Crimean Journal: An Eye-Witness Account of the Charge of the Light Brigade Book

In this modern age we would call her an embedded journalist, a news reporter who is attached to a military unit involved in an armed conflict. Yet English society in the 1850s encouraged women to act demurely and stay at home, not follow their husbands into combat. Even if Fanny Duberly, the unorthodox author of this best-selling book, noticed that her actions were raising disapproving Victorian eyebrows, that didn't stop her from riding straight into one of the most brutal wars of the 19th century. Fanny Duberly was just twenty-five when her husband, Captain Henry Duberly, and his unit, the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, were ordered into battle. Rather than remain at home, the avid horsewoman announced that she was packing her side-saddle and going with Henry to Russia's Crimean Peninsula. The intrepid amateur war correspondent spent the next two years camped alongside her husband and his troops during the course of their brutal campaign. What she saw and recorded in letters home to her sister shocked the English world, for there was little glory but plenty of death. Cholera slew elite officers and lowly enlisted men alike. Horses starved. The wounded lay untended. The dead went unburied. Allies argued. Incompetence was rampant. The Crimea was hell for men and indescribable for a woman on her own. Yet against the odds, Fanny Duberly rode through it all. She witnessed the battle of Balaklava, explored the ruins of captured Sebastopol, dined with lords, drank with soldiers and watched the ill-fated charge of the noble Light Brigade. No account of the Crimean War neglects to mention this courageous lady and her own recollections were turned into a historically accurate book which was published while the author was still risking her life in Russia. Rescued now from an undeserved oblivion, "Crimean Journal," tells how cities fell and nations argued, while half a million soldiers died in a bitter and largely forgotten conflict. Though no great military male figures emerged, two remarkable women are remembered. Florence Nightingale made her reputation improving the medical needs of soldiers and Fanny Duberly penned this vivid eye witness account of an unnecessary war. Fascinating, remarkable, courageous, mysterious, sympathetic, Fanny Duberly was the Victorian heroine deluxe and this is the true story of her astonishing adventure.