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WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE
WAR AND THE ARME
BLANCHE
BY
ERSKINE CHILDERS
EDITOR OF VOL. V. OF “THE TIMES HISTORY OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA”
AUTHOR OF “THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS”
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
THE RIGHT HON.
FIELD-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS, V.C., K.G.
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1910
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION BY FIELD-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS v
I. THE ISSUE AND ITS IMPORTANCE 1
II. THE THREEFOLD PROBLEM 21
I. THE PHYSICAL PROBLEM 21
II. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM 35
III. THE PROBLEM OF TRAINING 40
III. BRITISH AND BOER MOUNTED TROOPS 46
IV. ELANDSLAAGTE 61
V. FROM ELANDSLAAGTE TO THE BLACK WEEK 70
VI. COLESBERG AND KIMBERLEY 85
VII. PAARDEBERG AND POPLAR GROVE 113
VIII. THE RELIEF OF LADYSMITH 150
IX. BLOEMFONTEIN TO KOMATI POORT 168
X. THE GUERILLA WAR 210
XI. MOUNTED CHARGES IN SOUTH AFRICA 239
XII. A PECULIAR WAR? 261
XIII. BERNHARDI AND "CAVALRY TRAINING" 292
XIV. THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR 327
XV. REFORM 354
I. STUDY 354
II. NOMENCLATURE 356
III. ARMAMENT OF CAVALRY 357
IV. MOUNTED INFANTRY 366
V. YEOMANRY 368
VI. IMPERIAL MOUNTED TROOPS 370
VII. CONCLUSION 371
INDEX 373
INTRODUCTION
BY
FIELD-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS, V.C., K.G.
I have read with the greatest interest Mr. Childers’s illuminating book
“War and the Arme Blanche.” My opinion of the subject with which it
deals is already so well known throughout the army that I need not
labour to say how entirely I agree with the author’s main thesis;
indeed, anyone who will take the trouble to read “Cavalry Training”
(1904), will see that I anticipated the arguments which he has so ably
developed. This being so, it is not surprising that I should view the
regulations laid down in “Cavalry Training” (1907), with some concern.
Let us consider briefly what the history of this question—the
comparative value of steel weapons and firearms for Cavalry in war—is.
Until within the last few years our Lancer regiments depended entirely
on the lance and sword, while other Cavalry regiments depended almost
entirely on the sword.[1] This was inevitable because of the inaccuracy
and short range of the smooth-bore carbine. Tentative changes were made
when rifled arms were adopted, but it is only within the last thirty
years that Lancer regiments have had any firearm given to them save a
pistol.[2] With such an equipment and such traditions it was perhaps but
natural that the training of Cavalry should have been almost exclusively
devoted to shock tactics and the use of the _arme blanche_.
-----
Footnote 1:
No reference was made to the lance in the 1904 Regulations, because
that weapon had been discarded as practically useless, owing to the
introduction of breech-loading rifles. Now, unfortunately, the lance
has been reintroduced—a retrograde movement. The lance is a positive
impediment to dismounted action, as it adds greatly to the difficulty
of led horses being moved forward when the men advance. In other
words, it ties the men to the horses.
Footnote 2:
When the 9th Lancers were ordered to join my column on Field Service
in Kuram in 1879, carbines had to be served out to them, and the men
had to be put through a hurried course of musketry.
-----
But why now, with a different equipment, should Cavalry still be trained
on the old tradition, and their rifles reside in buckets attached to the
horse, only to be used on certain exceptional occasions to “supplement
the sword or lance”? (“Cavalry Training,” sec. 142.)
The late Colonel Henderson, in his essay on the tactical employment of
Cavalry, “Science of War,” chapter iii., page 51, pointed out that,
notwithstanding the introduction of gunpowder, the Cavalry was the arm
that had undergone the least change. He went on to say that
“shock-tactics, the charge, and the hand-to-hand encounter are still the
one ideal of Cavalry action; and the power of manœuvring in great
masses, maintaining an absolute uniformity of pace and formation, and
moving at the highest speed with accurately dressed ranks, is the
criterion of excellence.” He added: “to such an extent has this teaching
been carried out, that the efficiency of the individual, especially in
those duties which are performed by single men or small parties, cannot
fairly be said to have received due attention.”
After explaining how Cromwell’s troopers “were taught the value of
co-operation,” and how “Cromwell built up his Cavalry on a foundation of
high individual efficiency,” he goes on to show that, “as time went on
and armies became larger, and skill at arms, as a national
characteristic, rarer, drill, discipline, manœuvre in mass, and a
high degree of mobility came to outweigh all other considerations; and
when the necessity of arming the nations brought about short service,
the training of the individual, in any other branch of his business than
that of riding boot-to-boot and of rendering instant obedience to the
word or signal of his superior, fell more and more into abeyance.
Shock-tactics filled the entire bill, and the Cavalry of Europe,
admirably trained to manœuvre and attack, whether by the squadron of
150 sabres, or the division of 3,000 or 4,000, was practically unfitted
for any other duty. The climax of incompetency may be said to have been
reached during the cycle of European warfare, which began with the
Crimea, and ended with the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1877–78. The old
spirit of dash and daring under fire was still conspicuous, discipline
and mobility were never higher. The regiments manœuvred with
admirable precision at the highest speed, and never had great masses of
horsemen been more easily controlled. And yet, in the whole history of
war, it may be doubted whether the record of the Cavalry was ever more
meagre.”
Referring specially to the German Cavalry during the war of 1870–71,
Henderson says: “The troopers knew nothing whatever of fighting on
foot—their movements were impeded by their equipment--and a few
_Francs-tireurs_, armed with the chassepot, were enough to paralyze a
whole brigade.... In fact, to the student who follows out the operations
of the Cavalry of 1870–71 step by step, and who bears in mind its
deficiencies in armament and training, it will appear very doubtful
whether a strong body of mounted riflemen of the same type as the Boers,
or better still, of Sheridan’s or Stuart’s Cavalry in the last years of
the War of Secession, would not have held the German horsemen at bay
from the first moment they crossed the frontier.”
“Had the successes gained by shock-tactics been very numerous, it might
possibly be argued that the sacrifice of efficiency in detached and
dismounted duties, as well as the training of the individual, was fully
justified. What are the facts?” After enumerating the successes gained
by shock-tactics from the days of the Crimea onwards, when anything
larger than a regiment was engaged, Henderson adds: “Such is the record:
one great tactical success gained at Custozza: a retreating army saved
from annihilation at Königgrätz,[3] and five minor successes which may
or may not have influenced the ultimate issue. Not one single instance
of an effective and sustained pursuit; not one single instance—except
Custozza, and there the Infantry was armed with muzzle-loaders—of a
charge decisive of the battle; not one single instance of Infantry being
scattered and cut down in panic flight; not one single instance of a
force larger than a brigade intervening at a critical moment. And how
many failures? How often were the Cavalry dashed vainly in reckless
gallantry against the hail of a thin line of rifles! How often were
great masses held back inactive, without drawing a sabre or firing a
shot, while the battle was decided by the Infantry and the guns! How few
the enterprises against the enemy’s communications! How few men killed
or disabled, even when Cavalry met Cavalry in the mêlée! Can it be said
in face of these facts that the devotion to shock-tactics, the constant
practice in massed movements, the discouragement of individualism, both
in leaders and men, was repaid by results? Does it not rather appear
that there was some factor present on the modern battle-field which
prevented the Cavalry, trained to a pitch hitherto unknown, from reaping
the same harvest as the horsemen of previous eras? Was not the attempt
to apply the same principles to the battle of the breech-loader and the
rifled cannon, as had been applied successfully to the battles of the
smooth-bore, a mistake from beginning to end; and should not the
Cavalry, confronted by new and revolutionary conditions, have sought new
means of giving full effect to the mobility which makes it
formidable?”[4]
-----
Footnote 3:
Of Königgrätz it would probably be more accurate to say that the
Austrian Cavalry neutralized the Prussian Cavalry. It was the
formidable row of Austrian guns that saved the Austrian army.
Footnote 4:
Eight years have elapsed since Henderson wrote these words. When they
were penned the records of the South African War were not at his
disposal, and the Manchurian War had still to be fought. The histories
of these two campaigns only confirm his views, for during four years
of war it is impossible to find more than a few instances, and these
all trivial, of the successful use of the _arme blanche_.
-----
Since Colonel Henderson, no one has dealt so exhaustively and so
logically with this aspect of Cavalry in war as Mr. Childers. He has
gone thoroughly into the achievements of our Cavalry in South Africa. It
has been said that this war was abnormal, but are not all wars abnormal?
As, however, it was the first war in which magazine rifles were made use
of, and as the weapon used in future wars is certain to be even more
effective, on account of the lower trajectory and automatic mechanism
about to be introduced, shall we not be very unwise if we do not profit
by the lessons we were taught at such a heavy cost during that war?
These, then, are Mr. Childers’s conclusions in reviewing the period from
the beginning of the campaign up to March, 1900:
"Widening our horizon to include the whole area of the war at this
period, we perceive that Cavalry theory, so far as it was based on the
_arme blanche_, had collapsed. The only and not especially remarkable
achievement of that weapon is the pursuit at Elandslaagte on the second
day of hostilities. Everywhere else we have seen it directly or
indirectly crippling the Cavalry, and the greater the numbers employed
and the larger the measure of independence permitted, the more
unmistakable is the weakness. When the Cavalry succeed strategically, as
in the ride to Kimberley and back to Paardeberg, they succeed in spite
of disabilities traceable to _arme blanche_ doctrine. When they succeed
tactically, as in the Colesberg operations, and in containing Cronje’s
force on the eve of Paardeberg, they succeed through the carbine, in
spite of its inferiority as a weapon of precision. In tactical offence,
the paramount _raison d’être_ of the _arme blanche_, they fail, and in
reconnaissance they fail."
With every word of this I agree, and it must be remembered that my
judgment is based upon personal and first-hand knowledge. Why did our
Cavalry fail? Because they did not know, because they had never been
required to know, how to use the principal and most useful weapon with
which they were armed. Because they did not understand, because they had
never been asked to understand, that their rôle should consist in
attacking the enemy “exactly like the Infantry,[5] and to shoot their
way up to him.”[6]
-----
Footnote 5:
I do not mean to reflect in any way on those in authority before the
South African War for not having anticipated the power conferred by
the magazine rifle and smokeless powder. But I submit that in “Cavalry
Training” (1904) the lesson had been learnt, and the Manchurian War
has surely confirmed the decision reached in 1904.
Footnote 6:
Bernhardi, p. 60. Mr. Goldman’s translation, second edition, of
General von Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in Future Wars.”
-----
In this matter of shooting their way up to their enemy, Cavalry possess
great advantages owing to their mobility. General French’s admirable
movement at Klip Drift was essentially a rapid advance of fighting men
carried out at extended intervals. It was a rapid advance of warriors
who possessed the ability, by means of horses and rifles (not swords or
lances), to place their enemy _hors de combat_. It was an ideal Cavalry
operation, but it was not a “Cavalry charge,” as this term is generally
understood, and the _arme blanche_ had nothing to say to it.
In the preface to “Cavalry Training” (1904), I laid down that such an
operation was sound in principle. I went farther—I encouraged it—and
there is no doubt that on many occasions such an advance will have a far
greater effect than a methodical advance on foot. But, such an advance
must be essentially a rapid advance of fighting men armed with rifles,
and the threat lies in the power of the rifle.
In the same Preface I pointed out that the rifle, which “will chiefly be
required when dismounted, must be carried on the person of the soldier
himself.” The necessity for this was brought very prominently to my
notice during the fight in the Chardeh Valley, near Kabul, on December
11, 1879. On that occasion more than forty carbines were lost by the 9th
Lancers, two weak squadrons of which regiment, numbering only 213 men,
took part in the engagement. Partly owing to the rough nature of the
ground, and partly to the enemy’s fire, several horses fell, and before
the men could disengage the carbines from the buckets the Afghans were
upon them. Without their firearms the dismounted Cavalry were quite
helpless, and it was a sorry spectacle to behold these men, with their
swords dangling between their legs and impeding their movements, while
they vainly endeavoured to defend themselves with their lances. This
incident confirmed the experience I had gained in the Mutiny as to the
necessity for the firearm being attached to the man instead of to the
horse, and I at once issued orders for this change to be made, and for
the sword—which is only required to be used when the soldier is
mounted—to be carried on the saddle.
The strongest opposition to these alterations was made by Cavalry
officers in this country, and it was not until 1891—twelve years after
it had been adopted in Afghanistan—that sanction was accorded to the
_men’s_ swords being carried on the saddles. Eleven years more had to
pass before _officers_ were authorized (Army Order, June 1, 1902) to
have their swords similarly carried. But the rifle is still being
carried on the horse, and, if this arrangement is not changed, the
result will certainly be that, if a man gets upset and separated from
his horse in a fight, he will have neither sword nor rifle with which to
defend himself. This is not the case in India, where the rifle,
supported by a small bucket, is attached to the man, so that when he
dismounts the rifle goes with him.[7]
-----
Footnote 7:
I may point out here that General von Bernhardi agrees with this. On
page 176 (Mr. Goldman’s translation) he says: “The sword should
therefore be attached to the saddle, the carbine to the man, as is, in
fact, the practice of all races of born horsemen.”
-----
I trust that thirty years will not again be allowed to elapse before we
take to heart and act upon the main lesson to be learned from the Boer
and Russo-Japanese Wars, and in a lesser degree from every war that has
taken place since the introduction of breech-loading arms. That lesson
is, that knee to knee, close order charging is practically a thing of
the past. There may be, there probably will be, mounted attacks,
preferably in open order, against Cavalry caught unawares, or against
broken Infantry. But, after reading Mr. Childers’s book, backed by my
own practical experience, I am driven to the conclusion that the only
possible logical deduction from the history of late wars is, that all
attacks can now be carried out far more effectually with the rifle than
with the sword.
At the same time I do not go so far as the author in thinking that the
sword should be done away with altogether. It is desirable that Cavalry
soldiers, equally with their comrades in the Infantry, should have a
steel weapon of some kind for use in the assault by night, in a mist, or
on other occasions when a fire-fight might be impossible or inadvisable.
Instead, however, of the present sword, the Cavalry soldier would be
more suitably equipped with a sword-bayonet for fixing on the rifle when
fighting on foot—something like that with which our rifle regiments were
formerly armed—but made with a substantial handle, large enough to be
firmly gripped, so that in the event of its being required it could be
used on horseback as well as on foot. This sword-bayonet must, of
course, be attached to the man.
The two essentials of Cavalry in the present day are mobility and the
power to use the rifle with effect. Unless Cavalry is mobile it is
practically useless, as is proved over and over again in the pages of
this book. It is by saving their horses in every possible way, and by
skill in the use of the rifle, that Cavalry soldiers can hope to carry
out properly the many important functions required of them in advance
of, at a distance from, and in conjunction with, the main army. Further,
as the rifle is the weapon which will enable Cavalry to be of the most
real value in co-operating with the other arms on the actual field of
battle, Cavalry soldiers must not only be good shots, but they must be
taught how to fight as Infantry.
Owing to the enormous increase in recent years in the numbers which now
constitute a modern army, the strategical area in which Cavalry will
have to operate must inevitably be of considerable extent. Owing also to
the increased size of armies on the actual battle-field, and to the
extended formations necessitated by the long-reaching effect of modern
weapons, the strain upon the Cavalry horses is infinitely greater than
in former days, and unless men are taught to take every possible care of
their horses, Cavalry will be unable to co-operate with the other arms
when their services are most urgently needed—perhaps at a critical
period of the fight—or to follow up and harass a retreating enemy.
It is impossible to over-estimate the value of Cavalry—trained as I
should wish to see them trained—under the existing conditions of war. It
is Cavalry that carries out the preliminary operations. It is frequently
due to the information gained by Cavalry that a commander is enabled to
make, or alter, his plan of action. It may often happen that Cavalry may
help to decide the issue of a battle. It is by Cavalry that the fruits
of a successful action are most completely reaped. And it is to the
Cavalry that the army will look to save a retreat being turned into a
rout or a disaster.
It is for these reasons, and because Cavalry is so frequently required
to act alone, and often in quite small parties, at a considerable
distance from the main force, that all ranks need the most careful
training. The men should be intelligent and trustworthy; they require to
have their wits about them even in a greater degree than other soldiers,
for a single Cavalry soldier may at times have great responsibility
thrown upon him. The officers should possess all the qualities of good
sportsmen. They should be fine riders, careful horse-masters, have a
keen eye for country, and be thoroughly well educated.[8]
-----
Footnote 8:
Unfortunately, the expenses connected with life in our Cavalry
regiments are so heavy that only officers who have considerate means
of their own can afford to belong to them, and but few of such go into
the army as a profession. The only remedy is to make service in the
Cavalry more attractive to those who are not well off by increasing
the pay, and thus making it a prize for the Cadets at Sandhurst to
struggle for as they now struggle for the Indian army.
-----
In some recently written books on Cavalry great stress is laid on the
necessity for inculcating the “true Cavalry spirit,” and on the idea
that “shock action alone gives decisive results.” I cannot call to mind
one single instance during the last half-century—ever since, indeed,
arms of precision have been brought into use—when shock action alone has
produced decisive results, and I doubt whether shock action, or, in
other words, the _arme blanche_ alone, will ever again be able to bring
about such results against a highly trained enemy armed with magazine
rifles. I confess I cannot follow the train of thought which insists
upon Cavalry requiring a “spirit” for “shock action,” and a spirit
different, it is presumed, to the soldierly spirit which it is essential
for the other arms to possess if they are to behave with resolution and
courage on the field of battle.
It is this soldierly spirit, which can only be produced by discipline
and thorough training, that animates the Engineers to carry out the
extremely dangerous duty of blowing open the gates of a walled city. It
is this soldierly spirit that enables the Artillery to continue serving
their guns until the last man of the party is shot down. It is the same
soldierly spirit that enables the Infantry soldier to stand the strain
of lying out in the open, possibly for hours, under a burning sun or in
drenching rain, unable to move hand or foot without being shot at, a
strain to which the order to charge the enemy’s position comes as a
distinct and welcome relief. And it is the same soldierly spirit which
sustains the Cavalry soldier when employed on the important and
hazardous duties of scouting and reconnoitring, in the carrying out of
which he so often finds himself alone or with quite a small party. The
“charge” doubtless requires “dash,” but no special “Cavalry spirit”; the
excitement of galloping at full speed, in company with a number of his
comrades, is of itself sufficient to carry the Cavalry soldier forward.
I certainly would not venture to speak so decidedly on a matter, which
has given rise to so much controversy of late years, did I not feel that
I am justified in expressing an opinion from the fact that I have taken
part in Cavalry combats, and have frequently had occasion to scout and
reconnoitre with two, three, or perhaps half a dozen Cavalry soldiers,
at a time when capture by the enemy meant certain death. And I have no
hesitation in saying that scouting and reconnoitring try the nerves far
more seriously than charging the enemy.
In conclusion, I would ask you, my brother officers, in whatever part of
the Empire you may be serving, whether in the mounted or dismounted
branches, whether in the Cavalry, Yeomanry, Mounted Infantry, or
Colonial Mounted Corps, whether in the Artillery, Engineers, or
Infantry, to read this book with an unbiassed mind, and not to be put
off by the opening chapters, or to throw the book on one side with some
such remark as, “This is written by a civilian, and what can he know of
the subject?” Remember that most of our finest military histories have
been written by civilians. I would ask you to study the facts for
yourselves, weigh the arguments, follow the deductions, note the
conclusions, and then do one of two things. Either traverse the facts,
refute the deductions, and upset the conclusions, _or_ admit the facts,
agree to the arguments, acknowledge the deductions, and accept the
conclusions.
WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE
CHAPTER I
THE ISSUE AND ITS IMPORTANCE
My central purpose in this volume is to submit to searching criticism
the armament of Cavalry. That armament now consists of a rifle and a
sword in all regiments, with the addition of a lance in the case of
Lancers. I shall argue that the steel weapons ought either to be
discarded or denied all influence on tactics, and a pure type of mounted
rifleman substituted for the existing hybrid type. I shall contrast the
characteristics and achievements of this pure type with the
characteristics and achievements of the hybrid type. I shall argue that
a right decision in the case of Cavalry carries with it indirect
consequences of the most far-reaching importance in regard to the
efficient training of all our other mounted troops, regular or
volunteer, home or colonial—troops which belong almost entirely to the
pure type, but on whose training the mere existence of a hybrid type,
with a theory of tactics derived from the steel, reacts unfavourably.
I cannot do better than begin by quoting two passages from page 187 of
the latest edition of “Cavalry Training” (1907). They constitute an
epitome of the case I wish to combat, and I challenge almost every
proposition, express or implied, contained in them. The first runs as
follows:
“From the foregoing it will be seen that thorough efficiency in the use
of the rifle and in dismounted tactics is an absolute necessity. At the
same time the essence of the Cavalry spirit lies in holding the balance
correctly between fire-power and shock action, and while training troops
for the former, they must not be allowed to lose confidence in the
latter.”
Beginning with the first sentence, I challenge two assumptions implied
in it: first, that “thorough efficiency in the use of the rifle and in
dismounted tactics” (by hypothesis an absolute necessity) is compatible
with thorough efficiency in shock action, also, by hypothesis, a
necessity; second, that thorough efficiency with the rifle is confined
to what the compilers of the drill-book call “dismounted tactics.”
Passing to the second sentence of the same quotation, I challenge the
definition of the “essence of the Cavalry spirit” there laid down. This
definition is borrowed word for word from a German book, originally
written before the Boer War and republished in 1902, when the war was
ending, by an officer—the distinguished General Bernhardi—who founded
his conclusions not on experience but on report, and addressed those
conclusions to the German Cavalry, whose tactics, training, and
organization by his own admission were, and seemingly are still, so
dangerously antiquated in the direction of excessive reliance on the
steel as to present no parallel to our own Cavalry. I challenge the
Cavalry spirit so defined because it is a hybrid spirit, impossible to
instil and impossible to translate into “balanced” action, even if the
steel deserved, as it does not deserve, to be “balanced” against the
rifle. I challenge the definition still further, because it is not even
an honest definition. Affecting to strike a just balance between the
claims of the rifle and the steel, it does not represent the facts of
existing Cavalry theory and practice in this country. Though borrowed
from a German authority, it is even less to be relied on as representing
the facts of German theory and practice, nor does it correspond to the
general tenor of the very handbook—"Cavalry Training"—in which it
appears. Those facts and that tenor find their really honest and
truthful expression in the second quotation, which runs as follows:
“It must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is,
cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the
magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel.”
I challenge both the form and the essence of the statement: its form
because the words imply that “the speed of the horse and the magnetism
of the charge” are exclusively connected with the use of the cold steel;
its essence because the principle laid down is fundamentally unsound.
I want to induce all thinking men, whether professional soldiers or not,
who take an interest in our military progress, to submit this theory of
the _arme blanche_ once and for all to drastic investigation, in the
light of history—especially of South African history and Manchurian
history—in the light of physical principles, and in the light of future
Imperial needs. Above all, I want them to examine the case made for the
theory by Cavalry men themselves, and to judge if that case rests upon
an intelligent interpretation of new and valuable experience, or,
rather, upon a stubborn adherence to an old tradition whose teaching
they have indeed been forced to modify, but have not had the good sense
to abandon. The principles laid down by professional men for the use of
their own arm must of course exact the greatest respect, but they are
not sacrosanct, and if they are found to rest on demonstrably false
premisses they deserve to be discarded.
Of all military questions this question of the _arme blanche_ and the
rifle is one around which general or outside criticism may most
appropriately centre. It is not merely a Cavalry question; it cannot be
disposed of by reference to the British regular Cavalry as it exists
to-day. The training of all mounted troops, regular or volunteer, home
or colonial, however armed and trained, depends on clear notions as to
the relative value of the two classes of weapon. As an example of what I
mean, I suggest that it is shallow and unscientific to present the
Yeomanry with the “Cavalry Training” handbook as a whole, and to inform
them in a sort of postscript of three perfunctory pages that they should
be “so trained as to be capable of performing all the duties allotted to
Cavalry, except those connected with shock action.” According to the
interpretation of the words “duties connected with shock action,” the
injunction might mean anything or nothing. No clear interpretation of
the words could be derived from the handbook itself. The Yeoman might
turn for light to the Mounted Infantry Regulations, and ask if, in its
opening words, he was “an Infantry soldier ...” governed “in his
tactical employment by the principles of Infantry training,” and, if
not, in exactly what sense and for what reasons he was supposed to
differ from the Mounted Infantryman; but he would ask in vain. In the
end, he often concludes from the fact that he is “Cavalry,” that he is
in peril for lack of a sword, and appeals for the sword when he has
barely mastered the rudiments of the rifle. The Mounted Infantryman, who
has been first an Infantry soldier, nourished on “Infantry Training,”
may well wonder why that manual encouraged him not to fear Cavalry,
while directly he obtains a horse he is warned to fear the steel.
These are examples of confusion of thought at home. What of Greater
Britain? A critical time has arrived in our Imperial history. There is
an universal sense of the necessity of closer union for Imperial
defence. An Imperial General Staff has been initiated which is to
“standardize” organization and training. One of its functions ought to
be to formulate some clear, rational principles for the employment of
mounted troops. We know we can get large numbers of these troops. From
first to last in the Boer War we obtained upwards of 70,000 men outside
Great Britain. We could obtain many in another great war, and make far
more valuable use of them; if time and thought were to be given to their
organization and training, with a special view to service in an Imperial
Army. Inspiration in the first instance will naturally come from the
home country. What are we going to ask of these troops, who, be it
remembered, are designed to form an integral part of an Imperial Army,
ready, without the confusion, waste, and inefficiency due to an
improvised system, to take their place in the field for the performance
of definite, specific duties? We shall hardly, it is to be presumed,
recommend shock action with the steel weapon to men who have not even
the sentimental tradition of shock action, much less any practical
belief in its efficacy. In what light, then, is shock action to be
presented to them? What is to be their rôle? Are they, like the
Yeomanry, to be informed that they are unfit to perform an undefined
range of duties for which shock action alone is a qualification, or are
they to be held competent to act as “Cavalry,” while the Yeomanry cannot
claim that privilege? Again, are they, like the Mounted Infantry, to
regard themselves on the one hand as “Infantry soldiers” mounted upon
horses, and, on the other, as competent to perform regularly the duties
of “Divisional Cavalry”? Or are they to be called Mounted Riflemen, a
name officially unknown in England? And, if so, in what precise and
positive way do Mounted Riflemen differ from Yeomanry, Mounted Infantry,
and Cavalry? These questions must be answered, and they must be answered
to the satisfaction of practical men whose ideas of war have been
moulded by the South African War, where shock action, as they know very
well, fell into complete disuse, where all classes of mounted troops,
home and colonial, performed according to their varying degrees of
ability, the same functions, and where the rifle was the only weapon
which counted.
This question of weapons for horsemen must be fairly and squarely faced.
It is a national and Imperial question, upon which every shade of
opinion, volunteer or regular, should be consulted, and a verdict formed
on the evidence, historical and technical. Part only of the rich and
varied experience gained upon this question in South Africa was gained
by Cavalrymen. Gunners, Sappers, and Infantrymen, to say nothing of
volunteer officers of every description, led mounted troops with
distinction. The most brilliant Boer leading came from lawyers and
farmers. The point is largely one for common sense, applied to known and
recent facts, and everybody who takes any interest in military matters,
whether he bears arms or not, can and ought to form an intelligent
judgment on it.
But at present the situation is far from satisfactory, and, unless the
controversy can be brought to a head in time, seems likely to grow more
and more unsatisfactory. General public interest in the details of the
South African War languished even before it was ended. After the war was
over the tendency was to banish a tedious and unpleasant subject from
memory. That, probably, is only a phase, yet a phase which may be
dangerously overprolonged. The citizen army which fought in South Africa
side by side with the regular forces has disappeared. A great number of
its individual members still bear arms as volunteers, but most of the
organizations raised for war purposes have perished as such, and with
them many of the sound, young traditions which were derived from war
experience. A new generation is slowly coming into being, permeated,
indeed, by growing enthusiasm for military service, but not particularly
interested in the war, and taught on the highest authority to regard it
as abnormal. In the regular forces a somewhat similar tendency has been
inevitable; the causes which led to a general concentration of thought
on mounted problems have disappeared. The war once over, the army
naturally fell back into its normal organization. Men temporarily called
to become leaders of horse from branches outside the Cavalry and regular
Mounted Infantry returned to their former vocations and became
reabsorbed in their old interests.
A great current of vital and original thought was irrevocably diverted.
The ideas, no doubt, have lived on and thrived sporadically. At this
moment there is probably much opinion in the army at large which is
unfavourable to the official Cavalry view of the _arme blanche_, but the
opposition is neither authoritative nor effectively articulate. In the
natural course of things the regular Cavalry—a force centuries old and
vested with immemorial traditions, the premier mounted force of the
Empire—has reasserted its sway over theory and practice. Shock action,
consigned to complete oblivion in South Africa and to equally complete
oblivion in Manchuria, still holds the first place in the training of
the Cavalry soldier. The reaction has been gradual but sure. In 1903, a
year after our war, the lance, by official order, was relegated to the
realm of “ceremony” and “recreation,” and the sword was expressly
subordinated to the firearm, which became the soldier’s “principal
weapon.” Then the sword regained that place, and finally the lance
returned to use as a combatant weapon in conjunction with the sword. It
is true that the rifle has been substituted for the carbine, and that
“thorough efficiency in the use of the rifle” is enjoined as an
“absolute necessity”; but, as I have pointed out, the spirit of the
regulations suggests primary reliance on the steel as the main source of
enterprise and dash. I lay stress on the spirit, for in the endeavour to
make the best of both worlds, and to picture a perfect hybrid type,
capable of doing all that first-class mounted riflemen can do, and all
that first-class shock soldiers can do, the letter of the instructions
for the employment of Cavalry in the field is often inexcusably evasive
and ambiguous.
But if there were any doubt about the essential meaning, the published
writings of Cavalry authorities like General Sir John French, when
combating the advocates of the rifle, would dispel that doubt. At such
times, the principle of balance is forgotten, and the ineradicable
belief in the supreme efficacy of the steel is laid bare. Does this
belief rest on a sound basis? I want to show that it does not. It is a
formidable task; how formidable, the mere mention of the name of General
French will show. Deservedly he commands widespread respect and
confidence, not only as the most distinguished British Cavalry officer
now living, but as a soldier of high general ability. To a vast number
of minds his verdict on any military point would be decisive. In South
Africa he was the incarnation of the soldierly virtues. His name is
bound up with some of the best work done by the Cavalry during that war,
so that any critic of the _arme blanche_ who founds his criticism on
that war, finds himself continually confronted by the seemingly
unanswerable argument that our ablest Cavalry officer believes in the
_arme blanche_, and our ablest Cavalry officer, himself endowed with
long war experience, must be right. I ask the reader to reserve his
judgment. No one who has not studied in a critical spirit this question
of weapons for horsemen can realize the incalculable influence of purely
sentimental conservatism upon even the ablest Cavalry soldiers. The
whole history of the subject has been one of indifference to, or
reaction from, war experience, with the result that every great war from
the middle of the nineteenth century to the recent war in the Far East,
with the solitary exception of the American Civil War, has produced a
confession of comparative failure in the Cavalries employed, even from
the Cavalry leaders themselves. General French himself would, I believe,
be the first to admit that in South Africa he owed little or nothing to
the _arme blanche_, and everything to the rifle. His case is that that
war was abnormal. The _arme blanche_, indeed, is a religion in itself,
comparable only to the religion of sails and wood which, in the
affections of the old school of sailors—able sailors—long outlived the
introduction of ironclads. This kind of conservatism must be analyzed,
and, if need be, discounted, before we can arrive at the truth.
The published opinions of Sir John French may fairly be taken to
represent the best, and in a sense the official, case for the steel
weapon. In 1909 a new edition was issued in this country of Von
Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in Future Wars,” the work from which the compilers
of “Cavalry Training” have taken their definition of the hybrid “Cavalry
spirit,” and much more beside. It is admirably translated by Mr.
Goldman, who wrote “With French in South Africa,” after accompanying
General French in the field during an important part of the South
African campaign, who founded the _Cavalry Magazine_, and who may be
regarded as the principal lay advocate of the _arme blanche_.
Bernhardi’s book is preceded by an introduction from the pen of General
French himself. This introduction takes the form of an enthusiastic and
absolutely unqualified eulogy of everything contained in the German
publication, whose author is described as having, “with remarkable
perspicacity and telling conviction, dealt in an exhaustive manner with
every subject demanding a Cavalry soldier’s study and thought.”
Nor is the book only praised for its intrinsic merits. It is avowedly
put forward as a conclusive answer to the English critics of shock
manœuvre with the _arme blanche_—critics whom General French, in the
earlier part of his introduction, takes special pains to answer with
additional arguments of his own. Mr. Goldman, whose views may be
presumed to have received the approval of General French, adds a
preface, in which he pursues the same object. Here, then, we have a
volume which correctly represents in a compact and convenient form the
best professional opinion on this question. I propose to refer to it
incidentally, and at a later stage to submit it to closer analysis; but
I urge my readers to read the book for themselves, only taking care to
remember who Bernhardi was, when he wrote, why he wrote, and for whom he
wrote. I venture to think that they will pronounce the representation of
his volume as the last word of wisdom for British Cavalrymen, and as the
supreme vindication of the _arme blanche_, an almost incredible
phenomenon in a strange controversy. They will find it, indeed,
profoundly suggestive and interesting, but unconsciously destructive of
the very doctrines which its English sponsors believe it to uphold. A
more genuine representation of Continental thought may be found in a
book entitled “Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” by the Austrian
authority, Count Wrangel, to which I shall also refer.
In submitting theory to the test of facts, I propose to concentrate
attention on the modern evidence, and by “modern” I mean evidence since
the introduction of the smokeless long-range magazine rifle. Of the two
great wars since that era, those in South Africa and Manchuria, I shall
deal principally with the former. For Englishmen, bent on discovering
from their own national experience the best weapons and tactics for
mounted men of their _own race_, as distinguished from foreign races,
the South African facts are the only modern facts strictly relevant to
the inquiry. Aside from savage warfare, and disregarding the first Boer
War as too brief and inconclusive to afford reliable evidence, we have
to go back in our search for earlier experience as far as the Crimean
War, when the firearm was a plaything as compared with the modern rifle.
In the realm of foreign experience, there has been a great deal of
controversy, much of it painfully sterile, on Cavalry work in the
Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the Franco-German War of 1870, and the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. Here, too, the firearm, though
considerably improved, was primitive compared with the Mauser or the
Lee-Enfield rifles. Nor, in spite of the illuminating examples furnished
by the American Civil War, had anything approaching the type we now know
as mounted riflemen been initiated by the Continental soldiers. There
was no means of testing the value of this type, because it simply did
not exist. Cavalry training and manœuvres were still those of the
Napoleonic era. The firearm carried by the Cavalry was inferior even to
that carried by the Infantry, and scarcely an attempt was made to
inculcate any effectual use of it. Hence the comparative impotence of
the Cavalries.
The American Civil War of 1862–65, for Englishmen especially, stands in
a class by itself.[9] The men engaged in it were men of Anglo-Saxon
race, untrammelled by prejudices and traditions, working out mounted
problems by the light of common sense. The firearm, poor weapon as it
was, judged by our modern standard, became the most valuable part of
Cavalry equipment, and the most fruitful source of dash and enterprise.
Sheridan’s Cavalry were said by Stuart, who was the best possible judge,
to have fought better on foot than the Federal Infantry. The great
Cavalry raids in which the war abounded, and of which the European wars
which followed were conspicuously barren, depended absolutely for their
success, as all such enterprises always must depend, on aggressive
fire-efficiency. Fire from the saddle was constantly used by Morgan,
Forrest, and other leaders. Infantry on both sides learnt to despise the
sword, though for inter-Cavalry combats that weapon, owing to the
imperfections of the firearm, remained a trusted auxiliary. Our modern
rifle would have certainly produced the pure type of mounted rifleman
which South Africa produced in both sets of belligerents. The example
had no effect upon Continental tactics, a blind imitation of which has
always been the besetting sin of our own Cavalry school. Thirty-four
years later, when the rifle had enormously increased in power, we pitted
ourselves against the born shots and hunters of the veld with as little
regard for the Cavalry lessons of the American Civil War as though it
had never been fought.
-----
Footnote 9:
Colonel Denison’s “History of Cavalry” gives an excellent account of
Cavalry work in this war and others of the same period.
-----
Lastly, we have the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. That, as I shall
show, seals the doom of the _arme blanche_, and crowns the case for the
mounted rifleman. But it is a foreign war, and not, therefore, so
peculiarly applicable to ourselves as the Boer War, whose lessons,
nevertheless, it drives home. I propose to discuss it at a later stage,
and will only remark now that even the most ardent advocates of the
sword and lance have to admit that those weapons played no part in the
war, while, on the other hand, neither Cavalry, not even the Japanese,
approached the standard of fire-action attained in the course of our own
war.
One more general word about the history of the subject prior to 1899. A
vast amount has been written upon it. There is much common ground.
Nobody denies that the relative important of shock manœuvre with the
steel weapon has steadily declined for a century. It is generally
admitted that the examples of successful shock action in the European
wars of the sixties and seventies were relatively very few, and the
performances of the Cavalries relatively poor to those of other arms.
While persisting in the argument that, had certain conditions been
fulfilled, Cavalry work, including shock work, might have been more
distinguished, advocates of the steel now generally admit that even then
the neglect of fire-action was the main cause of ill-success. Upon this
point no one could speak more strongly than Bernhardi. But if there is
much common agreement, we must make our minds absolutely clear as to the
nature of this agreement. A great part of the controversy has raged
round a comparatively narrow point: whether masses of Cavalry can any
longer charge Infantry, and, if so, what are the limitations to the
success of such a charge. It is agreed that since 1870 limitations are
many and severe; but the settlement of that point leaves the major issue
untouched. The opportunities of the steel weapon may have diminished,
but to the Cavalry school this weapon remains the weapon _par
excellence_ for the Cavalry, the indispensably decisive factor in
inter-Cavalry combats, which are to take the form of shock duels, and
the main inspiration for all the wide and important range of duties
belonging to the arm. No historian has studied more profoundly, nor
written more brilliantly upon, the development of mounted tactics than
the late Colonel Henderson. He was deeply versed in the Civil War, and
preached to deaf ears the great possibilities even of an imperfect
firearm in the hands of Cavalry. In a masterly analysis of the mounted
actions of the European wars from 1866 to 1878,[10] he pointed out the
comparative failure of shock, and the magnificent opportunities which
would have been open to any body of mounted troops as skilled in
fire-tactics as Stuart’s Confederates. He even goes so far as to say
that “a few commandos of Boers could have reduced to utter impotence the
whole French Cavalry.” Yet, at the end of his inquiry, just when he
seems to have proved to an impartial reader that the day of the steel
weapon is over and the undivided reign of the rifle begun, he falters.
There is a strange logical hiatus. Then the old dogma proves too strong.
After all, he concludes, the source of the “Cavalry spirit” is, and must
be, the steel. A precisely similar phenomenon, though springing from
wholly different causes, and with more domestic justification, occurs in
the case of Bernhardi and of Wrangel. Henderson’s solution was that, if
we are to have thoroughly expert mounted riflemen, they must be embodied
in a separate force.
-----
Footnote 10:
“Science of War,” chap. iii., “Tactical Employment of Cavalry”
(undated).
-----
That compromise should have taken this particular form in Henderson is a
circumstance I have never been able to understand. It is utterly
contrary to Civil War experience, as he himself interprets it. That he
should recommend one pure type, armed with either weapon, or two pure
types, each armed with a different weapon; or one hybrid type, with
_theoretical_ perfection in both weapon, would be intelligible. That he
should recommend a hybrid type, with the steel strongly dominant and the
rifle admittedly inferior, plus a pure type of expert mounted riflemen,
is strange indeed, after the conclusions he draws from history. But the
_arme blanche_ plays the strangest tricks with the acutest minds.
Bernhardi and our own Cavalry school are shrewd enough to postulate
theoretical perfection in the hybrid type, even if they make the sword
the supreme source of dash. We do not know what Henderson’s final
opinions were. The essay in which he alludes to the Boers was written
before the end of the war. In him we can easily trace the cause of the
logical hiatus. He had to take into account the use of the steel by
American horsemen in inter-Cavalry combats, but at a time when the
imperfections of the firearm left a field to the steel which has since
been shut off. Whether the South African War, with its mounted
rifle-charges, modified his views, we are ignorant. His first volume of
the “Official History” never saw the light, and he died in 1903. But we
know this, that the last paper he ever wrote, the “British Army”—though
he does not touch specifically on the mounted problem at all—insists
primarily on the revolution wrought in all modern tactics by the deadly
efficacy of the smokeless, long-range magazine rifle, a revolution whose
essence was the substitution of individual skill and intelligence for
those formal, machine-like movements of massed bodies which are best
exemplified in the case of shock action.
Using the South African War as his primary source of illustration and
guidance, I ask the reader to grapple seriously with the logic and
history of this matter. I beg him not to be content, failing
incontrovertible arguments, with the assurance of Cavalry men that, in
spite of the lessened opportunities for the _arme blanche_ and the
greater importance of the rifle, the former weapon must still be
regarded as the governing factor in Cavalry training. I ask him to take
nothing for granted, but to examine every function of Cavalry, tactical
or strategical, defensive or offensive, whether against Cavalry,
Infantry, or guns, and with a pitilessly critical eye to investigate the
evidence bearing upon this vital question: Which is the better weapon?
He will be discouraged and confused at the outset by the obscurities
connected with nomenclature. Names sanctioned by time always have a
strong influence in human affairs. Nowhere is this influence more
disproportionately strong than in the case of mounted troops. The fine
old word “Cavalry” simply means horse-soldiers without regard to weapon;
but by the tradition of centuries it has always been, and is still
associated with the sword and lance, though, in fact, for a long time
past all Cavalries have been accustomed to carry some sort of firearm as
well. Then there are Mounted Infantry, a force, so to speak, improvised
out of Infantry, with a short additional training as horsemen; then the
volunteer Yeomanry, and the Colonial Mounted Riflemen.
Names apart, the reader must ask himself: What happens in action? Does
the rifle dictate tactics to the sword, or the sword to the rifle? What
precise part does the question of weapons play in the ascription to
Cavalry and the denial to Mounted Infantry of all the difficult and
important duties of the major reconnaissance, duties obviously requiring
many faculties, mental and physical, which have no connection with the
steel weapon? Can a man ride quicker or better, be more observant,
original, or intelligent because he carries a sword? Finally, how is
training to conform to weapons? In the realm of tactics does the
official language correspond with the truth? Why should the expression
“dismounted tactics,” as opposed to “mounted tactics,” be always used in
reference to the use of the rifle by Cavalry? Does not the common factor
of mobility transcend the factor of weapons? Cannot mounted riflemen
“charge,” not, of course, according to that narrow interpretation of the
word which restricts it to shock, but in ways equally, if not more,
efficacious? And if, aside from the mobility derived from the horse, the
dash shown in these and similar operations can demonstrably be shown to
have been inspired by the rifle, is not the old Cavalry maxim that dash
is derived from the sword seriously shaken? It is all very well in
printed instructions to inculcate perfection in both, but is it humanly
possible to maintain unimpaired in the same body of soldiers, still
defined as “Cavalry,” the old standard of shock manœuvre, with all
the rigorous training it demands, and all the specialized instincts and
habits associated with it, while adding all the equally rigorous, and
equally specialized education of body and mind, which is indispensable
to the production of a good mounted rifleman? If not, which weapon is
likely to go to the wall?
Seeking light on these and kindred matters, the student will find
himself straying in a fog of loose definitions corresponding to loose
thought. He will find the word “Cavalry” used in several different
senses for several different purposes; sometimes merely to mean armed
horsemen, sometimes with special emphasis on the steel weapon, sometimes
with particular reference to the rifle. He will find Bernhardi calling
the Boers Cavalry, and his commentator, Mr. Goldman, gravely rebuking
him for not seeing that they were Mounted Infantry. He will find General
French hotly combating the heresy that “Cavalry duels” are a thing of
the past, and confusing in his own mind duels decided by the _arme
blanche_ with those struggles for mastery between the rival mounted
forces of two opposing armies which, everyone agrees, must be a
preliminary factor of high importance in all campaigns; and we find him
becoming eloquent on the great and growing rôle of Cavalry in war, as
though anybody had ever doubted that proposition, except in so far as it
implied that Cavalry drew their power mainly from the _arme blanche_.
The South African War, no less than the Manchurian War, throws a flood
of light on all these difficulties. It seems strange that it should be
necessary to recommend a thorough sifting and weighing of the South
African evidence. Yet it is necessary, for it is the fashion now to
dismiss that war as abnormal, and throughout this volume I shall have to
devote considerable space to arguing why, for the purposes of this
controversy, it should not be regarded as abnormal. In the meantime, I
appeal for the maintenance of some reasonable sense of proportion in
this matter. The war lasted more than two and a half years. It cost
upwards of 200,000,000 pounds sterling. It exacted supreme efforts,
military and economic. The total number of male belligerents opposed to
us from first to last, foreigners and rebels included, scarcely exceeded
87,000. The total number of soldiers put into the field to meet them
from first to last exceeded 400,000. For us, as I have already reminded
the reader, it was the first great war against a race of European
descent since the Crimea. For us, and for everyone else, it was the
first test on the grand scale of the smokeless magazine rifle, not only
in the hands of Infantry, but in the hands of mounted troops, and in the
hands of mounted troops operating against Cavalry of the old type.
Artillery apart, our foes one and all were mounted riflemen of the pure
type. By degrees all our own mounted troops, of whatever category,
became merged in the same type. And the war gradually became a mounted
war. Mounted efficiency became the touchstone of success. Unprepared in
multitudes of ways for the great struggle, it was in this respect from
first to last that our chief deficiency lay. On the other hand, it was
by their skill in the use of the horse and rifle combined that the Boers
were enabled to defy us for so long.
Merely to state these elementary and indisputable facts is to prove that
the war cannot lightly be regarded as abnormal. Common self-respect, to
say nothing of historical judgment, should forbid such a manner of
thinking. We need to recognize both our faults and our merits as
disclosed at that great turning-point in our Imperial history. Pushed,
as it is pushed, to extremes, this idea of abnormality becomes a
narcotic, lulling us into lethargy and reaction. This was _our war_, won
only by a vast expenditure of _our_ blood and treasure. It has its
memories of bitter humiliation as of glorious achievement, and those
memories are _ours_. The experience is mainly valuable to us in that it
is _ours_. In moments of exaltation we congratulate ourselves, probably
with sound justification, on having, in spite of many blunders, achieved
what a Continental army could not have achieved. And yet, when it comes
to reading the plainest technical lesson of the war, we find the leading
exponents of Cavalry doctrine brushing aside our own priceless
experience, appealing to Germany for light and guidance, and introducing
German formulas—meaningless to Germans themselves—into British
instructional handbooks.
One of the worst features of this insistence on abnormality is the
tendency it breeds in Cavalry writers to read the mounted operations of
the war from the Cavalry point of view only. Had things been otherwise,
had there been the normal opportunities for shock manœuvre, how much
more brilliant would have been the part played by the Cavalry! That is
the line of argument, prompted, as no one can fail to observe, not only
by an abstract faith in the _arme blanche_, but by a very natural
anxiety to place in the best light the achievements of the Cavalry in
South Africa. Confined within proper limits, that motive is
unexceptionable, but the moment it begins to have the effect of
converting a technical question into a sentimental question it becomes
vicious. That is what has happened. No one can doubt the fact who reads
Mr. Goldman, General French’s military biographer, and notes the
laboured efforts to extract from the most unpromising material
conclusions favourable to the _arme blanche_, and the deplorable loss of
perspective which such an effort entails. May I say here, if Mr. Goldman
will permit me, that, although controversy will compel me to criticize
his work unsparingly, I gladly and sincerely recognize its value as a
historical narrative. We differ, not about facts, but about the reading
of facts. I think his very natural admiration and affection for the
Cavalry have led him into the error of believing that their reputation,
as a branch of the service, is bound up with the reputation of the steel
weapon. Believing the contrary myself, I cannot help chafing sometimes
under what seems a sort of coercion into assuming the rôle of a
detractor of the Cavalry, while my sole desire is to attack their
armament. I fancy that all critics of the _arme blanche_ have to face
the same disagreeable ordeal. I can only do my best throughout to make
my attitude clear. The topic ought to present no difficulties. As a
nation, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves if we cannot discuss a great
theme like this dispassionately on its merits. The Cavalry, like every
other body of mounted troops in the King’s dominions, is an Imperial
possession. We are all proud of them, and if we criticize their methods,
it is with the single object of making sure that the energies of this
splendid body of men are directed into the most fruitful channel. In all
wars we know we can count on their setting a high example of the great
soldierly qualities, but we also want to make sure of their taking their
right place at the outset, and maintaining that place throughout, as the
leading exponents of progressive thought applied to mounted problems,
and in that capacity to serve as models to all their Imperial comrades,
and to the world at large.
On its merits, then, and on broad lines, I propose to discuss this
question, avoiding so far as possible everything tending to cloud the
vision with prejudice or bias. When I illustrate from recent facts it is
not with the barren and invidious purpose of apportioning blame or
praise, but with the single aim of elucidating the truth.
CHAPTER II
THE THREEFOLD PROBLEM
I.—THE PHYSICAL PROBLEM.
In preparation for the historical evidence, I propose to state what I
consider to be the constituent elements of a threefold problem. There is
the purely physical problem, which in the marshalling of rival sets of
precedents, and in the formulation of rival definitions of the Cavalry
spirit, has almost always been overlooked. There is the psychological
problem, and there is the problem of training.
The physical conditions are simple, so simple as scarcely to need
comment, were not habit and usage apt to obscure the origin of
long-accepted maxims. I am almost afraid to submit my first proposition,
so naked a truism must it appear. The primary distinction between the
horse-soldier and the foot-soldier lies in the horse, not in the weapon
carried by the man. No permanent, fundamental distinction, either before
or after the invention of gunpowder, has ever existed between the
weapons carried by foot-soldiers and horse-soldiers respectively. At
this day both classes alike carry both a steel weapon and a firearm. A
vast amount may depend (and otherwise I should not be writing) on the
way the weapon may be permitted to govern mounted tactics, but from time
immemorial it has been the superior mobility derived from the horse that
has given to Cavalry, using the word in its widest sense, all the
special functions which distinguish it from Infantry. Let us beware,
then, if we find a writer coupling together the horse and the steel
weapon as though, by some immutable law, they were inseparable factors
of efficiency. Surely, they are not. The common denominator is the
horse. To ignore the lance or sword is not, with all respect to Sir John
French, to ignore the horse.[11] The sole issue is, by the agency of
what weapon can the horse, in conjunction with the will and the manual
skill and strength of the man, be used to the best advantage?
-----
Footnote 11:
“Cavalry soldiers must of course learn to be expert rifle shots, but
the attainment of this desirable object will be brought no nearer by
ignoring the horse, the sword, or the lance” (Introduction to
Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in Future Wars,” p. 22).
-----
If the horse has his merits, he has his drawbacks. Let us consider both,
strictly in relation to the question of weapons. Let us remember at the
outset what is too often forgotten, that the weapon is only used in
actual combats. In all those phases of war which precede combat, for the
rapid transportation from one point to another of any body of troops
great or small, ease of movement and secrecy of movement are the
paramount considerations. In a strategic raid or a tactical turning
movement, in any operation, offensive or defensive, from the action of a
patrol to the action of a division, the carriage of troops into the zone
of combat is a problem of mobility and secrecy pure and simple. Any
weapon which unduly burdens the horse or rider, or renders them unduly
conspicuous, is an obstacle to those ends only to be justified by
showing that it is indispensable for combats. Similarly, any system of
training which is designed to facilitate combat with any particular
weapon, but which reacts unfavourably upon mobility or secrecy prior to
the phase of combat, is, to that extent, to be deprecated. The scout
exemplifies the principle in its extreme form. Acting as a scout, he is
not meant to fight, but to move quickly, and to see without being seen.
It is quite possible that a few unarmed scouts might decide the fate of
armies; certainly scouts have, in fact, done so without recourse to
weapons.
Hitherto, so far as the merits and drawbacks of the horse are involved,
we are concerned only with his speed and endurance on the one hand, and
his visibility on the other. But as soon as we regard the horse as
entering the zone of combat, we are confronted with a new and serious
qualification to his value—namely, his vulnerability. This, in one
degree or another, is an invariable source of weakness. The danger to be
incurred may be reduced to a minimum, as in the case of the pursuit of
utterly demoralized troops. Surprise and stratagem may modify the risk
to an indefinite extent, but the risk always exists, and can be overcome
in the last resort only by a mobility so high as to transcend it. We
arrive thus at the two opposing factors, mobility and vulnerability, the
one tending to counteract the other; and from the physical point of view
it is upon the correct estimate of the relative strength of these two
factors that the solution of every tactical mounted problem depends. It
goes without saying that the invention and improvement of the firearm,
by immensely extending the zone of vulnerability and immensely
increasing the degree of vulnerability within that zone, has profoundly
affected the conditions of this ever-present problem. The reader, no
doubt, will add that the same general principle applies to Infantry.
True; but there is especially good reason to insist on its application
to mounted troops.
Arrived at this point, we must, for the sake of clearness, disregard the
hybrid type of horseman, and picture, for the time being, as separate
personalities, the horseman armed with a steel weapon and the horseman
armed with a firearm. Later on we will fuse the two personalities in
one, when we come to consider training. But for the present I want to
concentrate attention on the relative value in combat of fire and steel.
Let us take first the horseman armed with the steel weapon.
Two characteristics must be noted at once: (1) His steel weapon is used
from horseback only; (2) as against riflemen, whether mounted or
dismounted, it is only used in _offence_. In both these respects it
differs from the bayonet.
In encounters on horseback with other steel horsemen (assumed, as
before, to be pure steel horsemen) it may in a sense be said to be used
both in defence and offence, but these encounters do not immediately
concern us. If two bodies of horse _agree_ to settle accounts in that
way, that is their own affair. The best swordsmen and riders will win.
We are contrasting fire and steel, and the steel as against riflemen is
only used in offence—why will soon appear. We must picture, then, our
steel horseman as acting offensively.
Now, in the physical sphere, while the improvements in the firearm have
greatly increased both the zone and degree of the horseman’s
vulnerability, there is nothing to redress the balance in favour of the
horse or the steel weapon. Both the speed of the former and the efficacy
of the latter remain practically constant quantities from age to age. By
comparison with firearms, steel weapons may be said to be incapable of
improvement. As missiles they have been obsolete for centuries. As
manual implements their range is the range of a man’s arm, plus their
own length. They cannot be used at any point short of actual contact
with the enemy, a point which must be reached with the rider in the
saddle, while the growth in the destructive efficacy of the firearm,
directed against so large a target as that presented by rider and animal
combined, has steadily reduced the horseman’s power of reaching that
point without mishap. Even after he reaches it, he still presents the
same large area of vulnerable surface as compared with a man on foot.
On the other hand, if and when he obtains contact, he gains in two ways.
His weapon gains in efficacy relatively to the firearm, since for the
moment the factor of range has been equalized, or almost equalized.
Secondly, his horse has a new merit, its weight; but this is not an
individual, but a collective merit, only developed by the combined
weight of many horses.
That brings me to a consideration of the steel weapon’s sole function in
war—the shock charge. We are to regard the man now as a member of a
mass. He and his comrades, by the impact due to the united momentum of
their horses, aim at producing “shock,” with its stunning physical
effect on the defence. Aided by shock, they use their steel weapons.
Now, what are the necessary conditions for the production of genuine
shock? First, the horsemen must attack in dense formation, precisely the
formation which offers the best target for rifle-fire. Second, in order
to make shock effective, the riflemen who are the object of attack must
also be in tolerably dense formation, otherwise there is nothing
substantial on which to exert shock. This, of course, is one of the
greatest of the modern limitations to shock, for the whole tendency in
war is towards loose and away from dense formations, the cause being the
increased efficacy of firearms.
Thirdly, since the ground must be covered at high speed and with
absolute cohesion in order to obtain momentum and to minimize
vulnerability, the ground must in every case be such as to permit of
high speed, fairly smooth, fairly level, fairly open, and, above all,
continuously practicable up to the supreme moment of contact. Any
concealed obstruction or entanglement met with in traversing the danger
zone may irretrievably compromise the charge. For true shock a ragged,
disjointed impact is useless. Clean, sharp, and shattering impact is the
only end worth attainment. The ground may fulfil all these requirements
up to the last few yards, but in the last few yards a sunk ditch, a wire
fence, not to speak of more visible obstacles, such as hedges, walls,
earthworks, or any of the common features of an ordinary defensive
position, may render the whole enterprise nugatory. If the reader will
bear in mind the average character of ground in European countries, he
will recognize another serious limitation to the employment of shock.
Fourthly, supposing that all the conditions hitherto enumerated are
satisfied, speed is still dependent on the freshness of the horses.
Whatever their exertions in the performance of the innumerable and
highly responsible duties of Cavalry not necessarily involving combat,
the horses must be capable, whenever and wherever the opportunity
occurs, of a vigorous gallop, ending with the super-gallop known as the
“charge,” at this supreme moment—the one and only moment in which the
steel horseman fulfils his rôle. Modern war proves this standard of
freshness to be chimerical. In peace-training you may compromise on
speed as much as you please, and in point of fact the rigorous
directions of “Cavalry Training” (p. 125) are often diluted to a canter
ending in a short gallop. Futile compromise! The less speed, the greater
and longer the vulnerability of the mass, and the _less shock_.
Here are four conditions for the effective exercise of shock, each
stringent, and, since they must all be satisfied, of a fourfold
cumulative stringency. Note again the absence of analogy with the
bayonet, which is fixed to the rifle, and comes into use only at the
climax of a fire-fight on foot. The four conditions may be mitigated
genuinely by one circumstance, which I shall refer to later. At the
moment I wish to refer to an alleged mitigation which embraces a
profound fallacy, and I beg for the reader’s particular attention to
this point, for it is largely on that fallacy, at any rate in our own
country, that the _arme blanche_ continues to thrive.
Recall the first two conditions, which may be regarded as counterparts
of one another—density of formation, both in the attacking and defending
force. The reader will easily understand why the latter condition is so
necessary. To propel a massed body of horsemen against an extended line
of riflemen is a wasteful expenditure of effort. There will be no shock
worth the name, while the mass in motion is almost as vulnerable a
target to rifles as though the defence too were massed; fire is
convergent instead of direct, that is all. But supposing the horsemen
follow suit, and charge in loose, extended order? So they may, but in
that case also _they will not produce shock_, which is the indispensable
condition for the successful use of the steel weapon. Here is the heart
of the whole matter. Though there is, of course, no fixed moment when
shock may be said to disappear, it is plain that with every additional
yard of extension, either in the attacking or defending line, or both,
shock, which means the violent physical impact of a united body, must
diminish. It is equally plain that in proportion to this diminution of
shock the chances of the steel weapon rapidly dwindle and the
retaliatory power of the rifleman rapidly increases. He is now an
individual pitted against a rival individual who has lost the collective
power due to mass, while he retains the vulnerability due to large
surface presented by his horse. On these terms the rifleman has an
immense advantage. He has room to move in, a longer range for his far
more deadly weapon, and breathing-time. Let the student beware, then,
when he finds it laid down in the textbook that Cavalry, when attacking
Infantry, are to charge in “extended order” with the steel weapon.[12]
No thoroughly logical upholder of shock—no German, for example—would be
guilty of such a solecism. Bernhardi recommends, at the utmost, a
“loosening of the files” from the jammed, knee-to-knee rigidity of the
charge, as it is to be employed against horsemen. “Only _closed_ lines
on a broad front can be relied upon for success.”[13] Our idea of
extension could only come from confusion of thought in a period of
transition. The reader must watch this point most carefully when we come
to illustrations from the South African War. Is there, then, no
opportunity for horsemen to charge in extended order? Of course there
is; but not for horsemen using the steel. I shall come to the other type
in a moment.
-----
Footnote 12:
“Cavalry Training,” p. 129.
Footnote 13:
“Cavalry in Future Wars,” pp. 221–2 and 234 (4).
-----
I have dealt with the fallacious source of mitigation. Now for the true
source—surprise. This factor of course favours the attack, not only of
steel horsemen, but of all horsemen, and, indeed, of all troops in any
phase of military effort. But it is the soul of mounted effort, because
surprise is derived from mobility, and the horse is the instrument of
mobility. Surprise, therefore, can mitigate any of the rigorous
conditions imposed on shock. For example, the extended riflemen may be
caught in flank so suddenly that they can neither develop fire before
contact nor deploy frontally to meet it. Or massed infantry may be
caught in column of route. But in all cases the degree of surprise
requisite can only be measured by the rigour of the conditions, and
experience proves, admittedly, that under modern conditions an enormous
degree of surprise is necessary for the success of shock against
riflemen. On the whole we shall not be far wrong if we lay it down, as
Bernhardi plainly indicates, that the best, if not the only, opportunity
for the steel against riflemen is in the pursuit of utterly demoralized
troops. Here the least degree of shock is necessary, with a
corresponding slackening in the rigour of the conditions of shock, but,
be it noted, with a corresponding diminution in the efficacy of the
steel, which, as I pointed out, is closely dependent on shock. If we
reach a point when no shock is possible, the steel becomes no more
useful than the rifle.
So much for the steel, and the reader long before this will have seen
why the steel is only used in offence. It requires shock, shock requires
momentum, and momentum implies offence.
Now let us turn to the mounted rifleman, assumed to be of the pure type.
But observe at the outset that we have already been dealing with his
defensive rôle. Dismounted, he has the defensive power of Infantry, and
the physical factors involved are precisely the same. Continue to regard
him in defence, crediting him now with the additional mobility conferred
by the horse. If it is only under the rarest circumstances that Infantry
can be forced into combat on terms favourable to steel, still more
rarely can mounted riflemen be so forced. They can extend more quickly,
change front, or retire to better positions more easily—in a word, they
have a tactical suppleness and elasticity unknown to Infantry. Of
course, I am assuming that they are good mounted riflemen, skilled in
the instantaneous transition from the mounted to the dismounted state,
and able to manage their led horses adroitly and safely. It has always
been the belief of the _arme blanche_ school that steel horsemen if they
cannot charge dismounted riflemen, can at any rate charge their led
horses. All the facts, as I shall show, prove this idea to be illusory.
And now, on behalf of the rifle, let us carry the war into the enemy’s
camp, regarding the rifle, not as a defensive, but as an aggressive
weapon in the hands of mounted men. Save for the elimination of weight,
the physical merits and demerits of the horse remain precisely the same:
speed on the one hand, vulnerability on the other. To exploit the first
and minimize the second must be the effort here as always. But that is
the only point of similarity in the two widely different problems
presented by shock-tactics and fire-tactics. The sword can only be used
in a hand-to-hand encounter; the modern firearm has deadly effect at
long distances. From this fundamental difference in the two weapons
everything else follows. Shock, with its crushing limitations and
disabilities, is totally eliminated. The very idea of shock is utterly
foreign to the fire-tactics of mounted men, because there is no
necessity for it. There is no necessity, therefore, to comply with all
the conditions which are required to produce shock, and which in their
turn so dangerously enhance the vulnerability of horse and rider. Let us
try to contrast the two systems of attack, with the steel and the
firearm respectively, remembering that mounted riflemen, besides the
defensive, have the offensive power of Infantry plus the mobility
conferred by the horse.
As in defence so in offence, the firearm begins to be deadly when the
steel weapon is only an encumbrance, and when the firer is still
invisible. By the intelligent use of ground for the concealment of
horses, and the development of fire at successive points, the attack may
go through all the phases of Infantry attack with a vast increase of
mobility, and with the vulnerability of the horse reduced by skill to a
minimum.
But I need not dwell on the preliminary and intermediate phases of
combat. It is only in the last phase—that of the final assault—that any
parallel with shock-tactics begins. Up to this point the steel weapon
has been idle, nor even now can it be brought into play unless all those
four inexorable conditions are satisfied. The first two—close formation
both in the attacking and defending force—do not apply at all to mounted
riflemen, since there is no question of shock. The third and fourth have
but a remote application.
Far from being a unique moment, this is merely a culmination. The enemy
probably is already shaken, not by the fear of something which can only
materialize after contact, but by positive casualties wrought by a
long-range weapon. It remains to drive home the victory.
Contact may be desirable if feasible, but there is no imperative need
for it. Under many conditions rifle-fire is more effective at 5, 50,
even 100 yards’ distance than in a mêlée. A victory may be crushingly
conclusive without recourse to anything in the nature of a hand-to-hand
encounter; but if nothing save a hand-to-hand encounter will secure a
victory, the rifle provides scores of opportunities of obtaining that
encounter where the _arme blanche_ provides but one, if only the mounted
riflemen are versed in that elementary part of their trade, which
consists in knowing what and how to use, and when and how to discard,
the horse. As compared with the steel horsemen, they are almost
independent of ground. Instead of perpetually pining for level swards
and open “Cavalry ground,” they welcome inequalities and obstacles, for
these are the true conditions of surprise. Indeed, they make use of
these obstacles, instead of allowing them to baulk their efforts. Steep
ascents often aid them, entrenchments and other defences, natural or
artificial, at the point of contact,—hopeless barriers, however flimsy
in their character, to shock—can be surmounted by them. But supposing
the ground is open, level, and smooth, and a mêlée with the enemy
obtainable by quadrupeds, suppose, in fact, the only topographical
conditions which can render an _arme blanche_ charge possible, is there
no rôle open to them analogous to that of the steel horsemen? Can they
not charge home? I shall prove by a quantity of facts drawn from
experience that they can, and under conditions which would be fatal to
an _arme blanche_ charge. Not aiming at physical shock, not therefore
presenting the vulnerable target produced by close formation, they do
not need the same degree of speed, nor, consequently, that perpetual
freshness in their mounts which is the chimera of theorists and the
despair of practical men. Nor is the size of their horses—an important
element in _genuine_ shock—of any account to mounted riflemen. Within
rational limits, the smaller they are the better. Finally, in the
process of covering on horseback this last intervening space of open,
level ground, when the _arme blanche_, remember, even at the eleventh
hour is still idle, need the rifle, too, be idle? Again, I shall bring
ample modern testimony, which is fortified by much evidence from the
American Civil War, to show that fire from the saddle, even if unaimed,
may be used with signal effect, and in the case of the modern rifle, not
merely moral effect, but physical effect. It may take the shape of aimed
fire, as against horsemen at close quarters in pursuit, or against a
Cavalry “mass,” or groups of led horses; while a few casualties, even
from unaimed fire, in the defence, however constituted, produce great
effect in daunting aim and nerves alike. Here, mark, is the crowning
element of superiority in the rifle. Unlike the steel, which is used
only from horseback, it can be used both from horseback and on foot. The
first-class mounted rifleman—the ideal type we can construct from direct
war experience—will be at home in both. He will use saddle-fire mainly
in its unaimed or roughly-aimed form, and will dismount for effective
killing.
The “charge,” which is the sole function of the _arme blanche_, is no
longer the monopoly of the _arme blanche_. It is one of the
functions—the culminating function among many—of mounted riflemen. The
word, of course, is an unsatisfactory one, because in its ordinary
sense (derived originally from shock-tactics) it implies a mêlée or
hand-to-hand encounter, while for mounted riflemen, as for Infantry,
it has a far wider meaning. A charge ending within a few yards of the
enemy—for example, just below the crest of an elevation on which the
defending troops are stationed—is just as much a charge as if it were
pushed beyond that intervening space into the sphere of physical
contact, and it may be just as decisive. But examples, of which an
infinity may be cited, will lead me too far afield at the present
moment. I am regarding in isolation, so far as that is possible, the
physical side of the problem, and I suggest that the physical factors
give an immense superiority to the rifle over the steel as an
offensive weapon for mounted men. Obviously it is possible to conceive
cases when, from the physical point of view, the steel weapon may have
an advantage. The point is, how often in modern conditions can such
cases arise? I think that from the preceding analysis it will be clear
that these cases can be narrowed down to the small class I have
already mentioned—pursuits of thoroughly demoralized troops. Even then
the advantage is exceedingly problematical, and is, in point of fact,
not supported by any modern evidence. Under such extreme circumstances
as Bernhardi describes on page 15 of “Cavalry in Future Wars,” attack
with any weapon whatsoever—battle-axe, revolver, club—will have
approximately equal chances, if, indeed, any weapon at all is needed
to secure surrender. What the rifle can effect in the way of sheer
rapid killing I shall prove by facts.
Remember, too, another important point. Momentum is a continuing
condition of the shock charge. Impetus must be sustained, the defence
burst through, and a rally made on the farther side—a matter of time and
difficulty—for another stroke which inevitably must be less effective
than the first; and the first, owing to dense formation, has struck a
comparatively small area. The rifleman has nothing to do with continuing
momentum, and the stereotyped “rally.” His business is to use his rifle
when, where, and how he can, mounted or dismounted, and with as large a
radius as he can. He is always busy, and always formidable.
One more word on this contingency of the use of steel in utterly
demoralized retreat. It has always been the favourite dream of
Cavalrymen, but it is a dream which in modern war never comes true.
Panic is never universal. There are sections or groups always who have
nerve and spirit enough to fire, and show a decent front, and directly
any element of fire-defence enters in, the power of the steel wanes to
nothing, and the need for mounted riflemen begins. It was so even in
1866 at Königgrätz. It was so in South Africa and Manchuria.
I hope he is bearing in mind that it is only for the sake of clearness
that I have been taking pure types of steel horsemen and rifle horsemen
respectively, and crediting both with high excellence in their several
_métiers_. The hybrid horseman will, of course, have his share in the
advantages, defensive and offensive, of the pure mounted rifleman; what
share is another matter. I am now contrasting fire and steel in the
physical sphere, and I ask, have I exhausted the cases of opposition
between fire and steel? In reality I have, but I am too familiar with
the _arme blanche_ sentiment not to be aware that I shall be held to
have ignored one important case. Again it is an imaginary case. Two
solid masses of horsemen are pictured, the one with swords, the other
swordless, confronting one another at close quarters on an open
plain—"in the open" runs the vague phrase—both blocks on _horseback_.
Palpably, so the argument runs, the steel must triumph. Possibly, but
the contingency never happens, never can happen unless by one of those
stunning surprises which have no special relevance to mounted tactics,
and which argue scandalous neglect in the defence. For the steel
especially such stunning surprises are unattainable, because “open”
ground, one of the conditions of shock, is the worst ground for stunning
surprise. But the illusion does not stop here. It is elevated into that
complete conception of the inevitable shock duel which is the very
corner-stone of Cavalry theory. The idea is this, that in the last
resort shock alone can decide the combats of mounted troops. It is true
that this unqualified generalization is so contrary to common sense that
it is rarely set forth in so many words, but it comes to that, or there
is no meaning in the theory. The inter-Cavalry fight, says “Cavalry
Training,” whether in the phase of strategical reconnaissance, or on the
battle-field of all arms, must be decided by shock. Fire-action at the
best will have but a “negative result.”[14] I shall dispose of this
fallacy, which has itself paralyzed and sterilized Cavalries believing
in it, by illustration. Meanwhile the reader has probably detected its
inherent improbabilities. If there happens to be no available ground for
shock—and how much of England, for example, is available?—there must be
_negative_ effect on both sides—a double stalemate, a deadlock—unless
both parties resort by agreement to a favourable place, as in peace
manœuvres they do in fact often resort. But that is a secondary
fallacy: the fundamental fallacy is the supposition that the steel can
impose tactics on the rifle. It cannot. There is not a tittle of
evidence to prove that it can. All modern evidence proves that the rifle
imposes tactics on the steel, and the evidence only confirms the plain
physical principles.
-----
Footnote 14:
“Cavalry Training,” p. 194.
-----
II.—THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM.
In war the moral advantage of a weapon, whether used in offence or
defence, depends absolutely on its physical efficacy. It will inspire
confidence in its possessor and fear in his adversary in direct
proportion to its average working utility. Practical fighting men cannot
be induced for long to retain either a sentimental affection or a
superstitious awe for a weapon of proved inferiority. In the early days
of a war, when the merits of new weapons, or of old weapons in new
hands, are still in doubt, such irrational feelings have been known to
operate; but they do not last. At the beginning of the South African War
the Boers feared the horseman’s sword, but the fear did not last. The
physical capabilities of the weapon, in harmony with the physical
capabilities of the horse, determine the moral impulse of the horseman
and the moral effect upon the enemy.
In endeavouring to apply this simple criterion to the case of the _arme
blanche_ and the rifle, we are confronted at once with two formidable
obstacles, the “Cavalry spirit” and the “terror of cold steel”—the
former a subjective idea, the latter its objective corollary.
No one but a Cavalryman, perhaps, can fully appreciate the depth and
intensity of the old tactical tradition of the Cavalry, a tradition many
centuries old, the treasured heritage of many glorious fields. There is
nothing which exactly corresponds to it in other arms. Both the Infantry
and Artillery have been accustomed to rely continuously on improvements
in their weapons and to modify their field training accordingly. But, as
I have pointed out, the steel weapons of Cavalry are not susceptible of
improvement. With stereotyped weapon, however great the traditions
behind them, the tactics have tended to be stereotyped, not absolutely,
of course, but relatively to the progress made in other arms. Hence
there has grown up what is known as the “Cavalry spirit.” This
consecrates the past, and entrenches the type behind an impregnate
rampart of sentiment. Let us note that in relation to other branches of
the service the “Cavalry spirit” is something of an anomaly. No one
speaks, at any rate with the same peculiar emphasis, of an “Infantry
spirit” or an “Artillery spirit,” though the peculiar traditions of
these arms are no less glorious, their _esprit de corps_ no less
admirable, their ardour in action no less great. No; the Cavalry spirit
in latter days has come to be an unconscious tribute to change, and at
the same time the symbol of resistance to change.
Let us be quite clear about the nature of this spirit, otherwise we may
be misled by a mere point of nomenclature. I pass by that bilateral
definition, referred to in the beginning of this volume, which, as I
pointed out, represented mere lip-service to the rifle, and is not
seriously accepted by Cavalrymen themselves. Historically, here and on
the Continent the Cavalry spirit dates back to a time when there was but
one category of mounted troops, that known as “Cavalry,” to which all
the war duties naturally belonging to men provided with horses were
assigned, and whose primary weapons were the steel weapons. It has
outlived the intrusion of the rifle into mounted tactics and the
introduction of new pure types under the names of Mounted Infantry and
Mounted Riflemen. Outliving these innovations, it has naturally
retained, for Cavalrymen at any rate, a wider significance than present
conditions warrant. It implies in the larger sense dash, speed,
audacity, resource, nerve—qualities which should be the possession of
all soldiers vested with the high mobility given by the horse. And it
covers, in the larger sense again, all the duties still arbitrarily
assigned to Cavalry and arbitrarily withheld from mounted
riflemen—duties many of which have only the remotest connection with the
steel weapon, and could be—have been, in fact—performed equally well,
and better, by troops relying on the rifle. But, stripped of all these
confusing elements, which are due to the secular association of the
horse and the steel weapon as inseparable corollaries of one another,
the Cavalry spirit, in its inmost essence, means the spirit of fighting
_on horseback_ with a steel weapon, in contradistinction to the spirit
of fighting on foot with a firearm. As I have said before, with opposing
bodies of horse who both deliberately elect to contend on horseback with
the steel we have nothing to do. Our sole concern is to estimate the
influence of the modern rifle upon that method of fighting. Now, in view
of the physical principles set forth above, is the Cavalry spirit, as I
have defined it, a sensible thing to inculcate?
I shall prove that the “terror of cold steel,” the objective counterpart
of the “Cavalry spirit,” is a myth. Cold steel, no doubt, may seem
terrible enough to troops taught to rely on it, but no Infantryman worth
his salt feels any terror of the horseman’s steel. Infantry are taught
in our own country to despise it, not to fear it. _A fortiori_ mounted
riflemen, with the combative power of Infantry plus high mobility,
should be taught not to fear it. They are not so taught.
Strangely enough, the refutation of the theory of terror, and
incidentally of the whole theory of the _arme blanche_, is contained
within the covers of the Training Handbooks. Let the reader study
carefully the whole of page 92 of “Infantry Training” (“Meeting an
Attack by Cavalry”), noting specially the opening words about “open
ground” and “broken ground” in the case of a foot-soldier versus an
individual trooper. Forming square to meet shock has, of course, long
been abolished. Then let him read pages 60 and 61 of “Mounted Infantry
Training,” where he will actually find gravely set forth directions for
forming square to resist Cavalry, so vulnerable are Mounted Infantry
taught to regard themselves when “surprised in the open” (the vague old
phrase!) by Cavalry. Why give Mounted Infantry horses at all? Meanwhile
some zealot for the horse and the rifle has been allowed to insert on
page 57 a direction for Mounted Infantry to use saddle-fire, though only
in the case of “scouts and picked men.” So near we are to common sense,
and yet so far! Fancy a scout, whose aim is secrecy, using saddle-fire!
In all this insistence on imaginary sources of awe the true moral
factors underlying mounted action are forgotten. The greatest of these
is surprise. Behind the weapon is the horse, and the horse is common to
all mounted troops. Properly handled, mounted men will always be able to
exert a strong moral effect upon non-mounted men, simply from their
mobility, from their power to change or gain ground rapidly, to feint,
raid, and swoop, envelop, outflank, mystify, outmanœuvre—in a word,
to surprise their slow-moving antagonists. It is the horse which invests
them with this power, not the weapon, and if we are to speak of
“terror,” it is primarily the terror of surprise—in its widest
sense—which hampers and daunts unmounted troops in dealing with mounted
troops. Conversely, it is primarily the power of inflicting surprise
which instils dash into horsemen, however armed. Nor is surprise merely
an aggressive aim of horsemen; it is a defensive instinct, since the
mobility which gives surprise is set off to some extent by the
vulnerability of that engine of mobility, the horse. Here we come back
to physical conditions. Surprise is useless unless materialized through
the agency of a deadly weapon. For the materialization of surprise what
comparison can there be between a smokeless, accurate magazine rifle and
a weapon which is harmless unless and until physical contact is
attained, especially if it be remembered that the sort of physical
contact indispensable to success can only be brought about under such a
rare combination of exceptional circumstances as I have described?
To mounted riflemen surprise presents a whole world of activity unknown
to shock horsemen. In extreme, but not at all abnormal cases, they can
initiate, elaborate, and carry a surprise to complete and crushing
victory without even so much as being clearly seen by the defence. In
intermediate cases they can always be content with a far less _degree_
of surprise than shock horsemen, for whom surprise only materializes at
the supreme moment of a shock charge home. In remoter cases still they
can exercise a strong moral effect even at great distances by a threat
upon flanks or communications, when shock-trained horsemen would leave
the nerves of the enemy absolutely undisturbed.
III.—THE PROBLEM OF TRAINING.
Here we gather up the threads of the two preceding sections. I have
hitherto regarded fire-tactics and shock-tactics as distinct functions
attributable to distinct categories of troops. Initially, that is the
only way, I believe, of dissipating the mist of ambiguity cast over the
subject by the loose employment of undefined terms like “Cavalry,” and
by that obsession of thought which cannot conceive of the employment of
the horse to the best advantage without the accompaniment of a steel
weapon. But the question has to be faced: Cannot shock-tactics, for what
they are worth, and fire-tactics be harmoniously combined in a hybrid
type? We have at present only one category of troops which professes to
combine both functions—namely, our regular Cavalry, who carry both a
steel weapon and a good firearm. I can imagine a reader saying, “Granted
that your analysis of the rival merits of the two weapons is correct;
you admit that the steel may conceivably have a remote sphere of
utility: cannot the Cavalry do all that you picture mounted riflemen as
doing, and, in addition, when the rare opportunities present themselves,
use the steel effectively?” Or I can imagine the convinced advocate of
the _arme blanche_ saying: “Your analysis is all wrong: the steel has a
nobler and wider sphere than the rifle; still, for what it is worth, we
can use the rifle in the way you describe. We can do all your mounted
riflemen can do, and a great deal more besides.” As with the physical
and moral problems, when theory has said her last word, war experience
only can provide a final answer to these questions. Meanwhile I suggest
for the reader’s consideration that a profound fallacy underlies this
notion that you can train the same set of men to become perfect in the
use of weapons so different as the modern magazine rifle and the sword
or lance, no matter from which weapon they are taught to derive their
“spirit,” or which weapon is supposed to give them the most numerous or
valuable opportunities. If you favour one you prejudice the other; and
the more you endeavour to trim and compromise the less efficient the
hybrid you produce. As Count Wrangel truly says, you cannot serve these
two masters.[15] Both are equally exacting, and the types of education
they exact are as far apart as the poles. Until quite recent times,
outside a little perfunctory attention to the use of a short carbine,
training based on the steel occupied almost the entire time of European
Cavalries, including our own. Perfection in that training, whatever its
war value, requires hard, continuous training extending over years.
Manual practice in a steel weapon is an art in itself. To teach men to
handle in concert steel weapons from horseback with safety to
themselves, to say nothing of damage to their enemy, is a long and
difficult matter. To teach them the shock charge under peace conditions
and on selected ground and selected horses, with no bullets flying, and
with no unforeseen obstacles to mar the symmetry, speed and cohesion
which are the conditions of success, can be the outcome only of immense
patience and application in sheer mechanical drill. If anyone doubts
this let him go to “Cavalry Training” for confirmation. Whether the
charge be used rarely or often makes no difference. What is worth doing
at all is worth doing well, and to train men to do this thing well is a
very big business. If they cannot do it well, they will be beaten at
their own game by troops who can. It is futile to postulate an ideal
balance between shock-tactics and the loose fire-tactics imposed by the
modern rifle. For troops trained to rely mainly on the “terror of cold
steel” the shock charge cannot be a side-issue. It is, and must be, the
central aim of Cavalry education. It must govern drill, and through
drill its influence reacts upon and permeates all functions of Cavalry
to their remotest ramifications. The ideas behind it, the impulses
directing it, are ideas and impulses totally different from, and, under
modern conditions, fundamentally antagonistic to, those which inspire
fire-tactics.
-----
Footnote 15:
“Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” p. 55.
-----
What is true of specializing in shock-tactics is still more true of
specializing in fire-tactics. The art of the mounted rifleman, carried
to the point of perfection to which by war experience we know that it
can be carried, demands an exclusive education. Here, too, is a very big
business, inexperience in which cost us scores of millions of pounds in
South Africa. You cannot, by a stroke of the pen, as it were, graft this
art on to the art of steel and shock by merely re-editing the pre-war
Drill-Book. Marksmanship, though very important, is a comparatively
small part of the education. Civilians can become good marksmen. Our
Cavalry have proved latterly, to their high credit, that they can become
good target marksmen without an excessive sacrifice of time. Nor could
anyone who witnessed the general manœuvres of 1909 dream of saying
that the Cavalry had not made remarkable strides in fire-tactics in the
last few years. The advance, with its proof of the adaptability of our
men to the art, only renders the squandering of energy on shock the more
painful. We know that they can never learn enough of fire-tactics. What
cannot be taught unless it be made a highly-specialized branch of study
and training is the field-craft, the head, eye, and instinct for mounted
work with the rifle, to say nothing of the more purely technical
requirements—the special formations, the handling of led horses, fire
from the saddle, and the like. The work involves a special way of
looking at all field problems; it is inspired, as I have said, by ideas
and impulses of an altogether different category from those which
inspire shock. It requires less machine-like drill, more individual
intelligence, less crude exertion of muscle, more reliance on the wits,
and withal just as good riding, just as careful horsemastership, and
just as much self-sacrifice, audacity, and dash. I shall prove this up
to the hilt by direct illustration from modern wars; but is it not
self-evident? For here are men vested with the offensive and defensive
power of Infantry, together with a mobility which is several times that
of Infantry. Infantry have plenty to do to become good at their trade.
How imperious and exacting must be the demands upon mounted infantry! I
have slipped into one of the conventional definitions. Let us give it
capitals, and ask how the fire-duties of Cavalry differ essentially from
those of Mounted Infantry, or any other category of mounted riflemen?
Fog hangs heavy on that most pertinent inquiry. But the answer, of
course, is that there is no difference whatever. And it follows
necessarily that, however seldom or often fire-duties may be required of
Cavalry, Cavalry will be excelled by mounted riflemen in the performance
of those duties, just as they will be excelled in shock by troops who
have more practice in shock. In either sphere the hybrid type must
succumb to the pure type, and the moral is all the easier to see and
enforce because the pure type of mounted rifleman, however arbitrary and
fanciful the limits assigned to its utility, is actually and officially
recognized at this moment, whereas no such thing as a pure type of shock
horseman exists.
Nor is it only a case of competition with other mounted riflemen or
other hybrid Cavalry. Let the reader extract from “Cavalry Training,”
tabulate, and analyze all the fire-duties now theoretically allotted to
Cavalry. It will take some little trouble, because they are not
marshalled compactly or given the emphasis they deserve. He will find
that they cover almost the entire range of war, and it goes without
saying that in every one of these duties the trooper must be prepared to
fight approximately as well as the riflemen opposed to him, whether they
be Infantry or mounted men. Otherwise he will fail. Troops cannot be
manipulated in war so that each class meets only its corresponding type.
Each class must be prepared to meet any other, both in defence and
offence. I am not constructing an academical dilemma, but a dilemma
forced upon us by the facts of modern war. Bernhardi sees it clearly,
and goes much farther, accordingly, than “Cavalry Training” dares go, in
postulating that utterly unattainable perfection in both weapons which
is the only way out of the dilemma. More on that point later.
The truth is that, in this country, behind all the inconsequent
reasoning which pervades conventional theories of mounted training,
there lies the disastrous hallucination that skill with the rifle is a
comparatively easy thing to learn, a thing which is essentially
appropriate to imperfectly trained troops—volunteers, irregulars of all
sorts—and which can be taken in their stride, so to speak, by regulars,
whose crown and glory is shock. If this view were upheld only by the
regular Cavalry it would be bad enough, but there is a tendency to
uphold it among the volunteers too, so that we daily have the
heart-breaking spectacle of men who have not yet come to the point of
realizing the tremendous possibilities of the rifle crying aloud like
children for a steel weapon. The responsibility for that fatal
discontent rests absolutely on the Cavalry.
Lastly, let it be remembered that this is not merely a question of
carrying weapons of debatable combat-value. It is a question of
mobility, transcending weapons, but at the same time hinging on weapons.
I began this chapter by insisting on the pre-combat or non-combat phases
of war as distinguished from the combat phase, in which alone weapons
are useful. Nobody suggests dispensing with the rifle. Can we dispense
with the sword and lance? Their weight alone is something, especially
when both are carried. But besides that, they are the very weapons which
add to visibility and injure general mobility. The more closely you
adhere to the idea of shock—and, in strict logic, you should adhere to
it if you admit the steel weapon at all—the more you are bound in strict
logic to favour big horses and correspondingly heavy men. If you
disregard logic, as we instinctively disregard it now, except in the
case of the _élite_ of our regiments, you risk overthrow in the
theoretically inevitable shock duel with a more logical Cavalry. That is
a small risk, because, as I shall prove, modern war does not favour that
class of encounter. The great evil is the deadening effect of the shock
theory on that direct aggressive power with the firearm which modern war
insists on exacting. The result is either that humiliating inaction
which extorted the puzzled censure of Von Moltke as long ago as 1866, or
a dissipation of the physical energy of horses and men on circumventions
and evasions which only postpone without facilitating combat. It is a
matter of experience, too, that in time of peace the galloping standard
for the shock charge, the instinctive aversion to dismounting, and other
corollaries of the artificial shock system and the “spirit” founded on
it, tend to produce under real campaigning conditions defective horse
management and faults of a like character.
In the last resort the training of all our mounted troops turns on
_Cavalry_ training. If there is error there, error positive or negative
will penetrate every class. Is there error? The tests of peace are
illusory. Let us examine the tests of war.
CHAPTER III
BRITISH AND BOER MOUNTED TROOPS
In reviewing the mounted operations of the South African War, I must
impress upon the reader the necessity of regarding the war as a whole,
and not as a series of episodes gradually decreasing in dramatic and
technical interest, and ending in a long and dreary period, profitless
for study, of sporadic hostilities known as the “guerilla war.” A
guerilla war really began within the first six months of hostilities.
For serious students of the war, interest in its mounted tactics
increases from first to last, because the war gradually became more and
more a mounted war, and mounted tactics underwent a steady and
progressive development. It would be unnecessary to begin with any such
exhortation as this were it not for the sheer ignorance, even in
authoritative writers, of actual historical events during the latter
part of the war, events which have a direct instructional bearing on
preceding phases, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to
grasp issues and draw conclusions.
In a sense the war was always a mounted war, because the Boers were all
mounted. By tradition and choice they carried no steel weapon. Apart
from a small but very efficient artillery they relied on the rifle, in
the use of which they were highly proficient, and on the horse. They
were, in short, mounted riflemen. In that character they did, to the
best of their ability, all the work allotted in our own army to
Infantry, Mounted Infantry, Mounted Rifles, and Cavalry. This must
constantly be borne in mind when we compare them with our own categories
of troops, either in numbers or in efficiency. We cannot, for example,
in comparing them to our regular Cavalry, lay stress on their numerical
superiority over the latter arm, considered by itself. To make the
comparison pertinent we must throw into our scale the whole of our
Infantry, Mounted Infantry, and irregular horsemen, who supplemented the
regular Cavalry in the performance of those functions which the Boers
united in a single class of troops. The false basis of comparison
constantly appears in criticism of the war, even professional criticism.
The Boers had very few regular troops, and what they had were mainly
Artillery, the rest permanent police of a highly efficient quality.
Their army was a national militia, organized on a territorial system
admirably adapted for local warfare, but for united action on the grand
scale possessing grave defects. In combat, individual skill and
intelligence were remarkably high, the hunting and tracking instinct,
taking military shape in the skirmishing and scouting instinct, being
well developed. The habit of riding long distances over a thinly-peopled
pastoral country, on short commons, and in all weathers, bore military
fruit in endurance and in a skill in the care of horses which was of
incalculable value to them. Without any stereotyped system of tactics or
formations, there was a generally diffused common sense as to what to do
and how to do it in any given military conditions of a tactical
character, a _flair_ for opportunities and dangers, an eye for ground,
and above all an enormous belief, founded on knowledge and practice, in
the efficacy of the rifle, especially in defence, and especially when
the rifle was reinforced by the spade. Born shots and stalkers, they had
also a natural genius for practical field entrenchment, a valuable gift
in itself, but one which, in conjunction with moral causes, reacted
unfavourably at first on their offensive impulse.
Nor, in the early part of the campaign, did the high potential mobility
given to them by their horses act as compensation for this defect.
Exactly how far they lacked offensive impulse is a point exceedingly
difficult to determine, because it is complicated by their great
numerical inferiority. At only two of the big actions of the regular
war, the first and third, Talana and the battle of Ladysmith, had they
as much as a numerical equality. They were greatly outnumbered in the
rest of the Natal campaign, while in our central advance to Bloemfontein
and Pretoria, and on to Komati Poort, their strength in action was
rarely as much as a third of ours, often a quarter, and sometimes as low
as a fifth. In guns we always had an enormous preponderance. Still, in
consideration of their high skill as riflemen, we may certainly say that
at first they were deficient in offensive impetus, and missed
opportunities of victory. Siege-work particularly had a very bad effect
on them. In other field-work they seem to have regarded the horse—or
rather the pony—as a necessary and prosaic vehicle, without which life
on the veld under any circumstances whatever, peaceful or warlike, would
have been inconceivable. He was a commonplace means of transport rather
than a direct source of tactical, or even of strategical, enterprise. In
the tactical sphere, this failure to derive from the horse an aggressive
ardour analogous in kind to the “Cavalry spirit” was not due to any
embarrassment felt in disposing of led horses during the dismounted
phases of a fight, for they were wonderfully expert in this important
matter; nor, certainly, as later experience proved, was it due to the
lack of a steel weapon, which would have been alien to and destructive
of their peculiar tactics. The failure was due partly to an innate
affection for stalking and entrenchments, to a wholesome fear of the
rifle, corresponding to an equally wholesome reliance upon it, and in
some degree to a mere misapprehension of the physical risks involved. It
was connected, too, with a rooted aversion to straying far from their
slow and cumbrous transport waggons, concern for whose safety was an
obsession in the mind of each individual burgher, since they were
private, not public, property. But there was a graver obstacle than all
these, indiscipline, unfitness for that swift and sure collective action
without which no troops can attain a high degree of aggressive mobility.
A tactical inertia, out of all proportion to their real mobile power,
was only one symptom of a malady which infected the whole Boer
organization, military and national. Indiscipline in one form or another
paralyzed strategy, poisoned the springs of enterprise, set the man
above the corps and the province above the State. It promoted
selfishness, vacillation, and, in every commando in the field, a habit
of desertion, for the most part temporary, but none the less paralyzing.
If in all this there was a good deal of mere child-like levity, a
tendency to regard war rather as a series of big picnics than as a
sustained national effort, the moral evil was none the less
far-reaching, and, so far as the integrity of the two Republics was
concerned, mortal.
At this great crisis no deep common patriotism united the Boers. Their
national spirit had not, in the truest sense, come into being. It was
born later under new leaders and in the hour of disaster.
These phenomena are familiar in the struggle of primitive pastoral races
against powerful nations. I only draw attention to them in order to link
my own special topic with the wider moral study of which it forms an
inseparable part. The Boers, as mounted riflemen, cannot be considered
apart from the Boers as citizens of two States fighting for political
independence, and it will be found that the vivification of their civic
patriotism corresponded exactly with the vivification of their mounted
tactics. Unhappily, the study of these tactics has generally broken off
precisely at the point at which they begin to become most
interesting—that is, at the turning-point between Boer despair and Boer
hope; and broken off merely because that hope, however stimulating to
action in the field, was, in respect of its major objects, illusory.
It is a commonplace that both the merits and defects of the British
regular army, at the time when war was declared, were diametrically
opposite to those of the Boer militias. Imperial purpose was vigorous
and sustained; but the power of carrying out that purpose, even with
vastly superior resources in men, money, and material, was
disproportionately weak. Discipline was high, individual skill and
intelligence, especially in the use of the rifle, relatively low.
Excessive precision and formalism, the product of long years of peace,
characterized the drill and manœuvre of all arms alike. Of the
Artillery, which was by no means unaffected, I need say nothing here.
The Infantry, by comparison with the Boers, may be said to have been
wholly ignorant of the immense power of the modern rifle in modifying
formal tactics and in exacting fieldcraft and loose, flexible
extensions. Marksmanship was poor, the stalking instinct scarcely
existed, and the art of field-entrenchment was in a rudimentary stage.
On the other hand, disciplined valour and self-sacrifice, in a degree
unknown as yet to the Boers, offered substantial compensation for these
serious defects.
I pass to the Cavalry, the arm with which we are more immediately
concerned. The “Cavalry spirit,” when the war began, was essentially the
spirit described in the last chapter—the spirit, that is, of fighting on
horseback with a steel weapon. It was from this source that they were
taught to draw their inspiration for the great Cavalry virtues which may
all be summed up in the one word “dash.” The shock charge, founded on
high speed and knee-to-knee cohesion, was the supreme manifestation of
this spirit, the end to which all training led, and on which all
manœuvre was based. Reconnaissance and scouting nominally held a high
place in the scheme of education, but were in fact seriously prejudiced
by the excessive regard paid to the exactitude and precision of
movements in mass, which were to prove impracticable in the face of the
modern rifle. Individual training inevitably suffered. If fire-power in
the enemy, as a hindrance to mass and shock, was under-estimated,
fire-power as an auxiliary to the sword or lance was almost ignored. In
the current “Drill-Book” (1898), out of 450 pages, five were devoted to
“Dismounted Service,” as compared with twelve for “Ceremonial Escorts.”
Fire-action was treated as abnormal, and expressly contrasted with
“normal mounted action.” An inferior firearm, the short carbine, was
carried, but on the saddle, not, as it should be, on the back, and was
held in low esteem as essentially a weapon of defence, in
contradistinction to the steel, which is purely a weapon of offence. The
men, naturally enough, were poor shots and unaccustomed to skirmishing.
Their grand rôle was on horseback, not on foot. Fire-tactics signified
to them “dismounted tactics” in the most sterile sense of the
term—tactics, that is, devoid of aggressive mobility. Note the
interesting difference between this view and the original Boer view. The
Boers, too, may also be said to have regarded fire-tactics as
“dismounted tactics,” but only in this limited sense, that as yet they
had scarcely begun to reinforce the aggressive power of the rifle with
the aggressive mobility of the horse. In the minds of the Cavalry the
horse and the steel weapon were joint and inseparable ingredients of
aggressive tactical mobility. If we regard the horse in isolation as a
physical factor in combat, the Boers (following the formula suggested in
Chapter II.) overestimated his vulnerability and neglected his mobility.
The Cavalry did the opposite.
The standard of military education among officers, as throughout the
greater part of the army, was not high enough. If Bernhardi had written
“Cavalry in Future Wars” one year earlier, and had excited the interest
he has since excited, the difference might have been enormous, even if
his fallacies as well as his truths had been embraced. As it was, the
historical outlook was imitative of the Continental methods of the
sixties and seventies, which in their turn were imitative of still more
antiquated methods. The really great and stimulating Anglo-Saxon
precedent, the American Civil War, had had scarcely any effect on
Cavalry practice in this country, partly from inattention, partly
perhaps from the same mistaken impression which pervaded the German and
French schools, and was so soon to be shattered to pieces by our own
experience, that the methods of self-made volunteer troops afford little
or no instruction to regulars.
It is necessary to add that these observations are general. In every arm
there always have been and always will be differences between different
units, the consequence almost entirely of different degrees of ability
and energy in the officers, and, above all, in the commanding officer.
In the case of the Cavalry, methods being standardized throughout, the
important question was, when and in what volume would come the fresh
stream of initiative imperatively required? Very naturally, but most
unfortunately (for in regular corps influence from the top downwards is
of vital consequence), the senior men were the most conservative of all.
The hope lay mainly in junior men. How it materialized we shall see. In
the meantime ardour was universal, and the prime soldierly qualities of
physical courage, discipline, and endurance were, throughout all ranks
of the Cavalry, as in all branches of the service, at a high level.
The Mounted Infantry was a comparatively young, inadequately recognized
force, with few war traditions. Trained by able and intelligent
officers, themselves enthusiasts for the rifle, the force was eager to
gain distinction in the field, and to show that the rifle and the horse
could be vigorously and effectively combined. But the Cavalry theory,
modified in practice, undisputed in principle, hung heavy over its
prospects. The force was formed by abstractions from Infantry
regiments—a radically false system; it was taught deliberately that its
functions must, in the nature of things, be wholly different from and
subordinate to those of Cavalry; that reconnaissance, except for its own
protection, was outside its sphere; and that there was one function, the
“charge”—the noblest ideal of horsemen—to which it could never aspire.
In so far as the charge implied “shock” in its true sense of the
physical impact of one serried mass upon another serried mass, no fault
could be found with this restrictions. But, as I have suggested, to
mounted riflemen who realize their full potentialities, the charge
implies other things than shock. It denotes the culmination of
aggressive mobility. Aggressive mobility, therefore, overclouded by this
exterior motive of unattainable shock, was not before the war the
supreme ideal which it should have been, and could have been, to the
Mounted Infantry. Could have been, that is, if the magnitude of the task
involved in the education of riflemen for mounted work, even with the
limited aims in view, had been realized. Infantry soldiers, with all the
defects as well as all the virtues of Infantry training, thoroughly
imbued with the instinct for rigid formations, and at first unable to
ride, were the raw material, and a few months’ exercise with the horse
was considered sufficient to convert them into mounted riflemen. The
force, in short, as it entered the field, represented, both in
organization and training, one of those indefensible compromises between
foot-soldiers and horse-soldiers which will continue to be evolved as
long as ideas are confused by the belief that the steel weapon is, and
must be, the dominant weapon for horsemen. Happily for the Mounted
Infantry, war proved to be a great clarifier of ideas.
From the regular mounted troops of the home country we pass to that
great throng of volunteers—an army in itself—which, as the war
progressed, poured in ever-increasing volume into South Africa from
every part of the Queen’s dominions, or were raised within the borders
of South Africa itself. Known by a bewildering variety of
names—Yeomanry, Sharp-shooters, Horse, Light Horse, Mounted Infantry,
Mounted Rifles, Scouts, Borderers, Carbineers, Guides, and even Dragoons
and Lancers—they all in fact belonged to one distinct type, that of the
mounted rifleman. A small fraction carried steel weapons at the outset,
but none were seriously trained to shock; all relied on the rifle in
conjunction with the horse.
Whether, when they first took the field, the minds of these men
(regarded in the mass) were affected by a recognition, conscious or
subconscious, of a higher power known as shock transcending the humbler
functions of the rifle, and vested only in professional troops armed
with steel weapons, it is exceedingly difficult to say. At first
probably such a feeling had a strong, if unrecognized, effect on the
outlook of the mounted volunteers from the home country, as it certainly
affected that of the professional Mounted Infantry. The old territorial
Yeomanry force, at the time of the outbreak of war, did in fact carry a
steel weapon, and the new Yeomanry, improvised for the war, though they
came mainly from totally different classes from the old, and had little
in common with them but the name, could not be free from the
associations linked with the sword. To the Colonials, especially the
South Africans, who were deeply imbued with the Boer belief in the
rifle, the _arme blanche_ was probably little more than a race
tradition, exercising, perhaps, a sort of dim influence which they could
not have explained in words, but not consciously brought into line with
any practical scheme of mounted duties. The established volunteer corps,
from which the first Colonial mounted troops were derived, whether
inside or outside South Africa, had been designed for local defence, not
for Imperial co-operation. By a wise choice, for which we cannot be too
thankful, they had been trained, largely through the aid of Imperial
officers, almost entirely as mounted riflemen, without any explicit
understanding that they were to do functions subordinate or ancillary to
those of steel-armed professional Cavalry. As to aggressive mobility,
that was for them simply a question of fighting efficiency and
discipline, points in which they could not have been expected to reach
the standard attainable in permanent professional organizations.
In respect of these two points, fighting efficiency and discipline, all
writers have felt the difficulty of forming any general appreciation of
the irregular mounted troops, so heterogeneous was their composition, so
wide the variations of quality between contingents sent at different
times from the same source, so distractingly complicated the
vicissitudes both of name and composition through which many of the
corps went. It is enough for my purpose at this moment to note, first,
that all were enlisted originally for limited terms, and, second, that
the average excellence of the personnel was highest at the beginning,
and underwent a distinct decline as the war progressed. The decline set
in just when an opposite tendency was beginning to become visible among
the Boers, not in their case connected with reinforcements, for they had
none, but through a regeneration of existing elements. These facts have
a most important bearing on the development of mounted tactics.
These general observations on the volunteer mounted troops of the Empire
necessarily carry us beyond the actual military situation at the
outbreak of war. The Yeomanry and the vast majority of oversea
organizations had not been heard of then. So complete was the confidence
of the military authorities in the regular home troops that it was only
under strong governmental pressure that small detachments from the
self-governing colonies of Australasia and Canada were permitted to join
the flag, and of these, in compliance with an intimation that Infantry
would be preferred, only 775 officers and men, coming from Queensland,
New South Wales, New Zealand, and Victoria, were mounted. Of the British
Colonies in South Africa, Cape Colony had a normal volunteer force of
about 7,000, but mainly composed of Infantry, together with two
permanent mounted corps, the Cape Mounted Rifles and the Cape Mounted
Police, of whom about 1,000 men in all were available for the war. Far
away to the north two new volunteer regiments of mounted riflemen, the
Protectorate Regiment and the Rhodesia Regiment, were rapidly recruited
and trained in the two months preceding hostilities. Natal, by the
expansion _ad hoc_ of its normal volunteer force, was able to put a
total of rather more than 1,000 mounted men into the field, together
with 300 more drawn from the permanent Natal Mounted Police.
The Imperial Light Horse, with an original strength of 500, were ready
to take the field at once. Formed and equipped in Natal, but recruited
from among the best elements of the Uitlander population of the Rand,
this famous corps reached at once a high pitch of military efficiency.
Their Colonel was a brave and able Cavalry officer, who understood his
men and the work they would have to do, and had made no attempt to
impose upon them stereotyped Cavalry methods. Their strength lay in the
rifle and in the horse.
Such were the mounted troops of the two belligerent races. All were new
to civilized warfare on the scale now in prospect. All, with the single
exception of the British Cavalry, may be truly described as irregulars,
dependent mainly on their own native wit for the evolution of a good
system of fighting. Behind a great deal of over-confidence on both
sides, due to reciprocal misunderstandings of the lessons of the Majuba
campaign, there were not a few reservations and much curiosity as to the
relative value of weapons, as of many other things.
Before coming to actual hostilities I must deal briefly, even at this
early stage, with a question which must occupy our minds continually in
studying the mounted operations of the war, for upon the final answer to
it hangs the verdict upon the weapons. Were the conditions “abnormal”?
Were they abnormal—that is, in the sense that they did not give a fair
opportunity for testing the relative merits of the steel weapon and the
rifle? That is the narrow question before us, and I beg the reader to
concentrate upon it, without allowing his mind to be influenced by the
mass of irrelevant considerations which necessarily surround it. There
need be no mistake as to what is meant by “normal” in the minds of the
_arme blanche_ school. Their normal war is a war against one of the
great Continental armies, whose cavalries are penetrated with an even
stronger belief in the _arme blanche_ than our own. This is the special
eventuality for which we are supposed to prepare. Without pausing to
discuss the soundness of this view of “normality,” or the logical
consequences to which it would necessarily lead us, let us accept the
chosen ground of argument. Let us constantly be asking ourselves why
this or that set of conditions should not be reproduced in such a war,
and if they were so reproduced, which type of Cavalry—that relying
primarily on the “terror of cold steel,” or that relying primarily on
the rifle—would do the best. In these analogies let us picture Cavalry
in all their various functions, strategical or tactical, offensive or
protective, independent or in conjunction with other arms, and in
collision either with Cavalry, Infantry, or Artillery, fixing our
thought resolutely at every step on the weapon and the tactics
associated with it, and refusing to be led astray by circumstances which
have no direct or indirect bearing on these points. It is by no means an
easy task. Every war is abnormal in the sense that it differs from every
other war. The special peculiarities of the Boer War are on the surface,
patent to the most careless observer. But do they affect the point at
issue?
At present I only wish to dwell on two broad considerations—_personnel_
and _terrain_.
Humanly speaking, the Boers were very like ourselves. They were a white
race, with white ideals, of European descent, allied to us by blood, and
allied, if we are thinking of the German parallel, with the Germans.
Their religion was our religion. Their democratic instincts were as
strong as our own, and stronger than those of the Germans. In spite of a
multitude of points of contrast, economic and social, there was in them
no fundamental abnormality of race or custom which would justify, _prima
facie_, the conclusion that their methods of warfare could never be, and
should never be, our methods of warfare. They were neither savages on
the one hand, nor Martians on the other.
The ground on which the war was fought was only abnormal in the sense
that it was abnormally favourable to the _arme blanche_. As I pointed
out in the last chapter, one of the four great conditions precedent to
shock is open country. From a military point of view, no country in the
world is more favourable to the _arme blanche_ than South Africa.
Whether in regard to natural topography, or topography as modified by
man, it is incomparably more “open” than any possible European theatre
of war, including Great Britain, the least open of all. There are
mountain ranges, one of which became the scene of Buller’s long Natal
campaign, and rugged hilly districts, as there are in Europe; but the
predominant characteristic is that of vast, undulating plains, varied by
sharper inequities, by ridges, isolated heights, and minor ranges of
hills. These features frequently became centres of conflict, simply
because they supplied strong positions. Of features due to the presence
of man or under the control of man, of woodlands, gardens, orchards,
fences, walls, ditches, parks, enclosures, of towns and the intricate
semi-urban environment of towns, of all the thousand-and-one
obstructions to free mounted movement which characterize populous,
highly-developed countries, South Africa may be said to have been almost
destitute. The barbed-wire boundary fences of the very extensive farms
into which the country was divided were the commonest artificial
obstacles.
So much for the tactical opportunities of the _arme blanche_. By an
unavoidable paradox, ground tactically fit for that weapon is the least
favourable for scouting and reconnaissance. It is a pity that the words
which now head chapter vi. of “Cavalry Training” were not there in 1899.
“The increased power of modern firearms and the introduction of
smokeless powder have made it both more difficult and more necessary to
obtain information.” In that open country and with their long rifles,
the Boers outmatched our Cavalry scouts from the first. As regards local
intelligence, Natal and Cape Colony, the scenes of the most critical
fighting, were British territory, where there was an abundance of
skilled aid. It is true that in parts of Cape Colony there was a large,
and in Natal a small, unfriendly Dutch element. But that is a more
favourable state of things than a population entirely hostile. And when,
later, the task of repulse ended, and that of invasion began, and we
were faced with that very problem of a hostile population, even then it
was never wholly hostile. Besides a sprinkling of farmers British by
birth or sympathy, beside the lower class of Dutch _bywoner_, which from
the first showed signs of pliancy, and as time went on supplied us with
an increasing number of spies, besides the native races from whom we
ultimately obtained far more aid than the Boers, we derived enormous
advantage from the large urban British element in the Transvaal, which
gave us intelligence officers like Woolls-Sampson, and fine corps like
the Imperial Light Horse, composed of men who knew the language and
customs of the country. But supposing every soul in the country, white
and native, man, woman, and child, had been bitterly hostile from the
first, that surely is not to be regarded as an abnormal circumstance in
war. On the contrary, it is one of the very difficulties which Cavalry
exist to overcome. Bernhardi, it is interesting to note, lays special
emphasis on this difficulty as one likely to prove increasingly serious
in future wars.[16] After all, the object of war is to conquer, and
people resent being conquered.
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Footnote 16:
“Cavalry in Future Wars,” p. 10, and elsewhere.
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For my facts I shall rely mainly on our own “Official History,” so far
as it has progressed, and on the _Times_ History, which is already
complete. Though they often differ in criticism, these two histories
tally with remarkable closeness in matters of fact. The official volume
dealing with the greater part of the guerilla war is not yet published.