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Prussian Cavalry 1806-1871: The Search for Roles

The European cavalryman of the nineteenth century has a wide variety of negative historical images. In an increasingly democratic age, the unabashedly aristocratic tone of the horse soldiers has sharpened academic antagonism. Blue-blooded, waspwaisted, moustachioed, innocent of thought on subjects more profound than horses and women, the cavalryman can be portrayed as a comic figure. Sinister overtones are added by historians who describe officers obsessed with shock tactics, with the charge as a way of life, incapable of comprehending or responding to the changes wrought in warfare by the Industrial Revolution. From Balaklava to the "colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery" of the First World War, cavalry generals are held answerable for wasted human lives1. Viewed at closer range, however, a new image begins to emerge. The nineteenthcentury cavalryman, like his footslogging comrades, was caught in a double bind imposed by technology. Until the development and refinement of the internal combustion engine, cavalry was not a battlefield anachronism. N o other really mobile arm existed. The question was not whether cavalry should be abolished, but how it could best function given the geometrically-increased range and accuracy of modern weapons2. This search for roles involved more than the ability to predict the future itself a task less easy than is generally assumed when military technology is involved. It also required willingness to learn from past experience and avoid past mistakes. Institutions do not exist in a vacuum, and the problem of combining the skills of the historian and the futurologist to produce a viable military force are clearly illustrated by the experiences of the Prussian cavalry between 1806 and 1871. From the disaster of Jena to the triumph of Sedan, it struggled to do more than fill a niche in the order of battle, to be more than a system of outdoor relief for the lesser aristocracy. In the process it developed an increasingly coherent vision of the role and the nature of modern cavalry. That the vision was inaccurate in many respects, incomplete in many others, does not mean that it can be dismissed as the work of fools or charlatans. Nor can the circumstances contributing to its development be dismissed in a footnote. At least as significant, however, is the cavalry's continued willingness to modify its functions in light of its own experience. The adjustments may have been practical rather than theoretical, marginal instead of drastic. Their existence nevertheless reflects a degree of flexibility generally denied cavalry in general and Prussian cavalry in particular.