Watching this happen on the film Return of the King, I was reminded that in various historical novels and perhaps some legitimate Napoleonic histories, cavalry cannot break a square of infantry. True or not?
Thanks.
It’s not an absolute. With enough cavalry, you can break any formation of infantry (see Mongol Hordes for examples). The question is “Are you willing to pay that big a price?” Your cavalry is pricey and valuable, and likely to object to being squandered. So it is more cost-effective in both time and resources to attack infantry with infantry, or better yet artillery rather than cavalry.
It is a subject of some debate. Some historians claim to have found instances of horsemen taking out squares. The counter argument is that the squares in question were not fully or improperly formed. It all gets rather academic.
AS A GENERAL RULE, cavalry could not break squares formed by well-trained infantry.
Most histories of the Battle of waterloo discuss in detail how Napoleon’s repeated cavalry attacks on Wellington’s infantry squares were a very significant reason why Napolion lost.
I’ve wondered what happened if a suffciently suicidal heavy cavalryman (plate-armored knight) simply rammed his mount at full gallop into a row of pikemen. Knight dies, horse dies, yes. But could he crush a big enough hole in the ranks to make a difference?
One of the arguments I’ve heard is that horses will not willingly run over people.
It would depend on the dicipline of the infantry, romans , spartans, etc. The square holds, if the square is formed out of peasant levies, they can be spooked into running.
Declan
Actually, as I understand it, the problem was that the horses would not charge bayonets. Who said animals is dumb?
John Keegan addresses this to some extent in “The Face of Battle”, IIRC.
Basically, unlike Hollywood accounts, in real life, cavalry horses won’t charge sharp objects, whether they be medieval pikes or a square of bayonets.
Then you still have the Dead Knight and Horse combo in the way.
If you picture the scene with pointy sticks in Braveheart with some guys waving blankets in the background, it’s pretty easy to picture how difficult it would be to train a horse to jump into that mess.
What is about infantry squares that make 'em so deadly to cavalry?
Funny, I was watching it and had the exact same question.
With regards to deadliness Reply, I believe that horses will see the square, and instead of running through it, take the gap to either side of it. Then the infantry/archers/musketeers shoot the cavalry off of their horses as they run between squares.
Usually it was the positioning that interposed the square in front of the cav, giving the infantry, which actually should be pikeman, longer pikes than the lances of the cavalry breaks the charge. You can only do so many charges before you run out of horses do to exhaustian of the beasts.
Put a square in the middle of no where and you just get them flanked by the cav.
Declan
With a square, there is no flank and no rear. The only thing the cav have to charge are the long and pointy bits (pikes or, later, long rifles with long bayonets on them), which as stated horses are notably (and very sensibly) keen to avoid. Most casualties that cav caused where due to their ability to sweep around the flanks and charge home where there were essentially no defenses.
It’s also important to note that even in the early Middle Ages, you didn’t want to charge your knights at infantry. You would probably win (technology being what it was and infantry rarely being that disciplined) but it was risky and wise commanders avoided it.
Infantry could carry weapons longer than you had, and even if you did crash into the formation, you’d be dead. But they often stuck enough pointy things and had enough mass backing the front lines that you wouldn’t break the mass, and even the front guys would get nothing mre than bruises.
The other reason is that you’ve got no way to control things. The entire purpose of cavalry is to control the battle through getting superior force at the right point to break or harry the enemy. Charge them at a mass of enemies, and you lose that. They just get stuck fightng in a morass and lose their great advantages.
We still do the same thing today with rifles, essentially. A rifle team has to fix the enemy in position so that they can be outflanked. If they aren’t fixed, the enemy will just turn to face the assault, defeating the purpose.
The job of the cavalry is to outflank an already fixed infantry unit, cutting them to ribbons. The unit can’t turn without the infantry they’re engaged with doing them in. In the case of infantry squares, they’re not really properly fixed by a friendly force. If they were, they wouldn’t be in squares, but in a line.
Moral of the story- in modern warfare, like in old, you don’t charge an enemy that’s facing you.
A friend who did Civil War (ours, not yours) re-enactment as a cavalryman commented that you can’t make a horse charge onto a forest of pikes because it just won’t do it, it gets to within a few yards and goes “whoa, hang on a moment” and puts the brakes on, so all you can do is ride round and round the outside, Red Indian style, trying to knock the heads off the pikes with your sword.
There are a few instances of cavalry breaking infantry squares. In the Napoleonic wars I think the best known occasion was Garcia Hernandez
Summary: French infantry in square 1 held fire for too long. A dead horse slammed through the wall of men, letting in the following riders. Survivors of square 1 panicked and ran to square 2, where they messed up the formation enough to allow more horsemen in.
Don’t know about a knight, but in the Napoleonic era, sometimes squares would be have a gap broken into them by a horse getting shot by a gunpowder weapon very close to the square suddenly falling and tumbling into the square.
My understanding of Napoleonic warfare is that you form squares against cavalry, but lines against riflemen or cannon (to stop multiple casualties from a single missile).