“Cavalry Training” dares go, in postulating that utterly unattainable perfection in both weapons which is the only way out of the dilemma. More on that point later.
The truth is that, in this country, behind all the inconsequent reasoning which pervades conventional theories of mounted training, there lies the disastrous hallucination that skill with the rifle is a comparatively easy thing to learn, a thing which is essentially appropriate to imperfectly trained troops—volunteers, irregulars of all sorts—and which can be taken in their stride, so to speak, by regulars, whose crown and glory is shock. If this view were upheld only by the regular Cavalry it would be bad enough, but there is a tendency to uphold it among the volunteers too, so that we daily have the heart-breaking spectacle of men who have not yet come to the point of realizing the tremendous possibilities of the rifle crying aloud like children for a steel weapon. The responsibility for that fatal discontent rests absolutely on the Cavalry.
Lastly, let it be remembered that this is not merely a question of carrying weapons of debatable combat-value. It is a question of mobility, transcending weapons, but at the same time hinging on weapons. I began this chapter by insisting on the pre-combat or non-combat phases of war as distinguished from the combat phase, in which alone weapons are useful. Nobody suggests dispensing with the rifle. Can we dispense with the sword and lance? Their weight alone is something, especially when both are carried. But besides that, they are the very weapons which add to visibility and injure general mobility. The more closely you adhere to the idea of shock—and, in strict logic, you should adhere to it if you admit the steel weapon at all—the more you are bound in strict logic to favour big horses and correspondingly heavy men. If you disregard logic, as we instinctively disregard it now, except in the case of the élite of our regiments, you risk overthrow in the theoretically inevitable shock duel with a more logical Cavalry. That is a small risk, because, as I shall prove, modern war does not favour that class of encounter. The great evil is the deadening effect of the shock theory on that direct aggressive power with the firearm which modern war insists on exacting. The result is either that humiliating inaction which extorted the puzzled censure of Von Moltke as long ago as 1866, or a dissipation of the physical energy of horses and men on circumventions and evasions which only postpone without facilitating combat. It is a matter of experience, too, that in time of peace the galloping standard for the shock charge, the instinctive aversion to dismounting, and other corollaries of the artificial shock system and the “spirit” founded on it, tend to produce under real campaigning conditions defective horse management and faults of a like character.
In the last resort the training of all our mounted troops turns on Cavalry training. If there is error there, error positive or negative will penetrate every class. Is there error? The tests of peace are illusory. Let us examine the tests of war.
CHAPTER III
BRITISH AND BOER MOUNTED TROOPS
In reviewing the mounted operations of the South African War, I must impress upon the reader the necessity of regarding the war as a whole, and not as a series of episodes gradually decreasing in dramatic and technical interest, and ending in a long and dreary period, profitless for study, of sporadic hostilities known as the “guerilla war.” A guerilla war really began within the first six months of hostilities. For serious students of the war, interest in its mounted tactics increases from first to last, because the war gradually became more and more a mounted war, and mounted tactics underwent a steady and progressive development. It would be unnecessary to begin with any such exhortation as this were it not for the sheer ignorance, even in authoritative writers, of actual historical events during the latter part of the war, events which have a direct instructional bearing on preceding phases, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to grasp issues and draw conclusions.
In a sense the war was always a mounted war, because the Boers were all mounted. By tradition and choice they carried no steel weapon. Apart from a small but very efficient artillery they relied on the rifle, in the use of which they were highly proficient, and on the horse. They were, in short, mounted riflemen. In that character they did, to the best of their ability, all the work allotted in our own army to Infantry, Mounted Infantry, Mounted Rifles, and Cavalry. This must constantly be borne in mind when we compare them with our own categories of troops, either in numbers or in efficiency. We cannot, for example, in comparing them to our regular Cavalry, lay stress on their numerical superiority over the latter arm, considered by itself. To make the comparison pertinent we must throw into our scale the whole of our Infantry, Mounted Infantry, and irregular horsemen, who supplemented the regular Cavalry in the performance of those functions which the Boers united in a single class of troops. The false basis of comparison constantly appears in criticism of the war, even professional criticism.
The Boers had very few regular troops, and what they had were mainly Artillery, the rest permanent police of a highly efficient quality. Their army was a national militia, organized on a territorial system admirably adapted for local warfare, but for united action on the grand scale possessing grave defects. In combat, individual skill and intelligence were remarkably high, the hunting and tracking instinct, taking military shape in the skirmishing and scouting instinct, being well developed. The habit of riding long distances over a thinly-peopled pastoral country, on short commons, and in all weathers, bore military fruit in endurance and in a skill in the care of horses which was of incalculable value to them. Without any stereotyped system of tactics or formations, there was a generally diffused common sense as to what to do and how to do it in any given military conditions of a tactical character, a flair for opportunities and dangers, an eye for ground, and above all an enormous belief, founded on knowledge and practice, in the efficacy of the rifle, especially in defence, and especially when the rifle was reinforced by the spade. Born shots and stalkers, they had also a natural genius for practical field entrenchment, a valuable gift in itself, but one which, in conjunction with moral causes, reacted unfavourably at first on their offensive impulse.
Nor, in the early part of the campaign, did the high potential mobility given to them by their horses act as compensation for this defect. Exactly how far they lacked offensive impulse is a point exceedingly difficult to determine, because it is complicated by their great numerical inferiority. At only two of the big actions of the regular war, the first and third, Talana and the battle of Ladysmith, had they as much as a numerical equality. They were greatly outnumbered in the rest of the Natal campaign, while in our central advance to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and on to Komati Poort, their strength in action was rarely as much as a third of ours, often a quarter, and sometimes as low as a fifth. In guns we always had an enormous preponderance. Still, in consideration of their high skill as riflemen, we may certainly say that at first they were deficient in offensive impetus, and missed opportunities of victory. Siege-work particularly had a very bad effect on them. In other field-work they seem to have regarded the horse—or rather the pony—as a necessary and prosaic vehicle, without which life on the veld under any circumstances whatever, peaceful or warlike, would have been inconceivable. He was a commonplace means of transport rather than a direct source of tactical, or even of strategical, enterprise. In the tactical sphere, this failure to derive from the horse an aggressive ardour analogous in kind to the “Cavalry spirit” was not due to any embarrassment felt in disposing of led horses during the dismounted phases of a fight, for they were wonderfully expert in this important matter; nor, certainly, as later experience proved, was it due to the lack of a steel weapon, which would have been alien to and destructive of their peculiar tactics. The failure was due partly to an innate affection for stalking and entrenchments, to a wholesome fear of the rifle, corresponding to an equally wholesome reliance upon it, and in some degree to a mere misapprehension of the physical risks involved. It was connected, too, with a rooted aversion to straying far from their slow and cumbrous transport waggons, concern for whose safety was an obsession in the mind of each individual burgher, since they were private, not public, property. But there was a graver obstacle than all these, indiscipline, unfitness for that swift and sure collective
