For thousands of years the cavalry charge was the most fearsome weapon on the battlefield: a wall of horses and steel that could shatter an army's nerve in minutes, or die uselessly against steady infantry. Here are seven of the most famous cavalry charges in history, the triumphant and the doomed alike.
Gaugamela, 331 BC. Alexander led his Companion cavalry in a wedge through a gap in the Persian line, straight at King Darius, and the huge Persian army broke.
Kircholm, 1605. The winged hussars charged downhill and shattered a Swedish army three times their size, breaking its cavalry in about half an hour.
Klushino, 1610. The hussars charged again and again through a long morning until the far larger Russian and mercenary army fell apart.
Vienna, 1683. Late in the day King John III Sobieski led thousands of Polish and allied cavalry, the winged hussars at their head, down into the Ottoman camp, in what is often called the largest cavalry charge in history.
Somosierra, 1808. Napoleon's Polish light horse charged straight up a defended mountain pass at the Spanish batteries and took the guns in succession.
Waterloo, 1815. Marshal Ney launched thousands of French cavalry in massed charges against the Allied squares; unsupported by infantry, they broke against the disciplined lines, a famous lesson in the limits of cavalry.
Balaclava, 1854. Through a mistaken order the Light Brigade charged down a valley into the wrong Russian guns, a doomed and futile charge immortalised by Tennyson's poem.
