The Battle of Wagram: Charge of the 4th Cuirassiers, 1809 (NAP0234)

Wagram, 1809: the charge of the 4th Cuirassiers

Steel cuirasses over blue coats with red facings, brass helmets with crest and red plume, straight swords held out in front, an eagle in the middle of the squadron and the number 4 on the shabraques. At the centre, one man dressed unlike everyone else: the trumpeter, in red, on a white horse.

The trumpeter is not decoration

Once a charge is running, the voice carries nowhere. Command passes entirely through the trumpet: the rally, the change of direction, the halt. So the trumpeter has to be findable in one second among three hundred identical men — hence the reversed colours and, often, the light-coloured horse. It is a command system disguised as sartorial eccentricity.

What the cuirass does, and does not do

Seven to nine kilos of steel stop a cut, a badly delivered point, and a spent ball. They do not stop a musket ball at fifty metres and never claimed to. The real return on a cuirass is elsewhere: it makes the rider harder to kill in the mêlée that follows the shock, and it frightens whatever it is charging. A line of steel coming on at the gallop is an argument before it is a weapon.

What a charge like this is for

Almost never for breaking through. At Wagram — the largest battle fought to that date, over three hundred thousand men across two days — the heavy cavalry was sent in to buy time while an enormous concentration of artillery was brought into battery to open the Austrian centre. Twenty minutes bought by cuirassiers, paid for by cuirassiers, so that a hundred guns could get into position. That is what a charge is: a calculated expense.

The point, not the edge

Look at the blades: extended, not raised to strike. French doctrine preferred the thrust, using the heavy straight sword like a lance — a man run through goes down, a man cut sometimes keeps fighting. The British argued the opposite and sharpened for the cut. The difference comes down to one word, and you can read it in the position of the arms in this plate.