I don’t understand why Horses wouldn’t be afraid to charge into a wall of humans with weapons. And if they would do it, wouldn’t the first row tumble and all the other incoming horses would trip over them resulting in a domino effect?
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Training Training Training
Also avoiding the pointy end!
You can’t just take a random horse from a farm and drop it into battle and get good results
You have to train the horse to follow commands and to do so during the crazy noise of battle. Horses are skittish creatures, modern ones get terrified by plastic bags so convincing them that you really do want to charge full speed towards all the shouting and clashing metal is difficult, you have to spend many years riding them around those noises and riding in formation with others during those conditions so that when it comes time for the fight its just another training day and nothing bad has happened around those noises before.
The most important thing for a cavalry charge to be successful though is to *not go in the front*, don’t charge the pointy end! Cavalry gets destroyed by pikes and spears, that’s why so many armies used them for so long, but pikes are spears require staying in a tight format and can’t turn effectively. If a group of spearmen are fighting another group then you can hit them from the back or sides and at most one rank of guys will be able to turn and stick you with the pointy end, but the rest won’t be braced in the right direction and will just get tramped by the horses. Horses are big creatures, generally over 1000 lbs, when people get hit by a horse they go down and the horse tends to remain upright.
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