Originally Posted by
dmurray6
It's interesting you mention this Hinkel, as just yesterday I was reading Gilham's Manual for Volunteers And Militia (as it was the preferred manual for the troops and timeframe of the geographical region that interests me most). Gilham mentions that "The strength of the other arms is always based upon that of the infantry, which long experience has shown should be about four-fifths of the entire force.". With that in mind, if we had only infantry and cavalry on each side of a 32 vs. 32 skirmish, we'd have 25.6 infantry and 6.4 cavalry per side. Now, one must ask themselves, how much good would a cavalry of size 6.4 men do against infantry that contained 25.6 men. I believe the answer would be, "the cavalry would likely be disintegrated". Granted this does not take into account operationally, when and how cavalry would be used. I think its easy to see, that if we were forced to break these 32 men teams between the various arms of a regiment, we would find that we'd have very little infantry, at which point there would be no one for the other arms to support, which was their main role.