The 6th Inniskilling Dragoons at Waterloo, 1815 (NAP0066)

The 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, Waterloo 1815

Red coats, brass helmets with black horsehair crests, long straight swords, and on the rolled valises behind the saddle the regimental mark: 6 D. An officer to the right has his blade up. These are heavy cavalry in the 1812 pattern — the uniform that replaced the old cocked hat and made British dragoons look, deliberately, rather French.

A regiment named after a siege

Inniskilling is Enniskillen, in Fermanagh. The regiment traces itself to the companies raised there in 1689, during the war that followed the deposition of James II, and it carried that name for the next three centuries. Very few units are named after a place that small: it stuck because what happened there was the founding story the regiment told about itself.

The Irish third of the Union Brigade

At Waterloo the Inniskillings charged alongside the 1st Royal Dragoons and the Scots Greys. The brigade’s name says what it was for — English, Irish and Scots regiments brigaded together as a statement about a United Kingdom then barely fifteen years old. On the field it made no tactical difference at all; in London it made a great deal of political sense.

The sword, and the argument about it

That long straight blade is the 1796 heavy cavalry sword, and British officers complained about it for twenty years. It was built to cut, with a blunt hatchet point that made a thrust awkward, while French heavy cavalry favoured the point — a thrust kills more reliably than a cut, and a man run through does not get back up. British cavalry answered that a cut delivered from a big horse at speed ends the argument anyway. Both sides had a case, and the two swords are a good example of a weapon encoding a doctrine.

What the helmet was for

The crested helmet introduced in 1812 was not decoration either. Cavalry fought other cavalry with edged weapons swung downwards; a metal skull with a thick crest turns a cut that would otherwise open a head. It is also heavy, hot and expensive, which is why only heavy cavalry got one — and why the man wearing it is, by definition, a man the army had decided was worth protecting.