STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 095
The Transformation of the Dragoons
12. The Transformation of the Dragoons (3)
In sharp contrast to the moderate number of sixteen heavy cavalry regiments in all which Napoleon possessed was the great number of regiments of dragoons and of definitely light cavalry—chasseurs and hussars. In 1802, counting the six old heavy cavalry regiments which were renumbered as dragoons—there were 30 regiments of them—Napoleon had taken over 20 only from the Republican government in 1800. Of chasseurs he started with 25 regiments, but gradually raised the number to 31. Of hussars the old ten regiments were finally increased to 14. Lastly, the Emperor, far on toward the end of his career, created a class of cavalry hitherto unknown in the French national army, by establishing 9 regiments of lancers. In 1813, when the number of cavalry units was at its highest in Napoleon’s army, there were but 16 heavy regiments to 76 of medium and light horse.
The distinction between the 30 dragoon regiments and the other 46 was that the former retained at first some traces of the original character for which that arm had been formed. So far back as the XVIIth century they were essentially horsemen who were furnished with a musket (though a short one), and who were trained to fight on foot as well as on horseback. When dragoons first came into existence about the time of the Thirty Years War, they had been something of the kind of mounted infantry. That is to say, they were men with fire-arms who had been provided with horses in order that they might move rapidly, not light cavalry furnished with a musket for skirmishing purposes. Originally they had not been taught cavalry drill, and their horses were mere cobs—in Cromwell’s army, for example, there was a standing order that the maximum price to be paid for a dragoon horse was to be only from half to two-thirds of that allowed for the purchase of a horse for a regular cavalry regiment. Though provided with the sword, they had been taught to look on their musket as their main weapon, and when bayonets were invented in the end of the XVIIth century they had been duly furnished with them.
All through the XVIIIth century, however, the dragoons in every army in Europe, not in the French army only, were tending to become more and more cavalry, and less and less mere mounted infantry. This seems everywhere, in England no less than in France, to have come from no fixed policy of the military authorities, but rather from the misplaced energy of colonels who, wanting to assimilate their regiments to cavalry, improved the quality of the horses, exercised their corps more and more in the elaborate mounted drill of that period, and taught them to charge in line with the sword, instead of relying on dismounted service with the musket as their proper mode of action.
By the time of Frederick the Great the dragoons, alike in the Prussian, the French, and the English armies, had become merely a sort of cavalry which carried muskets or carbines, and were brigaded with, and numbered in sequence with, other cavalry of the line. They were no longer a separate arm, as they had been in 1650 or 1680. They only differed from other horse in that they were, because of their more effective fire-arms, expected to take charge of the skirmishing line in the commencement of cavalry actions, and were still considered to be the proper troops to send forward to seize posts and defiles when infantry could not get up in time. They were earmarked for dismounted work when cavalry was sent out unaccompanied by the other arms on exploration raids and reconnaissances.
But their uniforms had been changed and assimilated to that of cavalry in a way that made the service on foot very inconvenient. The French dragoons, when Napoleon took them over, were wearing tall brass-crested helmets and long boots to the knee, an equipment which made dismounted skirmishing work particularly difficult and uncomfortable. To scramble through hedges and ditches in tall boots and heavy brass helmets with crests and plumes was absurd.
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