrated too. Nonetheless,
he got the blame. He also got a nickname, not
so much Lord Lucan as Lord look On Am I right?
It wasn't fair, but it's stuck and it stung. Lucan
didn't want to be known as a dithering bystander. And
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that's another reason he was irked. And he read General
Ragland's first order of the day. It wasn't just that
the meaning of the words was hard to pass. Once
it had understood them. Lucan realized this was yet another
humiliating retreat. He had deliberately positioned his forces close to
where the Russians would have to pass if they were
to attack. Raglan was telling him to be cautious again,
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to move the cavalry further back back up on his
vantage point. Meanwhile, the old general changed his mind. Perhaps
Lord Lucan had got the positioning right in the first place.
Half an hour after sending his first order, General Raglan
sent his second ed squadrons of heavy dragoons to be
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detached towards bell Clover. That meant half of Lucan's cavalry
the heavy brigade, as opposed to the light. Another messenger
on horseback gingerly picked his way down the side of
the Sapoon Heights and galloped to Lord Lucan to hand
him the slip of paper. Lucan read it and rolled
his eyes great Now he had to move back to
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where he had been, but with only half his troops.
That wouldn't help if they ran into any Russians, and
they did, but luckily the Russians weren't expecting it. The
two forces skirmished briefly, and the Russians retreated. Up on
his hilltop, General Raglans spied an opportunity with that Russian retreat.
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Perhaps he could recapture those British cannons the Russians had
taken earlier, the ones nearby on the Causeway Heights, the
slope to one side of the valley. Raglan, being a
cautious man, didn't want to send the cavalry on their own.
He'd rather wait for the infantry soldiers to back them up.
But where were the infantry. He'd sent a message to
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their camp telling them to come right away. As it happened,
the urgency of Ragland's message had been lost on the
infantry leader. He had decided he could finish his breakfast
before setting off. But Ragland didn't know that he expected
the infantry to come into view at any moment. And anyway,
there weren't that many Russians near those guns on the
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Causeway Heights. The cavalry could take them on their own
if needed. Ragland dictated his third order of the morning
Cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to
recover the heights. They will be supported by infantry, which
have been ordered. Another messenger riding cautiously down the steep slope,
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another slip of paper handed to Lord Lucan, Another exasperated sigh.
It will be supported by infantry. What does that mean?
Does he want us to advance now and hope the
tree will arrive later, or are we supposed to wait
for the infantry to arrive and then advance. General Raglan
had meant advance straight away. Lord Lucan decided he should
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wait for the infantry. There was still no sign of them,
so the cavalrymen decided they might as well relax for
a while. They got off their horses, lit their pipes,
unscrewed the caps on their flasks of rum. Some had
brought hard boiled eggs from breakfast up on the hillside.
General Raglan watched through his telescope in mounting fury. Why
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were the cavalry smoking and drinking? He told them to advance.
He turned his telescope towards those captured British cannons on
the heights. Could he see Russian soldiers starting to drag
away those cannons? That's what it looked like. There was
no time to lose. Ragland dictated his fourth and fatal order.
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Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front,
follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying
away the guns. Raglan wanted the message to get to
Lord Lucan as quickly as possible, so he looked around
at the horseman he had with him on the hilltop.
Who among them would be the swiftest rider? Send Nolan.
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The impatient young captain eagerly took the message and geed
up his horse. Raglan called after him, tell Lord Lucan,
the gvalry is to attack immediately. At last, Nolan rode off,
exultant after weeks of frustration, Finally the cavalry had something
to do, and he Nolan would get to deliver the
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order to that dithering fool Lord look on. Captain Nolan
urged his horse on as it slithered and stumbled down
the steep side of the Sapoon Heights. He galloped the
last mile towards Lord Lucan and thrust the message into
his hand and runs rapidly to the front, which front
prevent the enemy carrying away the guns guns. Nolan watched
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Lucan trying to figure it out. His patients snapped. General
Ragland's orders are that the cavalry should attack immediately. A tech,
sir te what guns, sir? Where? And what to do? There?
My lord? There is your enemy, There are your guns.
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Nolan swept out a hand in the general direction of
well of what exactly it looked to Lucan like Captain
Nolan was pointing right down the valley towards the many
Russian cannons arrayed at the far end. There is your enemy,
there are your guns. Lucan gulped up on the hilltop.
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General Raglan was oblivious. It simply hadn't occurred to him
that there could be any ambiguity about what he wanted. Obviously,
this fourth order was a follow up to the third,
you know, the one that said recover the heights. So
when he said advanced to the front, he meant the heights, obviously,
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and when he said the gums, he meant the British
cannons that had been captured on the heights. That was obvious,
wasn't it not? To Lord Lucan, all he heard was
the curse of Knowledge was about to destroy the Light
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Brigade cautionary tales will return shortly. In the nineteen sixties
and nineteen seventies, the computing Titan IBM employed a Dutch
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psychologist called Gate Hofstader to fly around the world asking
questions of their employees in different countries. Questions like this,
how frequently in your experience does the following problem occur?
Employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers. IBM
wanted to understand how workplace culture differed from country to country.
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Were people collectivist or individualist, sticklers for rules or happy
to improvise, and what was their attitude to authority. Hofstader
came up with an idea he called power distance. In
a culture with low power distance, an employee who gets
an apparently stupid instruction feels free to say he's sure, boss.
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Where the power distance is high, the employees silently gulps
and carries out the stupid instruction. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers
describes how countries with a high power distance used to
have more fatal plane crashes. Captains and first officers spend
about the same amount of time at the controls, but
(24:07):
crashes would happen more often when the captain was flying.
If the first officer was flying badly, the captain would
tell them. If the captain was flying badly, the first
officer might not. Power distance is high in Korean culture.
In nineteen ninety seven, Korean air flight eight zero one
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was descending into Guam. The captain was tired. He wasn't
thinking straight. He was peering out of the cockpit window
to try to spot the runway. It seems he hadn't
realized that there were dark clouds ahead. The runway wouldn't
be visible. He should be relying on the instruments instead.
The first officer knew what was happening, but he didn't
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want to challenge the captain directly. Instead, he pointed at
the weather radar and dropped a hint. Don't you think
it rains more in this area? Here? The captain was
too distracted to understand. He kept on looking outside where
that runway. The flight engineer knew what was happening too,
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He tried an even weaker hint. Captain. The weather radar
has helped us a lot. Neither said what they must
have been thinking, Captain, you can't land the plane by
looking outside. The weather's too bad, And neither said another
word as the captain flew the plane through a dark
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cloud and into a hillside. Airlines now train their pilots
on how to speak up if they think the captain
is making a mistake, But on the battlefield in Balaclava
in eighteen fifty four there had been no such training.
The curse of knowledge had set the blunder in motion,
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and power distance was about to seal the deal. It
seemed to Lord Luken that General Raglan wanted the cavalry
to embark on a suicidal charge down the valley. Well,
then that's what they'd have to do. Alfred Lord Tennyson's
poem sums up the lot of the soldier theirs not
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to make reply theirs, not to reason why theirs, but
to do and die. Actually, Lord Lucan would have had
some scope to make reply and reason why. The power
distance here was complicated. Lucan outranked Captain Nolan, but Nolan
was speaking on behalf of General Raglan. Lucan couldn't refuse
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Raglan's order. But he could have pressed Nolan to explain it,
to make sure he understood. That's exactly what he had
done with a messenger who delivered the first ambiguous order
to move his troops to the left. But this time
he didn't. Perhaps he was angry about the insolence with
which young Nolan was treating him. Perhaps he was worried
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about how it would appear Lord look On wriggling out
of action once again. At any rate, he simply glared
at Nolan, then rode off to talk to the light brigade.
They were closest to the valley. They'd have to leave
the charge. The leader of the Light Brigade was Lord Cardigan,
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another wealthy aristocrat who had bought his position. Cardigan had
only just appeared on the battlefield. He wasn't camping with
the soldiers. He'd had his yacht sailed over from England
and moored in a nearby harbor. He often pitched up
late after a good sleep and a leisurely breakfast. The
noble yachtsman, the soldiers called him. He was also Lord
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Lucan's brother in law. They hated each other. Lord Cardigan,
you are to advance down the valley with a light brigade.
I will follow and support with the heavy brigade. Certainly, Sir,
would allow me to point out to you that the
Russians have a battery in the valley on our front,
and batteries of the riflemen on both sides. I know it.
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The General Regland will have it. We have no choice
but to obey. Cardigan readed his troops. Every last one
of them could see how crazy this was, that it
could achieve nothing, and they'd need a miracle to survive.
The soldiers knew someone had blundered. How well they were soldiers.
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Orders were orders. The bugle sounded. Cardigan kept the pace steady.
There was a mile and a half to the end
of the valley. The horses couldn't charge at full speed
all that way. But one soldier seemed impatient. He broke
ranks and rode out in front. It was Captain Nolan.
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What was he doing. Perhaps he'd only just understood the
blunder that was about to unfold and was trying to
change the light brigades's direction. Perhaps the impatient young captain
just wanted to be front and center. We shall never know.
Sooner had Captain Nolan ridden ahead than a Russian shell
exploded right in front of him, and a shard of
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hot metal ripped through his chest. Nolan was the first
to die. He was not the last, struck full in
the face. Has blood and brains were spattering us who
rode near streaks of fire about two feet long and
a foot thick, in the center of a gush of
thick white smoke, cannonballs tearing the earth up, and musket
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balls coming like hail. Bold graymare kept alongside of me
for some distance, tearing out her entrance as she galloped.
Had his head blown off. Rode about thirty yards before
he fell. Poor dumb brutes galloping a boatlow and numbers
the marred wild beasts. My overalls are massive bloods. The flame,
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the smoke, the raw were in our faces. It is
not an exaggeration to compare the sense to that of
riding into the bulk of a volcaneog up on the
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Sappoon Heights. General Raglan watched dumbfounded as the light Brigade
disappeared at full pelt into a bank of smoke. The Times,
his war correspondent, scribbled furiously in his notebook, the French
commander General Bosquey delivered a verdict for the ages see
menifique Missapalagier. It was magnificent, but no way to wage
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a war. When the smoke cleared, one in six of
the Light Brigade had been killed, more were captured or wounded. Incredibly,
more than half made it back with barely a scratch.
The charge had achieved precisely nothing. The loss of life
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and limb were senseless from our modern perspective, so was
the whole crimean war. So it seems jarring that the
survivors were not just offered sympathy but hailed as heroes.
When can their glory fade? Oh? The wild charge they made.
All the world wondered to know that you've got no
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choice in a doomed and dangerous mission because of some
hideous cock up, and to give it anyway, your full
blooded commitment. It no longer seems magnificent to us, but
we can at least admire the courage. And since Tennyson's
poem is easily the most famous memorial to this disaster,
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maybe he should get the last word. Honor the charge
they made, Honor the Light Brigade Noble six hundred. Key
sources for this episode include hell Riders by Terry Brighton
(32:25):
and The Charge by Mark Adkin, along with Elizabeth Newton's
dissertation The Rocky Road From Actions to Intentions. For a
full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary
Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn rust A. Sound
(32:46):
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright alongside Nazzar Elderazzi,
Ed Gohen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Copenah Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(33:07):
Miss Siam Unrowe and Ruthless Wright. This show wouldn't have
been possible without the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg,
Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie Magniory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick,
Maggie Taylor, and Yellow Lakhan and Maya Canig. Cautionary Tales
(33:29):
is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to rate, share, and review
Pushkin eighteen fifty four. A gently sloping valley near the
village of Balaklava in Crimea. On one side of the valley,
Russian troops with cannons. On the other side of the valley.
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Russian troops with cannons at the far end of the valley. Yes,
you've guessed it. Russian troops with cannons. This is the
Crimean War, the same grim conflict we heard about earlier
this season when Florence Nightingale treated six British soldiers. The
war was the global standoff of its day. The British, French,
(01:00):
and Turks were all worried about Russia's growing influence. Balaklava
is just outside Sevastopol, a strategic port on the Black Sea,
and the situation is delicately poised. With all their cannons,
the Russians are firmly in control of the valley. They've
just captured a bit more land and a few British cannons.
(01:21):
But now the commander of the British forces, General Raglan,
has ordered his cavalry to take those cannons back. General
Raglan watches to a telescope from his viewpoint on a
distant hilltop as his men on horseback ride towards the valley.
So far, so good. Now they should turn and climb
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the slope to surprise the small band of Russians who
are hauling off the heavy British guns. But they don't.
They keep on going further and further down the valley
between the Russians on both sides, towards the Russians at
the end. What on earth are they thinking? Cannon to
the right of them, cannon to the left of them.
(02:05):
That's how the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson famously scribed the
Charge of the Light Brigade. Generations of British school children
learned from his poem about the six hundred horsemen and
their suicidal charge into a valley full of guns, into
the Valley of death rode the six hundred. Tennyson based
(02:28):
his poem on a breathless first hand account in The Times.
The Times, his war correspondent, was watching from the hilltop
alongside the horrified General Raglan. As it turned out, in
his rush to file the story, he had miscounted there
were nearer seven hundred men and the light Brigade. Tennyson
was annoyed when he got this fact check seven hundred
(02:49):
would ruin the meter of his poem. He decided to
leave it as it was. Boldly they rode and well
into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell,
rode the six hundred. But why were six or seven
hundred of Britain's finest cavalrymen charging suicidely straight at Russian cannons?
(03:12):
Tennyson got this bit right. The soldier knew someone had blundered. Indeed,
someone had blundered. But who and why? I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales. The infamous crimean blunder
(03:55):
involved three men, an impatient young captain, a frustrated bullying lord,
and an amiable old general. That's General Raglan. Let's take
a moment to get to know the general first. The Times,
his war correspondent, describes Ragland's personal charm, sweet smile, kindly glance, courteous, gracious,
(04:18):
gentle manner. And how about a character reference from Florence Nightingale.
It was impossible not to love him. He was not
a very great general, but he was a very good man.
Not a very great general. Raglan had spent most of
his long career as a number two, well into his sixties.
(04:40):
Now he was still new to the top job. He
might have been a very great administrator in peace time,
but it was forty years since he'd been on a battlefield,
let alone commanded any troops. Now General Raglan is hundreds
of feet up on top of a hill, the Sapoon Heights.
He lifts his telescope to his eye. He's got a
(05:02):
commanding view of the British soldiers down below. It's like
watching from a box in a theater. In the distance,
he can see the valley the Russian troops are defending
with cannons on the slopes on both sides, and at
the end it's eight o'clock in the morning. General Raglan
will send four fateful orders to the cavalry over the
(05:23):
course of that morning. He clears his throat and dictates
the first cavalry to take ground to the left of
the second line of readouts occupied by tucks. To get
the order to the cavalry, Raglan has to send a
messenger to ride the steep and winding path down the
Sappoon Heights, then gallop across the plain. It takes twenty minutes.
(05:48):
The recipient of the message is a man named Lord Lucan.
He's in charge of the cavalry, which includes the Light Brigade.
He reads the message cavalry to take Wait. This makes
no sense. Why are communications some times hard to understand?
(06:11):
The psychologist and linguist Stephen Pinker reckons the single biggest
reason is the curse of knowledge. That's a curious cousin
of the Dunning Kruger effect. With Dunning Krueger, we don't
know what we don't know. With the curse of knowledge,
we don't notice when we know something others don't. The
(06:32):
curse of knowledge was ingeniously demonstrated in an experiment by
a Stanford University psychology student called Elizabeth Newton. She put
volunteers into pairs and gave one of each pair a
list of well known songs. Choose a song, she said,
and tap it out with your finger on the desk
like this. The job of the second volunteer was simple.
(07:00):
Listen to the taps and then guess the tune. Did
you get that one? No, try another. If you don't
recognize the tunes, don't feel bad. Very few of the
listeners among Elizabeth Newton's experimental subjects managed to They guessed
correctly just two and a half percent of the time.
(07:22):
But here's the part that demonstrates the curse of knowledge.
She asked the people who'd done the tapping, if we
played your tapping to lots of listeners, how many would
correctly guess the tune the tappers reckoned. Around half of
the listeners would get it right. But remember, hardly any
of the listeners actually did. The tappers were wildly over
(07:43):
confident in their ability to convey music using only taps.
Why because in their heads they weren't just hearing the taps,
they were hearing this or this. The people doing the
(08:06):
tapping simply couldn't imagine what it be like to hear
only the taps without the knowledge of which tune the
taps were intended to convey. Much the same thing happens
when an expert gives a talk full of confusing jargon.
They don't realize it's jargon. To them, it's a bunch
of very familiar words with perfectly clear meanings. They can't
(08:29):
conceive of what it's like to be someone who doesn't
understand the curse of knowledge is a devilish curse, says
Stephen Pinker. We do not notice the curse. Because the
curse prevents us from noticing it. We sometimes forget that
the person we're talking to might not have the context
to make sense of what we're saying. We mean one thing,
(08:52):
they hear something else entirely Down at the mouth of
the valley, Lord Lucan reads General Raglan's message again, cavalry
to take ground to the left to the second line
of redoubts occupied by Turks. It still makes no sense
(09:15):
redoubts occupied by Turks. There aren't any redoubts are temporary fortifications.
That's where the British cannons had been guarded by their allies,
the Turkish army. The Russians had captured them already that morning,
so the Turks weren't occupying the redoubts anymore. Still must
(09:36):
be what Ragland meant second line of redoubts. Isn't there
only one line? Yes? Can't help you there, Take ground
to the lift. Who's lift? Lift? Of what my lift?
Raglands lived? Who is he looking from anyway? There's the
curse of knowledge. Ragland had a perfect view from high
(09:58):
on a hilltop. He knew exactly what he meant by
to the left. He forgot that Lucan down below had
a different point of view. A more experienced commander might
have made sure to write something his troops couldn't possibly
misinterpret east or west, not right or left, as you
might have guessed. The puzzled Lord Lucan is the second
(10:19):
of our three main characters. He's the frustrated, bullying lord.
Unlike the amiable old general, Lord Lucan is not a
popular man. Lord Lucan had risen quickly through the ranks
of the British Army, a lieutenant colonel in his twenties.
Was this because of his military genius. No, if you
(10:40):
were good at your job, you might hope to get promoted,
but the only sure way to the top was money.
The British military sold off its top ranks to the
highest bidders. Lucan was a lieutenant colonel because he'd paid
to be one millions of dollars in today's money. Lord
Lucan soon got a reputation as a harsh, vindictive leader.
(11:00):
He'd had soldiers flogged for trivial misdemeanors. But then Lucan
stepped back from the army. It spent most of the
last two decades running his family estate in Ireland's County Mayo.
The smallholders who farmed his vast tracts of land were
struggling to pay their rent, and Lucan decided to modernize.
(11:21):
He had merged their small plots of land into bigger
farms that would be more productive. But to do that
he first had to force out his existing tenants. Lucan
was pitiless. He hired crowbar brigades of fifty men to
demolish his tenants houses. When the potato famine hit, he
(11:42):
kept going. Here's one survivor's account of the winter of
eighteen forty six in County Mayo. Sick and aged, little
children and women with child were alike thrust forth into
the cold snows of winter, and to prevent their return,
their cabins were leveled to the ground. The majority, rendered
(12:03):
penniless by the years of famine, wandered aimlessly about the
roads and bogs till they found refuge in the workhouse
or the grave. Lord Lucan, as I said, was not
a popular man. Now he was back in the army.
He'd swapped the crowbar brigades for the cavalry, and he
was struggling to work out exactly where General Raglan wanted
(12:26):
him to position his troops. He asked Ragland's messenger to
stay with him while he finished the maneuver, just to
make sure he'd understood what the general had in mind,
and this time he had. But there were three more
messages to come. Cautionary tales will return in a moment.
(12:55):
Why would the British Army sell ranks to the highest bidder?
It seems to make no sense. Wouldn't you want your
army to be run by the people who were best
at running an army. But the purchase system did have
some logic behind it, at least if you were a
part of Britain's ruling class. This was a time of
revolutions in Europe. If your army was run by capable
(13:18):
soldiers from the middle or lower classes, well that was risky.
The army might side with the people against the elite.
By selling off ranks to the highest bidders, you made
sure that could never happen, because only the landed gentry
could afford to be in charge. There was, of course,
a downside to this arrangement. Capable soldiers had to take
(13:41):
orders from incompetent aristocrats like the amiable old General Raglan
or the frustrated bullying Lord Lucan. Not surprisingly, the capable
soldiers sometimes resented this. It's time to meet the third
and final man who'll play a pivotal role in the blunder.
The impatient young Captain Louis Nolan is up on the
(14:05):
Sapoon Heights with General Raglan, waiting for his chance to shine.
He wasn't the son of a lord. His father was
a soldier and diplomat. The sons of lords went to
expensive private schools and studied ancient Greek. Nolan's school taught
him more practical subjects, engineering, military history, fencing, horsemanship. He
(14:28):
quickly gained a reputation as the army's most brilliant horseman,
and he quickly developed strong opinions on everything the army
was doing wrong. Still, just in his early thirties, he
wrote a book Cavalry, Its History and Tactics, and he
couldn't resist the odd swipe at the posh buffoons in
charge right up in golden letters. In every riding school
(14:52):
and in every stable, horses are taught not by harshness
but by gentleness. Where the officers are classical, the golden
rule may be given in Greek as well as in English.
This kind of snyde remark didn't endear him to the
higher ranks. Yes, they saw Captain Nolan's skills, but they
(15:13):
also thought he was far too young to be publishing
his opinions A great man, said one in his own estimation.
In the weeks before the Battle at Balaclava, the British
army made its way through Crimea, and the higher ups
made decision after decision that had infuriated Captain Nolan. Twice
(15:36):
the cavalry came across an unexpected chance to attack Russian troops,
and twice Lord Lucan held them back. There were one
thousand British cavalry looking on at a beaten army retreating
within a ten minutes gallop of them enough to drive
one mad. The decision to be cautious wasn't Lord Lucan's fault.
(15:59):
The orders came from General Raglan. Lucan was frustrated too. Nonetheless,
he got the blame. He also got a nickname, not
so much Lord Lucan as Lord look On Am I right?
It wasn't fair, but it's stuck and it stung. Lucan
didn't want to be known as a dithering bystander. And
(16:21):
that's another reason he was irked. And he read General
Ragland's first order of the day. It wasn't just that
the meaning of the words was hard to pass. Once
it had understood them. Lucan realized this was yet another
humiliating retreat. He had deliberately positioned his forces close to
where the Russians would have to pass if they were
to attack. Raglan was telling him to be cautious again,
(16:45):
to move the cavalry further back back up on his
vantage point. Meanwhile, the old general changed his mind. Perhaps
Lord Lucan had got the positioning right in the first place.
Half an hour after sending his first order, General Raglan
sent his second ed squadrons of heavy dragoons to be
(17:07):
detached towards bell Clover. That meant half of Lucan's cavalry
the heavy brigade, as opposed to the light. Another messenger
on horseback gingerly picked his way down the side of
the Sapoon Heights and galloped to Lord Lucan to hand
him the slip of paper. Lucan read it and rolled
his eyes great Now he had to move back to
(17:30):
where he had been, but with only half his troops.
That wouldn't help if they ran into any Russians, and
they did, but luckily the Russians weren't expecting it. The
two forces skirmished briefly, and the Russians retreated. Up on
his hilltop, General Raglans spied an opportunity with that Russian retreat.
(17:52):
Perhaps he could recapture those British cannons the Russians had
taken earlier, the ones nearby on the Causeway Heights, the
slope to one side of the valley. Raglan, being a
cautious man, didn't want to send the cavalry on their own.
He'd rather wait for the infantry soldiers to back them up.
But where were the infantry. He'd sent a message to
(18:14):
their camp telling them to come right away. As it happened,
the urgency of Ragland's message had been lost on the
infantry leader. He had decided he could finish his breakfast
before setting off. But Ragland didn't know that he expected
the infantry to come into view at any moment. And anyway,
there weren't that many Russians near those guns on the
(18:36):
Causeway Heights. The cavalry could take them on their own
if needed. Ragland dictated his third order of the morning
Cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to
recover the heights. They will be supported by infantry, which
have been ordered. Another messenger riding cautiously down the steep slope,
(18:56):
another slip of paper handed to Lord Lucan, Another exasperated sigh.
It will be supported by infantry. What does that mean?
Does he want us to advance now and hope the
tree will arrive later, or are we supposed to wait
for the infantry to arrive and then advance. General Raglan
had meant advance straight away. Lord Lucan decided he should
(19:20):
wait for the infantry. There was still no sign of them,
so the cavalrymen decided they might as well relax for
a while. They got off their horses, lit their pipes,
unscrewed the caps on their flasks of rum. Some had
brought hard boiled eggs from breakfast up on the hillside.
General Raglan watched through his telescope in mounting fury. Why
(19:42):
were the cavalry smoking and drinking? He told them to advance.
He turned his telescope towards those captured British cannons on
the heights. Could he see Russian soldiers starting to drag
away those cannons? That's what it looked like. There was
no time to lose. Ragland dictated his fourth and fatal order.
(20:04):
Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front,
follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying
away the guns. Raglan wanted the message to get to
Lord Lucan as quickly as possible, so he looked around
at the horseman he had with him on the hilltop.
Who among them would be the swiftest rider? Send Nolan.
(20:25):
The impatient young captain eagerly took the message and geed
up his horse. Raglan called after him, tell Lord Lucan,
the gvalry is to attack immediately. At last, Nolan rode off,
exultant after weeks of frustration, Finally the cavalry had something
to do, and he Nolan would get to deliver the
(20:46):
order to that dithering fool Lord look on. Captain Nolan
urged his horse on as it slithered and stumbled down
the steep side of the Sapoon Heights. He galloped the
last mile towards Lord Lucan and thrust the message into
his hand and runs rapidly to the front, which front
prevent the enemy carrying away the guns guns. Nolan watched
(21:11):
Lucan trying to figure it out. His patients snapped. General
Ragland's orders are that the cavalry should attack immediately. A tech,
sir te what guns, sir? Where? And what to do? There?
My lord? There is your enemy, There are your guns.
(21:32):
Nolan swept out a hand in the general direction of
well of what exactly it looked to Lucan like Captain
Nolan was pointing right down the valley towards the many
Russian cannons arrayed at the far end. There is your enemy,
there are your guns. Lucan gulped up on the hilltop.
(21:55):
General Raglan was oblivious. It simply hadn't occurred to him
that there could be any ambiguity about what he wanted. Obviously,
this fourth order was a follow up to the third,
you know, the one that said recover the heights. So
when he said advanced to the front, he meant the heights, obviously,
(22:15):
and when he said the gums, he meant the British
cannons that had been captured on the heights. That was obvious,
wasn't it not? To Lord Lucan, all he heard was
the curse of Knowledge was about to destroy the Light
(22:38):
Brigade cautionary tales will return shortly. In the nineteen sixties
and nineteen seventies, the computing Titan IBM employed a Dutch
(22:58):
psychologist called Gate Hofstader to fly around the world asking
questions of their employees in different countries. Questions like this,
how frequently in your experience does the following problem occur?
Employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers. IBM
wanted to understand how workplace culture differed from country to country.
(23:23):
Were people collectivist or individualist, sticklers for rules or happy
to improvise, and what was their attitude to authority. Hofstader
came up with an idea he called power distance. In
a culture with low power distance, an employee who gets
an apparently stupid instruction feels free to say he's sure, boss.
(23:45):
Where the power distance is high, the employees silently gulps
and carries out the stupid instruction. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers
describes how countries with a high power distance used to
have more fatal plane crashes. Captains and first officers spend
about the same amount of time at the controls, but
(24:07):
crashes would happen more often when the captain was flying.
If the first officer was flying badly, the captain would
tell them. If the captain was flying badly, the first
officer might not. Power distance is high in Korean culture.
In nineteen ninety seven, Korean air flight eight zero one
(24:30):
was descending into Guam. The captain was tired. He wasn't
thinking straight. He was peering out of the cockpit window
to try to spot the runway. It seems he hadn't
realized that there were dark clouds ahead. The runway wouldn't
be visible. He should be relying on the instruments instead.
The first officer knew what was happening, but he didn't
(24:52):
want to challenge the captain directly. Instead, he pointed at
the weather radar and dropped a hint. Don't you think
it rains more in this area? Here? The captain was
too distracted to understand. He kept on looking outside where
that runway. The flight engineer knew what was happening too,
(25:13):
He tried an even weaker hint. Captain. The weather radar
has helped us a lot. Neither said what they must
have been thinking, Captain, you can't land the plane by
looking outside. The weather's too bad, And neither said another
word as the captain flew the plane through a dark
(25:33):
cloud and into a hillside. Airlines now train their pilots
on how to speak up if they think the captain
is making a mistake, But on the battlefield in Balaclava
in eighteen fifty four there had been no such training.
The curse of knowledge had set the blunder in motion,
(25:56):
and power distance was about to seal the deal. It
seemed to Lord Luken that General Raglan wanted the cavalry
to embark on a suicidal charge down the valley. Well,
then that's what they'd have to do. Alfred Lord Tennyson's
poem sums up the lot of the soldier theirs not
(26:17):
to make reply theirs, not to reason why theirs, but
to do and die. Actually, Lord Lucan would have had
some scope to make reply and reason why. The power
distance here was complicated. Lucan outranked Captain Nolan, but Nolan
was speaking on behalf of General Raglan. Lucan couldn't refuse
(26:41):
Raglan's order. But he could have pressed Nolan to explain it,
to make sure he understood. That's exactly what he had
done with a messenger who delivered the first ambiguous order
to move his troops to the left. But this time
he didn't. Perhaps he was angry about the insolence with
which young Nolan was treating him. Perhaps he was worried
(27:02):
about how it would appear Lord look On wriggling out
of action once again. At any rate, he simply glared
at Nolan, then rode off to talk to the light brigade.
They were closest to the valley. They'd have to leave
the charge. The leader of the Light Brigade was Lord Cardigan,
(27:23):
another wealthy aristocrat who had bought his position. Cardigan had
only just appeared on the battlefield. He wasn't camping with
the soldiers. He'd had his yacht sailed over from England
and moored in a nearby harbor. He often pitched up
late after a good sleep and a leisurely breakfast. The
noble yachtsman, the soldiers called him. He was also Lord
(27:44):
Lucan's brother in law. They hated each other. Lord Cardigan,
you are to advance down the valley with a light brigade.
I will follow and support with the heavy brigade. Certainly, Sir,
would allow me to point out to you that the
Russians have a battery in the valley on our front,
and batteries of the riflemen on both sides. I know it.
(28:08):
The General Regland will have it. We have no choice
but to obey. Cardigan readed his troops. Every last one
of them could see how crazy this was, that it
could achieve nothing, and they'd need a miracle to survive.
The soldiers knew someone had blundered. How well they were soldiers.
(28:30):
Orders were orders. The bugle sounded. Cardigan kept the pace steady.
There was a mile and a half to the end
of the valley. The horses couldn't charge at full speed
all that way. But one soldier seemed impatient. He broke
ranks and rode out in front. It was Captain Nolan.
(28:53):
What was he doing. Perhaps he'd only just understood the
blunder that was about to unfold and was trying to
change the light brigades's direction. Perhaps the impatient young captain
just wanted to be front and center. We shall never know.
Sooner had Captain Nolan ridden ahead than a Russian shell
exploded right in front of him, and a shard of
(29:17):
hot metal ripped through his chest. Nolan was the first
to die. He was not the last, struck full in
the face. Has blood and brains were spattering us who
rode near streaks of fire about two feet long and
a foot thick, in the center of a gush of
thick white smoke, cannonballs tearing the earth up, and musket
(29:41):
balls coming like hail. Bold graymare kept alongside of me
for some distance, tearing out her entrance as she galloped.
Had his head blown off. Rode about thirty yards before
he fell. Poor dumb brutes galloping a boatlow and numbers
the marred wild beasts. My overalls are massive bloods. The flame,
(30:03):
the smoke, the raw were in our faces. It is
not an exaggeration to compare the sense to that of
riding into the bulk of a volcaneog up on the
(30:32):
Sappoon Heights. General Raglan watched dumbfounded as the light Brigade
disappeared at full pelt into a bank of smoke. The Times,
his war correspondent, scribbled furiously in his notebook, the French
commander General Bosquey delivered a verdict for the ages see
menifique Missapalagier. It was magnificent, but no way to wage
(30:59):
a war. When the smoke cleared, one in six of
the Light Brigade had been killed, more were captured or wounded. Incredibly,
more than half made it back with barely a scratch.
The charge had achieved precisely nothing. The loss of life
(31:19):
and limb were senseless from our modern perspective, so was
the whole crimean war. So it seems jarring that the
survivors were not just offered sympathy but hailed as heroes.
When can their glory fade? Oh? The wild charge they made.
All the world wondered to know that you've got no
(31:42):
choice in a doomed and dangerous mission because of some
hideous cock up, and to give it anyway, your full
blooded commitment. It no longer seems magnificent to us, but
we can at least admire the courage. And since Tennyson's
poem is easily the most famous memorial to this disaster,
(32:03):
maybe he should get the last word. Honor the charge
they made, Honor the Light Brigade Noble six hundred. Key
sources for this episode include hell Riders by Terry Brighton
(32:25):
and The Charge by Mark Adkin, along with Elizabeth Newton's
dissertation The Rocky Road From Actions to Intentions. For a
full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary
Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn rust A. Sound
(32:46):
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham, Carter and Jeffrey Wright alongside Nazzar Elderazzi,
Ed Gohen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Copenah Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(33:07):
Miss Siam Unrowe and Ruthless Wright. This show wouldn't have
been possible without the work of Mia La Belle, Jacob Weisberg,
Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carlie Magniory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick,
Maggie Taylor, and Yellow Lakhan and Maya Canig. Cautionary Tales
(33:29):
is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show,
please remember to rate, share, and review
Host
Tim Harford
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