Medium Cavalry
There is some question in the historical gaming community about the existence of medium cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars. Amongst historians, there is a very understandable impression that the general lack of references to any continental cavalry specifically as "medium" means that medium cavalry simply did not exist during the period.
However, documents for some nations do reveal that formations such as dragoons were slated to have what could be considered medium sized horses issued to them from the remount services. Their training was also different from the cuirassier and hussar troops that they accompanied into the field. My own suspicion is that the lack of a specific sub-title for the period does not guarantee there is no difference in field performance. For example, in WW1 there were different types and sizes of "field artillery" which were definitely different from each other. Just because some nations may not have referred to a 105mm field gun as "medium" does not mean that those guns would not have fallen into the middle range of generally available ordnance for the time. And if wargamers were to create WW1 rules today, we would not likely blame them for classifying that size to be medium for their artillery chart (if their rules happened to go that direction with the weapon function). Maybe a 105mm field gun and a 150mm field gun were both "just" field artillery, but a round from the 150mm will typically make a bigger bang. The basis of this last point is what I think interests the rules writing community. When the crush comes, how do the laws of physics play out. Titles take a rather secondary role in these concerns.
By the same token, French dragoons (for example) were most definitely assigned to have remounts that were between cuirassier and hussar horses in height. They were medium sized horses in that regard. Was the difference in weight and height enough to warrant a difference in combat? We honestly may never know. The difference was not huge, and there are precious few combat accounts commenting on it, some that do exist contradict each other.
As far as general tasking and organization, the cuirassier and dragoons were both considered line cavalry (broadly speaking). However, they did indeed receive different training, were subject to being tasked in different ways, and were widely recognized at the time for that despite what was also a distinct overlap in usage such as service together in army level cavalry reserves.
In 1803, a letter from Napoleon stated "I want, Citizen Minister, that you'll consider the cuirassiers, the dragoons and the hussars as being three different arms, and that you'll never ask me to transfer some officers from one arm to the other." The lack of a "medium cavalry" phrase smoking gun here is not the issue to a rules designer. The issue is that these cavalry types were indeed recognized as different, and the dragoons received both different training, and different horses (at least horses flagged in the system as different), which at least raises the question of variation in performance and effects. In the field, this could end up entirely in the wind. A battle fought at the start of a campaign might see the expected "mil spec" differences among mounts and training. Eight months later with the temperatures near freezing, may well have very different sizes mixed together as the remount services were sending out whatever they could (plus whatever was bought or impounded locally), along with units that had accumulated warfighting experiences in different ways, in different places. At that point, there could probably be a great deal more overlap between the various cavalry types.
In the opinion of Napoleonic Author John Elting, the cuirassier and dragoon services were indeed distinct. He notes in his book Swords Around A Throne, that there were "...the heavy cavalry like cuirassiers and carabiniers, the dragoons, and the light cavalry like the hussars and cheveau legere." Much like Napoleon's letter, Elting does not explicitly describe the dragoons using the word "medium," but he clearly outlines them as being between the heavy cuirassiers and the light hussars. He additionally noted that the dragoon arm of the French cavalry performed rather more poorly than the cuirassier service during the 1805 to 1807 period. One of the reasons he gave for the dragoons sometimes being placed in reserve next to the cuirassier at that time was to stiffen them up a bit. That did change by 1813, when veteran dragoon formations from Spain represented some of the better quality cavalry that France had to offer.
For rules, I typically supply broad averages based on likely training, tasking, size, selection, etc. But I also encourage people setting up games to consider mixing their troop ratings from game to game in order to reflect in our own table-top way, some of the wide performance variation that existed over the more than two decades of war.
For a hypothetical example, we could consider fully trained, veteran French dragoons in 1809 riding large, well bred Saxon remount horses* as being veteran "heavy" cavalry in the rules. By contrast, newly trained troopers for the same army, riding a mix of impounded aide-de-camp horses and local Spanish purchased ponies - all of them starving and marched half to death - might well fight on the field (in the rules) as green, light cavalry. At that point, the debate is not whether any period documents recognize medium cavalry as an official sub-title. What matters is being able to offer a continuum of performance markers to set different unit capabilities under various conditions. Was there an explicit "medium" cavalry sub-type recognized during the period? Maybe not. Do we use a medium effectiveness category to help bring about a variety of game results based on likely training, tasking and conditions? Definitely.
*The claim that Saxon horses were too spirited for French Army cavalry troopers is most likely not true. In any case, many of those horses were stolen - along with many Prussian horses - before they ever reached the French army depots in 1806.
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