STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 102
How Napoleon Employed His Cavalry
12. How Napoleon Employed His Cavalry (10)
So much for the character and composition of Napoleon’s cavalry. It remains to be explained how he used it. Roughly speaking, we may divide this question into two sections—his employment of cavalry in battle, and his employment of it in the operations which preceded and followed the decisive general action, which was usually the climax of one of his campaigns. The latter section is quite as important as the former, for there were certain of the Emperor’s campaigns in which the strategical advance and the pursuit were the decisive parts of the operations—as, for example, the Ulm campaign of 1805 and the Jena campaign of 1806. In each of these it was not the fighting itself so much as the use which was made of it after the initial success had been won, that was the decisive thing. In each of these campaigns the victory was not by itself conclusive, but the cavalry pursuit which followed made it so, and ended in the annihilation of two armies of which great part had in each case quitted the actual battle-field in decent order, and might have got off and continued the war, if the pursuit had been conducted by a less energetic enemy than the Emperor.
To proceed, then, with the question of Napoleon’s general employment of his cavalry in campaign.
We may notice first that he did not use it on a large scale for raids, or long movements at a great distance from his main body. The mass of his cavalry, including always the whole of the cuirassier and carabineer regiments, and also the cavalry of the Guard, was always with the central striking force of the army, not with the other and secondary body with which the Emperor tried to turn the enemy and get across his line of communications and retreat. I need hardly repeat here what has been so often set forth in books on Napoleonic strategy, that the normal shape of a campaign was the attack on the enemy, not with the mere intention of beating but with that of annihilating his field army. The hostile main body, not any fortress or capital, was always the Emperor’s objective. His aim was not the winning of battles or the occupation of territory, but the wiping out of the enemy’s army. And this aim, as worked out in great detail by Colonel Camon and other writers, was normally achieved by the combination of an attack which occupied the attention of the enemy, and held him fixed to the ground in which he had been caught, with the flanking action of a great column which by a wide sweep struck at the enemy’s line of retreat and cut him off from it. This was the general type of the operations which succeeded completely at Ulm, Jena and Marengo, which partially succeeded in the early part of the Austrian campaign of 1809, and which failed in the attempt to cut off the Russian army in the early part of 1812, and at Bautzen, and very notably in the pursuit of Sir John Moore in December 1808.
We might have expected that the outflanking force, the one which was destined to get across the enemy’s Kne of retreat, and shut him in, would normally have been composed to a very great proportion of cavalry, whose rapidity of movement would have been specially valuable in such a case. But I cannot find that this was the usual disposition of the Emperor’s forces. The column which did the intercepting work was normally composed of one or more army corps, with their corps-cavalry alone accompanying them, or at the most with a division or two of dragoons attached, while the great bulk, the so-called cavalry Reserve Corps, will be found with the frontal force, which was destined to attack and immobilize the enemy’s main body while the turning movement was in course of development.
We need not go into the details of the early Italian campaigns, for Napoleon had little cavalry in those days, and Italy is a country peculiarly ill-adapted for large cavalry operations, the plain being cut up with hedges, vineyards and canals in a way which makes cross-country operations almost impossible, while fighting in the mountains, like that of Montenotte or Rivoli, was necessarily incompatible with the employment of cavalry on a large scale or with decisive effect. We only find tactical use of comparatively small bodies at Castiglione and Marengo.
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