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Apparently, Cossacks went from being runaway peasants fighting with farming tools and sheltered behind wagons deployed as a fort to irregular cavalry fighting mainly with a lance. Charles François Philibert Masson (1762-1807), a Frenchman who served as a dragoon officer in the Russian court of Catherine the Great and Paul I, dismissed them as being little more useful than raiders and plunderers while Antoine Fortuné de Brack (1789-1850), another Frenchman who served as an officer in the Red Lancers unit during the Napoleonic Wars, described them as the 'best light cavalry in Europe'. Even better than Poles.
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