12. The Thundering Blow (14)
The typical employment of one of these great cavalry concentrations which the Emperor delighted to use was, as I have already said, for a thundering attack on a limited front some time after the battle had commenced, and the enemy’s line was beginning to grow exhausted. A great battle began with what Colonel Camon in his elaborate study of Napoleon’s methods calls the combat d’usure—attacks all along the line not pushed home but sufficiently vigorous to tie the enemy down to his ground, and cause his front line to lose its freshness. It was when he was growing somewhat battle-weary, and had begun to send his reserves into the fighting-line, that the blow would be delivered at the selected point, with a great mass of cavalry acting in conjunction with an infantry reserve—sometimes the Imperial Guard, sometimes (and more often) an army corps kept back for this special purpose.
The Emperor’s plan was to launch the cavalry reserve right into the middle of a fight in which the enemy was already engaged with troops of all arms, and had no time to reorganize his line for the special purpose of resisting a great attack by the mounted arm. Infantry already contending with French infantry, and not formed in square, lost in the smoke of a long morning’s action, and unable to prepare themselves in time, were the game which he was always hoping to discover—and often did. The breach made in the hostile line by the unexpected irruption of a mass of cavalry, which turned right and left to sweep down the back of deployed lines of infantry, was the ideal that he aimed at. The thing that he least desired was to have to use up his all-important cavalry reserve too early in the day, against an enemy whose front was still intact, and who had leisure to prepare to receive the attack.
That was the meaning of his angry comment on Ney’s management of the great cavalry attack at Waterloo—“c’est trop tôt d’une heure”—the marshal had begun to fall on the British centre before it had been seriously entamed, while it had ample leisure to form square. The cavalry should have been thrown in unexpectedly, in conjunction with an infantry assault all along the line. Ney would probably have replied that his master was to blame, for already in the first episode of the fight allowing all his infantry save the Guard to be distracted to other points than that one in the centre where the crucial attack was to be made. He did, as a matter of fact, use up along with one of his cavalry attacks the sole infantry division that Napoleon had left him available—that of Bachelu. But this force was too small, and its appearance in the midst of the cavalry attacks had little or no effect. Thrice such a strength was required, and the Emperor had, in miscalculation, used up a far greater force (five divisions) than he had intended, in the preliminary attacks on Wellington’s two flanks, where the final decisive thrust was not intended to be delivered.
The blow with the reserve cavalry which Napoleon habitually practised, therefore, was normally delivered late in the day, at the section of the hostile line where he intended to make his breach. That point might be broad or narrow; at Waterloo there is more than three-quarters of a mile between the Brussels road and the outermost enclosures of Hougoumont, the two limits of the cavalry attacks. The cavalry reserve was able to act on a long front of several brigades.
On the other hand, there were cases where the Emperor spied a very narrow joint in the enemy’s armour, and thrust with heavy forces at a front only a few hundred yards wide; such was the case at Ligny, where the two divisions of Milhaud’s cuirassiers, which struck the decisive blow against the Prussian centre, had to act in a column of regiments, one behind the other, because of the limited space at their disposal. The same was the case with Montbrun’s cuirassiers who stormed the great redoubt at Borodino, practically in column, swerving round its flank and entering it from the gorge.
Of course, these cramped attacks were dreadfully costly from the mass of men exposed to fire, and were far less likely to succeed than charges made with proper elbow-room, since the ground over which the rear squadrons had to charge was strewn with the wrecks of the regiments which had headed the column. Napoleon was quite aware of this, and in his general orders for his cavalry set forth the principle of attacks in successive lines, with a good space between the leading and the supporting brigades. But, as in all things, he held himself bound by no hard-and-fast rules. It did not matter how expensive a blow might be, if it pierced through the chosen point in the hostile line.
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