The Royal Dragoons at Waterloo: Red Coats against Cuirasses (NAP0096)

The Royal Dragoons at Waterloo: cloth against steel

Red coats, gilt helmets with black horsehair crests, straight swords up. And in the left foreground, seen from behind, a French cuirassier — breastplate, backplate, the regimental number on his blue shabraque. Look at the two men and the whole plate explains itself: one of them is wearing armour and the other is wearing a coat. On the ground, a dropped musket, a calfskin pack, a roundshot.

The British had abolished the cuirass a century earlier

By the 1700s British heavy cavalry had given up body armour: it was expensive, it wore out horses, and the prevailing view was that speed and a big horse were worth more than eight kilos of plate. France kept it, and built entire regiments around it. At Waterloo the two doctrines met on the same field, and the plate puts them a metre apart.

What a cuirass actually did, and what it did not

It turned sword cuts and spent musket balls, which is not nothing when the fight is a mêlée at arm’s length. It did nothing whatever against artillery — see the carabinier of NAP0252, whose breastplate is in a museum with a cannonball hole through it. And it cost: a cuirassier plus armour needed a heavier horse, which needed more forage, which needed more transport.

How you beat a man in a breastplate

You do not cut at his chest. You go for the face, the throat, the armpit, the thigh — or you unhorse him and let the ground do it. This is why the point mattered so much to the men in red: a thrust finds the gaps that a cut cannot. The heavy sword of 1796 had been criticised for its blunt tip, and many were ground to a point before the campaign.

The Royals took an Eagle that day

In the great charge of the Union Brigade the regiment captured the eagle of the 105th Line — one of the two taken at Waterloo, the other falling to the Scots Greys who rode beside them. An eagle was not a flag: it was the object the Emperor had handed the regiment in person, and losing it was understood as the end of that regiment’s honour.

Six years later, the British put the armour back on

The Household Cavalry received cuirasses in 1821. Whatever the men in this picture thought while they were fighting armoured men in cloth jackets, the army drew its conclusion afterwards — which is the most honest verdict available on the question the plate poses.