ion grasped the secret, viz. the unconditional obedience
of the horse to its rider, on which his success had depended. Neither
was it possible under the prevailing social conditions to secure the old
stamp of horse, or the former attention to detail on the part of men and
officers. In France, owing to the agricultural decay of the country,
suitable remounts for charging cavalry were almost unobtainable, and as
this particular branch of the army was almost exclusively commanded by
the aristocracy it suffered most in the early days of the Revolution.
The hussars, being chiefly recruited and officered by Alsatians and
Germans from the Rhine provinces, retained their individuality and
traditions much longer than the dragoons and cuirassiers, and, to the
very close of the great wars, we find them always ready to charge at a
gallop; but the unsteadiness and poor horsemanship of the other branches
was so great that up to 1812, the year of their destruction, they always
charged at a trot only, considering that the advantage of superior
cohesion thus gained more than balanced the loss of momentum due to the
slower pace.

Generally, the growth of the French cavalry service followed the
universal law. The best big horses went to the heavy charging cavalry,
viz. the cuirassiers, the best light horses to the hussars, and the
dragoons received the remainder, for in principle they were only
infantry placed on horseback for convenience of locomotion, and were not
primarily intended for combined mounted action. Fortunately for them,
their principal adversaries, the Austrians, had altogether failed to
grasp the lesson of the Seven Years' War. Writing in 1780 Colonel Mack,
a very capable officer, said, "Even in 1769, the cavalry could not ride,
could not manage to control their horses. Not a single squadron could
keep its dressing at a gallop, and before they had gone fifty yards at
least ten out of forty horses in the first rank would break out to the
front," and though the veteran field marshal Lacy issued new
regulations, their spirit seems always to have escaped the executive
officers. The British cavalry was almost worse off, for economy had
reduced its squadrons to mere skeletons, and the traditional British
style of horsemanship, radically different from that in vogue in France,
made their training for combined action even more difficult than
elsewhere. Hence the history of cavalry during the earlier campaigns of
the Revolution is