British Light Cavalary (Nations in Arms 1800-1815)

Tactics have been defined as "the exercises and manoeuvres of an army, or corps, or detachment when engaged with the enemy". In most cases, par­ticularly with European armies these are relatively easy to explain, for it has long been a self-appointed task of military theoreticicians to discuss them in great detail, and usual for the armies involved to follow certain basic principles.
With the British army of the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century however, there is a problem. Although theoretical tactical ideas undoubtedly existed, the central authorities lacked the power to enforce their implementation within individual regiments, which were still controlled by their respective Colonels. Various attempts were made in the 1790's to impose uniformity of drill and training, some of which were moderately successful. However this did nothing to destroy a pattern of tac­tical development which had begun in the eighteenth and was to persist well into the twentieth century. The depressing feature of this pattern was that the tactical lessons of a particular campaign were invariably forgotten once peace returned, necessitating an often costly process of re-learning in the next war. The cost was far higher if, in addition, the regiments of a specific arm imagined themselves to be capable of a tactic for which they had not been designed and stressed that tactic above all others, despite experiences which illustrated their mistake.
The history of British light cavalry from its origins in the mid eighteenth century to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 fits into this general pat­tern exactly. The first permanent light dragoon units were raised in 1759 and were designed as fast moving adaptable mounted infantry, capable of reconnaissance, skirmishing and the pursuit of a broken enemy. As such they should have been ex­tremely useful, but as the century progressed the original functions were gradually overlaid by a false and rather paradoxical emphasis upon shock action. This meant that when the Peninsula War began in 1808 light cavalry officers regarded the charge as the only tactic to be effected and totally ignored the specialist roles for which their units had been originally intended. The tactical history of such units between 1808 and 1815 is therefore one of im­provisation and the forced re-learning of basic skills under arduous combat conditions. The problems encountered and the degree of success with tactics like the charge, pursuit of a defeated enemy, covering of a retreat, reconnaissance, skirmishing and outpost duty form the main themes of this book. Any conclusions which are drawn, however, have to be tempered by the fact that as soon as the French Wars ended, the old pattern reappeared. The charge was restored to its former pre-eminence and the hard won lessons of the Peninsula and Waterloo campaigns were promptly forgotten. So the circle continued.