The Call of the Bugle – Part II: The Sound in the Story

English military bugle; Credit: Nevilley, Wikipedia

The Call of the Bugle opens with exactly that: A bugle call inside the head of a jaded, alcoholic reporter, which drives him to write about the final moments of a dark rider he saw die in the Charge of the Light Brigade—and to discover his own identity in the process. Bugle calls course through the story: They start in an empty newsroom and end in a peal of thunder outside an old cottage. They move the characters with their emotional power.

Take one of my favorite scenes:

The old general and the horse have gone out for their usual ride. The route takes them to a plateau overlooking the 17th’s base in the plain below. They hear successive calls as the regiment starts maneuvers in the morning haze. The sound haunts them with memories. The horse bucks and rears in increasing excitement. The general’s faded senses become clear, the feel and weight of a long-forgotten uniform returns, and the saber becomes a living thing stretched out before him. They scream and charge, and for a brief moment, both defy time and return to their youth.

But before we sail off into a cloud of 19th-century romanticism, let’s examine what we’re talking about more closely.

First things first: A bugle is not a trumpet. A trumpet has valves; a bugle does not. A trumpet is long; a bugle is compact. A trumpet has a bright sound; a bugle has a lower note. The bugle used in the charge was compact and fit the cavalry equipage; a trumpet would have been awkward to carry.

19th-century cavalry units used a lot of bugle calls to direct men and horses. Horses themselves learned to recognize the various calls. Hence, the general’s horse in the scene above knew and responded to the calls echoing across the plain.

If you want to hear these calls, do a Google video search of 19th-century British cavalry calls.

In the din of battle, a bugle call was clearer and easier to understand than a human voice, and its sound carried much further.

So, what did the bugle that blew the charge at Balaklava sound like?

Let’s set the stage.

According to eyewitnesses, the acoustics in the valley were superb. Onlookers standing on the ridge could hear dogs barking in the village a few miles away. It had rained the evening before, and the damp earth muffled the horses’ hooves. So when the Light Brigade began to advance, it did so in silence. Bystanders could hear the jingle of harnesses and creak of saddles as the units moved toward the waiting guns.

It must have been incredibly eerie, to say the least.

Imagine looking across a narrow valley and watching ranks of horsemen moving forward in total silence. There is a colored lithograph of the charge by William Simpson made from sketches he drew at the time, which shows the advance into the guns. (You can view it at my last blog post HERE.) Simpson was on the ridge, along with William H. Russell, who described the scene. “They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendor of war.” Russell’s description became the basis for Tennyson’s poem with its famous opening lines. “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward….” In turn, Tennyson based his poem on the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is my shepherd…. Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death…”

The image speaks for itself.

On to the bugle.

There was a dispute about which bugle blew the call and who the actual trumpeter was that signaled the charge, but more about that later.

There was a call, and you can hear it.

In 1890, a surviving trumpeter named Martin Lanfried, wounded and his horse killed, recorded the call on a wax cylinder. He blew a bugle used at Waterloo, but it is close enough in sound.

The first time I heard it, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

Yours will too.