Cruise of the Light Brigade: Heading into the Valley Of Death in the beautiful Black Sea

By FRANK BARRETT, MAIL ON SUNDAY TRAVEL EDITOR

Point of order: A gothic castle overlooks the Black Sea in precarious fashion near Yalta


Can you take us to the Valley of Death? I asked.

Alexei the guide smiled: 'This I have already prepared.' He was waiting at the foot of the ship's gangway as we disembarked at Yalta. There are, it seems, many Valleys of Death. Google it and you get 23.3 million suggestions. But for anyone with even a passing knowledge of British history, there is only one: the valley in the Crimea into which the Light Brigade charged.

This ill-fated adventure - vividly described in the famous poem by Tennyson ('Half a league, half a league, half a league onward ...') - has become an integral part of our national story: the Six Hundred who misunderstood a confused order and rode on ready to face death for their country ('Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die ...').

The chance to visit the actual scene of this glorious and tragic event was far too good to miss. We had joined the Princess Cruises Black Sea & Crimean Coasts trip at Varna in Bulgaria. En route to Yalta there were stops in Constanta in Romania and, first, Odessa in Ukraine.

Odessa is a Black Sea port with a significant place in Russian history. It was here in 1905 that sailors of the battleship Potemkin mutinied and became part of a wider, failed uprising in the town which foreshadowed the Russian Revolution a decade later.

The mutiny is immortalised in the 1925 film Battleship Potemkin, which includes the famous 'Odessa Steps' scene - you can watch it on YouTube - showing tsarist troops firing into a crowd in the city to end the uprising. It has become one of cinema's most iconic sequences. The mutineers fled to Romania in the aftermath of the mutiny and, according to our guide, one ended up in Dublin, where he opened a fish-and-chip shop and died in 1987 at the age of 102.

These days Odessa is much less mutinous; a cheerful, quietly prosperous place with a lovely old opera house. Here we cruise passengers were treated to a ballet version of Carmen - just a few dozen of us sprinkled around the huge, sumptuous auditorium.
While the eastern end of the Black Sea has had its troubles in recent years with conflict between Russia and Georgia, everything in this part of the world is peaceful and serene. Back on board, as our ship hugged the Black Sea coast on the final part of its overnight journey from Odessa to Yalta, we had a close-up view of the most picturesque part of Ukraine's seaside.

And then came Yalta itself, stunning and reminiscent of a French Riviera resort but, unlike most places on the Cote d'Azur, wholly unspoilt.

If you could catch a Ryanair flight to the principal Ukrainian Black Sea city of Sevastopol (and I'm amazed that you can't, given the range of odd Eastern European places that the no-frills airline serves), it would be a journey barely further than, say, London to Sicily.


A change of scene: The Crimea countryside - a place with such dark ties to British history - is now laced with vineyards


Yet Ukraine in some ways can seem as strange and remote as Outer Mongolia. It's a country with a population of around 48 million covering an area bigger than France.

After Russia, it's the second-largest country in Eastern Europe. Yet most of us probably know nothing about Ukraine beyond the fact that it was here that the Chernobyl disaster unfolded in 1986.

Then we hit the road for the journey to Sevastopol. On the way, Alexei recalled how local people had the awful news about the radiation leak kept from them by an embarrassed Soviet government anxious to play down the implications of a nuclear emergency. Many believe that it was this gross mishandling of Chernobyl that led to the gradual unpicking of the authority of the Soviet government, leading to 'glasnost' and eventually the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

As Alexei talked, we passed the summer house on the shores of the Black Sea where the architect of glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev, was famously held under house arrest during the attempted Moscow coup in August 1991.

Of all the former Eastern Bloc countries, Ukraine, which is keen to improve relations with the EU, was expected to prosper most under capitalism yet, against an unfolding background of political troubles over the past 20 years, its economy has stuttered - and it has not been allowed to forget the mighty presence of neighbouring Russia forever looking over its shoulder.

Sevastopol was for years the base of the Soviet Black Sea Fleet, which meant that the whole area was forbidden to Western tourists, denying them access to the famous Crimean War sites.

Even when Ukraine achieved sovereignty, it was agreed that Russia would continue to keep its part of the Black Sea Fleet here for a 'transition' period. A new agreement this year - linked to a tempting cut in the thorny matter of natural gas prices - has persuaded the Ukraine government to make this uncomfortable arrangement more permanent.

On the fast new road to Sevastopol, we enjoyed sweeping views of the coast. 'You know why it is called Black Sea?' asked Alexei.

Just as Greenland isn't particularly green and Iceland isn't covered in ice, the Black Sea is just standard sea colour (and I imagine this also goes for the Red and Yellow seas).

According to Alexei, 'black' is also the Turkish word for 'north'. Another explanation is that due to a layer of hydrogen sulphide that begins about 600ft below the surface of the sea, there are microbes that produce black sediments.

Alexei said it's 'probably due to anaerobic methane oxidation'. (I half-expected him to exclaim 'Seemples!' after he explained all this in his thickly accented 'compare-the-meerkat' English.)

Actually, its name is the only false note struck by the Black Sea - as a holiday destination, the area exceeds all expectations by several miles. It even provoked a poetic response from Russian author Anton Chekhov.


The road to Sevastopol offers stirring views of the Black Sea, named after dark sediment that lies 600ft under the water's surface


He spent the last years of his life in Yalta in the final stages of TB. The resort was a favourite destination for the legions of Russian TB suffers at the turn of the 19th Century. In one of his short stories, a character stands on his moonlit hotel balcony in Sevastopol contemplating the colour of the sea before him: 'It was a soft, gentle mixture of blue and green; in some parts the colour of the water was like copper sulphate, while in others it seemed that the moonlight had condensed and filled the bay instead of water; but what a harmony of colours in general; what a peaceful, calm and sublime mood!'

But just 40 years before, Sevastopol was a place that had been plunged into a version of hell. This part of Ukraine is the Crimean peninsula - and if the area means anything to us, it is because of the Crimean War - fought between 1853 and 1856 - the Charge of the Light Brigade and the balaclava.

Ah, how the very mention of the word 'balaclava' revives childhood misery. Every morning as I set off to infant school, my mother would insist I wear my hated balaclava. Why were we made to wear them? It was often cold in Newport, the South Wales town where I grew up, but I don't recall that dog sleds were ever required to get us to school.

I can remember somebody explaining - probably on Blue Peter - that the balaclava's origins lay in the Crimean War. They were knitted in their tens of thousands and sent over to the British troops in Balaclava who were suffering from the effects of the harsh winter.

Curiously, the Crimean War has left quite a fashion legacy, said Alexei. After Lord Cardigan led the ill-fated charge, he infamously trotted back to his private yacht moored at Balaclava for a champagne dinner; but now he is more widely remembered for his own way of keeping warm during the hostilities - the article of clothing to which he gave his name: the knitted cardigan.

Lord Raglan, who gave the imprecise order to Lord Lucan, who then sent Lord Cardigan and the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death, also gave us the raglan sleeve: another home knitting favourite. Alexei said: 'The baggy sleeve helped disguise the fact that Raglan lost an arm at Waterloo.'

The other legacy, more significantly, was the revolution in nursing driven by Florence Nightingale. 'But she visited the Crimea only once, probably for no more than week,' revealed Alexei, explaining that the bulk of her work was done in the hospital at Scutari in Istanbul, hundreds of miles from the conflict.

The Crimean War is now recognised as the first of the 'modern' wars fought with rifles, artillery, trench systems, steam battleships, telegraph, railways - and newspaper war correspondents. Nobody in Britain really had any clear idea why we were fighting there, but what they were able to read about the war told them that there was atrocious loss of life, with thousands of British casualties.

The generals were seen as clueless aristocrats whose progress to the top came via the simple expedient of being able to buy commissions. And though it was being fought far, far away, the Crimean War came home to Britain in the thousands of streets and terraces that took the names of its battles - Sebastopol (as it was then commonly spelt), Inkerman and Balaclava.

Alexei explained that the French paid similar tribute: 'It was in a tunnel under the Pont de l'Alma - named after the Battle of Alma - that Diana, Princess of Wales died in a car crash in 1997.'



Caton Woodville's famous painting of The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, which depicted soldiers in battle during the Crimean War


And suddenly we are at the Valley of Death. It's now largely covered in vineyards, but Alexei pointed out how the lie of the land helped confuse Lord Lucan when he received Lord Raglan's order to 'prevent the enemy carrying away the guns'.

Instead of turning towards the British lines, the Light Brigade veered to the heavily defended Russian positions and galloped straight into a death trap. Only 197 men were still with horses at the end of the charge: 118 men were killed and 127 wounded. A French general who watched the charge exclaimed: 'C'est magnifique mais ce n'est pas la guerre!' (It is magnificent but it is not war.)

Alexei then whisked us around the other main sights of the Crimea. Balaclava, where Cardigan kept his yacht, is a surprisingly attractive seaside place. Near the main beach is the start of a small canal that vanishes into a tunnel hewn out of a sheer cliff, along which Soviet nuclear submarines would sail to their base something straight out of James Bond. The underground bunker reached by the canal is now a tourist attraction. 'Long, damp tunnels - that's it really,' says Alexei.

Sevastopol was the principal objective of the British and French armies fighting in the Crimea and when the city fell, the Russians lost the war. The story of the siege of Sevastopol is portrayed in vivid detail in an exhibition in the city that features an informative 360-degree representation of one key day in the conflict.

Here we get another must-have fact from Alexei - he tells us that the Victoria Cross, introduced to mark the bravery of British soldiers in the Crimea, was made from metal from Russian guns captured during the siege.


Anton Chekhov, pictured here with wife Olga Knipper, saw out his days in Yalta


Less than a century after being destroyed by the British and French, Sevastopol was razed for a second time when it was besieged by the Germans during the Second World War. It was faithfully rebuilt in the classical style with wide streets, reminiscent of Paris.

On our way back, a few miles from Yalta, is more architectural elegance and a further reminder of the Second World War. A former summer residence of the Russian imperial family, the Livadia Palace became the centre of international attention in February 1945 when Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met here for a peace conference that effectively ceded control of Eastern Europe to Stalin.

In the courtyard of the palace you can see where the famous photograph of the three leaders was taken. The mostly local visitors, however, are more interested to see the exhibits relating to Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were shot following the Revolution.

Our final stop was at Chekhov's house.

'It's a terrible story,' said Alexei. 'The mother killed on the road and two poor orphans adopted and the new mother, she brings them up under an advertisement board.' As we were standing at the entrance to Chekhov's home - the White Dacha - I assumed he was describing a Chekhov story. He spent the final years of his life in this house he had built just outside Yalta and wrote two of his best-known plays here: The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters.

Alexei, however, is referring to a family of cats who now live nearby. You have the feeling it's a story Chekhov would have enjoyed.

He certainly loved this house and the garden, upon which he lavished attention. In the house is a telephone on which he spoke to Tolstoy; in the front room is a piano played by Rachmaninov when he came to visit.

It is now late afternoon and ferociously warm. I sit on a bench, and drink in the serenity of this lovely place. 'We shall find peace,' wrote Chekhov in his book Uncle Vanya. 'We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.'
Here, in this beautiful, peaceful area so scarred by war in the past, you feel all dreams are now possible.


Travel Facts

Princess Cruises (0845 355 5800, www.princess.com) operates Black Sea & Crimean Coasts trips on board Pacific Princess. A 12-night cruise starting in Athens on September 4, 2011, and ending in Venice costs from £1,779 per person including flights and transfers. The ship calls at Volos (Greece), Varna (Bulgaria), Constanta (Romania), Odessa, Yalta (both Ukraine), Istanbul (Turkey) and Ljubljana (Slovenia).

source: dailymail