Cavalry

Historically, cavalry (from the French word cavalerie, itself derived from cheval meaning "horse") are soldiers or warriors who fight mounted on horseback. Cavalry were the most mobile of the combat arms, operating as light cavalry in the roles of reconnaissance, screening, and skirmishing, or as heavy cavalry for decisive shock attacks. An individual soldier in the cavalry is known by a number of designations depending on era and tactics, such as a cavalryman, horseman, trooper, cataphract, knight, drabant, hussar, uhlan, mamluk, cuirassier, lancer, dragoon, or horse archer. The designation of cavalry was not usually given to any military forces that used other animals for mounts, such as camels or elephants. Infantry who moved on horseback, but dismounted to fight on foot, were known in the early 17th to the early 18th century as dragoons, a class of mounted infantry which in most armies later evolved into standard cavalry while retaining their historic designation.

• Halfway down the trail to Hell,
  In a shady meadow green
  Are the Souls of all dead Troopers camped,
  Near a good old-time canteen.
  And this eternal resting place
  Is known as Fiddlers’ Green.
  • Anonymous, "Fiddler's Green" (c. 1689), st. 1, associated with the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division; reported as a favourite poem of Jonathan M. Wainwright by Duane P. Schultz, Hero of Bataan (1981), p. 433; see also "Fiddler’s Green – Poem", 1st Cavalry Division Association (2024)

• From their black tents, long files of horse, they stream’d:
  As when, some grey November morn, the files,
  In marching order spread, of long-neck’d cranes
  Stream over Casbin, and the southern slopes
  Of Elburz, from the Aralian estuaries,
  Or some frore Caspian reed-bed, southward bound
  For the warm Persian sea-board: so they stream’d
  The Tartars of the Oxus, the King’s guard,
  First, with black sheep-skin caps and with long spears;
  Large men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come
  And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares.
  Next the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south,
  The Tukas, and the lances of Salore,
  And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands;
  Light men, and on light steeds, who only drink
  The acrid milk of camels, and their wells.
  And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came
  From far, and a more doubtful service own’d;
  The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks
  Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards
  And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes
  Who roam o’er Kipchak and the northern waste,
  Kalmuks and unkemp’d Kuzzaks, tribes who stray
  Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes,
  Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere.
  • Matthew Arnold, "Sohrab and Rustum" (1853)

• At dawn the drums of war were beat,
    Proclaiming, “Thus saith Mohtasim,
  ‘Let all my valiant horsemen meet,
    And every soldier bring with him
  A spotted steed.’” So rode they forth,
    A sight of marvel and of fear;
  Pied horses prancing fiercely north,
    Three lakhs—the cup borne in the rear!
  • Sir Edwin Arnold, "The Caliph’s Draught"
  • Indian Poetry (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1904)

• [T]he cavalry will never be scrapped to make room for the tanks; in the course of time cavalry may be reduced as the supply of horses in this country diminishes. This greatly depends on the life of fox-hunting, for which the class of horse required in the cavalry is used.
  • Neil Haig, "Substance or Shadow", Journal of the Royal United Service Institution (March 1921), p. 119; quoted by Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), p. 386, in connection with the ideas of Liddell Hart on the development of armoured warfare after the First World War. Neil Haig's more famous brother likewise dismissed motorised weapons as mere "accessories to the man and horse".

• Hast thou not seen my horsemen charge the foe,
  Shot through the arms, cut overthwart the hands,
  Dying their lances with their streaming blood,
  And yet at night carouse within my tent,
  Filling their empty veins with airy wine,
  That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood,
  And wilt thou shun the field for fear of wounds?
  • Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 2: Act 3, Scene 2

• Если хочешь быть красивым, поступи в гусары.
  • If you want to be beautiful, enroll in the Hussars.
  • Kozma Prutkov, Fruits of Reflection (1853-1854), No. 16.

• ‘With burnish’d brand and musketoon
    So gallantly you come,
  I read you for a bold Dragoon,
    That lists the tuck of drum.’
  • Sir Walter Scott, "Brignall Banks"; reported in The Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1918 (1939)

• Half a league, half a league,
    Half a league onward,
  All in the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.
  "Forward, the Light Brigade!
  Charge for the guns!" he said:
  Into the valley of Death
    Rode the six hundred.
  • Alfred Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), st. 1

• There is no freer man alive than a captain of cavalry in command of his own troop.
  • General Jonathan M. Wainwright; reported in Duane Schultz, Hero of Bataan (1981), p. 434

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Cavalry