本帖最后由 装甲掷弹熊 于 2011-3-18 21:35 编辑
先摘录点评兵种对抗的几段
骑兵对骑兵
Cavalry versus Cavalry
Do these instances tell us anything about the character of mass cavalry combat at Waterloo? Both popular impressions and copy-book drill - and the initial charges in the two great series, British and French, were launched copy-book style - supposed cavalry versus cavalry charges to mean the meeting of dense formations at high speed. Moreover at least two British cavalry officers maintained that this was what happened. Waymouth, of the 2nd Life Guards, informed Siborne that 'the (Heavy) Brigade, and the Cuirassiers too, came to the shock like two walls, in the most perfect lines' and Wood of the 10th Hussars, writing to a friend, was at pains to refute ' (what) the English papers say, "The Light Dragoons could make no impression on the French Cuirassiers." Now our regiment rode over them. Give me the boys who will go at a swinging gallop for the last seventy yards, applying both spurs when you come within six yards. Then if you don't go through them I am much mistaken.' Wood, however, did not actually complete his charge, being badly wounded before it got under way, while Waymouth was really retailing the witness of a comrade. Common sense tells us, too, that cavalry coming 'to the shock like walls' and 'at a swinging gallop' will achieve nothing but a collapsed scrummage of damaged horses and men, growing bigger as succeeding ranks are carried on to the leading ones by their own impetus. A little inquiry reveals, in any case, that formations were much less dense and speeds much lower than casual testimony, and certainly than the work of salon painters, implies. The British cavalry were too few in number to cover much expanse of ground and though French cavalry formations were fairly dense at Waterloo, their leaders attempted, even during the charges into the 'funnel' between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, to keep an interval between the squadrons, while regiments and squadrons themselves were formed in line. This meant that the 120 men of the squadron were formed in two ranks, one close behind the other, but that the succeeding squadron rode, if possible, 100 yards behind. In theory the squadron could be manoeuvred at a gallop, say over twenty miles an hour, but it would very shortly lose cohesion if it was, as stronger horses outstripped weaker; and in any case distances and gradients on tbe Waterloo field make it seem unlikely that high speeds were achieved with any frequency. The 'classic' encounter of the 2nd Life Guards and the French Cuirassiers, described by Waymouth, was as near as anything seen during the battle to a straightforward collision, in that the two bodies met head-on and in motion. But the French had come a long way, over 1,500 yards and the last stretch uphill; while the British, though having a shorter distance to cover, had had to negotiate a succession of obstacles - first the road on the top of the ridge, ' too wide to leap, and the banks too deep to be easily passed' (Waymouth), and then 'the enclosure of the farm of La Haye Sainte' - before they could get to the French. Acceleration into a 'swinging gallop' by either side appears, under the circumstances, to have been an unlikely conclusion to their advance. Indeed, Waymouth reveals that the ' shock' took the form of a 'short struggle' with swords, and that it was success in the sword fight which allowed the British to penetrate the French line. In other words, the two lines must have been almost stopped dead when they met, and the British able to penetrate the French line because they found or created gaps in it.
Confirmation of this surmise can be found in the testimony of other witnesses. Morris, a sergeant in the 73rd, relating his view of events during the great French cavalry attacks of the afternoon, writes that 'the Life Guard boldly rode out from our rear to meet [the Cuirassiers]. The French waited, with the utmost coolness, to receive them, opening their ranks to allow them to ride in.' Consent - the vital precondition for single combat proper - is thus made to appear equally necessary if cavalry formations were to fight each other in any effective fashion. When they did so, of course, they did not fight as formations, but as individuals or small groups. Morris continues his account with a description of the sort of fighting to which this 'opening of ranks' and 'allowing entry' led. 'I noticed one of the Guards, who was attacked by two cuirassiers at the same time... he disposed of one of them by a deadly thrust in the throat. His combat with the other lasted about five minutes.' We are back with single combat again.
Indeed, unless cavalry action resolved itself into a complex of single combats, it was pretty harmless to the participants. Mercer recalls watching two lines of French and British light cavalry skirmishing with each other on ground between the armies, on the evening of 17 June. 'The foremost of each line were within a few yards of each other - constantly in motion, riding backwards and forwards, firing their carbines or pistols, and then reloading, still on the move... I did not see a man fall on either side; the thing appeared quite ridiculous; and but for hearing the bullets whizzing overhead, one might have fancied it no more than a sham fight.' He has an equally dismissive account of cavalry's occasional mutual harmlessness even in the performance of its true shock role. It refers to an encounter during the afternoon cavalry battle. 'A Regiment of Cavalry (I think of the German Legion) ... formed up to attack a [French regiment]. The French, immediately aware of this danger, wheeled to the left into line, and, both advancing to the charge, literally came into collision at full gallop. The shock appeared tremendous, yet there was no check, each party passing through the other, and closing their files immediately on being clear.' In another account, his explanation of what occurred is still more revealing:
There was no check, no hesitation, on either side; both parties seemed to dash on in a most reckless manner, and we fully expected to have seen a horrid crash - no such thing! Each, as if by mutual consent, opened their files on coming near, and passed rapidly through each other, cutting and pointing, much in the same manner one might pass the fingers of the right hand through those of the left. We saw but few fall. The two corps re-formed afterwards, and in a twinkling both disappeared, I know not how or where.
The cavalry in both these cases, however, were fresh - so, too, more importantly, were their horses - and had kept their formation and their heads. Cavalry could, it must be emphasized, suffer very grievously at the hands of other cavalry when nerves failed, horses were blown or weapons markedly unequal. The French Lancers, armed with a weapon which gave them an advantage in reach of many feet over their British opponents, frequently killed or wounded opponents without being touched themselves. The Cuirassiers who gave way before the charge of the Life Guards near La Haye Sainte sought an escape down the sunken road and 'the 1st Life Guards made great slaughter amongst the flying Cuirassiers who had choked the hollow way' - a ready-made demonstration of Ardant du Picq's view that the most dangerous course in war is to retreat when in close contact with the enemy. It produces a situation the exact opposite of that obtaining in single combat by consent, and appears to stimulate an almost uncontrollable urge to kill among those presented with a view of the enemy's backs. It is this urge which made it so perilous for cavalry to overextend a charge, finding themselves at the end of it alone or scattered, on blown horses, and deep within the enemy's positions. Hence the heavy casualties suffered by the Scots Greys who, carried away by success and inexperience, rode right across the valley separating the two armies after their repulse of d'Erlon's attack. 'Our men were out of hand,' wrote one of the staff officers present. Every officer within hearing Exerted themselves to the utmost to reform the men; but the helplessness of the Enemy offered too great a temptation to the Dragoons, and our efforts were abortive. It was evident that [his] reserves of Cavalry would soon take advantage of our disorder ... If we could have formed a hundred men we could have made a respectable retreat, and saved many; but we could effect no formation, and were as helpless against their attack as their Infantry had been against ours. Everyone saw what must happen. Those whose horses were best, or least blown, got away. [Most of the rest] fell into the hands of the enemy ... It was in this part of the transaction that almost the whole of the loss of the Brigade took place.
The Greys in fact lost nearly 200 men and over 200 horses in this short space of time, chiefly through being ridden down by French Lancers, who spared no one, mounted, unhorsed or even disabled. Ponsonby, the Brigade Commander, was among those killed, and lost his life because of a false economy. He had left his best charger, worth far more than the government compensation fund would pay if it were killed, behind the lines and chosen to ride instead an inferior hack. The French Lancers caught him struggling to safety over heavy ground, easily rode him down, and speared him to death.
Cavalry versus Artillery
骑兵对炮兵
Cavalry were also vulnerable to other cavalry which happened to be accompanied by horse artillery, even if the two bodies of horsemen were otherwise evenly matched. The 7th Hussars, in the retreat to Waterloo, had charged a body of French light cavalry 'but could make no impression ... we did not give ground, nor did they move. This state of things lasted some minutes, when they brought down some Light Artillery'; these guns knocked over several of the British and swiftly persuaded their commander to order the rest away. On the battlefield itself, however, mobile artillery was not usually a threat to cavalry, being too valuable to risk in detached action, when it might easily be captured. At Waterloo, as in most other pitched battles of the period, the artillery draught horses were sent to the rear once the guns had been brought up, and the gunners then fought where they stood, usually among or slightly in front of the infantry. This static artillery, for, all that its crews looked so exposed to charging swordsmen, was one of two agents of destruction from which the cavalry had most to fear (the other being steady infantry formed in square), and the British gunners at Waterloo were certainly responsible for a very large proportion of the deaths and wounds which the French cavalry suffered. Rudyard, an officer of Lloyd's battery of 9-pounders, wrote of the afternoon attacks to Siborne:
The Cuirassiers and Cavalry might have charged through the Battery as often as six or seven times, driving us into the Squares, under our Guns ... In general, a Squadron or two came up the slope on our immediate front, and on their moving off at the appearance of our Cavalry charging, we took advantage to send destruction after them, and when advancing on our fire I have seen four or five men and horses piled up on each other like cards, the men not having even been displaced from the saddle, the effect of canister.
This extract invites a short commentary, since it is highly descriptive of what the artillery did during the battle. Rudyard is telling us that guns were posted some distance, perhaps twenty or thirty yards, in front of the infantry (a position unthinkable a hundred years before or after); that they were firing a multiple projectile, consisting of 'a number of small cast-iron spheres in a sheet metal can which disintegrated on discharge' (canister), at an operational range of about a hundred yards or less; that the French who survived the salvoes, of which they had to stand perhaps two or three as they approached, actually rode past and round the guns, whose crews fled before them to the shelter of the infantry squares; the cavalry, then subjected to the square's musketry, lost whatever impulsion it had left and, on seeing the British cavalry to the square's rear, turned and retreated., leaving the guns, which it had no means of removing, where they stood, to be re-manned by their crews and used against the backs of the cavalrymen as they withdrew. Why the artillerymen were able to stand by their guns so long is explained by Mercer in another place: he estimated the pace of the Horse Grenadiers' advance as a brisk trot ('none of your furious galloping'), noted that the impact of his battery's first salvo, fired at sixty yards, brought it down to a walk, and that the second and subsequent salvoes piled up such 'heaps of carcasses' that the survivors either could not get past them, or, if they did, fell individually victim to his fire and that of the squares to his rear. Nevertheless some escaped by spurring their horses between the guns and riding through the intervals between the squares and back again; while others died without coming within striking distance of the artillery, for Mercer's guns were double-shotted, and the round-shot which followed the canister in the same discharge smashed deep into the French formation, striking several horses or men in succession. Little wonder that 'the survivors struggled with each other' and that he 'actually saw them using the pommels of their swords to fight their way out of the milce ... pushing furiously onward, intent only on saving themselves ... until the rear of the column, wheeling about, opened a passage, and the whole swept away at a much more rapid pace than they had advanced.' Even so they were not at once out of danger. The gunners in front of the 14th Regiment who, 'at the [French cavalry's] approach, had thrown themselves at the feet of our front rank men, returned to their guns and poured a murderous fire of grape into the flying enemy ... When the smoke cleared ... the matted hill was strewed with dead and dying, horses galloping away without riders and dismounted cuirassiers running out of the fire as fast as their heavy armour would allow.'
Thus the cavalry versus artillery fight at Waterloo turned out to be almost. wholly one-sided affairs. Even when the French horsemen notionally took possession of the British guns, they were unable to remove them, having with them neither harness nor limbers with which to tow them away. That they did not try, or succeed in, spiking them either (that is, driving a spike into the touch-hole by which they were fired) has always caused puzzlement; the probable explanation is that the act required a man to dismount, something which no cavalryman, whether out of braggadocio, stupidity, caste-pride or self-preservation, seemed prepared to do in the face of the enemy.
Cavalry versus Infantry
骑兵对步兵
How much more successful were the cavalry's encounters with infantry? To this a clear-cut answer is more difficult to offer, for such encounters were more varied in character. Cavalry could do infantry very great harm, using 'harm' in a military rather than human context.
The regiments of the Union Brigade which charged the flank of d'Erlon's Corps, at a moment when it was under fire and attempting to deploy from column to line, reduced it to a purposeless crowd in a few instants. 'As we approached at a moderate place,' wrote Evans, a staff officer of the Brigade, 'the fronts and flanks began to turn their back inwards; the rear of the Columns had already begun to run away ... In going down the hill the Brigade secured about 2,000 prisoners, which were successfully conducted to the rear ... The enemy fled as a flock of sheep across the valley - quite at the mercy of the Dragoons.' Shelton, an officer of the 28th Regiment who followed these Dragoons on foot, 'distinctly saw them charge the heavy Reserve Column, and break it. The greater number of the French threw down their arms when broken by cavalry.' (Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons saw these muskets later 'in two lines nearly as regularly as if laid on parade'.) Some did not. 'Many,' recalled Marten of the 2nd Life Guards, 'threw themselves on the ground until we had gone over, and then rose and fired.' But in neither case did many of these infantrymen suffer personal injury. To lie down was usually enough to put one beyond a swordsman's (though not a lancer's) reach, and those who shammed were already safely behind the cavalry, whose attention was focused on the enemy lines to which their impetus was carrying them; those who offered a genuine surrender had it readily accepted, for this was early in the battle, when there was clearly much fighting ahead, and no time or motive for casual slaughter. At the end of the day, however, isolated bodies of infantry whose nerve had gone and who could no longer expect support from the rest of the army, suffered wounds and death when trying to escape or even surrender. Duperier, a ranker-officer of the 18th Hussars, came late in the evening on 'a regiment of infantry of the franch, nothing but "vive le Roy", but it was too late beside our men do not underlined franch, so they cut a way all through till we came to the body of reserve when we was saluted with a voly at the length of two sords. We tacked about and had the same fun coming back.' Murray, commanding the regiment, got in among a mob of the fugitives, one of whom thrust at him with his bayonet: 'his orderly was compelled to cut down five or six in rapid succession for the security of his master'; not a story, one feels, which would convince a court of inquiry.
But even that late in the day French infantry which 'would stand' could see off British cavalry without trouble. Taylor, of the 10th Hussars, saw, at about the same time as Duperier was massacring the unfortunate French turncoats, 'about thirty of the 18th... gallantly, though uselessly, charge the square on the hill, by which they were repulsed'. And indeed if the story of Waterloo has a leitmotiv it is that of cavalry charging square and being repulsed. It was not absolutely inevitable that horsemen who attempted to break a square should rail. The 69th Regiment, caught before it had properly formed square at Quatre Bras, had had three of its companies sabred by French cavalry, and lost one of its colours (the disgrace was the greater because it had also lost a colour at Bergen-op-Zoom the year before). And at Garcia Hernandez, in 1812, Bock's Dragoons of the King's German Legion had broken clean into a regiment of French infantry standing securely in square and delivering fire. What happened on that occasion, however, helps to explain why the event had no counterpart at Waterloo - was, indeed, one of the rarest occurrences in contemporary warfare. It came about because one of the dragoon horses, moving on a true course and at some speed, was killed in mid-stride, and its rider with it; continuing the charge for several paces, the pair of automatons did not collapse until directly above the bayonets of the front rank. Carrying these down, they opened a gap through which a wedge, and then the remainder, of the regiment followed. The dead horse had done what living flesh and blood could not; act as a giant projectile to batter a hole in the face of the square. The feat of breaking a square was tried by the French cavalry time and again at Waterloo - there were perhaps twelve main assaults during the great afternoon cavalry effort - and always (though infantry in line or column suffered) with a complete lack of success. Practice against poorer troops had led them to expect a different result: a visible shiver of uncertainty along the ranks of the waiting musketeers which would lend their horsemen nerve for the last fifty yards, a ragged spatter of balls over their heads to signal the volley mistimed, then a sudden collapse of resolution and disappearance of order - regiment become drove, backs turned, heads hunched between shoulders, helot-feet flying before the faster hooves of the lords of battle; this, in theory, should have been the effect of such a charge. This process was more nearly realized in many places along Wellington's front than the magnitude of the ultimate cavalry debacle suggests. 'The first time a body of cuirassiers approached the square into which I had ridden' (it was the 79th Regiment's) wrote a Royal Engineer officer, 'the men - all young soldiers - seemed to be alarmed. They fired high and with little effect, and in one of the angles there was just as much hesitation as made me feet exceedingly uncomfortable.' Morris, a sergeant of the 71st, testifies to the power of the psychological shock-waves emitted by these mounted onsets. 'A considerable number of the French cuirassiers made their appearance, on the rising ground just in our front, took the artillery we had placed there and came at a gallop down upon us. Their appearance, as an enemy, was certainly enough to inspire a feeling of dread - none of them under six feet; defended by steel helmets and breastplates, made pigeon-breasted to throw off the balls. The appearance was of such a formidable nature, that I thought we could not have the slightest chance with them.' In every case, however, almost exactly the same sequence of events served to bleak the impetus of the cavalry's advance and to transfer the psychological advantage from attackers to defenders. First of all, the cavalry changed direction or decelerated or even stopped as they came within effective musket-shot of the square. Sometimes they did so because the protective artillery, or a well-timed and well-aimed volley, had knocked down horses in the leading ranks. Leeke, of the 52nd, describes them coming on 'in very gallant style and in very steady order, first of all at the trot, then at the gallop, till they were within forty or fifty yards of the front face of the square, when, one or two horses having been brought down, in clearing the obstacle they got a somewhat new direction, which carried them to either flank... which direction they all preferred to the charging home and riding on to our bayonets . Eeles, of the 95th: kept every man from firing until the Cuirassiers approached within thirty or furry yards of the square, when I fired a valley from my Company which had me effect, added to the flit of the 71st, of bringing so many horses to the ground, that it became quite impossible for me Enemy » continue their charge. I certainly believe that half of the Enemy were at that instant on the ground; some few men and horses were killed, more wounded, but by far the greater part were thrown down over the dying and wounded. These last after a short time began to get up and run back to their supports, some on horseback but most of them dismounted.
Sometimes the stop happened because the leaders hoped to trick or panic the square into firing before its shots could take proper effect, meaning to ride in during the fifteen-second delay necessary for re-loading. The Duke himself recalled watching squares which 'would not throw away their fire till the Cuirassiers charged, and they would not charge until we had thrown away our fire'; but, as he knew, the trick would not work against soldiers, like the British, who were trained always to keep half the fire of the regiment in reserve. Sometimes the French stopped simply because they feared to go forward, often when they had already entered the narrow, deadly killing ground immediately in front of the square and the safer course would have been to go on rather than back Reynell, commanding the 71st, refers to these 'repeated visits from [the] Cuirassiers. I do not say attacks, because these Cavalry Columns on no occasion attempted to penetrate our Square, limiting their approach to within ten or fifteen yards of the front face, when they would wheel about, receiving such fire as we could bring to bear upon them, and, as they retired, en passant, that from the neighbouring square.'Injurious though it was for cavalry to flinch or turn away from squares which bad fire in hand, the results of riding round them, Red Indian fashion, or loitering with intent to terrorize were worse. For the infantry's fear of the cavalry seemed dissipated by the smoke of their first discharge. The Royal Engineer, sheltering with the 79th, noted how quickly moral superiority shifted:
No actual dash was made upon us. Now and then an individual more daring than the rest would ride up to the bayonets, wave his sword about and bully; but the mass held aloof, pulling up within five or six yards, as if, though afraid to go on, they were ashamed to retire. Our men soon discovered they had the best of it, and ever afterwards, when they heard the sound of cavalry approaching, appeared to consider the circumstance a pleasant change (from being cannonaded)!
Macready, of the 30th, remembered that his men 'began to pity the useless perseverance of their assailants, and, as they advanced, would growl out, "here come those d—d fools again'". Confident in, even elated by their ability to outface the French squadrons (at Quatre Bras, after their second dispersal of a French charge, there had been 'a good deal of laughter and handshaking' in the 30th's square)' the British infantry began to inflict on them heavy casualties whenever they were foolish or badly enough led to linger within range. Saltoun, commanding the Guards' light companies, ordered them to fire at a group of French cavalrymen who then 'rode along the front of the 52nd with a view of turning their right flank, and were completed destroyed by the fire of that regiment.' The 40th Regiment, alerted by an experienced sergeant who called out, 'They are in armour. Fire at the horses,' brought down Cuirassiers in swathes. ' It was a most laughable sight to see these guards in their chimney armour - trying to run away, being able to make little progress and many of them being taken prisoner by those of our light companies who were out skirmishing.'
This reference to casualties among the horses should remind us that the French troopers were engaged in a dual battle of wills - not only with the British musketeers but also with their own mounts. Gronow, an intensely acute observer in one of the Foot Guards' squares, describes how 'the horses of the first rank of cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders, came to a standstill, shaking and covered with foam, at about twenty yards distance ... and generally resisted all attempts to force them to charge the line of serried steel'; much the same thing happened in front of Mercer's battery, where a ' confused mass stood before us ... vainly trying to urge their horses over the obstacles presented by their fallen comrades.' As the casualties increased and the going on the slope up to the British positions deteriorated, and as the litter of carcasses grew to form a tide-mark around the edge of the squares' killing zones, it became more and more difficult to force the horses to face fire. The less resolute French units drew off a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards, leaving their skirmishers to loose off their pistols at the British infantry, or trot up and down firing their carbines. It was a perfectly fruitless, almost pathetic proceeding. Indeed, the question poses itself to the modern reader whether sympathies - given that sympathy is an appropriate emotion - over the conflict between cavalry and squares are not misplaced. On the face of it, the predicament of the storm-racked battalions (Mercer's analogy for the attack of the cavalry on Wellington's chequerboard of squares was that of 'a heavy surf breaking on a coast beset with isolated rocks, against which the mountainous wave clashes with furious uproar, breaks, divides and runs, hissing and boiling, far beyond up the adjacent beach') is breath-catching.
But, as Jac Weller has shown by careful analysis of formation-widths, the number of cavalrymen in an attacking line was always much lower than the number of infantrymen with whom their onset brought them face to face. If the average strength of a battalion was about five hundred, it would, formed four deep, present in square a face about sixty feet across, opposing about 140 men to the approaching French cavalry. They, because of the greater bulk of their horses, could present no more than about eighteen men on the same width of front, with another eighteen immediately behind, and it was these thirty-six who would take the brunt of the square's fire. But even though they would suffer worst by the first volley, the full strength of the squadron to which they belonged was only a hundred and twenty; and if its moral power failed to disarm the infantry - as it always did fail at Waterloo - then each horseman theoretically became the target for four infantrymen. Viewed like this, 'Here come those d—d fools again' seems an appropriate judgment on the character of the conflict. |
发表于 2011-3-18 21:30:49
提升卡
变色卡
发表于 2011-3-19 22:21:01
发表于 2011-3-22 11:26:21
楼主
