The charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo: you’ll know it from the Risk board game. Hundreds of soldiers on lustrous white horses, manes billowing as they gallop straight at the viewer. A magnificent sight, but the stuff of nonsense: the horses probably weren’t all greys and they definitely weren’t turned out as if for Ascot.
This is one fact to emerge from War Horse: Fact or Fiction?, the exhibition now showing at the National Army Museum in Chelsea (until August). Other myths are dispelled. Contrary to popular opinion, the history of British cavalry is not one of heroic failure. Even the bloodiest charges succeeded in their military aims. To adapt Tennyson, the Light Brigade did and died in the valley of death.
Above all, the show explains that cavalry were not the only war horses.
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