All right, this is the one you've all been waiting for. Balaclava Day, 1854. When 678 men of Lord Cardigan's Light Brigade (most of whom are sitting in 54mm replica in my attic) rode into the Valley of Death and into legend after a confused order took them the wrong way.
'It was a mad-brained trick, men,' Cardigan said to the survivors afterwards, 'but it was no fault of mine.'
'Go again, sir?' an anonymous soldier asked him. Makes you proud to be British, doesn't it?
In other news ...
It was a good day for a battle today - Agincourt was fought in 1415 in the mud of Northern France. The French nobility were all but wiped out by a much smaller force, largely of archers, under Henry V. A while ago there was a move to have October 21 (Trafalgar Day) or October 25 (Agincourt Day) declared a public holiday in Britain, but that was shelved in case it upset our French colleagues in the EU. Actually, on the basis of that there ought to be no public holidays because I can't think of a day when we didn't knock seven bells out of them.
