Introduction

It is the afternoon of 18 June 1815 and the place is the bloody, muddy field of Waterloo. A massive infantry attack has just been launched by over 15,000 French troops of D’Erlon’s I Corps against the left centre of Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch army. Napoleon’s Grand Battery of over seventy guns has done its job of softening up the Allied infantry and now it is all up to the French infantry, struggling gamely but resolutely up the slopes towards their objective. As they get to within thirty paces of the Allied infantry they halt and open fire, driving back their adversaries, slowly but steadily, until they themselves are brought to a standstill by veteran British infantry, thrust forward by their divisional commander, Sir Thomas Picton, himself a veteran of countless actions in the Iberian Peninsula. Deep within the dense French columns the sense of exhilaration turns to impatience, then to anxiety and then...panic and bewilderment. French troops are falling everywhere, and falling fast. Those at the head of the column are literally cut down where they stand whilst at the rear of the column the men begin to stream away like sand through an hour glass. But it is not the firepower of the British line that has inflicted such pain and panic on the French. No, it is something equally powerful and just as destructive – a full-blooded charge by 2,000 heavy British cavalry. These two brigades, the Household Brigade and the Union Brigade, will wreak so much havoc upon D’Erlon’s corps – some 2,000 killed and wounded, 3,000 prisoners and two Imperial eagles are among the haul – that, for the remainder of the afternoon, Napoleon will never again attack in any serious fashion against that part of Wellington’s main line. And yet up on the ridge of Mont St Jean the Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-Dutch army, the Duke of Wellington, watches with a mixture not of joy and satisfaction but of horror, frustration and probably an overwhelming sense ofdéja vu. True, he is mightily relieved at having seen off the first real French infantry attack to be thrown against him, but it is one which has left him seriously bereft of cavalry for the remainder of the day as a result of the heavy casualties inflicted upon the Household and Union Brigades during their successful charge.

It must have seemed to Wellington like a return to the bad old days in Spain and Portugal when it appeared to be almost impossible for his cavalry to achieve anything substantial without subsequently pressing the self-destruct button and undoing all of their previous good work, a malaise which set in from the very outset of the war in the Peninsula. Indeed, at Vimeiro on 21 August 1808, his first major battle was marked by a cavalry charge by the 20th Light Dragoons which saw the regiment lose its commander in a rash gallop into enemy lines in pursuit of beaten infantry