12. How Napoleon Deployed His Cavalry Before Battle (13)

It remains only to speak of the Emperor’s actual use of cavalry in the battle and the pursuit. Already, before he became the master of France, the old system of formal battles, in which each party disposed itself in parallel lines, with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the two wings, had ceased to be universal, though some of the famous engagements of Frederick the Great had still been fought upon that stereotyped plan. But in the first period of the War of the French Revolution the type of general actions had changed for a permanency. And instead of forming the symmetrical elbow-to-elbow lines of battle of the old style, French armies advanced to the attack in separate columns, which sought no alignment with each other, and each went for its objective in the way which its commander thought best. Indeed, the numbers engaged in these wars rendered the old system, by which an army advanced from a single road and deployed into action in a single line, impossible. What an army of 25,000 men could do in the way of neat manoeuvring could not be carried out by an army of 100,000 men or more, such as Napoleon often put into action. Hence the battle-lines were formed by bodies of troops coming to the front from several directions, at different hours, and in varying formations. There was no symmetry about it, and its order was constantly changing.

For in a Napoleonic battle the fighting began, as a rule, long before many of the units had reached the ground. The cavalry had no longer its stereotyped place; it was no longer certain that the mass of it would be found on the two wings, with a solid reserve placed apart in the centre behind the infantry of the front line. Oddly enough, there was only one battle in Napoleon’s whole career where the entire army was drawn out, as if for review, in a perfectly symmetrical array, and that was the least fortunate of all his actions—Waterloo. Critics have often speculated why he took such trouble, contrary to his wont, in the orderly deploying of the host that attacked Wellington, and some have supposed that he did so with the object of frightening his enemy into retreat by such a display of force, for he would have preferred to tackle Wellington in the running fight of pursuit, rather than to attack him deliberately in the excellent position which he had taken up.

Napoleon may be said to have been an opportunist in his orders of battle, and to have taken the special needs of the particular action into account, without any stereotyped or favourite sort of formation. He placed his cavalry simply where he thought it would best serve his purpose. At Austerlitz the great mass of it was behind his left wing, massed under Murat. Putting aside the light cavalry attached to the separate army corps, all the mounted men save one division of dragoons, which supported the weak right wing of the army, and the Guard cavalry in reserve to the rear, were concentrated in this one quarter—not less than 96 squadrons, nearly 15,000 men, were thrown into the battle, ultimately, in this one direction, smashing up the Russian right wing, while Soult and Bernadotte’s infantry were piercing the centre. But concentration of this kind was by no means the Emperor’s sole system. Not unfrequently he used cavalry drawn out in line to link the advance of infantry columns which would otherwise have been too far separated, and liable to be taken in flank by irruption of the enemy.

At Essling and at Eylau his centre, during great part of the action, consisted of cavalry deployed in this fashion. At Ligny his whole right was composed of Grouchy’s reserve cavalry, almost without any infantry support, who “contained” for the whole day one of the three army corps forming Blucher’s host, without ever committing themselves to serious action. At Waterloo, on an entirely different system, the main mass of the cavalry was distributed equally in two bodies, behind the front line composed of the deployed infantry of Reille’s and D’Erlon’s corps. Only the corps cavalry of those two units was on the wings. Quite a different array to this was that of Wagram, where the main force of cavalry was about equally divided between the two wings, leaving little more trian the Guard cavalry and one division of cuirassiers behind the centre—a disposition not unlike that of an old-fashioned battle à la Frédéric, which resulted in there being not enough cavalry in the centre to exploit the victory, when Macdonald’s famous column finally won the battle, by breaking through the middle point of the Archduke Charles’s long line.

The only point in which Napoleon’s battle arrays are all more or less similar is that he so arranged his cavalry that great masses of it could co-operate for those heavy attacks, far on in the day, which he specially practised. Even at Waterloo, where the cavalry was more equally distributed along the line than in any other of his actions, he did not employ it in a scattered fashion, but brought all the squadrons of his right centre (Milhaud) across the Brussels road westward, to employ it along with the cavalry of the left centre (Kellerman) in an attack on the single section of Wellington’s line which he had designed to pierce through, so that 12,000 sabres finally acted in a mass on one front of not much over three-quarters of a mile.

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