GERMAN INFLUENCE BY ERSKINE CHILDERS AUTHOR OF LONDON 1911 [All rights reserved] Printed in Great Britain PREFACE This essay is meant to be read in connection with the facts and arguments adduced in my book of last year, "War and the Arme Blanche," with its Introduction by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts. From the nature of the case I have not been able to avoid a small measure of repetition, but I have done my best to confine myself to new ground. A word about my object in writing again. Contemporaneously with the publication of "War and the Arme Blanche," General von Bernhardi published in Germany his "Reiterdienst," and an English edition, translated by Major G.T.M. Bridges, D.S.O., under the title "Cavalry in War and Peace," appeared simultaneously in this country. Like its predecessor, "Unsere Kavallerie im nÄchsten Kriege" (translated under the title "Cavalry in Future Wars"), this new book by General von Bernhardi was headed with a highly laudatory Preface from the pen of General Sir John French, who commended it to military students in this country as a brilliant and authoritative treatise on the employment of Cavalry in modern war. It was included in the valuable "Pall Mall Series" of military books, published by Hugh Rees and Co.; and, in short, unless the critical faculties and native common-sense of Englishmen can be aroused, it is likely to become a standard work. There exists, be it remembered, no similar work, modern and authoritative, by a British author. My object in this essay is to arouse those critical faculties and that common-sense. Without any disrespect to General von Bernhardi, who writes, not for Englishmen, but, as a German reformer, for what he regards as an exceptionally backward Cavalry, I wish to show, not only that we have nothing to learn even from him in the matter of Cavalry combat, but that, if we only have the pluck and independence to break off the demoralizing habit of imitating foreign models, and to build on our own war experience and our own racial aptitudes, we have the power of creating a Cavalry incomparably superior in quality to any Continental Cavalry. The indispensable condition precedent to that revival is to sweep away root and branch the tactical system founded on the lance and sword, and to create a new system founded on the rifle. I shall endeavour to show, using von Bernhardi's "Reiterdienst," with Sir John French's Introduction, and our own official Manuals, as my text, that in the matter of modern Cavalry warfare no principles worthy of the name exist among professional men. The whole subject is in a state of chaos, to which, I believe, there is no parallel in all the arts of war and peace. And the cause of that chaos is the retention in theory of a form of combat which is in flagrant contradiction with the conditions exacted by modern firearms, and is utterly discredited by the facts of modern war. The excellence of the translation furnished by Major Bridges has made it unnecessary for me to introduce into this essay the various terms and phrases used in the original German text. After a study of that text, I am satisfied, if Major Bridges will permit me to say so, that, obscure as the author's exposition often is, no part of the obscurity is due to the translator. I have not found a technical term of which he has not given the correct English equivalent, or a passage where he has not accurately interpreted the original sense. Let me add that I have been encouraged further to write this essay by the keen and instructive controversy which followed the publication of my book of last year. Incidentally I have taken the opportunity in this volume to reply to some of the criticisms against its predecessor, and to clear up some points which I think were not fully understood. E.C.
GERMAN INFLUENCE ON BRITISH CAVALRY INTRODUCTORY Impartial observers of the recent controversy upon the merits of the lance and sword as weapons for Cavalry must have been struck by one singular circumstance—namely, that there exists in our language no standard modern work upon the tactics and training of Cavalry in modern war, written by a Cavalryman, accepted by Cavalrymen, and embodying and illustrating the lessons of the two great modern wars waged since the invention of the long-range, smokeless magazine rifle. Without such a work, controversy is seriously hampered. The need for it is beyond dispute. Whatever the extent of the revolution brought about by the magazine rifle, a revolution, by universal admission, there is. Since 1901 a serious firearm has been substituted for the old carbine formerly carried by the Cavalry, and the Cavalry Manual has been rewritten, with increased stress on the importance of fire. It is also the fact that, from whatever causes, the lance and sword have proved, both in South Africa and Manchuria, almost innocuous weapons. These facts demand, to say the least, serious recognition from those who still hold that the lance and sword are the most important weapons of Cavalry. Angry letters to the daily press, desultory and superficial articles in the weekly and monthly press, are not enough. What is wanted is some comprehensive and authoritative exposition of what Cavalry functions are in modern war, how they have been modified by the firearm, and why, with chapter and verse, not by way of vague allegation, the only great wars in which that firearm has been tested are to be regarded as "abnormal" and uninstructive. For illumination and confirmation on these matters, we are constantly referred, in defence of the lance and sword, by our own Cavalry authorities to foreign countries whose armies have had no experience at all of modern civilized war as revolutionized by the modern magazine rifle. We are referred, above all, to Germany, and, in particular, to the works of a German officer, General von Bernhardi, who (1) writes exclusively for the German Cavalry, without the most distant reference to our own; (2) whose own war experience dates from 1870, when he fought as a Lieutenant, and who has not seen the modern rifle used in civilized war; (3) who believes that no wars, ancient or modern, except the American Civil War of 1861-1865, afford an analogy to modern conditions, and that the modern Cavalryman must base his practice on "speculative and theoretical reflection"; (4) who states that the German Cavalry, owing to indifference to the revolution wrought by the modern firearm, and excessive adherence to "old-fashioned knightly combats," is at this moment wholly unprepared for war and is trained on Regulations which, though quite recently revised, he makes the subject of stinging and sustained ridicule; (5) who is so ignorant of the technique of fire-action by mounted troops that he renders it, unconsciously, more ridiculous even than shock-action; and (6) who firmly believes in the lance and sword, and in the shock-charge as practised "in the times of Frederick the Great and Napoleon." In this strange list of qualifications the reader will see the makings of a pretty paradox. And a pretty paradox it is, a bewildering, incomprehensible paradox; not so much, indeed, that a German author, born and bred in a German atmosphere, should be so saturated with obsolete German traditions that even in the act of denouncing them he can subscribe to them, but that British Cavalrymen, headed by Sir John French, our foremost Cavalry authority, men who have had three years' experience of war with the modern magazine rifle, who have seen the arme blanche fail and the rifle dominate tactics, and who, eight years before the German Cavalry even stirred in its sleep, acquiesced in changes in Cavalry armament and training directly based on that experience—that these men should acclaim the works of the aforesaid German author as the last word of wisdom on the tactics and training of modern Cavalry, and represent them as such to young British Cavalrymen, is a circumstance which almost passes belief. Still, it is a fortunate circumstance. We have a body of doctrine to grapple with and controvert. If we succeed in dissipating the myth of German superior intelligence on Cavalry matters, we go a long way towards dissipating the whole of the arme blanche myth, which in the opinion of our greatest living soldier, Lord Roberts—an opinion founded on lifelong experience of war—is as mischievous a superstition as ever fettered a mounted military force. The whole of the material is here—and it is unexceptionable material for controversy—for Sir John French himself contributes his own views on the subject in the form of laudatory Introductions to both of General von Bernhardi's works. I propose in the following pages (1) to criticize General Sir John French's views, so expressed; (2) to analyze and criticize General von Bernhardi's recently published work, "Cavalry in War and Peace," and to contrast his teaching with that of our own Service Manuals; (3) to try to show that each General refutes himself, that both refute one another, and that Sir John French is, by a strange irony, far more reactionary than the German officer to whom he directs us for "progressive" wisdom; (4) to expose the backwardness and confusion in every department of Cavalry thought, here and in Germany, as a direct consequence of the attempt to found a tactical system upon obsolete weapons; and (5) incidentally to put forward what I venture to suggest is true doctrine. This doctrine, briefly, is that the modern Cavalry soldier is, for practical purposes, represented by three factors—man, horse, and rifle—and that it is only by regarding him strictly and constantly as a mounted, that is to say, an especially mobile, rifleman, as distinguished from the less mobile foot-rifleman, that we can establish his war functions on a simple, sound, and logical basis. I ask the reader to hold that clue firmly as a guide through the perplexities and obscurities of the topic and the obsolete terminology and phraseology which not only disturb reasoning but distort and enfeeble practice. At the outset let the reader grasp the following historical facts as to the efficacy of swords and lances in civilized war: 1. Franco-German War of 1870-71: Six Germans killed and 218 wounded by the sabre and clubbed musket counted together. No separate figures for the lance. [Total German casualties from all weapons, 65,160.][1] 2. South African War, 1899-1902: No statistics as to death. About fifty Boer casualties through lance and sword together, and about fifty more prisoners taken. [Total Boer and British deaths, and wounds from all weapons, about 40,000.] 3. Russo-Japanese War, 1904-05: No exact figures, but apparently not more than fifty casualties from lance and sword together. [Total casualties in action, over 400,000.] Two works by General von Bernhardi have been translated into English, and widely circulated among our military men. I propose to say but little about the first, "Cavalry in Future Wars," because I have already endeavoured to criticize it in detail in my own book, "War and the Arme Blanche." It is the second work, "Cavalry in War and Peace," published only in 1910, that I wish to make the basis of discussion in this volume; but in order to explain the history of German influence on British Cavalry, it is necessary to recall briefly certain features of its predecessor. "Cavalry in Future Wars" was first published in German in 1899, before the Boer War broke out. There was a second edition in 1902, when the Boer War was drawing to a close, and this second edition, headed by General French's Introduction, was translated and published in England in 1906. It was a strange work, strangely sponsored. The keynote was fire-action for Cavalry, the moral drawn by the English sponsor shock-action for Cavalry. The chapters on fire-action, urging the adoption of a firearm even better than the Infantry rifle in substitution for a mere pop-gun, formed in themselves a complete refutation of shock; while the chapters on shock, so illogical and self-contradictory was the method of exposition, formed an equally complete refutation of fire-action. It is true that the spirit of fire predominated, that fire was the General's message to his lethargic brother-officers, but the message was so strangely expounded that it is no wonder that for ten years they turned a deaf ear to it. Instead of telling them at the outset that if they themselves adopted a good firearm, and learnt to use it properly, they would immensely enhance the value of Cavalry for all the purposes of war, he opened his argument with a melancholy dirge over the departed glories of the Cavalry owing to the adoption by other classes of troops of the deadly modern firearm. They must recognize, he told them, that they had been "driven out of their place of honour on the battlefields of the plains"; that they could henceforward only attack Infantry who were already so shattered and demoralized by the fire of other Infantry as to have reached the point of throwing away their arms, and much more in the same sense. Never was such a tactless prophet! And the pity of it was that he did not really mean all he said. What he meant was that the ancient glories of the arme blanche, when pitted against the firearm, were gone past recall—a circumstance scarcely worth an elegy, one would imagine, from a scientific soldier. War is business, not romance, and if the same or better results can be produced by an intelligent and dashing use of the firearm, it is waste of breath to lament the decay of the lance and sword. It was the main purpose of the General's work to prove that these results could be so obtained, and whenever he warmed to his subject, and fell into temporary oblivion of the romantic weapons, he proved his point well enough, in theory. But, unfortunately, his oblivion of the lance and sword lasted only as long as he was criticizing the action of Cavalry against troops not armed with those weapons. When he came to the action of Cavalry against Cavalry, both by hypothesis armed, not only with the lance and sword, but also with the best modern rifle obtainable, the principle he had just established—namely, that the rifle imposes tactics on the steel—disappeared, and the opposite principle—that the steel imposes tactics upon the rifle—took its place. I say "principle," but in this latter case no reasoned principle based on the facts of war was expounded, because it seemed never to occur to the General that Cavalry in combat with Cavalry would have the bad taste to use their rifles. Needless to say, it was impossible to sustain this daring paradox with any semblance of logic and consistency throughout a book dealing with all the phases of war. War is not a matter of definitions, but of bullets and shells. And, in fact, the General threw logic and consistency to the winds. In his fire-mood he unconsciously covered shock-tactics with ridicule, but in his shock-mood (no doubt, much to the relief of the victims of his wrathful invective in Germany) he conclusively demolished the principle of fire. This was easily explicable. In the first place, the General was a German writing exclusively to Germans, to whom the bare idea of relying on the prosaic firearm seemed sacrilegious. Merely to implant that idea in their heads, to persuade them that the rest of the world was moving while they were asleep, was a vast enough aim for a German reformer—too vast an aim, indeed, as the event proved. In the second place, the General, so far as the effect of modern firearms was concerned, was working wholly in the realm of theory. When he first published his book those weapons had not been tested in civilized war. The most recent relevant war experience was that of 1870 and of the other European wars of that period, when the firearm was exceedingly imperfect. But even then, as he frankly and forcibly stated, it was in consequence of their neglect of this firearm, imperfect as it was, that the European Cavalry, the German Cavalry included, gave such a painfully poor account of themselves. He looked farther back, just as Colonel Henderson and many other critics in our own country looked back, to the brilliant achievements of American Cavalry in the Civil War of 1861-1865, mainly through the agency of the firearm. But here the firearm was still more primitive—a fact of which General von Bernhardi took no account. It was enough for him that inter-Cavalry shock survived through the Civil War, though the steel came to be wholly ineffective against Infantry. That forty years of scientific progress might have produced a weapon which would have banished shock in any form did not occur to him. Nevertheless, there seemed to be good ground for the hope that, when he came seriously to collate and examine the phenomena of the first great wars since the invention of the modern rifle—those in South Africa and Manchuria—he would find in the exact confirmation of his views on fire, and in the complete falsification of his views on shock, ground for a drastic revision of his whole work, with a view, not perhaps to a complete elimination of the steel weapons, but to their complete subordination to the rifle. It is true that the omens were not very favourable. Between 1899 and 1902, when his second edition was published, a great mass of South African information became available, not in finished historical form, but in a form quite suitable for furnishing numberless instructive examples of the paramount influence of fire and the futility of the lance and sword. But the General made no use of these examples. He confined himself to a general allusion to the "very important data obtained in South Africa as to the employment of dismounted action by Cavalry" (p. 7), and in a later passage (p. 56) to some commendatory remarks on the "brilliant results" obtained through mounted charges made with the rifle only by the Boers in the latter part of the war. Unfortunately, it was plain that he had given no close technical study either to these charges or to the "important data" vaguely alluded to; otherwise he would have saved himself from many of the solecisms which abound in his work. Still, the fact remained that the war was unfinished when his second edition was published, while another great war broke out only two years later. It seemed not unlikely that mature reflection upon the incidents of these wars would ultimately tend to clarify and harmonize his views on shock and fire. Meanwhile the English edition was published, with its Introduction by General Sir John French. By this time (1906) the events of our own war were fully collated and recorded, while the Manchurian War had also taken place. Instead of supplying a really useful commentary upon the German work, written from the point of view of British experience, instead of drawing attention to its deficiencies and errors, and pointing out how inevitable they were under the circumstances of its composition, General French hailed the work as a complete, final, and unanswerable statement of Cavalry doctrine. Von Bernhardi, he said, "had dealt with remarkable perspicuity and telling conviction and in an exhaustive manner with every subject demanding a Cavalry soldier's study and thought." How Sir John French's readers reconciled this effusive eulogy with the contents of the book remains a mystery. As I have said, the only really important feature of the book was the insistent advocacy of fire-tactics—and not merely defensive, but offensive fire-tactics—for Cavalry. This feature was minimized in the Introduction. In its place was a vehement attack on the advocates of fire-tactics in England, the truth of whose principles had just been signally demonstrated in our own war. There was not a word about the "important data" to be derived from the war; not a word about the Boer charges, of whose terribly destructive effects Sir John French knew far more than General von Bernhardi. On the contrary, the war was dismissed in a few slighting and ambiguous sentences, as wholly irrelevant to the arme blanche controversy, in spite of the fact that, in direct consequence of the war, our Cavalry Manual had been rewritten and the Cavalry firearm immensely improved—facts which would naturally suggest that the war had been instructive. Praise of Von Bernhardi, singular as the form it took, was by no means academic. In the next revision of our Cavalry Manual (1907) the compilers borrowed and quoted considerably from "Cavalry in Future Wars." And yet every sound principle in that work had years before been anticipated and expounded far more lucidly and thoroughly in the fascinating pages of our own military writer, Colonel Henderson, whose teaching had been ignored by the Cavalry of his own country. FOOTNOTES: [1] Report of German Medical Staff. No French figures available. SIR JOHN FRENCH ON THE ARME BLANCHE So the matter stood until, early in 1910, General von Bernhardi produced his second work, "Cavalry in War and Peace." An admirable English translation by Major G.T.M. Bridges promptly appeared, again with an Introduction by Sir John French. It must, one might surmise, have given him some embarrassment to pen this second eulogy. The previous book had been "perspicuous," "logical," "intelligent," and, above all, "exhaustive and complete." Two wars, it is true, had intervened, but neither, according either to Sir John French or, we may say at once, to General von Bernhardi, was of any interest to Cavalry. What fresh matter, either for German exposition or for British eulogy, could there be? That is one of the questions I shall have to elucidate, and I may say here that the only new fact for General von Bernhardi is the recent promulgation of a revised set of Regulations for the German Cavalry, Regulations which, in his opinion, though "better than the old ones," are still almost as mischievous, antiquated, and "unsuitable for war" as they can possibly be, and whose effect is to leave the German Cavalry "unprepared for war." But this is not a new fact which could properly strengthen Sir John French in recommending the German author to the British Cavalry as a brilliantly logical advocate of the lance and sword, and it is not surprising, therefore, that the tone of his second introduction is slightly different from that of the first. For the first time there appears a reference to the German Cavalry Regulations, from which the English reader would gain an inkling of the fact that General von Bernhardi is not a prophet in his own country, and that all is not harmony and enlightenment among the "progressive" Cavalry schools of Europe. On one specific point—raids—Sir John French "ventures to disagree" with General von Bernhardi, and he writes, also in quite general terms, that he does not "approve of all that the German Regulations say about the employment of Cavalry in battle." But even this latter note of criticism is very faint and deprecatory; nor is there anything to show that the writer, except on the one point mentioned, is not thoroughly at one with the German author's principles. The main purpose of this Introduction, as of the earlier one, is to claim that Bernhardi's book is a triumphant justification of the lance and sword. It is a "tonic for weak minds," an antidote against the "dangerous heresies" of the English advocates of the mounted rifleman, whose "appeals from ignorance to vanity" deserved scornful repudiation. Once more, and in warmer language than ever, the General protests against the pernicious tendency to attach value to the lessons of South Africa; but this time, fortunately, he gives some specific reasons for regarding the war as "abnormal," and I shall devote the rest of this chapter to an examination of these reasons. They are four: (1) That the "Boer commandos dispersed to the four winds when pressed, and reunited again some days or weeks later hundreds of miles from the scene of their last encounter." This curious little summary of the war shows to what almost incredible lengths of self-delusion a belief in the arme blanche will carry otherwise well-balanced minds—minds, too, of active, able men like Sir John French, who have actually been immersed in the events under discussion. One fails at first to see the smallest causal relation between the phenomena of the war as he sets them forth and the combat value of the lance and sword, but the implied argument must be this: that these weapons could not be given a fair trial in combat because there was no combat, or, rather, only combat enough to cause the hundred casualties and prisoners for which, by the recorded facts, the lance and sword were accountable. We figure a bloodless war, in which at the mere glimpse of a khaki uniform the enemy fled for "hundreds of miles"—at such lightning speed, moreover, that one of the chief traditional functions of the arme blanche, pursuit, was wholly in abeyance. Who would gather that there had been a "black week"; that Botha and Meyer held the Tugela heights for four months against forces between three and four times their superior in strength; that Ladysmith (where there were four Cavalry regiments) was besieged for four months, Kimberley for the same period, and Mafeking for seven months; that for at least nine months no "dispersion" took place even remotely resembling that vaguely sketched by Sir John French; and that during the whole course of the war no tactical dispersion took place which would conceivably affect the efficacy of the lance and sword as weapons of combat? A mere statement of the fact that the net rate of Boer retreat, even during the purely partisan warfare of 1901-02, was almost invariably that of ox-waggons (two miles an hour on the average), that until the last year of the war the Boers were generally accompanied by artillery, and that from the beginning of the war to the end not a single waggon or a single gun was ever captured through the agency, direct or indirect, of the lance and sword, shatters the hypothesis that these weapons had any appreciable combat value. But that is only the negative side of the argument. We have to deal with a mass of plain, positive facts in favour of the rifle as an aggressive weapon for mounted troops. The Boer rifle caused us 29,000 casualties, over 40 guns and 10,000 men taken in action—losses which, to say the least, are evidence that some stiff fighting took place; for men who, when "pressed," run for "hundreds of miles" cannot take prisoners and guns. We have before us the details of some hundreds of combats, in which Cavalry as well as other classes of troops were engaged, and the only effective way of testing the value of the steel weapons is to see what actually happened in these combats. The result of this inquiry is to show that the lance and sword were practically useless both in attack and defence, whatever the relative numbers and whatever the nature of the ground. No serious historian has ever attempted to make out any case to the contrary. No responsible man at the time would have ventured publicly to assert the contrary. It was patent to everybody—leaders and men—that the Boers were formidable because they were good mounted riflemen, and that our bitter need was for mounted riflemen as good as theirs. It is only when years of peace have drugged the memory and obliterated the significance of these events—melancholy and terrible events some of them—that it is possible to put forward the audacious claim that the lance and sword had no chance of proving their value because the Boers invariably ran away from them. It must be evident that if this first reason for the failure of the lance and sword given by Sir John French is valid, it would be needless to proffer any others. And the others he does proffer only demonstrate further the weakness of his case. "Secondly," he says, "the war in South Africa was one for the conquest and annexation of immense districts, and no settlement was open to us except the complete submission of our gallant enemy." Such a campaign, he goes on to say, "is the most difficult that can be confided to an army," etc. Perfectly true—we agree; but what bearing has this obvious truth on the combat value of the lance and sword? The issue before us is this: Is a certain mode of fighting possible in modern days? Is it practicable for men to remain in their saddles and wield steel weapons against men armed with modern rifles? "No," answers Sir John French, "it is not practicable, if your aim is annexation and the complete submission of a gallant enemy." Poor consolation for the unhappy taxpayer who pays for the maintenance of exceedingly expensive mounted troops, and commits himself to a scheme of conquest and annexation in the faith that these troops are efficient instruments of his will! Where would Sir John French's argument lead him, if he only followed it up and supplied the missing links? But that is the worst of this interminable controversy. Such nebulous arguments never are worked out in terms of actual combat on the battle-field. Thirdly, says Sir John French, the horses were at fault. "We did not possess any means for remounting our Cavalry with trained horses...." "After the capture, in rear of the army, of the great convoy by De Wet, our horses were on short commons, and consequently lost condition, and never completely recovered it." This is an old argument, expressed in the old vague, misleading way. The war lasted nearly three years, beginning in October, 1899. The period referred to by Sir John French was in February, 1900. Long before this, when there was no complaint about the horses, the futility of the lance and sword, and the grave disabilities under which the Cavalry laboured owing to their inadequate carbine, had been abundantly manifest. The steel weapons may be said to have been obsolete after Elandslaagte, on the second day of the war. At the particular period referred to by Sir John French—the period of the operations against Cronje and Kimberley—heat and drought did undoubtedly play havoc with all the horses in both armies, with those not only of the Cavalry, but of the mounted riflemen and Artillery on both sides. In February, 1900, a third of Cronje's small force was on foot, a pretty severe disability, since his whole force was scarcely equal to our Cavalry division alone, with its gunners and mounted riflemen included, while it was less than a quarter as strong as the whole army at the disposal of Lord Roberts. Sir John French makes use of a misleading expression when he says that "the Cavalry horses lost condition, and never completely recovered it." Nine-tenths of the horses here referred to succumbed altogether within a few months, and the Cavalry, like nearly all the mounted troops engaged in the operations in question, were completely remounted in June, for the grand advance from Bloemfontein to Pretoria. During the succeeding two years of warfare all the mounted troops, Cavalry included, were several times remounted. So were the Boer troops, who, of course, had no remount organization at all for "trained" or untrained horses, and had to be content with anything they could pick up on the veldt. Yet, besides imposing fire-tactics on the Cavalry in every type of combat alike, they invaded the traditional sphere of Cavalry (and were imitated to some extent by our own Colonials and Mounted Infantry) by developing on their own account a most formidable type of mounted charge, which during the last year of the war alone cost us 18 guns and 2,500 men killed, wounded, and prisoners. These charges were made with little rats of starveling ponies, whose extreme speed was scarcely that of the slow canter of an ordinary Cavalry charger. If Sir J. French were to descend to statistics and facts, he would find it impossible to trace any causal relation between the efficacy of the lance and sword and the condition of the horses from time to time. The phenomena are precisely the same under all conditions from first to last. Everywhere and always the rifle is supreme. The better the horse, the better help for the rifle—that is all. In point of fact, he is quite aware that the principal success of the regular Cavalry was achieved when the horses were at their worst—that is to say, in the very period he refers to, when the Cavalry headed off Cronje and pinned him, purely by fire-action, to the river-bed at Paardeberg. Another good performance—though it was by no means specially a Cavalry performance; for mounted riflemen and Infantry were associated with the Cavalry—was the prolonged screening operations in front of Colesberg (November to January, 1900). There was no complaint about the horses then, but the sabre never killed or hurt a Boer. It was only once drawn from the scabbard, and was speedily resheathed, owing to hostile fire. I pass to the last and strangest of Sir John French's reasons for regarding the war as abnormal in the sense that it gave no opportunity for the use of the lance or sword. It is this: That, "owing to repeated and wholesale release of prisoners who had been captured and subsequently appeared in the field against us, we were called upon to fight, not 86,000 or 87,000 men, but something like double that number or more, with the additional disadvantage that the enemy possessed on his second and third appearance against us considerable experience of our methods and a certain additional seasoned fitness." Here again is a proposition which alone is sufficient to destroy the case for the lance and sword. If, as a defence of those weapons, it means anything, it must mean that the Cavalry, by means of their steel weapons, were perpetually taking prisoners, to no purpose, because these prisoners were constantly released. Gradually the enemy learnt "experience of our methods," that is, of our shock-methods with the lance and sword, and, armed with this experience and the "seasoned fitness" produced by successive spells of fighting, they eventually countered or evaded those shock-methods, with what result we are not told. But such an interpretation is inadmissible. What Sir John French surely should say is precisely the reverse of what he does imply—namely, that we started the war in an ignorance of the Boer methods which cost us scores of millions of pounds; that we slowly learnt experience of those methods, and ultimately conquered the Boers and ended the war by imitating those methods. That is the plain moral of the war, as enforced by every historian. Observe that, for the sake of argument, I am accepting as historically accurate Sir John French's statement about the advantage possessed by the Boers owing to the release of their prisoners. It is almost superfluous to add that the statement, in the sense he uses it, has no historical foundation. The truth is exactly the opposite. The advantage was immensely on our side. The Boers took many thousands of British prisoners, but permanently retained none, because they had no means of retaining them. During the last year of the war prisoners were released on the spot. A large proportion of these men fought again, some several times. No Boer prisoner of war—that is, captured in action—was released. In December, 1900, we had about 15,000 in our possession; in May, 1902, about 50,000. It was mainly by this attrition of the Boer forces that we reduced them to submission. The element of historical truth in Sir John French's proposition is this: that in 1900, after the fall of Bloemfontein, a considerable number of Boers surrendered voluntarily, not in action, and were dismissed to their farms under a pledge not to fight again—a pledge which they broke, under circumstances into which we need not enter. There are no exact statistics as to the numbers of these men, but at an outside estimate they cannot have amounted to more than 5 per cent. of the total number of Boers engaged in the war. In any case, the point is totally irrelevant to the question of shock-tactics. That is a question of combat, and in combat, as Sir John French is aware, the Boers were, nine times out of ten, greatly outnumbered. Such are Sir John French's reasons for the failure of the lance and sword in South Africa. They constitute an instructive revelation of the mental attitude of the advocates of those weapons. Is it not plain that we are dealing here with a matter of faith, not of reason; of dogma, not of argument; of sentiment, not of technical practice? The simple technical issue—what happens in combat?—is persistently evaded, and refuge sought in vague and inaccurate generalizations, which, when tested, turn out to throw no light upon the controversy. Sir John French himself manages to demonstrate in this same Introduction that the question is really one of sentiment. It is a seemingly incurable delusion with him that the whole campaign on behalf of the rifle is an attack of a personal nature on the war exploits of himself and the regular Cavalry, instead of being, what it really is, an attack on the lances and swords carried by the Cavalry. This delusion carries him to the strangest lengths of professional egotism. In the whole of this Introduction there is not a line to indicate that any British mounted rifleman unprovided with steel weapons took part in the war, or that the tactics and conduct of these men have the smallest interest for Englishmen or the smallest bearing on the present controversy. No one would gather that our Colonial mounted riflemen led the way in tactical development, and frequently, brief and rough as their training had been, excelled the Cavalry in efficiency, simply because they were trained on the right principles with the right weapon. "Even in South Africa," says Sir John French, "grave though the disadvantages were under which our Cavalry laboured from short commons and overwork" [as though these disadvantages were not shared equally by our mounted riflemen and by the Boers themselves!], "the Boer mounted riflemen acknowledged on many occasions the moral force of the cold steel, and gave way before it." Then follows a concrete instance, taken from the action of Zand River in May, 1900. Anyone familiar with the history of the war must have felt deep bewilderment at the General's choice, for purposes of illustration, of this action, which has not generally been held to have reflected high credit on the Cavalry. It is needless to discuss the battle in detail, because the accounts of it are set forth clearly and accurately enough in the "Official" and Times Histories, and, inter alia, in Mr. Goldman's work, "With French in South Africa." As a very small and unimportant episode in the battle, there was certainly a charge by a whole brigade of regular Cavalry against some Boers whom the Times History describes as a "party," and whom Mr. Goldman, who was present, estimates at 200 in number; but it is perfectly clear, from all accounts, (1) that the casualties resulting from the charge were too few to deserve record; (2) that the charge had no appreciable effect upon the fortunes of the day; (3) that the Cavalry on the flank in question suffered serious checks and losses at the hands of a greatly inferior force; and (4) that Sir John French's turning force, like General Broadwood's turning force on the opposite flank, completely failed to perform the supremely important intercepting mission entrusted to them by Lord Roberts, and failed through weakness in mobile fire-action. Sir John French's version of the action teems with inaccuracies. All the cardinal facts, undisputed facts to be found in any history, upon which the judgment of the reader as to the efficacy of the steel must depend, are omitted. There are no figures of relative numbers, no times, no description of the terrain, no statement of casualties. I will instance only one, but the greatest, error of fact. He writes that "the rÔle of the Cavalry division was to bring pressure to bear on the right flank of the Boer army, in order to enable Lord Roberts to advance across the river and attack the main Boer forces." This is a highly misleading account of Roberts's tactical scheme for the battle. Eight thousand Boers, disposed in a chain of scattered detachments, held no less than twenty-five miles of country along the north bank of the Zand River, their right resting on the railway, which ran at right angles to the river. We had 38,000 men, including 12,000 mounted men, of whom 5,000 were regular Cavalry. To have used the mounted Arm merely to "bring pressure to bear" upon the Boer flanks would have been a course altogether unworthy of Lord Roberts and the great army he controlled. He set no such limited aim before the Cavalry. He planned to surround and destroy the enemy by enveloping movements on both flanks, and gave explicit orders to that effect. French, with 4,000 men, had orders to ride round the Boer right flank, and seize the railway in their rear at Ventersburg Road. The same objective was given to the turning force under Broadwood, 3,000 strong, on the Boer left. Both enveloping operations failed. To "press" the Boers into retreat was nothing. They must have retreated anyhow, in the face of an army five times their superior. The point was to prevent them from retreating into safety, to cut off their retreat, and with mounted turning forces together nearly equal to the whole Boer force this aim was perfectly feasible, given one condition, which was not fulfilled—that our mounted troops, headed by our premier and professional mounted troops, the Cavalry, could use their rifles and horses approximately as well as the Boers. Now let us come to the heart of the matter. Let us waive all criticism of the accuracy and completeness of Sir John French's narrative, and test the grounds of his belief that it was owing to their fear of the sword that the Boers gave way when Dickson's brigade charged. The Cavalry carried firearms as well as swords, and outnumbered the party charged by at least five to one. We cannot apply the test of casualties, because there were so few. The only test we can apply is that of analogy from other combats. Conditions similar to those of Zand River were repeated, on a smaller or larger scale, thousands of times. Do we find that steel-armed mounted troops had greater moral effect upon the enemy than troops armed only with the rifle? Did the presence of the lance and sword on the field of combat make any difference to the result? The answer, of course, is that it made no difference at all. Anyone can decide this question himself. We know precisely what troops were present, and how they were armed, in all the combats of the war. We can detect many different factors at work, psychological, technical, tactical, topographical; but there is one factor which we can eliminate as wholly negligible, and that is the presence of the lance and sword. The same phenomena reappear whether those weapons are there or not. For example, during Buller's campaign for the conquest of Northern Natal (May to June, 1900) very little use was made of regular Cavalry. During the first phase, the advance over the Biggarsberg, the six regiments of Cavalry at Buller's disposal were left behind at Ladysmith. The mounted work throughout was done mainly by irregulars. Was it of a less aggressive and vigorous character on that account, by analogy, say, with the mounted operations during the advance of Roberts from Bloemfontein to Pretoria? We find, on the contrary, that the results were better. The total relative numbers on the Boer side and our side were about the same: we were about four to one. But while Roberts had 12,000 mounted men, of whom 5,000 were Cavalry, Buller had only 5,500 mounted men, of whom 2,500 were Cavalry. Do we find that when the steelless irregulars mounted their horses, as Dickson's brigade mounted their horses, and made a rapid aggressive advance—"charged," that is—the Boers were any less inclined to retreat? On the contrary, they were more inclined to do so. Witness, for instance, Dundonald's long and vigorous pursuit with his irregular brigade over the Biggarsberg on May 14. Or take the Bloemfontein-Pretoria advance, in which Zand River itself was an incident. Can we trace any further this alleged "terror of the cold steel"? Allowance must be made for the brief and inadequate training of the Mounted Infantry and Colonials; but, even with this allowance, a study of the facts shows that they did as well as the Cavalry, and sometimes better. The only effective local pursuit was made by Hutton's Australians at Klipfontein (May 30), where a gun was captured. These men had no steel weapons, yet they charged, and rode down their enemy. Take Plumer's brilliant defence of Rhodesia with mounted riflemen. Take the relief of Mafeking, one of the most arduous and finely-executed undertakings of the war. Did the 900 troopers of the Imperial Light Horse who carried it out suffer from the lack of swords and lances? They would not have taken them at a gift. Did their work compare unfavourably with that of the Cavalry Division, 6,000 strong, in the relief of Kimberley? On the contrary, when we contrast the numbers employed, the opposition met with and the distance covered (251 miles in eighteen days), we shall conclude that the achievement of the irregulars was by far the more admirable of the two. An infinity of illustrations might be cited to prove the same point, but, in truth, it is a point which stands in no need of detailed proof. The onus probandi lies on those who defend weapons which palpably failed. It is the Cavalryman's fixed idea that "mounted action," as the phrase goes, is associated solely with steel weapons; that soldiers in the saddle are only formidable because they carry those weapons. Mounted riflemen are pictured as dismounted, stationary, or as employing their horses only for purposes of flight. These fictions were blown to pieces by the South African War, and the irony of the case is that Sir John French gratuitously brings ridicule on the Cavalry by reviving them. If they are not fictions, the Cavalry stand condemned by their own pitifully trivial record of work done with the steel. But this is to slander the Cavalry. They do not stand condemned; their steel weapons stand condemned. They themselves, like all other mounted troops, did well precisely in proportion to their skill in and reliance on the rifle and horse combined. Their lances were soon returned to store; their swords, after rusting in the scabbards for another year, were also, in the case of nearly all regiments, abandoned; a good Infantry rifle replaced the weak carbine, and the Cavalry became definitely recognized as mounted riflemen. No one has ever regarded Sir John French himself as otherwise than a leader of conspicuous energy and resource. But, so far from owing anything to the lance and sword, he suffered heavily from the almost exclusive education of his troops to those weapons, and from the inadequacy of their firearm. THE BRITISH THEORY OF THE ARME BLANCHE And now, what in Great Britain is the real theory on this question? Let us go to Sir John French again. The South African War, he says, is no guide for the future. It is abnormal, for the reasons stated above. The Manchurian War he has also stated to be abnormal. Where, then, is the theoretical advantage of the lance and sword over the modern rifle? We are left in ignorance. The physical problem is untouched. All we have is the bare dogmatic assertion that the steel weapon can impose tactics on the rifle. This is how Sir John French expresses the theory on p. xi of his Introduction: "Were we to do so" (i.e., to "throw our cold steel away as useless lumber"), "we should invert the rÔle of Cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm, and make it a prey to the first foreign Cavalry that it meets; for good Cavalry can always compel a dismounted force of mounted riflemen to mount and ride away, and when such riflemen are caught on their horses, they have power neither of offence nor defence, and are lost." Eight years have elapsed since the Boer War. Memories are short, and it is possible now to print a statement of this sort, which, if promulgated during the dust and heat of the war itself, when the lance and sword fell into complete and well-merited oblivion, and when mounted men on both sides were judged rigidly by their proficiency in the use of the horse and the rifle, would have excited universal derision. The words which follow recall one of the writer's "abnormalities" already commented on: "If in European warfare such mounted riflemen were to separate and scatter, the enemy would be well pleased, for he could then reconnoitre and report every movement, and make his plans in all security. In South Africa the mounted riflemen were the hostile army itself, and when they had dispersed there was nothing left to reconnoitre; but when will these conditions recur?" When, indeed? There was nothing, it seems, to reconnoitre, because the enemy always "scattered and dispersed." And the Generals were "well pleased"! "Nothing left to reconnoitre"! One can only marvel at the courage of Sir John French in breathing the word "reconnoitre" in connection with Cavalry work in South Africa. He ought to admit that Cavalry reconnaissance was bad, and that the army suffered for it. No historian has ever defended it. It was the despair of Generals who wanted information as to the position of the enemy. Wits apart, the rifle ruled reconnaissance, as it obviously always must rule it. Ceteris paribus, the best rifleman is the best scout. The Cavalry were not good riflemen, and were therefore not good scouts. Not a single Boer scout from the beginning to the end of the war was hurt by a sword or lance. Those weapons were a laughing-stock to foe and friend alike. And Sir John French's proposition is, not so much that the reconnaissance was good—presumably, that goes without saying—but that there was nothing to reconnoitre, thanks, apparently, to the terror spread by the lance and sword. Such a travesty of the war may be left to speak for itself. But it is very important to comprehend the root idea which underlies it, an idea which, as we shall see, reappears in a less extreme form in General von Bernhardi's writings. It is expressed in the words "we should invert the rÔle of Cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm." The rifle, it will be seen, is regarded as a defensive weapon, in contradistinction to the lance and sword, which are offensive weapons. To sustain this theory, it is absolutely necessary, of course, to proceed to the lengths to which Sir John French proceeds—to declare, in effect, that there was no war and no fighting; for if once we concede that there was a war, study its combats and compute their statistical results, we are forced to the conclusion that the rifle must have been used in offence as well as in defence. Abstract reflection might well anticipate this conclusion by suggesting that a defensive weapon and a defensive class of soldiers are contradictions in terms. There must be two parties to every combat, and, unless there is perfect equilibrium in combat, one side or the other must definitely be playing an offensive rÔle; and, even in equilibrium, both sides may be said to be as much in offence as in defence, whatever weapons they are using. The facts mainly illustrate the abstract principle. The Boers could not have taken guns and prisoners while acting on the defensive. Talana Hill, Nicholson's Nek, Spion Kop, Stormberg, Sannah's Post, Nooitgedacht, Zilikat's Nek, Bakenlaagte, were not defensive operations from the Boer point of view. Nor were Magersfontein, Colenso, Elandslaagte, Paardeberg defensive operations from the British point of view. Whether the rifles were in the hands of Infantry or mounted troops is immaterial. A rifle is a rifle, whoever holds it. It is just as absurd to say that the Boers who rode to and stormed on foot Helvetia and Dewetsdorp belonged to a defensive class of soldiers as it is to say that the Infantry who walked to and stormed Pieter's Hill belonged to a defensive class of soldiers. It is still more absurd to say that the Boers who charged home mounted at Sannah's Post, Vlakfontein, Bakenlaagte, Roodewal, Blood River Poort, and many other actions, and the British mounted riflemen who did similar things at Bothaville, were performing a defensive function, while the Cavalry who pursued at Elandslaagte were performing an offensive function. Take this action of Elandslaagte, the solitary genuine example of a successful charge with the arme blanche. By whom was the real offensive work done? By the Infantry and by the Imperial Light Horse acting dismounted, and by the Artillery. After hours of hard and bloody fighting, these men stormed the ridge and forced the Boers to retreat. In the act of retreat they were charged by the Cavalry, who had hitherto been spectators of the action. It might be objected that I am taking a verbal advantage of Sir John French. He is guilty, it may be argued, only of the lesser fallacy—that of thinking that the rifle is a defensive weapon for mounted men as distinguished from Infantry. Not so. He perceives the logical peril of admitting that the rifle is an offensive weapon for any troops, and in another passage, when deprecating attacks on the "Cavalry spirit" (p. vii), makes use of the following words: "Were we to seek to endow Cavalry with the tenacity and stiffness of Infantry, or take from the mounted arm the mobility and the cult of the offensive which are the breath of its life, we should ruin not only the Cavalry, but the Army besides." (The italics are mine.) It may be pointed out that, but for their firearms and the mobility and offensive power derived from them, the Cavalry in South Africa would indeed have been "ruined" beyond hope of rehabilitation. But let us look at the underlying principle expressed. Infantry are "stiff and tenacious" (that is, obviously, in defence). Cavalry have the "cult of the offensive." Those are the distinctive "spirits" of the two Arms. The bitter irony of it! Which Arm really displayed the most "offensive spirit" in South Africa? Study the lists of comparative casualties in the two Arms during that period of the war in which Infantry were mainly engaged. If at Talana, the Battle of Ladysmith, Colenso, Dronfield, Poplar Grove, Karee Siding, Sannah's Post, Zand River, Doornkop, or Diamond Hill, the Cavalry in their own sphere of work had shown the offensive power displayed by the Infantry in the battles on the Tugela, or in Methuen's campaign from Orange River to Magersfontein, or at Driefontein, Doornkop, Bergendal, and Diamond Hill, the war would have showed different results. There was no distinction in point of bravery between any branches of the Services. Fire-power and fire-efficiency were the tests, and lack of a good firearm and of fire-efficiency on only too many occasions fatally weakened the offensive spirit of the Cavalry. And what of the "tenacity and stiffness" with which we must not "seek to endow" Cavalry? Ominous words, redolent of disaster! Have not they fully as much need of those qualities as Infantry? Imagine our Cavalry doing the work that the Boers had to do on so many score of occasions—to fight delaying rearguard actions against immensely superior numbers, with no reserves, and a heavy convoy to protect. We shall be fortunate if, through reliance on and skill in the use of the rifle, they display as much tenacity and stiffness as Botha's men at Pieter's Hill or Koch's men at Elandslaagte against forces four times their superior in strength, to say nothing of such incidents as Dronfield, where 150 Boers defied a whole division of Cavalry and several batteries; of Poplar Grove and Zand River, where small hostile groups virtually paralyzed whole brigades; or of Bergendal, where seventy-four men held up a whole army. There was nothing abnormal tactically or topographically about any of these incidents. Any function performed by the Boer mounted riflemen may be demanded from our Cavalry in any future war. Suppose them, for example, vested with the strictly normal duty of covering a retreat against a superior force of all arms; suppose a squadron, like the seventy-four Zarps at Bergendal, ordered to hold the cardinal hill of an extended position, and their leader replying: "This is not our business. We are an offensive Arm. We cannot entrench, and we have not the tenacity and stiffness of Infantry. Our business is to charge with the lance and sword." Would the General be well pleased? The reader will ask for the key to this curious discrimination between the "spirits" of Cavalry and Infantry. It is this: The lance and sword, when pitted against the rifle, can, if they are used at all, only be used in offence. Men sitting on horseback, using steel weapons with a range of a couple of yards, plainly cannot defend themselves against riflemen. Even the Cavalry tacitly admit this principle, and if they accepted its logical consequence, a logical consequence completely confirmed by the facts of modern war, they would admit, too, that the sword and lance cannot be used for offence against riflemen in modern war. But they will not admit that. "Tant pis pour les faits," they say. "All modern war is abnormal. Our steel weapons dominate combat. Without them we are nothing." In these circumstances they are forced to set up this strange theory—that Cavalry is a peculiarly "offensive" Arm, a theory which the reader will find expressed in all Cavalry writings. On the face of it the theory is meaningless. It is a mere verbal juggle, because, as I said before, there are two parties to every combat, and defence is the necessary and invariable counterpart of offence. All combatant soldiers, including Cavalry, carry firearms, and if Cavalry choose to use these firearms in offence, by hypothesis they will impose fire-action on the defence, whether the defence consists of Cavalry or any other class of troops. Conversely, if they use their rifles in defence, as by hypothesis they must, they will impose fire-action on the attacking force, be it Cavalry or any other Arm. In other words, the rifle governs combat. That is why the lance and sword disappeared in South Africa. Both in offence and defence the Boer riflemen forced the Cavalry to accept combat on terms of fire. And what kind of Cavalry do our Cavalrymen count upon meeting in our next war? They count, incredible as it seems, upon meeting Cavalry not superior, but inferior, to the Boer mounted riflemen, inferior because, as I shall show from von Bernhardi, they defy science, shut their eyes to the great principle of the supremacy of fire, are prepared deliberately to abdicate their fire-power, and hope to engage, by mutual agreement, as it were, and on the understanding that suitable areas of level ground can be found, in contests of crude bodily weight. And what of the action of Cavalry against other Arms? We know Sir John French's opinion about mounted riflemen. They will gallop for their lives "defenceless" at the approach of "good" Cavalry. But Infantry, riflemen without horses, who cannot gallop, but can only run? Their case, it would seem, must be still more desperate. They are not only defenceless, but destitute even of the means of flight. And yet even Sir John French credits them, if not with an offensive spirit, at least with "tenacity and stiffness," derived, of course, from their rifles. But their mounted comrades, armed with these same rifles, lack these soldierly qualities. We arrive thus at the conclusion that the horse, which one would naturally suppose to be a source of immensely enhanced mobility and power, is a positive source of danger to a rifleman unless he also carries a lance or sword. Here is the reductio ad absurdum of the arme blanche theory, and I beg for the reader's particular attention to it. Of course, the conclusion is in reality too absurd; for Sir John French himself does not really believe that Infantry are a defensive Arm. In point of fact, no serious man believes that Infantry in modern war have anything whatever to fear from the lance and sword, and their training-book is written on that assumption. Nor does Sir John French really believe that Mounted Infantry are a defensive Arm who run from Cavalry; otherwise, he would never rest until he had secured the complete abolition of our Mounted Infantry, who are now, under his official sanction, designed to act, not only as divisional mounted troops against steel-armed Continental Cavalry, but to co-operate with, and in certain events take the place of, our own regular Cavalry in far wider functions, and are presumably not going to be whipped off the field at the distant glimpse of a lance or sword. And I may say here that the reader can obtain no better and more searching sidelight on the steel theory than by studying the Mounted Infantry Manual (1909) for the rules given about similar and analogous functions. Nor, if Sir John French went the whole length of the theory, would he, as Inspector-General, have permitted our Colonial mounted riflemen to think that they might be of some Imperial value in a future war. It is only in order to sustain his a priori case for the steel weapons that he finds himself forced into the logical impasses to which I have drawn attention. |
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