French Cavalry Charge, Waterloo 1815 The most celebrated Reserve Cavalry charge of them all occurred in the late afternoon of 18 June 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo – the single most crucial day of the entire Napoleonic Wars. This attack, which began as the result of Marshal Michel Ney’s tactical confusion, eventually grew into a series of massed charges which, for two hours, battered the already weary Allied infantry regiments. But by 6pm, the Emperor’s heavy cavalry regiments had been decisively defeated; in another two hours, the battle – and the First Empire -- was lost. In the aftermath of Waterloo, these great attacks have been described as being completely void of any military merit; glorious, but futile, manoeuvers which only helped Ney and Emperor Napoleon to lose this crucial battle: Given the confusion of the battle, it is not completely clear how many individual charges the Reserve Cavalry made between 4 and 6 pm – Houssaye says four charges, while French historian Louis-Adolphe Thiers says Ney led 11 charges of 10,000 cavalrymen. This later figure is likely an exaggeration, because “…by degrees, every charge became weaker and weaker; the French horsemen, their battle steeds exhausted, their officers having fallen in scores, slowly losing heart, brave men as they were, began to feel they could not overcome their enemy.” In all, there were probably four main charges: the first and second charges undertaken by Milhaud’s IV Cavalry Corps and Lefebvre Desnoettes’ Guard Light Cavalry Division; Kellermann’s III Cavalry Corps and Guyot’s Guard Heavy Cavalry Division reinforced the third and fourth charges.