Cavalry and chariots against infantry

[Domen]

Dan, thank you for your link. However, I hope you do not mind me saying so but I can't help feeling Churchill's story is a bit neat, contrived and artificial, and many reactions on the site show that I am not alone in my scepticism.

Eduard,

That's because you are British.

And British military history suffers from notorious lack of cavalry being important in battles. British armies relied on infantry. You have only a handful, a terrible scarcity of accounts which confirm the efficiency of cavalry (but they are excellent - as I now realize), and that's why you are so suspicious, that you don't believe them because they are supposedly so few. But you overlook plenty of similar accounts from history of other armies - armies which relied heavily on cavalry, unlike the British army.

For me - as I live in Poland - this account of Churchill is reliable, because I've read similar accounts about charges of cavalry, that say similar things (and I've already quoted some of them in this thread). The account of Churchill is perhaps even more detailed than these Polish primary sources, as it describes the two charges performed by the 21st Lancers in 1880 in extreme detail (and then he also describes fates of individual soldiers, which I also like very much). That's what I want to say.

Also - please note this and take into consideration - the 21st Lancers were by no means experienced in mounted warfare. Churchill explicitly wrote, that it was their very first charge in that war!

Surely this lack of experience in mounted combat contributed to casualties in the 2nd clash.

The lesson from this is one - ignoring military history of other armies can lead to wrong judgments of accounts describing unusual events from history of your army (but usual for some other armies).

So pretty much what already Sean Manning noticed at the beginning of this thread:

Anglophone researchers tend to vastly underestimate capabilities of cavalry.