Such are the facts of the South African War, our only great war since the Crimea, and the first serious test for the whole world of the smokeless magazine rifle. What results can we place to the credit of the arme blanche?

1. The pursuit at Elandslaagte (October 21, 1899), on the second day of hostilities: Boers killed, wounded, and prisoners, say fifty. (No figures are forthcoming, but I think fifty is on the safe side.)

2. Klip Drift (February 15, 1900): A “penetrating,” semi-aggressive charge, in widely extended order, by a very large force, with a big backing of Infantry and Artillery, through a gap in a small hostile skirmishing screen. Boer casualties about fifteen.

3. Diamond Hill (June 11, 1900): Two brave but insignificant little charges, which received as much punishment as they gave. Boer casualties about seventeen.

4. Welgevonden (February 12, 1901): A small charge in the open. Boer casualties and prisoners about twenty.

Not a single example of true shock.

This gives a record of about a hundred casualties and prisoners due directly to the arme blanche. There may, no doubt, have been a few others in unrecorded episodes. To be well on the safe side, let us put the total at 200. All the other damage inflicted by the Cavalry, whether in offence or defence, was inflicted through the agency of the carbine or rifle. The opportunities lost through 262over-training in the steel and inexperience in the firearm are beyond computation.

With the exception of an unknown, but certainly small, proportion of casualties caused by Artillery, all the other losses in action, British and Boer, during the war were caused by the rifle, and all of our own casualties, close upon 30,000 in number, were (with the same exception) inflicted by mounted riflemen.

From the first to the last day of the war the rifle dominated every encounter, small or great, Elandslaagte and the rest included. Awaking finally to this fact, but at least a year too late, we converted our Cavalry into mounted riflemen. Every possible function and every possible species of encounter which mounted men can conceivably undertake in any war was illustrated again and again. In reconnaissance, in raids, in protective work and independent work, in pursuit and retreat, in battle and out of battle, acting as divisions, brigades, regiments, squadrons, troops, patrols, or as single scouts, the Cavalry were submitted to every sort of test during more than two and a half years. All our other mounted troops and all the Boer troops were submitted to similar tests. Out of it all emerges the single type of mounted rifleman, competent to do all duties alike, and incapable of doing any of them well unless he is as skilled in the rifle as he is on the horse—competent, too, if required, to perform functions never before dreamt of by any European Cavalry—to make, hold, and storm entrenchments, and to take his place in the main line of battle.

Here is a mass of evidence, vast, various, cogent. For the last time, I ask, was the war “peculiar”? Of course it was peculiar. Every war is peculiar. Terrain differs, races differ, degrees of civilization and stamps of military organization differ, quarrels and aims differ, aptitudes and temperaments differ, and, lastly, with the progress of science, weapons differ. That brings us to the point—the 263only point relevant to our inquiry: Were the peculiarities of the Boer War such as to invalidate the conclusions developed in its course as to the armament and tactics of mounted troops?

Even that way of putting the question is a little too wide. In Great Britain, at any rate, one big conclusion is admittedly valid for all future wars—namely, that the Cavalry must carry a good rifle, not a bad carbine, and must be able to use it with far more freedom and skill than they ever dreamed of before the war. We have got that far, and stopped. Shrinking from anything radical, taking refuge in compromise, we have fashioned in theory, and only in theory, an ideal hybrid, perfect both in shock and the rifle, and given him the formula for a hybrid “Cavalry spirit,” which is quoted at the beginning of this volume. But—and this reservation is vital—we have taught him in “Cavalry Training” to rely mainly on shock and the “terror of cold steel,” which “nothing can replace.”

That settles the final form of our question: Were the peculiarities of the war such as to justify the re-establishment of the lance and sword in their old position as the dominant weapons of Cavalry? Remember the proved penalties of error, if error there be—the extra weight and extra visibility of equipment, when every additional ounce of weight and every additional inch of vulnerable and visible surface tells, to say nothing of the complications, moral and physical, caused by allegiance to two diametrically opposite tactical ideals and tactical systems.

The answer we shall give to the question carries with it answers to many more. Are we justified in reverting to exactly the same old view of “Mounted Infantry” as existed before the war, and which the war, regarded as an episode by itself, reduced to ridicule? Was the war so abnormal that we are still in our handbook of “Mounted Infantry Training” to lay down, foremost among the 264purposes for which that arm is to be employed, the purpose of “forming a pivot of man?uvre for Cavalry, of supporting them generally with their fire, and ... of giving to the Cavalry such Infantry support, when they are acting at a distance from other troops, as will prevent the necessity of the Cavalry regiments being employed in any other capacity than that of their purely Cavalry r?le.”[66] Prodigious indeed must be the abnormalities which would warrant the fresh enunciation of such a "general principle"! Note the words “Infantry support,” both in their context and in connection with the opening paragraph of the handbook, to the effect that “Mounted Infantry are Infantry soldiers governed in their tactical employment by the principles of Infantry training.” Substitute the synonymous word “riflemen” for “Infantry” in the three cases where the latter word is used, and there is, indeed, a substratum of very sound truth in the proposition. But it is truth which would be heresy to the authorities. For them, apparently, it was Infantry who, under British leading, relieved Mafeking, charged at Bothaville and Roodekraal, pursued at the Biggarsberg and Wildfontein, saved the guns at Sannah’s Post, and scouted, raided, and screened everywhere. It must have been Infantry, moreover, disguised as Cavalry, who held the Colesberg lines, intercepted Cronje on the Modder, and ran to earth Lotter; Infantry, under Boer leading, who captured a third of the main army’s transport at Waterval, intervened brilliantly at the climax of the battle of Paardeberg, ambuscaded and pursued at Sannah’s Post, raided Cape Colony, Natal, and 265the railway communications, and charged at Bakenlaagte and Roodewal. Was the war really so peculiar as to warrant such grotesque inferences as these? Was a war which produced not a single example of true shock so peculiar as to justify the vague and unintelligible instructions to Yeomanry—namely, that they are to be “so trained as to be capable of performing all the duties allotted to Cavalry except those connected with shock action”? And what of our mounted forces overseas? Suppose a war on Colonial soil against a European army—to my mind a far more likely contingency than a war on European soil—suppose (merely for the sake of argument) such a war in South Africa, where we should be aided both by Dutch and British mounted troops. Was the great war of 1899–1902 so peculiar as to warrant our telling the Boer troops or the Imperial Light Horse that they are not fit “to discharge Cavalry duties”?

There is a big case, an authoritative case, an overwhelmingly convincing case, founded on a reasoned analysis of the campaign, to be made out here by the advocates of the arme blanche if they are to justify existing practice. When, where, and by whom has this authoritative case been presented? I am at a loss to say. Directly we begin to grapple with this allegation of abnormality we find we are fighting with phantoms, with nebulous, elusive, and often mutually contradictory arguments held, some by one person, some by another. I scarcely know how far I need engage in this ghostly conflict. I have exhorted the reader from the first, in following my review of the war, to picture for himself parallel situations in a European war, distinguishing relevant from irrelevant peculiarities, and, without being led astray by mere names and labels, to test weapons and the tactical theories based on them by facts. I have endeavoured to assist him by analysis and comment, and I believe at one time or another I have dealt with every 266abnormality which is alleged to quash the verdict against the arme blanche. But I am not sanguine enough to hope that I have carried conviction, and I venture now to deal once more in a separate chapter with the allegation as a whole. In order to narrow the controversy within incontestably sound and fair limits, I will take the three powerful advocates of the arme blanche to whom I alluded in my first chapter, and from whom I have since frequently quoted—General Sir John French, Mr. Goldman, and General von Bernhardi. The last we may regard as the most powerful of all, since his book, “Cavalry in Future Wars,” translated by Mr. Goldman, and furnished with an introduction by General French, is not only described by the latter officer as being the last word of logic and wisdom on all Cavalry matters without exception, but has been largely drawn upon in practice by the compilers of our own “Cavalry Training.”

In General French’s long and warmly written introduction, levelled avowedly against the “misleading conclusions” of those who criticize shock, only one short passage is to be found in which the South African War—our own great war—is so much as alluded to, and then only to be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders as almost irrelevant to the controversy. Both the allusion and its context are, I am afraid, rather obscure, so I give the paragraph in full:

“In dwelling so persistently upon the necessity for Cavalry being trained to the highest possible pitch to meet the enemy’s Cavalry, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I agree absolutely with the author in the principle he lays down that the Cavalry fight is only a means to an end, but it is the most important means, and I have thought it right to comment upon this because it is a principle which in this country, since the South African War, we have been very much inclined to overlook. To place a force of Cavalry in the field in support of a great army which is deficient in the power to overcome the 267opposing Cavalry, is to act like one who would despatch a squadron of war-vessels badly armed, badly trained, and ill-found, to blockade a distant coast-line defended by a powerful fleet. What is the naval fight in the open sea but a means to an end? It would be as sensible to dwell on the inutility and waste of a duel between hostile fleets as to lay down the principle that the ‘Cavalry battle’ in no way affects the mutual situation of hostile armies” (p. 26).

Sincerely desirous of understanding the General’s meaning, I confess that this passage baffles me, and I scarcely know what it would convey to a reader fresh from the study of our war. Do the words which I have italicized imply that the non-Cavalry portion of our “great army,” the Infantry and Artillery, were not worthy of the “support” of our Cavalry, and denied that arm a chance of distinguishing itself in the “Cavalry fight”—that is, presumably the shock fight? That cannot be the sense intended, for the imputation not only would never be made by General French, but is in itself indefensible. I need not argue that proposition again. If any narrative of the war does not disprove it to the most cursory reader, my previous narrative and comments would add no further conviction.

We must arrive at some other interpretation; and yet there seems to be no other that does not involve the writer in self-refutation. Read literally, the sentence compares “a force of Cavalry” (sent out under the circumstances described) to a squadron of war-vessels badly armed, badly trained, and ill-found, while the unequal naval fight with the “great fleet,” which results, is intended surely to be analogous to the “Cavalry fight.” Both are “means to an end”—in the one case to landing and invasion, in the other to the destruction of a hostile army. In the last sentence the simile becomes more precise, the “duel” between hostile fleets being expressly likened to the “Cavalry battle,” and very 268aptly likened, if we do not assume with General French that the Cavalry battle must inevitably be a shock battle. It is true that in the case of the South African War the simile is impaired by the fact that the “opposing Cavalry,” constituting as they did the entire hostile force, cannot be regarded as the counterpart of our Cavalry. But, disregarding that material point, where does the simile lead us? To the conclusion that our Cavalry were badly armed, badly trained, and ill-found. That is admittedly true of armament and training; for the rifle has been permanently substituted for the carbine, and “thorough efficiency” in its use officially enjoined ever since, while the steel weapon, during the war, failed. “Ill-found” might refer to horses. But the General, as the context shows, does not mean to take this dangerous line of argument. Who, then, were the troops referred to? No part of the army was “ill-found” by comparison with the Boers, who in most of the resources possessed by great and wealthy nations were miserably ill-found, and were reduced for the last year to destitution. “Badly armed,” except in the case of the Cavalry, is another misnomer. The Infantry were armed with the best modern rifle, and although the Artillery at first found their guns outranged, they soon received the aid of naval and other heavy guns, and always had an overwhelming numerical superiority over the Boers. “Badly trained” does, indeed, apply in a certain sense to the whole army, particularly to its practical organization for war. But it applies, too, to the Boers, and in the latter respect far more pertinently.

I have no desire idly to split straws. If the passage I have quoted formed part of a reasoned argument for the abnormality of our great war, I agree that it would be unfair to make too much of a case of obscure exposition. But it stands alone, and I am justified in criticizing the attitude of mind which permits so high a Cavalry authority 269as General French, in an essay part of which is explicitly directed against the advocates of mounted riflemen, to treat so vaguely and superficially the great national struggle which, for the time being, at any rate, did confirm their views. My justification is the greater in that such an attitude of mind is strictly typical of a great number of the adherents of the shock system. Pressed, they are altogether unable to put into precise language their reasons for disregarding the Boer War. In a later chapter, when dealing with the Manchurian War, I shall have to refer to General French’s equally inadequate treatment of the theme of another case of abnormality.

In the meantime I can do no better than take two propositions from the paragraph quoted above, about which there can be no doubt. (1) A “Cavalry battle” without shock is inconceivable to General French. There must be either shock or no battle, for surely no opponent of shock would go so far as to argue that, shock being a thing of the past, it was “inutility and waste” for opposing sets of mounted troops to fight with one another at all, in any way? We have here, in an unusually extreme form, that theory of the inevitable shock duel between opposing Cavalries to which I alluded in my second chapter. It occurs again on page xxii of the same Introduction.

“How, I ask, can the Cavalry perform its r?le in war until the enemy’s Cavalry is defeated and paralyzed? I challenge any Cavalry officer, British or foreign, to deny the principle that Cavalry, acting as such against its own arm, can never attain complete success unless it is proficient in shock tactics.”

Here is the case complete, but, alas! strangely qualified by the words I have italicized. Is there some arrière-pensée here? What if the hostile Cavalry, like the Boers, do not believe in shock? Surely, the case thus 270stated begs the whole question at issue. Observe that the underlying axiom is that the steel can always impose tactics on the firearm. Contrast this axiom with the facts of the Boer War, where the Boers were the “opposing Cavalry,” and were admittedly strong enough, though in what way we are not told, to throw into prominence the many defects of the great army sent to overcome them. And, by the way, we may remind the General that it did overcome them in the end, mainly through the improvisation of mounted riflemen (whom he ignores altogether), and through the assimilation of the Cavalry to that type.

(2) The other clear deduction from the paragraph is this, that the Boers were, on the whole, from whatever cause, a formidable enemy. They are compared to a powerful fleet, and we are represented, in whatever capacity, as suffering from certain weaknesses. That is the general colour of the argument, and I draw the reader’s attention to it, because the gist of Mr. Goldman’s argument is of a precisely opposite character; and this contradiction, in one form or another, runs through all the hazy generalizations that one hears expressed in public or private on the topic of abnormality.

To the best of my belief, Mr. Goldman is the only writer who has had the courage to set forth categorically, in the form of a reasoned argument designed expressly to prove the superiority of Cavalry over mounted riflemen, the various grounds for regarding the South African War as abnormal. He does this in his Appendix A. to “With French in South Africa” (1903), and again in his preface to Von Bernhardi’s “Cavalry in Future Wars.”

Before examining these grounds it is essential to know what Mr. Goldman means by a “mounted rifleman.” Here is his appreciation, on page 408 of the former book: “... the horseman armed only with a rifle. We may assume that he has received the special Cavalry training 271aforesaid, and that in every way he is qualified to perform the duties of Cavalry.” (I do not know what to make of this curious admission.) “But he is equipped solely to fight on foot. Hence, no sooner does it become necessary for him to assume the offensive than he is forced to dismount, and from that moment his rate of progress depends solely upon the pace he can walk.”

Truly, a poor creature! But we think of South Africa and rub our eyes. Was this the figure cut by mounted riflemen, Boer and British, in South Africa? It may be said without exaggeration that all the “offensive” mounted work was done by mounted riflemen or by Cavalry acting as such. And think of the charges—Bakenlaagte, for example. At what moment did Botha’s men begin to “assume the offensive”? According to Mr. Goldman, when they “dismounted.” And when was that? Within point-blank range of our guns, after a charge of a mile and a half.

To proceed with the quotation: “Moreover, he has given hostages to fortune. His led horses being an easy prey to a handful of mounted horsemen, he cannot leave them far behind, for, should he lose them, his usefulness for reconnoitring purposes is gone; the opposing Cavalry will merely push on and through the gap he has left in his screen.” We rub our eyes again. When did Boer led horses fall a prey to Cavalry, acting as “Cavalry”? Not in a single instance. As for the idea that the mounted rifleman is handicapped for “reconnoitring purposes”—after all the bitter losses and humiliations from which we suffered in South Africa through imperfect reconnaissance, one can only regard the suggestion with respectful amazement. Similarly with the suggestion about “pushing through gaps in screens.” This, as I have repeatedly pointed out, is what the Cavalry could not do. Their inability to do it was the predominant characteristic of all the fighting in which they were engaged—with 272one only apparent exception—the Klip Drift charge, where the screen was not a screen, but an isolated skirmishing line of 900 men and 2 guns, which was pierced without shock, and almost without bloodshed, by 5,000 horsemen, covered by the fire of 56 guns, and supported by a division of Infantry.

To proceed: “It must be remembered that the mounted rifleman cannot fight on horseback. He has no weapon for that purpose, so that his only means of taking the offensive is to act on foot.... If in open country, the mounted rifleman cannot hope to meet the Cavalryman mounted. In these circumstances he is practically unarmed; for the firmest believer in the rifle will scarcely maintain that the rifle-fire of mounted men is a serious quantity; anyone who has experienced it knows how perfectly ineffective it is.” Well, I leave the reader to judge of the soundness of all this, in view of our experiences in South Africa. It reads like a dream. Is it, to say the least, an adequate treatment of the theme? Surely it would be wiser to make some overt reference to the fine examples of aggressive mobility shown by our Colonial irregulars, or to the Boer charges, if only for the sake of proving their negligibility. This particular passage may have been written before Mr. Goldman (whose narrative of the war ends at Komati Poort) had had full opportunity to study final developments, but his book was published in 1903; he was cognizant when he wrote, at any rate, of Sannah’s Post, and in his preface to, and notes upon Bernhardi (1906 and 1909), he maintains an equally icy silence upon the achievements of mounted riflemen in South Africa, until a passage of warm praise from Bernhardi himself extorts from him the footnote, inaccurate as to facts and mistaken in criticism, which I quoted in the last chapter (p. 254).

I need not pursue this quotation further. The writer eventually admits that in an “enclosed country” (what 273of the South African terrain?) the mounted rifleman has a certain value, but the most he will yield is that here the “mounted rifleman and the Cavalryman are on an equality.” Truly, an astonishing conclusion! Surely part of this Appendix must have been written before the war and left unrevised? Even then the writer was old-fashioned, for the Mounted Infantry Regulations of 1899, while warning that arm in a general way that they “needed the assistance of Cavalry,” told them that when they cannot get this assistance, their “best security was to be keeping in broken, intersected, woody, or marshy ground, where they would have a great advantage over Cavalry.” It is indisputable that men who spend their whole time in practising rifle-tactics, must be more efficient than men who spend half or more than half their time on shock-tactics. The strange thing is, that Mr. Goldman, in another connection, himself quotes the official warning with approval, as putting the mounted riflemen in their right place. Yet, we may well ask, when in South Africa did mounted riflemen ask for the assistance of Cavalry—that is to say, of Cavalry “as such,” to use General French’s expression? How often, on the other hand, did Cavalry, as such, ask for the support of mounted riflemen, as such?

And these mounted riflemen of ours, who came in so many thousands from so many lands, to do such splendid and such absolutely indispensable work for the Empire? Not a single allusion to them either in this essay or in the Preface to Bernhardi. Boers alone are used for illustration. Anyone without knowledge of the war would infer that the whole of the mounted work on our side had been done by Cavalry. Nor is the conversion of the Cavalry themselves into mounted riflemen mentioned.

One further question of definition before I proceed to the “peculiarities” of the war. What does Mr. Goldman mean by “shock”? He does not define it, nor does 274“Cavalry Training,” wisely enough, attempt a definition; but under the heading “Shock Action” (p. 410), he adduces as an example of shock the Klip Drift charge, where the Cavalry files were eight yards apart, and the immediate objective of the charge was a sprinkling of extended skirmishers. I should weary the reader if I again exposed this fallacy at length. Shock means impact. This charge was not shock, by any interpretation of that word, nor in the sense in which Bernhardi or any European Cavalry understands it. It was the right pattern of charge, but, as after experience proved, it was essentially the pattern of charge appropriate to mounted riflemen, and it was through blindness to this fundamental difference that the Cavalry never made another like it.

Now for Mr. Goldman’s “abnormalities.”

1. Terrain.—To take this point first, as the least important. Indeed, I scarcely know whether to take it seriously or not. It is rarely expressed elsewhere, and I think Mr. Goldman himself regards it as a desperate resource. After saying, broadly, that “certain physical and local conditions go far to explain why the Cavalry were not more effective with the lance and sabre,”[67] he complains that the “boundless plains” were “seamed with ridges and watercourses,” while “the shock-tactics of Cavalry require open ground free from large obstructions like rocky kopjes, thick bush, and strong fences” (i.e., wire fences, which, as he admits, were easily cut, and in time became no hindrance). But, while condemning, apparently, the whole of the Transvaal, he cautiously admits that in the Free State “the conditions were favourable.” Was there ever a more remarkable example of under-statement? What does he expect? Where is his ideal battle-ground of the future? Taken as a whole, South Africa, though its rolling plains were not quite so flat or so free from fences and dongas as the 275plains of Northern Manchuria, may be regarded as one of the most perfect man?uvring grounds for Cavalry which the civilized world contains. Of course, there were “obstructions” even in the most favourable areas, and, of course, these obstructions had a way of coming into prominence when fighting was afoot. Battles are not fought on billiard-tables. One side or the other usually seeks defensible positions. And why should Cavalry complain of irregularities? How effect surprise on a dead-level plain? It was by using irregularities that mounted riflemen won their most brilliant successes in South Africa. Shock is extinct, precisely because the ground which it imperatively demands makes Cavalry most vulnerable to fire and least capable of surprise.

2. Bad Condition of Horses and Poor Remounts.—I dealt with this point in Chapters VI. and VII. The difficulties of the long voyage and acclimatization, and the imperfections of the remount system, are well known. A preventable cause of wastage, careless management and riding, is also scarcely disputed. On the debatable point of over-weight, Mr. Goldman, in a separate Appendix, contends that the horses were needlessly over-loaded. All causes together do not explain away tactical facts covering two years. The more closely these facts are scrutinized—even those of actions like Poplar Grove, where the excuse has been most loudly raised—the less adequate the explanation. On inspection it always turns out that the enemy’s skill with the firearm, and our own deficiencies in that respect, are the principal cause of imperfect achievement. Where the Cavalry showed skill with the firearm there they obtained their tactical successes, irrespective of the condition of their horses. In the excellent Colesberg operations no complaint was raised about the horses. When were sabres drawn? Once, but without result, owing to delaying rifle-fire. In the arduous operations for the relief of Kimberley, 276when the horses were at their worst, the Cavalry achieved their most important success, by intercepting and containing Cronje. On the strategical aspect of these operations, the use of lan............