# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Nolan, Lewis Edward

​NOLAN, LEWIS EDWARD (1820?–1854), captain 15th hussars and writer on cavalry, born about 1820, was son of Major Babington Nolan, sometime of the 70th foot, and afterwards British vice-consul at Milan. Two brothers, like himself, lost their lives in battle. Obtaining a commission in an Hungarian hussar regiment, he was a pupil of Colonel Haas, the instructor of the Austrian imperial cavalry, and served with the regiment in Hungary and on the Polish frontier. Leaving the imperial he entered the British service by purchase as ensign in the 4th king's own foot 15 March 1839, and on 23 April was transferred to the 15th king's hussars, then ordered to India, as cornet, paying the difference in the value of the commission. He purchased his lieutenancy in the regiment 19 June 1841, and his troop 8 March 1850. He was some time aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-general Sir George Frederick Berkeley, commanding the troops in Madras, and afterwards extra aide-de-camp to the governor, Sir Henry Pottinger. When the regiment was ordered home in 1853, Nolan got leave to travel in Russia, and visited the principal military stations. He was sent to Turkey in advance of the eastern expedition to make arrangements for the reception of the cavalry of the force, and to buy up horses. He landed in the Crimea as aide-de-camp to the quartermaster-general, Colonel Richard (afterwards Lord) Airey [q. v.], and was present at the Alma.
At Balaklava, on 25 Oct. 1854, by express desire of Lord Raglan, the commander-in-chief, Nolan carried a written order to Lord Lucan, the officer commanding the British cavalry, bidding him prevent the Russians from carrying away some English guns which they had just taken from Turkish troops under Liprandi. The guns were on the causeway heights away on the front of the light brigade (Kinglake, v. 218–19). Lucan expressed doubt about the meaning of the order, and subsequently alleged want of respect towards himself on Nolan's part. ‘Where are we to advance?’ he asked; and Nolan replied, ‘There's your enemy, and there are the guns, my lord!’ Lucan, in after years, always asserted that the guns were not visible where he received the order, although they could be plainly seen by Lord Raglan's staff on the higher ground. Lord Cardigan [see Brudenell, James Thomas], in command of the light brigade, received the order direct from Lucan himself, but wrongly understood the instructions to mean a charge straight down the valley, past the guns, against the Russian batteries at the far end. The brigade had just got into motion—Cardigan leading, with the 13th light dragoons (now hussars) and the 17th lancers as his first line—when Nolan was seen riding obliquely across the advance and gesticulating. It was assumed that he was making an excited attempt to hurry on the charge, but in reality he appears to have been endeavouring, as an officer of the quartermaster-general's staff, to divert the brigade from its course down the valley to its nearer and intended objective on the right front. A fragment of Russian shell from the first gun fired struck him on the chest, laying it open to the heart. For a moment his body, with rigid uplifted sword-arm, was borne along the front, and then dropped from the saddle in a squadron interval of the 13th dragoons as the brigade swept onward into the ​‘valley of death.’ Twenty minutes later, when the survivors of the ‘six hundred’ were coming in, Cardigan broke out in a complaint of Nolan's interference, but Lord Raglan checked him by remarking that just before he had all but ridden over Nolan's lifeless body.
Nolan was a most accomplished soldier—he spoke five European languages and several Indian dialects; he was a superb rider and swordsman, winner of some of the stiffest steeplechases ever ridden in Madras, and an enthusiast in all relating to his arm, with unbounded faith in its capabilities when rightly handled. He was the author of a work on ‘Breaking Cavalry Horses,’ an adaptation of Bauchir's method to British military requirements, an edition of which, revised by the author, was published posthumously in 1861, and also of a book on ‘Cavalry’ (London, 1851), which attracted a good deal of notice at its first appearance. But although a dashing, impetuous soldier, Nolan, in the eyes of most of the officers of the cavalry division, was ‘a man who had written a book,’ who was full of new-fangled ideas, and was too ready at expressing them.
[Hart's Army Lists; Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea, cabinet edition, vols. ii. and iii. and vol. v. passim; Lord George Paget's Light Brigade in the Crimea, 1881; Nolan's writings; Gent. Mag. 1855, pt. i. p. 88; a portrait of Nolan from a painting, taken in India, appeared in the Illustr. London News, 24 Nov. 1854.]
H. M. C.