Cavalry vs Infantry Squares

[[GG] SeaDogg]

One of my favorite narratives from David Howarth's book:"Waterloo - A Near Run Thing" (1968) is his description of the action in the afternoon. Apologies to anyone who has read and/or knows this subject by heart. I think some of the guys out there may enjoy this, its both entertaining and informative. I'll go thru it in sections, I'm wondering if we can simulate this part of the battle in some detail so that its competitive for each side.
(If you have never read this book shame on you, its a classic, based on solid research by a great historian, and told entirely through the eyes of 17 British and French participants in the battle who left some of the best written accounts of the battle.)

This passage begins in the chapter appropriately titled "AFTERNOON" and is preceded by the fighting around La Haye Sainte.

"While that small attack began, flared up and failed, everyone in Wellington's army who could see across the valley was eagerly watching the French and wondering what the next move would be. Telescopes were passed from hand to hand. All the officers were anxious: the Prussians had been expected for the past two hours, but nobody had seen them yet, and the long bombardment was becoming as much as the toughest troops could stand. But what they saw, about four o'clock, surprised them so much that at first they could not believe it. A vast force of cavalry appeared, between the main road and the fields of Hougoumont; and yet there was not a movement to be seen among the enemy's infantry. It looked as if Napoleon was planning an attack by cavalry alone. But nobody had ever heard of an unsupported cavalry attack against an unbroken line of infantry and artillery- and the line, although it was shaken, was far from broken yet. The Duke, who expected brilliant generalship from Napoleon, thought he might be planning a huge outflanking manoeuvre to the west beyond Hougoumont, and he sent a brigade of his own cavalry out in that direction. But no; the cuirassiers, followed by lancers and horse chasseurs, were coming to the right of La Haye Sainte and to the left of Hougoumont. It could only be a frontal attack, against the part of the British line between the two farms, the part that had so far seen no fighting and done nothing but suffer inactivity under the gunfire. All along the British line, people discussed it in amazement, and everyone who knew the rules of tactics, from the generals down to the sergeants, formed the same opinion: Bonaparte was trying it too soon, he could not hope to break the line like that, it was suicide for his cavalry. The word went round with almost gleeful confidence- 'Prepare to recieve cavalry'- and the infantry, lying down behind the ridge, stood up and formed squares in a chequered formation like a chessboard. The Duke said, 'D amm it, the fellow's a mere pounder after all!" And he sent out a peremptory order to the gunners, who were on the forward slope: to maintain their fire as long as possible, and then take refuge inside the squares. Everyone waited."
~~~(pg 114-115)~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

Resuming pg 115-

~~~
"But the attack had not been ordered by the Emperor. Since the order to take La Haye Sainte, no word of any kind had come down from Rossomme. A grand cavalry attack, supported by the infantry of his Imperial Guard, had been in the Emperor's mind as the culmination of the battle, and he had said so to Ney and his Generals in the morning. But it was Ney who was now preparing the attack, and people ever since have wondered why he did it. He must have believed the Duke was on the point of retreating, otherwise it made no sense at all. He had thought so early in the morning and been wrong. Now, through the smoke from the bottom of the valley, the crest of the ridge must have seemed deserted again. And his scouts, if any found a clearer view, may have seen the deserters, the hordes of prisoners and wounded, and the men escorting them, all moving back towards the forest: some of the foremost pickets of the Prussian army saw that sight and mistook it for a general retreat. At all events, Ney sent back an aide to the cavalry generals, to order up a force of cavalry.

But then, through more misunderstandings, the movement seems to have grown into something far bigger than he probably intended. One of the generals sent forward two regiments, but another, more senior, stopped them and sent a message to Ney that he only took his orders from his own commander. Hey rode back himself, very angry - and no wonder. He overruled the general, and in his anger - perhaps because of it - he increased his order to include another six regiments of cuirassiers. 'En avance!" he is said to have shouted. 'The salvation of France is at stake!' And with him at its head, the entire remaining force of Napoleon's cuirassers began to move forward at a trot.

And then, from a hollow where they had sheltered near La Belle Alliance, the lancers and then the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, which was not under Ney's command but directly under the Emperor's, came streaming down to the valley behind the cuirassiers. Who ordered them to come? Certainly Ney did not. Perhaps they joined of their own accord in what promised to be a triumphal exercise. For Ney, when he saw them coming, there was only one possible explanation: that the Emperor had ordered it, that the Emperor knew the British were ready to break and had decided the moment had come for the grand attack. He may well have assumed that the infantry of the Guard, who were out of his sight, were also on the move. And so he found himself, sword in hand, in the proudest position a soldier of France could have filled, leading no less than 12,000 splendid horsemen in fullfilment, as he believed, of the Emperor's command, towards the greatest imaginable feat of martial glory.

But the Emperor, sunk in his moody seclusion on the mound at Rossome, had not given the order and was so far out of touch with events that he had no even see the movement of his cavalry."
~~~(pg116)~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

~~~(Continuing pg 116-118)~~~

"The British who watched were overwhelmed, not by fear but but honest admiration."... (Union troops at the Battle of Gettysburg 48 years later would express exactly the same admiration for the Southern troops crossing the field on July 3rd during 'Pickets Charge'- although that attack was not due to mistaken orders.)...
"..Everyone who saw the host of horsemen riding up the slope at a slow canter, flowing over the undulations of the ground, was struck by the same simile: the line of them glittered, Gronow wrote, like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. In that line were five hundred abreast, riding stirrup to stirrup, purposeful, deliberate, unhurried and utterly confident in appearance: and behind the front rank were at least a dozen other ranks of equal length. In the gap, a thousand yards wide, between the orchards of La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, the ranks contracted a little to avoid the musket fire, and some riders reported afterwards that their horses were lifted off the ground by the pressure. Beyond the farms they expanded again and climbed towards the gunners on the ridge, a spectacle of awful granduer, Gronow said, which nobody who survived the day could have forgotten in after life. And to the watchers they seemed to come in silence: the roar of the guns drowned every other sound.

Most of the infantry could not see them coming. The first thing they knew was that the French artillery suddenly stopped, and for that they were thankful: nothing else, they thought, could be so bad. But their own artillery just in front of them was still firing down the slope as fast as it could load. And then, battery by battery, that stopped too, and they saw the gunners running back for shelter. And in the silence, their ears still ringing, they heard the pounding of the hoofs and felt it through the ground, and then the shout of triumph as the horsement overran the guns; and the first of the lines, at a gallop now, came throught the gunsmoke over the top of the ridge.

It may have been more of a shock to the French than the British, a shock most of all perhaps to Ney: for the infantry knew that the cavalry was coming, but the cavalry did not know the infantry was there: at fifty paces, instead of a broken line of fugitives, they were confronted by solid squares of bayonets, the formation it was supposed no cavalry could break. But at those close quarters, the hearts of the British sank. To Gronow, it looked as if nothing could resist the shock of that terrible moving mass. To Sergeant Morris, thoroughly awake, (he had been surprised that he could nap intermittently while the troops lay down behind the slope prior to this)- it seemed the British had not the slightest chance. And to Mercer, watching from a distance, still in reserve, the infantry squares seemed to vanish under the flood of horsemen, and he could not believe there would be a man alive when the flood receded.

Afterwards, nobody in the infantry squares had a clear consecutive memory of what happened. They only remembered isolated moments, glimpses through the battle smoke, sudden piercing impressions of sound or smell or sight: the rest was a daze of excitement, fear or horror.

Tom Morris was in the front rank of his regimental square, kneeling with the butt of his musket wedged in the mud beside him, and the muzzles and bayonets of the other two ranks above his head. He clearly remembered the line of horses galloping down on him. They were only a dozen paces away, it seemed to him, when his rear rank fired a volley. Horses came crashing down, their riders fell, some dead, some wounded, some still able to unclasp their heavy armour and run away. The line of them broke, divided and veered aside, and galloped through the spaces each side of the square like a wave of the sea which breaks and eddies round a rock. Morris's rank, and the second rank behind him fired their volleys, and the sides of the square opened fire too as the horses went charging past them. ..."
~~~(pg 119)~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

~~~(pg 119)~~~
"Lieutenant Gronow remembered the strange sound of musket-balls against the Frenchman's breastplates, like a hail-storm beating on windows: the smell of burnt cartridges and the suffocating smoke: the moans of agony of dying men and horses which sickened and appalled him. As a born horseman, he felt for the horses - scarcely less intelligent that the men, he believed, and yet unable to understand the things men thought they were fighting for - now being slaughtered, kicking, struggling or lying mutilated and still in dreadful attitudes, and often raising their heads as if they were looking for their riders, hoping for help.

Yet to shoot at the horses, not at the men, had been the order in Sergeant Lawrence's square, which was next to Gronow's, because the rumour had spread before the battle began that the cavalry's armour was proof against musketry - and indeed it could turn aside a glancing shot. Lawrence was immunized to horror: when the horses fell, it seemed to him a most laughable sight to see the riders trying to run away in what he called their chimney armour. And what he remembered most clearly of the whole awful episode was a macabre joke. His captain, standing beside him, was blown to bits by a shell. A man close by, a notorious character who had always been in trouble with the captain shouted sarcastically, 'Hullo, there goes my best friend.' A lieutenant who stepped forward to take the captains place heard the shout but missed the point of it. 'Never mind,' he said sententiously, 'I will be as good a friend to you as the captain' - and seemed puzzled by the man's reply, 'I hope not, sir.'

Mercer, watching with his battery in reserve, believed the front line had been totally overwhelmed. He could not see any squares still standing on the ridge, only a few abandoned guns with their muzzles in the air. Everywhere in front of him were horsemen, crossing, turning and riding about in all directions through the smoke without any plan that he could understand. An artillery colonel who had joined him thought the situation was desperate. 'It does look very bad,' Mercer said, ' but I trust in the Duke, who I am sure will get us out of it somehow or other.' He would have said more but his men could hear him: he was thinking that if the final catastrophe had come, he would spike his guns and retreat with all his horses across country, avoiding the main road which he was certain would be blocked. The horsemen were beginning to come together in ranks and groups" it seemed the battery itself was about to be attacked. 'I fear all is over,' the colonel said, and this time Mercer had to agree. Suddenly, loud shouts to the westward drew his attention: two dense columns of infantry were marching down on him. They were not British: he thought they were French, but he held his fire. An officer rode out to see, came back and said they were certainly French. Mercer gave the order to fire - and then the colonel recognized them: they were Belgian. Relieved on that score, Mercer turned round to look at the ridge again. All the cavalry had vanished, and none of his men could tell him how or where.

Lord Uxbridge, with the cavalry lines behind the squares, perhaps had a clearer view than most, and a clearer idea, as a cavalry man, of what was going to happen. He saw the charging line of the French break up on the front line squares, close up again behind it and break again on the second line. He saw the French regiments mixing, growing confused and losing their momentum, cuirassiers, lancers and chasseurs riding round the squares in opposite directions. His own forces, excepting the Household and Union Brigades, were still in their battle lines. And he chose his moment for a counter-charge.

Morris was aware of the wave of horsemen receding, the movement turning back towards the ridge, and then he saw the Life Guards: and men of his regiment forgot themselves for a minute in watching a hand-to-hand cavalry battle which surged all round them, a bloody exhibition of horsemanship and swordsmanship. And what stuck in his mind ever after was a slashing backhand sword-stroke which sent a cuirassier's helmet flying with his head inside it, and the horse which galloped way with the headless rider sitting erect in the saddle.

Lord Uxbridge's cavalry had driven the French back, over the ridge again and down the slope. The gunners were running out of the squares, opening fire wherever the cavalry gave them a chance. And the moment the ridge was clear of Frenchmen, the French artillery also opened up: in the squares, the ordeal by cannon fire began afresh. But not for long. The French reformed their ranks and attacked again. "
~~~pg 121~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

~~~(pg 121~~~

"Nobody could remember afterwards how many times the cavalry came charging up the slope: officially, it was reckoned there were twelve attacks. Nor could anyone say how long it lasted: perhaps it was an hour and a half. In every charge, the same things happened: the French cavalry overran the guns, but then they lost formation when they eddied round the squares, and found themselves vulnerable to the musketry and whatever cavalry Lord Uxbridge could lead against them. Twelve times, the greater part of the Duke's artillery was in the hands of the French: yet every time, when the gunners ran out to their guns again, they found them in working order. Nobody, in the stress of the moment, thought this was strange. But afterwards, it seemed to most people the strangest thing in the whole of the battle. In all those twelve attacks, the French never thought of spiking the British guns. It would have been easy. All they needed was a handful of headless nails and a hammer: all they had to do was drive a nail down the touch-hole and the gun was out of action. It was common practice, and had been so for centuries. Artillerymen carried nails to do it with, either to spike the enemy's guns or to spike their own if they had to be abandoned: Mercer had thought of it as a matter of course. A couple of dozen mounted artillerymen riding up with the cavalry could have done it in a minute. Even the cavalry themselves could have broken the wooden sponge-staves, and that would have made the guns useless before very long. Or they could have harnessed horses to the guns and limbers and dragged them away, and Wellington's army would have been crippled.

But the French did none of these things. Perhaps again the Emperor was too far away to see the opportunity, and Ney was too closely involved. For Ney was on the ridge itself, furiously urging horsemen on to the task that was impossible - somebody saw him in a fever of frustration beating on the muzzle of a British gun with the flat of his sword. But the Emperor was only watching through his telescope. At first, he was reluctant to believe the horsemen he could see on the ridge were his own. Some of his staff, convinced that they were, thought victory was won. But he was wiser. 'This is a premature movement,' he said to his chief of staff, 'and it may have fatal results in the course of the day. ' Marshal Soult agreed, and put the blame on Ney. 'It is an hour too soon, but we must stand by what is already done,' the Emperor added. And he ordered forward another four brigades of cavalry - a useless addition: already there were so many horsemen on the narrow front that none of them were able to manuver. .."
~~~(pg122)~~~

[[GG] Lord Ashram]

Awesome reads, thanks for typing all this Dogg!

[[GG] SeaDogg]

We're not quite out of the scrap yet matey. I jus'need to restock me locker.

[[GG] SeaDogg]

Howarth documents the dramatic story-telling with concrete evidence in the form of more eye-witness recollections leading towards the dramatic end of this phase of the battle.
~~~(pg122)~~~

"Every time the French came thundering up the slope, the man next to Morris said, 'Tom, Tom here comes the calvary' - and every time he got the word wrong. Morris believed the French were turning the British guns round and firing at his square at point-blank range, and he even had a mental picture afterwards of French artillerymen with the slow matches in their hands. Nobody else reported that, and probably, he was mistaken. But shells and grape-shot certainly came from somewhere, blasting lanes right through the square. The men on both sides of him fell, the man who said 'calvary' got a ball through his thigh and died of it later, and Morris had a piece of cast iron which lodged in his cheek so that the blood ran down inside his clothes. The old captain, thirty-two years in the army and never in action before, was horribly frightened - so Morris said - and came to him several times for a drop of something to keep his spirits up: but he was blown to bits before the day was out. Yet every time the grape-shot blasted gaps in the square, the infantry closed them, dragging the wounded into the square and throwing the dead outside, before the cavalry could ride through them.

French lancers were killing what British and German wounded they happened to see. A mounted swordsman could not easily reach a wounded man who was lying on the ground, but a lancer could do it with horrifying ease, a mere gesture of the heavy lance as he rode by. It angered the British who saw it almost beyond control - such a blatant disregard for what they thought were the decencies of war. It angered them just as much when their allies did it. Gronow saw a colonel of the French Hussars fall under his horse, and while he struggled to free himself two Brunswick soldiers ran out of the neighboring square and took his purse, his watch and his pistols - and then they put the pistols to his head and blew his brains out. A shout of 'Shame!' went up from the British square. But the British, so illogically merciful to men who were wounded, were utterly merciless to anyone who was not, whatever his situation. Sergeant Wheeler, still in the sunken lane beyond the Nivelles road, saw nearly a hundred horsemen coming along it a a full gallop; they must have passed through the squares, and rather than ride back through the musketry fire were looking for a way round the end of the British line. But the lane had been blocked by branches. Unable to climb the banks, and unable to turn because of the others pressing on behind, they came to a halt jammed together as tightly as so many horses could be. Wheeler and his companions, manning the road block, fired a single volley. By the time they had loaded again and the smoke cleared, one man, and only one, was running away. One other was taken prisoner. For curiosity, Wheeler went to see what had happened to the rest. The men who were shot dead were lucky, he thought, for the wounded horses, plunging and kicking, were finishing what the musketry had begun. He could not see a single man he thought was likely to recover, and as he had other business to attend to, he left them to their fate.

It must have been after the first charge that Mercer was ordered up to the front line on the ridge. Sir Augustus Frazer, who commanded the horse artillery, came galloping up with his face as black as a chimney sweep's and his sleeve torn open by a musket shot. 'Left limber up, and as fast as you can!' he shouted. Mercer gave the order, 'At a gallop, march!' and away they went. (The Duke himself saw them from a distance: 'Ah! that's the way I like to see horse artillery move,' he said.) Frazer rode up with Mercer, and repeated the Duke's order: in a cavalry charge, do not expose your men but retire into the squares. Coming fresh to the ridge, Mercer noticed the air was suffocatingly hot like an oven, and above the roar of cannon and musketry he heard a humming noise, like myriads of black beetles on a summer night. He knew what it was, the cannon shot, the grape and musket balls. But his battery surgeon had never heard the infernal music before, and Mercer laughed at his astonishment. 'My God, Mercer, what IS that? What IS all this noise? How curious! How very curious!' And then, when a cannon shot rushed hissing past, 'There!' There! What is it all?'

The troop galloped into position between two squares of young Brunswick soldiers - only boys, Mercer thought. They were standing like logs while the shot made great gaps in their squares, and their officers and sergeants were physically pushing them together to close the gaps and thumping them to make them move. They seemed to be at a breaking point; if they see us run, he thought, they will run too. And he made up his mind to stick to his guns whatever happened, and neglect the order the Duke had given.

There was not more time to think: the cavalry were not a hundred yards away, coming out of the smoke at a brisk trot, Grenadiers in blue: their broad brown belts and huge muff caps made them seem gigantice. 'Form line for action! Case-shot!' he shouted, and the guns drew up behind a little bank, the muzzles hardly above the level of the ground. The first round brought down men and horses, the Brunswickers opened musket fire, and the other guns came into action one by one. Even to Mercer, the effect seemed terrible - the ground instantly covered by a struggling mass of wounded. It slowed the whole body of them to a walk, but still they came slowly on, the second and the third ranks picking their way through the bodies, his men reloading, ramming and firing again. Now at a few yards, every shot of the case his something: the leaders hesitated, turned aside and rode away to the flanks, exposing the ranks which were following. But the mass of horsemen could not suddenly retreat. Some turned about and tried to ride back through the body of the column: the guns fired again and again, the men who had ridden up so superbly became a mob, struggling with each other, using the pommels of their swords to fight a way through their own comrades, still falling in scores at every blast of shot. Some, desperate at finding themselve pent up before the guns, charged through them, and some were carried past by bolting horses maddened by their wounds. For a minute or two of appalling slaughter, the column was held there, imprisoned by its own size and weight: and then the rear ranks wheeled about and opened a passage, and the whole mass of it swept away down the slope and into cover. Mercer's men ceased fire, but reloaded and stood ready: beyond the ridge, they could still see the tops of the high caps of the enemy. This time, they double-loaded, with ball and case-shot on top of it, the shortest-range and most lethal of the artillery's devices. ..."

~~~(pg 126)~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

~~~(pg126)~~~

"There was warning of the next charge. A swarm of skirmishers ran up the hill, taking cover behind the corpses, and started a galling fire with muskets and pistols at scarcely forty paces. The artillery had no reply to that: they had no small arms, and had to stand still with their slow matches lighted and be shot at. Mercer saw them growing restive, and feared they would be goaded into letting fly and wasting ammunition; and it was then that he put his horse at the bank in front of the battery and rode up and down to quieten his men and draw the skirmishers' fire on himself, calling them by all the insulting names in French he could remember, and trusting to luck that even at forty paces none of them would hit him. And none of them did.

The squadrons came again, at the same steady trot, more numerous, it seemed, than ever: not a furious galloping charge, but a deliberate advance, at the measured pace of men determined to carry their way. Before, they had shouted and cheered: now they came in grim silence. And the gunners waited, also grim and silent. This time, a French officer rode ahead in a rich uniform, covered with decorations on the breast, and he alone was shouting and waving his sword: perhaps it was Ney. Mercer had a moment to reflect that only his own word was wanted to hurl destruction on that splendid show of gallant men and horses. He had condidence now. He let them come until the head of the column was fifty yards away - the rear of it still out of sight below the brow. Then he shouted 'Fire!"

The effect was instant and dreadful. Nearly the whole leading rank was scythed down by the case-shot, and the round-shot penetrated the column and carried confusion through the depths of it. The ground, already encumbered with the victims of the earlier charge, became almost impassable. But still the riders struggled over the rampart of dead and wounded, intent on reaching the guns. It was impossible. Some cleared everything and rode through the battery, some came plunging forward to fall at the muzzles of the guns; but the mass of them tried in vain to urge their horses over the gruesome obstacle. The officer, still shouting them on, was unhurt. But with the same confusion, the same struggle among themselves, the survivors retreated over the brow of the hill. And with their retreat, as ever, the French artillery began again.

'Da m'n it Mercer, a voice said, 'you have hot work of it here': Sir George Adam Wood, the veteran commander of the artillery, appeared through the smoke and shellfire. He was blinking, Mercer observed, as a man does when he is facing a gale of wind. 'Yes, sir, pretty hot,' Mercer said with soldierly modest, and began to give the general an account of what had happened. But he had to interrupt it - 'There they are again!' the leading squadrons once more were on the ridge, riding forward again at the same fatal spot. Mercer could admire their bravery and persistence, and almost feel sorry for them. It was folly to attempt the thing, he thought. For his gunners, it was child's play now to shoot them down, they could not possibly approach in good order across the wall of their own dead. Seeing them turn defeated to retire again, he was intoxicated by his own success and was crying 'Beautiful, beautiful!'' and flourishing his sword. Someone behind him seized his sword arm and said, 'Take care, or you'll hit the Duke.' - and the Duke himself rode past in front of the battery, which abruptly had to cease fire. He looked tired and serious, and seemed not to take the slightest notice of the remnants of enemy cavalry still charging about to find a way of escape."

~~~(pg 127)~~~

[[GG] SeaDogg]

Almost done here.
~~~ (pg 128 - 130)~~~

"Slowly, around the squares of infantry, a kind of stalemate came about, a state of affairs that nobody had seen before in battle. The cavalry was irresistible, but the squares were immovable. Even the Duke was astonished. 'We had the French cavalry walking about us as if they had been our own,' he said afterwards. 'I never saw British infantry behave so well.' The infantry in fact had learned by repeated experience to welcome the cavalry, because when they were there the artillery stopped, and the cavalry was much the less dangerous of the two. And they also learned that when they fired a volley, the cavalry tried to break through them before they could reload. So they stopped firing. On the other hand, the ground had been so cut up, and so encumbered with corpses, that the cavalry could not charge, or move at more than a trot. For the most part, they only walked, prowling around the squares and looking for any chance to break in. Often they halted, and French and British stood staring at each other, and neither side could think of anything fresh to do. Men in the squares came to know the faces of the French after seeing them so many times. The huge attack, with the thousands of men on each side, broke down into scattered individual contests, each watched by hundreds of men who had nothing to do. A cuirassier walked his horse right up to the point of Morris's bayonet, leaned out of the saddle and made a cut at him with his sword. Morris could not avoid it, and shut his eyes. When he opened them the man was lying in front of him on the ground: a rear-rank man had wounded and unhorsed him. There at Morris's feet he tried to kill himself with his own sword. It was too long. He dropped it and took a bayonet that was lying there, raised himself with one hand, put the point of the bayonet under his cuirass and fell on it.

That classis gesture of despair might stand as a symbol of Napoleon's cavalry, when at last its survivors rode down the slope and were ordered to abandon the attack. They had met their match. Thrown into the battle without the support of infantry, they had fought to the death with blind unquestioning bravery and achieved absolutely nothing, except to add vastly to the sum of suffering. For the Emperor, the attack had wasted time that he could not afford, and had crippled the cavalry for ever: its failure had opened the cracks in his army's resolution. For the British and their allies, the losses of life and limb had been as bad or worse: the insides of the squares were like hospitals or morgues. But they had gained the time that the French had lost and - which was more - they had proved their own courage to themselves. They had won the round, and were proud of it. Desperately few of them were left. But probably, after they saw the cavalry ride away, nothing short of annihilation could have shifted the remnants off the ridge."

[[GG]SirDabrowski]

That's awesome, SeaDogg.

I like how it gives individual accounts of different people. And it tells the story well: I can actually imagine the cavalry trotting around the squares, incapable of doing anything.

[[GG] SeaDogg]

Every one of Howarth's books are this good.
Want to get me started on his book about Trafalgar?

[[GG]SirDabrowski]

Trafalgar!?

Yes! Please!

SeaDogg, you're great.

[[GG] SeaDogg]

B'gawd oi'll niver make seamen out'n yew/

Hey Dabb, see if you can answer this: What did they used to call a soldier's wind?