About half of Wellington's army at Waterloo, 1815, was made up of Dutch and Belgian troops. After Napoleon's first defeat in 1814 the Allied powers formed a new (and short-lived) 'kingdom of Holland and Belgium' under the house of Orange. The joint army was a mixture of patriots who had rebelled aga[...]

After the disastrous Russian campaign in 1812, Napoleon was desperate to scrape together a new army to resist the inevitable Allied offensive in Germany. Particularly short of cavalry, he levied four complete regiments of "Guards of Honour" - totalling no less than 10,000 men - from the upper classe[...]

Osprey's study of the German commanders of World War I (1914-1918). The turn of the 20th century saw Imperial Germany as essentially a militarist state, whose growing industrial resources and wealth were harnessed to the task of increasing German military power, at a time of aggressive expansionist [...]

This is a concise history of the hand-picked elite cavalry guard that served as Napoleon's close personal escort and were committed to the most dangerous areas of combat on the battlefield. Formed from his original escort of 'Guides' and the 'Consular Guard' in 1799, the Mounted Chasseurs were a per[...]

Mounted upon their huge black horses, the Mounted Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard were the senior heavy cavalry unit of the French army and were never defeated in battle. Their long list of battle honours earned them the nicknames 'the Giants' and 'the Gods'. In this latest addition to the Osprey m[...]

Dressed in distinctive green uniforms and classically inspired copper helmets, the Dragoons of the Imperial Guard were raised in 1806 by the same criteria as other Guard units - by selection of picked, literate veterans from Line regiments who had six to ten years of service, and citations for brave[...]