Cossack Cavalry Charging in the Snow, Russia 1812 (NAP0090)

Cossacks in the snow, lance in hand

Three riders among the firs on fresh snow: fur caps with coloured crowns, coats that do not match one another — one purple, one brown trimmed with fur, one blue — sabres at the hip and, held out, the long blue-shafted lance. None of them is wearing a uniform in the sense that a French dragoon wears one, and that is exactly the subject.

Irregular cavalry

Cossacks were raised on a community basis — the Don, the Urals, the Bug — served under their own atamans, equipped themselves, and topped up their pay with the right to plunder. Against infantry in square or heavy cavalry in close order they were of little use, and the Russian command knew it. Their job was not the charge but everything around it: screening, scouting, cutting couriers, taking convoys, keeping an army from sleeping.

The lance is a cheap weapon

A long shaft held in both hands does not require the years of practice a cavalry sabre demands, and it keeps a dismounted or disordered man at arm’s length. It is the weapon of the pursuer, not of the man who breaks a line. Against a retreating column with open flanks and dead horses, it worked with frightening regularity.

Horses that eat what they find

This is the detail that decided the 1812 campaign more than any battle did. Steppe horses are small, hardy and used to foraging for themselves; French horses were large, selected animals that needed oats and rest. The cavalry of the Grande Armée was not destroyed in combat — it starved and froze, and once it was gone the army lost its eyes at the moment it was crossing a thousand kilometres of hostile country.

Why the retreat became a disaster

Between Moscow and the Berezina, Platov’s Cossacks and the partisan detachments almost never fought a battle. They simply made it impossible to stop. Men who fell behind did not come back, foraging parties did not return, convoys disappeared. An army that cannot halt to eat consumes itself — and this plate shows the men who operated that mechanism.