Quote Originally Posted by Didz View Post
Interestingly, and somewhat strangely, infantry rarely fired when in square and on the rare occassions when cavalry actually managed to break a square, it was usually due to some freak accident rather than courage or determination.

There are some really interesting eyewitness accounts of cavalry v infantry in square amongst the Waterloo letters, and Hofshoerer's books on the Waterloo Campaign also has some first hand accounts from official Prussian Army reports.

The thing that is unrealistic is the point made by Antisocialmunkey e.g. Real horses aren't stupid, and can't be trained to be stupid. Its that more than anything that makes a square a good defence against cavalry.
If you go by Waterloo, then yes. However there was a French square that was basically run down in Spain. They didn't actually do anything wrong, but the cavalry made contact and pushed through. Then unluckily the commanding officer got knocked down and then the infantry lost courage obviously.

Horses aren't stupid, but they are a herd animal, and they can be trained to do absolutely insane things. It is about trust. When you see horses go on those jumping courses, the obstacles are plainly not scary. But to a horse they are. They look like they can rip it's belly open, break it's legs, and it doesn't know what's behind it. There is a reason they don't always jump. But mostly they do.
Horses in the day were training to not be scared of musketry, if they were scared of that they were basically little better than draftanimals.
The fear they had to face was the seemingly impassable wall of men in a formation. That they could be trained to not exactly ignore, but they could be taught to trust their rider. Medieval heavy cavalry rode down solid formations often enough without scattering to the wind. They didn't always win, but they did slam head first into enemy infantry. Like at Bouvines (there we both have winning head first and losing).

Horses can be trained to run at a living wall. Hell, police horses do so all the time. And don't bring up pointy things, horses have an eyesight that is pretty poor, they can only see pointy things like bayonets up close and only if it's to the sides. Dead ahead they can't see them (at the ranges where the things are within the eyesight overlap). That is partly why it is both a challenge and a possiblity to train them.