12. The Failure of the Mounted Infantry (4)
Bonaparte seems in the beginning of his imperial rule to have conceived the notion of going back to the old ideal that dragoons should be essentially mounted infantry, and not a sort of medium heavy cavalry equipped with a fire-arm that was inconveniently long for mounted service. In 1801–2 we find that he issued special orders that the dragoons at the great camps of Compiègne and Amiens were to be taught infantry drill, and especially the bayonet exercise, and what was more important, he made the experiment of substituting in many regiments gaiters suitable for easy movements on foot for the high and heavy boots reaching to the knee which were in use. It is said that he had been influenced in the direction of creating mounted infantry by the good service which he had seen performed in Egypt by the camel corps which he had organized there, a body which moved rapidly, but, of course, could not charge, and always dismounted to fight on foot.
In 1803, when the main body of the French army was camped along the shores of the Channel for the projected invasion of England, Bonaparte brought almost the whole of his dragoons to the coast without horses. There were to be some twenty regiments of them embarked, with their saddles alone; the transport of horses in the small flat-bottomed boats which formed his Boulogne flotilla being only possible on a very small scale. These dragoons, after the landing in Sussex or Kent, were to be furnished with horses seized in the countryside—perfectly untrained of necessity. So that it was clearly Napoleon’s intention to execute his invasion of England with little but mounted infantry to support the other arms. Till the horses should be collected, the dragoon regiments were to march on foot as battalions of infantry. If the invasion had ever taken place, it is curious to speculate on what might have happened. The strength of a French army at this time depended very much on its excellent cavalry with its great power of manoeuvring. Bonaparte was prepared to forgo this advantage, and would have had little to oppose to the very considerable force of English cavalry then concentrated along the south coast. Moreover, he would have been disappointed in the idea that he could rapidly mount his dragoons on requisitioned horses, as the English Government had made elaborate preparations for the transport into the interior of all horses of all descriptions—draught as well as riding—at the first news of a landing. Practically the French would have had to operate with a force composed of infantry and artillery alone.
When the Emperor’s plan for obtaining command of the English Channel and throwing his army ashore in Sussex had failed, owing to the vigilance of Nelson and (we must add) of Lord Barham, the head of the Admiralty, Napoleon found himself almost immediately engaged in the Austro-Russian War of 1805. It is interesting to find that he marched straight off from the Channel to the Danube one division of no less than 5,000 dismounted dragoons, who had been prepared to act as mounted infantry for the invasion of England, and had no horses ready. Eight regiments, the division of Baraguay d’Hilliers, marched all the way on foot from Boulogne to Ulm in their gaiters, with the short musket and bayonet on their shoulders. It was a disaster to this force which seems to have turned the Emperor away from his well-developed plan for making his dragoons into mounted infantry. Baraguay d’Hilliers’s division was acting as the baggage guard of one of the main columns, which was performing the circular sweep round Ulm that shut in General Mack, and forced him to surrender with all his army. It was marching behind Dupont’s division with its convoy, and the grand park of artillery. The one large Austrian detachment which escaped from Ulm, that commanded by the Archduke Ferdinand, a force largely composed of cavalry, happed at Albeck upon the column formed by Dupont and the dismounted dragoons.
After getting past the flank of Dupont with much trouble, a great part of the Archduke’s horse fell upon the convoy and park, with the dismounted dragoons escorting them. In the combat which followed the Archduke’s cavalry pushed back the dragoons and captured much of the great train which eight regiments of them were escorting. The explanation given by French authorities is that the dragoons, while ceasing to be cavalry, had become only mediocre infantry, manoeuvred badly, failed to form square promptly, and were easily thrust away from the important convoy which they were guarding. Though hotly pursued on the following days by Murat, the cavalry of this Austrian column got away, towards Bohemia, though the infantry were taken. It was the only section of Mack’s army which escaped capture.
Napoleon ordered a court of inquiry, not a court martial, to sit on Baraguay d’Hilliers, and seems to have been convinced by its report that the division of dismounted dragoons had failed to put up a good fight, because its training had halted halfway between that of cavalry and infantry, and had not fitted it for a stand-up fight on infantry tactics. The deduction which he seems to have drawn from the affair of Albeck was that it was no use to treat the dragoons as infantry, and that he must resign himself to falling back on the tendency that had been operating for the last hundred years. He must recognize that they had merely become cavalry, and employ them as such in the main; though, as they were armed with the short musket, they might be used for skirmishing, the seizing of advanced positions and the defence of villages in preference to other cavalry. All the dismounted squadrons were furnished with horses ere long, from those captured from the Austrian cavalry which had surrendered.
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