Horse Grenadiers of the Guard at Eylau, 1807 (NAP0062)

Eylau: the reserve spent at the right moment

Snow, flat white light, and no horizon to speak of. Black bearskins, dark blue coats, long straight swords; on the right an officer on a shabraque bordered in gold with the eagle embroidered on it, and beside him a trumpeter in crimson. In the foreground on the left a Russian lies in the snow next to his dropped musket. This is the same regiment as NAP0237 — and this time it is being used correctly.

What Lepic said, twice

Colonel Louis Lepic led the Guard horse grenadiers that day, and two of his remarks survive. Surrounded by Russians who called on him to surrender, he is reported to have answered: «Look at those faces — do they look as if they want to surrender?» And earlier, to his own men ducking under the roundshot: «Heads up! Grapeshot is not filth.» A regiment is partly made of things like that, and this one repeated them for a century.

The charge that had to be made twice

The Guard cavalry went through the Russian lines — and then had to come back through them to return to its own army. That is the part nobody imagines: a charge is not a one-way journey, and the return, on tired horses through troops that have had time to reform, is more dangerous than the arrival. It is also why cavalry that keeps going is cavalry that is lost.

Why it worked here

Eylau went wrong for the French almost immediately — a corps lost its direction in the blizzard and was destroyed in front of the Russian batteries, and for some minutes there was very little between the Emperor and the enemy. The heavy cavalry was committed precisely because the situation was desperate, which is the definition of a reserve: something kept back for the moment when there is nothing else.

The same men, eight years later, at Waterloo

🔗 At Waterloo this regiment charged unbroken squares for two hours, in an attack nobody had ordered, and ceased to exist as a formation — see NAP0237. Same regiment, same equipment, opposite outcomes. The difference is not in the men or the horses: it is entirely in the decision about when to spend them.

The snow is not weather, it is the subject

Eylau was fought in a February storm, and the paintings that leave the snow out miss the point of the battle. Powder is unreliable when wet, visibility comes and goes, and men who lie down wounded do not get up. The Russian in the foreground is being covered while we look at him, and by the following morning the field held something like forty thousand casualties from both armies.