For those who might not want to bother with a dictionary, an anachronism is an error in computing time and a thing out of harmony with the present. It suddenly dawned on me the other day that I was guilty of perpetrating a real humclinger of anachronistic folly - if there is such an expression! To elaborate, in our wargames here both Tony Bath and I are very keen on cavalry, we both like the panache, the 61an, the dash and everything else that goes with the mounted arm and, as a result our forces are often heavily out of proportion in their cavalry strengths. When I was forming my Franco-Prussian War armies, I organized twenty-four infantry regiments for each of the two countries but found that, so fascinating were the types and uniforms, I had no less than eleven cavalry units per side! Take the American Civil War - what do we find? Large forces of cavalry taking off on long flanking marches, in which they destroyed supplies, bridges, and the like, dismounting to fight with Spencer carbines if necessary. I don't suppose that many of the casualties at Brady Station, possibly the biggest cavalry affair of the war, were caused by sabers! And take the big battles, at Gettysburg there was little cavalry action except on the fringes and some miles away; at Antietam, Shiloh, Chancellorsville and the rest - cavalry conspicuous by their absence but in our Civil War battles each force ALWAYS has some cavalry who charge and melee with infantry in great gusto! And the Franco-Prussian War - Von Bredow's charge at Mars-la-Tour was probably the last successful cavalry charge in Western European warfare and it was only as successful as it turned out to be because they managed to approach to within a few hundred yards in a depression! The French cavalry were slaughtered by infantry fire at Sedan where the Cuirassiers of the Guard were also murdered at Vionville. I suppose that British cavalry did something in the 1880's although they appear to have dropped a real clanger at Omdurman through not realizing that there was a dervish-filled nullah hidden from them! So, back to where we began - we don't use our cavalry properly, do we? We are really having a glorious old Napoleonic time with them about 75 years too late just because we like it better that way. And that is the crux of the argument I suppose and governs the fact that we use them that way because it appeals to us and will continue to do so for the same reason! On the other hand, there does seem to be a case for working our some sort of rules to cover the use of cavalry in their proper role of scouting, covering a retreat or harassing one. I think, talking out of the top of my head, that if one had to allocate a certain amount of strength of one's cavalry strength to moving ON THE MAP in a scouting role before one could find out the strength of the opposing force then it might be interesting - and realistic! By using the matchbox-map position system of Warwick Hales (described in the September 61 WGD I think) then small cavalry scouting forces could move on maps, draw away from each other when a cavalry patrol meets another patrol but be entitled to be told the strength of any other force they might encounter with a 20% variation either way to make for the natural differences in personal estimation of size. Back to MWAN #112 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 2001 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com