12. Napoleon and His Cavalry (1)
In dealing with such a vast subject as this, on which solid books of no mean size, like that of Colonel Picard, have been written, I feel that it is very hard to avoid a slip into one of two opposite dangers. If one keeps to general outlines and obvious comment, one risks the charge of being dull and having nothing new to say. If one attempts to go into illustrative detail, and to touch on controversies, there is considerable chance that one may become unintelligible, from citing too many obscure facts. It may be a case of the wood that was invisible because there were so many trees. This second peril is the worse one; it is better to be obvious than to be obscure. There is much profit, after all, in endeavouring to formulate general conclusions.
I shall simply, therefore, deal with Napoleon’s cavalry, its numbers and organization, and then endeavour to explain his habitual methods of dealing with it. Examples of the actual management of regiments and brigades belong to the study of tactics. They may be followed by those who are anxious to work out details in the colossal works which the French War Office compiled in the first decade of the XXth century, such as the five volumes of Colin’s Campaign of Austerlitz or the four volumes of Saski’s Campaign of 1809, or Balagny’s Napoleon en Espagne. Here there is detail and original documents sufficient to satisfy the most earnest and omnivorous inquirer.
The mounted troops which Napoleon, when he had carried out his coup d’état of Brumaire and made himself First Consul, took over from the Directory consisted of 84 regiments, 25 of heavy cavalry (of which only one was furnished with the cuirass), 25 regiments of chasseurs, 10 of hussars, 20 of dragoons. The heavy cavalry were three-squadron regiments theoretically composed of 531 men; the rest four-squadron regiments with a nominal effective of 942. In actual practice it was seldom found that a heavy regiment had more than 350–400 men in line, or a light cavalry regiment over 600.
Napoleon had, of course, no time to reorganize the mounted arm before the campaigns of Marenzo and Hohenlinden. But in the long Continental peace which followed the treaty of Lunéville in 1801, and which did not end till the war with Austria and Russia in 1805, the Austerlitz campaign, he had ample time to make all the changes that he pleased. There was nothing to hinder him in the fact that during the greater part of the period 1801–5 he was engaged in a maritime war with England. His land forces were not concerned in it, except the army of Egypt, which was captured wholesale in 1801 by Abercromby’s expedition.
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