Gee, we never had comic books with hussars when I was a kid. We had Sgt Fury and his howling commandos and Asterix and Obelisk but no hussars. I feel vaguely cheated . . .

Anyway, if you think about how a cannon is designed, to withstand the blast of several pounds of black powder in order to channel the force and hurl an iron ball a kilometer or more, it would have to be a really big bag of powder with a really solid obstruction in the barrel to disable a cannon.

I'm just reading the memoirs of a Russian hussar from the Napoleonic period. He was at Eylau and wrote about some French batteries being overrun, with the hussars hacking at the carriage wheels with their sabres. While it probably felt good I'm not sure they would have done enough damage to knock the gun out of commission.

I've always wondered why horsemen didn't carry a hammer and spike to deal with enemy cannon effectively. The answer is probably a combination of not wanting to dismount during a battle and a reluctant acknowledgement that the odds of actually capturing a gun is so low as not to justify the extra weight for their horse to carry!

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