Joanne,

You're overthinking this thing. You have an officer being given a sword by his men because they like and respect him and think that he was a good officer and perhaps responsible for more of them coming home alive than would have had he not been their commander. There's nothing more to it than that. Whether they were mounted or dismounted doesn't factor in to this equation. Neither does the method by which they obtained the sword. It was a gift from appreciative men. You can make a lot of guesses and suppositions, but that's all they are, unless you can come up with some documentation somewhere. But you don't want to confuse these guesses with facts. It just confuses the issue.