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The last charge: The Battle of Mars-la-Tour and Von Bredow’s ‘Death Ride’, 16 August 1870
One of the crucial battles of the Franco-Prussian War was also the scene of perhaps the last successful cavalry charge in Western European warfare, as William E Welsh explains.
On the morning of 16 August 1870, hundreds of French cuirassiers were eating breakfast and grooming their horses when Prussian artillery shells slammed into the midst of their camp on the escarpment west of the city of Metz. Four batteries of Prussian six-pounders had unlimbered at mid-morning on the heights south of Vionville, three miles east of the village of Mars-la-Tour, and began a furious fire on the French horsemen.
The Prussian gunners had sighted their cannon by aiming at the reflection of the sun on the French cavalry’s silver cutlery and goblets, as well as at the colourful tablecloths of their mess. The percussion-fused shells exploded on contact, and with deadly accuracy.
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