Proponents of the lance insisted that due to its longer reach vis-à-vis a saber, the lancer would have a decided advantage over the swordsman through intimidation as the two sides rushed toward each other. The weapon’s morale affect is the greatest, de Brack extolled, and its thrusts the most murderous of all the armes blanches [sharp-edged cavalry weapons]. The Prussian cavalry authority Jean Roemer pointed to instances where lancers had been successful against opponents equipped only with sabers. These included General M.I. Platoff’s six hundred Cossacks of the Don who held off, for a short time, the French at Eylau; Denizoff’s Cossack Guards who severely punished the French cuirassiers at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813; and the French lancer regiments under Colonel Bro that did so much damage to the British Household and Union cavalry brigades at Waterloo that the two units were rendered hors de combat.

However, to be truly effective against the saber, regardless of de Brack’s and Roemer’s opinions, the lancer had to be an expert with his weapon — and his opponent had to be a less-experienced horseman.

Nevertheless, seldom were the lancer units highly skilled, and even when they were there was no guarantee that the lancers would prevail. In his memoirs, Baron Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin de Marbot discussed a classic example of the saber winning out over even the best lancers. Marbot, colonel of the French 23rd Chasseurs a Cheval at the Battle of Polotsk on August 26, 1812, found his light cavalry regiment, armed only with sabers, face to face with well-trained, veteran lancer units of the Russian Cossack Guard Cavalry. He reported that during the encounter:

My regiment met with more resistance from the Cossacks, picked men of large stature, and armed with lances fourteen feet long….I had some men killed and many wounded; but when, at length, my troopers had pierced the bristling line of steel, all the advantage was on our side. In a cavalry fight, the length of lances is a drawback when their bearers have lost their order and are pressed closely by adversaries armed with swords which they can handle easily, while the lancers find it difficult to present the points of their poles.

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Thus, the perceived advantage of the lance as a tool that could accurately strike its intended target before the rider came within saber range could never be fully realized or exploited against enemy cavalry, even under the most favorable conditions for its use.

However, if the protagonist favoring the lance found himself on shaky ground when it came to fighting against cavalry with sabers, he stood on firm terrain when the discussion turned to lancers engaging infantry. In 1815, Sergeant James Anton of the 42nd Highlanders found himself facing French lancers at the crossroads town of Quatre Bras. Describing his feelings afterward, he said, Of all descriptions of cavalry certainly the lancers seem the most formidable to infantry, as the lance can be projected with considerable precision and with deadly effect without bringing the horse to the point of the bayonet….

Napoleon’s marshal Auguste Frederic Louis Viesse de Marmont, a veteran corps commander of the Grande Armée, expressed the same feeling when he noted after Waterloo that The lance is the weapon for cavalry of the line, and principally for those destined to fight against infantry. He added that cavalry armed only with sabers will be stopped by enemy bayonets before they can strike a blow themselves, and thus will be repulsed, whereas the same line of cavalry, furnished with a row of pikes [lances] which stand out four feet in front of the horses will rout the foot soldiers.

Of course, lancers unfortunate enough to be subjected to sustained musket fire from the target infantry, especially infantry formed into squares, faced almost certain defeat unless they had cannon or infantry support. If the soldiers in a square could not fire, however, they were also easy prey to the lancer. Such was the case at the Battle of Dresden, when a heavy rain the night before the battle of August 17, 1813, made it impossible for the infantry to discharge their flintlocks. The mud was so deep that the cavalry could attack only at a quick walk. With about fifty lancers leading his brigades in a third assault on two huge Austrian infantry squares, French General M.V.N. de Fay Latour-Maubourg’s troopers came within a few feet of the enemy, who could not fire their weapons. The lancers methodically proceeded to spear their way into the squares, breaking them completely.

The same situation presented itself at the Battle of the Katzbach River, August 22-26, 1813, fought in a heavy downpour. The 23rd Chasseurs a Cheval, armed with sabers, repeatedly attempted to break a Prussian infantry battalion’s square and failed, even though the Prussians could not fire a single round at the French. The impasse was resolved when the French 6th Lancer Regiment crushed in the front of the Prussians at the first charge because of the advantage of their longer weapon.

Lancer enthusiasts particularly appreciate the destruction of Sir John Colborne’s British infantry brigade of Stewart’s 2nd Division at the Battle of Albuera on May 16, 1811. Three of the four battalions were sent forward in line formation during a violent storm. Blinded by rain and deafened by the thunder and clatter of hail, the English were surprised when the 1st Vistula Lancers and the 2nd Hussars struck their flank just as they were being raked in front by musket and cannon fire. Within minutes, Colborne’s command lost fifty-eight officers out of eighty and twelve hundred of its sixteen hundred enlisted men. Their attackers, numbering only eight hundred, suffered two hundred casualties.

Nevertheless, those dismissive of the lance argued that only when the infantry could not respond with musket fire due to poor weather, or on those rare occasions when infantry found themselves surprised and unable to form a square, was the lance effective against steady troops. They even suggested that the lancers attacking Colborne’s flank caused less loss than did the enemy fire to their front.

Regardless of the examples of lancer usefulness and uselessness during the Napoleonic wars, European militaries continued to employ lancers after 1815. Great Britain raised its first lancer regiments in 1816, using them against the indigenous peoples of the empire. When World War I broke out in 1914, all the major combatants fielded lancer formations. Of course, they quickly discarded them when barbed wire and machine gun fire prevailed on the battlefields.

Just as in the seventeenth century, the evolving technology of war doomed the lance, along with the horse-borne trooper who carried it into battle.

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This article was written by Arnold Blumberg and originally published in the Winter 2006 edition of MHQ. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History today!

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