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Keith Hutson

Light Brigade

 i.m. Macauley’s Leaping Infants 1856 – 1866

Alive, but both legs left at Balaclava, lance corporal Macauley swore he’d rather starve than beg: perhaps pride came before and following a fall, for men who’d been with the Six Hundred and survived. His plan was martial: muster local urchins lame from twisted, short or withered limb, club foot, rickets — plus those born whole who later got what they deserved — then teach them theirs was not to reason why, when he said Jump, but ask How high? The Times claimed it could never last, yet England’s Most Unlikely Acrobats toured ten years without praise: laughter, instead, kept both Macauley and his army fed.