Cavalry

• 1. Introduction

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  Cavalry, the word itself, comes from the French cavalerie, rooted in cheval, the French word for horse. For most of recorded history, these mounted soldiers were the fastest, most feared, and most decisive force any army could field. From the steppes of Central Asia to the fields of Waterloo, the sight of horsemen thundering toward you was often enough to break the will of an opponent before a single blow was struck.

  But cavalry was never just about speed. A soldier on horseback carried with him three compound advantages over anyone standing on the ground: greater height, superior speed, and crushing inertial mass. Add to that the sheer psychological terror a wall of charging horses could produce, and you begin to understand why armies across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas devoted so much wealth and labor to raising and maintaining these forces.

  The word cavalry covered an astonishing variety of fighters. Depending on the era and the tactics, a mounted soldier might be called a hussar, a lancer, a dragoon, a cuirassier, a cataphract, a knight, a samurai, or simply a horseman. Each title carried its own history, its own doctrine, its own equipment. Heavy cavalry delivered shock attacks at the decisive moment of battle. Light cavalry scouted, screened, raided, skirmished, and ran down retreating enemies. These two roles would define the mounted arm for thousands of years.

  Yet by the early 20th century, the horse soldier was already becoming obsolete. Machine guns, barbed wire, and rapid-fire rifles were about to transform what cavalry could and could not do on the modern battlefield. How did an institution so central to warfare for so many centuries adapt, decline, and ultimately reinvent itself? The answer touches on technology, conservatism, class, terrain, and some of the most dramatic moments in military history. The story begins not with a horse at all, but with a chariot.

• 2. Before the Saddle

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  The chariot came first. Before the Iron Age, the battlefield role that cavalry would later occupy was filled by light, fast, two-wheeled vehicles pulled by horses. The chariot originated with the Sintashta-Petrovka culture in Central Asia, spreading outward through nomadic and semi-nomadic Indo-Iranian peoples who carried the technology into settled civilizations. The pharaohs of the New Kingdom of Egypt adopted it from 1550 BC onward. The Assyrian army and Babylonian royalty embraced it both as a weapon of war and as an object of ceremonial prestige.

  Horseback riding as a military practice appears to have followed close behind. From at least the 15th century BC, military elites in Egypt, Assyria, the Hittite Empire, and Mycenaean Greece were practicing mounted combat. Horse bones recovered from the Tollense valley in northern Germany, one of the oldest verified battlefields ever found, date to the 13th century BC.

  Assyrian stone reliefs from 865-860 BC show what those early cavalry soldiers actually looked like. At that stage, the men had no spurs, no saddles, no saddle cloths, and no stirrups. Riding into combat under those conditions was far more demanding than simply riding for transport. Assyrian cavalry operated in pairs: the reins of a mounted archer were controlled by his neighbor's hand, leaving the archer free to shoot. Even so, these soldiers carried swords, shields, spears, and bows. Later Assyrian images show the arrival of primitive saddle cloths, allowing each archer to manage his own horse.

  As early as 490 BC, a breed of large horses was being raised on the Nisaean plain in Media specifically to carry men in heavier armor. By the 4th century BC, the Chinese state of Zhao adopted cavalry tactics during the Warring States period (403-221 BC). And by 331 BC, when Alexander the Great defeated the Persians, chariots had become obsolete in most armies. The last recorded use of a chariot as a shock weapon in continental Europe was at the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC. Outside the continent, the southern Britons still met Julius Caesar with chariots in 55 and 54 BC, but the last mention of chariot use in Britain comes from the Caledonians at Mons Graupius in 84 AD. The transition from chariot to horseman had taken centuries, but it was complete.

• 3. Riders of Greece, Rome, and the East

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  Pelopidas of Thebes was his city's first great cavalry commander, and his tactics and skills were absorbed by Philip II of Macedon during the years Philip spent as a guest-hostage in Thebes. That transfer of knowledge would have enormous consequences. The Macedonian kingdom developed a heavy cavalry force called the hetairoi, the Companion cavalry, of Philip II and Alexander the Great. Alongside these elite fighters, the Macedonian army deployed lighter horsemen called prodromoi for scouting and screening, as well as the Ippiko, Greek heavy cavalry armed with the kontos, a cavalry lance, and a sword. Alexander's conquests of Persia, Bactria, and northwestern India demonstrated what this combination of disciplined cavalry and infantry could achieve.

  The early Roman Republic took a very different approach. Cavalry was the preserve of the equites, the wealthy landed class who could afford horses and heavier armor. Horses were provided by the Republic and could be withdrawn if neglected or misused. As the equites became more of a social elite than a functional military grouping, Rome began filling its cavalry ranks with Italian socii allies. The weakness this created was exposed brutally by Hannibal Barca during the Second Punic War. At the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal's superior mounted forces helped inflict a catastrophic defeat on the Romans. The lesson was absorbed: Rome began recruiting auxiliary cavalry from among Gauls, Iberians, and Numidians, with the Numidians especially valued as mounted skirmishers and scouts.

  In the later empire, cavalry's importance grew steadily. The Romans adopted the Spatha, a long sword that became the standard cavalry weapon throughout most of the 1st millennium. After the Roman defeat at Carrhae against the Parthians, the Romans recognized the value of large cavalry formations and began developing their own cataphracts and clibanarii, fully armored cavalry units modeled on eastern patterns. The replacement of the Roman saddle with variants on the Scythian model, featuring pommel and cantle, and the later adoption of stirrups, gave riders a far more stable seat. These were not minor adjustments. They changed what cavalry could physically do in combat, and as a result, cavalry began to take on a more dominant role on the European battlefield during the 4th and 5th centuries.

• 4. Knights, Charges, and Infantry's Answer

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  From the late 10th century onward, heavily armed horsemen known as milites or knights emerged as an expensive elite that dominated both the battlefield and the broader social order of medieval Europe. These warriors were considered the ultimate expression of heavy cavalry: equipped with the finest weapons, wearing state-of-the-art armor from head to foot, leading charges at full gallop in close formation with the lance. Their actions at the height of a battle could decide its outcome almost before the infantry had engaged.

  But knights were always the minority. The arms, armor, and horses they required were affordable only to a select few, and medieval armies relied on large numbers of foot soldiers to handle every other task. Medieval chroniclers paid disproportionate attention to the mounted elite, which led early historians to overestimate how dominant cavalry really was. The truth was more complicated. Well-trained and disciplined infantry could defeat knights. Massed English longbowmen triumphed over French cavalry at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. At Gisors in 1188, Bannockburn in 1314, and Laupen in 1339, foot soldiers proved they could resist cavalry charges as long as they held their formation.

  The Swiss pike square changed the calculation further. Once the Swiss developed pike formations for offensive as well as defensive use, infantry began to reclaim dominance. The introduction of missile weapons requiring less skill than the longbow, such as the crossbow and hand cannon, also shifted power toward masses of cheaper infantry. These weapons proved highly effective in the Hussite Wars, used alongside Wagenburg tactics.

  In the early 16th century, a French or Spanish army could have up to half its numbers made up of various kinds of cavalry. But the pistol, developed partly to bring cavalry back into relevance, produced the caracole, a maneuver that was not particularly successful. By the time the Polish Winged Hussars reached their peak during the Siege of Vienna in 1683, when hussar banners participated in what was described as the largest cavalry charge in history to repel the Ottoman attack, their days of dominance were already numbered. By 1776, after their last engagement at the Battle of Kliszow in 1702, the Winged Hussars had been demoted largely to ceremonial roles.

• 5. Cavalry at Its Peak and Decline

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  The greatest cavalry charge of modern history took place at the 1807 Battle of Eylau, when the entire French cavalry reserve, 11,000 strong and led by Joachim Murat, launched a massive charge through the Russian infantry lines. Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, cavalry retained an irreplaceable role: scouting, patrolling the fringes of encampments, intercepting deserters, and pursuing retreating enemies. At the Battle of Waterloo, repeated charges by up to 9,000 French cavalrymen ordered by Michel Ney failed to break the British-Allied army, who had formed into infantry squares. Massed infantry in squares were deadly to cavalry, but offered an excellent target for artillery.

  By the beginning of the 19th century, European cavalry had crystallized into four main categories. Cuirassiers were heavy cavalry wearing body armor and armed with pistols and swords. Dragoons were originally mounted infantry, later classified as medium cavalry. Hussars were light cavalry armed primarily with sabres. Lancers or Uhlans were light cavalry armed with lances. Individual nations added their own variations: France had its chasseurs a cheval, Prussia its Jager zu Pferde, Russia its Cossacks.

  The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 provided one of the last examples of cavalry achieving decisive results on a modern battlefield. At the Battle of Mars-la-Tour, a Prussian cavalry brigade smashed the centre of the French battle line after skillfully concealing their approach. This action, which became known as Von Bredow's Death Ride after the brigade commander Adalbert von Bredow, was used for decades afterward to argue that massed cavalry charges still had a future.

  But the South African War of 1899-1902 told a different story. Mounted Boer citizen commandos fighting on foot from cover proved more effective than regular cavalry employed on horseback. The British Army withdrew lances for all but ceremonial purposes in 1903 and placed new emphasis on dismounted action, though lances were readopted for active service in 1912. In 1882, the Imperial Russian Army had converted all its line hussar and lancer regiments to dragoons with an emphasis on mounted infantry training. The last major cavalry battle would be the Battle of Komarow in 1920, between Poland and the Russian Bolsheviks.

• 6. World War I and the End of the Horse

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  In August 1914, all combatant armies still retained substantial numbers of cavalry. The opening weeks of war on both the Eastern and Western Fronts seemed to promise a role for mounted troops. On the Western Front a German attempt on the 12th of August 1914 to use six regiments of massed cavalry to cut off the Belgian field army from Antwerp failed when they were driven back by rifle fire. The two German cavalry brigades involved lost 492 men and 843 horses in repeated charges against dismounted Belgian lancers and infantry. One of the last recorded charges by French cavalry came on the night of the 9th and the 10th of September 1914, when a squadron of the 16th Dragoons overran a German airfield at Soissons, while suffering heavy losses.

  Once the Western Front stabilized into trench warfare, barbed wire, uneven muddy ground, machine guns, and rapid-fire rifles combined to make horse-mounted troops suicidal on the front lines. By early 1915, most cavalry units on the Western Front were no longer seeing front line action. Cavalry comprised 9.28% of the total manpower of the British Expeditionary Force in France in September 1914. By July 1918, that proportion had fallen to 1.65%. The French cavalry numbered 102,000 in May 1915 but had been reduced to 63,000 by October 1918.

  On the Eastern Front, the flatter terrain gave cavalry more room to operate, but even here the value of mounted formations was overrated. In February 1917, the Russian regular cavalry, exclusive of Cossacks, was reduced by nearly a third from its peak number of 200,000. The Austro-Hungarians had been progressively converting horse cavalry regiments to dismounted rifle units since late 1914. Tanks, introduced on the Western Front by the British in September 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, represented the mechanized future of decisive shock action.

  In the Middle East, however, mounted forces retained genuine strategic value across the Sinai and Palestine Campaign. Australian, British, Indian, Ottoman, Arab, and New Zealand mounted troops operated as both cavalry and mounted infantry. Beersheba was captured by the Australian Mounted Division's 4th Light Horse Brigade in 1917. A subsequent pursuit by the 4th Cavalry Division and the Australian Mounted Division followed by the 5th Cavalry Division reached Damascus. The armistice came while armored cars and 5th Cavalry Division lancers were still pursuing Ottoman units north of Aleppo.

• 7. Mechanization and the Modern Legacy

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  A combination of military conservatism and post-war financial constraints kept horse cavalry alive longer than its battlefield record justified. As late as the 1922 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, mounted troops were still argued to have a major role to play in future warfare. The British Army mechanized all cavalry regiments between 1929 and 1941, combining them with the Royal Tank Regiment to form the Royal Armoured Corps. The U.S. Cavalry abandoned its sabres in 1934 and began converting horsed regiments to mechanized units, starting with the First Regiment of Cavalry in January 1933.

  The last horsed regiment of the British Indian Army, the 19th King George's Own Lancers, held its final mounted parade at Rawalpindi on the 28th of October 1939. That unit still exists in the Pakistan Army today, but as an armored regiment. The 39 cavalry regiments of the British Indian Army had been reduced to 21 through a series of amalgamations after World War I, and by the end of 1940 all Indian cavalry had been mechanized.

  During World War II, significant mounted action was largely restricted to the Polish, Balkan, and Soviet campaigns. A persistent myth holds that Polish cavalry armed with lances charged German tanks in September 1939. The episode that generated the myth was a clash on the 1st of September near Krojanty, when two squadrons of the Polish 18th Lancers armed with sabres scattered German infantry before being caught in the open by German armoured cars, not tanks. Polish cavalry throughout that campaign continued to use horses as transport and dismounted to fight.

  In Turkey, General Fahrettin Altay led cavalry during the War of Independence that proved decisive in the Kemalist victory over the Greek Army at the Battle of Dumlupinar in 1922. The 5th Cavalry Corps slipped behind the main Greek army, cutting off communications, supplies, and retreat routes, forcing the surrender of the remaining Greek forces. Military historians have suggested this may have been the last time in history that cavalry played a definitive role in determining the outcome of a battle. Today the word cavalry persists, but it describes units equipped with fast armored cars, light tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and helicopters. The horse is gone from the front line, though not from the ceremonial parades where its presence still commands something of the old authority.