Chapter XIV The Russo-Japanese War
Soon after Bernhardi published his second edition of “Cavalry in Future Wars,” the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 broke out. Like the Boer War, it fulfilled to the letter all his prognostications as to the value of fire for Cavalry and belied all his theories as to the “collision of Cavalry masses.” Whether he regarded it as abnormal, I do not know. But here, to our own arme blanche school, as we might have expected, is another “peculiar” war.
It was the second great land war between civilized races since the invention of the smokeless, long-range magazine rifle. It was attended by many circumstances which were absent in South Africa. Both armies were constructed on the European model; both were regular, not volunteer; both were in very large force; both possessed steel-armed Cavalry. The war, in shorts, may be said to have been the complement of the Boer War in illustrating all those conditions which were not present in South Africa, but which are likely to be present in a European war. Much of the terrain was even better than South Africa for shock-tactics. Though from the Yalu to Liao-yang the campaign was fought in a mountainous area, from the Tai-tse-ho northward vast open plains, unfenced, unobstructed, of a character not to be met with in any likely European war-area, were the rule.
What happened? No shock. That is not quite literally true of inter-Cavalry combats, for history records one almost laughably trivial case of pseudo-shock. There are said to have been others between patrols in the early days.79 Not a single charge against riflemen on foot. The lance and sword were nowhere. In combat the rifle was supreme, banishing the very thought of the sword even from the minds of those who carried it, and inspiring the only effective action for Cavalry as for Infantry.
I ventured to describe the Boer War as presenting a mass of evidence, vast, various, cogent, against the steel, and in favour of the rifle. Here is another mass of complementary evidence, equally vast, various, and cogent, drawn from the very type of war which our soldiers now envisage—namely, one waged between European armies—in a temperate climate, at any rate in the matter of heat, and in which both Cavalries possess the arme blanche.
Before he begins even to think about explanations, I want the reader to grasp the broad facts in all their naked simplicity. Four years of war in all in South Africa and Manchuria, under every imaginable condition. No shock. In our war a few small cases of pseudo-shock, which belong strictly to the realm of the rifle. Numerous rifle charges, some very deadly. In both wars the rifle supreme, the steel negligible. What miraculous combination of circumstances could warrant our calling the Manchurian War in its turn “peculiar”?
In England, the arme blanche theory for a moment seemed to be in great danger. Some prompt and decisive counter-stroke was indispensable. There could be no compromise here, nothing but a bold lunge straight at the heart would suffice to fell the now formidable heresy. What form did the stroke take? I give it in the words of General Sir John French:
“That the Cavalry on both sides in the recent war did not distinguish themselves or their arm is an undoubted fact, but the reason is quite apparent. On the Japanese side they were indifferently mounted, the riding was not good, and they were very inferior in numbers, and hence were only enabled to fulfil generally the rôle of Divisional Cavalry, which they appear to have done very well. The cause of failure on the Russian side is to be found in the fact that for years they have been trained on exactly the same principles which these writers” (i.e., advocates of mounted riflemen) “now advocate. They were devoid of real Cavalry training, they thought of nothing but getting off their horses and shooting; hence they lamentably failed in enterprises which demanded, before all, a display of the highest form of the ‘Cavalry spirit’” (Introduction to Bernhardi, p. xxvii.).
It is true that these words were published in 1906, when information was still limited; but they appear unmodified in the edition of 1909, and they are in strict accordance with the theory on which our Cavalry are at this moment trained. To bring them into line with the facts as now known would be to declare the arme blanche theory a myth, and to shatter the system based on it.
But before approaching the facts, I propose, as in Chapter XII., to criticize the attitude of mind which permits a high Cavalry authority to brush aside with such confidence another great war in which the sword and lance fell into complete oblivion. It seems to be perfectly useless for critics of those weapons to heap up masses of modern evidence against them and to prove that there is not a tittle of evidence for them, if we cannot also show to the public the kind of way in which the problem is viewed by those responsible for their retention.
General French held high command in a long, mainly mounted war. Explain away the result as we may, this war did, in fact, produce by long evolution, under exacting stress, a certain type of soldier common to both belligerents—the mounted rifleman. It was a splendid type on both sides, and if we combine the best qualities of Britons and Boers we can, if we please, construct from it an ideal type. At any rate, what these troops did is on record. The greater their excellence in combining, for strenuous practical work, the rifle and the horse, the better the results. This was the criterion of success. Herein lay “dash”; herein, to borrow General French’s words, lay the “highest form of the ‘Cavalry spirit.’” It was by approximation to this standard, and by oblivion of all methods directly associated with the steel, that the regular Cavalry acquitted themselves best. It was our glory, not our shame, that we were able to produce this type, and to make it attain, even in the case of raw volunteers, to such a high standard. It was the glory of our brave enemies that, by virtue of progressive excellence in this type, they were able to make the task of the stronger nation so long, costly, and laborious.
How does General French represent this type when he is deploring the failure of the hybrid type in Manchuria? The Russians, he says, “were devoid of real Cavalry training. They thought of nothing but getting off their horses and shooting,” and had no “Cavalry spirit,” and these, the General says, were “exactly the same principles” which admirers of mounted riflemen advocate. No wonder he resents such advocacy, if such are the “principles,” and no wonder he objects to mounted riflemen who are taught to regard their horses as checks, not helps, to mobility and dash. So far from being his opponents’ “principles,” these are the very principles upon which, under the blighting influence of the arme blanche school, our fine force of existing Mounted Infantry is starved—theoretically, at any rate, into a sort of humble subservience to the steel.
Now, would it not be more natural and normal if, knowing what he knows by war-experience of what mounted riflemen can do, General French were to approach this Manchurian question from a somewhat different standpoint? Should he not consider the possibility that the Russian Cavalry, which was armed “on exactly the same principles” which he advocates—and was not, as he seems to imply, trained only in the firearm—might have failed through lack of excellence in the whole-hearted union of the rifle and the horse, as the joint constituents of that aggressive mobility which constitutes the “spirit” of the mounted rifleman? But no. He rushes at once to the conclusion least capable of proof, the conclusion for which there are no positive data since 1870, and very little then, since there were no smokeless, long-range rifles, nor any type of mounted rifleman to force the issue into prominence.
And to what strange conclusions his contemptuous definition of the mounted rifleman brings him! In the admirable Colesberg operations, when the steel did nothing and inspired nothing, we know that his own Cavalry, under his own direction, were “continually getting off their horses and shooting.” After their thirty-mile ride from Kimberley (and the steel did not help them to ride) to intercept Cronje, the same Cavalry did well only through forgetting their “real Cavalry training,” and taking what he regards as the discreditable step of “getting off their horses to shoot.” So did De Wet’s men in their equally long rides to the fields of Paardeberg and Sannah’s Post. It is true that on many occasions the Cavalry, when in superior force, were too ready, not through lack of spirit but through inherent faults of training, to dismount prematurely and take to the carbine. But at whose compulsion? That of mounted riflemen. And why? Precisely because they had not grasped “the highest form of the ‘Cavalry spirit’”—reliance on horse and firearm in combination. The rifle charge, taught us by the Boers, is, to say the least, not described in an illuminating way by the words “getting off their horses to shoot.” Saddle-fire apart, the words, nevertheless, are perfectly accurate. But the Boers shot to more terrible purpose than the Cavalry shot. Historical truth compels us to add that many of our own mounted riflemen excelled the Cavalry in this respect. The handful of Mounted Infantry, who after a chase of many days pounced on and pinned down De Wet at Bothaville, were working, I submit, on the right “principles.” So were the Australians who hung on the same leader’s heels in the desperate hunt of February, 1901.
If this is General French’s mental attitude towards the Manchurian War, I am afraid we cannot expect to find him expressing himself lucidly and cogently on the subject. Turn back to the passage I quoted. The Japanese, he says, indifferently mounted, indifferent riders, and inferior in numbers—drawbacks, be it noted, which are as serious for genuine mounted riflemen as for Cavalry—did very well, but only as Divisional Cavalry. The meaning is not very plain (for they never did well with the steel), but I take it to be this: In our own army the Divisional Cavalry consist, not of Cavalry, but of Mounted Infantry. Their duties, as officially laid down, are “to assist the Infantry in the immediate protection of the division by supplying mounted men for divisional patrolling in connection with the advanced, flank, and rear guards and outposts; to maintain connection with the protective Cavalry,” and other small duties. Proceeding from this analogy, the General means, I gather, to convey that the Japanese Cavalry, acting in those minor capacities, did very well as mounted riflemen. That is all to the good, and presumably they would have done better still with better horses, better riding, and greater numbers.
Is there not also a presumption that with these added advantages they would have done better still in larger rôles as mounted riflemen? But where is the argument leading us? Here are the Russians. No praise for them, even in minor rôles, and even with their better horses, better riding, immense numbers, and, above all, their “years of training” as mounted riflemen. Surely the latter characteristic alone would have enabled them, qua mounted riflemen, to overcome the few and badly equipped Japanese Cavalry acting as mounted riflemen? Overcome them, I mean, not merely in minor capacities, but in all the large and important functions of Cavalry?
The General tacitly admits that neither side made use of the steel. And yet, why not? One can understand that with these manifold sources of weakness which he details they did not attack Infantry with the steel, but why not attack one another? Was the mutual “terror of cold steel” so great as to neutralize the steel? The two Cavalries frequently met in different capacities and in different shades of numerical strength, strategically and tactically. Surely when both sides carry steel weapons this second total disappearance of the “shock duel,” officially held to be an inevitable feature of modern war, both in the strategical and tactical phases, needs further explanation.
Pursuing our scrutiny with an eye trained to detect the arme blanche bias in its myriad fleeting forms, we detect a clue in the word “enterprises” near the end. This suggests neither the battle-field nor reconnaissance, but distinctly the big raid. We recall Mr. Goldman’s complaint of the strategical mishandling of the Cavalry in South Africa, and his assumption that big raids must end in shock-tactics.
I do not know if this was in the General’s mind when he wrote of “enterprises which demanded before all a display of the highest form of the ‘Cavalry spirit.’” If it was, I can only respectfully repeat my view, expressed frequently elsewhere, that there is here a radical confusion of thought between combat and strategy, between mobility in its broadest sense and tactics, and Bernhardi would be the first to tell him so. Fortunately, this question of raids is as open to positive demonstration by Manchurian facts as any other point of Cavalry practice. But before even approaching the Manchurian facts, and taking my stand purely on South African lessons, I have shown, I hope, that prima facie the General’s reason for the comparative failure of the two Cavalries is open to the strongest suspicion. The facts themselves dispose of the reason altogether.
It was never part of my scheme to deal in detail with the Manchurian story. I believe that for Englishmen, their own great war should be sufficient evidence. And yet, having reached this point, I feel inclined to regret that I did not begin with the Asiatic war, hardly complete as the material still is, and briefly summarize our own, so exaggerated seems to be the craving in many minds for foreign precedents and foreign models, so reckless the disregard for British experience, even when that experience is most stimulating and glorious. Happily, the Manchurian data are simple, uniform, and as absolutely free from complications or apparent contradictions as the South African data whose lessons they confirm.
What is the salient point? With all respect to General French, the salient point for Englishmen, who know by bitter experience that shock training has failed them, is not whether the Russians or Japanese were good shock horsemen, but whether they were good mounted riflemen. Our own Cavalry in South Africa were good shock horsemen, but that did not save the friends of shock from the necessity of finding elaborate reasons for the disappearance of shock during that war. Now for our salient point. Were the Russian Cavalry, who were far the most numerous and in some ways the better equipped of the two Cavalries, good mounted riflemen, by our proved standard of what is good? The answer, from all critics and observers, comes unanimously and emphatically, “No.” In the first place, they were of the hybrid type, carrying swords and, in the great majority of cases, lances as well. Their legendary skill in fire-action proved to be a myth. The Boers would have laughed at them. Our own mounted riflemen would have regarded them as inefficient and ignorant. To the surprise of many people, they had none of the “habits and instincts” for modern war that the Boers had, nothing of the stalking power, the scouting power, the genius for ground and surprise, much less the charging power developed. The Historians of our General Staff (part i., p. 29) supply the explanation: “The system of tactical training was not unlike that of other European armies. Thus the Cavalry was trained both for mounted and dismounted combat, but the musketry training necessary to make it efficient when on foot fell short of the requirements of modern war. The Cossacks, who formed the greater part of the Russian mounted force, were trained on lines similar to the regular Cavalry, but did not attain to the standard laid down for the latter.”
We must allow, of course, for general causes. The whole Russian army, by the testimony of its own leaders, was in a backward state, and the Cavalry was as backward as other arms. Its morale, by comparison with the Japanese morale, was low. In every arm the officers—that vitally important element—were ill-educated; in every arm, together with much splendid devotion and zeal, some of the officers were neglectful of duty. The Cavalry suffered as much as any arm. Wrangel, the Austrian critic, describes the greater part of the Russian Cavalry engaged in the Manchurian Field Army, especially those Cossack organizations which consisted of troops of the second and third class of reserves, as being in the general sense “inefficient mounted troops.”80 Our own Official Reports, however, give a more favourable impression. The older reserve men were, no doubt, unfit for the field, but among the Don, Orenburg, and Trans-Baikal Cossacks there seems to have been some very good material.
Mr. McCullagh, in his book, “With the Cossacks,” gives an interesting description of the great variety of religions, races, languages, colours, and military types which were embodied in the troops known broadly as Cossacks. The Caucasians, though they carried carbines, appear to have been by tradition and choice steel horsemen pure and simple. But whatever the training, there is no dispute about the incompetence of all the Cossacks as riflemen. Captain Spaits gives a distressing account of their failures.81 McCullagh says: “They had no skill whatever in attacking entrenched Infantry. Once dismounted, they are lost.” (p. 182). Both these writers accompanied them in the field. On manœuvre and general employment there is an equally general agreement. Unlike the Japanese, they were maintained for the most part in large independent bodies, in dim homage, we may presume, to that “collision of Cavalry masses” which is the basis of the shock theory. So massed, they were generally idle, just as the Cavalries of 1866, 1870, and 1877 were too often idle, by the admission of Bernhardi, Kuropatkin, and Von Moltke. There never appears a trace of talent for fire-tactics, or an attempt to play either the aggressive or the delaying rôle of the riflemen in South Africa.
What effect had that War had upon Russian Cavalry? None. No more effect than the brilliant performances of the Civil War leaders had upon the Austrian, Prussian, and French Cavalries in the wars of 1866 and 1870, or upon our own Cavalry in 1899. How many Cossack privates had heard of our war? How many of their officers had studied it? Truly those words, “trained for years on the very principles these writers advocate,” are a little hard on those Cavalry leaders in South Africa who led mounted riflemen with distinction. They are very hard, if he only knew it, on General French.
Kuropatkin (vol. ii., p. 151) is cruelly illuminating. It is true he never mentions armaments or the tactics derived from it. Nor did Von Moltke in his equally hard censure of the Prussian Cavalry of 1866 for the same grave delinquency—timidity on the battle-field. It was left for Bernhardi to disclose the true cause and the true remedy. Kuropatkin dwells on “training” and on commanders, most of whom he accuses of cowardice; for “the material of which our Cavalry was composed was excellent” (with certain exceptions afterwards named). What “training” and “command” meant becomes apparent. The Cavalry should have fought as “obstinately as Infantry,” and by way of contrasting the two arms he gives pitiless statistics of relative casualties at the battles of Mukden and Telissu, where no observer or historian has ever suggested that there was any reason for or sense in shock. The single example he names of a good performance, that of the Cossacks at Yen-tai Mines, was one of defensive fire-action pure and simple, where the Cavalry “fought with greater bravery than some of Orloff’s Infantry.” Surely it was knowledge, not courage, that the rest lacked.
Look at the only large “enterprise” undertaken by the Russian Cavalry—Mishchenko’s great raid, with 8,000 men and 34 guns, upon Ying-kou in January, 1905. No better example could be found for proving the fallacy of associating the success of independent strategical enterprises with the steel weapon. Of the conditions of success, one category has nothing to do with combat, but purely with mobility. The distance was 80 miles, as compared, for example, with the 100-mile raids imagined by Mr. Goldman for South Africa. There was a slow-moving millstone of a convoy, requiring protection and limiting speed, exactly our own difficulty when our mounted troops, Cavalry included, cut themselves completely adrift from their communications, exactly the difficulty which Bernhardi insists on when dealing with the limitations to Cavalry raids. Scouting was bad. Contrast the Boer scouting. Scouts, at any rate, do not have shock duels. Passing to combat, we find no shadow of a suggestion in any narrative that there was the remotest opportunity for shock (except for a case mentioned by McCullagh, where a Cossack brigade charged a few Chinese brigands). The Japanese troops met with were always Infantry, and were always in great numerical inferiority. Until actually reaching Ying-kou, they were met with in the shape of small detachments guarding villages or railway-bridges. Result, small fire-actions, in which the Cossacks showed incompetence. Contrast De Wet’s skill in raiding similar posts. One of the three Russian columns, several regiments strong, was kept back, says Captain Spaits, for three hours by half a company of Infantry, which occupied a small trench—the history of Dronfield and Poplar Grove repeating itself in Manchuria. Another column was defied by a handful of Infantry at Niu-chuang. Finally, at Ying-kou, after the repulse of one Russian column by a precipitately de-trained batch of Japanese Infantry, Mishchenko, with 1,500 men, made a night attack on the railway-station, held by 300 Japanese Infantry. His dispositions were painfully crude; he was repulsed with heavy loss, the retirement, says Colonel Shisnikoff, was “an utter rout,” and that was the end of the raid. Contrast the Boer night attacks, so rarely, even when unsuccessful, suffering serious loss, so often highly successful. The results of the raid, a few transports burnt and some trivial demolitions on the railway, may be regarded as nil. The retreat to the base was precipitate, headlong, and what was the reason for the retreat? The rumour that a force of Japanese Infantry was preparing to block the line of retreat. In view of what had happened, Mishchenko was right not to risk that contingency. But is not all this a pitiful satire on the theory of hybrid training? Observe that the conditions were strictly normal. Raids on communications always have to meet stationary dismounted detachments of the enemy. What, then, is the use of a Cavalry which cannot attack and defeat Infantry by Infantry methods? The only abnormality was the absence of any hostile Japanese Cavalry throughout the whole course of the raid. And we are asked to believe that the grand raison d’être for elaborate and perfect training in the steel is to overthrow the enemy’s Cavalry, who are also, by our official hypothesis, “thoroughly efficient” in the rifle, and who, on this occasion, were not present at all! And after overthrowing them by shock, then there is to be, in General French’s words, “a brilliant field of enterprise for Cavalry as mounted riflemen.” Brilliant! “The story of the raid,” says Colonel Shisnikoff, “is a memory of shame to those who took part in it.” And to crown all, it is General French’s warning to our Cavalry that the Cossacks failed in the war owing to overtraining as mounted riflemen! Quo non mortalia pectora cogis, ferri sacra fames?
These are the Cavalry who, he suggests, were trained on our heretical principles. “Continually getting off their horses!” Is it a disgrace to dismount? Does he regret that Scobell’s Lancers at Bouwer’s Hoek did not use shock with the lance in storming Lotter’s laager? Would Mr. Goldman have had these Russians charge loop-holed buildings on horseback? Once in the course of this raid, they are said to have charged a wall, and one account of the night attack on Ying-kou represents some of the Cossacks as having advanced on foot, “sword in hand.” The true fighting moral of this enterprise was that the Cossacks should have been better riflemen. Contrast the great raids of the Civil War, when the firearm, although so imperfect, was the governing factor. Why were there never any great raids in the Franco-German War? Study Bernhardi, that unconscious satirist of the steel, and you will guess why. Lastly, contrast the Japanese raid (described fully in our “British Officers’ Reports,” ii.) by 172 men, under Colonel Naganuma, who, in the course of an expedition round the Russian rear, beginning on January 9, 1905, lasting more than two months, covering a vast distance, and including several hotly contested fire-actions, achieved the substantial result of blowing up by night the great railway-bridge at Hsin-kai-ho on February 12. The result was to cause Kuropatkin to divert 8,000 men, including a division of Cavalry, from the imminent battle of Mukden for the defence of his communications. This raid and its fellow under Hasegawa were in the style of Stuart and De Wet. Compare, too, the ride of Smuts to Cape Colony, and its subsequent results in diverting troops to that quarter and in actual damage to our forces and communications.82
Few as the achievements of the Russian Cavalry were, whatever they did achieve was through fire-action. Kuropatkin and all critics praise Samsonoff’s defence of the Yen-tai coal-mines during the battle of Liao-yang, when he checked by fire the Japanese pursuit of Orloff’s beaten division. Rennenkampf, another leader of Cavalry who showed signs of ability, in the course of the great battle of the Sha Ho, led 1,500 Cossacks against the Japanese communications on the upper Tai-tse-ho (October 8 to 12, 1904). Wrangel commends his enterprise, but admits his complete failure. Our “British Officers’ Reports,” vol. i., pp. 664–668, give a full account of the whole episode, and describe the brilliant success of the Second Japanese Cavalry Brigade under Prince Kanin, first in anticipating Rennenkampf at Chaotao, which had been defended by only seventy Infantry for two days, then in driving the Cossacks back and forcing them to uncover one of their own Infantry brigades, which was attacking Pen-hse-hu, on the northern bank of the Tai-tse-ho. Prince Kanin, unmolested by the Cossacks, proceeded to surprise the reserve battalions of this brigade, and in the space of a few minutes killed many hundreds with his six Maxims. The result was the retirement of the Russian left and Stackelberg’s eventual retreat. Needless to say, there was no question of shock between the two Cavalries, nor any suggestion from any quarter that there was any reason for it or possibility of it.
Wrangel credits the Russians with having “adequately solved some strategical tasks”—for instance, the guarding of the passes of the Fen-shui-ling Mountains against Kuroki and Nodzu, and the discovery, but nothing more than the bare discovery, of Kuroki’s flank movement at Liao-yang, and of Nogi’s terrible turning stroke at the battle of Mukden. In other respects they showed the most pitiful weakness at that last great crisis. No less than 25,000 strong, they were outmanœuvred and outfought by two brigades of Japanese Cavalry acting with Infantry. Of course no shock duel, and yet was the effect of the Japanese Cavalry “negative,” in the words of “Cavalry Training”? On the contrary, it was tremendously positive, and with larger numbers might have been as decisive as Sheridan’s interception of Lee in April, 1865. Wrangel gravely remarks that if the Cossacks had first overthrown the Japanese Cavalry a great rôle would have been open to them in resisting Nogi’s main force—not, he goes out of his way to say, with the arme blanche, but with fire-action. The old story! If they could not overcome even the Japanese hybrid Cavalry with fire, how could they overcome Japanese Infantry? As for shock, it is cynical levity to breathe the word in connection with that Titanic fire-struggle of March, 1905.
Wrangel himself throws some light on these perplexing conundrums. It is on page 24. He has just been deploring the fiasco of Mishchenko’s raid, and has added that throughout the war the Russian Cavalry showed none of that “desire for action” which “we recognize as the first and most important attribute of our arm.” (As though, forsooth, it was not the first attribute of Infantry and Artillery!) We await resignedly the usual Cavalry dictum—that they were ill-trained for shock, and were “continually getting off their horses.” Not a bit of it. He goes on thus:
“On the other hand, a just critic, without any further ado, must admit that the prevailing conditions made it extraordinarily difficult for the Cavalry masses of Kuropatkin to play the part of Cavalry in battle. Indeed, we do not mind openly declaring that, in our opinion, no other European Cavalry, supported by the principles of the Cavalry tactics of the day, would have been in a position to perform anything of note on the Manchurian battle-fields” (“Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” p. 23).
He goes on to say that Cavalry cannot attack “Infantry masses” (but there were no masses during Mishchenko’s raid) unless utterly demoralized, and that “as long as the two battle-fronts are struggling with one another, the Cavalry arm is obliged to respect unrestrained the emptiness of the modern battle-field,... which is ruled by the magazine rifle.”
Really, what are we coming to? It was something of a shock to hear Bernhardi saying that Cavalry had been driven from their place of honour on the battle-fields of the plains, but that this arm, whose soul is offence, is to respect unrestrained the emptiness of the modern battle-field is surely a counsel of appalling levity. Mounted riflemen, at any rate, do not carry respect for the dangers of the battle-field to this length. If they had, there would have been no war in South Africa at all. Our foes would have respected the emptiness of the veld from Pretoria to Cape Town.
Wrangel marches cheerfully on towards the inevitable reductio ad absurdum:
“As the lion-hearted Japanese Infantry never gave the Russian dragoons or Cossacks the pleasure of retreating in disorder to exemplify the last-mentioned principles, it remained only for the latter to seek out the hostile Cavalry. This also the Russian Cavalry divisions did not succeed in doing—whether through their own fault remains for the present undecided” (ibid., p. 29).
This is not sarcastic; it is the sincere thought of a serious Cavalry soldier, who believes in the arme blanche. Here is the admission, frank and unabashed, that Cavalry, because they are deficient in fire-power, are only formidable to Cavalry, who are equally deficient in fire-power; that nobody cares a snap of the fingers for the lance or sword but those who, choosing to carry those weapons, agree to fear them. Clearly, even this exception is no exception, because one or both parties may by caprice or design break the compact and take to the firearm, which will then “rule the battle-field.” In another passage on page 17, when commenting on the failure of the Russian Cavalry to use an “active screen” in the phase of strategical reconnaissance—i.e., in non-battle-field encounters of the rival Cavalries—he gives as a cause the fact that the “Japanese Cavalry seldom committed themselves to shock tactics”—precisely the opposite cause alleged by General French—namely, that the Russians themselves were “continually getting off their horses.” Wrangel perceives that the steel weapon is lost if this sort of thing goes on; so in his final conclusion, quoted in my last chapter (p. 316), he urges his own Cavalry to remain deaf to the “so-called” intelligence of the advocates of fire training, which is impossible to combine with shock training, but to give the carbine an emphatically secondary place, and concentrate on shock. If all Cavalries agree on this self-denying ordinance, then, he implies, ground permitting, and far from the unseemly fire-scuffles of the battle-fields, we shall have, if both sides play fair, some grand spectates of shock. There is less mental chaos in Wrangel than in most exponents of shock, because he ignores the historical achievements of mounted riflemen, and therefore feels no need for compromise; but he cannot altogether escape self-contradiction. In order to proffer an illustration of the theory that shock should decide inter-Cavalry combats, he instances the first in the war—at Tschondschu (Tiessu) on March 28, 1904 (pp. 51–53)—a small affair where six squadrons of Cossacks were driven away from a walled town by the fire-action of three squadrons of Japanese Cavalry. We read that the Russians, being in larger force, should have “obtained a brilliant result” with the arme blanche, and also that the Japanese, after forcing the Russians to accept fire-action, should have charged and defeated the Russians. At the end we discover that the writer has no knowledge of the terrain beyond the fact that the town was situated in a “mountainous district,” from which fact he infers that there must have been “ground over which the Japanese could have advanced unseen” for their charge. Truly a startling variation of the usual complaint of lack of “Cavalry” ground!
It is greatly to be regretted that Count Wrangel’s ignorance of the attainments of British Cavalry permits him to class them among other European Cavalries as equally incompetent to have succeeded better than the Russians on the Manchurian battle-fields. Like de Negrier’s biting criticism of the French Cavalry, the pronouncement throws a strange light on our own theory of imitating the armament of Continental armies. Our Cavalry have very good firearms, and are, so far as time allows, trained to use them a good deal better than the Austrians permit. And they can use them well, as they showed in South Africa, where they did engage in the “battle,” and as they have shown in our recent manœuvres. But, that point made clear, I make no apology whatever for quoting at length the Austrian critic in a chapter starting originally from an appreciation of Manchurian problems by our foremost Cavalry authority, General French. The fundamental line of reasoning in both cases is precisely the same, but Wrangel is ruthlessly logical and careless of the logical consequences. General French’s reasoning leads him inexorably to precisely the same conclusion as Wrangel—namely, that steel-armed Cavalry can be formidable only to steel-armed Cavalry. Both men believe in the indispensable shock duel, both underrate the rifle as a source of dash—for Cavalry. General French sneers at it in the words “continually getting off their horses”; Count Wrangel does not sneer at it. He respects it so much as to banish Cavalry from the sphere of fire altogether, for clean and decent encounters with a less formidable weapon. This is the inevitable tendency of the present reaction in England. “Cavalry Training” and Bernhardi’s book admit, no doubt, of the most liberal interpretation in the right direction by officers who resolutely work out to their logical conclusion the directions given for fire-action, and ignore the conflicting directions for the steel. But whence is to come this liberal interpretation, when high Cavalry authorities denounce leanings towards fire as a betrayal of the “Cavalry spirit,” and, so far from depreciating the sword, add the lance?
Let us turn to the Japanese Cavalry. They were a very small force. Outside the thirteen, and eventually seventeen divisional regiments of 420 men apiece, which seem to have been in excess of divisional requirements (for Infantry did much of the work required), there were only two independent brigades of three regiments apiece—2,300 sabres together. The troopers carried good firearms, though of too short a range, but were trained principally for shock, and used the antiquated German drill-books denounced by Bernhardi. Lances wisely had been left at home, and only swords taken to the war. The men, constitutionally, were bad horsemen. Their horses were poor and were overloaded.83 The astonishing thing is that they did so well under these conditions. As soon as they grasped the fact that fire governed action, the talent for fire which they shared with the Infantry, coupled with great keenness, was their salvation. Enormously outmatched in numbers, they overawed and outfought the enemy’s Cavalry; they fulfilled sufficiently well, at any rate, in conjunction with the Infantry, the task of reconnaissance, both protective and offensive—and, in short, took a substantial part in enabling Japan to win the war. Needless to say, they were just as “lion-hearted”—to use Wrangel’s expression—as other arms, but, having been trained and armed on false principles, naturally did not win laurels as great as those of the Infantry. Nevertheless, there is truth, I believe, in what Wrangel—always frank, at whatever cost—says in the following passage:
“The Japanese Cavalry, scarcely without exception, carried out their performances with the carbine, and in close touch with their own Infantry. To this circumstance, without doubt, we have to ascribe the principal reason why there has been hesitation among military critics in giving full recognition to their activity. A certain narrow-mindedness obstructs the means used to gain the end, which in no way is inclined to further the interests of the arm” (pp. 49, 50).
Extraordinary the words seem, in the face of Wrangel’s ultimate conclusion about the arme blanche; but the topic breeds paradox. Still stranger is what follows:
“‘To be victorious is the chief thing.’ Under all circumstances this will remain our motto. If we do not succeed with the sword or lance, then let us try firearms. If we are too weak to gain success alone, then let us only be too thankful and accept without scruple the help of our Infantry. Accordingly, on these principles the Japanese Cavalry consistently acted. To reproach them because of this is extremely unjustifiable” (p. 50).
Then, forgetting that he has previously explained the absence of shock in the Russians by the Japanese adoption of fire-tactics, he adds:
“Besides, it must not be forgotten that they (the Japanese), as the weakest force, had the manner of fighting dictated to them by their opponents.”
A whimsical side-light on all of which is thrown by General Sir C. J. Burnett (“British Officers’ Reports,” vol. ii., p. 543), who thinks the “much-maligned” Japanese Cavalry, “with their thorough knowledge of shock-tactics,” must have found it “gall and wormwood to hang on to the skirts of their Infantry,” instead of “riding straight at the opposing Cavalry whenever the opportunity offered.”
Wrangel adds that men on “fast-galloping horses,” and on “not too unfavourable ground,” will be able to enjoy the “irresistible pleasure of charging home with the sword” against dismounted Cavalry. Elsewhere he speaks, in a passage I have quoted before, of the necessity of “eternally galloping.” Our minds go back to the vast destruction of British horseflesh in South Africa, to the wild chimera of the “eternally galloping” horse in any war, to the hard incessant work imposed on scouts and patrols (who have somehow to combine scouting and patrolling with battle duties), and lastly to the charges at the canter made by the ill-fed, undersized Boer ponies. Again, I make no apology for quoting these passages. Wrangel is another of the enfants terribles, like Bernhardi. He betrays his own case, and the more fatally because he does not seem to have studied our war at all; but his case au fond is the same as that of our own Cavalry school.
Among the achievements of the Independent Japanese Cavalry I have mentioned the case of Naganuma’s raid, of Prince Kanin’s important success at Pen-hse-hu, and of the energetic co-operation with the Second and Third Armies at Mukden. In this latter case Wrangel credits them with having pushed forward “in an extraordinarily quick and energetic manner,” driving the Russian Cavalry before them. That the praise is well deserved is shown by the “British Officers’ Reports” (vol. ii.). The Russian Cavalry are estimated at 25,000, the Japanese at 3,240. The latter, both in obtaining information and in action, did extraordinarily well, especially with Nogi’s Third Army. The information is not wholly complete. Exactly how near the Cavalry came to interception does not appear.
Wrangel also gives high praise to the work of the First Cavalry Brigade at the battle of Telissu on June 14–15, 1904. Sir Ian Hamilton (vol. ii., p. 330, etc.) conveys the same impression in regard to the battle, though he, like Kuropatkin, dwells principally on the feebleness of the Russian Cavalry in not using plain opportunities for delaying fire-action against Oku’s turning force. A preliminary combat of advanced guards on May 30 had led to the only recorded case of an arme blanche charge in the war, when two squadrons of Cossacks charged one Japanese squadron and, not having room to gather speed, used their lances as quarter-staves. Would not revolvers have done better? The squadron was defeated, but the “general results of the engagement were indecisive.”84 In the culminating battle of the 15th the Japanese Brigade checked a critical counter-attack by Glasko’s Thirty-fifth Infantry Division, freed the flank of the Third Japanese Division, and took an energetic part in the pursuit of the Russians, driving back the rear-guard by fire.
All critics and historians mention the splendid behaviour of the Second Japanese Cavalry Brigade and of other divisional detachments at the battle of January 26 to 29, 1905, called by the Russians Shen-tan-pu, and by our historians Hei-kou-tai (see “British Officers’ Reports,” vol. ii., pp. 45–58). It was a vehement attack of four divisions against the left of the Japanese entrenched line, held by the Second Army, forty miles south of Mukden. The Japanese Cavalry brigade occupied a cluster of villages near the junction of the Hun and Taitsu Rivers, and in the course of a bitterly contested battle, lasting three days, had to take their share, sometimes with Infantry support, in meeting attacks by greatly superior forces. In this case the work they had to do was precisely the work of Infantry, and our minds go back once more to the directions of our “Cavalry Training”—that Cavalry may be called upon to “occupy localities for defence,” but that their defences are on no account to be otherwise than of the “simplest description,” so as not to weaken the offensive instinct of an essentially offensive arm—in other words, so as not to compromise the steel weapon. This is to organize defeat. If the Japanese had thought so lightly of fire and the concomitants of fire, they would never have had the offensive instinct which they showed at Pen-hse-hu, Telissu, and Mukden.
Everywhere the same moral. In screening, raiding, and battle, fire is master. No observer suggests on any definite occasion any definite opportunity for the use of steel by the Cavalry engaged. Sir Ian Hamilton, the senior of the large staff of British officers who watched the Manchurian War, himself a successful leader in South Africa, has given his opinion officially (“Reports,” vol. ii., p. 526) and in his published diary. He does not miss or evade the point; he grapples with it directly, and is constantly contrasting South African mounted men and methods with Manchurian men and methods, and his conclusion is unreservedly in favour of the rifle. His opinion began to be confirmed at the first battle of the war, the Yalu, where neither Cavalry had any effect on events. His Japanese friends, he tells us, were very much surprised, and naturally, for they held German theories. But “the warmest advocate of shock must allow, when he follows the course of events on this occasion over the actual ground, that there was no place or opportunity where the horse could possibly have been of any value except to bring a rifleman rapidly up to the right spot” (vol. i., p. 137). Throughout the Manchurian campaign “the thought never” but once “occurred to him to long for Cavalry to launch at the enemy during some crisis of the struggle. Neither Infantry has the slightest idea of permitting itself to be hustled by mounted men, and it has been apparent... that the Cavalry could not influence the fighting one way or another, except by getting off their horses and using their rifles.”
Nevertheless, two of the officers who were present do succeed in concluding that the war proves the supreme value of the steel weapon; and if my readers wish to gauge the tyranny of a blind faith over the minds of accomplished practical men, whose Reports on any other point are lucid and convincing, let him read, in close connection with Count Wrangel’s two contradictory explanations of the absence of shock, the remarks on the Japanese Cavalry by General Sir C. J. Burnett and Colonel W. H. Birkbeck (vol. ii., pp. 542–545). It would be a comedy, if such comedies did not have tragic consequences. Colonel Birkbeck seeks an interview with General Akiyama. That vigorous employer of aggressive fire-action states that his Cavalry learnt to draw their “greatest confidence” from the firearm. Wincing, however, under a reminder from Colonel Birkbeck of the religious “cult of the sword” in Japan, he pleads defensive necessities against the enormous numerical strength of the Russians, who, however, were “incapable of forcing an issue at close quarters”! If they had been Cavalry” truly trained as such,” besides being enormously superior, then—but the General is too clever to court the reductio ad absurdum—then “the case would have been different.” General Burnett’s comment I quoted on page 347, and to complete the comedy, Colonel Birkbeck, in a separate report (No. 10), has conjecturally attributed the inaction of the 25,000 Russian Cavalry at the battle of Mukden to their lack of training for shock! In his interview with the more tactful Colonel McClernand, of the United States army, Akiyama speaks the plain, unvarnished truth.
Let the reader now take a bird’s-eye view of the historical chain of authoritative comment on the performances of Cavalry.
Here is Von Moltke reporting to the King of Prussia, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866:
“Our Cavalry failed, perhaps not so much in actual capacity as in self-confidence. All its initiative had been destroyed at manœuvres... and it therefore shirked bold, independent action, and kept far in the rear, and as much as possible out of sight,” etc. (“Taktisch-Strategische-Aufsätze”).
General French, in his Introduction to Bernhardi (p. xxvii), actually quotes this view as a warning to our Cavalry of the present day against “ultra-caution” with the steel in the presence of Infantry fire; quotes it, I repeat, in the beginning of a volume whose central thesis is the futility of the steel in opposition to fire.
It may be added that an “Austrian officer of high rank,” who is quoted in the French translation of the Austrian Official History of that same war of 1866, attributed what he calls the “success” of the Prussian Cavalry to their reliance on the support of Infantry—that is, on fire. His compatriot Wrangel, forty years later, says the same of the Japanese Cavalry.
Bernhardi reminds his countrymen that in the war of 1870 their own Cavalry, and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 the Russian Cavalry, only obtained the poor success they did obtain because “not even approximately equal Cavalry” opposed them, criticizes their performances severely, and passionately advocates perfection in the use of the rifle.
We come to the South African War, where the firearm inspires the best achievements of Cavalry and the steel weapon is discarded, and where we find even the most convinced upholders of the arme blanche forced to construct an elaborate and often self-contradictory scheme of explanation for the failure of the British Cavalry—qua Cavalry—in that campaign.
The Japanese Cavalry only approaches other arms in so far as it uses fire well. And we end with Kuropatkin, who has condemned the Russian Cavalry in the war of 1877, and who, in the war of 1904–5, almost in the identical words used by Von Moltke, deplores the lack of confidence and dash in the Cavalry, and regards them as having failed.
Unanimity. Censure and excuses always. Of what other class of soldiers is this invariable complaint made? And what is the common element in all these censured Cavalries? Inefficiency in fire-action. Of the wars prior to the invention of the deadly modern rifle, which is the war where Cavalry are least censured and most praised? The American Civil War, earlier than any of those I have named, where the Cavalries learnt reliance on the firearm, though their example passed unnoticed in Europe. After that invention, what type do we find winning its way to success in South Africa? The mounted rifleman. Which weapon succeeds in Manchuria? The firearm.
I have carried the reader of this volume through a very Wonderland of paradox. Let him collect the threads of one more paradox in our own domestic history.
In 1899, deaf to history and its most brilliant English exponent, Colonel Henderson, our Cavalry went to war equipped and trained like the present French Cavalry.
They and the nation suffered accordingly. After the war, Lord Roberts embodied in a preface to the “Cavalry Training” Manual of 1904 the ripe experience, not only of the South African War, but of a long life spent in military service. He inculcated reliance on the rifle as the principal weapon for all purposes of the Cavalry soldier. Two years later, although Manchuria had confirmed his words in every particular, the injunction was forgotten, and our Cavalry were sitting at the feet of a German writer who had nothing to tell them about the rifle which they had not already learnt by costly war experience, and who was addressing, not them, but a Cavalry ignorant of the ABC of modern fire-tactics. But, as a matter of theory, not of experience, he clung to shock, expounding it in terms irreconcilable with fire. Our Manual of 1904 was superseded by the Manual of 1907, with the directions of Lord Roberts expunged and Bernhardi’s self-contradictory counsels embodied. In the August number of the Revue des deux Mondes of 1908 many people were astonished to find set forth in full by General de Negrier, as a model to the “dreaming” French Cavalry, Lord Roberts’s preface to our Manual of 1904. That Manual is cancelled. So that to find in its living, authoritative form the verdict of our greatest living soldier, derived from facts, not from theory, on a technical and tactical question of vital importance, the student has to search the files of a French review.
Chapter XV — Reform
I — Study
“Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
I venture to address my first recommendation to professional soldiers, volunteer soldiers, and civilians alike. Study your own great war. Shut your ears to those who say it is abnormal. Study it with an open mind, forming your own opinion, and remembering that this is your experience.
With the facts and conditions of your own modern war thoroughly in your head, re-study other wars, including the last great war in Manchuria. Note the progress made during the last fifty years in the precision, range, and smokelessness of the firearm, compared with the unimprovable nature of the steel weapon. Ask yourself if the professional Cavalries in these various wars were alive to the lesson of this revolution, and whether their successors, judged by their own writings, are alive now to the lesson. And do not, I beseech, when you hear it said (with truth) that the “principles of war” never change, be misled into imagining that the steel weapon for horsemen is one of the “principles of war.”
Picture past wars, such as the Franco-German War, by the light of the knowledge actually then in existence, but unused, as to the possibilities of the rifle in the hands of mounted men. Reckon the opportunities lost, and ask yourself if the successes gained by the steel might not have been gained equally well even in those days by first-class mounted riflemen.
Remember all the while in constructing out of precedents this “case law” that there is a “common law” behind, a physical principle, which is independent in the last resort of all psychological and historical associations. Follow it out, as I have often suggested in terms of vulnerability and mobility, constantly using the foot-riflemen as an analogy. But realize that the bayonet, which is used as the climax of a fire-fight on foot, is not the analogue of the sword or lance, which are used from horse-back only, on a system impossible to associate with fire. Superimpose the moral and psychological factors—in one word, the spirit—bearing in mind that the best weapon will promote the best spirit, and inspire the most fear in the enemy. Lastly, take training, and reflect whether it be possible for a hybrid type to attain perfection in two highly exacting and, under modern conditions, profoundly antagonistic methods of fighting. Weigh the terrible cost of not reaching perfection, the humiliation of being impotent even against inferior Infantry, and doubly impotent against superior mounted riflemen.
In studying the functions of mounted troops with the aid of the Official “Training Books,” constantly distinguish weapons from mobility, the combat phase from the pre-combat phase. Do not be enticed into assuming that men armed with steel weapons can ride, drill, scout or manœuvre better, by virtue of those weapons. On the contrary, observe how steel weapons, not only by their mere weight in metal and leather, but by their manifold corollaries, react harmfully on mobility and intelligence, and in the case of the lance on visibility as well. Remember that in war every ounce and every inch tells, and that there is no other weapon on which to save weight. Nobody as yet suggests dropping the rifle. That is admittedly indispensable.
II — Nomenclature
The grand distinction between the foot-soldier and the horse-soldier is the horse. The link which unites them is the rifle. We need some classification which emphasizes both the distinction and the link. All our terms, as at present used, are misleading. Those ancient and simple names, Cavalry and Infantry, are really all we want, but their significance is blurred by the modern intrusion of Mounted Infantry and its unofficial synonym, Mounted Riflemen, and Yeomanry.
“Mounted Infantry” is a very bad name, because, though accurate in a sense, it suppresses the common element, the rifle, and emphasizes the horse, which is the distinguishing element, by a sort of contradiction in terms, as though one were to say, horse-foot-soldiers. And in the very act of emphasizing the horse it belittles both that noble animal and its rider. It seems to say, “mount by all means, but above all dismount”; “continually get off your horse”—“ignore the horse,” to adapt expressions now familiar to the reader.
“Mounted Riflemen,” though far better than “Mounted Infantry,” is also unsatisfactory (1) because it suggests a non-existent distinction between foot riflemen and Infantry, (2) because it suggests a non-existent class of mounted troops who are not riflemen.
Of course, the source of all this confusion is the retention of the steel weapon for our existing regular Cavalry, and the hybrid type which results.
I myself should strongly advocate the total abolition of all the modern jargon, and a return to the primitive simplicity of Cavalry and Infantry. Those names will live; nothing can extirpate them, and if they stood alone their very isolation would force into prominence the really fundamental points of similarity and dissimilarity in the troops they represent. Of course, there will always be different qualities of Cavalry, as of Infantry, corresponding to length and continuity of training, and the most difficult and exacting functions will naturally be allotted to the best-trained troops. But do not let us make the sword or lance the criterion of excellence. Let us select any other criterion but that, paying at least so much of a compliment to modern war experience. Do not let us tell the relievers of Mafeking or De Wet that they cannot engage in a strategical raid; the Australians that they cannot pursue; De la Rey, the New Zealanders, and the riflemen of the Rand that they cannot charge. Do not let us impress upon our Mounted Infantry, with their South African traditions, that because they have no sword or lance, they cannot play the big, fast game they played in South Africa. By all means, if it is convenient, give them the limited functions of divisional Cavalry, but do not put it on the ground of defective armament. Give them a chance to realize their own worth, and do not commit the crowning folly—crime it might well be called—of singling them out from all the army for what is in effect a lecture on the “terror of cold steel.”
III — Armament of Cavalry
I now come to the central object of my volume. My own belief is that reform here must be radical. If it were possible, as the United States Cavalry find it possible, to place the sword in a thoroughly subordinate position, and keep it there, accepting whole-heartedly all the logical consequences of its subordination, there would be little objection to its retention. Nobody can deny that it can be useful on very rare occasions, though I hope to have proved that the rifle, in expert hands, can do better, even on those rare occasions.
But experience proves that in this country it is utterly impossible to keep the sword or lance subordinate. Their fascination seems to be irresistible. They laugh at facts and feed men on seductive fictions. We know what the course of reaction has been. For a brief space after the South African War it was in fact made officially subordinate. Then the sword regained its old domination. Now the lance, from the cold shades of “ceremony,” has become a combative weapon, also dominant, and in the case of Lancer regiments, sharing its supremacy with the sword, so that we have now what I venture to call the preposterous spectacle of horsemen armed with no less than three weapons, one of which, when at rest, adds several feet vertically to visibility. Of the respective value of the lance and sword in combat, where combat takes place, I say nothing, but on every other ground the lance is utterly indefensible. At the combined army manœuvres of 1909, for example, Lancers were operating in hedge-bound country, like that which covers so large a part of England, and where lances constantly make just the difference between concealment and exposure. They are incompatible with effective fire-action.
But that after all is a secondary matter. What makes compromise impossible is the fact that the steel weapon carries with it logically the whole theory of shock. Add the firearm and you are faced with dilemmas from which there is no escape. You cannot even take the elementary step of attaching it to the man, instead of to the saddle, without prejudice to the idea of shock. You cannot, as “Cavalry Training” tacitly admits, carry sufficient ammunition. Drop shock, and logic would tear aside the veil, and leave the steel weapon discredited. It could not live on “extended formations,” eight-yard intervals and thin makeshifts of that sort. There plainly it would be trenching on the legitimate sphere of the rifle, and throwing its own inferiority into prominence. The steel involves shock, and shock involves a whole structure of drill, training and equipment, which are not only antithetical to fire-action, but prejudicial to general mobility. Splendid troops, with keen commanders and careful training, like our regular Cavalry, manage to attain a fairly high standard in both fire-action and shock-action; no one can doubt that who witnessed the manœuvres of 1909. But reconnaissance was admittedly imperfect, and the conditions were peace conditions. Time spent in training for the steel is time robbed from other training. None know better than General French and other Cavalry officers with war experience how tremendously exacting is the standard of excellence required of the mounted rifleman, and how vital the importance of saving weight. War teaches us that only by exclusive and unremitting attention to the use of the horse and rifle in combination is it possible to make good mounted riflemen.
They can never know enough, never practise enough. And, when the last word is said, there remain those “out-of-door habits and sporting instincts” which are so difficult to imitate artificially, and for whose absence it is so difficult to compensate by drill and discipline.
But surely no better material exists in any European country than in this for the production of good mounted riflemen. We have the men, and we have the experience. We are leagues ahead of Germany, where steps are only now being taken to provide the Cavalry with a carbine equal in power to the Infantry rifle; leagues ahead of Austria and France; leagues ahead of Russia, unless since 1905 she has revolutionized her training. And yet we are blind to our good fortune; not only blind but enviously imitative of the errors of foreigners, who in turn are ignorant of our elements of strength. Colonel Repington, our ablest military publicist, and one of the best friends the Cavalry or the army at large ever had, warns the Cavalry that their shock-action needs improvement, by comparison with Continental standards, while Bernhardi and de Negrier passionately exhort their countrymen, to wake up to the efficacy of the rifle. But Bernhardi cannot bring himself to give up the steel, so, as the most reputable exponent of compromise we can find, we copy into our drill-book those of his maxims on fire which can safely be quoted without fatally injuring the case for the steel. It is enough to make angels weep! Observe once more that we are courting failure in neglecting our own aptitudes. Our Cavalry school believes in the inevitable shock duel, and prophesies “negative” results for fire in the encounters of rival Cavalries. Continental schools believe the same, so that both Cavalries in a European war, oblivious, as of old, of their real battle duties, will seek the shock duel if level ground can be found for it. If our single division is beaten in a brute contest of weight we shall be reaping the fruits of compromise. But the more likely contingency is that the same old cruel and pointless censure will be meted out to both Cavalries, for “mutual paralysis” and “idleness” on the battle-field.
All this proves, I submit, that compromise is impossible. Sword and lance should be abolished, and the training book rewritten in the light of that abolition. With nothing but the rifle to depend on, a new, pure, equality magnificent, and far more fruitful spirit would at once permeate the whole force. There can be no such thing as a hybrid spirit, and the Cavalry know it; hence the re-enthronement of the steel spirit. But inculcate unreservedly the true aggressive fire-spirit, or rather the horse-and fire spirit, and you will get it in a form which would astonish the old European Cavalries.
From “Cavalry Training,” even as it now stands, extract and marshal lucidly all the functions which Cavalry are now supposed to perform with the rifle, whether in offence or defence.85 Realize the tremendous responsibilities involved, and remember that in any even of these functions to pit half-trained riflemen against first-class riflemen, whether Infantry or mounted, is to court failure, and possibly humiliating and disastrous failure—for the sake of what? Of obtaining not even perfection, but mediocrity in a class of tactics whose value rests on no proofs from any war since the invention of the smokeless modern rifle.
Dismiss these distracting and meaningless distinctions between the “Cavalry fight” and other fights, between “mounted action” and “dismounted action,” which are now treated as though they had no connection with one another, and as though in the swift and various vicissitudes of war it were possible to sort troops into classes or to foresee from moment to moment which tactics to employ. Realize that under present arrangements there is, and can be, no provision whatever for that rapid transition from one to the other which battle conditions demand if Cavalry are to play the fast, confident game they should play. A man with a horse is a man with a horse. Make him feel it at all times. Do not tell him that a wound inflicted from the saddle counts in some mysterious way more than one inflicted on foot. Explain that mounted action and dismounted action may alternate with lightning rapidity, and merge in one another in a thousand ways. In teaching the charge with the rifle do not make the subaltern refer to two distinct chapters, one dealing with the ride into decisive range, another with his action when he dismounts—perhaps only a few yards from the objective—for the fire-climax. And for very shame avoid such puerilities as the direction that before embarking on dismounted action additional ammunition is to be served out.
Make the mere mention of “Cavalry ground” an offence punishable by fine. Tell Cavalry that all ground which a horse can approach at all is ground for them, and all equally honourable and fruitful ground. Tell them to welcome inequalities as the indispensable condition of surprise, not to hanker after open plains, where surprise is impossible. Get rid, too, of the equally demoralizing notion that in order to fulfil their supreme function in action their horses must perpetually be in a condition to gallop fast.
Saddle-fire for mounted troops is optional, according to capacity. But it should certainly be adopted by professional Cavalry, and practised regularly. I need not discuss the difficulty of learning saddle-fire. The mere fact that it is officially enjoined for picked Mounted Infantry in a three months’ training proves its feasibility, to say nothing of its combat-value. Obviously it cannot be regarded as an absolutely essential concomitant of mounted action. A vast amount was accomplished without it in South Africa, and our own men, even in their best work, never used it. Nor was it used by either side in Manchuria, because neither side came near the South African standard of mounted rifle-tactics. But that it may be, if used at the right moment, skilfully, and for certain definite ends, of very great value, we know both from our own experience and from American history. It has genuine moral effect, and may have material effects of an importance out of all proportion to the actual loss of life inflicted, whether in horse or men. A few random bullets may stampede a crowd of led horses, or throw into disorder a regiment massed for shock. In the pursuit of mounted men by mounted men, in the running mêlée, so to speak, experience shows that skilled shots and riders can bring down men with aimed fire. A revolver might be better for this purpose, but the multiplication of weapons is on all accounts to be avoided. The rider must feel in every moment of his field-life that he and his rifle are one for all purposes.
It goes without saying, therefore, that the rifle should be slung, as even the Russians and Japanese slung it, and, as Bernhardi recommends, on the back.
But for the arme blanche there would be plenty of time to learn not only saddle-fire, but much beside in the inexhaustible lore of the mounted rifleman. For example, a good first-hand knowledge of entrenchment is absolutely essential, as anyone can see who looks in “Cavalry Training” for the fire-functions allotted to Cavalry; and at least one sharp lesson in South Africa drives home the same moral. To allocate a small detachment of Royal Engineers is to trifle with the subject. Entrenching tools, in the use of which the troopers themselves have been practised, should accompany every regiment or brigade. Remember the Cavalry at Hei-kou-tai and Pen-hse-hu. If you give men firearms at all, you must teach them thoroughly the defensive as well as the offensive use of firearms, for the two things are one. Men who cannot defend cannot attack.
A truce, then, to the rhetoric about Cavalry being essentially an arm of offence. Ça va sans dire. Every combatant arm is an arm of offence. Infantry would regard such an exhortation as a poor compliment. Of course we know and make full allowance for the reason of the exhortation—namely, that the arme blanche is by its very nature only a weapon of offence, and that in Cavalry theory the arme blanche is the supreme source of dash. Get rid of this theory, and you get rid of all excuse for the exhortation.
The arme blanche gone, the path of progress in every department opens out broad and clear. We want light, lithe, wiry men, and horses to match—horses at any rate in which nothing of any moment is sacrificed to size, and of which hardihood is the predominant characteristic. Small horses were far the hardiest in South Africa and Manchuria. High speed is altogether secondary; looks are nothing.
The vexed question of the weight of general equipment (apart from the extra weight of steel weapons) I regard as outside the scope of this volume. The margin gained by abolishing steel weapons should be used for extra ammunition. In South Africa our men carried 130 rounds, the Japanese in Manchuria 150 rounds.
Should the troopers carry a bayonet? That is an interesting question, because it forces us to contrast the relative powers and duties of the foot-rifleman and the horse-rifleman. It is an open question, not vital, because the weight of a bayonet is small, and it does not impose a separate system of tactics. It may be said on the one hand that mobility and surprise are the grand advantages possessed by mounted riflemen over foot-riflemen, and should compensate for the bayonet, which, in point of fact, scarcely justified itself in South Africa. The Boers lost little by the lack of it, even in storming entrenchments at night, while their charges in the open were based directly on the idea, first of a swift stunning ride in, then on destructive magazine fire. That is the true idea, and we should not forget it. The bayonet suggests the slow, if less vulnerable, approach of men on foot. Even in the case of Infantry, critics of both the great modern wars associate over-close formations and unskilful skirmishing with an exaggerated idea of the importance of the cold steel. I except Port Arthur conditions, where horsemen were not wanted.
On the other hand, all British riflemen find confidence in the bayonet, and, as Lord Roberts truly says, it may be exceedingly useful in a dismounted night attack. War since 1865 proves that Cavalry must have the power to press home an assault against entrenched Infantry. As Mishchenko discovered, they cannot make the simplest raid without it. In strict logic, therefore, the trooper needs the bayonet if the Infantryman needs it. Only let us be sure that the utility of the bayonet is fully great enough to warrant the possible risk of making the trooper forget that normally his horse gives him a great tactical advantage over Infantry, and a range of opportunities unknown to them. Whatever we decide, let us not act in mimicry of “potential foes.” If the new German carbine has a bayonet, as I believe it has, let us not make the bayonet a fourth weapon in imitation, but a second weapon to fortify the rifle.
On manœuvre not strictly connected with any special weapon I only wish to repeat the clear lesson of South Africa and the wise counsel of Bernhardi, that the less Cavalry, when in free and independent movement, are taught to rely on the support of Horse Artillery the better.
I need scarcely say that we should erase the last vestiges of the idea that Cavalry should count on the support of mounted riflemen. If we abolish the arme blanche that distorted and unwholesome idea dies a natural death.
The conditions of service constitute a most important point. For officers the force should be as cheap as any other part of the army, the career ouverte à tous les talents. Every stimulus should be given for the accession of the best men, both mentally and physically, and selection should be rigid. Cavalry is a very important arm, demands the most varied powers, and should command the highest talent. It is a relatively small force, it has highly specialized functions, and of all arms it is the least easy to replace in the thick of a war. It must be a comparatively expensive force to maintain, but the expense should fall on the State which it serves. That perhaps is a counsel of perfection for the State in its relation to officers of all arms, but if it softens anywhere, it should soften in the case of the Cavalry.
And the source of the present excessive standard of expense? Analyze the whole matter carefully, and you will find at the back of it that enemy to progress, the arme blanche. Abolish that, and, with a little friendly help from the State, the evil will cure itself.
IV — Mounted Infantry
We touch here special questions of finance and administration which complicate the issue. But a clear mind on the question of armament and tactics will help immensely to simplify the problem. Let us begin by calling them for all purposes “Cavalry.” That ought to be a simple and unobjectionable change, because in combined operations they are, in fact, called Cavalry, and are allotted the duties of divisional Cavalry. The name changed, what follows? Logically, no doubt, that they should be merged in the Cavalry. Apart from the steel weapon, their characteristics are the same. Apart from the shock-charge, and assuming equal length of training, their functions and powers should be precisely the same. They are mounted riflemen, as the Cavalry should be. On the other hand, there is an advantage, no doubt, from the point of view of expense and simplicity, in the plan of abstraction from Infantry battalions for short periods of mounted service; but I suggest that the advantage is small by comparison with the evils of the system. (1) In war, when fresh contingents have to be raised (as they surely will have to be raised), the abstraction, as we know to our cost, weakens the efficacy of the Infantry battalions. (2) Though the soldier’s prior training (presumed to be thorough) as an Infantryman is of immense help to him in learning the work of a mounted rifleman, it is wholly impossible for him, in the short time available, to obtain all the trained aptitudes and instincts of a first-class mounted rifleman.
Is it not common sense that, if we go to the expense of providing professional soldiers with horses at all, we should go a little farther, and make them thorough professional horsemen, during their whole training? Should we not rather add to the Cavalry than abstract from the Infantry? I am sure it would pay us well.
But whether or no this step is taken, and whether or no the arme blanche is abolished, let us at all events revise their instruction in the light of war-experience, abandoning all this excessive stress on their character as Infantry, laying all the stress we will on their character as riflemen, and equal stress on their character as horsemen. Of course, as long as they remain, so to speak, improvised horsemen, their responsibilities must be appropriate to their efficiency, but they should not be taught to feel that they lose something by the lack of a steel weapon. By all means let them act as a “pivot of manœuvre” for regular Cavalry, where the two arms are acting together, if, as mounted riflemen, they are less efficient than Cavalry. But away with this absurd notion that their support on such occasions is intended to leave Cavalry leisure and opportunity for indulging in shock. Away, above all, with the demoralizing insinuation that if caught “in the open,” whatever that vague and elusive phrase may mean, they are, owing to the possession of horses, actually more vulnerable to attack by the steel than Infantry; that to meet this contingency, they must form square, an operation long obsolete in the case of the Infantry, except for savage warfare. This is just the way to make them lose all confidence not only in the very weapon which Infantry are taught to rely on so implicitly against the steel, but in the horse itself. I wonder if the existing Mounted Infantry believe in the suggestion after their previous training as Infantry. If any one of them, does, I can only say to him: “Read once more and learn by heart page 92 of ‘Infantry Training’ (‘Meeting an Attack by Cavalry’). Remember you now have a horse; exercise your common sense, and you will conclude that unless you are ‘surprised’ in a sense which would be a disgrace to soldiers of any class or type, mounted or dismounted, you have an immense advantage over Cavalry acting ‘as such.’”
V — Yeomanry
Here are volunteer mounted riflemen; a keen, vigorous force, composed of some of the best elements in the nation, but without prior training as Infantry, obtaining a very small amount of field exercise, with horses specially provided for such occasions. They belong to the same type as Mounted Infantry; but, through no fault of their own, are less efficient. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, they are called “Cavalry,” and receive, in an appendix to “Cavalry Training,” three special pages, which begin with the direction that “Yeomanry should be so trained as to be capable of performing all the duties allotted to Cavalry, except those connected with shock action.” Let us follow out the effect which these words are calculated to have upon the mind of an average member of the Yeomanry. At the first blush the sentence wears an air of simplicity. Having no lance or sword, the Yeoman clearly cannot practice shock. But what are the “duties connected with shock action” which he must not perform? If he were to begin by studying Bernhardi, he might very well come to the satisfactory conclusion that the only opportunity for shock was in the collision of huge Cavalry masses. But he need not read Bernhardi, because Bernhardi, he is informed, inspires “Cavalry Training.” In “Cavalry Training” he searches in vain for an exhaustive list of these duties. He finds emphasis on the big shock duel, with its “positive” result, but no qualification in respect of smaller duels. He hears about the “Cavalry fight,” which is clearly a shock fight, and also about Cavalry in “extended order,” charging Infantry, and wonders if this, too, is shock, and presumes on the whole that it is. Eventually he comes to the conclusion, and the very reasonable conclusion, that he is lost without a steel weapon, irretrievably lost if he meets Cavalry, and at the best, perhaps, weak in aggression against Infantry. If he refers to “Mounted Infantry Training,” it is only to find that even this arm, with its professional character and longer continuous training, is taught to fear the steel weapon. Reverting, therefore, to his original proposition, that the sword is absolutely essential, he appeals to be equipped with the sword.
But what, meanwhile, of that terrifically deadly weapon, the rifle? With his eighteen days’ field training, is he yet fit to meet on terms of fire professional mounted riflemen, to say nothing of swordsmen and Lancers? Is he, with his limited practice and his double function of horseman and rifleman, fit to oppose even volunteer Infantry? He has vague recollections of a war in which large numbers of volunteer troops under his own appellation met small numbers of skilled mounted riflemen, did remarkably well under the circumstances, but on the whole were completely outmatched. But the uncomfortable memory is soon stifled. That was an “abnormal” war. Cavalrymen say it was abnormal. He need not study that war, and in point of fact I am afraid it is true that the majority of our volunteer mounted officers do not study it. Why should they, when German theorists and German battles are presented to them on the highest authority as the best guides to education?
I am fully aware that many Yeomanry officers resent the demand for a steel weapon, and take the line of common sense in the whole matter. But the opinions I have represented must be reckoned with, for they will grow, as the war fades farther into the past and the reaction to steel in the Cavalry gathers strength. In the summer of 1909, there was a correspondence in the Times initiated by an anonymous “Squadron Leader” of Yeomanry, who represented that to send swordless Yeomanry into war was sheer murder; that in the face of Cavalry they were “unarmed sheep”; that he cared nothing about the Boer War (of which, indeed, he was evidently quite ignorant); that it was “peculiar”; that our Cavalry and foreign Cavalries believed in the arme blanche, and that for his part he pinned his faith on authorities like General von Pelet Narbonne, the German author of “Cavalry in Action.”
Of all the many pernicious effects of the survival of the arme blanche, this indirect encouragement to our volunteer horsemen to belittle the good weapon and hanker for the bad weapon is one of the worst. The responsibility rests absolutely on the arme blanche school of thought. There is no valid answer to the demand. They, least of all, can combat it. Nor would there be any valid answer if the Mounted Infantry raised the same demand. Every mounted man should have a sword, or none. In war you cannot sort out troops so that one class need only meet its own corresponding class. Germans, for example, have no steel-less Cavalry. By hypothesis, therefore, our Yeomanry cannot take the field at all against them. And how, on the same hypothesis, are our Mounted Infantry, acting as “divisional Cavalry,” to meet German divisional Cavalry?
Meanwhile, it is impossible to make any other recommendation to the Yeomanry than this. Regard yourselves as belonging to the highest type of mounted soldier—that is, to the mounted riflemen. Concentrate on the rifle and the horse. The more you do that and the more the hybrid professional horsemen waste their energies in compromise, or destroy their efficacy in concentrating on the steel, the fitter you will be to meet them in war.
VI — Imperial Mounted Troops
It is for the Imperial General Staff to grapple with this question. We are dealing here with men who will never really believe that a steel weapon is the distinguishing mark of a superior Cavalry. How the steel weapon at present is to be submitted to them in an intelligible and natural way, I do not know. Without it the whole problem solves itself. It will be possible then to arrange for their inclusion in an Imperial army on some definite and reasoned basis, with functions defined according to their capacity as mounted riflemen.
VII — Conclusion
I hope I have written nothing in this volume which does not come within the bounds of fair criticism. I have written strongly, because I feel strongly on a point about which every Englishman, soldier or civilian, has a right to feel strongly. We have wasted too much energy, brains and splendid human material on the perverse pursuit of a phantom ideal. It is painful, at this moment, to see a great current of keenness and ability so misdirected and misapplied.
Let us trust our own experience, shake off this crippling superstition, and start afresh on lines which we have proved to be successful. [Blank Page]
Footnotes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
6. Bernhardi, p. 60. Mr. Goldman’s translation, second edition, of General von Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in Future Wars.”
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.”
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.
9. Colonel Denison’s “History of Cavalry” gives an excellent account of Cavalry work in this war and others of the same period.
10. “Science of War,” chap. iii., “Tactical Employment of Cavalry” (undated).
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).
12. “Cavalry Training,” p. 129.
13. “Cavalry in Future Wars,” pp. 221–2 and 234 (4).
14. “Cavalry Training,” p. 194.
15. “Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” p. 55.
16. “Cavalry in Future Wars,” p. 10, and elsewhere.
17. “With French in South Africa,” p. 426.
18. Unless the last Boer rush was of this character. The “Official History” (vol. i., p. 169) says that fifty Boers “charged boldly uphill” to within twenty yards of the crest held by the Gordons and the Imperial Light Horse, and then used their rifles. Whether they charged mounted is not stated.
19. “With French in South Africa,” p. 421.
20. Mr. Goldman complains that, although open, the country contained ridges, which provided successive lines of resistance to a retreating enemy. He does not see what ridicule he throws on Cavalry by such a line of argument.
21. I have tried, as usual, to follow the figures of the “Official History,” although for this period they are inadequate. Sometimes the considered estimate of the historian is given, sometimes the Intelligence estimate on the spot, with or without a warning that it was exaggerated, while in the case of particular operations the estimate is occasionally altogether omitted. It is not stated how much allowance is made for men detached on non-combatant duties, and for that leakage from particular commandos of burghers “on leave” which was such a grave source of weakness for the enemy.
On January 10, when Roberts landed, the historian’s estimate of “total effective strength of Boers in the field” (vol. i., p. 409) is 46,500, thus disposed:
| Joubert in Natal | 21,000 |
| Schoemann at Colesberg | 5,000 |
| Grobelaar around Stormberg | 4,000 |
| Cronje at Scholtz Nek | 8,000 |
| Ferreira besieging Kimberley | 3,000 |
| Snyman besieging Mafeking | 2,500 |
| H. Botha on Rhodesian border | 1,000 |
| “Reinforcements” | 2,000 |
| —-—- | |
| 46,500 |
On February 16 (four days after Roberts began his move) an Intelligence estimate (“somewhat exaggerated”) is given to this effect:
| Cronje (including Kimberley force) | 12,000 | 20 guns |
| A. Cronje (detached by Cronje)22 | 1,300 | 2 guns |
| Near Goemansberg | 300 | 1 gun |
| Reinforcements (i.e., to Cronje) (“uncertain”) | 5,000 | |
| Colesberg | 8,000 | 10 guns |
| Stormberg, etc | 2,000 | |
| —-—- | ||
| 28,600 |
The Natal estimate is omitted, but by reference to the chapters on Natal at the same period the total Boer strength there cannot have been more than 12,000. Add, therefore, 12,000 + the forces of Snyman and H. Botha on January 10, i.e., 3,500, and we get
| 15,500 | ||
| —-—- | ||
| Total | 44,100 |
22. These figures are certainly wrong. Andries Cronje’s force should be included in the 12,000 credited to Cronje.
23. These and the subsequent figures are taken from Roberts’s despatch of February 16. No figures of strength (only of units) are given either in the text or appendices of the “Official History.”
24. The Times History describes Broadwood’s brigade as galloping after Gordon’s, half a mile behind. The German critic, who appears to have been an eyewitness, speaks of 6,000 horsemen charging as though in one body. I base my account on our own “Official History.”
25. German Official Account of the South African War, vol. i., p. 147.
26. “With French in South Africa,” pp. 83, 84, and Appendix A., p. 411.
27. Vol. ii., p. 36.
28. See Henderson’s “Science of War,” pp. 53, 54.
29. Times History gives “150–200”; “Official History,” “200”; German History, “100.”
30. I follow the account of French’s motives given by the “Official History.” Both the Times History and Mr. Goldman represent him as having decided from the first against interception, and regard the next move, to Middelpunt Ridge, as the first stage in an indirect or semi-direct pursuit. The point is not material. It was either irresolute interception or indirect pursuit.
31. Broadwood’s request, and the delay, are not expressly noted in the “Official History.” In fairness to Broadwood, I take them from the Times History. But it is quite clear from the official narrative that there must have been a considerable delay.
32. See p. 201, line 22, where the Cavalry narrative, broken off at p. 197, is resumed (8 or 8.30 a.m.) “On the left” (i.e., on the south of the Modder) “disaster was only warded off by the gallantry of small groups of the bolder burghers,” etc., down to p. 203.
33. “Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” Eng. Translation, p. 32.
34. “Official History,” vol. ii., p. 235; Times History, vol. iii, p. 588. There was no question of using the arme blanche.
35. South African Light Horse, Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry, Bethune’s Mounted Infantry, Imperial Light Horse (1 squadron), Natal Carbineers (1 squadron), a few Natal Mounted Police.
36. “Official History,” vol. ii., chaps. xx-xxii.; Times History, vol. iii, chaps. ix. and x.
37. It is just possible, no doubt, to take a different view of the affair. The German critic, who is always indifferent to mounted questions, thinks the whole turning movement was a mistake, and that, therefore, the question of supporting Dundonald was not of much consequence. The facts of the wretched friction between Warren and Dundonald are set forth exhaustively in our own “Official History” (pp. 362, 363, and Appendix 9 [c]), and a reader can form his own opinion. The comment affords an example of that criticism by innuendo which so often mars the careful and conscientious narrative of facts, and which generally defeats its own object—that of avoiding direct censure on individuals. The result frequently is to censure the wrong individual. In this case, reading between the lines, one is led to infer that Dundonald was wholly to blame in not sending sufficiently explicit messages to Warren. This interpretation of what happened leaves out of account all the larger aspects of the case, and the chapters are so written as to obscure these larger aspects. Buller’s original orders to Warren (p. 347) “embodied,” we are told, a “broad and bold conception.” So they undoubtedly did. Here is outspoken praise, well deserved. Whence came the failure, then? No one could guess from comments in the text, although, by exercising common sense on a study of the facts, two explanations stand out plainly: (1) That Buller, having framed his plan in outline, divested himself of responsibility for its execution, and remained a passive, though not an uncritical, spectator of events. (2) That speed in the turning movement was the essence of the plan, but that Warren never realized this, and was too slow, his mind perpetually fixed on his heavy transport and oblivious to the offensive possibilities of his advance. Ignoring these broad considerations, which have an obvious and direct bearing on the Dundonald-Warren friction, the Official Historian takes care to investigate and print every message bearing on that topic, and to justify, at any rate by implication, Warren’s caution. Could there be a worse moral, above all, for mounted troops? Overcurt as Dundonald’s messages were, they struck a note which would have elicited the right response from a mind tuned to the right key. One must make some allowance, too, for human nature. Imagine the feelings of a leader of horse who, at such a time and with such an opening before him, had been compelled at the outset to send back a regiment of regular Cavalry “to prevent the grazing oxen being swept away” from the main body! (Appendix 9 [c]).
38. This, nevertheless, is precisely what Mr. Goldman does in a passage of his book, “With French in South Africa,” p. 422. His proposition, sufficiently bold in itself, is that the regular Cavalry were not given sufficient chances in South Africa, and he instances particularly Buller’s failure to use his Cavalry in pursuit at this period. By the use of the vague word “Cavalry” to cover all Buller’s mounted troops, the majority of whom were irregular mounted riflemen, Mr. Goldman introduces into a correct statement of fact the unwarrantable suggestion that the steel weapon, the distinguishing feature of Cavalry, was deprived of a chance of inflicting a “crushing defeat” on the enemy. It must be understood that Mr. Goldman, in the essay I am referring to, is engaged in an express effort to prove the superiority of Cavalry over mounted riflemen.
39. War Commission Evidence, vol. ii., pp. 182, 183.
40. “Official History,” vol. ii., chaps. xxvi. and xxvii.; Times History, chap. xvi.
41. Vol. ii., p. 270.
42. See “With French in South Africa,” pp. 420–423, and 426, 427.
43. Two Australian detachments were included in one of the brigades.
44. Hamilton had begun his fighting on April 30, at Houtnek, where he dislodged Philip Botha from a strong position, though without inflicting any appreciable loss.
45. I am reckoning French’s three brigades at the figure of 3,600 given in the Appendix to the “Official History.” In the text they are said to have numbered 4,500 “sabres,” plus Artillery. This would make the total nearly 14,000.
46. “Official History,” vol. iii., p. 72.
47. Bernhardi utters a wholesome warning on this subject in his “Cavalry in Future Wars” (p. 54), and advocates direct fire-action. “Cavalry Training,” if it could reach the point of regarding mounted riflemen as “Cavalry,” would, of course, do the same, and thereby refute the theory of the inevitable “shock duel” between opposing Cavalries.
48. No complete figures exist. The “Official History” ignores the subject. I take these figures from the Times historian, who quotes from calculations made by one of Roberts’s staff (see vol. iv., p. 162).
49. I have no space for details, but I ask the reader to study either the Times or the Official narratives; and I suggest that it was not worth while to make so great a circuit in order to turn out 500 Boers from distant flank posts. If French, leaving a small containing force, had advanced direct upon Lakenvlei by the road the Infantry took, he would have been in a position to act upon the Boer rear at an early hour.
50. “Official History,” vol. iii., pp. 485–488; Times History, vol. v., pp. 15–20.
51. I am not theorizing. This was the experience both of the Japanese and the Russians, as in South Africa and in the American Civil War. See “Reports of Military Observers (United States) attached to the Armies in Manchuria” (Part V.). Also Chapter XIV., infra.
52. Times History, vol. v., pp. 281–284.
53. Vide supra, p. 41.
54. This is probably the explanation of what happened. See Times History, vol. v., pp. 339–340.
55. Times History, vol. v., pp. 360–376.
56. This was our own Intelligence estimate. General Botha, in a recent visit to London, informed me that to the best of his recollection he brought no more than 250.
57. Times History, vol. v., pp. 423–427.
58. Ibid., pp. 455–458.
59. Times History, vol. v., pp. 383–384.
60. Times History, vol. v.: Yzer Spruit, pp. 498–500; Tweebosch, pp. 501–508; Boschbult, pp. 520–522.
61. An hour and a half later a general pursuit was begun by all three divisions. It went on for eighteen miles, and resulted in the capture of three guns and thirty burghers.
62. Between May, 1901, and April, 1902, nine principal charging actions cost us 2,500 casualties and prisoners and 18 guns. The war cost about 5½ millions a month.
63. Times History, vol. v., p. 173.
64. Times History, vol. v., p. 226, Wildfontein; p. 475, Roodekraal.
65. “With French in South Africa,” p. 423. Vide infra, p. 285.
66. I am quite aware that under present arrangements our Mounted Infantry are allotted the duties of Divisional Cavalry, but this circumstance does not affect the general principles laid down for their action, which remain the same, and postulate the inferiority of mounted troops without steel weapons. The contradiction in terms exhibited by the nomenclature only serves to emphasize the confusion of thought involved.
67. “With French in South Africa,” p. 422.
68. On the subject of horses see Times History, vol. vi., part ii., chapter vi. The total number provided for the British army was 518,794 (mules 150,781). The net wastage accounted for was in horses 347,007 (mules 53,339). The Boers took the field with 50,000 to 60,000 horses, which were renewed several times. Their net wastage is estimated conjecturally at 100,000.
69. I ought, perhaps, to allude to another argument which appears in Mr. Goldman’s Preface to Bernhardi, though it is expressed in very vague terms, and the meaning is beyond me: “The Cavalry, after the first few weeks of 1900, as an effective force had practically ceased to exist.” Figures of strength and disposition will be found in my previous chapters.
70. This, as I shall show in the next chapter, is precisely the conclusion reached unconsciously by Bernhardi, and consciously by Wrangel. Their only tactical rôle with the steel is in the “collision of Cavalry masses”—i.e., between masses of Cavalry who both believe in the steel and engage on that understanding.
71. See Bernhardi’s warning, “Cavalry in Future Wars,” pp. 169, 170.
72. “Cavalry in Future Wars,” p. 51. Non-frontal pursuits, especially “strategical” pursuits, are to be by fire-action.
73. Mr. Goldman’s estimate. The Times Historian speaks of a “party,” the Official History a “commando.” The total force detached by Botha against the division was certainly very small.
74. “The War in South Africa” (March to September, 1900), (translated by Colonel Du Cane), p. 288.
75. Revue des deux Mondes, August, 1908.
76. Vide supra, p. 286.
77. Times, September 2, 16, etc., 1909.
78. Times, September 16, 1909.
79. The recorded case (referred to later) was at Telissu. Colonel McClernand, the U.S. Official Cavalry observer, quotes the Colonel of the Japanese Cavalry of the Guard as having referred to a few steel combats between patrols in the early months of the war.
80. “Cavalry in the Russo-Japanese War,” pp. 8–11.
81. “Mit Kosaken durch die Mandschurei.”
82. Times History, vol. v., pp. 302–319, 388, 394.
83. Both on horses and on horse-mastership opinions differ (see “British Officers’ Reports,” vol. ii., and the U.S. Reports). The figures of wastage seem to show good management.
84. Our Official Historians (Part ii., p. 32), referring to the same incident, speak of a charge in “open order” over fifty yards of ground, and of lances being used with “great effect.” The losses on both sides were evidently small.
85. See p. 318.
The End
| Telegrams: | |
| ‘Scholarly, London.’ | 41 and 43 Maddox Street, |
| Bond Street, London, W. | |
| Telephone: | January, 1910. |
| No. 1883 Mayfair. |
Mr. Edward Arnold’s
Spring List of New Books
January-March, 1910.
LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY.
By Lord HUGH CECIL, M.P.
This pithy volume contains an address delivered by the author on the occasion of his inauguration as President of the Associated Societies of the University of Edinburgh. He does not trench upon the difficult ground of metaphysics, but takes as his subject for discussion Political Liberty and its Limitations and Objects. In the course of the address the interesting thesis is evolved that Liberty consists in the power of doing, not what others approve of, but what they disapprove of, and that if an individual has not the right to do what others deprecate, he is not free at all. This thesis is tested by application to several of the political problems of our own day.
ACROSS THE SAHARA.
From Tripoli to Bornu.
By HANNS VISCHER, M.A.
Political Service, Northern Nigeria.
In his adventurous and interesting journey, the author traversed a region practically unexplored by any white man since the days of Barth. Starting with a large and somewhat unruly caravan, one of his great difficulties was to keep the peace between the Arabs and Negros who composed it: as the expedition advanced farther south they had to encounter terrible desert tracts where no water could be found for days, and where oases were few and far between. At a later stage the hostility of certain native tribes with a taste for brigandage caused serious trouble, and some severe fighting. The author, however, accepted his mischances with philosophy, and imparts to the reader the pleasure and excitement that each day’s journey brought forth. The narrative is graphic and picturesque, and much information is conveyed incidentally as to the resources of the country and the life of its inhabitant.
WITH A PREHISTORIC PEOPLE: The A=ki=ku=yu of British East Africa.
By W. SCORESBY ROUTLEDGE, M.A., Oxon, and KATHARINE ROUTLEDGE, M.A.
Trin. Coll., Dublin.
This is the first published account of one of the most interesting of African peoples, previously unknown to white men, who have lately come under British rule. The object of the authors, who have recently returned from a prolonged sojourn amongst them, is to describe primitive life as it really exists, and the book should be of great value to those who are interested in our Empire and its responsibilities as well as to those of more scientific tastes. It should also prove of material assistance to Government officials, settlers, and travellers in the country described, enabling them to understand native thought and custom. ‘The great interest of the subject,’ say the authors, ‘lies in the fact that the A-ki-kú-yu of to-day are at the point where our ancestors stood in earliest times.’ There are nearly two hundred pages of illustrations from the authors’ photographs.
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1801–1900.
Volume II., from 1833 to 1867.
By the Right Hon. Sir HERBERT MAXWELL, Bart., P.C.,
Author of ‘The Life of Wellington,’ etc.
The second of Sir Herbert Maxwell’s three volumes covers the central period of the nineteenth century, and extends from the passing of the first to the passing of the second Reform Bill, the latter date being, of course, chosen not as marking the close of an epoch, but simply in order to divide the century as nearly as possible into equal third parts. The outstanding feature of English politics during the first portion of this period is the disappearance of the old-time Tories and the creation of the modern Conservative Party by Sir Robert Peel. Of the questions which agitated the country in and out of Parliament, two are of special interest at the present hour—namely, the reform of the administration of the Poor Law in 1834, and the controversy between Protection and Free Trade. With the close of the latter by the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the disappearance of Peel from the scene, a new era opens. The strife of parties continues under new leaders, some of whom have only recently passed away; but it is concerned with less momentous issues, and the interest shifts largely to external matters, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the war in the United States, and the beginnings of great changes in the political system of Europe, where the events of 1848 ushered in a new epoch, which witnessed the struggle for liberty in Italy, and the sudden rise of Prussia.
It has been said with reference to Sir Herbert Maxwell’s first volume, that he is a politician, therefore a party man, therefore disqualified from writing history. The criticism was anticipated by the author, who has given what is surely the sufficient and only possible answer to it—namely, that hitherto the writing of the history of the period has been monopolized by party men—of the other side.
WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE.
By ERSKINE CHILDERS,
Author of ‘The Riddle of the Sands’; Editor of Vol. V. of the
‘“Times” History of the War in South Africa,’ etc.
With an Introduction by the Right Hon. Field-Marshal
EARL ROBERTS, K.G.,
Author of ‘Forty-One Years in India.’
The writer attacks the present armament of cavalry, with whom the sword or lance is the dominant weapon, and the rifle the subordinate weapon. All forms of compromise being impossible, he advocates the abolition of the steel weapon, and the conversion of cavalry into the highest and most perfect type of Mounted Riflemen. His historical argument is based mainly upon the South African War, in the course of which steel weapons were abandoned altogether, and an exceedingly high type of mounted rifleman developed; but he traces the slow revolution in mounted methods, wrought by improved firearms, from the middle of the last century up to the present day, culminating in the Manchurian War, where, as in South Africa, the steel was practically of no account. The author’s view is that the education and efficiency not only of the cavalry, but of all our mounted troops, home or colonial, regular or volunteer, mounted infantry, mounted riflemen, or yeomanry, depends on clear notions as to the relative value of the rival weapons, and he shows what confusion and obscurity the undefined functions of the steel weapon import into any consideration of the vitally important functions of the mounted rifleman. He advocates one pure type, under a single name—Cavalry—for all purposes.
A HISTORY OF
THE LONDON HOSPITAL.
By E. W. MORRIS,
Secretary of the London Hospital.
With 16 pages of Illustrations and several Plans. One Volume.
The history of this great Hospital is not only interesting on account of the particular incidents of its long and honourable career, and the prominent men who have been connected with it, but also provides a typical example of the way in which our splendid medical charities have grown and developed. Beginning with a survey of the condition of Medicine and Surgery in 1741, the date of the foundation of the Hospital, the author describes its early days in Goodman’s Field, the move to Whitechapel, and the gradual growth during the last hundred and fifty years. He then deals with the system of Administration, Finance, and Management, the relation of the Hospital to Medical and Surgical Science, the Medical School, and the Development of Sick Nursing. The reader is initiated into some noteworthy customs and ceremonies of the Hospital, and some account is given of the men whose names stand out in its history. The author has enjoyed exceptional advantages in writing his book, through his position as Secretary of the Hospital, and has collected some valuable materials for illustrating it from sources not generally accessible.
NEIGHBOURS AND FRIENDS.
By M. LOANE,
Author of ‘An Englishman’s Castle,’ ‘The Queen’s Poor,’ etc.
Miss Loane’s store of anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of the poor, their ways of living, and their modes of thought and expression, are apparently inexhaustible. Readers of her earlier works will find in ‘Neighbours and Friends’ a collection as entertaining and as full of interest as any of its predecessors. Miss Loane never dogmatizes, and rarely indulges in generalization, but there are few problems connected with the Administration of Public Relief on which her pages do not throw fresh light.
A SUMMER ON THE CANADIAN
PRAIRIE.
By GEORGINA BINNIE CLARK.
This is a genial and breezy account of how two young English ladies went out to Canada and joined their brother, who, with another young Englishman, had taken up a grant of land in the North-West and was trying to convert it into a farm. The story is ‘told like a novel,’ but it is obviously founded very closely on facts, and is realistic in the best sense of the word—a piece of actual everyday life. The sisters do not fall in love with their brother’s partner, and the young men do not display any heroic capacity for triumphing over difficulties. On the contrary, they are rather an ordinary pair of amiable inefficient people, and they fare accordingly. What happens is consequently very much more amusing than if the book had been constructed to point a moral, while there is plenty to be learned from it by those who choose to read between the lines.
AN ENGLISH STUDENT’S
WANDER-YEAR IN AMERICA.
By A. G. BOWDEN-SMITH.
The author of this book has made a study of an aspect of American life which will be novel to most English readers. She was fortunate enough to be able to visit representative specimens of every variety of higher educational centre—and in America there are many varieties. Being fresh from the life of Newnham College, she was peculiarly alert to note the points in which they resembled and differed from the corresponding institutions in England; and she has traced with remarkable shrewdness the resulting effects, not only in respect to education in the narrower sense, but on individual character, and in the form of influences, subtle and far-reaching, on social development. She had the advantage of meeting the students on an equal footing, and so gained many opportunities of seeing things as they are which an ‘educational expert’ of higher standing and authority could not have enjoyed. But Miss Bowden Smith is herself an educational expert in a very real sense, and readers of her comprehensive and sympathetic survey will feel that they have gained a quite new insight into the character of the American people.
THE CLERGY AND SOCIAL
SERVICE.
Cambridge Lectures on Pastoral Theology.
By the Very Rev. W. MOORE EDE, D.D.,
Dean of Worcester.
These lectures differ from others delivered on Pastoral Theology at Cambridge in the extent to which they emphasise the opportunities of social service which are open to the clergy, and the importance of utilizing them—a subject in which their author has had great experience through his intimate connection with industrial life and working-class organizations. That this aspect of clerical life is pre-eminently the one which needs to be brought before candidates for Holy Orders at the present time is the general opinion of those who would see the social re-organization which is now taking place dominated by spiritual rather than by materialistic ideals. There are six lectures, entitled: What is the Church and what are its Duties?—Equipment for the Work—Reading, Preaching and Speaking—Agencies Outside the Church which are Working for Social Redemption—The Church and Charity—The Church as Teacher and Inspirer of Education.
THREE NEW NOVELS.
FRANKLIN KANE.
By ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK,
Author of ‘Valerie Upton,’ ‘Amabel Channice,’ etc.
This is the story of a partie carrée, two men and two women (one of each is American, the other English), the threads of whose lives become interwoven, owing to a chance meeting in an hotel. How will they pair off? This is the problem: now one solution seems inevitable, now another. As the plot develops two of the dramatis personæ stand revealed as irredeemably ordinary, weak, egoistic; two as self-reliant, noble, and capable of clear-eyed self-sacrifice. Ultimately the determining factor is character, which proves stronger than the chains of circumstance. It is comedy, but serious comedy, and the situations towards the close have a poignancy of which Miss Sedgwick alone possesses the secret.
AN EXTREMELY INTERESTING NOVEL
BY A NEW AUTHOR.
SILVERWOOL.
A Tale of the North Country Fells.
By EMILY JENKINSON.
Every page of this powerful and original novel is fragrant with the fresh mountain air of the Fells. What Thomas Hardy has done for the people of Wessex, Miss Jenkinson aims with considerable success at doing for the Northern Dalesmen. ‘Silverwool’ is a prize ram, and the action of the story to some extent centres round his fortunes in the show-ground, affording the author scope for some very interesting studies of country life and character. The situations are excellent, the characters well-drawn, and the style literary and charming.
A STEPSON OF THE SOIL.
By MARY J. H. SKRINE.
This story deals with life in an English village of the southern counties. It concerns itself chiefly with an old couple in an old cottage, their ‘hidy-holes,’ their relations with each other, and with a runaway waif, who becomes their lodger: also with the fortunes in love and luck of handsome Robert Burn, the Warrener; and with the local wise woman and her ‘lawful arts.’ It is impossible to do justice to the charm and skill of the story in a mere outline. The waif, Phil White, is admirably drawn, so are the old Dallins. There is a delicate strength in the picture of Jane Dallin, which will be appreciated by every reader.