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At Waterloo when Napoleon sent a dispatch rider back to Paris with a message saying the battle of Waterloo was won for France he complained of feeling ill and took a nap after placing Ney in command without giving him any specific orders. Wellington’s next move (designed to be seen by a Napoleon who was now asleep) was to allow his weakest troops to run from the centre of the field and move stronger troops from the flanks towards the centre to encourage Napoleon to think the centre was collapsing. What he will have been hoping Napoleon would then do is attack up the centre - yet again - using infantry. The ground there was too muddy there to deploy any of his considerable cavalry advantage, which he had not used all day. Instead Ney made a move which would only have been the right move if the centre was really in collapse and Wellington's army about to panic and flee: he sent in all of the French cavalry without infantry support. Wellington’s infantry formed squares which cavalry cannot break.

If Ney had attacked with a reasonably large force of cavalry with infantry support the French infantry would then have been able to deploy as a line. It would have decimated the British squares since the square is an easy target to hit even with inaccurate Napoleonic war muskets whilst only one side of the square can fire back at the line, a much more difficult target to hit. Wellington would have been forced to use cavalry to shift the French line and enable his squares to redeploy. (A square cannot redeploy under fire as the square is the last resort position adopted only when the only alternative is death, i.e. being run down by cavalry.) But since Napoleon had an overwhelming cavalry advantage and plenty of infantry this tactic could have been repeated until Wellington had run out of cavalry to shift the French infantry. But instead Ney threw all of the French cavalry in at once (and threw the battle away in so doing) as cavalry cannot break squares and can hardly ever be regrouped in time to be used more than once in a single battle.

Then Blucher arrived. If he hadn’t Wellington could have reduced the Chateau with his artillery and defeated the other remaining French forces (all infantry) since he still had infantry and heavy cavalry and Napoleon by then had none. Game set and match Wellington! This is why Clausewitz in Das Krieg, written to try and analyse why Prussian militarism and its forces had been so devastatingly defeated at Jena, argues that - however strong your position may be - you will throw it all away if you make the fatal mistake of attacking a strongly defended enemy position with cavalry without infantry support. According to Clausewitz if you do this, you lose. Game over.

Now what does all this have to do with June 1940?
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