In the second stanza of the poem, the word "blundered" indicates that some mistake has been made. The narrator asks if any of the men who made up the Light Brigade, a group that fought in the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, were dismayed when they were ordered to charge into a valley—surrounded by Russian soldiers with guns on all sides. The narrator essentially answers his question, claiming that even if the soldiers knew that some mistake was being made, they also knew that it was not for them to argue or to try to understand the order but simply to carry the order out. And so these six hundred men rode into the "valley of Death"—so called by the narrator because so many of the men died as a result.