‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is not about gu10 light bulbs but a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson about a brigade of soldiers who rode into the “valley of death”.

The poem relates the story of a brigade of six hundred soldiers who were instructed to charge the enemy forces that had been stealing their weaponry. Though all the soldiers realized that their commander had committed a massive error in telling them to do this, not a single soldier was discouraged or upset by the command and executed it anyway. As the role of a solider is to obey and “not to make reply…not to reason why”, they rode into the “valley of death”.

The soldiers courageously rode towards their death, assaulted on both sides and from the front by canons: “Into the jaws of Death/ Into the mouth of hell/ Rode the six hundred.” The soldiers charged the opposing army and broke through their line, killing their Russian and Cossack enemies. As the brigade returned “back from the mouth of hell”, there were few left.