Lancieri di Novara at Pozzuolo del Friuli, 1917 (XX0096)

The Lancieri di Novara at Pozzuolo del Friuli, 1917

The Lancieri di Novara fought alongside the Genova Cavalleria in the same two-day action at Pozzuolo del Friuli, on 29 and 30 October 1917. Where the Genova is remembered for the charge, the Novara’s part in those hours is the story of what a lancer regiment had become by the fourth year of an industrial war.

A regiment older than Italy

Raised in 1828 in the army of the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Lancieri di Novara predates the unified Italian state by more than thirty years. Regiments of this kind carried their own institutional memory, their own traditions of recruitment and their own reputation — which is why the Italian cavalry regiments are remembered individually rather than as a single arm.

The lance, and when it stopped mattering

The lance had been reintroduced across European cavalry in the nineteenth century as a shock weapon against unbroken infantry. Against magazine rifles and machine guns it was useless, and by 1917 Italian lancer regiments fought mostly dismounted, using their horses to reach a position quickly and then fighting on foot with carbines. The regimental name persisted long after the weapon it referred to had stopped being decisive.

Two regiments, one action

Pozzuolo was fought house by house and hedge by hedge, with the two regiments holding adjacent sectors of the same position. The task was identical for both: force the advancing columns to stop, deploy and fight, and so delay them long enough for the retreating Italian army to cross the Tagliamento. Both regiments were effectively destroyed in doing it.

Rearguard actions and how they are judged

A rearguard is not asked to win, and its success cannot be measured in ground held — Pozzuolo was lost, as planned. It is measured in hours imposed on the enemy, and in what those hours allow to happen elsewhere. That is an unusual thing to commemorate, and it is why actions like this one occupy a particular place in the regimental histories of the Italian cavalry.

The last years of the horse

Italian cavalry regiments were still mounted into the Second World War, and Italian units carried out some of the last cavalry charges in European history on the Eastern Front. Pozzuolo sits close to the end of a very long institutional tradition, at the point where its remaining usefulness — speed of movement over broken ground, in a situation that had stopped being a stable front — was briefly relevant again.