THE BRITISH THEORY OF THE ARME BLANCHE
AND now, what in Great Britain is the real theory on this question?
Let us go to Sir John French again. The South African War, he says, is
no guide for the future. It is abnormal, for the reasons stated above.
The Manchurian War he has also stated to be abnormal. Where, then, is
the theoretical advantage of the lance and sword over the modern rifle?
We are left in ignorance. The physical problem is untouched. All we
have is the bare dogmatic assertion that the steel weapon can impose
tactics on the rifle. This is how Sir John French expresses the theory
on p. xi of his Introduction: "Were we to do so" (_i.e._, to "throw
our cold steel away as useless lumber"), "we should invert the rôle
of Cavalry, turn it into a _defensive_ arm, and make it a prey to the
first foreign Cavalry that it meets; for good Cavalry can always compel
a dismounted force of mounted riflemen to mount and ride away, and when
such riflemen are caught on their horses, they have power neither of
offence nor defence, and are lost."
Eight years have elapsed since the Boer War. Memories are short,
and it is possible now to print a statement of this sort, which,
if promulgated during the dust and heat of the war itself, when
the lance and sword fell into complete and well-merited oblivion,
and when mounted men on both sides were judged rigidly by their
proficiency in the use of the horse and the rifle, would have excited
universal derision. The words which follow recall one of the writer's
"abnormalities" already commented on: "If in European warfare such
mounted riflemen were to separate and scatter, the enemy would be well
pleased, for he could then reconnoitre and report every movement, and
make his plans in all security. In South Africa the mounted riflemen
were the hostile army itself, and when they had dispersed there was
nothing left to reconnoitre; but when will these conditions recur?"
When, indeed? There was nothing, it seems, to reconnoitre, because the
enemy always "scattered and dispersed." And the Generals were "well
pleased"! "Nothing left to reconnoitre"! One can only marvel at the
courage of Sir John French in breathing the word "reconnoitre" in
connection with Cavalry work in South Africa.
He ought to admit that Cavalry reconnaissance was bad, and that the
army suffered for it. No historian has ever defended it. It was the
despair of Generals who wanted information as to the position of the
enemy. Wits apart, the rifle ruled reconnaissance, as it obviously
always must rule it. _Ceteris paribus_, the best rifleman is the best
scout. The Cavalry were not good riflemen, and were therefore not good
scouts. Not a single Boer scout from the beginning to the end of the
war was hurt by a sword or lance. Those weapons were a laughing-stock
to foe and friend alike. And Sir John French's proposition is, not so
much that the reconnaissance was good--presumably, that goes without
saying--but that there was nothing to reconnoitre, thanks, apparently,
to the terror spread by the lance and sword.
Such a travesty of the war may be left to speak for itself. But it is
very important to comprehend the root idea which underlies it, an idea
which, as we shall see, reappears in a less extreme form in General von
Bernhardi's writings. It is expressed in the words "we should invert
the rôle of Cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm." The rifle, it will
be seen, is regarded as a _defensive_ weapon, in contradistinction
to the lance and sword, which are offensive weapons. To sustain this
theory, it is absolutely necessary, of course, to proceed to the
lengths to which Sir John French proceeds--to declare, in effect, that
there was no war and no fighting; for if once we concede that there was
a war, study its combats and compute their statistical results, we are
forced to the conclusion that the rifle must have been used in offence
as well as in defence. Abstract reflection might well anticipate this
conclusion by suggesting that a defensive weapon and a defensive class
of soldiers are contradictions in terms.
There must be two parties to every combat, and, unless there is
perfect equilibrium in combat, one side or the other must definitely
be playing an offensive rôle; and, even in equilibrium, both sides
may be said to be as much in offence as in defence, whatever weapons
they are using. The facts mainly illustrate the abstract principle.
The Boers could not have taken guns and prisoners while acting on the
defensive. Talana Hill, Nicholson's Nek, Spion Kop, Stormberg, Sannah's
Post, Nooitgedacht, Zilikat's Nek, Bakenlaagte, were not defensive
operations from the Boer point of view. Nor were Magersfontein,
Colenso, Elandslaagte, Paardeberg defensive operations from the British
point of view. Whether the rifles were in the hands of Infantry or
mounted troops is immaterial. A rifle is a rifle, whoever holds it.
It is just as absurd to say that the Boers who rode to and stormed on
foot Helvetia and Dewetsdorp belonged to a defensive class of soldiers
as it is to say that the Infantry who walked to and stormed Pieter's
Hill belonged to a defensive class of soldiers. It is still more absurd
to say that the Boers who charged home mounted at Sannah's Post,
Vlakfontein, Bakenlaagte, Roodewal, Blood River Poort, and many other
actions, and the British mounted riflemen who did similar things at
Bothaville, were performing a defensive function, while the Cavalry
who pursued at Elandslaagte were performing an offensive function.
Take this action of Elandslaagte, the solitary genuine example of
a successful charge with the _arme blanche_. By whom was the real
offensive work done? By the Infantry and by the Imperial Light Horse
acting dismounted, and by the Artillery. After hours of hard and bloody
fighting, these men stormed the ridge and forced the Boers to retreat.
In the act of retreat they were charged by the Cavalry, who had
hitherto been spectators of the action.
It might be objected that I am taking a verbal advantage of Sir
John French. He is guilty, it may be argued, only of the lesser
fallacy--that of thinking that the rifle is a defensive weapon for
mounted men as distinguished from Infantry. Not so. He perceives the
logical peril of admitting that the rifle is an offensive weapon for
any troops, and in another passage, when deprecating attacks on the
"Cavalry spirit" (p. vii), makes use of the following words: "Were we
to seek to endow Cavalry with the _tenacity and stiffness_ of Infantry,
or take from the mounted arm the _mobility and the cult of the
offensive_ which are the breath of its life, we should ruin not only
the Cavalry, but the Army besides." (The italics are mine.) It may be
pointed out that, but for their firearms and the mobility and offensive
power derived from them, the Cavalry in South Africa would indeed have
been "ruined" beyond hope of rehabilitation.
But let us look at the underlying principle expressed. Infantry are
"stiff and tenacious" (that is, obviously, in _defence_). Cavalry
have the "cult of the offensive." Those are the distinctive "spirits"
of the two Arms. The bitter irony of it! Which Arm really displayed
the most "offensive spirit" in South Africa? Study the lists of
comparative casualties in the two Arms during that period of the war
in which Infantry were mainly engaged. If at Talana, the Battle of
Ladysmith, Colenso, Dronfield, Poplar Grove, Karee Siding, Sannah's
Post, Zand River, Doornkop, or Diamond Hill, the Cavalry in their
own sphere of work had shown the offensive power displayed by the
Infantry in the battles on the Tugela, or in Methuen's campaign from
Orange River to Magersfontein, or at Driefontein, Doornkop, Bergendal,
and Diamond Hill, the war would have showed different results. There
was no distinction in point of bravery between any branches of the
Services. Fire-power and fire-efficiency were the tests, and lack of a
good firearm and of fire-efficiency on only too many occasions fatally
weakened the offensive spirit of the Cavalry.
And what of the "tenacity and stiffness" with which we must not
"seek to endow" Cavalry? Ominous words, redolent of disaster! Have
not they fully as much need of those qualities as Infantry? Imagine
our Cavalry doing the work that the Boers had to do on so many score
of occasions--to fight delaying rearguard actions against immensely
superior numbers, with no reserves, and a heavy convoy to protect. We
shall be fortunate if, through reliance on and skill in the use of
the rifle, they display as much tenacity and stiffness as Botha's men
at Pieter's Hill or Koch's men at Elandslaagte against forces four
times their superior in strength, to say nothing of such incidents
as Dronfield, where 150 Boers defied a whole division of Cavalry
and several batteries; of Poplar Grove and Zand River, where small
hostile groups virtually paralyzed whole brigades; or of Bergendal,
where seventy-four men held up a whole army. There was nothing
abnormal tactically or topographically about any of these incidents.
Any function performed by the Boer mounted riflemen may be demanded
from our Cavalry in any future war. Suppose them, for example, vested
with the strictly normal duty of covering a retreat against a superior
force of all arms; suppose a squadron, like the seventy-four Zarps at
Bergendal, ordered to hold the cardinal hill of an extended position,
and their leader replying: "This is not our business. We are an
offensive Arm. We cannot entrench, and we have not the tenacity and
stiffness of Infantry. Our business is to charge with the lance and
sword." Would the General be well pleased?
The reader will ask for the key to this curious discrimination between
the "spirits" of Cavalry and Infantry. It is this: The lance and sword,
_when pitted against the rifle_, can, if they are used at all, only be
used in offence. Men sitting on horseback, using steel weapons with a
range of a couple of yards, plainly cannot defend themselves against
riflemen. Even the Cavalry tacitly admit this principle, and if they
accepted its logical consequence, a logical consequence completely
confirmed by the facts of modern war, they would admit, too, that the
sword and lance cannot be used for offence against riflemen in modern
war. But they will not admit that. "Tant pis pour les faits," they say.
"All modern war is abnormal. Our steel weapons dominate combat. Without
them we are nothing."
In these circumstances they are forced to set up this strange
theory--that Cavalry is a peculiarly "offensive" Arm, a theory which
the reader will find expressed in all Cavalry writings. On the face
of it the theory is meaningless. It is a mere verbal juggle, because,
as I said before, there are two parties to every combat, and defence
is the necessary and invariable counterpart of offence. All combatant
soldiers, including Cavalry, carry firearms, and if Cavalry choose
to use these firearms in offence, by hypothesis they will impose
fire-action on the defence, whether the defence consists of Cavalry
or any other class of troops. Conversely, if they use their rifles in
defence, as by hypothesis they must, they will impose fire-action on
the attacking force, be it Cavalry or any other Arm. In other words,
the rifle governs combat. That is why the lance and sword disappeared
in South Africa. Both in offence and defence the Boer riflemen forced
the Cavalry to accept combat on terms of fire.
And what kind of Cavalry do our Cavalrymen count upon meeting in our
next war? They count, incredible as it seems, upon meeting Cavalry not
superior, but inferior, to the Boer mounted riflemen, inferior because,
as I shall show from von Bernhardi, they defy science, shut their
eyes to the great principle of the supremacy of fire, are prepared
deliberately to abdicate their fire-power, and hope to engage, by
mutual agreement, as it were, and on the understanding that suitable
areas of level ground can be found, in contests of crude bodily weight.
And what of the action of Cavalry against other Arms? We know Sir John
French's opinion about mounted riflemen. They will gallop for their
lives "defenceless" at the approach of "good" Cavalry. But Infantry,
riflemen without horses, who cannot gallop, but can only run? Their
case, it would seem, must be still more desperate. They are not only
defenceless, but destitute even of the means of flight. And yet even
Sir John French credits them, if not with an offensive spirit, at least
with "tenacity and stiffness," derived, of course, from their rifles.
But their mounted comrades, armed with these same rifles, lack these
soldierly qualities. We arrive thus at the conclusion that the horse,
which one would naturally suppose to be a source of immensely enhanced
mobility and power, is a positive source of danger to a rifleman unless
he also carries a lance or sword.
Here is the _reductio ad absurdum_ of the _arme blanche_ theory, and
I beg for the reader's particular attention to it. Of course, the
conclusion is in reality too absurd; for Sir John French himself does
not really believe that Infantry are a defensive Arm. In point of fact,
no serious man believes that Infantry in modern war have anything
whatever to fear from the lance and sword, and their training-book is
written on that assumption. Nor does Sir John French really believe
that Mounted Infantry are a defensive Arm who run from Cavalry;
otherwise, he would never rest until he had secured the complete
abolition of our Mounted Infantry, who are now, under his official
sanction, designed to act, not only as divisional mounted troops
against steel-armed Continental Cavalry, but to co-operate with, and
in certain events take the place of, our own regular Cavalry in far
wider functions, and are presumably not going to be whipped off the
field at the distant glimpse of a lance or sword. And I may say here
that the reader can obtain no better and more searching sidelight on
the steel theory than by studying the Mounted Infantry Manual (1909)
for the rules given about similar and analogous functions. Nor, if
Sir John French went the whole length of the theory, would he, as
Inspector-General, have permitted our Colonial mounted riflemen to
think that they might be of some Imperial value in a future war. It is
only in order to sustain his _a priori_ case for the steel weapons that
he finds himself forced into the logical _impasses_ to which I have
drawn attention.
There is one further point to deal with before leaving Sir John
French's Introduction. He admits the necessity of a rifle for Cavalry,
and we may presume him to admit that the Boer War proved the necessity
for a good rifle and the futility of a bad carbine. When, in his
opinion, is this rifle to be used? "I have endeavoured to impress upon
all ranks," he writes on page xvii, "that _when the enemy's Cavalry
is overthrown_, our Cavalry will find more opportunities of using
the rifle than the cold steel, and that dismounted attacks will be
more frequent than charges with the _arme blanche_. By no means do I
rule out as impossible, or even unlikely, attacks by great bodies of
mounted men against other arms on the battle-field; but I believe that
such opportunities will occur comparatively rarely, and that undue
prominence should not be given to them in our peace training." (The
italics are mine.)
This is a typically nebulous statement of the combat functions of
Cavalry in modern war, and, like the generality of such statements,
will be found to contain, if analyzed, a refutation of the writer's
own views on the importance of the _arme blanche_. We ask ourselves
immediately why he thought it necessary to account for the failure
of the _arme blanche_ in South Africa by the elaborate accumulation
of arguments for "abnormality" developed a few pages earlier. After
all, it seems, the war, in its bearing upon the efficacy of weapons,
was normal. The Boers had no "Cavalry" in the writer's use of the
word--that is, steel-armed Cavalry. What he assumes to be the primary
and most formidable objective of our own steel-armed cavalry was,
therefore, by a fortunate accident, non-existent. There was no need
to "overthrow" it, because there was nothing to overthrow, and our
Cavalry was free from the outset to devote its attention to the
"other Arms"--that is, to riflemen and Artillery--assumed evidently
by the writer to be a secondary and less formidable objective. But
here, apparently, "opportunities" for the _arme blanche_ are to occur
"comparatively rarely" in any war, European or otherwise, whether
the riflemen show "tenacity and stiffness" or "disperse for hundreds
of miles"; whether the horses are perennially fresh or perennially
fatigued; whether we outnumber the foe or they outnumber us; whether
annexation or mere victory is our aim.
If only, we cannot help exclaiming, this principle had been recognized
in 1899! We knew the Boers had no swords or lances: we had always known
it. If only we had prepared our Cavalry for the long-foreseen occasion,
trained them to fire, given them good firearms, and impressed upon
them that opportunities for shock would occur "comparatively rarely,"
instead of teaching them up to the last minute that fire-action was an
abnormal, defensive function of their Arm, worthy of little more space
in their Manual than that devoted to "Funerals," and much less than
that devoted to "Ceremonial Escorts."
The root of the fallacy propounded by Sir John French lies in his
refusal to recognize that a rifle may be just as deadly a weapon in the
hands of Cavalry as in the hands of "other Arms," and, indeed, a far
more deadly weapon, thanks to the mobility conferred by the horse. If,
for example, Infantry can, as he tacitly admits they can, force Cavalry
to adopt fire-action, _a fortiori_ can Cavalry, if they choose, force
Cavalry to adopt fire-action. In other words, the rifle governs combat,
as it did, in fact, govern combat in South Africa and Manchuria. But
Cavalry operating against Cavalry, according to Sir John French,
are not so to choose. We can only speculate upon what may happen if
one side is so unsportsmanlike as to break the rules and masquerade
as another Arm. The stratagem is simple, because the rifle kills at
a mile, and the orthodox Cavalry may be unaware until it is too late
that the unorthodox Cavalry is playing them a trick. Meanwhile the best
riflemen, whether they have horses or not, _will win_, and horsemen who
have spent 80 or 90 per cent. of their time in steel-training will have
cause to regret their error.
But Sir John French contemplates no such awkward contingencies. We may
surmise, however, that it is owing to an uncomfortable suspicion of
his own fallacy that in this paragraph and elsewhere he is so careful
to isolate inter-cavalry combats from mixed combats, and to postulate
the complete "overthrow" of one Cavalry--an overthrow effected solely
by the _arme blanche_--before permitting the surviving Cavalry, in
Kipling's words, to "scuffle mid unseemly smoke." He has a formula
for the occasion. In this paragraph it is "when the enemy's Cavalry
is overthrown." On page xiv, speaking of raids, which he deprecates,
he says: "Every plan should be subordinate to what I consider a
primary necessity--the absolute and complete overthrow of the hostile
Cavalry"; and on page xv: "If the enemy's Cavalry has been overthrown,
the rôle of reconnaissance will have been rendered easier," a truism
upon which the Boer War throws a painfully ironical sidelight.
If the reader is puzzled by this curiously superfluous insistence on
the "overthrow" of the enemy analogous to the equally superfluous
insistence on the "offensive" character of the Cavalry Arm, he will
once more find an explanation in the anomalous status of the _arme
blanche_. No one would dream of repeatedly impressing upon Infantry,
for example, as though it were a principle they might otherwise
overlook, that their primary aim must be the absolute and complete
overthrow of the hostile Infantry. But the advocate of the _arme
blanche_ is always on the horns of a dilemma. He dare not admit that
the rifle in the hands of Cavalry is as formidable a weapon as in the
hands of Infantry, if not a far more formidable weapon. He therefore
instinctively tends to picture steel-armed Cavalry as perpetually
pitted against steel-armed Cavalry. Both sides are always in offence
until the moment when one is "completely and absolutely overthrown."
Then some other rôles, very vaguely delineated, open up to the victor.
Needless to say, this picture bears no resemblance to war. Troops are
not, by mutual agreement, sorted out into classes, like competitors in
athletic sports. Every Arm must be prepared to meet at any moment any
other Arm, _and any other weapon_.
Nor do these "complete and absolute" obliterations of one Arm by its
corresponding Arm ever, in fact, happen. That they could ever happen
through the agency of the lance and sword is the wildest supposition of
all. Compared with rifles, these weapons are harmless. Even the most
backward and ignorant Cavalry, trained to rely absolutely on the lance
and sword, would, if it found itself beaten in trials of shock, or,
like the Japanese Cavalry, greatly outnumbered, resort to the despised
firearm, imitate the tactics and vest itself with something of the
"tenacity and stiffness," as well as with the aggressive potency, of
those "other Arms," which, by hypothesis, must be attacked with the
rifle; and in doing so it would force its antagonist to do the same.