Most dramatically, the Great War brought the end of cavalry. Mounted soldiers had been a central element in offensive warfare since before the time of Alexander the Great. As a way of delivering a decisive shock to an enemy, they dominated European battlefields from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. All the armies that went to war in 1914 included huge numbers of troops on horseback—the Russians put more than a million in the field, many of them Cossacks—despite the fact that the decline in their value had begun to be apparent as early as the Civil War.
