On Film
Some small sense of the noise and power of a cavalry charge can be gained from the 1970 film Waterloo, which featured some 2000 cavalrymen, some of them cossacks. It included detailed displays of the horsemanship required to manage animal and weapons in large numbers at the gallop (unlike the real battle of Waterloo, where deep mud significantly slowed the horses). The Gary Cooper movie They Came to Cordura contains an excellent scene of a cavalry regiment deploying from march to battleline formation. A smaller-scale cavalry charge can be seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003); although the finished scene has substantial computer-generated imagery, raw footage and reactions of the riders are shown in the Extended Version DVD Appendices.
Other films that show cavalry actions include:
- The Charge of the Light Brigade, about the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War
- 40,000 Horsemen, about the Australian Light Horse during the Sinai and Palestine campaign of World War I
- The Lighthorsemen, about the Battle of Beersheba, 1917
- War Horse, about the British cavalry in Europe during World War I
- Hubal, about the last months (September 1939 - April 1940) of Poland's first World War II guerilla, Major Henryk Dobrzanski, "Hubal"
Read more about this topic: Cavalry
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“The motion picture is like a picture of a lady in a half- piece bathing suit. If she wore a few more clothes, you might be intrigued. If she wore no clothes at all, you might be shocked. But the way it is, you are occupied with noticing that her knees are too bony and that her toenails are too large. The modern film tries too hard to be real. Its techniques of illusion are so perfect that it requires no contribution from the audience but a mouthful of popcorn.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)