Cavalry and chariots against infantry

[Domen]

The Polish-Lithuanian hussars of the seventeenth century are a very interesting case, but I have not read much on them and will never learn the appropriate languages to read the primary sources. So thank you for the references to these Polish(?) scholars such as Dr. Sikora! I think that one problem that we Anglophones have is that we grow up with stories of infantry defeating cavalry, so we tend to underestimate cavalry.

On the other hand, we Eastern Europeans perhaps tend to overestimate cavalry. While the truth is most likely somewhere in the middle between both points of view. Indeed most source references to the history of Polish-Lithuanian hussars are in various Eastern, Northern and Central European languages, as well as Turkish (basically in languages of those who used them and those who fought against them).

There are some exceptions of course - like the diary of Patrick Leopold Gordon (born 1635 - died 1699), which is written in archaic English (or Scottish maybe?). He was a Scottish national and a general of the Imperial Russian army, who fought against Polish-Lithuanian forces in numerous battles:

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/riiss/diariesofpat...rdon.shtml

You might be interested in Henrik Olsgaard's account of the time that a good rider on a trained horse crashed into the Saxon shield-wall at the 2006 reenactment of Hastings (here). The rider thought that the infantry were going to part to let him through, and the infantry thought that he was going to wheel off at the last moment. Most of the horses refused to get close to the shield wall, but most of them had been recently hired so were not trained warhorses and not used to their riders.

Very interesting story. I have read a similar one (but with people being afraid of horses coming close to them - not inversely ) regarding the making of the movie "Waterloo":

"Extras playing British infantry panicked repeatedly and scattered during the filming of some of the cavalry charges. Attempts to reassure them by marking the closest approach of the horses with white tape similarly failed, and the scene was cut."

Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066549/trivia

This is about the famous scene of the French cavalry charge against British infantry squares. Or rather about the first planned version of that scene - in which horses apparently were supposed to actually hit the infantry, but extras playing infantrymen were too afraid of trying this.

I've read, that in reality some of those 26 British squares nearly got broken by French cavalry - and were saved only by counterattacks of returning British cavalry under Lord Uxbridge. Anyway - according to what I've read, it did not look like in this movie, and casualties of the British infantry were heavy, despite the fact that it repulsed French charges in supposedly-invincible square formations.

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Edit:

Yes - Dr. Radek Sikora is a Polish scholar. But he is active on a few English-language fora. If you see a user with nick "Radosław Sikora" on some history forum, be 99% sure that it is him. He has also published some English-language articles, including on his website (check the "Materiały" section):

http://radoslawsikora.republika.pl/