Lancers were light cavalrymen armed with and trained in the use of a lance. In the medieval period, the term ‘lance’ was also used to describe a knight plus a small band of retainers. Lancers first appeared in Europe as organized light cavalry in the early 18th century and were Poles in the Army of Saxony, but before that the lance was widely used in the Middle East from the earliest days of Islam. These Polish troops, called Uhlans, also served in the French army as part of a contingent of Saxon volunteers during the War of the Austrian Succession, 1742-8, and were armed with pennon-tipped lances. In the French service they wore helmets with horsehair crests but in Saxony they wore the square-topped national cap of Poland called a czapska. Both uhlan and czapska derive from Turkish and clearly associate the Polish lancers with origins in Turkey. Austria first used lancers in 1781 and formed a regiment in 1791, Russian utilized lancers from the 1770s, and in 1797 lancers joined the French army of Italy, under the Polish Gen Dombrowski. Lancers became a part of the French imperial army, with the title Chevaux-légers-polonnais, in 1807 and the Lancers of the Imperial Guard were formed in 1810.
By 1810, most of the combatant European powers' armies included regiments of lancers, the troopers of which, in addition to their swords, pistols, and carbines, all carried similar lances with ash shafts varying in length from 7 to 10 feet (2.1 to 3 metres), tipped with a steel point and often having a metal shoe at the butt-end. Britain introduced lancers into its light cavalry in 1816 and by the end of the 19th century had six such regiments armed with lances 9 feet (2.7 metres) long and, after c.1868, of bamboo rather than ash. In British India, Maratha fighting traditions led gradually to the introduction of the lance and, by 1918, there were sixteen lancer regiments in the Indian army. In America, the lance had long been the hunting and war weapon of the Plains Indian but, in the early years of the American civil war, 1861-5, at least one regiment of Federal Cavalry, the 6th Pennsylvania (Rush's Lancers), were equipped with 10 foot (3.04 metre) fir lances.
The long-range breech-loading rifle contributed strongly to the obsolescence of the lancer by the late 19th century and the advent of the machine gun finished the process. Lancers continued to be retained, and armed with lances, in some European armies, notably the British, French, and German, throughout WW I and several cavalry actions were fought with lances in its opening months. The figure of the lancer, particularly the German Uhlan, was in the forefront of British propaganda during WW I, British lancers being commonly depicted as the last embodiment of knighthood in action and their German counterparts as baby-killers. After 1918, lances have been retained for ceremonial purposes and have appeared in tattoos and military tournaments carried by cavalry regiments of varying designations, not always lancers, in ‘musical rides’. The bodyguards of the presidents of India and Pakistan are still armed with them for ceremonial purposes, tracing this practice to the romantic figure of the 19th-century Bengal lancer.
— Stephen Wood
