The Charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo, 1815 (NAP0070)

The charge of the Scots Greys, Waterloo 1815

Red coats, black bearskin caps, sabres up, and under every man a grey horse. In the foreground the French infantry they have just ridden over — blue coats, packs, muskets dropped in the rye. The Greys are going forward at the moment everything is still going right, which lasted about twenty minutes.

The horses are the regiment

The name is not decorative. The regiment had been mounted on grey horses since the 1690s, and kept doing it for two centuries, which meant a permanent commitment for whoever had to find remounts: greys are a minority in any horse population, and replacing casualties after a hard campaign was a standing headache. It survived because a regiment that can be recognised at a mile is worth the trouble.

Three kingdoms in one brigade

At Waterloo the Greys formed part of the Union Brigade with the 1st Royal Dragoons and the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons — English, Scots and Irish. The name was the point: the brigade was a deliberate statement about a United Kingdom barely fifteen years old at the time. It is the kind of political object that armies build without saying so out loud.

The charge that worked

They went in against d’Erlon’s corps as it crowded onto the ridge, already disordered by the climb and by musketry. Heavy cavalry hitting infantry that is neither in square nor in formation is a slaughter, and it was: the French attack collapsed, and the brigade took two imperial eagles, one of them by Sergeant Ewart of the Greys. At that moment the British left had been saved by a single charge.

And then it did not stop

Instead of rallying, they rode on — up the far slope, into the French gun line, on blown horses, more than a kilometre from their own position. French lancers and cuirassiers, fresh and formed, came down on them from the flank. The Union Brigade lost close to half its strength in the counter-attack that followed, and effectively ceased to exist as a fighting formation for the rest of the day.

Why it happened, and why it kept happening

The easy explanation is indiscipline. The real one is mechanical: a horse at the gallop under a heavy man in ground like this is finished in a few hundred metres, and cavalry that has just broken an enemy is scattered by definition — the men who need to rally are strung out, deafened, and full of adrenaline. Rallying after a successful charge is the hardest thing heavy cavalry ever has to do, and British heavy cavalry failed at it more than once in this period. The grass in this picture is the reason it is so hard: tall rye, soft ground, and horses that are already spent.