https://open.spotify.com/episode/3q4DW7sibOlfhecpxCnNmg?si=87pB4mDdRc6CI1HB4aaOqw
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade in the First World War
In the early months of the First World War, when the world still imagined the conflict would be fast and mobile, Canada sent a cavalry brigade overseas—horsemen trained for a kind of war that was already slipping into the past. By the time the Canadian Cavalry Brigade reached the Western Front in 1915, the trenches had carved the landscape into a static maze of mud and wire. The brigade’s troopers, drawn from regiments like the Royal Canadian Dragoons and Lord Strathcona’s Horse, found themselves fighting dismounted, rifles in hand, learning the grim arithmetic of trench warfare alongside the infantry.
Yet the cavalry never disappeared. They waited. They trained. They kept their horses ready for the moment the front might break open again. And when those rare opportunities came—during the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, or in the final months of 1918—the brigade moved with a speed and violence that seemed almost anachronistic amid the industrial slaughter. Their charge at Moreuil Wood in March 1918, often described as one of the last great cavalry charges in history, was a desperate, close-quarters fight that helped blunt a major German offensive. It was the kind of action that felt ripped from another century, yet it unfolded in the shadow of machine guns and poison gas.
As the war shifted in its final hundred days, the brigade finally found the kind of battlefield it had been built for. The front began to move, villages were liberated in rapid succession, and the Canadians captured prisoners, guns, and ground at a pace that would have been unthinkable earlier in the war. They scouted ahead of advancing infantry, exploited breakthroughs, and—when needed—dismounted to fight on foot with the same determination they had shown in the trenches.
The Canadian Cavalry Brigade’s story is one of adaptation in a war that punished tradition. They were relics of an older military age, yet they carved out a place for themselves in the most modern conflict the world had ever seen. Their legacy lives on not only in regimental histories but in the vivid paintings of artists like Alfred Munnings, who captured the grit, exhaustion, and strange beauty of mounted soldiers fighting a mechanized war.
