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GERMAN INFLUENCE
ON BRITISH CAVALRY
BY
ERSKINE CHILDERS
AUTHOR OF
"WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE," "THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS,"
"IN THE RANKS OF THE C.I.V."
EDITOR OF VOL. V. OF "THE 'TIMES' HISTORY OF THE WAR"
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1911
[_All rights reserved_]
_Printed in Great Britain_
PREFACE
This essay is meant to be read in connection with the facts and
arguments adduced in my book of last year, "War and the _Arme
Blanche_," with its Introduction by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts. From
the nature of the case I have not been able to avoid a small measure of
repetition, but I have done my best to confine myself to new ground.
A word about my object in writing again. Contemporaneously with the
publication of "War and the _Arme Blanche_," General von Bernhardi
published in Germany his "Reiterdienst," and an English edition,
translated by Major G.T.M. Bridges, D.S.O., under the title "Cavalry
in War and Peace," appeared simultaneously in this country. Like its
predecessor, "Unsere Kavallerie im nächsten Kriege" (translated under
the title "Cavalry in Future Wars"), this new book by General von
Bernhardi was headed with a highly laudatory Preface from the pen of
General Sir John French, who commended it to military students in this
country as a brilliant and authoritative treatise on the employment
of Cavalry in modern war. It was included in the valuable "_Pall
Mall_ Series" of military books, published by Hugh Rees and Co.;
and, in short, unless the critical faculties and native common-sense
of Englishmen can be aroused, it is likely to become a standard
work. There exists, be it remembered, no similar work, modern and
authoritative, by a British author.
My object in this essay is to arouse those critical faculties and that
common-sense. Without any disrespect to General von Bernhardi, who
writes, not for Englishmen, but, as a German reformer, for what he
regards as an exceptionally backward Cavalry, I wish to show, not only
that we have nothing to learn even from him in the matter of Cavalry
combat, but that, if we only have the pluck and independence to break
off the demoralizing habit of imitating foreign models, and to build
on our own war experience and our own racial aptitudes, we have the
power of creating a Cavalry incomparably superior in quality to any
Continental Cavalry.
The indispensable condition precedent to that revival is to sweep away
root and branch the tactical system founded on the lance and sword, and
to create a new system founded on the rifle.
I shall endeavour to show, using von Bernhardi's "Reiterdienst," with
Sir John French's Introduction, and our own official Manuals, as my
text, that in the matter of modern Cavalry warfare no principles worthy
of the name exist among professional men. The whole subject is in a
state of chaos, to which, I believe, there is no parallel in all the
arts of war and peace. And the cause of that chaos is the retention in
theory of a form of combat which is in flagrant contradiction with the
conditions exacted by modern firearms, and is utterly discredited by
the facts of modern war.
The excellence of the translation furnished by Major Bridges has made
it unnecessary for me to introduce into this essay the various terms
and phrases used in the original German text. After a study of that
text, I am satisfied, if Major Bridges will permit me to say so, that,
obscure as the author's exposition often is, no part of the obscurity
is due to the translator. I have not found a technical term of which he
has not given the correct English equivalent, or a passage where he
has not accurately interpreted the original sense.
Let me add that I have been encouraged further to write this essay by
the keen and instructive controversy which followed the publication of
my book of last year. Incidentally I have taken the opportunity in this
volume to reply to some of the criticisms against its predecessor, and
to clear up some points which I think were not fully understood.
E.C.
_March, 1911._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
I. THE GERMAN MODEL 1
II. "CAVALRY IN FUTURE WARS" 7
II. SIR JOHN FRENCH ON THE ARME BLANCHE 15
III. THE BRITISH THEORY OF THE ARME BLANCHE 36
IV. CAVALRY IN COMBAT 53
I. INSTRUCTION FROM HISTORY 53
II. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF COMBAT 66
V. TACTICS AGAINST THE VARIOUS ARMS 86
I. THE PURELY CAVALRY FIGHT 86
II. THE CHARGE UPON INFANTRY 94
III. THE DISMOUNTED ATTACK BY CAVALRY 98
VI. THE FIGHT OF THE INDEPENDENT CAVALRY 103
I. GERMAN VIEWS 103
II. THE BRITISH VIEW 124
VII. THE BATTLE OF ALL ARMS 133
I. GERMAN VIEWS 133
II. THE BRITISH VIEW 154
VIII. RECONNAISSANCE 163
I. WEAPONS 163
II. THE PRELIMINARY SHOCK-DUEL 168
III. DIVISIONAL RECONNAISSANCE 172
IV. SCREENS 173
IX. THE RIFLE RULES TACTICS 186
I. GENERAL VON BERNHARDI ON SOUTH AFRICA 186
II. VIEWS OF THE GENERAL STAFF 200
III. OTHER CAVALRY VIEWS 205
X. THE MORAL 214
GERMAN INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CAVALRY
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
I. THE GERMAN MODEL.
IMPARTIAL observers of the recent controversy upon the merits of the
lance and sword as weapons for Cavalry must have been struck by one
singular circumstance--namely, that there exists in our language no
standard modern work upon the tactics and training of Cavalry in modern
war, written by a Cavalryman, accepted by Cavalrymen, and embodying and
illustrating the lessons of the two great modern wars waged since the
invention of the long-range, smokeless magazine rifle. Without such
a work, controversy is seriously hampered. The need for it is beyond
dispute.
Whatever the extent of the revolution brought about by the magazine
rifle, a revolution, by universal admission, there is. Since 1901
a serious firearm has been substituted for the old carbine formerly
carried by the Cavalry, and the Cavalry Manual has been rewritten, with
increased stress on the importance of fire. It is also the fact that,
from whatever causes, the lance and sword have proved, both in South
Africa and Manchuria, almost innocuous weapons. These facts demand,
to say the least, serious recognition from those who still hold that
the lance and sword are the most important weapons of Cavalry. Angry
letters to the daily press, desultory and superficial articles in
the weekly and monthly press, are not enough. What is wanted is some
comprehensive and authoritative exposition of what Cavalry functions
are in modern war, how they have been modified by the firearm, and
why, with chapter and verse, not by way of vague allegation, the only
great wars in which that firearm has been tested are to be regarded as
"abnormal" and uninstructive.
For illumination and confirmation on these matters, we are constantly
referred, in defence of the lance and sword, by our own Cavalry
authorities to foreign countries whose armies have had no experience at
all of modern civilized war as revolutionized by the modern magazine
rifle. We are referred, above all, to Germany, and, in particular, to
the works of a German officer, General von Bernhardi, who (1) writes
exclusively for the German Cavalry, without the most distant reference
to our own; (2) whose own war experience dates from 1870, when he
fought as a Lieutenant, and who has not seen the modern rifle used in
civilized war; (3) who believes that no wars, ancient _or modern_,
except the American Civil War of 1861-1865, afford an analogy to modern
conditions, and that the modern Cavalryman must base his practice on
"speculative and theoretical reflection"; (4) who states that the
German Cavalry, owing to indifference to the revolution wrought _by the
modern firearm_, and excessive adherence to "old-fashioned knightly
combats," is at this moment wholly unprepared for war and is trained
on Regulations which, though quite recently revised, he makes the
subject of stinging and sustained ridicule; (5) who is so ignorant of
the technique of fire-action by mounted troops that he renders it,
unconsciously, more ridiculous even than shock-action; and (6) who
firmly believes in the lance and sword, and in the shock-charge as
practised "in the times of Frederick the Great and Napoleon."
In this strange list of qualifications the reader will see the makings
of a pretty paradox. And a pretty paradox it is, a bewildering,
incomprehensible paradox; not so much, indeed, that a German author,
born and bred in a German atmosphere, should be so saturated with
obsolete German traditions that even in the act of denouncing them he
can subscribe to them, but that British Cavalrymen, headed by Sir John
French, our foremost Cavalry authority, men who have had three years'
experience of war with the modern magazine rifle, who have _seen_ the
_arme blanche_ fail and the rifle dominate tactics, and who, eight
years before the German Cavalry even stirred in its sleep, acquiesced
in changes in Cavalry armament and training directly based on that
experience--that these men should acclaim the works of the aforesaid
German author as the last word of wisdom on the tactics and training of
modern Cavalry, and represent them as such to young British Cavalrymen,
is a circumstance which almost passes belief.
Still, it is a fortunate circumstance. We have a body of doctrine to
grapple with and controvert. If we succeed in dissipating the myth
of German superior intelligence on Cavalry matters, we go a long way
towards dissipating the whole of the _arme blanche_ myth, which in
the opinion of our greatest living soldier, Lord Roberts--an opinion
founded on lifelong experience of war--is as mischievous a superstition
as ever fettered a mounted military force. The whole of the material
is here--and it is unexceptionable material for controversy--for Sir
John French himself contributes his own views on the subject in the
form of laudatory Introductions to both of General von Bernhardi's
works.
I propose in the following pages (1) to criticize General Sir John
French's views, so expressed; (2) to analyze and criticize General von
Bernhardi's recently published work, "Cavalry in War and Peace," and
to contrast his teaching with that of our own Service Manuals; (3)
to try to show that each General refutes himself, that both refute
one another, and that Sir John French is, by a strange irony, far
more reactionary than the German officer to whom he directs us for
"progressive" wisdom; (4) to expose the backwardness and confusion in
every department of Cavalry thought, here and in Germany, as a direct
consequence of the attempt to found a tactical system upon obsolete
weapons; and (5) incidentally to put forward what I venture to suggest
is true doctrine.
This doctrine, briefly, is that the modern Cavalry soldier is, for
practical purposes, represented by three factors--man, horse, and
rifle--and that it is only by regarding him strictly and constantly
as a mounted, that is to say, an especially mobile, rifleman, as
distinguished from the less mobile foot-rifleman, that we can establish
his war functions on a simple, sound, and logical basis. I ask the
reader to hold that clue firmly as a guide through the perplexities and
obscurities of the topic and the obsolete terminology and phraseology
which not only disturb reasoning but distort and enfeeble practice.
At the outset let the reader grasp the following historical facts as to
the efficacy of swords and lances in civilized war:
1. Franco-German War of 1870-71: Six Germans killed and 218 wounded by
the sabre and clubbed musket counted together. No separate figures for
the lance. [Total German casualties from all weapons, 65,160.][1]
2. South African War, 1899-1902: No statistics as to _death_. About
fifty Boer casualties through lance and sword together, and about fifty
more prisoners taken. [Total Boer and British deaths, and wounds from
all weapons, about 40,000.]
3. Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05: No exact figures, but apparently not
more than fifty casualties from lance and sword together. [Total
casualties in action, over 400,000.]
II. "CAVALRY IN FUTURE WARS."
Two works by General von Bernhardi have been translated into English,
and widely circulated among our military men. I propose to say but
little about the first, "Cavalry in Future Wars," because I have
already endeavoured to criticize it in detail in my own book, "War and
the _Arme Blanche_." It is the second work, "Cavalry in War and Peace,"
published only in 1910, that I wish to make the basis of discussion in
this volume; but in order to explain the history of German influence on
British Cavalry, it is necessary to recall briefly certain features of
its predecessor.
"Cavalry in Future Wars" was first published in German in 1899,
before the Boer War broke out. There was a second edition in 1902,
when the Boer War was drawing to a close, and this second edition,
headed by General French's Introduction, was translated and published
in England in 1906. It was a strange work, strangely sponsored. The
keynote was fire-action for Cavalry, the moral drawn by the English
sponsor shock-action for Cavalry. The chapters on fire-action, urging
the adoption of a firearm even better than the Infantry rifle in
substitution for a mere pop-gun, formed in themselves a complete
refutation of shock; while the chapters on shock, so illogical and
self-contradictory was the method of exposition, formed an equally
complete refutation of fire-action.
It is true that the spirit of fire predominated, that fire was the
General's message to his lethargic brother-officers, but the message
was so strangely expounded that it is no wonder that for ten years
they turned a deaf ear to it. Instead of telling them at the outset
that if they themselves adopted a good firearm, and learnt to use it
properly, they would immensely enhance the value of Cavalry for all
the purposes of war, he opened his argument with a melancholy dirge
over the departed glories of the Cavalry owing to the adoption by other
classes of troops of the deadly modern firearm. They must recognize,
he told them, that they had been "driven out of their place of honour
on the battlefields of the plains"; that they could henceforward only
attack Infantry who were already so shattered and demoralized by the
fire of other Infantry as to have reached the point of throwing away
their arms, and much more in the same sense. Never was such a tactless
prophet! And the pity of it was that he did not really mean all he
said. What he meant was that the ancient glories of the _arme blanche_,
when pitted against the firearm, were gone past recall--a circumstance
scarcely worth an elegy, one would imagine, from a scientific soldier.
War is business, not romance, and if the same or better results can
be produced by an intelligent and dashing use of the firearm, it is
waste of breath to lament the decay of the lance and sword. It was the
main purpose of the General's work to prove that these results could
be so obtained, and whenever he warmed to his subject, and fell into
temporary oblivion of the romantic weapons, he proved his point well
enough, in theory.
But, unfortunately, his oblivion of the lance and sword lasted only
as long as he was criticizing the action of Cavalry against troops
not armed with those weapons. When he came to the action of Cavalry
against Cavalry, both by hypothesis armed, not only with the lance and
sword, but also with the best modern rifle obtainable, the principle
he had just established--namely, that the rifle imposes tactics on the
steel--disappeared, and the opposite principle--that the steel imposes
tactics upon the rifle--took its place. I say "principle," but in
this latter case no reasoned principle based on the facts of war was
expounded, because it seemed never to occur to the General that Cavalry
in combat with Cavalry would have the bad taste to use their rifles.
Needless to say, it was impossible to sustain this daring paradox
with any semblance of logic and consistency throughout a book dealing
with all the phases of war. War is not a matter of definitions, but
of bullets and shells. And, in fact, the General threw logic and
consistency to the winds. In his fire-mood he unconsciously covered
shock-tactics with ridicule, but in his shock-mood (no doubt, much to
the relief of the victims of his wrathful invective in Germany) he
conclusively demolished the principle of fire.
This was easily explicable. In the first place, the General was a
German writing exclusively to Germans, to whom the bare idea of relying
on the prosaic firearm seemed sacrilegious. Merely to implant that
idea in their heads, to persuade them that the rest of the world was
moving while they were asleep, was a vast enough aim for a German
reformer--too vast an aim, indeed, as the event proved. In the second
place, the General, so far as the effect of modern firearms was
concerned, was working wholly in the realm of theory. When he first
published his book those weapons had not been tested in civilized war.
The most recent relevant war experience was that of 1870 and of the
other European wars of that period, when the firearm was exceedingly
imperfect. But even then, as he frankly and forcibly stated, it was
in consequence of their neglect of this firearm, imperfect as it was,
that the European Cavalry, the German Cavalry included, gave such a
painfully poor account of themselves. He looked farther back, just as
Colonel Henderson and many other critics in our own country looked
back, to the brilliant achievements of American Cavalry in the Civil
War of 1861-1865, mainly through the agency of the firearm. But here
the firearm was still more primitive--a fact of which General von
Bernhardi took no account. It was enough for him that inter-Cavalry
shock survived through the Civil War, though the steel came to be
wholly ineffective against Infantry. That forty years of scientific
progress might have produced a weapon which would have banished shock
in any form did not occur to him.
Nevertheless, there seemed to be good ground for the hope that, when he
came seriously to collate and examine the phenomena of the first great
wars since the invention of the modern rifle--those in South Africa
and Manchuria--he would find in the exact confirmation of his views on
fire, and in the complete falsification of his views on shock, ground
for a drastic revision of his whole work, with a view, not perhaps to
a complete elimination of the steel weapons, but to their complete
subordination to the rifle. It is true that the omens were not very
favourable.
Between 1899 and 1902, when his second edition was published, a
great mass of South African information became available, not in
finished historical form, but in a form quite suitable for furnishing
numberless instructive examples of the paramount influence of fire
and the futility of the lance and sword. But the General made no use
of these examples. He confined himself to a general allusion to the
"very important data obtained in South Africa as to the employment of
dismounted action by Cavalry" (p. 7), and in a later passage (p. 56) to
some commendatory remarks on the "brilliant results" obtained through
mounted charges made with the rifle only by the Boers in the latter
part of the war. Unfortunately, it was plain that he had given no close
technical study either to these charges or to the "important data"
vaguely alluded to; otherwise he would have saved himself from many
of the solecisms which abound in his work. Still, the fact remained
that the war was unfinished when his second edition was published,
while another great war broke out only two years later. It seemed not
unlikely that mature reflection upon the incidents of these wars would
ultimately tend to clarify and harmonize his views on shock and fire.
Meanwhile the English edition was published, with its Introduction by
General Sir John French. By this time (1906) the events of our own war
were fully collated and recorded, while the Manchurian War had also
taken place. Instead of supplying a really useful commentary upon the
German work, written from the point of view of British experience,
instead of drawing attention to its deficiencies and errors, and
pointing out how inevitable they were under the circumstances of its
composition, General French hailed the work as a complete, final, and
unanswerable statement of Cavalry doctrine. Von Bernhardi, he said,
"had dealt with remarkable perspicuity and telling conviction and in
an exhaustive manner with every subject demanding a Cavalry soldier's
study and thought." How Sir John French's readers reconciled this
effusive eulogy with the contents of the book remains a mystery. As
I have said, the only really important feature of the book was the
insistent advocacy of fire-tactics--and not merely defensive, but
offensive fire-tactics--for Cavalry. This feature was minimized in the
Introduction. In its place was a vehement attack on the advocates of
fire-tactics in England, the truth of whose principles had just been
signally demonstrated in our own war.
There was not a word about the "important data" to be derived from the
war; not a word about the Boer charges, of whose terribly destructive
effects Sir John French knew far more than General von Bernhardi. On
the contrary, the war was dismissed in a few slighting and ambiguous
sentences, as wholly irrelevant to the _arme blanche_ controversy,
in spite of the fact that, in direct consequence of the war, our
Cavalry Manual had been rewritten and the Cavalry firearm immensely
improved--facts which would naturally suggest that the war had been
instructive.
Praise of Von Bernhardi, singular as the form it took, was by no
means academic. In the next revision of our Cavalry Manual (1907) the
compilers borrowed and quoted considerably from "Cavalry in Future
Wars." And yet every sound principle in that work had years before
been anticipated and expounded far more lucidly and thoroughly in the
fascinating pages of our own military writer, Colonel Henderson, whose
teaching had been ignored by the Cavalry of his own country.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Report of German Medical Staff. No French figures
available.]