Were those injured in the Charge of the Light Brigade cared for by the Lady with the Lamp?

Back in our school days, the texts we read for the English classes often had essays by, or about, people who had made some serious mark on history.  Thus, we read about Florence Nightingale--the Lady with the Lamp--and her untiring contributions to treat the sick and the wounded and how she became the patron saint of nursing.

When growing up, and pretty much throughout my life, every so often my father, or his uncle, quoted from memory something from Shakespeare or Tennyson.

What connects the first paragraph on Florence Nightingale with the second on Tennyson?

Making those connections has always been what the life of an academic has been all about.  Years ago, I watched a few episodes of James Burke's Connections and loved the way he tied the stories together.  The world is one amazing set of interconnections. The tangled webs we weave, indeed. Living now as we do with the world wide web, we ought to easily understand that compared to when we were kids, right?

In my classes, too, I try my best to convey to students that understanding even a tiny, tiny bit of this world is not accomplished by merely studying a bunch of courses in any one single formal academic discipline.  Instead, we need to take courses in different disciplines and, more importantly, think through the connections.  And the way I teach, well, it is all about integrative learning where I am constantly highlighting to them the connections to poetry or science or anything else.  To me, there is simply no other way of learning

But, of course, all these are considered to be old-fashioned ideas--even the integrated curriculum that was in the place in the Honors Program was slowly and systematically dismantled because faculty and students saw no value in such an integrated learning.  But, I continue to march along to my own drum beat!

Anyway, real life events are no different with connections in plenty.  Events do not happen in isolation. Case in point: how the Lady with the Lamp and Tennyson come together.  In Crimea.

One of Tennyson's poems, which we did not read back in the school days, but I have heard it recited more than once, was The charge of the light brigade.  One often recited verse from that is this one:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
   Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
   Left of six hundred.

To understand a poem like this means we have to dig deeper into the context that triggered Tennyson to write about it.  The tangled world wide web and Wikipedia make it so simple: "about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War."

The Crimean War.

Aha, you say, because Crimea is so much in the news these days.

It was also during this Crimean War that Florence Nightingale became that famous Lady with the Lamp:

Florence Nightingale's most famous contribution came during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports got back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On 21 October 1854, she and the staff of 38 women volunteer nurses that she trained, including her aunt Mai Smith,^[9] and fifteen Catholic nuns (mobilised by Henry Edward Manning)^[10] were sent (under the authorisation of Sidney Herbert) to the Ottoman Empire. They were deployed about 295 nautical miles (546 km; 339 mi) across the Black Sea from Balaklava in the Crimea, where the main British camp was based.

It is that same Crimea that is now the scene of intense geopolitics.

Of course, there is also that other famous Crimean connection: The Yalta Conference.

The question remains, however, on what we learnt, if anything at all, from such previous entanglements in the web that the world is.  I suspect we did not, and we humans rarely do.  Which is why ought not to be surprised when history repeats itself.