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 action without which no troops can attain a high degree of aggressive mobility.

A tactical inertia, out of all proportion to their real mobile power, was only one symptom of a malady which infected the whole Boer organization, military and national. Indiscipline in one form or another paralyzed strategy, poisoned the springs of enterprise, set the man above the corps and the province above the State. It promoted selfishness, vacillation, and, in every commando in the field, a habit of desertion, for the most part temporary, but none the less paralyzing. If in all this there was a good deal of mere child-like levity, a tendency to regard war rather as a series of big picnics than as a sustained national effort, the moral evil was none the less far-reaching, and, so far as the integrity of the two Republics was concerned, mortal.

At this great crisis no deep common patriotism united the Boers. Their national spirit had not, in the truest sense, come into being. It was born later under new leaders and in the hour of disaster.

These phenomena are familiar in the struggle of primitive pastoral races against powerful nations. I only draw attention to them in order to link my own special topic with the wider moral study of which it forms an inseparable part. The Boers, as mounted riflemen, cannot be considered apart from the Boers as citizens of two States fighting for political independence, and it will be found that the vivification of their civic patriotism corresponded exactly with the vivification of their mounted tactics. Unhappily, the study of these tactics has generally broken off precisely at the point at which they begin to become most interesting—that is, at the turning-point between Boer despair and Boer hope; and broken off merely because that hope, however stimulating to action in the field, was, in respect of its major objects, illusory.

It is a commonplace that both the merits and defects of the British regular army, at the time when war was declared, were diametrically opposite to those of the Boer militias. Imperial purpose was vigorous and sustained; but the power of carrying out that purpose, even with vastly superior resources in men, money, and material, was disproportionately weak. Discipline was high, individual skill and intelligence, especially in the use of the rifle, relatively low. Excessive precision and formalism, the product of long years of peace, characterized the drill and manoeuvre of all arms alike. Of the Artillery, which was by no means unaffected, I need say nothing here. The Infantry, by comparison with the Boers, may be said to have been wholly ignorant of the immense power of the modern rifle in modifying formal tactics and in exacting fieldcraft and loose, flexible extensions. Marksmanship was poor, the stalking instinct scarcely existed, and the art of field-entrenchment was in a rudimentary stage. On the other hand, disciplined valour and self-sacrifice, in a degree unknown as yet to the Boers, offered substantial compensation for these serious defects.

I pass to the Cavalry, the arm with which we are more immediately concerned. The “Cavalry spirit,” when the war began, was essentially the spirit described in the last chapter—the spirit, that is, of fighting on horseback with a steel weapon. It was from this source that they were taught to draw their inspiration for the great Cavalry virtues which may all be summed up in the one word “dash.” The shock charge, founded on high speed and knee-to-knee cohesion, was the supreme manifestation of this spirit, the end to which all training led, and on which all manoeuvre was based. Reconnaissance and scouting nominally held a high place in the scheme of education, but were in fact seriously prejudiced by the excessive regard paid to the exactitude and precision of movements in mass, which were to prove impracticable in the face of the modern rifle. Individual training inevitably suffered. If fire-power in the enemy, as a hindrance to mass and shock, was under-estimated, fire-power as an auxiliary to the sword or lance was almost ignored. In the current “Drill-Book” (1898), out of 450 pages, five were devoted to “Dismounted Service,” as compared with twelve for “Ceremonial Escorts.” Fire-action was treated as abnormal, and expressly contrasted with “normal mounted action.” An inferior firearm, the short carbine, was carried, but on the saddle, not, as it should be, on the back, and was held in low esteem as essentially a weapon of defence, in contradistinction to the steel, which is purely a weapon of offence. The men, naturally enough, were poor shots and unaccustomed to skirmishing. Their grand rÔle was on horseback, not on foot. Fire-tactics signified to them “dismounted tactics” in the most sterile sense of the term—tactics, that is, devoid of aggressive mobility. Note the interesting difference between this view and the original Boer view. The Boers, too, may also be said to have regarded fire-tactics as “dismounted tactics,” but only in this limited sense, that as yet they had scarcely begun to reinforce the aggressive power of the rifle with the aggressive mobility of the horse. In the minds of the Cavalry the horse and the steel weapon were joint and inseparable ingredients of aggressive tactical mobility. If we regard the horse in isolation as a physical factor in combat, the Boers (following the formula suggested in Chapter II.) overestimated his vulnerability and neglected his mobility. The Cavalry did the opposite.

The standard of military education among officers, as throughout the greater part of the army, was not high enough. If Bernhardi had written “Cavalry in Future Wars” one year earlier, and had excited the interest he has since excited, the difference might have been enormous, even if his fallacies as well as his truths had been embraced. As it was, the historical outlook was imitative of the Continental methods of the sixties and seventies, which in their turn were imitative of still more antiquated methods. The really great and stimulating Anglo-Saxon precedent, the American Civil War, had had scarcely any effect on Cavalry practice in this country, partly from inattention, partly perhaps from the same mistaken impression which pervaded the German and French schools, and was so soon to be shattered to pieces by our own experience, that the methods of self-made volunteer troops afford little or no instruction to regulars.

It is necessary to add that these observations are general. In every arm there always have been and always will be differences between different units, the consequence almost entirely of different degrees of ability and energy in the officers, and, above all, in the commanding officer. In the case of the Cavalry, methods being standardized throughout, the important question was, when and in what volume would come the fresh stream of initiative imperatively required? Very naturally, but most unfortunately (for in regular corps influence from the top downwards is of vital consequence), the senior men were the most conservative of all. The hope lay mainly in junior men. How it materialized we shall see. In the meantime ardour was universal, and the prime soldierly qualities of physical courage, discipline, and endurance were, throughout all ranks of the Cavalry, as in all branches of the service, at a high level.

The Mounted Infantry was a comparatively young, inadequately recognized force, with few war traditions. Trained by able and intelligent officers, themselves enthusiasts for the rifle, the force was eager to gain distinction in the field, and to show that the rifle and the horse could be vigorously and effectively combined. But the Cavalry theory, modified in practice, undisputed in principle, hung heavy over its prospects. The force was formed by abstractions from Infantry regiments—a radically false system; it was taught deliberately that its functions must, in the nature of things, be wholly different from and subordinate to those of Cavalry; that reconnaissance, except for its own protection, was outside its sphere; and that there was one function, the “charge”—the noblest ideal of horsemen—to which it could never aspire. In so far as the charge implied “shock” in its true sense of the physical impact of one serried mass upon another serried mass, no fault could be found with this restrictions. But, as I have suggested, to mounted riflemen who realize their full potentialities, the charge implies other things than shock. It denotes the culmination of aggressive mobility. Aggressive mobility, therefore, overclouded by this exterior motive of unattainable shock, was not before the war the supreme ideal which it should have been, and could have been, to the Mounted Infantry. Could have been, that is, if the magnitude of the task involved in the education of riflemen for mounted work, even with the limited aims in view, had been realized. Infantry soldiers, with all the defects as well as all the virtues of Infantry training, thoroughly imbued with the instinct for rigid formations, and at first unable to ride, were the raw material, and a few months’ exercise with the horse was considered sufficient to convert them into mounted riflemen. The force, in short, as it entered the field, represented, both in organization and training, one of those indefensible compromises between foot-soldiers and horse-soldiers which will continue to be evolved as long as ideas are confused by the belief that the steel weapon is, and must be, the dominant weapon for horsemen. Happily for the Mounted Infantry, war proved to be a great clarifier of ideas.

From the regular mounted troops of the home country we pass to that great throng of volunteers—an army in itself—which, as the war progressed, poured in ever-increasing volume into South Africa from every part of the Queen’s dominions, or were raised within the borders of South Africa itself. Known by a bewildering variety of names—Yeomanry, Sharp-shooters, Horse, Light Horse, Mounted Infantry, Mounted Rifles, Scouts, Borderers, Carbineers, Guides, and even Dragoons and Lancers—they all in fact belonged to one distinct type, that of the mounted rifleman. A small fraction carried steel weapons at the outset, but none were seriously trained to shock; all relied on the rifle in conjunction with the horse.

Whether, when they first took the field, the minds of these men (regarded in the mass) were affected by a recognition, conscious or subconscious, of a higher power known as shock transcending the humbler functions of the rifle, and vested only in professional troops armed with steel weapons, it is exceedingly difficult to say. At first probably such a feeling had a strong, if unrecognized, effect on the outlook of the mounted volunteers from the home country, as it certainly affected that of the professional Mounted Infantry. The old territorial Yeomanry force, at the time of the outbreak of war, did in fact carry a steel weapon, and the new Yeomanry, improvised for the war, though they came mainly from totally different classes from the old, and had little in common with them but the name, could not be free from the associations linked with the sword. To the Colonials, especially the South Africans, who were deeply imbued with the Boer belief in the rifle, the arme blanche was probably little more than a race tradition, exercising, perhaps, a sort of dim influence which they could not have explained in words, but not consciously brought into line with any practical scheme of mounted duties. The established volunteer corps, from which the first Colonial mounted troops were derived, whether inside or outside South Africa, had been designed for local defence, not for Imperial co-operation. By a wise choice, for which we cannot be too thankful, they had been trained, largely through the aid of Imperial officers, almost entirely as mounted riflemen, without any explicit understanding that they were to do functions subordinate or ancillary to those of steel-armed professional Cavalry. As to aggressive mobility, that was for them simply a question of fighting efficiency and discipline, points in which they could not have been expected to reach the standard attainable in permanent professional organizations.

In respect of these two points, fighting efficiency and discipline, all writers have felt the difficulty of forming any general appreciation of the irregular mounted troops, so heterogeneous was their composition, so wide the variations of quality between contingents sent at different times from the same source, so distractingly complicated the vicissitudes both of name and composition through which many of the corps went. It is enough for my purpose at this moment to note, first, that all were enlisted originally for limited terms, and, second, that the average excellence of the personnel was highest at the beginning, and underwent a distinct decline as the war progressed. The decline set in just when an opposite tendency was beginning to become visible among the Boers, not in their case connected with reinforcements, for they had none, but through a regeneration of existing elements. These facts have a most important bearing on the development of mounted tactics.

These general observations on the volunteer mounted troops of the Empire necessarily carry us beyond the actual military situation at the outbreak of war. The Yeomanry and the vast majority of oversea organizations had not been heard of then. So complete was the confidence of the military authorities in the regular home troops that it was only under strong governmental pressure that small detachments from the self-governing colonies of Australasia and Canada were permitted to join the flag, and of these, in compliance with an intimation that Infantry would be preferred, only 775 officers and men, coming from Queensland, New South Wales, New Zealand, and Victoria, were mounted. Of the British Colonies in South Africa, Cape Colony had a normal volunteer force of about 7,000, but mainly composed of Infantry, together with two permanent mounted corps, the Cape Mounted Rifles and the Cape Mounted Police, of whom about 1,000 men in all were available for the war. Far away to the north two new volunteer regiments of mounted riflemen, the Protectorate Regiment and the Rhodesia Regiment, were rapidly recruited and trained in the two months preceding hostilities. Natal, by the expansion ad hoc of its normal volunteer force, was able to put a total of rather more than 1,000 mounted men into the field, together with 300 more drawn from the permanent Natal Mounted Police.

The Imperial Light Horse, with an original strength of 500, were ready to take the field at once. Formed and equipped in Natal, but recruited from among the best elements of the Uitlander population of the Rand, this famous corps reached at once a high pitch of military efficiency. Their Colonel was a brave and able Cavalry officer, who understood his men and the work they would have to do, and had made no attempt to impose upon them stereotyped Cavalry methods. Their strength lay in the rifle and in the horse.

Such were the mounted troops of the two belligerent races. All were new to civilized warfare on the scale now in prospect. All, with the single exception of the British Cavalry, may be truly described as irregulars, dependent mainly on their own native wit for the evolution of a good system of fighting. Behind a great deal of over-confidence on both sides, due to reciprocal misunderstandings of the lessons of the Majuba campaign, there were not a few reservations and much curiosity as to the relative value of weapons, as of many other things.

Before coming to actual hostilities I must deal briefly, even at this early stage, with a question which must occupy our minds continually in studying the mounted operations of the war, for upon the final answer to it hangs the verdict upon the weapons. Were the conditions “abnormal”? Were they abnormal—that is, in the sense that they did not give a fair opportunity for testing the relative merits of the steel weapon and the rifle? That is the narrow question before us, and I beg the reader to concentrate upon it, without allowing his mind to be influenced by the mass of irrelevant considerations which necessarily surround it. There need be no mistake as to what is meant by “normal” in the minds of the arme blanche school. Their normal war is a war against one of the great Continental armies, whose cavalries are penetrated with an even stronger belief in the arme blanche than our own. This is the special eventuality for which we are supposed to prepare. Without pausing to discuss the soundness of this view of “normality,” or the logical consequences to which it would necessarily lead us, let us accept the chosen ground of argument. Let us constantly be asking ourselves why this or that set of conditions should not be reproduced in such a war, and if they were so reproduced, which type of Cavalry—that relying primarily on the “terror of cold steel,” or that relying primarily on the rifle—would do the best. In these analogies let us picture Cavalry in all their various functions, strategical or tactical, offensive or protective, independent or in conjunction with other arms, and in collision either with Cavalry, Infantry, or Artillery, fixing our thought resolutely at every step on the weapon and the tactics associated with it, and refusing to be led astray by circumstances which have no direct or indirect bearing on these points. It is by no means an easy task. Every war is abnormal in the sense that it differs from every other war. The special peculiarities of the Boer War are on the surface, patent to the most careless observer. But do they affect the point at issue?

At present I only wish to dwell on two broad considerations—personnel and terrain.

Humanly speaking, the Boers were very like ourselves. They were a white race, with white ideals, of European descent, allied to us by blood, and allied, if we are thinking of the German parallel, with the Germans. Their religion was our religion. Their democratic instincts were as strong as our own, and stronger than those of the Germans. In spite of a multitude of points of contrast, economic and social, there was in them no fundamental abnormality of race or custom which would justify, prima facie, the conclusion that their methods of warfare could never be, and should never be, our methods of warfare. They were neither savages on the one hand, nor Martians on the other.

The ground on which the war was fought was only abnormal in the sense that it was abnormally favourable to the arme blanche. As I pointed out in the last chapter, one of the four great conditions precedent to shock is open country. From a military point of view, no country in the world is more favourable to the arme blanche than South Africa. Whether in regard to natural topography, or topography as modified by man, it is incomparably more “open” than any possible European theatre of war, including Great Britain, the least open of all. There are mountain ranges, one of which became the scene of Buller’s long Natal campaign, and rugged hilly districts, as there are in Europe; but the predominant characteristic is that of vast, undulating plains, varied by sharper inequities, by ridges, isolated heights, and minor ranges of hills. These features frequently became centres of conflict, simply because they supplied strong positions. Of features due to the presence of man or under the control of man, of woodlands, gardens, orchards, fences, walls, ditches, parks, enclosures, of towns and the intricate semi-urban environment of towns, of all the thousand-and-one obstructions to free mounted movement which characterize populous, highly-developed countries, South Africa may be said to have been almost destitute. The barbed-wire boundary fences of the very extensive farms into which the country was divided were the commonest artificial obstacles.

So much for the tactical opportunities of the arme blanche. By an unavoidable paradox, ground tactically fit for that weapon is the least favourable for scouting and reconnaissance. It is a pity that the words which now head chapter vi. of “Cavalry Training” were not there in 1899. “The increased power of modern firearms and the introduction of smokeless powder have made it both more difficult and more necessary to obtain information.” In that open country and with their long rifles, the Boers outmatched our Cavalry scouts from the first. As regards local intelligence, Natal and Cape Colony, the scenes of the most critical fighting, were British territory, where there was an abundance of skilled aid. It is true that in parts of Cape Colony there was a large, and in Natal a small, unfriendly Dutch element. But that is a more favourable state of things than a population entirely hostile. And when, later, the task of repulse ended, and that of invasion began, and we were faced with that very problem of a hostile population, even then it was never wholly hostile. Besides a sprinkling of farmers British by birth or sympathy, beside the lower class of Dutch bywoner, which from the first showed signs of pliancy, and as time went on supplied us with an increasing number of spies, besides the native races from whom we ultimately obtained far more aid than the Boers, we derived enormous advantage from the large urban British element in the Transvaal, which gave us intelligence officers like Woolls-Sampson, and fine corps like the Imperial Light Horse, composed of men who knew the language and customs of the country. But supposing every soul in the country, white and native, man, woman, and child, had been bitterly hostile from the first, that surely is not to be regarded as an abnormal circumstance in war. On the contrary, it is one of the very difficulties which Cavalry exist to overcome. Bernhardi, it is interesting to note, lays special emphasis on this difficulty as one likely to prove increasingly serious in future wars.^[16] After all, the object of war is to conquer, and people resent being conquered.

For my facts I shall rely mainly on our own “Official History,” so far as it has progressed, and on the Times History, which is already complete. Though they often differ in criticism, these two histories tally with remarkable closeness in matters of fact. The official volume dealing with the greater part of the guerilla war is not yet published.