EARLY morning sun bathed the scrubland and the vineyards beneath the Sapoune Heights. Sergeant Larsen of the 17th Lancers rose high in his stirrups and addressed his two companies of light cavalry.

“Savour the moment, gentlemen,” he bellowed. “The Thunderer has returned to the Valley.”

Sabres and lances glinting in the sunlight, the Lancers and the 13th Light Dragoons, who were in the front line of the original charge, cantered off to form up a quarter of a mile down the valley.

We stood near the site of the Russian guns at the Don Cossack battery, today marked by a thin green line of poplars.

William Howard Russell, The Times’s correspondent in the Crimea, watched from the heights as the Light Brigade charged at 11.10 in the morning, 150 years ago today .

“They swept proudly past, glittering in the morning sun in all the pride and splendour of war,” he reported from a safe distance. Yesterday The Times took the role of the enemy.

The far-away trumpet call carried on the still air. They were on the move; first the walk, then the trot, then the gallop, each increase in pace signalled by the trumpet.

Fifty yards from us the trumpet sounded again the officers screamed “Charge” and 24 jangling horses and men changed up into overdrive. Our defence was a small tussock of spindly grass.

They came upon us like thunder, hooves drumming on the dry earth, horses’ mouths foaming, men screaming “Charge” with spindrifts of spittle, the red and white pinnacles on their lances fluttering furiously and their drawn sabres gleaming murderously.

As they passed us at full tilt we could see evil in the whites of their eyes and feel the radiant heat off their perspiring mounts. It may only have been a re-enactment for the camera, but we were still mightily relieved not to be Russian gunners.

The sergeant — in real life Alan Larsen, a New Zealand-born events manager from Salisbury — drills his troop of Lancers with military discipline and historical accuracy, as does his opposite number in the Light Dragoons, Geoff Potts, a sergeant in the Army Medical Corps. By day their troopers are air traffic controllers, university lecturers, Royal Mail managers and students, aged from 16 to 59. Their usual displays are of Napoleonic battles. “We have not done the Charge of the Light Brigade before,” Mr Larsen said. “We have always felt it would be disrespectful, but we have made an exception for the 150th anniversary.”

They repeated the performance later in the day for a crowd of appreciative locals who had turned up in their Ladas to make a picnic of the spectacle. Today there will be no charge; with the present Lord Cardigan at their head, they will hold a simple ceremony in the Valley of Death as the Earl lays a wreath in memory of the 110 dead by a simple white cross.

Lord Cardigan watched yesterday’s re-enactment from the sidelines. He complains of the unfair weight of history that burdens him. “The English schoolboy is taught two things: that the Charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster and that Cardigan led it. They inevitably assume it was his fault,” the present Earl said with more than a hint of exasperation.

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