The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

PURSUIT OF ALBION 255

were sitting ducks. Not that the allies were models of homicidal
efficiency. They had their own failures of supply and hygiene (their
greatest enemy was disease) and their share of stupidities of
command (in those days the British army was still selling
commissions), fondly immortalized in Tennyson's "Charge of the
Light Brigade."
But the Russians were worse.