Investigations of a Dog

This is the first part of an analysis of the way cavalry fought in battles. It mostly focuses on the English Civil War, but I’ll be drawing some examples from other places and periods. To start with, I’m going to discuss a concept known as “shock”, which is very frequently mentioned in histories of cavalry tactics.

There are many variants of this concept, but they all generally imply that cavalry charges resulted in a collision between two tightly packed bodies of men and horses, with the losers ridden down by the speed and/or weight of the winners. This kind of thinking is very noticeable in one of the most recent military histories of the civil war, Malcolm Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (2004; ISBN: 0582772818). This is how they describe the Swedish tactics associated with Gustavus Adolphus (p. 34):

The charge was always made in a tightly packed formation… Close order turned the whole squadron into a single missile, maximising the shock of impact and preventing individual horses from turning away before contact.

The context makes it clear that Wanklyn and Jones believe this is how it actually happened. They use an even more emphatic metaphor to describe Oliver Cromwell’s tactics (p. 272, my emphasis):

At the next engagement, at Gainsborough two months later, both sides charged, but Cromwell’s men, although surprised, were able to deploy quickly from column into line while ‘keeping close order’, that is each man keeping cheek by jowl with his neighbour, thus creating an equine battering ram that would gain momentum as the horse picked up speed in the charge.

Time for my favourite Wick Murray quote again:

There is only one problem with this theory. It is wrong.

It’s really quite worrying that anyone could be repeating those old myths and cliches in 2004, because John Keegan convincingly refuted the whole idea of shock in The Face of Battle (first published 1976; I’m working from the 1978 Penguin paperback, ISBN: 0140048979). Jeremy Black has a point when he says we need to move beyond Keegan’s horizons, but there are apparently some military historians who haven’t even caught up with him yet. (I realise that I’m appealing to a metanarrative of progress in which some points of view are delegitimated just because they’re old, but in subsequent posts I’ll be showing that the shock issue isn’t really a simple binary opposition between new and old.)

In his analysis of Waterloo, Keegan points out that getting two solid walls of cavalry to collide with each other at speed would have been impossible for a number of reasons (pp. 147-151). Although I’m now suspicious of his appeal to “common sense” (at best intellectually lazy, and at worst a cover for insidious ideology), some rational deductions based on my empirical experiences (which include years of riding horses and watching equestrian sports, as well as studying documents which recount early modern battles) lead me to the same conclusion. Even at the best of times it’s incredibly difficult to arrange large numbers of horses into a solid straight line. When horses are packed close together and under stress, they are likely to kick and bite each other or back away. The more stressful the situation, and the more highly strung the horses, the worse it gets. The start of the Aintree Grand National, especially the notorious fiasco of 1993, would be a good example here, but I can’t find any video footage online. While 40 horses is a large field for a horse race, it’s a trivial number compared to civil war armies. The New Model Army had an establishment of 6,000 cavalry (not including officers), divided into regiments of 600, which were then divided into troops of 100. Imagine trying to get all of them into textbook formations.

You might get your horses standing more or less still in something like a line while waiting for the order to advance, but things would get even more tricky once you started to move as you would have to keep every horse going dead straight at exactly the same speed. From the mid-eighteenth century well-drilled infantry were capable of doing this by marching in step to the beat of a drum, but cavalry almost certainly didn’t have the necessary degree of control over their horses. Well trained horses and riders can do dressage to music, but getting that kind of skill and experience in a force of 6,000 on top of weapons training and with constant attrition seems unlikely, and being able to carry it out under fire seems even more unlikely. Terrain would further disrupt charges. Going uphill would tire the horses more quickly, while walls, hedges, ditches, sunken roads, furze bushes, and even rabbit holes were all potential obstacles. Many horses might be tired from marching, poorly fed, and suffering from diseases.

Assuming the two bodies of cavalry even got near each other and were going at any kind of speed, shock obsessed cavalrymen could have tried to steer their horses towards enemy horses in order to batter them down. But horses aren’t like cars or tanks, they are living creatures with minds of their own. They tend to have a strong and justifiable fear of crashing into solid objects, causing them to try and lunge away from threatening objects or stop dead before they get to them (I once had to go to hospital with concussion because of this, but anyway…). In any case, if horses could be made to crash into each other head on, it would just end up with both horses dead or crippled (which basically means being shot anyway). More speed or weight wouldn’t increase your chances of survival, it would just make the collision more deadly for both sides. This bit isn’t conjecture: it’s basic Newtonian physics.

The idea that fleeing infantry could be “ridden down” is no more plausible. When Anmer collided with Emily Davison during the 1913 Derby, he fell over (watch film of the incident). His jockey was injured in the fall, and the horse was lucky to escape with only bruised shins. This is not really what you want to happen to your cavalry if you’re trying to win a battle.

Considering that the best case outcome would be equal losses on both sides, shock starts to look undesirable as well as unattainable. Maybe you could pursue an attritional doctrine of a horse for a horse, but that would be counterproductive. During the First Civil War, troop horses usually cost between £5 and £10 each (some were even more valuable), with saddles starting out at £2.10s in 1642 and falling to 15s by 1646. In contrast the price of an infantry musket went from £1 to 10s in the same period (see Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death, 2000, ISBN: 0750914963, p.72). Frank Tallett wasn’t exaggerating when he said that cavalry were “ruinously expensive” (War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1992, ISBN: 0415024765). Civil war armies didn’t always have the money to pay for enough remounts, and schemes to get them without paying proved unsustainable. Losses of horses from gunshots, disease, starvation, exhaustion, lameness, and theft were difficult enough to make up.

You have to wonder how many people with military experience actually believed that shock could and should happen. Was it just something that was made up by theorists who were out of touch with reality? In the next post I’ll be looking at how drill books said cavalry should fight.

Bibliography

1. Peter Edwards, Dealing in Death (Sutton, 2000).
2. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (Penguin Books Ltd, August 1978).
3. Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe (Routledge: London, 1992).
4. Maclolm D. G. Wanklyn and Frank Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Pearson: Harlow, 2005).