Tactics in the English Civil War?

[Duke John]

From the few Osprey books that I have and what I have read on the internet, English Civil War (ECW) battles tend to be decided by the side that could win the cavalry battle which was fought on the flanks. The infantry regiments, composed of pikemen flanked by musketeers, would approach each other and units would either break before contact, fire at each other, or enter melee usually ending in a relatively harmless push-of-pike.

Regiments formed up in a checkerboard format, with the second or even third line supporting the first line. But how was this done exactly?

How tactically interesting were ECW battles? First Newbury, with all its terrain features breaking up the terrain seemed much more challenging than the open field of Marston Moor resulting in a long line of infantry pushing against the opposing long line of infantry. What tactical decisions did the infantry commanders in general make to influence the outcome?


If there was to be an ECW game with practically 100% historically correct simulation of command and control of pike and shot armies how interesting would it be in your eyes? Would it be too limiting as it mostly a matter of lining up, marching, charging the cavalry and a push of pike and then waiting before one side broke after which it was a matter of mopping up? If so, what freedom would you take to improve gameplay when it comes to loosening up the historical accuracy?


And could someone give me a few good titles of books dealing with tactics used in the English Civil War? I am particularly interested in indepth reviews of what decided the outcome of confrontations between individual regiments. Diagrams are a definite plus!

If you happen to know a few good websites about this then please post them also.

Many thanks for any responses,
Duke John

[matteus the inbred]

Seeing as you've had no response at all so far, I thought I'd suggest you try contacting an ECW/Pike and Shot Reenactment Organisation/Society, or these links -
www.pikeandshotsociety.org
www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/index.htm
www.caliverbooks.com

I don't think tactics and tactical manouevring were particularly sophisticated in the early war though, as most troops on both sides were fairly raw conscripts or 'trained band' troops, and even the apparently 'regular' troops of the English crown during the Bishop's Wars tended to run away a lot. Some veterans of the 30 Years War would've been useful, and some regiments (Newcastle's Whitecoats at Marston Moor, eg.) were capable of astonishing tenacity. I have read that ECW armies were generally based on the looser 'Swedish' lines rather than heavy 'tercio' style warfare; the indiciplined and enthusiastic activities of troops like Rupert's cavalry suggest this would have appealed to the leaders on both sides.
A book I have called 'British Battles' has a fairly detailed section on the ECW, I will try and remember to give you more details (Authors, ISBN) tomorrow, along with anything else I can dredge up...

[King Kurt]

Things were a bit more varied than suggested. The quality of the troops varied greatly, but the New Model Army of cromwell was comprable to the 30 years war Swedes and adopted the volley tactics from them. Infantry tended to be 2 muskets to 1 pike with the pike being principaly to protect the shot from cavalry. Troops included dragoons - mounted infantry - and these were important in the battle of Naesby where they provided flanking fire for the Parlimentarians.

Some of the troops in Scotland were interesting - especialy the Montrose armies - excellent musketeers, salvo firing with 2 handed swords for when things got hand to hand.

[Duke John]

Great, replies!

What would happen when two opposing infantry units met? Would they stand back firing at the opposing musketeers? Would the musketeers join the fight? I guess that would have been more lethal than the melee between pikemen which became more of a pushing contest after first contact.

[King Kurt]

My general impression would be that they would exchange fire for a volley or 2 then get stuck in. The musketeers all had swords and I would imagine that the musket itself was an effective club. It was the impact of the salvo volley which made the difference - all 3 ranks fired at once inflicting in one go substanial casulties - the morale effect of that would be devastating, but you needed well trained, good morale troops to do that. You could imagine one good volley causing a unit to waiver then break when the shooters charged. Muskets were relatively slow to reload, so morale was key. In the 50 years after the ECW, pikes all but disappeared to be replaced by salvo firing muskets with plug then ring bayonets. Firelock muskets replaced matchlocks as well.
The British Army has its roots in the New Model Army - even down to the red coats - and it evolved into the well trained, high morale firepower based regements of the 18th and 19th centuries and the traditions which continue today.

[Duke John]

I read in books and on the internet that the pikemen would eventually get into a pushing contest as it became too crowded too effectively use the pike (which I always found strange as accounts of Swiss pikemen or Landsknechts fighting were usually more bloody). The musketeers on the other hand would use their musket as a club or their sword which resulted in a more dangerous and chaotic melee.

Wouldn't that mean that the musketeers would rout more quickly or at least die much faster than the pikemen? It seems strange to me that commanders would have such different fighting styles side by side.

I also read about infantry repeatedly attacking other infantry. How would this work? Would the pikeman turn around and retreat? Or would they step back, which is much slower, but safer? Or is an attack in this context composed of musket volleys and a failed charge (eg, not hitting home)?

[matteus the inbred]

The book I mentioned is British Battles, by K. Guest/D. Guest ISBN 0004709683, it's got lots of snippets of just the kind of info you wanted in it, plus colour photos of reenactors and stuff, and a general description of most of the major ECW battles.
Basically what you said is right though, the opposing lines would advance, exchange musketry and then charge if one commander judged the moment to be right. Early in the war lots of pikemen featured in big pushing matches, rather like scrums with pikes added (Edgehill became a static shoving match until the cavalry returned, even the earl of Essex fought on foot in the lines with a pike). Later in the war, as King Kurt says, the proportion of musketeers increased, and pikemen were used to stop cavalry. Clubbed muskets and halberds for NCOs were probably more widely used than swords cos the swords that got issued were cheap rubbish and bent easily. Pikes were often shortened from the regulation 18 feet to something between 12 and 15 feet for easier use in combat, so this suggests a big brawl rather than a 'phalanx' style push of pike.
Pike blocks would sometimes stand off and 'poke' at each other rather than engaging full on. I guess much of this depended on the training and morale of the regiments...Royalist Cornish pikemen were particularly respected after Braddock Down, when they charged uphill at 'push of pike' and shattered the enemy line, and the Whitecoats were similarly hard to take down.

Things were a bit different in Scotland where Montrose in particular used MacDonald and Gordon Highlanders as well as regularly equipped Irish troops. I've got a couple more sources to check, but I've gotta get back to work before the boss sacks me...!

[CBR]

If by pushing you mean men would get involved in vicious fighting like this:

Some re-enactors raise their pikes and goes in to push and shove the other unit but doesnt have much to do with what little info we have of the ECW and pike fighting in general.

My guess is that the picture shows the most extreme example of combat and other times it would be more at a distance with pike fencing. Depends on morale and other random happenings.

Musketeers would be fighting out on the flanks and leave the pikemen to face the enemy pikemen.

There are AFAIK several examples of pikeunits that disengaged only to go at it again after a short reforming of the ranks. Most likely men would simply back away as they got tired or demoralised and as the enemy unit were in a similar situation the two units would seperate.


CBR

[Watchman]

Plain musketeers caught by virtually anything else - pikemen or any cavalry - in the open were pretty much as good as dead. Which is why they always operated in tandem with pikemen and/or cavalry squadrons in line duty. A lousy sword the musketeer barely knows how to use and a clumsy clubbed musket aren't exactly something you go up against an advancing pike-hedge or charging cavalry squadron with.

Mind you, I understand the musketeers would pretty often end up brawling against their opposite numbers while the pike- or horsemen were busy with their colleagues on the other side - being able to roll up the flanks of the enemy unit would of course be quite useful if you could rout the enemy shooters.

Anyway, by what I've read of it pike-and-shot era field battles were usually rather drawn-out affairs where opposing units would clash repeatedly, fight for a while, disengage, reform and do it all over again until someone's resolve snapped. Due to the relatively smaller units and general fluidity cavalry-cavalry fights tended to be resolved relatively quickly (usually - there were instances in the TYW where the squadrons spent the whole day hammering at each other with little to show for it except mounting casualties), but infantry formations of any quality seem to generally have been able to withstand downright extreme attrition without breaking if only engaged at the front.

Apparently something commanders really hated in general was the occasionally occurring scenario where the infantry lines just faced each other at something like twenty meters away (when neither had the resolve to engage with cold arms) and just blasted away with their muskets and artillery - that tended to incur obscene casualties even if your side was ultimately victorious, which was hardly quaranteed in any case. Breaking this sort of bloody deadlock usually required the cavalry to sweep a flank and start rolling up the enemy line, although that might not quite work like planned if the enemy could deploy reserve units to for a stopgap line to secure the flank.

[matteus the inbred]

If there was to be an ECW game with practically 100% historically correct simulation of command and control of pike and shot armies how interesting would it be in your eyes? Would it be too limiting as it mostly a matter of lining up, marching, charging the cavalry and a push of pike and then waiting before one side broke after which it was a matter of mopping up? If so, what freedom would you take to improve gameplay when it comes to loosening up the historical accuracy?

On that note, I have played DMB/DBR wargames rules for this period; they are heavily researched and based on both logical deduction of troops roles and equipment and one primary sources.
The basic outcome seemed to be:
Musket-armed foot (called Shot) slaughter anything dumb enough to let them shoot it, but get stuffed by almost anything in hand-to-hand except pikes.
Cavalry have no chance whatsoever against pikes unless they shoot them and then mob them on all sides. Pistol armed cavalry have no chance against heavy or lance armed cavalry in a scrap unless they can get a volley off first.
Pikes are basically there to protect Shot. Anything else just shoots them. In contrast to much of the evidence in this thread, Shot were actually quite effective in hand-to-hand vs pike, presumably to represent the effects of the Shot firing a close-range volley and then getting stuck in.
Artillery was only good for forcing people to move position when they didn't want to, or suffer the cumulative effects of being raked by guns.
This actually led to very quick game resolutions compared to the earlier and more thoroughly tested Medieval/ancient rules...I suspect an 'accurate' representation in a computer version would lead to the sort of battle times we sometimes see in RTW or on Very Hard level in MTW, ie. everything's over damn quickly! Most troops had either low morale or little ability/training to regroup after setbacks, or very high morale coupled with excellent training or aggression that allowed them to make quick work or opponents. Giving units very high combat factors on all sides often seems to make for a much shorter fight when using probability (ie. dice) to resolve fighting...

[Watchman]

I'm not wholly convinced of the capability of shot vs. pike in melee, at least not without some fairly thorough softening-up beforehand at range which in turn would pretty much require the enemy shot to be largely neutralized first (for obvious reasons in infantry fights the "sleeves" of shot would tend to deploy before the central block of pikemen who had little to do at that phase anyway). Although the fact military theory initially considered a 1:2 ratio of pike to shot to be good, later unbalanced it further to increase available firepower (attempts at "double arming" the pikemen didn't work too well - the English peculiarity of a combined pike-longbow ought to give an indication of the lenghts this quest which finally resulted in the bayonet went), and in practice the pike arm tending to be undermanned relative to the theory for assorted logisytical reasons might have something to do with it; shot feeling confident enough to fight pike with cold arms could easily have something like four to one numerical superiority at the outset...

Anyway, I know the Swedish army retained pikemen into the Great Northern War at the beginning of the 1700s specifically for their usefulness in cold-steel shock action (which their military doctrine was a bit obsessed with at the time), despite the bayonet being already in general use everywhere. You'd think that told something of the relative shock power of the pike.

If English Civil War troops were prone top routing quickly this would then really be an issue with their quality rather than the tactics of the period. Thirty Years War clashes between forces of roughly comparable caliber in comparision tended to go on for quite a while unless one side aquired a telling advantage, whereas raw and poorly motivated troops could break very quickly indeed (at Breitenfeld practically the entire untested Saxon army broke almost at first contact with the veteran Imperial troops, for example, whereas the Swedes and Imperials slugged it out for hours). These weren't yet the linear infantry tactics of the next century, after all; the troops still fought in rectangular blocks of some depth (the old massive tercios having been phased out already midway to the TYW), not in very long but thin lines which possessing enormous firepower but were also worrisomely brittle psychologically.

Cavalry have no chance whatsoever against pikes unless they shoot them and then mob them on all sides.

True enough. Any steady, close-order infantry is almost invulnerable to cavalry shock action anyway, as horses flat out refuse to run against such a solid obstacle; pikes doubly so, as they tend to skewer the horsies to boot. The caracole pistol-skirmish tactic actually evolved more or less specifically to enable cavalry fight pikemen - the very deep ranks in turn developed to allow the cavalry to outshoot the supporting shot by plain constant volume of fire.

[SwordsMaster]

From what I know of pike and shot tactics - my area is more the "tercio" era - muket sleeves would be deployed in front of the pikemen squares in loose order and would retreat after skirmishing into the gaps between the "checkered" formation (kinda like the roman quincux), with some of them getting behind the pikemen and then joining the fight in the square as their light weapons and superior mobility allowed them to sneak between the lines of engaged pikemen without disrupting their formation to aid in the killing at a range shorter than a pike's.

I mean, an armoured man with a 4 meter pike that he was shoving into someone else couldn't really defend himself at short range, so the musketeers would be there for him as well as to kill the horses and horsemen that would be disrupting the formation.

[Watchman]

Sounds about like what one would imagine the shot to do in the thinner 1:2 formation too - chances are if the opposing regiments were close enough for the pikes to engage each other the shot wouldn't want to stand around having a reload-and-volley race with their opposite numbers; I really don't want to imagine how nasty a firefight at those ranges would be. One suspects one or both sides would advance to contact and duke it out with clubbed muskets and whatever (musketeers apparently usually didn't bother with their swords, which few of them knew to use worth a damn anyway and many likely didn't even have in the first place whatever the regulations might say); should there emerge a victor they could of course then fall on the flanks of the engaged enemy pikemen, which sounds like one of those things that tends to persuade a regiment to give ground and try to regroup.

Pistol armed cavalry have no chance against heavy or lance armed cavalry in a scrap unless they can get a volley off first.

Most heavy cavalry of the period used pistols too. Pistol-armed heavy shock cavalry had worked well for the future Henry IV in the French religious wars of the previous century against heavy lancers (the technique of discharging the pistol before contact and then falling on with the sword was called pistolade back then, apparently), and although they tended to have a hard time at it for various reasons pistol-toting Swedish cavalry was often able to take on the fearsome Polish lancers and win during Carolus X's Polish adventure (Carolus II Gustavus had originally adopted the aggressive cavalry tactics specifically to deal with the Poles in the first place; he was apparently able to achieve something of a stalemate).

The lance may be a quite powerful shock weapon, but it is also unwieldy, outreached by most any firearm (including the pistol, at least against unarmoured targets - period cavalry armour was pretty tough) and no good after the initial impact; in comparision pistols are easy to carry around and also quite handy and effective melee weapons able to punch through all but the heaviest armour at point-blank ranges.

As a side note, Napoleonic lancers - uhlans - seem to in most sources be considered as particularly effective against infantry (especially badly formed one) but nothing particularly special against other cavalry.

The question was really about the relative weight of armour and hence survivability and of tactics and psychology. Even cuirassieurs, the heaviest cavalry of the period, fighting with the caracole skirmish technique could be routed relatively easily by lighter cavalry which simply aggressively pressed home a charge, as the formation and training involved wasn't really all that well suited for dealing with that kind of onslaught - the Swedes had given a few rude surprises this way when they first got involved in the TYW, and the same apparently held for the Royalists early in the Civil War (the Parlamentarians actually had most of the cuirassieurs around and apparently persisted in trying the somewhat old-fashioned firepower tactics for a while, whereas Rupert had learned the trade on the continent and advocated more aggressive style). Once the Imperial cuirassieurs had started using similarly aggressive tactics, however, the comparatively light (ie. wearing at most a breastplate and helmet) Swedish cavalry was often at dire straits indeed despite their practice of deploying musketeers between the squadrons for point-blank firepower.

Cuirassieurs tended to be relatively few in number though, as despite their undeniable usefulness and power as battlefield shock cavalry they were expensive to equip (you could get several lighter horsemen at the price of one) and logistically problematic as their tough armour was very heavy and had to be mostly transported in the baggage train, greatly limiting their strategic mobility and hence all-around usefulness. Lighter cavalry in comparision could if necessary wear their armour on the march and range far and wide.

Artillery was only good for forcing people to move position when they didn't want to, or suffer the cumulative effects of being raked by guns.

This may have been true in the Civil War, but that would have been due to plain dearth of cannon in England then. On the continent light regimental field guns had been proliferating rapidly since the Swedes introduced the idea in the 30s (again originally having developed the idea to help even the odds against the nasty Poles), and those 3-pounders could add some truly obscene firepower to any formation. Not only were they longer ranged and faster to reload (about half the time normally, I understand) than muskets, at shorter ranges - around 100 meters and under - they normally switched to grapeshot specifically prepacked with its gunpowder with which rates of fire as high as once in six seconds could be reached. Given that a smoothbore musket took around half a minute to reload in comparision and wasn't really useful beyond around fifty meters tops even in seasoned hands one can see the attraction and withering amounts of fire possible.

I've incidentally read that the Scots used very light "frame guns" specifically to fire grapeshot as sort-of regimental support guns.

[cegorach]

The lance may be a quite powerful shock weapon, but it is also unwieldy, outreached by most any firearm (including the pistol, at least against unarmoured targets - period cavalry armour was pretty tough) and no good after the initial impact; in comparision pistols are easy to carry around and also quite handy and effective melee weapons able to punch through all but the heaviest armour at point-blank ranges.


========> I disagree with the conclusion. The main problem with the lance is that you need a skilled lancer to use it. Pistols were inaccuarate and - in melee - virtually one-shot weapon so was the lance in its medieval and Polish-Hungarian ( i.e. hollow) version. Lance however has tremendous impact, is much more accurate and actually breaks enemy formation which is its main use. Early-modern lancers usually were deployed in first 2 ranks of a cavalry formation, sometimes more and were followed by pistol armed cavalry in the same unit and lighter cavalry charging in second, third and later waves.

Its almost the same story as with heavily armoured cuirassier - pistol armed unarmoured cavalry was cheaper so in general replaced all other cavalry formations in early XVIIIth century, but the re-appearance of the armoured cuirassier and the new lancer cavalry proves that more specialisedl cavalry is an excellent tool and still has its place.



As a side note, Napoleonic lancers - uhlans - seem to in most sources be considered as particularly effective against infantry (especially badly formed one) but nothing particularly special against other cavalry.


Completely disagree. Lancers were considered very dangerous cavalry when attacking enemy infantry OR cavalry. Again their main strenght was the impact of the charge and again usually only first two ranks of an uhlan formation used the weapon.

Finally again the main problem was how to find a skilled lancer to fight in an uhlan unit, which in some cases was very hard to achieve i.e. British cavalry.

The best uhlan units ( e.g. Polish) were pretty dangerous to any enemy cavalry - the British learnt this lesson at Albuhera and Waterloo - others already adopted lancer units to their armies. The British decided to do it soon afterwards.
Even during the ACW one unit of lancers was created, but their soldiers lacked skill to use them efficiently, besides ACW cavalry initially charged rather rarely ( the plans to create a Polish lancer unit were abandoned because of the lack of suitable candidates - in 1863 January Uprising was started in Poland which has something to do with it).
Modern, napoleonic lance was much easier to use than 200 years earlier and in hands of skilled soldier was terrible weapon. lancers were generally the only light cavalry which could easily destroy enemy cuirassiers - e.g. at Grochow in 1831 Polish uhlans crashed Russian cuirassiers and because they were willing to take prisoners they used the lances as clubs on the cuirassiers' helmets blinding them and capturing most of these heavy horsemen.
It was incredibly accurate and veteran lancers never abandoned their lances using these even after the initial charge to great effect.


Only machine gun ended the time of lancer cavalry and later the time of all cavalry as well.

Regards Cegorach

[Watchman]

It's really rather irrelevant whether a man falls from his horse due to being skewered with four or five meters of steel-tipped or from being hit by a 10+ mm ball of lead moving at near-supersonic velocities (blackpowder pistols could actually have very high muzzle velocities; the crappy ballistics of the balls just lost the energy damned fast) from practically point-blank ranges, methinks. He's hors de combat all the same, and leaves a hole in the line. Ditto if it's the horse falling down, although I've read the big animals could actually be surprisingly difficult to take down (although they leave an even bigger hole in the line when it happens).

The issue would rather seem to be that the lancer is largely bereft of his weapon after the impact - even if there's not someone stuck on it now it's not really all that well suited for close melee, as the medieval knights also right well knew - whereas the pistoleer still has his second gun loaded and ready for use, and in such close quarters he's virtually quaranteed to both hit and penetrate (unless the target is in some really hardcore armour; topnotch cuirassieur suits have been recorded to bounce even point-blank hits to the side of the helmet).

Pistols, particularly wheellocks, were certainly one-shot weapons for most purposes. They took around as long to reload as the long-arms, and rewinding the wheellock mechanism on horseback was a bit of a feat in itself. Despite their assorted problems (like mechanical unreliability, high price tag and general uselessness past around five to ten meters) they were, however, very good all-purpose cavalry weapons. When not needed they could be carried ready to use in the saddle holsters, leaving the hands free for other things such as handling a carbine or the reins or whatever. In use they could drop even an armoured man from around as far as a lance, and were still lethal in the often chaotic and crowded melee that developed when horse fought horse. When spent they were simple to holster out of the way and swap to the sword (or mace or warhammer or whatever the trooper now actually preferred to swing), or could be reversed and used as a sort of light mace.

Plus, unlike a lance, they were actually useful against pike even from the front. Cavalry simply cannot charge home into a solid unfaltering body of men regardless of what those are armed with (small groups of second-rate Late Roman infantry have been recorded holding off Sassanid cataphracts simply by holding formation and making a lot of noise until the latter went away frustrated) - the horses flat out refuse to comply and pull short, and pikemen are going to win any ensuing stabbing match by sheer number of points per unit of frontage if nothing else. But with a pistol they don't need to. Not counting the musketeers that invariably hung around the pikemen "gun" cavalry could simply shoot the pikemen up from safe distance until they were sufficiently thinned out and shaken to be breakable with a charge, something lancers had a bit of obvious difficulty trying.


I'll concede the point on the uhlans though. I've read the Russian Cossacks could achieve some pretty impressive feats with their lances, but I kind of thought they were a bit of a special case given their somewhat unusual recruiting pool and tactical employement. Other lancers rerely get even mentioned in the sources I've read, but if there were indeed problems with training them properly in most countries then this could certainly be explained simply by their small numbers.

Although beating up cuirassieurs in melee isn't all that great a boast. Heavy dragoons could manage that, as could other shock cavalry. "Napoleonic" cuirassieurs (I've read they were originally the brainchild of Frederic the Great of Prussia, actually) weren't the seemingly invulnerable tanks of the 1600s in three-quarter armour; they had no shortage of uncovered bits to stick a sword or spear into. By what I've read of it their armour was primarily to enable them to charge home through infantry musket volleys with less punishing casualties and hence with higher chance of success (since fewer casualties = less psychological damage = more likely to press home the charge), whatever edge it gave in horse fights being more a fortunate byproduct.

I'm not sure of it, but I'm increasingly beginning to think the renewed emphasis on pure "cold steel" shock among cavalry from around early 1700s onwards and the eventual complete abandoning of cavalry pistols was a direct result of pikemen being phased out by the bayonet and infantry deploying in long thin firing lines. Despite the murderous volleys those could spit they were at least actually chargeable with cavalry and given that they often broke before contact when facing a determined bayonet charge seem to have been distinctly more psychologically fragile than the old rectangular blocks had been. Heck, determined cavalry could even collapse hollow squares if things went well whereas those old pike-and-shot tercios could fight off assaults from all sides simultaneously if need be and charging them with cavalry had been an entirely losing proposition...

I'm kind of thinking it went a bit so that when the cavalry reverted to chiefly using their swords the lance, once essentially replaced by a pair of pistols, for fairly obvious reasons got a new lease of life since it certainly outreached the sword and tactical doctrine no longer resulted in the lancers having to push home the last few meters before contact through a withering pistol volley. It also kind of noticeably outreached the bayonet too which hardly hurt any.

Of course, the "Napoleonic" uhlan lance was not the same lance that the wheellock pistol rendered largely obsolete. The old lance was that European speciality, the one-handed couched lance - a weapon designed and optimized for maximum charge impact and nothing else. The new "lance" was actually nothing new; it was the good old two-handed cavalry spear that had been used all across Eurasia since not long after man learned to sit atop a horse, not perhaps quite the equal of the specialized European couched lance in raw shock power (not that it wasn't "couchable" too) but far more generally useful also in melee, and since neither the couched lance nor the pistolade were any longer the competition... Well, there were good reasons why horsemen so widely and so long tended to favour some sort of spear over a sword as their main weapon.

Plus, of course, European military thinking was devolving in some rather odd ways around the period too. What kinds of armies issue unsharpened cavalry sabres anyway...?

Only machine gun ended the time of lancer cavalry and later the time of all cavalry as well.

Uh... didn't the remaining uhlan units of most armies lose their lances already around mid-late 1800s or something...? I'm pretty sure I've read something along those lines. 'Course, Eastern Europe with its vast open spaces may be different - there's a Russian Civil War propaganda poster on my wall with a charging lancer (with a rifle slucng across his back and red star on his hat, mind you) on it, and some accounts I've read of the WW2 East Front suggest Russian cavalry harassing retreating Germans occasionally still employed armes blanches (at least one field surgeon recounts having to treat sabre wounds and so on).

[cegorach]

It's really rather irrelevant whether a man falls from his horse due to being skewered with four or five meters of steel-tipped or from being hit by a 10+ mm ball of lead moving at near-supersonic velocities (blackpowder pistols could actually have very high muzzle velocities; the crappy ballistics of the balls just lost the energy damned fast) from practically point-blank ranges, methinks. He's hors de combat all the same, and leaves a hole in the line. Ditto if it's the horse falling down, although I've read the big animals could actually be surprisingly difficult to take down (although they leave an even bigger hole in the line when it happens).


=========> Hmm I would rather say that the difference is pretty large. The battlefield experience of numerous armies says that lance is much more efficient weapon in breaking enemy formation than a pistol. Virtually every army given choice between lance and pistol ( I am not talking about the choice between expensive lancer and cheap reitar) adopted lances:
- Poles started using lances more after numerous battles against Russian reiter, reformed cavalry with their medium-light cavalry completely rearmed in 1670s, before they used 'the pistol based charge' - of course didn't abandon the pistols completely, but lance started its long reign in their army,
- Russians adopted lancer regiments to support their reiter cavalry and providing them with much more powerful charge,
- Scots abandoned reiter cavalry in favour of the lancers almost completely and achieved exceptional victories, even over the famous Ironsides e.g. Musselurgh in 1660 or even earlier at Marston Moor in 1644.

Of course there are to notable points to consider:
1. how to find suitable, skilled horsemen,
2. that it was always the choice between cavalry of similar class and cost - reiter vs. medium-light lancer usually ends with adoption of larger or smaller lancer regiments acting as first wave of a charge.




The issue would rather seem to be that the lancer is largely bereft of his weapon after the impact - even if there's not someone stuck on it now it's not really all that well suited for close melee, as the medieval knights also right well knew - whereas the pistoleer still has his second gun loaded and ready for use, and in such close quarters he's virtually quaranteed to both hit and penetrate (unless the target is in some really hardcore armour; topnotch cuirassieur suits have been recorded to bounce even point-blank hits to the side of the helmet).


==========> Lancers were armed with pistols too as secondary or rather tertiary weapon. The second pistol was usually reserved for either pursuit or self-defence in a retreat, after the initial impact if the formation is still dense and unbroken cvalrymen can do little more than either slash each other without much effect (i.e. lock themselves in combat) , retreat and try again ( hard to achieve) or wait untill support arrives to outflank the enemy somehow.
The initial impact is more important and lance gives more powerfully charging cavalry, given no option to charge lancers aren't really much weaker than any other cavalry pistol fire is rarely what can stop charging cavalry.


Pistols, particularly wheellocks, were certainly one-shot weapons for most purposes. They took around as long to reload as the long-arms, and rewinding the wheellock mechanism on horseback was a bit of a feat in itself. Despite their assorted problems (like mechanical unreliability, high price tag and general uselessness past around five to ten meters) they were, however, very good all-purpose cavalry weapons. When not needed they could be carried ready to use in the saddle holsters, leaving the hands free for other things such as handling a carbine or the reins or whatever. In use they could drop even an armoured man from around as far as a lance, and were still lethal in the often chaotic and crowded melee that developed when horse fought horse. When spent they were simple to holster out of the way and swap to the sword (or mace or warhammer or whatever the trooper now actually preferred to swing), or could be reversed and used as a sort of light mace.


=========> Lance can be discarted as well, of course if we talk about similar class of weaponry i.e. lighter lance compared to a pistol. Again the question how to receive charge and stay alive isn't much a choice between inaccurate pistol and prety useless heavy lance. Also light lance isn't much useful when facing charging enemy, but lancers aren't created for receiving a charge after all.



Plus, unlike a lance, they were actually useful against pike even from the front. Cavalry simply cannot charge home into a solid unfaltering body of men regardless of what those are armed with (small groups of second-rate Late Roman infantry have been recorded holding off Sassanid cataphracts simply by holding formation and making a lot of noise until the latter went away frustrated) - the horses flat out refuse to comply and pull short, and pikemen are going to win any ensuing stabbing match by sheer number of points per unit of frontage if nothing else. But with a pistol they don't need to. Not counting the musketeers that invariably hung around the pikemen "gun" cavalry could simply shoot the pikemen up from safe distance until they were sufficiently thinned out and shaken to be breakable with a charge, something lancers had a bit of obvious difficulty trying.


===========> It depends what lance are we talking about - Polish Winged Hussar lance was pretty sufficient in breaking pikemen formations ( I can give examples ).
But if not having to consider these exceptional horsemen there is still the question how efficient was pistol armed cavalry against pikemen.
The answer is it isn't - because we are talking about cavalry using 2 or so pistols and not employing the caracole anymore its wrong to assume that they are much more efficient than lancers.
Firstly because lancers of this period of time had pistols as well so if the lance isn't useful they still had the same choice as reiters - shot them with pistols.
Second if we assume that this cavalry has enough time to shoot and reload many times clearly there is something wrong going on - either the enemy already fled leaving most determinated rearguard for some reason without too many musketeers to speak of or its purely theoretical excercise.
Simply cavalry has something else to do than to try to shoot pikemen to bits because it takes a very long time with 1 or even 2 loaded pistols. Dragoons or surely already approaching musketeers are more suitable, besides pikemen left without musketeers are very rare if not impossible to find on a battlefield at that time.
Conclusion - reiters are no better than lancers (excluding Polish Husaria).


I'll concede the point on the uhlans though. I've read the Russian Cossacks could achieve some pretty impressive feats with their lances, but I kind of thought they were a bit of a special case given their somewhat unusual recruiting pool and tactical employement. Other lancers rerely get even mentioned in the sources I've read, but if there were indeed problems with training them properly in most countries then this could certainly be explained simply by their small numbers.


========> Actually sooner or later all ( except Sweden, Danemark and maybe other places) ALL the countries of Napoleonic Era had adopted lancer regiments of various quality of course, but in several more important battles lancers had shown how dangerous they are e.g. Albuhera, Leipzig or Waterloo it is impossible not to notice their actions.


Although beating up cuirassieurs in melee isn't all that great a boast. Heavy dragoons could manage that, as could other shock cavalry. "Napoleonic" cuirassieurs (I've read they were originally the brainchild of Frederic the Great of Prussia, actually) weren't the seemingly invulnerable tanks of the 1600s in three-quarter armour; they had no shortage of uncovered bits to stick a sword or spear into. By what I've read of it their armour was primarily to enable them to charge home through infantry musket volleys with less punishing casualties and hence with higher chance of success (since fewer casualties = less psychological damage = more likely to press home the charge), whatever edge it gave in horse fights being more a fortunate byproduct.


==========> Well... quite opposite heavy cavalry was almost lethal to light cavalry ( with the exception of few fortuante or elite regiments and the lancers) and the armour and helmet has much to say why they were so dangerous. Heavy horsemen used bigger steeds, were armoured and recruited big, strong men they were imposing sight and very powerful weapon against infantry or even better against enemy cavalry.
Victories of light cavalry over 'the heavies' are pretty rare events, lancers were able to defeat them because of several factors, first and most important was always the lance itself.





Of course, the "Napoleonic" uhlan lance was not the same lance that the wheellock pistol rendered largely obsolete. The old lance was that European speciality, the one-handed couched lance - a weapon designed and optimized for maximum charge impact and nothing else. The new "lance" was actually nothing new; it was the good old two-handed cavalry spear that had been used all across Eurasia since not long after man learned to sit atop a horse, not perhaps quite the equal of the specialized European couched lance in raw shock power (not that it wasn't "couchable" too) but far more generally useful also in melee, and since neither the couched lance nor the pistolade were any longer the competition... Well, there were good reasons why horsemen so widely and so long tended to favour some sort of spear over a sword as their main weapon.

Plus, of course, European military thinking was devolving in some rather odd ways around the period too. What kinds of armies issue unsharpened cavalry sabres anyway...?


==============> Lance wasn't odd idea, the pistol fuelled charge was abandoned rather because of the faster pace of the charging cavalry - pistols were not abandoned after all. And it was a different weapon than the old spears to the same degree as the pistol is no longer javelin thrown before a charge.



Uh... didn't the remaining uhlan units of most armies lose their lances already around mid-late 1800s or something...? I'm pretty sure I've read something along those lines. 'Course, Eastern Europe with its vast open spaces may be different - there's a Russian Civil War propaganda poster on my wall with a charging lancer (with a rifle slucng across his back and red star on his hat, mind you) on it, and some accounts I've read of the WW2 East Front suggest Russian cavalry harassing retreating Germans occasionally still employed armes blanches (at least one field surgeon recounts having to treat sabre wounds and so on).

============> Not really, lances were kept even in 1914, theu were abandoned more because of lower possibility of a battlefield real charge
- cavalry became mounted infantry more or less after all.

Last european lancers were employed during the Russian Civil War indeed, but there were fewer and fewer opportunities to use these e.g. during the last cavalry battle in Europe at Komarowo in 1920 between Poles and Russians only some odd soldiers had a lance and these still were highly valued, but after this war even the last cavalry units abandoned them - Poles sometimes used them during military exercises so these are sometimes (wrongly ) shown in texts or documentaries about the 2nd WW together with the idiotic cavalry charges the tanks legend ( or rather propaganda piece).

Suprisingly 2nd WW includes most likely more successful charges than the 1st WW or maybe just the charges were prepared better, it is hard to speculate.
In many ways these were more dangerous than earlier - soldiers after all were conscripted civilians who avoided close combat intentionally or just because battles were not fought as h-t-h melee but rather a firefight.
This way the 'barbaric' use of h-t-h weaponry by charging horsemen was able to damage enemy morale to really frightening levels.
For example on the 1st September 1939 a regiment of Polish Pomeranian brigade of cavalry charged an infantry battalion from German 2nd motorised infantry division. The charge was very successfull literally stunning the entire division which refused to move for 2 days in 'the face of increasing cavalry attacks' ( only one in reality)also for the entire 1939 Polish defensive war Polish cavalry got much psychological advantage over Germans. The rumours of 'the wild charges' halped them much during the usual kind of battles this cavalry fought - typical infantry actions with two noteworthy points higher morale and greater mobility-firepower factors.
This would be unthinkable during the 1st WW.
Also later cavlry could achieve similar success e.g. in 1942 or 1943 Italian cavalry caused much havoc during one of the last non-Soviet ( or Soviet controlled like the 1st Polish cavalry brigade charge in Pomerania in 1945) cavalry charges.

Regards Cegorach

[Watchman]

I'm leery of the idea of the ability of any shock cavalry to do Jack Manure to formed and steady pikemen with cold steel. I don't care if the Husars had five-meter lances or something; if Parthian and Sassanid cataphracts with their four-meter kontos spears couldn't really even dent the lines of sword-toting Roman infantry and Medieval knights could be seen off by commoner militias and peasant-levy shieldwalls (or often rather haphazardly armed dismounted knights) and so on and so on I don't really see how the Hussars could magically convince their horses to do something no other cavalry force ever managed to goad them into doing regardless of how hard they tried.

Now, the Husaria were pretty good at manuever and not too shabby at feigned flight, and by what little I've seen written of it this is how they demolished the Swedes at Kircholm - lured them out of formation and tore apart with a sudden counterattack. This is credible and sounds like being well within Polish military practices of the time - they did a lot of fighting with pesky steppe armies after all. The supposed ability to frontally engage formed pike-and-shot formations, however, goes directly contrary to everything I've ever read of cavalry warfare and frankly sounds like pure fantasy.

Most European heavy cavalry ended up using the caracole for the pretty specific reason that although it took bloody forever to bring results it at least actually worked against pikemen, which is something no amount of armour or lenght of lance had done. Bet your hoop they tried pretty much everything else too - they had centuries to experiment after all.

As for the pistol vs. lance thing, I would like to point out that even armies who had long maintained effective lancer traditions - the English demi-lancers had proven pretty workable against German Reiters in the Low Countries in the late 1500s for example, and a great many cuirassieurs came from the ranks of nobility who still learned to use the lance if only for tournament jousting (the Swedish Rustkammaren has Gustavus II Adolphus' jousting harness on display...) - seem to have decided the pistol was the better bet, and properly deployed it seems to have served well enough even in head-on clashes with lancers. And this happened within fairly short time after the wheellock pistol became widely available; the way shock-cavalry doctrine started becoming obsessed with cold steel around the same time the pike fell out of use among the infantry can hardly have been a coincidence either.

The second pistol was usually reserved for either pursuit or self-defence in a retreat, after the initial impact if the formation is still dense and unbroken cvalrymen can do little more than either slash each other without much effect (i.e. lock themselves in combat) , retreat and try again ( hard to achieve) or wait untill support arrives to outflank the enemy somehow.

The battlefield formations of the 1600s normally had to clash several times until either one's cohesion and morale was sufficiently worn out that they broke for good. They would advance to contact, clash until one gave ground, retreat and pursue for some distance, reform, catch their breath (and reload, and whatever), and do it all over again. Nothing new under the sun there, this was how field combat had for the most part been done since God knows when. If neither side held any particular advantage and was well disciplined this could drag out for quite a while, and might not actually even get resolved at all unless something drastic - like a supporting flank attack - interwened. In the TYW there were several instances where the battlelines simply hammered at each other for the better part of a day in a grim attrition match - commanders obviously didn't really like doing this since it kind of wasted troops and could go either way.

Lance can be discarted as well, of course if we talk about similar class of weaponry i.e. lighter lance compared to a pistol. Again the question how to receive charge and stay alive isn't much a choice between inaccurate pistol and prety useless heavy lance. Also light lance isn't much useful when facing charging enemy, but lancers aren't created for receiving a charge after all.

Did you know, medieval cavalry actually developed a practice of having the flanks of the squadron wield their swords (or whatever) already during the charge. This was because the lancers were very vulnerable for a brief while immediately after the charge when they were discarding their now-useless pointy things and getting their backup weapons out; the job of the guys with the backups already out was to defend their comrades during this time...

Incidentally, "gun" cavalry could and did receive charges stationary (usually first discharging their carbines at range and then pistols at point-blank distance). How well it worked depended on quite a few factors, but enemy cavalry trying to break into such solid fire-spewing blocks often did find themselves stumped. It should be remembered that even horse-archers have been recorded succesfully facing down heavy cavalry the same way - horses aren't any keener on running headlong into a solid immobile line of other horses than a solid immobile block of men, one imagines.

The answer is it isn't - because we are talking about cavalry using 2 or so pistols and not employing the caracole anymore its wrong to assume that they are much more efficient than lancers.
Firstly because lancers of this period of time had pistols as well so if the lance isn't useful they still had the same choice as reiters - shot them with pistols.

And how exactly are they going to go through the rather complicated procedure of reloading a wheellock while still holding onto the big, unwieldy lance I wonder...? One of the issues with the lance was after all that it pretty much always kept one hand occupied. "Pistoleer" cavalry conversely often also carried carbines for ranged work, and although I don't really know the details I know they were as a rule very thoroughly drilled in unit-level maneuvering; some kind of "mounted counter-march" not entirely unlike the caracole may well have been included in the training regime for dealing with infantry.

Second if we assume that this cavalry has enough time to shoot and reload many times clearly there is something wrong going on - either the enemy already fled leaving most determinated rearguard for some reason without too many musketeers to speak of or its purely theoretical excercise.
Simply cavalry has something else to do than to try to shoot pikemen to bits because it takes a very long time with 1 or even 2 loaded pistols. Dragoons or surely already approaching musketeers are more suitable, besides pikemen left without musketeers are very rare if not impossible to find on a battlefield at that time.

You seem to be missing the point that major field battles with up-to-date "pike and shot" armies often took a long time. In some cases several days, with the troops simply sleeping in their positions. The battlelines could be many kilometers long, and the distances maintained between successive lines of units around a hundred meters or so.

As mentioned before "pistoleer" cavalry commonly also carried carbines, but it is true enough that involving them in a shooting match with infantry formations wasn't generally speaking the most effective way to use them. But it's not like there always was much choice; you formed the line from what you had. AFAIK the full-sized infantry musket kind of tended to outgun and out-range the smaller cavalry carbine too, nevermind now the pistol which was virtually a close-combat weapon anyway (although its effective range against close-packed masses of practically unarmoured footmen was rather longer than against other cavalry in decent armour). On the other hand the cavalry could actually wear enough armour to actually have a measure of protection against incoming fire, and given the abysmal accuracy of smoothbore guns (and the generally less-than-stellar skill of their users) and the way visibility rapidly went to Hell in a handbasket due to the thick clouds of smoke black powder produces the advantage was likely somewhat relative. In any case, one imagines the cavalry could employ their maneuverability to compensate by retreating out of range to reload plus they only really had to thin out the pikemen anyway; once those were sufficiently frayed the musketeers were pretty much fair game, after all.

But without doubt commanders would prefer to use their own "shot" - foot or dragoons - for this rather than wasting valuable cavalrymen if at all possible. Or artillery. Regimental guns were often attached to cavalry squadrions too.

Well... quite opposite heavy cavalry was almost lethal to light cavalry ( with the exception of few fortuante or elite regiments and the lancers) and the armour and helmet has much to say why they were so dangerous. Heavy horsemen used bigger steeds, were armoured and recruited big, strong men they were imposing sight and very powerful weapon against infantry or even better against enemy cavalry.
Victories of light cavalry over 'the heavies' are pretty rare events, lancers were able to defeat them because of several factors, first and most important was always the lance itself.

One reads of British "heavy" dragoons and other unarmoured cavalry occasionally trouncing French cuirassieurs, for example. I've read several accounts of the cuirassieur helmet simply splitting under a strong cut, and even without that kind of lucky shot there was always the face and limbs - or the horse - to aim at. Oh, there's no doubt the Napoleonic cuirassieur was a force to be reckoned with; he was an elite heavy cavalryman after all, and his armour hardly hurt any. But hand-to-hand attacks could be aimed at the bits his harness didn't cover rather better than shots at range (which were what his gear was primarily against), and period cavalry fights were also rather more about discipline, morale and unit cohesion than actually killing the enemy soldiers - and while I can hardly claim to be a great expert on the subject what I've read of it seems to suggest cuirassieurs weren't on the whole all that more resilient in those terms than any other higher-end heavies.

Lance wasn't odd idea, the pistol fuelled charge was abandoned rather because of the faster pace of the charging cavalry - pistols were not abandoned after all.

Cavalry charge speed was normally dictated by the need to maintain unit formation and the all-important cohesion. What little I know of it doesn't seem to suggest standard Napoleonic attack paces were much different from those of 17th-century Reiters.
And IIRC not a few armies dumped cavalry pistols altogether within a few decades of the end of the Napoleonic Wars - they had a kind of obsession with armes blanches. 'Course, out in the New World cavalry started not too long later realizing a revolver (and/or shotgun) was a way better shock and melee weapon than some pesky chunk of steel...

And it was a different weapon than the old spears to the same degree as the pistol is no longer javelin thrown before a charge.

Really ? I've seen pictures of those lances. Around two or three meters long, fairly small head, two loops for both carry and to serve as a wrist-strap, right ? They're practically cut-down kontos sarmaticus - even the carrying-loop arrangement harkens back to what the ancient steppe peoples and many of their neighbours used (the lineage to the lances used by the Russian Cossacks around Napoleonic times being obviously pretty direct, for example).
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck...

Pistol. Javelin. Largely identical tactical role, different weapon (with the bonus effect of way nastier psychological impact). Bad comparision.

Not really, lances were kept even in 1914, theu were abandoned more because of lower possibility of a battlefield real charge - cavalry became mounted infantry more or less after all.

And worked way better as mounted infantry too on the average, AFAIK. I may be confusing the uhlans with the cuirassieurs here, admittedly - most of those guys lost the armour (except for ceremonial occasions) around the mid-late 1800s and became little different from regular cavalry, but now that I think about it I do seem to recall seeing the odd bunch of lancers in assorted WW1 contexts.


...
...incidentally, aren't we hijacking the thread a bit ? "Take us to Alaska or else...!"

[cegorach]

[QUOTE=Watchman]I'm leery of the idea of the ability of any shock cavalry to do Jack Manure to formed and steady pikemen with cold steel. I don't care if the Husars had five-meter lances or something; if Parthian and Sassanid cataphracts with their four-meter kontos spears couldn't really even dent the lines of sword-toting Roman infantry and Medieval knights could be seen off by commoner militias and peasant-levy shieldwalls (or often rather haphazardly armed dismounted knights) and so on and so on I don't really see how the Hussars could magically convince their horses to do something no other cavalry force ever managed to goad them into doing regardless of how hard they tried.


============> A matter of the right horse taming or training - the steeds were prepared to turn on spot, loose or make the formation denser during a charge and achieve several other quite unusual things. These beast were expensive for a reason greater than their stamina - export of the horses was banned as well for a reason.
Of course this is hard to achieve it ( read: impossible) without much training, but it was happening.




Now, the Husaria were pretty good at manuever and not too shabby at feigned flight, and by what little I've seen written of it this is how they demolished the Swedes at Kircholm - lured them out of formation and tore apart with a sudden counterattack. This is credible and sounds like being well within Polish military practices of the time - they did a lot of fighting with pesky steppe armies after all. The supposed ability to frontally engage formed pike-and-shot formations, however, goes directly contrary to everything I've ever read of cavalry warfare and frankly sounds like pure fantasy.

======> Hmm NOT out of formation - it lored the first line of the advancing Swedes and generally convinced Charles IX to move the entire army.
In the senter when the most spectacular act of the battle happened 300 Hussars faced over 3000 infantry so no less than 1000 pikemen and they did break through.
Other examples of the cavalry engaging the pikemen FRONTALLY :
Lubieszow 1577 ( against German Landsknechts), Mitau 1622 ( against Swedes), Polonka and later Basia both in 1660 and both against the Russians, Smolensk 1633 against Russian foreign regiments and (I am not entirely sure)
probably Klushino 1610 against western mercenaries under Swedish command.

The charges did happen, all from the front, all successfull. Husaria was the only cavalry I know which indeed could do it, was trained to do this and finally did it in reality.

The main factor was slightly longer lance than the pike ( after we exclude the parts of both weapons lost behingd the horse's head and between pikemen's legs.





As for the pistol vs. lance thing, I would like to point out that even armies who had long maintained effective lancer traditions - the English demi-lancers had proven pretty workable against German Reiters in the Low Countries in the late 1500s for example, and a great many cuirassieurs came from the ranks of nobility who still learned to use the lance if only for tournament jousting (the Swedish Rustkammaren has Gustavus II Adolphus' jousting harness on display...) - seem to have decided the pistol was the better bet, and properly deployed it seems to have served well enough even in head-on clashes with lancers. And this happened within fairly short time after the wheellock pistol became widely available; the way shock-cavalry doctrine started becoming obsessed with cold steel around the same time the pike fell out of use among the infantry can hardly have been a coincidence either.
The battlefield formations of the 1600s normally had to clash several times until either one's cohesion and morale was sufficiently worn out that they broke for good. They would advance to contact, clash until one gave ground, retreat and pursue for some distance, reform, catch their breath (and reload, and whatever), and do it all over again. Nothing new under the sun there, this was how field combat had for the most part been done since God knows when. If neither side held any particular advantage and was well disciplined this could drag out for quite a while, and might not actually even get resolved at all unless something drastic - like a supporting flank attack - interwened. In the TYW there were several instances where the battlelines simply hammered at each other for the better part of a day in a grim attrition match - commanders obviously didn't really like doing this since it kind of wasted troops and could go either way.

Did you know, medieval cavalry actually developed a practice of having the flanks of the squadron wield their swords (or whatever) already during the charge. This was because the lancers were very vulnerable for a brief while immediately after the charge when they were discarding their now-useless pointy things and getting their backup weapons out; the job of the guys with the backups already out was to defend their comrades during this time...


=======> The fact that the lances were abandoned wasn't only due to the weakness you describe - trained lancer was harder to get than trained cuirassier it was all the matter of cost, besides when the process was started it required much effort to design new lancer tactics, it generally became historical tactic deemed to be archaic, partly because it was to some degree, but unfortunatelly with most of cavlry units reverting to caracole so not facing fully agressive, shock tactics of eastern armies there was no need for lancers any more.
After all it took much time (almot 100 years) before the Napoleonic lancer was accepted.



Incidentally, "gun" cavalry could and did receive charges stationary (usually first discharging their carbines at range and then pistols at point-blank distance). How well it worked depended on quite a few factors, but enemy cavalry trying to break into such solid fire-spewing blocks often did find themselves stumped. It should be remembered that even horse-archers have been recorded succesfully facing down heavy cavalry the same way - horses aren't any keener on running headlong into a solid immobile line of other horses than a solid immobile block of men, one imagines.


==========> Receiving the charge by discharging firearms only... It could work against less stubborn enemy - Poles for example used this against the Tatars at very close range and followed it with a charge of a neighbouring unit. It is rather a matter of morale and cavalry classess facing each other.
Stopping enemy highly motivated cavalry of similar class i.e. heavy horse charging heavies or light charging lights by firepower ( cavalry pistol or carbine firepower) would be quite unusual.


And how exactly are they going to go through the rather complicated procedure of reloading a wheellock while still holding onto the big, unwieldy lance I wonder...? One of the issues with the lance was after all that it pretty much always kept one hand occupied. "Pistoleer" cavalry conversely often also carried carbines for ranged work, and although I don't really know the details I know they were as a rule very thoroughly drilled in unit-level maneuvering; some kind of "mounted counter-march" not entirely unlike the caracole may well have been included in the training regime for dealing with infantry.


============> Well lancer units DIDN'T consist of lancers alone - they were to give the power to the charge - there were soldiers in the same unit to exploit the breakthrough and they were always free to use their firearms.


You seem to be missing the point that major field battles with up-to-date "pike and shot" armies often took a long time. In some cases several days, with the troops simply sleeping in their positions. The battlelines could be many kilometers long, and the distances maintained between successive lines of units around a hundred meters or so.


=========> Yes I do. It is entirely different thing, even artillery can be reloaded many times during such clashes.

As mentioned before "pistoleer" cavalry commonly also carried carbines, but it is true enough that involving them in a shooting match with infantry formations wasn't generally speaking the most effective way to use them. But it's not like there always was much choice; you formed the line from what you had. AFAIK the full-sized infantry musket kind of tended to outgun and out-range the smaller cavalry carbine too, nevermind now the pistol which was virtually a close-combat weapon anyway (although its effective range against close-packed masses of practically unarmoured footmen was rather longer than against other cavalry in decent armour). On the other hand the cavalry could actually wear enough armour to actually have a measure of protection against incoming fire, and given the abysmal accuracy of smoothbore guns (and the generally less-than-stellar skill of their users) and the way visibility rapidly went to Hell in a handbasket due to the thick clouds of smoke black powder produces the advantage was likely somewhat relative. In any case, one imagines the cavalry could employ their maneuverability to compensate by retreating out of range to reload plus they only really had to thin out the pikemen anyway; once those were sufficiently frayed the musketeers were pretty much fair game, after all.

==========> very risky task, but it is unlikely to find a situation like this, cavlry had different job to do after all. I would rather expect light skirmishers to employ this tactic than the line cavalry which has something else to do after all.



One reads of British "heavy" dragoons and other unarmoured cavalry occasionally trouncing French cuirassieurs, for example. I've read several accounts of the cuirassieur helmet simply splitting under a strong cut, and even without that kind of lucky shot there was always the face and limbs - or the horse - to aim at. Oh, there's no doubt the Napoleonic cuirassieur was a force to be reckoned with; he was an elite heavy cavalryman after all, and his armour hardly hurt any. But hand-to-hand attacks could be aimed at the bits his harness didn't cover rather better than shots at range (which were what his gear was primarily against), and period cavalry fights were also rather more about discipline, morale and unit cohesion than actually killing the enemy soldiers - and while I can hardly claim to be a great expert on the subject what I've read of it seems to suggest cuirassieurs weren't on the whole all that more resilient in those terms than any other higher-end heavies.


==========> There are examples to contradict this statement Empress Carabiniers for example didn't use backplate armour and suffered heavy losses from hands of Austrian uhlans. Similar thing happened to Austrian cuirassiers who had no backplates as well - this time from French Cuirassiers.

British heavy draggons - true they were not armoured, but almost always they faced French dragoons - cuirassiers were met ( I am not 100% sure) only at Waterloo and the single example is hardly a proof.
I agree that unit cohesion and morale was more important than armour, but armour was very useful and decided several times. Besides I have read descriptions whisch clearly show how devastatin were the cuirassiers to enemy light cavalry ( at Ligny for example they simply smashed Prussian hussars). It was generally hard to convince light horsemen to attack enemy heavies and only some commanders actually were able to throw them away this way. Again lancers were judged to be able to defeat enemy heavies even if these after all were in higher class of cavalry.



Cavalry charge speed was normally dictated by the need to maintain unit formation and the all-important cohesion. What little I know of it doesn't seem to suggest standard Napoleonic attack paces were much different from those of 17th-century Reiters.
And IIRC not a few armies dumped cavalry pistols altogether within a few decades of the end of the Napoleonic Wars - they had a kind of obsession with armes blanches. 'Course, out in the New World cavalry started not too long later realizing a revolver (and/or shotgun) was a way better shock and melee weapon than some pesky chunk of steel...


===========> If I am correct the French employed the 'wild charge' at full gallop which was later adopted in British army for example. The British stopped shooting before charging after some time - it was generally more successfull than the later French line cavalry tactic to shoot and charge after the salvo, I am sure it weakened the impact of the cavalry charge either slowing it down or in a different way.

Revolver doesn't exclude a charge - besides in the beginning the greatest problem was to teach soldiers how to fight on horseback without cutting the horses' ears - fighting in formation was another step it took some time before it was achieved.


Really ? I've seen pictures of those lances. Around two or three meters long, fairly small head, two loops for both carry and to serve as a wrist-strap, right ? They're practically cut-down kontos sarmaticus - even the carrying-loop arrangement harkens back to what the ancient steppe peoples and many of their neighbours used (the lineage to the lances used by the Russian Cossacks around Napoleonic times being obviously pretty direct, for example).
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck...

Pistol. Javelin. Largely identical tactical role, different weapon (with the bonus effect of way nastier psychological impact). Bad comparision.


=======> Rather exaggerated intentionally BTW. It is a little unfair to draw such a straight line between the kontos and the lance. The use of the weapon and some technical details for sure make it a different weapon.

And worked way better as mounted infantry too on the average, AFAIK. I may be confusing the uhlans with the cuirassieurs here, admittedly - most of those guys lost the armour (except for ceremonial occasions) around the mid-late 1800s and became little different from regular cavalry, but now that I think about it I do seem to recall seeing the odd bunch of lancers in assorted WW1 contexts.


===========> A little later - in 1871 armoured cuirassier cavalry was still in use. They almost all turned into lancers later, that is true, but the general tendency was to abandon all cavalry in the western front.
I agree that the mounted infantry was a better and pretty obvious new tactic for the cavalry - it worked very well in 1939 for example.
BTW The suprising thing is that one of the last armies to use HORSEMEN
on a battlefield was US army - I have read they had these soldiers on the Phillippines in 1941/42... I wonder maybe the legend about cavalry charging tanks isn't such a lie after all... and considering the quality of the Japanese tanks they might succeed in cutting those with sabres...



Off topic. Untill someone goes back to the main idea we can discuss something else. After all I recalled Scottish Lancers in my earlier post for a reason.

[macsen rufus]

Well, speaking as a hypothetical Alaskan, I'm finding the discussion very interesting

[Watchman]

============> A matter of the right horse taming or training - the steeds were prepared to turn on spot, loose or make the formation denser during a charge and achieve several other quite unusual things. These beast were expensive for a reason greater than their stamina - export of the horses was banned as well for a reason.
Of course this is hard to achieve it ( read: impossible) without much training, but it was happening.

No offense but I'm calling bollocks on that. In one form or another shock cavalry existed for well over two thousand years, and during all that time what invariably frustrated the heaviest horsemen was a solid block of men refusing to falter or budge which the horses flat out refused to go too near. It's pretty much an iron rule of military history that so long as their nerve and formation holds heavy infantry can always at the very least check and usually see off heavy cavalry.

Are you telling me to believe the Early Modern Poles, alone in history, found some special way to train the horses to overcome just about their single most fundamental instinctive limitation as war mounts, that of (for what was originally a plains runner perfectly sensible) worrying about footing and obstacles and simply refusing to run into those ?

No way José. If there really was a way to do that, it'd have been both found and widely adopted a long long time ago given how earnestly something of the sort was sought and military history would read quite differently indeed (for starters the Parthians and Sassanids would've splattered Roman infantry; as it went if their horse-archers couldn't thin out the ranks for one reason or another the cataphracts proved time and again almost impotent, which is also why they later started carrying bows).

======> Hmm NOT out of formation - it lored the first line of the advancing Swedes and generally convinced Charles IX to move the entire army.
In the senter when the most spectacular act of the battle happened 300 Hussars faced over 3000 infantry so no less than 1000 pikemen and they did break through.
Other examples of the cavalry engaging the pikemen FRONTALLY :
Lubieszow 1577 ( against German Landsknechts), Mitau 1622 ( against Swedes), Polonka and later Basia both in 1660 and both against the Russians, Smolensk 1633 against Russian foreign regiments and (I am not entirely sure)
probably Klushino 1610 against western mercenaries under Swedish command.

The charges did happen, all from the front, all successfull. Husaria was the only cavalry I know which indeed could do it, was trained to do this and finally did it in reality.

The main factor was slightly longer lance than the pike ( after we exclude the parts of both weapons lost behingd the horse's head and between pikemen's legs.

The lenght of weapon doesn't really matter; the problem is the hardwired instincts of the horse. The kontos outreached the gladius, spatha and any infantry spear short of a pike quite handsomely, and cataphracts still couldn't charge home for effect against steady heavy infantry for their entire history beginning at the murk of the steppes centuries BC and still seen in places around 1600 AD (the Japanese cavalry yari was essentially the same thing as the continental kontos). The Medieval cavalry lance similarly outreached most everything short of a pike it went up against; yet mounted knights, the pinnacle of specialized shock cavalry in history, tended to break against solid infantry like waves on rocks. And so on and so on.

There are about three circumstances where shock cavalry can succesfully engage heavy infantry for full effect. One is that the infantry aren't properly formed up to present a solid front and thus also can't prop up each other's morale in the face of the scary incoming horsemen. Another is that they've simply sustained too heavy casualties to form a proper line and/or hold it steady. Third is that quite simply their resolve fails and they falter enough for the formation to lose its solidity. If one or those conditions are met the cavalry can quite well obliterate the entire formation beyond any chance of recovery and basically eat them alive, and I strongly suspect this is what the Hussars had going for them. The use of superior tactical maneuverability to disjoint the enemy line and create an opening sounds like one likely candidate, and was indeed since time immemorial a typical theme of "eastern" cavalry tradition the Poles also drew on. Another is that by all accounts the Hussars were an impressive and imposing sight by any standards; aside from the usual aristocratic and warrior peacockishness this may also have had practical applicability in the field of psychological warfare (recall that the Napoleonic shako and other showy military acoutrements also had the same purpose), and it is easy to conceive similar reasons to lie behind the Hussars' apparently unrestrained charge at full gallop and distinctive war-cry I've seen several sources mention.

In short, it seems perfectly conceivable the Hussars could quite simply just plain scare enemy formations into faltering enough to become vulnerable, especially if those had not previously encountered this kind of blood-curdling onslaught. In any case it seems a far more credible explanation than the incredulous claim they could actually manage the Holy Grail of heavy cavalry warfare and somehow goad their mounts into pressing home against formed infantry, keeping in mind that a cavalry charge was particularly against infantry psychological first and physical a distant second.

=======> The fact that the lances were abandoned wasn't only due to the weakness you describe - trained lancer was harder to get than trained cuirassier it was all the matter of cost, besides when the process was started it required much effort to design new lancer tactics, it generally became historical tactic deemed to be archaic, partly because it was to some degree, but unfortunatelly with most of cavlry units reverting to caracole so not facing fully agressive, shock tactics of eastern armies there was no need for lancers any more.
After all it took much time (almot 100 years) before the Napoleonic lancer was accepted.

As I keep pointing out pistols were at first pretty specifically employed against lancers, as for example Henry IV quite succesfully did in the French religious wars. The Dutch originally developed the early form of caracole to counter lancers - although I've read this relied chiefly on the lightly equipped pistoleers being more mobile than the heavy lancers and thus able to evade charges, not unlike steppe horse-archers often did. Lighter English demi-lancers apparently did pretty well against the heavy German Reiters in Spanish employ in the Low Countries though.

The point is that the two techniques butted heads for quite a while in the late 1500s, and the pistol by and large won put.

==========> Receiving the charge by discharging firearms only... It could work against less stubborn enemy - Poles for example used this against the Tatars at very close range and followed it with a charge of a neighbouring unit. It is rather a matter of morale and cavalry classess facing each other.
Stopping enemy highly motivated cavalry of similar class i.e. heavy horse charging heavies or light charging lights by firepower ( cavalry pistol or carbine firepower) would be quite unusual.

Anything but. Even notably offensive cavalry like the Swedes used it quite often to good effect, and in several English Civil War battles aggressive Royalist cavalry battered fruitlessly against stationary Parlament horse who coldly discharged their firearms in succession to their faces and finally drew swords if they could close in.

=========> Yes I do. It is entirely different thing, even artillery can be reloaded many times during such clashes.

This wasn't 1400s artillery, you know. A properly drilled gun crew could reload and fire their piece markedly faster than even a veteran musketeer his gun.

==========> very risky task, but it is unlikely to find a situation like this, cavlry had different job to do after all. I would rather expect light skirmishers to employ this tactic than the line cavalry which has something else to do after all.

You formed the battleline from the troops you had. If the enemy's infantry centre outreached yours, what were you going to do - leave a hole ? R-i-i-i-ght.
You put cavalry there and hoped for the best, else the foe cheerfully marched the whole regiment into the gap, threw in a few cavalry squadrons for good measure, and rolled up your infantry from the side.

==========> There are examples to contradict this statement Empress Carabiniers for example didn't use backplate armour and suffered heavy losses from hands of Austrian uhlans. Similar thing happened to Austrian cuirassiers who had no backplates as well - this time from French Cuirassiers.

British heavy draggons - true they were not armoured, but almost always they faced French dragoons - cuirassiers were met ( I am not 100% sure) only at Waterloo and the single example is hardly a proof.
I agree that unit cohesion and morale was more important than armour, but armour was very useful and decided several times. Besides I have read descriptions whisch clearly show how devastatin were the cuirassiers to enemy light cavalry ( at Ligny for example they simply smashed Prussian hussars). It was generally hard to convince light horsemen to attack enemy heavies and only some commanders actually were able to throw them away this way. Again lancers were judged to be able to defeat enemy heavies even if these after all were in higher class of cavalry.

The examples I've read seemed to include occasions from the Spanish campaign, IIRC...

Hussars were primarily scouts, flankers and pursuit troops. Pitting them against heavy cavalry in general and cuirassieurs in particular seems like something any commander worth the title would only do in desperate circumstances where he simply doesn't have anything more appropriate available.

[Watchman]

============> A matter of the right horse taming or training - the steeds were prepared to turn on spot, loose or make the formation denser during a charge and achieve several other quite unusual things. These beast were expensive for a reason greater than their stamina - export of the horses was banned as well for a reason.

It should be noted this sort of "footwork" and maneuver training had always been what warhorses were taught, and besides the need for above-average quality a major consituent in their enormous price. Here is a nice article about the training of medieval warhorses. And as they were taking drill, unit cohesion and maneuverability to entirely new levels the horses of Early Modern gun-toting cavalry were no doubt put through at the very least equivalent regime.

Now, the Poles did have a major advantage in that their warhorse stock was some of the best around, and its military significance was such that export sales were banned (although how well this could actually be enforced is entirely another thing, especially given the almost nonexistent and impotent central authority of the Polish crown). But this doesn't mean there was anything special or unusual in their training.

===========> If I am correct the French employed the 'wild charge' at full gallop which was later adopted in British army for example.

I doubt it. Especially in horse against horse clashes unit cohesion was of supreme importance, and although I don't know if the dense knee-behind-knee attack formation was still in use at the period without doubt every effort would have been made to maintain unit coordination, cohesion and matched speed of advance so that the squadron hit home as a single compact mass.

The British stopped shooting before charging after some time - it was generally more successfull than the later French line cavalry tactic to shoot and charge after the salvo, I am sure it weakened the impact of the cavalry charge either slowing it down or in a different way.

I thought the pistol was already very much a secondary weapon of opportunity at the time, with charges being conducted with cold arms ? AFAIK if the assault cavalry were "shot in" this was done by supporting dragoons or specialists such as the elite French carabineers...

Revolver doesn't exclude a charge - besides in the beginning the greatest problem was to teach soldiers how to fight on horseback without cutting the horses' ears - fighting in formation was another step it took some time before it was achieved.

'Course, out in the New World cavalry started not too long later realizing a revolver (and/or shotgun) was a way better shock and melee weapon than some pesky chunk of steel...

Emphasis added. Nobody ever said revolver-wielding cavalry didn't charge. They just noticed said handgun was a rather better weapon for it than the sabre, which was kind of sucky quality anyway. And why not - it outreaches everything short of another gun, drops people at least as reliably than the crappy sabre, is way easier to use and more convenient to carry around. Since even early revolvers were both rifled and repeaters they also lost just about all the problems the old muzzle-loader cavalry pistols had suffered from too.

Ears with bits missing were pretty much the mark of a warhorse already in the Early Modern period and probably earlier too.

Early Modern and later cavalry were next to worthless as battlefield units if their unit drill sucked, so for obvious reasons it was what training primarily focused on. Indeed, the real revolution in Early Modern warfare was pretty much that the actual skill at arms of the trooper became very secondary to his (and his horse's) ability to function as a part of the unit, and while any proper Antique or Medieval cavalry warrior would no doubt have soundly trounced his 1600s onwards colleague in single combat (and likely wondered how such a twerp could be considered a warrior in the first place) it is worth noting that the new system was what ultimately prevailed on the battlefield.

=======> Rather exaggerated intentionally BTW. It is a little unfair to draw such a straight line between the kontos and the lance. The use of the weapon and some technical details for sure make it a different weapon.

It's got a wooden shaft up to around three meters long.
The shaft is typically festooned with two loops for transport and wrist-strap purposes.
It is topped with a steel spearhead.
It is used both for a "couched" charge and two-handed "lance fencing" on horseback.

I think I may be excused if the essential differences from the two-handed cavalry spears of old don't strike me as glaringly obvious.

===========> A little later - in 1871 armoured cuirassier cavalry was still in use. They almost all turned into lancers later, that is true, but the general tendency was to abandon all cavalry in the western front.
I agree that the mounted infantry was a better and pretty obvious new tactic for the cavalry - it worked very well in 1939 for example.
BTW The suprising thing is that one of the last armies to use HORSEMEN
on a battlefield was US army - I have read they had these soldiers on the Phillippines in 1941/42... I wonder maybe the legend about cavalry charging tanks isn't such a lie after all... and considering the quality of the Japanese tanks they might succeed in cutting those with sabres...

Both the French and the Prussians still had cuirassieurs in the 1870-71 war, I know that much, and apparently their armour still offered a measure of protection from bullets. Not long after that all but very few cuirassieur units became essentially ceremonial parade units and their armour, if not completely abandoned, purely decorative toys of brass and suchlike. The uhlans were entirely separate cavalry type, although I understand in not a few countries they also lost their lances around the time and became little different from other cavalry save for the name and assorted items of uniform.
Some countries still kept the lance, though.

I also know both the Germans and Soviets used cavalry on the East Front to good effect (as their ability to cover a lot of ground and independence from gasoline supplies was obviously useful on the vast open steppe) for the whole war, and most other armies still retained a cavalry arm even if those usually didn't make themselves terribly useful.

Off topic. Untill someone goes back to the main idea we can discuss something else. After all I recalled Scottish Lancers in my earlier post for a reason.

Fair enough. I seem to recall reading somewhere the Scottish lancers were more scouts, harassers and raiders in the old Border Riever tradition though, even if they sometimes made themselves valuable on the battlefield (as the Rievers had also done every now and then).

[cegorach]

No offense but I'm calling bollocks on that. In one form or another shock cavalry existed for well over two thousand years, and during all that time what invariably frustrated the heaviest horsemen was a solid block of men refusing to falter or budge which the horses flat out refused to go too near. It's pretty much an iron rule of military history that so long as their nerve and formation holds heavy infantry can always at the very least check and usually see off heavy cavalry.

Are you telling me to believe the Early Modern Poles, alone in history, found some special way to train the horses to overcome just about their single most fundamental instinctive limitation as war mounts, that of (for what was originally a plains runner perfectly sensible) worrying about footing and obstacles and simply refusing to run into those ?

No way José. If there really was a way to do that, it'd have been both found and widely adopted a long long time ago given how earnestly something of the sort was sought and military history would read quite differently indeed (for starters the Parthians and Sassanids would've splattered Roman infantry; as it went if their horse-archers couldn't thin out the ranks for one reason or another the cataphracts proved time and again almost impotent, which is also why they later started carrying bows).


=========> Hmm so you do assume that they charged to impale themselves on enemy pikes ?

Training of Polish warhorses was pretty unique with the final tests requiring extreme agility - gallop, turn on the spot in a circle of rougly 3 m diameter earlier alone and later in a formation.

So yes I claim the cavalry DID charge enemy in deployed dense formation lowering their lances to throw the first rank of the enemy like broken dolls with immediate 'halt' if the enemy formation wasn't sufficiently 'prepared' to carry on the charge.

There is NOT A SINGLE ONE example of Husaria charge stopped by pikemen. NOT ONE. It either was stopped before it reached the pikemen or the pikemen 'disappeared'.





The lenght of weapon doesn't really matter; the problem is the hardwired instincts of the horse. The kontos outreached the gladius, spatha and any infantry spear short of a pike quite handsomely, and cataphracts still couldn't charge home for effect against steady heavy infantry for their entire history beginning at the murk of the steppes centuries BC and still seen in places around 1600 AD (the Japanese cavalry yari was essentially the same thing as the continental kontos). The Medieval cavalry lance similarly outreached most everything short of a pike it went up against; yet mounted knights, the pinnacle of specialized shock cavalry in history, tended to break against solid infantry like waves on rocks. And so on and so on.

There are about three circumstances where shock cavalry can succesfully engage heavy infantry for full effect. One is that the infantry aren't properly formed up to present a solid front and thus also can't prop up each other's morale in the face of the scary incoming horsemen. Another is that they've simply sustained too heavy casualties to form a proper line and/or hold it steady. Third is that quite simply their resolve fails and they falter enough for the formation to lose its solidity. If one or those conditions are met the cavalry can quite well obliterate the entire formation beyond any chance of recovery and basically eat them alive, and I strongly suspect this is what the Hussars had going for them. The use of superior tactical maneuverability to disjoint the enemy line and create an opening sounds like one likely candidate, and was indeed since time immemorial a typical theme of "eastern" cavalry tradition the Poles also drew on. Another is that by all accounts the Hussars were an impressive and imposing sight by any standards; aside from the usual aristocratic and warrior peacockishness this may also have had practical applicability in the field of psychological warfare (recall that the Napoleonic shako and other showy military acoutrements also had the same purpose), and it is easy to conceive similar reasons to lie behind the Hussars' apparently unrestrained charge at full gallop and distinctive war-cry I've seen several sources mention.

In short, it seems perfectly conceivable the Hussars could quite simply just plain scare enemy formations into faltering enough to become vulnerable, especially if those had not previously encountered this kind of blood-curdling onslaught. In any case it seems a far more credible explanation than the incredulous claim they could actually manage the Holy Grail of heavy cavalry warfare and somehow goad their mounts into pressing home against formed infantry, keeping in mind that a cavalry charge was particularly against infantry psychological first and physical a distant second.


============> Well soldiers who NEVER have heard as well as those who met them several times experienced the same problem. Pikemen did not a single time stopped Husaria.
They were not a suicide unit so didn't charge is a stupid way i.e. 'come on boys we will crush them under our steeds' belllies !' it was rather charge - retreat - second line charges - retreats - third line charges - retreats - first line charges again - etc. Enemy had to be very strong willed.

I do agree that the psychological effect was the most important but it was achieved in certain way with the very REAL possibility to be the next target of the lances.

On the battlefield it was really frightening - first the noise, second the warcry, next the imposing sight, later 'they are coming !' and suddenly the first rank(-s) are thrown lifeless with the terrible sound of the breaking hollow lances - if it wasn't enough OK the Hussars do not impale themselves but simply turn and retreat. Now imagine receiving this kind of charge every 3-5 minutes !

I am aware how important is the dense infantry formation and how resilent it was, but the whole trick was that they were still very agile cavalry so didn't press home, didn't try to fight against the impossible odds, but EXPLOITED the opportunity if this appeared and they were adept at making it highly probable with the final super-depressing psychological effect which was the caused by the sudden death of numerous soldiers of the first rank or ranks.
At Klushino Husaria had to charge for 8-10 times to finally break enemy formations and cause the Russian-Swedish army to give up and surrender in massess.


Conclusion i.e. what do I actually mean.

I agree the psychological impact was the most important part and that the dense infantry formations were able to stop Husaria (in theory), but the way the charge of this cavalry was performed was so psychologically destructive that NONE was able to resist it in REALITY.
Either stop them before they reach you or try to retreat behind city walls ( Moscow 1612), use cover like fences ( Klushino 1610), disciplined and powerful firepower at close range( Warka 1656), massess of soldiers 10 times larger than them ( Szklow 1654) or use suprise assault ( Walhoff 1625, Zborow 1649, Dirschau 1627, Gorzno 1629) or simply attack them dismounted with several times larger forces and in no condition to resist ( Korsun 1648, Batoh 1652, Szepielewicze 1654, Zolte Wody 1648, Cecora 1620).
The best thing is to combine several factors at once ( Mewe 1626).

In most of those battles either Husaria was given very hard time before victory, draw or was overwhelmed, but the fact remains pikemen were not able to resist.
Even extremely persistent foes were defeated sooner or later like at Szklow where 2500 Lithuanian soldiers ( 500 Hussars) faced 20 000 Russian cavalry, half of those reformed reiters.





As I keep pointing out pistols were at first pretty specifically employed against lancers, as for example Henry IV quite succesfully did in the French religious wars.

=====> Yes, the Millers, but I think it was more a matter of better discipline and higher morale + possibly better tactic of the Hugenot cavalry - Gendarmes were after all in worse condition as a unit than in the early XVIth century.



Lighter English demi-lancers apparently did pretty well against the heavy German Reiters in Spanish employ in the Low Countries though.

=======> Perhaps because they were used in a better way than the Gandarmes.

The point is that the two techniques butted heads for quite a while in the late 1500s, and the pistol by and large won put.

Anything but. Even notably offensive cavalry like the Swedes used it quite often to good effect, and in several English Civil War battles aggressive Royalist cavalry battered fruitlessly against stationary Parlament horse who coldly discharged their firearms in succession to their faces and finally drew swords if they could close in.

========> hmm. Can you give the examples. I am curious, because in the books I have it is written that the Parliamentarian horse tried to use this tactic with rather bad consequences - also in both largest clashes - Marston Moor and at Naseby the Royalists broke through the Parliamentarian cavalry, chased them and of course... didn't return...


And how exactly are they going to go through the rather complicated procedure of reloading a wheellock while still holding onto the big, unwieldy lance I wonder...? One of the issues with the lance was after all that it pretty much always kept one hand occupied. "Pistoleer" cavalry conversely often also carried carbines for ranged work, and although I don't really know the details I know they were as a rule very thoroughly drilled in unit-level maneuvering; some kind of "mounted counter-march" not entirely unlike the caracole may well have been included in the training regime for dealing with infantry.


==============> I am sure I posted before that only a part of them used lances - there were literally no lancer-only formations inearly-modern and Napoleonic period or later.
The third rank and later usually used carbines just like the pistolier cavalry.



This wasn't 1400s artillery, you know. A properly drilled gun crew could reload and fire their piece markedly faster than even a veteran musketeer his gun.


=======> Whatever. You got the idea anyway.

You formed the battleline from the troops you had. If the enemy's infantry centre outreached yours, what were you going to do - leave a hole ? R-i-i-i-ght.
You put cavalry there and hoped for the best, else the foe cheerfully marched the whole regiment into the gap, threw in a few cavalry squadrons for good measure, and rolled up your infantry from the side.

=========> Extreme measures. It is not this cavalry job to keep enemy pikemen occupied after all, if there is no other possibility all right, but it is something the cavalry is not designed to do.
Of course there are... questionable situations like at Lutzen when Piccolomini's cuirassiers ( or rather heavily armoured arquebusiers) faced Swedish commanded musketeers standing in front of them and presenting them with the opportunity for target practice.
I still cannot understand why Wallenstein ordered them to receive the fussilade without any action...

The examples I've read seemed to include occasions from the Spanish campaign, IIRC...

========> Cuirassiers in this campaign... I am not expert on the penninsular war, but I am quite sure there were no cuirassiers sent there. Maybe some soldiers did mistake the French dragoons with them. Have no idea.
Maybe I will ask Lord Ux...


Hussars were primarily scouts, flankers and pursuit troops. Pitting them against heavy cavalry in general and cuirassieurs in particular seems like something any commander worth the title would only do in desperate circumstances where he simply doesn't have anything more appropriate available.

========> I am glad you agree.

Regards Cegorach

[econ21]

Fascinating discussion, although Cegorach, it would be helpful if you could review your use of the quote function - a couple of posts end up quoting almost everything, masking the detailed responses you make.

On Napoleonic British cavalry vs French cuirassiers, I think you are right they only met at Waterloo. Napoleon regarded Spain as the graveyard of cavalry and so generally sent only lights plus some dragoons there. Some wargames of Waterloo - e.g. the Breakaway games representation using Sid Meier's Gettysburg engine - rate the cuirassiers as rather low quality (e.g. 5/10) compared to highly rated British cavalry (7/10+, including the light cavalry) to try to replicate this relative performance.

I have read that since British cavalry (especially heavy cavalry) was rather few in number, they were often well mounted and the heavy vs light distinction meant less than in continental armies. It's one of the disagreements I had with the NTW team, their rating Napoleonic British cavalry as poor when my reading (admittedly of mainly English language sources) shows that they often delivered devastating charges - e.g. smashing D'Erlons' corps at Waterloo. The poor opinion of British cavalry by people such as Wellington, IMO, referred more to problems of control e.g. reforming after the charge (again, as typified by the charge the Union brigade at Waterloo).

Also, I recall seeing a diagram of the frequency of wounds in Napoleonic cavalry vs cavalry encounters and believe Watchman is right that most injuries from swords were on the arms and the head, so while a cuirass would presumably help, it might not help that much. It probably would be particularly useful against a lance though, for which presumably the torso would be a tempting target.

[SwordsMaster]

Also, I recall seeing a diagram of the frequency of wounds in Napoleonic cavalry vs cavalry encounters and believe Watchman is right that most injuries from swords were on the arms and the head, so while a cuirass would presumably help, it might not help that much. It probably would be particularly useful against a lance though, for which presumably the torso would be a tempting target.

Maybe most wounds were on the arms and head because the cuirasse helped, and the hits on the cuirasse didn't wound...

[cegorach]

[QUOTE=econ21

I have read that since British cavalry (especially heavy cavalry) was rather few in number, they were often well mounted and the heavy vs light distinction meant less than in continental armies. It's one of the disagreements I had with the NTW team, their rating Napoleonic British cavalry as poor when my reading (admittedly of mainly English language sources) shows that they often [B]delivered devastating charges[/B] - e.g. smashing D'Erlons' corps at Waterloo. The poor opinion of British cavalry by people such as Wellington, IMO, referred more to problems of control e.g. reforming after the charge (again, as typified by the charge the Union brigade at Waterloo).



Fine with quotes, I will try.

About the Brits. The problem is that they were skilled hosemen individually or in small formations, but British cavalry wasn't able to fulfill the battlefield role of other major powers' cavalry, they were simply uncomparable to the French cavalry 'rams' devastating entire armies.

The British had great squadrons, even regiments, but anything bigger seems to be not only hard to controll, but the British commanders ( including Wellington) had problems in using them well enough.
Besides it is hard to truly judge their combat power because the first battle where large masses of British cavalry was used was Waterloo...
If wewill use that as the example the British cavalry was really terrible...

BTW They had pretty nice encounter with Polish Vistula lancers at Albuhera where British cavalry was completely outclassed.



Wounds - cuirass provided much protection and helped against light cavalry which simply wasn't supposed to face heavy cavalry the fact that most woulds were caused to those body parts changed little on the battlefield because only desperate commanders would use light cavalry to engage armoured cavalry.
Lancers were the only light horsemen who had compensated for the simple fact that they are light cavalry with the lance itself which if usd in formation gave them huge advantage over any cavalry at least at the beginning of a combat - this was usually quite enough.
Another thing lance is much more accurate than sword so against cuirass wearing horsemen it was pointed at the head.

The best possible test would to create heavy lancer (probably with longer lances - e.g. it is not unreasonable that some form of Winged Hussars with for example 3 meter long lances would be a good option) cavalry and put them in combat vs. 'ordinary' heavy cavalry - this time both sides would have armour, bigger steeds etc and it would be a perfect test of the main weaponry itself.

I am sure that lancers would win this confrontation.

[Watchman]

=========> Hmm so you do assume that they charged to impale themselves on enemy pikes ?

If the pikemen hold and the horses actually proceed to run headlong into the waiting forest of pointy things, yes, that will be exactly what happens. Although I'm under the impression the skittish beasts are prone to hitting the brakes before contact; unlike humans they have no sentient decision-making ability that would allow them to entirely disregard their basic survival instincts.

Training of Polish warhorses was pretty unique with the final tests requiring extreme agility - gallop, turn on the spot in a circle of rougly 3 m diameter earlier alone and later in a formation.

And the usefulness of this in delivering a charge against heavy infantry is...? One use I can think of is an about-face for backing off if the charge wasn't succesful, but that's about it.

So yes I claim the cavalry DID charge enemy in deployed dense formation lowering their lances to throw the first rank of the enemy like broken dolls with immediate 'halt' if the enemy formation wasn't sufficiently 'prepared' to carry on the charge.

That means "braced for impact and holding steady". And you know what ? If they do that the Husaria have exactly two options (and odds are their mounts will make the choice for them, as they always did for cavalry in the same circumstances) - abort the charge or get spitted.
You see, I've been doing some elementary trigonometric calculations in my head. And those say that five-meter lance loses to even a five-meter pike. See, the lance loses around a meter before it clears the horse, and still more for having to be aimed at a downward angle - from something like 2-2.5 meters up to about 1.5 meters high, which can likely be taken as a workable estimate of where the braced pikeman's center of mass is. The first-rank pikeman, conversely, should be in the sideways crouch period military manuals illustrate, left leg leading, left hand holding the pike steady, left foot on the butt of the pike securing it firmly on the ground, right hand on the sword hilt for the melee. Quick rudimentary test of the stance suggested this placed the left shoulder pretty much directly above the left knee which in turn is directly above the left leg. The end result ? The pike doesn't lose reach due to the stance and grip. It is of course held up in an angle - all sources tell the pikemen held the tip at the level of the horse's breast, which I'm guessing can for the purposes of the comparision assumed to be about 1.5 to 2 meters from the ground.

End result ? Horse kebab before the lance-tip ever reaches the first pikeman, although against a five-meter lance the guy is still probably a goner as the rapidly perishing horse's remaining momentum pushes the tip over the remaining distance. But then there's the successive ranks of pikemen too. I understand the first four normally kept their weapons at the ready when receiving charge.

Of course, there's no particular reason to assume the pike was mere five meters long - they could easily be and commonly were at least a meter longer, although apparently lazy soldiers tended to occasionally shorten theirs to make them easier to carry.

Nonetheless the conclusion should be fairly obvious. If the pikemen hold and the cavalry press home the charge, the only first line getting thrown around like ragdolls are the riders from the backs of their dying mounts - and this isn't counting the horses' little mental block about running into obstacles.

There is NOT A SINGLE ONE example of Husaria charge stopped by pikemen. NOT ONE. It either was stopped before it reached the pikemen or the pikemen 'disappeared'.

Which can also without difficulties be read as "either the Husaria pulled short when they realized the pikemen wouldn't budge and tried something else, or the pikemen wavered too much and were duly obliterated."

They were not a suicide unit so didn't charge is a stupid way i.e. 'come on boys we will crush them under our steeds' belllies !' it was rather charge - retreat - second line charges - retreats - third line charges - retreats - first line charges again - etc. Enemy had to be very strong willed.

This starts sounding a bit more credible; wearing down the resolve and morale of the enemy with successive feints and ruses - although how this was to be carried out while under constant fire from the musketeers that invariably flanked the pikemen eludes me. Every single one of those feints would be met with lead and duly result in casualties among both men and horses, undermining the Hussars' morale and resolve in due course. Hussar armour wasn't made to the bulletproof standards of the reiters, was it ? What with keeping it light for mobility and all.

I do agree that the psychological effect was the most important but it was achieved in certain way with the very REAL possibility to be the next target of the lances.

On the battlefield it was really frightening - first the noise, second the warcry, next the imposing sight, later 'they are coming !' and suddenly the first rank(-s) are thrown lifeless with the terrible sound of the breaking hollow lances - if it wasn't enough OK the Hussars do not impale themselves but simply turn and retreat. Now imagine receiving this kind of charge every 3-5 minutes !

The lances would only ever hit home anyway if the rest of the psychological assault did its work - and in that case they would certainly help shove the morale and cohesion of the infantry from "wavering" to "panic" as the horsemen plowed into the ranks. But that is as it always was with shock cavalry; it would ever rebound from determined resistance and slaughter weakness.

Although I'd imagine the seemingly absurdly long lances must have seemed extra threatening, especially if (as was very likely) the pikemen hadn't faced lancers before; they no doubt made him wonder if his weapon was quite long enough, which when you think about it may well have been one of the reasons the lances had gotten that long in the first place. Them Poles seem to have been pretty damn good at this psychological warfare thing.

I am aware how important is the dense infantry formation and how resilent it was, but the whole trick was that they were still very agile cavalry so didn't press home, didn't try to fight against the impossible odds, but EXPLOITED the opportunity if this appeared and they were adept at making it highly probable with the final super-depressing psychological effect which was the caused by the sudden death of numerous soldiers of the first rank or ranks.

Doesn't add up. The lance loses to the pike in reach period (see above), and the infantry are pretty much quaranteed to have more firepower. Going too near the infantry like that would mainly result in casualties for the attacking cavalry and at mildly inconvenience the footsloggers. Remember that the cavalry of the west wore heavy armour and was drilled in specialized maneuvers specifically to be able to dance with the infantry blocks like that without dying en masse; the Hussars had neither.

Hit-and-run attacks on the infantry formations in turn are out of question for the very simple reason they would be suicide - if the infantry hold their nerve they're effectively untouchable behind their pike-hedge, and will not waste time punishing the foolhardy horsemen with their guns. If conversely the infantry waver - pretty much a requiement for any mounted frontal assault to be any sort of success - the Hussars will most likely be able to eat them for breakfast by charging home and the point becomes moot.

Which means it has to be something else. And I'm guessing that something is utilizing the superb mobility of the Polish cavalry to goad the infantry into a vulnerable position and tearing them apart the second an opening presents itself.

Eliminating the enemy cavalry first and then running rings around the exposed infantry would also seem like one way to go about it. Having their cavalry support demolished and rightly feared Polish cavalry looking for openings all around them no doubt really hurt the morale of most infantrymen, nevermind now if they were subjected to simultaneous cavalry assaults from multiple directions. A full-blown tercio might have been able to resist such attentions, but I doubt if too many were ever employed against the Commonwealth.

I agree the psychological impact was the most important part and that the dense infantry formations were able to stop Husaria (in theory), but the way the charge of this cavalry was performed was so psychologically destructive that NONE was able to resist it in REALITY.
Either stop them before they reach you or try to retreat behind city walls ( Moscow 1612), use cover like fences ( Klushino 1610), disciplined and powerful firepower at close range( Warka 1656), massess of soldiers 10 times larger than them ( Szklow 1654) or use suprise assault ( Walhoff 1625, Zborow 1649, Dirschau 1627, Gorzno 1629) or simply attack them dismounted with several times larger forces and in no condition to resist ( Korsun 1648, Batoh 1652, Szepielewicze 1654, Zolte Wody 1648, Cecora 1620).
The best thing is to combine several factors at once ( Mewe 1626).

In most of those battles either Husaria was given very hard time before victory, draw or was overwhelmed, but the fact remains pikemen were not able to resist.
Even extremely persistent foes were defeated sooner or later like at Szklow where 2500 Lithuanian soldiers ( 500 Hussars) faced 20 000 Russian cavalry, half of those reformed reiters.

Methinks you're letting your bias get in the way of your assessements. We seem to be in agreement that the sheer psychological impact of an incoming Hussar charge was often enough to unnerve the opponent to the degree where he became vulnerable, at least. Where you go wrong is only looking at the occasions where the pikemen failed in their duty, dithered and duly died, and forget the very obvious possibility that other times when it seemed clear the pikemen would instead hold the Hussars aborted the charge and veered off rather than get too close to the waiting lines of musketeers. Agile, high-mobility cavalry like them should have had little difficulties with such maneuvers.

Recall also that if for example the withering firepower Carolus X's troops met the Polish charges with during the Deluge had not been backed up by a solid base of serried, disciplined pikemen and well-drilled cavalry squadrons (which, incidentally, seem to have been quite able to go head to head with Polish cavalry and come away the victors) they would have been reduced to bloody rags in the mud in no time flat. Without the protective "wall" of pikes to discourage enemy cavalry musketeers were as good as dead and artillery only marginally better less so. There's a reason the pike was always around until the bayonet allowed every musketeer to double as a spearman, and that was the fact that so long as they stood steady the hostile horsemen had to stay at an arm's reach.

=====> Yes, the Millers, but I think it was more a matter of better discipline and higher morale + possibly better tactic of the Hugenot cavalry - Gendarmes were after all in worse condition as a unit than in the early XVIth century.

Which does not remove the fact they specifically elected to use the pistol instead of the lance and trounced armoured lancers head on.

=======> Perhaps because they were used in a better way than the Gandarmes.

Possible, but I'm rather guessing the vulnerability of caracole-style tactics and formations (although I don't actually know if the Germans in question used them in the well-known form) to assaults by relatively agile and highly aggressive cavalry. That worked pretty well in the favour of the Swedes immediately after their entry into the TYW too, after all.

========> hmm. Can you give the examples. I am curious, because in the books I have it is written that the Parliamentarian horse tried to use this tactic with rather bad consequences - also in both largest clashes - Marston Moor and at Naseby the Royalists broke through the Parliamentarian cavalry, chased them and of course... didn't return...

Well, at least Osprey's Ironsides (Warrior 044, if you care) talks of both Powick Bridge and Roundway Down as examples; in the latter the Royalists eventually won, but probably (to quote the book) "due to the fact that being drawn up only three deep they were able to outflank their six-deep opponents."

Besides, if gå på enthusiasts like the Swedes would use it on occasion instead of counter-charging the tacic must have had its merits.

==============> I am sure I posted before that only a part of them used lances - there were literally no lancer-only formations inearly-modern and Napoleonic period or later.
The third rank and later usually used carbines just like the pistolier cavalry.

I know enough of how lances are employed to firmly assume the lancer attack line was two ranks deep tops - if they maintain close order the second rank will be able to extend its lances between the first rank, but more ranks than that offer no real advantage. Or this at least is how Medieval knights did it, and if period illustrations are to be believed (and I don't see why not) it remained the standard lancer deployement until the whole weapon was dumped in favour of the pistol. Given the tendency of the Hussars to deliver charge at full gallop which mucked up the line right fast (Medieval chivalry attacked at trot or canter specifically to preserve the integrity of the line, and it was for the same reasons later cavalry avoided going all out too) that third support line with its guns cannot have been all that near the front rank and in any case that's a cold comfort for the first two lines who're the ones to meet the enemy fire in the first place.

=========> Extreme measures. It is not this cavalry job to keep enemy pikemen occupied after all, if there is no other possibility all right, but it is something the cavalry is not designed to do.
Of course there are... questionable situations like at Lutzen when Piccolomini's cuirassiers ( or rather heavily armoured arquebusiers) faced Swedish commanded musketeers standing in front of them and presenting them with the opportunity for target practice.
I still cannot understand why Wallenstein ordered them to receive the fussilade without any action...

Warfare is always making the most of what you have, and everyone could always do with more of this or that or the third thing over there. If there weren't enough infantry, then the horse had to do it - hopefully they'd been given proper training back in the day.

Wallenstein likely had absolutely no idea of what was happening with Piccolomini and his boys. Generals of the period rarely had particularly clear intel to work with during major field battles when the lines stretched for kilometers, the sounds of combat drowned out most noise and thick clouds of gunpowder smoke darkened the sun. Anyway, Piccolomini put up with it for about fifteen minutes (he may have thought the musketeers were there to bait him into a trap or something similar) by what I've read and then splattered the musketeers and pulled to a less exposed position. Most sources gave the impression his unit actually didn't suffer particularly heavy casualties in the episode - that cuirassieur armour was a damned hard nut to crack even with a full-sized musket. Sort of the whole point of the entire damnably expensive and inconvenient thing, of course.

[econ21]

Maybe most wounds were on the arms and head because the cuirasse helped, and the hits on the cuirasse didn't wound...

I had thought about that but I doubt it - few Napoleonic cavalry had cuirasses (no English ones, which probably formed the sample). I can't recall where I saw the chart - I think it was an internet article arguing for the superiority of the cut (curved sabre) over the thrust (straight sword) for cavalry.

Besides it is hard to truly judge their combat power because the first battle where large masses of British cavalry was used was Waterloo...
If wewill use that as the example the British cavalry was really terrible...

Infamy! Infamy! You've all got it in for me!

Seriously, the British cavalry did great at Waterloo. The heavy cavalry wrecked D'Erlon's I Corps and sabred a fair amount of the grand battery. Personally, I've always seen that as the decisive moment of the battle. It was the most serious French attack and by all accounts the infantry vs infantry contest was in the balance until the British heavy cavalry charged. After that, the French were short of men and the approach of the Prussians doomed them. The II Corps was bleeding away at Hougomont; VI Corps was facing the Prussians. Napoleon had virtually no infantry left to take on the Allied centre. So the French wasted their heavy cavalry in futile charges against squares (now there is an example of terrible use of cavalry). When La Haye Sainte fell and Ney asked for it to be reinforced, Napoleon replied: "Troops? Do you think I can manufacture them?". He still had much of the Guard, but it was not enough.

Here's an evocative description of the charge by one Scots Grey:
http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/529/

I am not sure I can think of a better use of heavy cavalry than Wellington's at Waterloo. Indeed, it's bread and butter Total War tactics - let the enemy get committed, then unleash your cavalry on their flanks.

[cegorach]

Now we are really off topic - at least it is about the British cavalry...


[QUOTE=econ21]


Seriously, the British cavalry did great at Waterloo. The heavy cavalry wrecked D'Erlon's I Corps and sabred a fair amount of the grand battery. Personally, I've always seen that as the decisive moment of the battle. It was the most serious French attack and by all accounts the infantry vs infantry contest was in the balance until the British heavy cavalry charged. After that, the French were short of men and the approach of the Prussians doomed them. The II Corps was bleeding away at Hougomont; VI Corps was facing the Prussians. Napoleon had virtually no infantry left to take on the Allied centre. So the French wasted their heavy cavalry in futile charges against squares (now there is an example of terrible use of cavalry). When La Haye Sainte fell and Ney asked for it to be reinforced, Napoleon replied: "Troops? Do you think I can manufacture them?". He still had much of the Guard, but it was not enough.

I am not sure I can think of a better use of heavy cavalry than Wellington's at Waterloo. Indeed, it's bread and butter Total War tactics - let the enemy get committed, then unleash your cavalry on their flanks.[/QUOTE]



I disagree.

THe initial charge was great, true, but the ENTIRE cavalry later all but disappeared thanks to the simple fact that it failed to retreat when disciplinated cavalry would. THey were trashed by the guard cavalry including ( some satisfaction for me he, he) the 100 men Polish lancer squadron.

It is not true that the French losses were so great, first one division avoided the charge completely, second the rest regrouped, reformed and attacked again.
The losses were serious, BUT not crippling, however the British cavalry all but DISAPPEARED (lossess were about 50 % + almost everyone loset horses or tired them completely) so in the end it was more the British who suffered more from the charge.

There was infantry left. Someone fought at La Haye Sainte after all. In the end the British had little left on their left wing, the French had to use the remaining troops against the Prussians, but a decisive blow in the center from the Guard would break the Brits - what happened in reality ( little numbers of Middle Guard only) was a joke...

This Ney decision to charge was really stupid, it was typically rash and pointless and also unnecessary - I agree here.

[King Kurt]

The experience of British and french cavalry at waterloo shows how and how not to use your mounted arm. The British did not have a significant amount heavy cav at Waterloo but they were used well in combination with the infantry and artillery. D'Erlon's corps slogged up the hill - suffered greatly from the British musketry and artillery - and just as they were wavering get hit by the Union Brigade charging at full pelt, down hill. The charge shattered that assault and there was no furthur significant infantry attack until the Guard were thrown in - a sign that it was napoleon's last throw of the dice, as they were rarely, if ever committed. Admittedly the Union brigade was spent as a force as they were eventually caught by french cavalry in the french lines - but they had done their job. Contrast that to ney's friutless use of his mounted troops - sent in without support to attempt to break formed steady infantry in square, supported by artillery. The presence of artillery and infantry with the French cav would have broken through, but their lack of a combined arms approach spelt inevitable failure.
However, a comparison between British and French cavalry is not comparing like with like. The French mounted arm was much, much bigger and was needed for a bigger variety of roles. The British emphasis was always on the infantry which was to be its battle winning arm over and over again. The cavalry was there principally to support the infantry and to carry out scouting activities. The Heavy cavalry arm was always small and arguebly waterloo was the only battle in which it made a significant impact. In contrast the light cavalry played a part in most of the Peninsula battles and was well regarded in its ability for scouting and skirmishing.

[Duke John]

I would appreciate it if this stays on topic. It's been very interesting and if you run out of gas concerning the original topic then I would kindly ask you to make a new topic about cavalry during Napoleonic times or whatever you wishes to discuss.


To fuel the discussion a bit:
It has been said multiple times that infantry would retreat and form up again. Why didn't the opponents follow up and keep the pressure high? If their side was winning why let the enemy recover? Was it because both sides tended to be equally disordered and pursuing could prove disastrous or was just too confusing to be reliable?


Cegorach, you can also select text in your post and then press the little text balloon icon to put quote tags around it.