STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 101
The Effectiveness of Lancers vs Infantry
12. The Effectiveness of Lancers vs Infantry (9)
There are several cases quoted in the history of Napoleon’s later wars where lancers, in wet weather, broke infantry which had successfully driven off cavalry armed with the sabre alone. One was on the second day of the Battle of Dresden, August 27, 1813, when Murat’s cavalry reserve was attacking in drenching rain the squares formed by Lichtenstein’s Austrian infantry division. These squares, though hardly able to defend themselves at all by fire, kept off by their solidity several charges of Bourdesoulte’s cuirassiers, till General Latour Maubourg bethought him of the device of placing the fifty lancers who formed his escort, the only troops of that arm on the spot, in front of the first squadron of a cuirassier regiment which was repeating its charges. Marmont tells us that the idea was at once successful, that the lancers made a breach in the square which had hitherto proved inaccessible, and so the Austrian front was decisively broken, with disastrous results. Wherefore, he adds, the notion that Napoleon had in 1812 of attaching a lancer regiment to each heavy cavalry brigade was a good one, and it was a misfortune that the arrangement was not repeated in 1813.
An almost precisely similar incident is related by Marbot in his account of the Battle of the Katzbach, which was also fought in very heavy rain. He writes that his own regiment, the 23rd Chasseurs, was utterly unable to break the square of a Prussian battalion, though it could not fire a single shot at him. His men fenced for several minutes sabre against bayonet, with no satisfactory result. But the 6th Lancers being ordered up against the same square, crushed in the front of the Prussians at the first charge because of the advantage of their longer weapon.
It must not, of course, be forgotten that another advantage of the lance was that it was far more effective in pursuit than the sabre, and that it could reach men who had thrown themselves down flat, and who in that position could not be reached with the shorter weapon. This last advantage was noted in the Zulu and Sudanese wars and other modern English campaigns.
On the other hand, when cavalry had got wedged in a mêlée, after a charge where neither side would give way, there is evidence from the Napoleonic wars that the lancer was gravely incommoded by the length of his weapon when engaged with the hussar or dragoon. I have two notes on this from English sources, one with regard to the combat of Carpió, September 27, 1811, when the 16th Light Dragoons were engaged with the lancers of Berg.
An officer of the former regiment writes that he had never before seen lancers: “They looked well, and were formidable till they were broken and closed with by our men, and then the lances proved an encumbrance: they caught in the appointments of other men and actually pulled them off their horses”.
The other note is as regards the combat of Genappe on the day before Waterloo, when it is noted that Subervie’s lancers, as long as their line was unbroken, were most formidable and beat off our 7th Hussars, but when once they were involved in a hand-to-hand mêlée with the Life Guards, whose impact had burst through their first line, they were by no means to be feared, and were mastered in close combat with some ease, and driven back by inferior numbers. They had no room, it may be remarked, because the fight took place in a street, the entry into the village of Genappe, where both parties were jammed in the narrow space between the two rows of houses. Marbot’s account of Polotzk bears this out.
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