When I received it I placed it in the hands of Brigadier-General Airey, the Quartermaster-General, and requested him to suggest to his lordship to withdraw the communication, considering that it would not lead to his advantage in the slightest degree; but Lord Lucan having declined to take the step recommended, I have but one course to pursue—that of laying the letter before Your Grace and submitting to you such observations upon it as I am bound, in justice to myself, to put you in possession of. Lieutenant General the Earl of Lucan complains that in my dispatch to Your Grace of the 28th of October, I stated that, “from some misconception of the instruction to advance, the Lieutenant General considered that he was bound to attack at all hazards.” His Lordship conceives this statement to be a grave charge and an imputation reflecting seriously on his professional character, and he deems it incumbent upon him to state those facts which he cannot doubt must clear him from what he respectfully submits as altogether unmerited. I have referred to my dispatch and far from being willing to recall one word of it, I am prepared to declare, that not only did the Lieutenant General misconceive the written instruction that was sent him, but that there was nothing in that instruction which called upon him to attack at all hazards, or to undertake the operation which led to such a brilliant display of gallantry on the part of the Light Brigade, and unhappily, at the same time occasioned such lamentable casualties in every regiment composing it. In his lordship’s letter he is wholly silent with respect to a previous order which had been sent him. He merely says that the cavalry was formed to support an intended movement of the infantry. This previous order was in the following words:—“The cavalry to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to recover the heights. They will be supported by infantry which has been ordered to advance on two fronts.” This order did not seem to me to have been attended to, and therefore it was that the instruction by Captain Nolan was forwarded to him. Lord Lucan must have read the first order with very little attention for he now states that the cavalry was formed to support the infantry, whereas he was told by Brigadier General Airey, “that the cavalry was to advance and take advantage of any opportunity to recover the heights, and that they would be supported by infantry.” Not that they were to support the infantry; and so little had he sought to do as he had been directed, that he had no men in advance of his main body, made no attempt to regain the heights, and was so little informed of the position of the enemy, that he ask Captain Nolan, “where and what he was to attack, as neither enemy nor guns were in sight?”