Cavalry versus Warships: A French Experiment

Most of us in the history biz, I suspect, have our favorite historical battles. Classicists might celebrate Thermopylae and Cannae, and modernists might fondly recall the ridges of Gettysburg and the bloody street of Stalingrad. My own tastes often run to the absurd, so give me instead a military encounter that borders on the ridiculous: the Second Battle of the Texel (22 January 1795), one of the very few naval battles won by a cavalry charge.

I exaggerate, but not by much. During the winter of 1794-95, French troops invaded Holland in support of Dutch republican rebels - and to grab more territory and resources for the French Republic. In January French commanders decided to take advantage of the weather by seizing an ice-bound Dutch naval squadron. The ships in question lay off Texel Island in the frozen Marsdiep strait. Dutch rebel admiral Jan de Winter took a body of cavalry and horse-drawn artillery across the ice, and sent ahead a detachment of hussars (heavy cavalry) to intimidate his adversaries.

The Dutch squadron commander, Hermanus Reintjes, remained unimpressed. His heavily-armed ships retained enough mobility to target and destroy De Winter’s horsemen, and in any event he knew the war would be decided by French forces on the mainland, not on Marsdiep. The Dutch government ships thus ignored the rebel cavalry, whose "charge" inflicted no damage except, perhaps, to the hussars' own dignity. A few days later the Captain Reintjes learned that rebel forces had taken the national capital, and he quietly surrendered his fourteen ships and 850 guns. De Winter got his bloodless victory and its attendant glory. That he received no lasting fame says a lot about historians' and history-readers' bloodthirstiness. Most of us don't see a battle as memorable unless it soaks the ground in blood.  

Source: Kat Eschner, “Only Time in History When Men on Horseback Captured a Fleet,” Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Jan. 2017.

Winter, and the Wolf

Modern climate scientists remain uncertain about the cause of the Great Frost, an exceptionally severe and deadly winter that afflicted Europe in 1709. Their educated guesses point to volcanic eruptions elsewhere in Eurasia, reduced solar activity, and a deepening of the contemporaneous Little Ice Age. About the season’s severity one cannot doubt. In France, crops failed, livestock perished, and trees exploded from frost. The coasts of Italy froze, trapping unsuspecting sailors and binding Venice to terra firma. In the northeast, the Baltic Sea remained a solid highway of ice until April. Throughout the continent, one million people died of exposure and starvation before the year was out. No one who survived had ever seen anything like it, the coldest winter in five hundred years.

Not your usual winter in Venice. (Le Lagon Gelee, Wikimedia)

The monumentally brutal weather and subsequent famine did not help France’s financial and military fortunes in the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession. It certainly contributed to the decisive defeat of Swedish forces in the Great Northern War. Charles XII of Sweden, until then undefeated, set himself against an unconquerable adversary when he chose to winter over in Ukraine. Thousands of Charles’s troops died of cold, and many more succumbed to starvation thanks to Tsar Peter’s methodical despoliation of his own countryside. When the main armies met at Poltava that July, a well-rested and well-fortified Russian force faced a drastically weakened Swedish one.* The Swedes put up a good fight for several hours, but eventually their battle lines buckled and split, and Russian infantry fell upon and destroyed them.

Poltava gold medal (1709), via coinsweekly.com

Charles lost 9,000 men, his dreams of imperial glory, and very nearly his throne. He fled to Moldavia, then a Turkish protectorate, and did not return home until 1715. The Swedish king's loss did not, however, become the Russian monarch's immediate gain. Peter decided to pursue his adversary into Ottoman territory, forgetting that offensive warfare is particularly risky in a place and time when roads were scarce, supplies ruinously expensive, and soldiers a wasting asset. Voltaire believed that the tsar had "too poor an opinion of his [new] enemy," and that enemy would eventually correct him: a Turkish army under Balaci Mehmet Pasa managed to capture Tsar Peter and his troops at the Battle of Stanilesti (22 July 1711). The Turkish government obliged Russia to sign a treaty surrendering the port of Azov and destroying several border forts. Perhaps the Ottomans could extracted better terms, but their officials seem to have realized what Peter did not, that human fortunes could prove as fickle as the weather, and one would do best not to follow Charles and Peter along the paths of hubris.

What of those too humble to merit the verbiage of Classical tragedy, the French peasants who starved in the countryside, the Prussian widows who froze to death in their cottages, the Swedish soldiers who sickened in their camps or bled out on the battlefield? The sovereigns who fought the Great Northern War built monuments to the Battle of Poltava and its fallen, who had traded their lives for a tiny share of glory. The civilian dead of the Great Frost and famine got at most a burial entry in a parish record. The cheapness and anonymity of their lives the annalists of the eighteenth century took for granted. The revolutions that ended the era had many goals, but one of them was, perhaps inevitably, the re-valuing of those humble lives and the giving of names to the nameless.          

Sources:

Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (Smithsonian Books, 1999), 164-63; Stephanie Pain, "1709: The Year Europe Froze," New Scientist, 7 Feb. 2009; Voltaire, History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, trans. Winifred Todhunter (E.P. Dutton, 1908), quote p. 215.



* The Swedes also had a significant disadvantage in artillery: they had only four field guns to the Russians’ 100.