STUDIES IN THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 104
The Main Duty of Napoleon’s Cavalry
12. The Main Duty of Napoleon’s Cavalry (12)
It is in consonance with this habitual dislike of Napoleon to use his cavalry for wide turning movements, that we find him never (it may practically be said) using it for long-distance raids—I mean incursions into the enemy’s rear for the purpose of destroying roads or bridges, capturing magazines, or disorganizing the administration of the country-side. Such operations were not unknown to the earlier age—twice Frederick the Great had seen Berlin captured in his rear by flying forces of Austrian and Russian light horse. And in 1813 similar tactics were tried on the largest scale against Napoleon himself, when (while the French army was still on the Oder) Tettenborn rode ahead with his cossacks and hussars, captured Hamburg and Lubeck and pushed into the middle of the electorate of Hanover, upsetting the French administration and raising the country-side in local insurrection.
A similar cavalry incursion round Napoleon’s rear, in the weeks before the Battle of Leipzig, had very appreciable results in distracting his reserves, and diminishing the extent of the country from which he could draw his supplies. The only instance of any importance in which we can speak of Napoleon’s cavalry executing something like a raid was Lassalle’s capture of Stettin in 1806. And this was not a deliberate independent enterprise ordered by the Emperor himself, but a case where a cavalry brigadier, taking part in a general pursuit of a routed army, diverged on his own responsibility to seize an important fortress and bridge, over which the retreating Prussians might probably attempt to pass, and succeeded in doing so owing to his own power of “bluffing” and the inconceivable stupidity and cowardice of the governor.
It seems that Napoleon did not choose to utilize his cavalry for raids, even when he had a large superiority in it, and preferred to use it as a battering force in battle, or as a screening force in front of his main columns of attack. Perhaps we may explain his attitude by remembering that his end was always to break up and annihilate the army opposed to him, and that subsidiary operations which might harass it, but would not necessarily lead to its being surrounded and annihilated, seemed to him comparatively useless. A cavalry raid may incommode, but does not necessarily lead to the destruction of the army whose rear has been molested. Exploits like Allenby’s great circular sweep in Palestime in 1918 are rare in history.
The main duty of Napoleon’s cavalry, then, was to make its weight felt in battle, to urge pursuits to the extreme limit of possibility, and to screen the advance of the main columns, which it covered, on each road that they were using, at a moderate distance only to the front.
On the comparatively rare occasions when he had been brought to a halt in the middle of a campaign by the exhaustion of his resources, or by a check received, the light cavalry brigades and dragoons of his central reserve would be disposed along the whole front of his line of cantonments, but the heavy brigades, the cuirassiers, carabineers and Guard cavalry, were drawn to the rear along with the infantry—the Emperor always intended them for battle-service only, and refused to wear them out by throwing them into the screen which performed outpost duty for the whole army. Such was the disposition of affairs during the long halt on the Prussian-Russian frontier which followed Eylau and preceded Friedland (March-May 1807), and in the check which ensued when in 1812 the Emperor had captured Moscow but found that the war was still to go on, and that he had exhausted his offensive power.
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