Excerpt:
This is a French cuirass, a breastplate worn as body armour by French cavalry. The hole is from a British cannonball that smashed through the unlucky soldier’s chest. The Waterloo campaign was the first occasion that British troops found themselves face to face with Napoleon’s heavy cavalry, whose armoured cuirasses and metal helmets made them a daunting foe.

Yet as the British would discover, even these armoured troopers were by no means invincible as this breastplate brings home with shocking force.

The bulk of Napoleon’s heavy cavalry was made up of the twelve regiments of Cuirassiers, but the elite of the arm, in their own eyes at least, were the men of the two regiments of Carabiniers. With a lineage running back to 1679, the Carabiniers had only been given cuirasses in 1809. Unlike the cuirassiers, their armour was gilded with brass rather than being of polished iron, and their old blue uniforms were changed for white. Both regiments served with distinction throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and in 1815 were brigaded together under Général de Brigade Blanchard as part of Général de Division Kellermann’s III Corps de Cavalerie.