description of a cavalry charge. this one is from the battle of Salamanca, 1812

1. A Cavalry Charge
from Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe’s Sword. Harmondsworth,England: Penguin Books, 1983
Horsemen. The Heavy Cavalry, newly come from Britain and eager to try out their
mounts and their long thirty-five inch straight blades, blades they said were too heavy for a
swift parry, but wonderful for killing infantrymen.
The sun had bleached the plain pale. The killing ground was beginning to fill, as a stage
might fill, but still it waited the spark that would fan into battle.... The French column was
being crumpled, thrown back [by British infantry volleys]....
The French battalions recoiled. They were outnumbered, outgunned and outgeneraled.
They had thought they were the vanguard of a march, and found they were the front line of
a battle, and their defeat was about to become a disaster.
Sharpe watched it. He hated the cavalry as all infantrymen hated cavalry and he was used
to seeing the British cavalry ill-led and ineffective, but Fate was capricious on that hot Span-
ish afternoon. The British Heavy Dragoons, some from the King’s own bodyguard, came on
the French from the north. They wanted to fight. They came up from their dead ground [a
hollow in the plain, where they had been hidden from the French] in two ranks, trotting to
keep their order, and their black horsetail plumes on their shining crested helmets rippled
as they moved. Sharpe, watching through the glass [his telescope], saw a shiver of light, a
glitter, and the swords were up and the horsemen were booted knee to booted knee.
He did not hear the trumpet that put them into the canter, but he saw the line go faster,
and still kept their discipline, and he knew what they must be feeling. All men fear the mo-
ment of going into battle, but these men were on their big horses and the smell of the pow-
der was in their nostrils and the trumpet was setting their blood on fire and the swords in
their hands were hungry. The French were not ready. Infantry can form square and the text-
books say that no cavalry in the world can break a well-formed square. They were falling
back from a massive infantry attack and they were firing and loading, cursing their General,
when the earth shook.

2. A thousand horses, the best horses in the world, and a thousand swords came from the
dust and the trumpets spurred the horsemen into the final charge, the moment when the
(over)
horse is released to run like the devil and the line will stagger and bend, but it does not mat-
ter because the enemy is so close. And the horsemen, who had been given a target that every
cavalryman dreamt of, opened their mouths in a triumphant scream and the great, heavy,
edged blades came into the French with all the weight of man and horse. The fear had
turned to anger, to craziness, and the British killed and killed, split the Battalions, rode
down the French and the huge blades fell and the horses bit and reared, and the French,
who could do no other, broke and ran.
The horses ran with them. The swords came from behind. The Heavy Dragoons drove
paths of blood and dust through the fugitives and there was no difficulty in killing.The
French had their backs to the horses so the swords could take them in the neck or over the
skull and the horsemen reveled in it, snarled at their enemies, and the swords had so many
targets. The musket sound had gone. It was replaced by the thunder of hooves, by screams,
and by the cleaving sound of a butcher’s block....
Sharpe watched from the hill, privileged as a spectator. And he saw the French left
chewed into fragments between the horses and the Third Division [of British infantry]. He
watched the Heavy Dragoons, superbly led, reform again and again, charge again and again,
and they fought till the troopers were too weary to hold the heavy swords.
Eight French Battalions had been broken. An Eagle had been lost, five guns [cannons]
captured, and hundreds of prisoners, their faces blackened by powder and their heads and
arms sliced by swords, had been taken. The French left had been split, shattered and massa-
cred. Now the horsemen were spent. Fate was not all on the British side. She had decreed
the death of the Heavy Dragoons’ General [Major-General John Gaspard Le Marchant (1766 –
22 July 1812) born of an old Guernsey Channel Island Anglo-French family, was one of the finest
British cavalry generals of his generation; he was also an intellectual soldier who had a great influ-
ence on the efficient functioning of the army he served in. He was instrumental in the founding of
the earliest British military academy and staff college; and saw active service in the French Revolu-
tionary Wars and the Peninsular War].who would never again be able to show the British cav-
alry how to fight, but their
job this day had been done.
Their blades were thick
with blood, they had ridden
to glory, and they would
remember the moments for-
ever when all a man had to
do was lean right, cut down,
and spur on.
Cornwell, pp.247-249