The line cavalry comprised 16 regiments of Cuirassiers and _Carabiniers_, 24 of Dragoons, 28 of _Chasseurs-à-cheval_, 11 of Hussars, and 9 of _Chevau-légers_. The last were special regiments designed to accompany the heavy Cuirassiers, who were ill adapted for performing scouting and outpost duty. Each cavalry regiment had, as a rule, 1 depôt squadron and 4 field squadrons, each of 2 companies of 125 officers and men, or a total of 1000 sabres. _Chevau-léger_ regiments appear to have had only 3 field squadrons. Cuirassiers were protected by steel helmets and cuirasses. The cuirass covered both back and breast, and weighed about 15 pounds. The breastplate was theoretically bullet-proof at a range of 40 metres, and really seems to have afforded fairly adequate protection, judging from the small proportion of killed and wounded among the cuirassier officers disabled at Borodino. Cuirassiers were armed with a long, straight sword and a pair of pistols. Dragoons carried in addition a carbine. _Chasseurs-à-cheval_ and Hussars had carbine, pistol and a curved sabre. In the _Chevau-léger_ regiments two-thirds of the troopers were armed with lance, sabre and one pistol; the remainder had, in place of the lance, a carbine in order to perform skirmishing and outpost duties. The cavalry was largely mounted upon horses of German breed; but even so the supply was hardly adequate. Besides, many of the horses were too young, and the hardships of the war destroyed them at a rate which was steadily on the increase. The pace of the charges was never the wild gallop familiar to us from many a spirited but inaccurate painting. A trot was the best that Cuirassiers could usually do, and light cavalry was often little faster. It has become a kind of legend that Napoleon’s artillery was always his strongest arm, but this was by no means the case. In his earlier campaigns he was weak in artillery; in 1805 and 1806 he had but 5 guns to 3000 men. It is true that his gunners were generally better trained than their opponents; but at Eylau at any rate this hardly compensated for numerical inferiority, the French having only some 250 guns to oppose to 460 Russian pieces. At Aspern, again, Napoleon put only some 200 guns into the field against more than 300 admirably served Austrian cannon. His infantry also was evidently deteriorating in quality, and needed the moral as well as the physical support of powerful batteries. In and after 1809, therefore, Napoleon greatly augmented his field artillery. He also revived a practice of very doubtful utility in attaching to each regiment of infantry 2 or 4 light guns, served by a detachment of regimental gunners. The experiment had very qualified success; corps commanders were inclined to regard the regimental artillery as a mere nuisance. It would surely have been better to attach batteries of regular artillery to the regiments.