III.—The Problem of Training.
Here we gather up the threads of the two preceding sections. I have hitherto regarded fire-tactics and shock-tactics as distinct functions attributable to distinct categories of troops. Initially, that is the only way, I believe, of dissipating the mist of ambiguity cast over the subject by the loose employment of undefined terms like “Cavalry,” and by that obsession of thought which cannot conceive of the employment of the horse to the best advantage without the accompaniment of a steel weapon. But the question has to be faced: Cannot shock-tactics, for what they are worth, and fire-tactics be harmoniously combined in a hybrid type? We have at present only one category of troops which professes to combine both functions—namely, our regular Cavalry, who carry both a steel weapon and a good firearm. I can imagine a reader saying, “Granted that your analysis of the rival merits of the two weapons is correct; you admit that the steel may conceivably have a remote sphere of utility: cannot the Cavalry do all that you picture mounted riflemen as doing, and, in addition, when the rare opportunities present themselves, use the steel effectively?” Or I can imagine the convinced advocate of the arme blanche saying: “Your analysis is all wrong: the steel has a nobler and wider sphere than the rifle; still, for what it is worth, we can use the rifle in the way you describe. We can do all your mounted riflemen can do, and a great deal more besides.” As with the physical and moral problems, when theory has said her last word, war experience only can provide a final answer to these questions. Meanwhile I suggest for the reader’s consideration that a profound fallacy underlies this notion that you can train the same set of men to become perfect in the use of weapons so different as the modern magazine rifle and the sword or lance, no matter from which weapon they are taught to derive their “spirit,” or which weapon is supposed to give them the most numerous or valuable opportunities. If you favour one you prejudice the other; and the more you endeavour to trim and compromise the less efficient the hybrid you produce. As Count Wrangel truly says, you cannot serve these two masters.[[15]] Both are equally exacting, and the types of education they exact are as far apart as the poles. Until quite recent times, outside a little perfunctory attention to the use of a short carbine, training based on the steel occupied almost the entire time of European Cavalries, including our own. Perfection in that training, whatever its war value, requires hard, continuous training extending over years. Manual practice in a steel weapon is an art in itself. To teach men to handle in concert steel weapons from horseback with safety[safety] to themselves, to say nothing of damage to their enemy, is a long and difficult matter. To teach them the shock charge under peace conditions and on selected ground and selected horses, with no bullets flying, and with no unforeseen obstacles to mar the symmetry, speed and cohesion which are the conditions of success, can be the outcome only of immense patience and application in sheer mechanical drill. If anyone doubts this let him go to “Cavalry Training” for confirmation. Whether the charge be used rarely or often makes no difference. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and to train men to do this thing well is a very big business. If they cannot do it well, they will be beaten at their own game by troops who can. It is futile to postulate an ideal balance between shock-tactics and the loose fire-tactics imposed by the modern rifle. For troops trained to rely mainly on the “terror of cold steel” the shock charge cannot be a side-issue. It is, and must be, the central aim of Cavalry education. It must govern drill, and through drill its influence reacts upon and permeates all functions of Cavalry to their remotest ramifications. The ideas behind it, the impulses directing it, are ideas and impulses totally different from, and, under modern conditions, fundamentally antagonistic to, those which inspire fire-tactics.
What is true of specializing in shock-tactics is still more true of specializing in fire-tactics. The art of the mounted rifleman, carried to the point of perfection to which by war experience we know that it can be carried, demands an exclusive education. Here, too, is a very big business, inexperience in which cost us scores of millions of pounds in South Africa. You cannot, by a stroke of the pen, as it were, graft this art on to the art of steel and shock by merely re-editing the pre-war Drill-Book. Marksmanship, though very important, is a comparatively small part of the education. Civilians can become good marksmen. Our Cavalry have proved latterly, to their high credit, that they can become good target marksmen without an excessive sacrifice of time. Nor could anyone who witnessed the general manœuvres of 1909 dream of saying that the Cavalry had not made remarkable strides in fire-tactics in the last few years. The advance, with its proof of the adaptability of our men to the art, only renders the squandering of energy on shock the more painful. We know that they can never learn enough of fire-tactics. What cannot be taught unless it be made a highly-specialized branch of study and training is the field-craft, the head, eye, and instinct for mounted work with the rifle, to say nothing of the more purely technical requirements—the special formations, the handling of led horses, fire from the saddle, and the like. The work involves a special way of looking at all field problems; it is inspired, as I have said, by ideas and impulses of an altogether different category from those which inspire shock. It requires less machine-like drill, more individual intelligence, less crude exertion of muscle, more reliance on the wits, and withal just as good riding, just as careful horsemastership, and just as much self-sacrifice, audacity, and dash. I shall prove this up to the hilt by direct illustration from modern wars; but is it not self-evident? For here are men vested with the offensive and defensive power of Infantry, together with a mobility which is several times that of Infantry. Infantry have plenty to do to become good at their trade. How imperious and exacting must be the demands upon mounted infantry! I have slipped into one of the conventional definitions. Let us give it capitals, and ask how the fire-duties of Cavalry differ essentially from those of Mounted Infantry, or any other category of mounted riflemen?
Fog hangs heavy on that most pertinent inquiry. But the answer, of course, is that there is no difference whatever. And it follows necessarily that, however seldom or often fire-duties may be required of Cavalry, Cavalry will be excelled by mounted riflemen in the performance of those duties, just as they will be excelled in shock by troops who have more practice in shock. In either sphere the hybrid type must succumb to the pure type, and the moral is all the easier to see and enforce because the pure type of mounted rifleman, however arbitrary and fanciful the limits assigned to its utility, is actually and officially recognized at this moment, whereas no such thing as a pure type of shock horseman exists.
Nor is it only a case of competition with other mounted riflemen or other hybrid Cavalry. Let the reader extract from “Cavalry Training,” tabulate, and analyze all the fire-duties now theoretically allotted to Cavalry. It will take some little trouble, because they are not marshalled compactly or given the emphasis they deserve. He will find that they cover almost the entire range of war, and it goes without saying that in every one of these duties the trooper must be prepared to fight approximately as well as the riflemen opposed to him, whether they be Infantry or mounted men. Otherwise he will fail. Troops cannot be manipulated in war so that each class meets only its corresponding type. Each class must be prepared to meet any other, both in defence and offence. I am not constructing an academical dilemma, but a dilemma forced upon us by the facts of modern war. Bernhardi sees it clearly, and goes much farther, accordingly, than “Cavalry Training” dares go, in postulating that utterly unattainable perfection in both weapons which is the only way out of the dilemma. More on that point later.
The truth is that, in this country, behind all the inconsequent reasoning which pervades conventional theories of mounted training, there lies the disastrous hallucination that skill with the rifle is a comparatively easy thing to learn, a thing which is essentially appropriate to imperfectly trained troops—volunteers, irregulars of all sorts—and which can be taken in their stride, so to speak, by regulars, whose crown and glory is shock. If this view were upheld only by the regular Cavalry it would be bad enough, but there is a tendency to uphold it among the volunteers too, so that we daily have the heart-breaking spectacle of men who have not yet come to the point of realizing the tremendous possibilities of the rifle crying aloud like children for a steel weapon. The responsibility for that fatal discontent rests absolutely on the Cavalry.
Lastly, let it be remembered that this is not merely a question of carrying weapons of debatable combat-value. It is a question of mobility, transcending weapons, but at the same time hinging on weapons. I began this chapter by insisting on the pre-combat or non-combat phases of war as distinguished from the combat phase, in which alone weapons are useful. Nobody suggests dispensing with the rifle. Can we dispense with the sword and lance? Their weight alone is something, especially when both are carried. But besides that, they are the very weapons which add to visibility and injure general mobility. The more closely you adhere to the idea of shock—and, in strict logic, you should adhere to it if you admit the steel weapon at all—the more you are bound in strict logic to favour big horses and correspondingly heavy men. If you disregard logic, as we instinctively disregard it now, except in the case of the élite of our regiments, you risk overthrow in the theoretically inevitable shock duel with a more logical Cavalry. That is a small risk, because, as I shall prove, modern war does not favour that class of encounter. The great evil is the deadening effect of the shock theory on that direct aggressive power with the firearm which modern war insists on exacting. The result is either that humiliating inaction which extorted the puzzled censure of Von Moltke as long ago as 1866, or a dissipation of the physical energy of horses and men on circumventions and evasions which only postpone without facilitating combat. It is a matter of experience, too, that in time of peace the galloping standard for the shock charge, the instinctive aversion to dismounting, and other corollaries of the artificial shock system and the “spirit” founded on it, tend to produce under real campaigning conditions defective horse management and faults of a like character.
In the last resort the training of all our mounted troops turns on Cavalry training. If there is error there, error positive or negative will penetrate every class. Is there error? The tests of peace are illusory. Let us examine the tests of war.
CHAPTER III
BRITISH AND BOER MOUNTED TROOPS
In reviewing the mounted operations of the South African War, I must impress upon the reader the necessity of regarding the war as a whole, and not as a series of episodes gradually decreasing in dramatic and technical interest, and ending in a long and dreary period, profitless for study, of sporadic hostilities known as the “guerilla war.” A guerilla war really began within the first six months of hostilities. For serious students of the war, interest in its mounted tactics increases from first to last, because the war gradually became more and more a mounted war, and mounted tactics underwent a steady and progressive development. It would be unnecessary to begin with any such exhortation as this were it not for the sheer ignorance, even in authoritative writers, of actual historical events during the latter part of the war, events which have a direct instructional bearing on preceding phases, and without a knowledge of which it is impossible to grasp issues and draw conclusions.
In a sense the war was always a mounted war, because the Boers were all mounted. By tradition and choice they carried no steel weapon. Apart from a small but very efficient artillery they relied on the rifle, in the use of which they were highly proficient, and on the horse. They were, in short, mounted riflemen. In that character they did, to the best of their ability, all the work allotted in our own army to Infantry, Mounted Infantry, Mounted Rifles, and Cavalry. This must constantly be borne in mind when we compare them with our own categories of troops, either in numbers or in efficiency. We cannot, for example, in comparing them to our regular Cavalry, lay stress on their numerical superiority over the latter arm, considered by itself. To make the comparison pertinent we must throw into our scale the whole of our Infantry, Mounted Infantry, and irregular horsemen, who supplemented the regular Cavalry in the performance of those functions which the Boers united in a single class of troops. The false basis of comparison constantly appears in criticism of the war, even professional criticism.
The Boers had very few regular troops, and what they had were mainly Artillery, the rest permanent police of a highly efficient quality. Their army was a national militia, organized on a territorial system admirably adapted for local warfare, but for united action on the grand scale possessing grave defects. In combat, individual skill and intelligence were remarkably high, the hunting and tracking instinct, taking military shape in the skirmishing and scouting instinct, being well developed. The habit of riding long distances over a thinly-peopled pastoral country, on short commons, and in all weathers, bore military fruit in endurance and in a skill in the care of horses which was of incalculable value to them. Without any stereotyped system of tactics or formations, there was a generally diffused common sense as to what to do and how to do it in any given military conditions of a tactical character, a flair for opportunities and dangers, an eye for ground, and above all an enormous belief, founded on knowledge and practice, in the efficacy of the rifle, especially in defence, and especially when the rifle was reinforced by the spade. Born shots and stalkers, they had also a natural genius for practical field entrenchment, a valuable gift in itself, but one which, in conjunction with moral causes, reacted unfavourably at first on their offensive impulse.
Nor, in the early part of the campaign, did the high potential mobility given to them by their horses act as compensation for this defect. Exactly how far they lacked offensive impulse is a point exceedingly difficult to determine, because it is complicated by their great numerical inferiority. At only two of the big actions of the regular war, the first and third, Talana and the battle of Ladysmith, had they as much as a numerical equality. They were greatly outnumbered in the rest of the Natal campaign, while in our central advance to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and on to Komati Poort, their strength in action was rarely as much as a third of ours, often a quarter, and sometimes as low as a fifth. In guns we always had an enormous preponderance. Still, in consideration of their high skill as riflemen, we may certainly say that at first they were deficient in offensive impetus, and missed opportunities of victory. Siege-work particularly had a very bad effect on them. In other field-work they seem to have regarded the horse—or rather the pony—as a necessary and prosaic vehicle, without which life on the veld under any circumstances whatever, peaceful or warlike, would have been inconceivable. He was a commonplace means of transport rather than a direct source of tactical, or even of strategical, enterprise. In the tactical sphere, this failure to derive from the horse an aggressive ardour analogous in kind to the “Cavalry spirit” was not due to any embarrassment felt in disposing of led horses during the dismounted phases of a fight, for they were wonderfully expert in this important matter; nor, certainly, as later experience proved, was it due to the lack of a steel weapon, which would have been alien to and destructive of their peculiar tactics. The failure was due partly to an innate affection for stalking and entrenchments, to a wholesome fear of the rifle, corresponding to an equally wholesome reliance upon it, and in some degree to a mere misapprehension of the physical risks involved. It was connected, too, with a rooted aversion to straying far from their slow and cumbrous transport waggons, concern for whose safety was an obsession in the mind of each individual burgher, since they were private, not public, property. But there was a graver obstacle than all these, indiscipline, unfitness for that swift and sure collective 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 manœuvre 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 manœuvre 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.
CHAPTER IV
ELANDSLAAGTE
Note on Nomenclature.—Throughout the chapters dealing with the Boer War I use the expression “Cavalry” to mean British regular Cavalry. I use the expression “Mounted Infantry” to mean regular British Mounted Infantry (i.e., drawn from Infantry battalions). I use the general expression “mounted riflemen” to cover all mounted troops, Boer or British, armed only with the rifle.
The campaign opened in Natal with the attempt of General Sir W. Penn Symons, with 4,000 men and 18 guns, to hold the untenable Northern position at Dundee against a greatly superior converging force of Joubert’s Transvaalers. Sir George White, who only with reluctance had consented to this attempt, was concentrating at Ladysmith, and facing the Free Staters; while midway between White and Symons a detached Boer force, 900 strong, under Koch, war about to plant itself upon the railway connecting Dundee and Ladysmith. Symons’s mounted troops were one regiment of Cavalry, three companies of Mounted Infantry drawn from the three battalions which formed his Infantry brigade, a squadron of Natal Carbineers, and a few picked Guides. Joubert’s southward advance from the frontier was excessively slow—seventy miles in a week. Watched and reported by Cavalry and other patrols, it nevertheless culminated in a complete surprise of the British camp at dawn on October 20, 1899, by Meyer’s force of some 4,000 men and 8 guns. The General’s overconfidence was the principal cause of this surprise, and it is interesting to note that his reason for not establishing more Cavalry pickets to supplement the inadequate system of defence in the heights above the Dundee valley was that he wished to keep the Cavalry fresh—fresh, that is, for shock action. The battle of Talana was, from our point of view, an Infantry fight, fought with splendid spirit and tenacity, and, for the moment, a victory. From the Boer point of view, in this case, as in all others, it was a mounted rifleman’s fight. Our own mounted troops were employed with an aggressive purpose, that of turning the Boer right and intercepting the Boer retreat. They consisted of Cavalry and Mounted Infantry acting in concert, the latter, according to the regulations of that period, being regarded as a “valuable auxiliary to the former.” The movement began well. An admirable, but also a somewhat dangerous position, was gained well behind the main Boer force, within range of its led horses and commanding its line of retreat, at a moment when retreat was just setting in. Stratagem and fire-action combined might have produced great results. Shock was preferred. A few Boers were sabred, some thirty prisoners were taken, and then the movement collapsed. The Boers took the offence. The commanding officer on our side lost his head, and, after much difficulty, half the Cavalry got back without their prisoners to the British lines; the rest of the force, after a running fight, in which the rifles of the Mounted Infantry were the only effective means of defence, was surrounded and forced to surrender. It would be unjust and undiscerning to make too much of this opening episode. Nevertheless, in so far as the value of the arme blanche was concerned, not merely as a weapon, but as an inspiration of resourceful and effective manœuvre, the incident was of bad augury.
The next day, October 21, came Elandslaagte, fought on the line of communication connecting Dundee and Ladysmith between Koch’s force of 900 men and 2 guns, planted astride the railway, and a mixed force of 3,500 men and 18 guns sent out by White from Ladysmith under command of General French. Our mounted troops were three squadrons of Cavalry, five of the Imperial Light Horse, and a few Natal volunteers. The fighting, which ended brilliantly for ourselves, was highly honourable to both sides. From the Boer point of view, it consisted in a magnificently stubborn defence of a strong position by an inferior force of mounted riflemen, fighting on foot up to the moment of actual contact, and under crushingly superior Artillery fire. From our point of view, with one interesting novelty, to which I shall refer later, it was a plain, hard, straightforward fight with the three arms co-operating on thoroughly conventional lines: the Infantry carrying through a well-planned frontal attack with remarkable dash; the Artillery shelling the main position; the Cavalry watching both flanks during the progress of the action, and, just at dusk, after the final repulse of the enemy from the main position, pursuing with the lance and sword. The pursuit, carried on for about a mile and a half with vigour and enthusiasm, touched only a portion of the retreating burghers, but, so far as it went, it was effective: it struck the “terror of cold steel” into the pursued with scarcely any loss to the two squadrons engaged; it caused casualties and surrenders, though precisely to what extent is difficult to say. No figures exist. In short, the Cavalry had performed with considerable success the peculiar function traditionally assigned to their arm.
Now let us turn to the unconventional feature of this fight. The Imperial Light Horse, early on the same morning, had made the reconnaissance on which the battle scheme was founded, and had seized and held necessary tactical points. They had rushed the railway-station by a gallop in open order. Together with the Cavalry (who came out later with the main force from Ladysmith) they had prepared the way for the Infantry advance, and had helped to clear a flank during the early part of the action. But in addition to these duties they dismounted and joined with the Infantry in the assault of the main position, took a prominent and, at one critical moment, a decisive share in the desperate fighting which wrested it from the Boers, and suffered losses (including that of their brave Colonel) heavier than most of the units engaged.
Mr. Goldman, in remarking on Elandslaagte, makes the strange comment that the Imperial Light Horse were “trained as Cavalry,” and adduces their exploits on this occasion as an example of the value of that arm in South Africa.[[17]] This is the first of many misinterpretations upon which I shall have to comment. For all practical purposes the Imperial Light Horse were mounted riflemen, who used rifles, not carbines, and, as far as I know, never in all their history made or attempted to make an arme blanche charge, yet were very effective in action, and were very fair scouts. Used for the bloody assault at Elandslaagte, they could not also be used for the pursuit. If they had not joined in the assault, could they, or troops of their type, have been used in an equally effective way for the pursuit? The inquiry compels us to look back a little more closely at the conditions of the charge.
The following points should be noted:
1. For the troops engaged on both sides this was the first day of hostilities. Steel-armed Cavalry was a new fact to the Boers. The steel had the best chance it ever was to have of inspiring “terror.”
2. There were no Boer reserves left to cover the retreat.
3. The light was failing, a circumstance favourable to the steel, unfavourable to fire. (Contrast the broad daylight at Talana, when the Boers rallied and outmanœuvred the cavalry.) Some light is necessary, of course, but, within obvious limits, the poorer the better.
4. The ground was as open and smooth as Cavalry on the average can expect. Dongas and rocks during the initial advance only; from within 300 yards of the enemy and onwards (according to the “Official History”) not a lawn, but fair galloping ground.
5. Horses and men fresh, not hitherto seriously engaged. Why? Because there had been no opportunity for the use of steel.
6. The enemy, already shaken and spent by a hard fire-fight on foot, were retreating at their usual ambling trot, in loose, formless groups; “raggedly streaming,” as the Official Historian correctly puts it. He adds that this objective, “a crowd in the loose disorder of defeat, seemed to offer an indefinite object for a charge,” but “that there was no likelihood of a better whilst sufficient light remained.” I must digress for a moment on that illuminating obiter dictum, because it gives a clue to the Cavalry view of Cavalry work. The historian is regretting the absence of a chance for “shock,” in its literal and in its only accurate meaning, of the collision of two massed bodies; two, and both massed. The Boers were not massed; clearly, therefore, it was of no use for the Cavalry to adopt mass, and in point of fact they charged with “extended files.” There could be no “shock,” therefore—that is, violent physical impact—and there was in fact none. The Boers were ridden down individually. What the official commentator does not apprehend is that this absence of mass, in his view an unfortunate drawback, was in fact one of the very conditions which made the charge possible. It was a corollary to the beaten, spent state of the pursued. Ragged streaming away is a characteristic of defeated troops in retreat. Cohesion means morale, and morale means the will and power to retaliate. Nor is it only a question of morale. The physical conditions of the preceding fire-fight determine the nature of the retreat. In this case some 900 Boers, in widely extended order, had been defending a line nearly two miles long against an enemy proportionately extended, both extensions being truly normal—that is to say, dictated by the range and deadliness of the modern rifle. Retreat from such a line, immediately after a failure to withstand a punishing assault, pressed in some quarters to the bayonet’s point, excludes cohesion in any troops, European or extra-European. Boers, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, never troubled much about set formations at any time, whether or no there was time for them, not through incapacity, but simply because they did not need them, and not needing them were better without them. For them, therefore, this kind of ragged retreat was not solely the result of the beating they had suffered. Normal in any troops, it was normal in a peculiar sense with them.
I dwell on this point at some length, not because of the intrinsic importance of this fight, or of the Official Historian’s comment upon the pursuit (for he may have written thoughtlessly), but because it directly raises the big issue dealt with in my analysis of the physical problem in Chapter II. I enumerated there the many crushing limitations which surround the use of real shock against riflemen, mounted or on foot, and I instanced the pursuit of beaten troops as one of those rare cases where the steel weapon has its best opening. But I also pointed out that this was a case where any well-mounted troops, however armed, have a good opening; and that brings us back to the point from which we started in comparing, for the sake of illustration, the work of the Imperial Light Horse and the Cavalry at Elandslaagte. First, however, let us recapitulate the six favourable conditions of this Cavalry pursuit:
(1) Novelty of the steel. (2) No Boer reserves. (3) Bad light. (4) Open and smooth ground. (5) Fresh horses and men. (6) Ragged retreat of beaten enemy.
This may be regarded as a rare combination of ideal conditions; how rare will be seen as the war proceeds.
Now for the Imperial Light Horse, whom, let me say, I am regarding, not as an individual regimental unit, but as a type of what good riflemen can do, just as the Cavalry squadrons engaged were types of what Cavalry, decidedly good according to the standard of their time, could do.
I asked, would the Imperial Light Horse, if they had not been used for the fire-fight, have been capable of an equally effective pursuit without the use of steel weapons? The speculation, of course, though instructive, is largely academical, the crucial point being that they had been used for the preceding fire-fight. However, for the sake of argument, we must vest them with favourable condition No. 5, “Fresh horses and men.” Nos. 2, 4, and 6 would have been equally applicable to them; No. 1 is irrelevant. There remains No. 3, “Failing light.” This would have been distinctly adverse to the accurate use of the rifle, but at the same time let us remember the fundamental distinction between the rifle and the steel—that is, range. Posted, for the sake of argument, in the spot where the Cavalry were posted (threatening the enemy’s right rear), the Imperial Light Horse would at once have had the first bodies of retreating Boers well within the range of vulnerability: 500 yards is the official estimate. Yes, but fire at this moment would no doubt have meant delay, and caused less damage to the Boers than the undelayed steel-armed Cavalry. Granted; a point to the Cavalry. Let us go on. After routing a first batch in a long gallop, the Cavalry turned on their tracks, met a second batch, and scattered and harassed these men also. Would not the Imperial Light Horse meanwhile have had a good chance of intercepting these men? Finally, picture the irregular corps as capable of fire from the saddle, and keep that point in your mind for future illustration.
All this is the veriest sketch, suggestive of the factors inherent in mounted combats, but utterly unreal, because it is utterly impossible to postulate identical circumstances for steel-action and fire-action. The essence of the matter is that the Imperial Light Horse, by aptitude, training, and equipment, were capable of joining effectively in the Infantry assault of the main position, and that the Cavalry, by aptitude, training, and equipment (they carried the short carbine), were neither capable of, nor designed for, similar intervention. If the Colonials had not been used for the main assault, the course of the battle might have been changed. The assault might have failed (in the penultimate phase there was an exceedingly critical revival on the Boer left flank, checked by the Gordons and Imperial Light Horse combined), or the assault might have been consummated too late to give to the Cavalry the margin of light necessary for their pursuit. Or—and this is really the most pertinent and suggestive eventuality—the Imperial Light Horse used as their capacity deserved, might have operated actively on the enemy’s rear at an earlier period, when the Cavalry was still passive. Result, a change of battle conditions, which defies speculation. On the other hand, we can, to a certain extent, isolate our view of the Cavalry exploit. They did, under ideal conditions, exactly what they were trained to do, and I do not think they, or any other Cavalry similarly trained, could have done it better.
In dwelling so long upon the topic of pursuit we must remember that there was no question at any moment of a charge by Cavalry either upon unbroken riflemen or upon led horses. Nor (save in the case of the rush upon the station by the Imperial Light Horse) was there any attempt on the part of the mounted riflemen on either side, Boer or British, to carry aggressive mobility to the point of charging on horseback into point-blank range of riflemen on foot.[[18]] Developments of that sort were still a long way off.
I have enlarged so much on this small fight in order to focus the reader’s attention upon the principles it illustrates. Let him study it in conjunction with the action of Talana, which preceded it, and with all the multitude of fights which followed it, in the next two and a half years. Let him begin at once to picture parallels in European warfare, on a bigger scale or smaller scale, and ask whether they tell for or against the arme blanche, and why? Imagine the 900 Boers as a German force, either of Cavalry or of the three arms in normal proportion, and without anything in the least degree resembling either our Imperial Light Horse or the militant burgher. Should we have won more or less easily? Or imagine 3,500 Germans, constituted as before, tackling the 900 Boers. Instead of moderately open ground, suppose ground diversified with copses, walls, hedges, a sunk lane or two. Make any permutations or suppositions that you please, and test each by South African facts.
Finally, ask yourself at every step, on which method, that of the arme blanche or the rifle, will it pay best in the long-run to train mounted troops?
CHAPTER V
FROM ELANDSLAAGTE TO THE BLACK WEEK
October to December, 1899.
In these two opening combats of the war the steel weapon had had its first rebuff and its first success. What was to happen now?
Immediately after Elandslaagte, French’s force, having disposed of Koch, was recalled by White to Ladysmith (October 22). On the same night the Dundee force, now in a situation of great and growing peril from Joubert’s united commandos, was forced to retreat hurriedly and secretly to Ladysmith. White sent out 5,300 men to cover the last stage of the retreat against any possible interruption from the 6,000 Free Staters who were threatening Ladysmith from the west. Hence the action of Rietfontein (October 24), a desultory fire-fight, for the most part at very long ranges, against an invisible and intangible enemy; in its proof of the mysterious, far-reaching potency of the rifle, a pregnant contrast to the close encounters at Talana and Elandslaagte.
But it was six days later, at the battle of Ladysmith (or Lombard’s Kop), that the most definite and substantial proof was given of the superiority of the rifle over the steel. Joubert had closed on Ladysmith with 12,000 men. White, also with 12,000 men, of whom 3,000 were mounted, conceived a bold and elaborate plan of attack designed not merely to drive the Boers back, but to inflict a crushing defeat. To his two mounted brigades (each composed of two Cavalry regiments and a corps of Colonial mounted riflemen) White assigned functions which were typical of the military theory of that day. One was to co-operate with the Infantry attack on the right, wheeling wide round the flank, and getting behind the enemy’s left. The other, held in reserve behind our left Infantry attack, was designed, when both attacks had succeeded, to cut in upon the Boer line of retreat (which lay towards the left or north), and pursue the beaten burghers. In order to facilitate the scheme of pursuit, an Infantry force had been detached by night to seize a pass—Nicholson’s Nek, of evil memory—which the Cavalry would have to surmount before debouching upon the plain. Since the force so detached suffered disaster, and the whole of White’s attack, here and elsewhere, failed, the left mounted brigade had very little to do. The right mounted brigade, whose work began with daylight, failed to effect the purpose assigned to it. Fire-tactics were immediately imposed upon it by the enemy’s mounted riflemen operating on rocky, bushy ground, and in fire-tactics the Mauser, in the words of the “Official History,” at once “dominated the carbine.” Advance was impossible; proper flank support to the Infantry was scarcely less difficult; even the retreat at the end of the day’s fighting was far from an able performance. French, who led the brigade, was not the French of a fortnight later, when the horse and the steel weapon were beginning to be dissociated after their long traditional partnership. For the present the fact was painfully obvious that the only professional troops endowed with the mobility of the Boers were the least capable of grappling with the Boers in action.
But did mobility, backed by the rifle, inspire dash in the Boers? At this period, except in isolated cases, no. The inertia, so disproportionate to their tactical flexibility and brilliant skirmishing skill, was never more apparent than at the close of this battle outside Ladysmith, when White began his retreat. No such opportunity was ever to present itself again for a really decisive victory. Joubert regarded the action as a defensive action, and had issued general orders against a pursuit. On the other hand, a simple burgher, Christian de Wet, had inspired the one genuinely aggressive enterprise which distinguished the Boer movements on this day—namely, the attack and capture of the detached force at Nicholson’s Nek. This—like the capture of Majuba nearly twenty years earlier—was a feat of stalking pure and simple, with which the horse had little to do, save that it bore the riflemen rapidly from a distant part of the field into the outermost fringe of the zone of combat. The outermost fringe—that is the point to watch. Could horses penetrate the inner fringe under rifle-fire and so precipitate the decisive phase of a conflict? While waiting for the answer let us be sensible and remember that after all the main thing is to win fights. Galloping under fire is only a means to an end. Stalking under fire requires nearly as much dash to be effective.
The long siege of Ladysmith now virtually began. By an error of judgment all the mounted troops, including the Cavalry regiments, were retained within the lines, and were thus practically demobilized for five months. Happily for our arms, however, French and his staff just succeeded in leaving the town for the south before investment was complete. Happily, too, the strenuous efforts to raise more volunteer mounted troops within South Africa were now bearing fruit. Two fine but wholly raw regiments, Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry and Bethune’s Mounted Infantry, were able to strengthen the miserably scanty forces which, pending the arrival of Buller and heavy reinforcements from England and the Cape, stood between Southern Natal and invasion. Even so, there was nothing during the first half of November to stop Joubert with the forces at his disposal from a vigorous raid on Maritzburg, and even on Durban. But his tactical inertia was exceeded by his strategical inertia. Egged on by Louis Botha, he did indeed initiate a raid with a force of over 3,000 picked men on picked horses, but it degenerated into a leisurely foray for loot and cattle. The time for action slipped by. British troops were pouring into Natal to redress the strategical balance, and in the last week of November the Boer force withdrew behind the Tugela, there, aided by abstraction from the investing force, to begin their long and desperate struggle to prevent the relief of Ladysmith.
Colenso, fought on December 15, was the first great event in this historic conflict. From our point of view, like all the subsequent fights in Natal, it needs very little comment. Buller, commanding a force of 18,000 men, of whom 2,500 were mounted, made a frontal attack with his Infantry and guns upon an immensely strong entrenched position held by 6,000 Boers. He failed, inflicted only nominal loss on the enemy, suffered 1,100 casualties himself, and lost ten guns. Two Cavalry regiments formed the professional nucleus of the mounted brigade; the rest were raw irregulars. There were Bethune’s and Thorneycroft’s Mounted Infantry, who, in the fighting around Estcourt three weeks earlier, had been just blooded and no more, a squadron of Imperial Light Horse and some Natal volunteers who had had much the same experience, and the newly enlisted South African Light Horse, who had not yet fired a shot. Reconnaissance prior to the battle had been little more than nominal. Pitted against the Boer outposts—expert shots all of them—our scouts had rarely been able to get near the enemy’s lines. The Tugela fords were not properly known; the enemy’s principal positions were but dimly conjectured. Artillery fire was the substitute for reconnaissance, and that produced no response from the crafty burghers.
In the battle itself the rifle from first to last governed tactics. The aggressive task given to the mounted brigade was the attack upon Hlwangwane Mountain, the great natural outwork upon which the Boer left flank rested. The irregulars were chosen for this attack, and rightly chosen, because rifles were absolutely essential. They made a plucky but vain effort to carry a strong position strongly held, and extricated themselves with some difficulty at the end of the day. The work of the Cavalry was confined to covering their retreat. As at Ladysmith, there was no opportunity for the steel, not from any chance causes, but because the rifle saw to it that no such opportunity should be allowed to occur.
Colenso was one of the three defeats in that sad week of mid-December, when the nation first realized the magnitude of the enterprise it had undertaken in South Africa. Let us carry events in other quarters of the field of war up to the same point, with special emphasis on the use of mounted troops.
Far up in the north the investment of Mafeking had begun immediately after the declaration of war (October 12). In a week the whole of the railway from Mafeking to Orange River was in Boer hands, and on the 23rd Kimberley was definitely invested. On no portion of this line were there any regular mounted troops, and of the local levies the only mobile force outside a besieged town was the Rhodesian Regiment of mounted riflemen, 450 strong, based on Tuli and commanded by Plumer, who, with this little handful of men and his own nerve and resource, did extraordinarily good work in threatening the Northern Transvaal, and at a later period in aiding in the relief of Mafeking.
Meanwhile the Boer invasion of Southern Cape Colony hung fire for three full weeks, and when it at last began, on November 1, the day Buller landed in South Africa, it was dilatory and methodless. Still, the strategical situation for ourselves was serious. White’s investment in Ladysmith, and the consequent danger to Southern Natal, had dislocated the entire scheme of British strategy, which was founded upon a resolve to land a whole Army Corps in Cape Colony and advance straight upon Bloemfontein and Pretoria. Buller’s decision, as we know, was to divert the greater part of his Army Corps to Natal, take command there himself, and make the relief of Ladysmith the primary British object. Probably the decision was the best that could have been come to, but it involved the dissolution of the Army Corps as an organized instrument of conquest, and the reduction of the grand scheme of irruption upon the enemy’s capital to a minor scheme of advance up the western railway line for the relief of Kimberley. In the meantime, and until a fresh army could be sent out from England, the vital portions of Cape Colony, comprising the great ports and the system of communications radiating therefrom, could only be protected against invasion by a mere demonstration of force exercised in the midst of districts teeming with disaffection.
Happily the Boer[Boer] leaders had no eye for aggressive strategy, nor indeed any military organization on which to base aggressive strategy. Absorbed by the prospect of capturing Mafeking and Kimberley, just as in Natal they were absorbed by the prospect of capturing Ladysmith, they fell naturally in both cases into an attitude of strategical defence—defence against the relief of the towns they were investing. The same feebleness which characterized the raid upon Southern Natal early in November characterized the straggling invasion of Southern Cape Colony at the same period. Nevertheless, it was no light task for us to conceal our weakness in this quarter, and, with a thin containing line of troops gathered from the fragments of the old Army Corps, to hold in play greatly superior Boer forces. It was French who was called to undertake this delicate and difficult duty. How he performed it I shall relate in the next chapter. For the present, let us briefly review Methuen’s advance from Orange River towards Kimberley.
Methuen started on November 20 with a total force of 10,000 men, including 7,000 Infantry, 16 guns, and only 1,000 mounted men. The professional mounted element was represented by one Cavalry regiment, and three companies of regular Mounted Infantry; the irregular element by Rimington’s Guides and a handful of New South Wales Lancers. Methuen, therefore, was relatively weaker in mounted troops than any leader in Natal, and his operations provide proportionately less material for criticizing mounted tactics and the weapons suitable thereto. I say “proportionately” less, because, as I pointed out in my preliminary chapter upon the numbers and quality of the British and Boer mounted troops, we cannot reckon the Boers twice over, once in their capacity as dismounted riflemen holding positions against our Infantry, and a second time as mobile riflemen available for mounted evolutions against our Cavalry. Yet that strange error has been constantly made, and among other cases in the case of Methuen’s first three battles—Belmont (November 23), Graspan (November 25), and Modder River (November 28), in the first two of which the total British force engaged outnumbered the total Boer force engaged by nearly four to one, and in the third by more than two to one, while the British mounted troops, reckoned independently, amounted to half the Boer force and a quarter the Boer force respectively. The enemy, with something over 2,000 men at Graspan and Belmont, and with about 3,500 at Modder River, supported by Artillery which never exceeded three guns and two pompoms, had to make head against 7,000 British Infantry on the first two occasions, 6,800 on the second, and 7,500 on the third, backed by Artillery which rose from sixteen to twenty guns. The Infantry included the Brigade of Guards, and, taken as a whole, were as fine a body of troops of their class as could be found in any European country. These troops bore the brunt of all three battles. They stormed the rocky heights at Belmont and Enslin, and faced the yet more deadly fire which swept across the level plain from the sunken beds of the Modder and the Riet. Whatever tactical flexibility the Boers may have derived from their ponies in meeting these attacks, nearly the whole of their small force was pinned to its position until the crisis of each action, by the necessity of meeting Infantry and Artillery attacks in superior force.
The British mounted troops, on a reasonable calculation of relative strength, must be regarded as having been left approximately free for supplementary independent action on the enemy’s flanks and rear. This is how Methuen regarded them and endeavoured to use them. In the event, though all worked their hardest, they had no appreciable effect on any of the actions. The steel weapon was useless, although the terrain for shock was ideal. The Cavalry were not adapted or properly trained for fire-action, and the Mounted Infantry and irregulars, though trained and adapted for it, were very backward in the art. Reconnaissance, too, was inadequate. Methuen never knew with accuracy the strength and position of the enemy, and at Modder River was totally at sea until his Infantry was actually under heavy fire. The conditions no doubt were exacting. It was not numbers, but a small quantity of picked scouts that was needed. But Cavalry training had not encouraged that kind of individual merit.
The conventional comment upon all these actions has been that, owing to the paucity and exhaustion of the mounted troops, we could not reap the fruits of victory by sustained and destructive pursuit. There is truth, of course, in the proposition, but only that sort of half-truth which for instructional purposes is often more misleading than error.
As an example of this sort of mistaken criticism I will take the Official Historian’s remarks upon Graspan, on which occasion Methuen sent his mounted men in two bodies (one including two squadrons of Lancers, the other one squadron) six miles to the rear of the enemy’s main position with a view of surprising their laager and cutting off their retreat. There were no Boer reserves here, save a small guard to the laager, which, though sighted by the stronger British detachment, was not attacked. The Boers ultimately dealt with were the same men who had held the main position almost to the bayonet’s point against our Infantry, and who retreated after their defeat at that point. So far from intercepting or hampering the retreat, both bodies of mounted troops, unable to effect a junction, were attacked in detail by the fugitives, and put into dangerous positions, from which the fire-power of their Mounted Infantry and mounted riflemen were the principal means of extrication.
The Official Historian says: “At Graspan, as at Belmont, the open plains across which the enemy was compelled to retire were singularly favourable to Cavalry action, and had a satisfactory mounted brigade with a Horse Artillery battery been available, the Boers could not have effected their escape without suffering very heavy losses. Not only were the mounted troops at Lord Methuen’s disposal insufficient numerically, but their horses were already worn out by the heavy reconnaissance duty which had of necessity been carried out day after day without relief under the adverse conditions of a sandy soil, great heat, and a scarcity of water.”
There could be no better instance than this of the way in which the arme blanche faith is perpetuated from generation to generation, in defiance of experience. Every schoolboy has been puzzled by that reiterated comment upon most of the battles of history, that the exhaustion, or insufficiency, or feeble handling of the Cavalry by the victorious side prevented the full fruits of victory being garnered in. Why does this phenomenon happen so very often? he wonders. The historians rarely tell him two simple reasons—namely:
1. That troops armed even with a poor firearm are rarely so utterly and universally demoralized, even after a severe defeat, as to be unable to check the onset even of fresh Cavalry.
2. That Cavalry, who in all normally constituted armies form but a small proportion of the combatant troops, if they have worked hard in reconnaissance on previous days, not to speak of their action in prior phases of the battle, rarely find their horses fresh enough for long sustained gallops against a retreating army. (The reader will remember that this freshness is one of the four great conditions for the successful use of the steel.)
Both these limitations, which are cumulative, must be constantly borne in mind when criticizing mounted action in the South African War or any other war, and it must be noted that the second limitation applies to mounted riflemen, as well as to Cavalry, with this important reservation, that fire-action very often enables the former to dispense with long gallops, while for the steel weapon nothing short of a hand-to-hand mêlée, attained through the medium of the “charge,” is of any use at all.
Now what moral does the Official Historian draw from Graspan? His conclusion amounts to this, that if, in addition to our Infantry and sixteen field and naval guns, and in addition to about 900 mounted troops whose horses were worn out with reconnaissance, we had had a “satisfactory” mounted brigade (and the context shows that he means a brigade of Cavalry) and a battery of Horse Artillery, both fresh for pursuit and with an ideal terrain over which to pursue, the Boers, 2,000 to 3,000 in number, many of them just as tired as our men by long rides to the field and by reconnaissance, would not have effected their escape without heavy losses. If we could only have everything always as we wish it! Unfortunately, in most wars the kind of conditions imagined by the critic are Utopian. If we count on obtaining anything like such a superiority over any European foe, we are living in a fool’s paradise. Instead of complaining of our bad luck in fighting against the Boers, we ought to congratulate ourselves upon our advantages, and search coldly and unflinchingly for the causes which enabled so small a people to withstand a powerful Empire for so long.
In the light of common sense, what is the most striking feature of Graspan and of all these other fights? Surely the power of a small number of mounted riflemen, skilled in the management of the horse and skilled in the use of the modern firearm, to withstand greatly superior forces framed upon the European model, even allowing for cases where the proportion of mounted troops did not reach the normal European standard. The one thing emphatically that these fights in South Africa do not prove is that we wanted more steel-armed horsemen. The only way of proving that we did involves that reductio ad absurdum of the steel weapon which the Official Historian unconsciously finds himself drawn to embrace. For that is what it comes to. Given a force of mounted troops approximately equal to the whole Boer force, plus a threefold superiority in Infantry and guns, and we should have turned defeat into destruction. During an important part of the campaign, as I shall afterwards show, we did actually obtain something like these very conditions, but in only one instance were able to make destructive use of them, and in that instance solely through the agency of the firearm.
Before leaving Graspan, let us note for future use that on two occasions parties of Boers tried to ride down British mounted troops (both Cavalry and Mounted Infantry) in the open. The attempts failed, but there was no retort in kind. De la Rey was in command of the Boer force on this day. It will be interesting to observe his use of the mounted charge at a later period of the war.
At Magersfontein, on December 10, Methuen’s enterprise for the relief of Kimberley came to an abrupt end. Since the battle of Modder River, twelve days earlier, both sides had been reinforced. The Boers, holding a strong entrenched position under Cronje, were now some 7,000 in number with 5 guns and some pompoms. Methuen had received a brigade of Infantry, another Cavalry regiment, a fourth company of Mounted Infantry, and a battery of Horse Artillery. Altogether he had 11,000 Infantry, 1,600 mounted troops, and 33 guns (not counting a large number of machine guns)—that is to say, a total superiority of about two to one, and in guns of about six to one. Between a third and a quarter of the Boer force—representing their right—was not engaged in the battle. About seven-eighths of our force was engaged.
It is scarcely necessary to recall the tragic catastrophe which befell the Highland Brigade in their night attack upon the key of the Boer position, Magersfontein Hill, where the enemy’s centre rested. The rest of the battle, from the British point of view, resolved itself into a successful effort to save this isolated brigade from total annihilation, and an unsuccessful effort to break through the Boer left, which was flung forward crescent-wise over undulating, bushy ground. The whole battle was a fire-battle; the rifle supreme, the British guns of very little aggressive killing value, though potentially of high defensive value in preventing Boer counter-strokes. Horses on both sides were in the background. With the exception of some irregulars on our extreme left, all our mounted troops, including the Cavalry, fought on foot like the Infantry. The two Lancer regiments, their equipment and habits considered, did particularly well, but not, let it be remembered, in the capacity for which they had undergone nineteen-twentieths of their severe and elaborate training. I hope that here, as at Colenso, the reader will mentally figure his European parallels, substituting whatever categories of troops he pleases, in whatever relative strength, and on whatever terrain. We may remark that the topography of Magersfontein was in no sense peculiar. The position was not nearly as strong as at Colenso, where a river divided the combatants. Nor was it stronger than the averagely strong defensive position in Europe. The height of Magersfontein Kopje had no significance; for, like shrewd soldiers, the Boers had discovered that it is the forward and lowest slopes of a hill which give the most deadly field of fire, and it was these which they defended. The position was entrenched with peculiar skill, and held by peculiarly steady and accurate marksmen—that was all. These marksmen were mounted riflemen, many of whom had ridden to join Cronje from distant points. If they had been shock-trained European horsemen, they could neither have entrenched nor held the position. Though they scarcely used their horses at all during the action, the horses (like their cumbrous and bulky transport) were there, out of range, in almost defenceless knots and groups, vulnerable to just the sort of attack which Cavalry are supposed to be able to deliver. Separation from their horses, it may be observed, did not perturb these riflemen in the manner in which mounted riflemen are always, in Cavalry theory, supposed to be perturbed. They sat in narrow ditches on nearly level ground, from which retreat meant exposure to a withering storm of gun and rifle fire. Nor on this occasion is it easy to impute lack of aggressive dash to the Boers. Very few troops so situated and so outmatched in numbers and Artillery could have launched counter-strokes, whether mounted or on foot. That is a point which must be kept in mind whenever we compare the action of a small force of high mobility against a large force of low mobility. The defensive power of the former is far greater in proportion than its offensive power.
While the Highland Brigade was moving “ghost-like to its doom” in the dark morning hours of December 10, Gatacre’s force—200 miles away in Cape Colony—was approaching an even worse fate at Stormberg. This unhappy affair need not detain us long. It was a case of a mismanaged night attack by 1,850 Infantry, 450 regular Mounted Infantry, and 12 guns, upon 1,700 Boers. Although the surprise was complete, ignorance of the topography and the exhaustion of the troops involved our force in disastrous failure. Our Mounted Infantry escorted the guns and covered the final retreat, but took no part in the critical fighting. So far as mounted lessons are concerned, the moral was against the Boers. Here, certainly, they showed a marked lack of aggressive mobility. When total destruction of the British force was well within their grasp, they were content with a partial, if substantial, success. There was no real pursuit, even by two fresh commandos which appeared on the flank of the retreat. If the action stood alone, it might be plausibly conjectured that the absence of a steel weapon was accountable for this slackness. A review of the whole war disposes of the supposition.
Colenso, Magersfontein, Stormberg, three decided checks in three widely distant areas of the theatre of war, constituted the “Black Week” of mid-December, 1899. With the single exception of the charge at Elandslaagte, on the second day of hostilities, the sword and lance had effected nothing.
CHAPTER VI
COLESBERG AND KIMBERLEY
December, 1899, to February, 1900.
The immediate effects of these events may be put under four heads:
1. A national and Imperial awakening to the greatness of the emergency.
2. The appointment of Lord Roberts to the supreme command in South Africa.
3. Large additional reinforcements of regular troops of all three arms, and of militia.
4. The improvisation of large numbers of additional mounted troops. These belonged to three categories:
(a) Three thousand additional regular Mounted Infantry, improvised by abstraction from every Infantry battalion in South Africa, with additions from Great Britain.
(b) The enlistment and gradual despatch of large bodies of volunteer mounted riflemen; from Great Britain (in the shape of 10,000 Yeomanry), and from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India.
(c) The enlistment in South Africa of a quantity of new irregular corps of mounted riflemen, including a local militia for the defence of Cape Colony, the latter force being backed by Town Guards partly composed of Infantry.
No question ever arose of training the mounted irregulars to the use of the steel weapon. The long postponed decision to raise Yeomanry, for example, was directly inspired by a telegram from Buller after Colenso, asking for “8,000 irregular Mounted Infantry.” This view of present requirements did not represent any radical change of military theory. There was a general impression abroad, first, that this was a “peculiar” war demanding peculiar expedients; second, that it was a comparatively simple and easy matter to improvise mounted riflemen. The first proposition was a misleading half-truth, the second a profound fallacy, but the net result, however arrived at, was good. Outside the Cavalry itself, it was already generally recognized that the rifle must, in this war at any rate, be the dominant arm for mounted troops. Even among the Cavalry, reliance upon the carbine and upon the support of mounted riflemen had intensified with every day of hostilities.
As I explained in the previous chapter, the Natal entanglement, with the wholesale diversion of troops which it entailed, had left Cape Colony in mid-November almost defenceless against invasion, slowly and timidly as that invasion was proceeding. It came at two principal points: in the north-east by way of Aliwal North and Burgersdorp to Stormberg; and in the centre by way of Norval’s Pont to Colesberg, and on towards Naauwpoort. The former advance threatened only the East London railway-line. The latter advance was the more serious in that it endangered, not only Methuen’s communications with the south, but the whole of the railway system from our two major ports, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, with its three cardinal junctions—De Aar, Naauwpoort, and Rosmead. The three serious defeats of mid-December, and especially that of Gatacre at Stormberg, increased the danger. At least six weeks must elapse before sufficient reinforcements could be gathered for the great projected advance under Roberts. Torpid as the Boer strategy was, pusillanimity on our part might encourage them at any moment to greater efforts. Our one resource for the time being was “bluff.” Buller had realized this from the first, and given instructions accordingly to French, who had taken up the command at Naauwpoort on November 20, with orders to “worry” the enemy, and make, if he could, a bold show of operating towards Colesberg.
French performed the difficult rôle allotted to him with complete success. His operations lasted ten weeks, and included a multitude of small schemes and enterprises, which it is impossible for me to recount in detail. I can only sketch his doings and methods in broad outline, with a special view to their bearing on the question of weapons for mounted men.
Aggression, perpetual but never rash, was the keynote of his action. As the handful of troops with which he started work slowly grew, by accretion from the base, to a substantial force, he steadily pushed forward, first to Arundel, then to Rensburg, then to a line immediately threatening Colesberg, all the time widening his protective net to right and left over the adjacent country. His system was to harass, surprise, impose upon the enemy constantly, with forays, reconnaissances, and stratagems. Except for the unhappy failure of an infantry night attack, no sensational fights occurred, but a great number of small engagements, which would repay close study.
The troops employed were of all arms—Infantry, Horse Artillery, regular Mounted Infantry, Australasian and South African mounted riflemen, and regular Cavalry. Numbers and composition varied from time to time. The total force at French’s disposal for active operations rose from about 1,200, mainly Infantry, on November 20, to 2,000, half of them mounted, in the second week of December, and to 4,500 in the second week of January, 1900, when all immediate danger to the Colony was at an end, and he was firmly established in the positions round Colesberg, with his rear quite secure. This force included four batteries of Artillery, and no less than 2,000 mounted men (an unusually high proportion), of whom some 1,200 were regular Cavalry.
The Boers, who were under the very poor leadership of D. Schoemann, were also progressively reinforced. Their available fighting strength at any given time is impossible to measure, since it varied from day to day, and week to week, with the energy or indifference of the burghers. But it is fairly safe to say that at the outset they outnumbered the British force by nearly two to one, held a distinct though lessening superiority for about three weeks—the really critical period of the operations—and in the second week of January were approximately equal to French’s forces. At a somewhat later stage they were considerably reinforced.
Because French was a cavalryman, and because more than half the mounted troops engaged were regular Cavalry, it has often been too lightly assumed that the Colesberg operations proved the value of the training peculiar to Cavalry—that is, in the arme blanche. Mr. Goldman, for example, in the course of a contrast between the types of Cavalry and mounted riflemen, cites these operations as an example of the “successful use of Cavalry when properly employed.”[[19]]
Observe the confusion caused by nomenclature. The arme blanche was not and could not have been used, though the terrain was perfect for it.[[20]] I think I am right in saying that only on one occasion, the fight of January 3 near Maeder’s farm, was there any question of sabres, even in pursuit. The 10th Hussars and a squadron of Inniskilling Dragoons, with two horse batteries, were engaging a force under Piet de Wet, which had just failed in a surprise attack on an Infantry position. Suddenly the Boers lost heart, and bolted across the plain; the Cavalry followed in pursuit, but were checked by the fire of a small party who stopped to take cover in some rocky ground. By the time these men had been turned out their comrades were safe. This is a typical illustration of the weakness of Cavalry in pursuit.
The Cavalry, like the irregulars, acted throughout as mounted riflemen, and though, like all the troops engaged, they did well, they would have done much better if they had carried rifles instead of carbines, and had spent their professional life in practising rifle-tactics. In the same way the regular Mounted Infantry would have done better if in peace they had been regarded, not as a cross between Infantry and Cavalry, but as fully-fledged mounted troops, capable, with time and the proper education, of being of as much general practical utility as Cavalry. The 400 New Zealand Mounted Rifles, who formed the majority of the unprofessional mounted troops engaged, stood from the first on a footing of equality with the regulars, because they had nothing to unlearn, though, like everyone else, much to learn.
I must add three remarks upon the Colesberg operations:
1. Unlike the formal actions or battles we have hitherto been considering, these operations presented a multitude of minor tactical problems arising from the daily contact of small bodies of troops on a wide front. In all these small encounters down to those of patrols, the rifle, not the steel, governed tactics. If only those of our present Yeomanry officers who are asking for the sword, not so much for shock action on a big scale as for this very class of small encounters, would take the trouble to study the work of their own countrymen in such operations as those around Colesberg, they would, I believe, be converted to implicit faith in their rifles.
2. The operations, so far from being abnormal, bear a strong resemblance to the kind of work which, under our present system, Cavalry, unhelped by Infantry or mounted riflemen, will have to do in any European war, particularly during the initial stage of mobilization and concentration for a united advance. During this stage it is the duty of the Cavalry to form a screen, both protective and aggressive in character. This was exactly what French, with his composite force, did. Besides assisting to cover the rear of an existing force—Methuen’s—he was in the position of covering the front of a hitherto partially mobilized and unconcentrated army. At first most of the army he was screening was still in England, his and its primary base. Gradually it collected in force behind him, at the Cape Peninsula or secondary base, until it swelled into the force which marched under Roberts to Bloemfontein. That an ocean intervened between the primary and secondary bases does not affect the analogy. In the light of the Colesberg operations, how grotesque seems the theory of the great preliminary shock duel which, according to “Cavalry Training” and the German theorists, is to be sought by the rival Cavalry screens!
3. The “spirit” which actuated our operations around Colesberg was not the “Cavalry spirit,” which means essentially the spirit of fighting on horseback with a steel weapon. It was the spirit which should actuate all troops, but particularly mounted troops, simply because they possess horses—the spirit of aggressive mobility, backed by resource, stratagem, and dash. In French this spirit, not only now but throughout the war, was admirably exemplified, and we can only regret profoundly that it did not rest on a radical belief in the firearm as distinguished from the steel weapon, and that the Cavalry he led was not trained upon that principle.
4. That French’s personality as an able and vigorous officer was a decisive factor in the success of the Colesberg operations is proved by the narrative of other mounted work at the same period. The best mounted enterprise done by Methuen’s troops during the long halt at the Modder was Pilcher’s Sunnyside raid of January 1, 1900, by Queenslanders and Mounted Infantry. The Cavalry work, both in the reconnaissance of January 8, and at the Koedoesberg on February 7, was the reverse of vigorous.
The Relief of Kimberley.
We now approach the principal Cavalry achievements in the South African War. To explain their origin I must refer to the general military situation at the beginning of February, 1900. The only substantial change which had occurred in the Boer dispositions since their successes of mid-December, 1899, was the gradual reinforcement of the Colesberg force, which French had been containing, from a strength of 2,000 to 7,000; elsewhere they had stood in an attitude of passive defence. Cronje had sat in his trenches at Magersfontein facing Methuen at Modder River. The Stormberg force, facing Gatacre, had been almost inactive, and behind Cronje the sieges of Kimberley and Mafeking had been carried on with no great vigour. In Natal the siege of Ladysmith had been maintained with diminished energy and steadily diminishing numbers, while Louis Botha held the line of the Tugela against the repeated attacks in ever-increasing strength of Buller’s relieving force. At the beginning of February the third of these attacks, that by way of Vaal Krantz, had just failed.
Behind the screen so skilfully maintained by French the new army had been steadily collected. At the beginning of February it was sufficient for an advance.
By this time the last opportunity for aggressive Boer strategy on the grand scale had completely passed away. For general, not merely local aggression, brain and mobility combined could not have availed to counteract the numerical superiority which we had now gained, and were increasing daily. Our strength on paper in South Africa at that moment (about 130,000 men on a conservative estimate) approximately trebled the paper strength of the Boers, including their foreign and rebel auxiliaries.
Our effective fighting strength—100,000 men and 270 guns—was between double and treble the effective fighting strength of the Boers at the same period. Our “effective fighting men” in Cape Colony alone, given by Roberts in his despatch of February 4 as 51,900 (exclusive, as he said, of the garrisons of Mafeking and Kimberley and of seven militia battalions, and evidently exclusive also of all auxiliary non-combatant units), considerably exceeded the enemy’s entire field-force, reckoned on a gross, not on a net, basis.[[21]]
But, although it was distinctly our turn for aggressive strategy, the problem which faced Roberts was one of extreme difficulty. The fall of any one of the three besieged towns, especially that of Ladysmith, would have involved a grave loss of prestige, and Ladysmith was hard pressed. Kimberley, in a far from heroic spirit, was actually threatening surrender, if not relieved immediately. Roberts had to operate on exterior lines with a hastily improvised army, deficient in staff arrangements, transport, commissariat, and, above all, trained and experienced mounted troops. He rose to the height of a great occasion.
His scheme, briefly, was to leave a skeleton force under Clements in front of Colesberg; to turn the left flank of the Stormberg commandos with Brabant’s Corps of 3,000 Cape Colony mounted volunteers; and, with the bulk of his own army, to march by the western flank on Bloemfontein, smashing Cronje and relieving Kimberley in one stroke. This stroke, he was well aware, would automatically lessen the pressure upon Natal.
All the Cavalry in Cape Colony, and, under the original scheme, nearly all the regular Mounted Infantry, together with Colonial mounted contingents, were to be formed into a semi-independent unit under French for the relief of Kimberley.
The preliminary movements were consummated with extraordinary secrecy and skill. By February 10 an army of 45,000 men and 118 guns[[23]] had been collected behind the Modder, of whom 37,000, representing approximately 30,000 combatant troops, afterwards took part in the invasion of the Free State.
The Infantry divisions, including that of Methuen, were four, with a gross strength of nearly 30,000, and 76 guns. The Cavalry division, which is our particular concern, with a gross strength of 8,000 men and 42 Horse Artillery guns, was divided into four brigades—three consisting of regular Cavalry, one consisting of regular Mounted Infantry and Colonial mounted riflemen. The regular Cavalry brigades contained altogether seven regiments and portions of two others, a total of about 3,000 sabres. The brigade of mounted riflemen was 2,250 strong.
A word about the force of regular Mounted Infantry, totalling 3,500, now under Roberts. Most of this force had been raised during the last two months, and was very raw and crude, a large proportion of the men being scarcely able to ride, while a few still wore trousers or kilts. The horses, too, were ill-trained and in bad condition. But the force had at last been given the outline of a regular organization, and was now distributed in eight battalions of 450 each, grouped in three divisions, under Colonels Alderson, Hannay, and Ridley. Roberts had intended all of these to form part of the independent mounted force, but this plan, through lack of time, proved not to be feasible. Alderson’s division alone, 870 strong, went with French, brigaded, as I have shown, with 1,400 Colonials. The rest of the regular Mounted Infantry stayed with the main army, in company with other volunteer mounted units (City Imperial Volunteers and Colonials), making up a total mounted reserve with Roberts of some 3,600 men.
Cronje’s forces, including the men investing Kimberley and a detachment in the west under Liebenberg, numbered at the utmost 11,000, with 20 guns. Of these 7,500 were under his immediate control. Numerically, therefore, he was barely a quarter as strong as Roberts, without counting in the latter’s force (as it should properly be counted) part at least of the Kimberley garrison. In respect of mounted men, if all Cronje’s troops, including the Kimberley investing force, had been mounted, and all available for purely combatant duties, they would have been barely more than equal, numerically, to the mounted troops under Roberts—that is to say, to the Cavalry division and the mounted reserve reckoned together. Or, to put the case in another way, if we set off the Kimberley garrison against the Boer investing force, the Cavalry division, with its horse-gunners included, was equal to Cronje’s main force. Behind the Cavalry division lay the mounted reserve, four divisions of Infantry, and 76 guns.
In point of fact, Cronje’s main force was not all mounted, much less well mounted. Sandy soil and burning heat had played havoc among his horses during the last two months. Not more than a quarter of his burghers were well enough mounted to perform long and rapid marches; about half were poorly mounted, and the rest were actually on foot. Regarded as a whole, moreover, his army was no more mobile than our own. It was supplied, like ours, through the agency of heavy ox-transport, in motion slow and cumbrous to the last degree.
I have to insist on these figures and facts because, obviously, they have a close bearing on our inquiry into the relative merits of the steel weapon and the firearm. On the whole the Cavalry division, when the operations began, was approximately as well off in the matter of horses as Cronje’s force. They were in as good condition, probably, as the horses of an invading army coming 6,000 miles by sea to a different hemisphere can expect to be. The division was given a laborious task, though a strictly normal task, in the shape of a raid. The weather was very hot, water scarce, and the conditions exceedingly trying. The horses succumbed in hundreds, mainly from unpreventable causes. But we have to recognize a preventable cause. We may pass over the vexed question of overloading. Most contemporary critics seem to have agreed that the horses of all our mounted troops were overloaded; but the light load is a counsel of perfection exceedingly difficult to work out in practice. I refer to faults under the heading of horse management, which was admittedly not up to the war standard. The defect was common to all our mounted troops, but in the case of the professionally trained Cavalry we can trace the indirect influence of the shock theory, which in time of peace had encouraged artificial manœuvre as opposed to work under real field conditions. And yet, by perverse reasoning, the destruction of horse-flesh has been twisted by some writers into a negative argument for the arme blanche. As we shall see, steel weapons at no period of the war had any combat-value, whatever the condition of the horses.
It is depressing to reflect that the short raid now proposed under the trying conditions described was not strategically necessary. Kimberley stood in no material danger. Roberts, in overwhelming force, only twenty miles away, and ready to strike at Cronje, would have been justified in disregarding the demands made by the civil population for immediate relief. Practically he could scarcely take this course. Facing the situation boldly and generously, he included the immediate, physical relief of the town in his scheme of attack on Cronje, asked the Cavalry Division to perform the task, and was enthusiastically and energetically obeyed. We must remember, however, that under normal conditions the situation could scarcely have arisen. Faced by 45,000 men, of whom, guns apart, a fifth were mounted, Cronje must have raised the siege, and, if he risked a battle, have concentrated every man for it. Even as it was, had our large mounted force been not only as mobile but as highly trained in the rifle as the enemy, it would surely have been used to secure the envelopment and defeat of Cronje where he stood, in the Magersfontein position. But it was not so highly trained. That was the governing factor and the true “abnormality.” Kimberley could be given immediate relief only by a long, circuitous march which in the end wrecked the mobility of the division.
The position was this: The Modder separated Cronje from Roberts. Twenty miles north of the Modder, and behind Cronje, lay Kimberley; but Cronje’s communications did not lie in this direction. Though the force investing Kimberley was still supplied by rail from the Transvaal—that is, from the north—Cronje himself was now based by road on Bloemfontein, nearly 100 miles to the east—towards his left flank, that is—a thoroughly false and dangerous strategical position for the Boer leader. It lay with Roberts to cut this line of communication and envelop Cronje. North he must have operated, for Cronje might decide at any moment to cut adrift from Bloemfontein and retire north; but there was nothing to be gained by operating as far north as Kimberley.
Cronje, stubborn in spirit, but slow in thought and action, and, on this occasion, badly served by his scouts, was thoroughly mystified by the secrecy and suddenness of his enemy’s stroke. Until the last moment he clung to the belief that he was to be attacked in the Magersfontein trenches, which he had defended so successfully two months earlier. When threatening symptoms appeared to his left front, he did his best to watch this quarter by despatching successively three small bodies of his best-mounted burghers, under A. Cronje, Lubbe, and Christian de Wet, some 1,200 in all; but he made no effort to set in motion his partly dismounted main force of about 6,000 men, with its unwieldy laager.
Ramdam, twenty miles south of the Modder, and forty miles by air-line from Kimberley, was the British point of concentration. French and the Cavalry division left this point for the north early on February 12, with the main army slowly following, less Methuen’s division, which remained to confront Cronje. Two days’ march brought French to the Modder, with his troops and gun-horses already much spent. According to the “Official History,” forty horses were dead and 326 unfit to march. There had been barely more than a show of opposition at the crossing of the Riet and the Modder. De Wet, if he had chosen, might have done more to delay the advance with the 800 men whom at one moment he had under his hand, but he was daunted by the imposing array of horsemen and guns, and left Lubbe with only 250 men to dispute the passage of the Modder. He himself hung on the rear of the grand army, where he soon found his opportunity for a formidable stroke.
From the Modder at Klip Drift to Kimberley is twenty miles. Cronje, though he did not yet suspect French’s objective, was beginning to be alarmed, and now detached another 800 men and 2 guns, under Froneman and De Beer, who were joined by 100 men under Lubbe, to oppose him. French, on the morning of the 15th, after a day’s rest, swept this little force aside by one abrupt and vigorous stroke, which has become famous as the “Klip Drift Charge.” A mountain of error has been heaped upon this event. Let us examine the circumstances.
French, on the night of the 14th, had been joined, thanks to some splendid forced marching, by the sixth Infantry division and by most of Hannay’s brigade of Mounted Infantry—that is to say, by about 6,000 Infantry, 20 guns, and 1,500 mounted men—a force in itself numerically superior to the whole of the main body now remaining with Cronje. With the Cavalry division added there were now at Klip Drift some 13,000 men and sixty-two guns. Cronje’s communications with the east were definitely severed, the point of severance was held in force, and French was free for his independent spring on Kimberley. As it happened, Cronje on the same afternoon, dimly alarmed, had moved his headquarters and main laager a little east, so that it actually lay only six and a half miles west of Klip Drift, though the Cavalry, in spite of a day’s rest, were too tired for the reconnaissance necessary to discover this fact. If the fact had been discovered, it would have shed a curious light on the proposal to relieve Kimberley.
However, the immediate problem was to open the road for French to that town. Nine hundred Boers (with 100 of Lubbe’s men reckoned in) and two guns faced the large force at Klip Drift. They were disposed in an arc, concave from the British point of view, occupying two converging ridges, between which ran an expanse of open ground about a mile in width at the narrowest point, and gently rising to a “Nek.” Both valley and Nek were good galloping ground, without wire or obstacles of any kind. Very few Boers were on the Nek—perhaps a hundred; the majority were on the two ridges. Instead of clearing them out in the manner usual at this period, by a slow preliminary assault, French resolved to rush his whole division through the valley and over the Nek, under cover of Artillery fire.
It was a sensible resolve, promptly made and admirably executed. At the moment when French formed it he was about a mile distant from the Modder and about two miles from the Nek. His division, in column of brigade masses, had been checked by the fire of the two Boer guns posted on the western or left-hand ridge, about 3,000 yards away, and by rifle-fire from the nearest part of the eastern ridge, about 1,500 yards away. All seven batteries of Horse Artillery, supported by two batteries of the Infantry division and two naval guns—fifty-six guns in all—had opened on the two ridges and the devoted pair of Boer guns, and had temporary silenced the latter. It was now that French ordered the charge, and while it lasted, all but two horse batteries, which were kept in reserve, continued to bombard the Boer positions. Gordon’s brigade, less two squadrons, which were engaged on the flanks, led the way, deployed in extended order—eight yards between files, twenty yards between front and rear rank—pace, fourteen miles an hour. Broadwood’s brigade came next, 800 yards behind, and the other two brigades (one of Cavalry, the other of mounted riflemen) followed, though exactly at what interval and in what formation we are not told precisely. But I think we may assume that the fully deployed charge was made only by Gordon’s brigade, and that, at any rate, this was enough to secure the object in view.[[24]]
It must be clearly understood that the objective of the charge was the lightly-held Nek, to reach which the division had to run the gauntlet of the flank fire from the two converging ridges. All went well. As the official account says: “The squadrons of the leading brigade came at once under a shower of bullets, both from front and flanks, yet few fell. The extended formation, the pace of the charge, and thick clouds of dust, puzzled the burghers, while the supporting fire of the batteries shook their aim.” The Nek was reached and won, the burghers who held it fled, only a few remaining to “be struck down or made prisoners.” (The Times History says about a score were “speared or made prisoners.”) Their comrades on the flank ridges appear to have ridden off before the charge was well over. With only fifteen casualties, the whole division and its seven horse batteries passed the danger-point, and went on that same day to Kimberley. Ferreira and the investing force beat an immediate retreat, and the town was relieved.
Such was the charge at Klip Drift. What can we learn from it? In the first place, let us try to grasp the realities that lie behind conventional phraseology. The movement was not a “charge” in the commonest sense of the word, as applied either to Cavalry, Infantry, or any other troops. Though offensive in character, it was not even in absolute strictness an attack; for upon the Nek, which was the objective of the movement, there was nothing worth the attack of a division. Least of all, as the Times History truly points out, was it a “Cavalry charge” in the sense of a shock charge with the steel weapon, for there was nothing substantial upon which to exert shock. This was perfectly realized by French, who was intentionally taking the line of least resistance, in accordance with his primary object, which was to get to Kimberley, not to defeat these Boers. With that end in view, he ran the gauntlet of fire, pierced the Boer line, and proceeded. There was no possibility or intention of producing shock, for the leading brigade charged with files eight yards apart, a formation which excludes anything approaching shock. Nor had the result anything to do with the steel weapon: necessarily not, for shock is the only real raison d’être of the steel weapon. The threat of any weapon would have served to drive the handful of Boers from the Nek in the face of such a deluge of horsemen. Their actual losses were as insignificant as our own. There was no pursuit of any part of the Boer force, for, as the Official Historian dryly remarks, “The British troopers, riding seventeen stone, and mounted on weak and blown horses, had no chance of catching an enemy riding fourteen stone on fresh animals.” That should surely give cause for reflection. This was only the fourth day out from Ramdam: it had been preceded by a day’s rest, and this was the first operation of the morning. Difficulties apart, in order to have converted the movement into such an attack as would have constituted a test of weapons, it would have been necessary for French either to pursue as best he could, or to use the position gained in order to turn upon Cronje’s main laager, which now lay defenceless only six miles to his rear, or even upon the rear of Cronje’s combatant force at Magersfontein. But, even if he had known that Cronje’s transport was so near, his orders were explicit—to relieve Kimberley instantly. By an ironical coincidence, at this very moment De Wet was raiding the main army’s transport at Waterval.
The direct result of neglecting the Boers who were driven away from Klip Drift was that a number of them returned shortly after the repulse, and took up an entrenched position north of the sixth division, where they curtailed the reconnaissances of our Mounted Infantry, and enabled Cronje’s main force to march across our front during a bright moonlight night.
As far as weapons are concerned, the whole interest of the day centres in the rifle—the Boer rifle. For the first time in the war a large body of our mounted troops had deliberately entered and penetrated a fire-zone on horseback. That was the new fact. How had they done it? What were the conditions? What light is thrown on the age-old physical problem of vulnerability and mobility as modified by the modern magazine rifle? These are the questions of really serious interest to students of mounted action. It must be admitted that Klip Drift by itself does not afford much foundation for argument. With every Boer rifle on the field reckoned as an effective factor, the disparity in the size of the forces engaged was so abnormal as to preclude far-reaching conclusions. Of course, every Boer rifle on the field was not effective. All the 900 burghers present cannot have been in the immediate firing-line, and the firing-line by no means wholly commanded the masses of moving horsemen. Unfortunately, none of the accounts are precise on these important points—volume of fire and range. One can make only rough inferences from a comparison of narratives and maps.
The official map represents the enemy’s arc-shaped firing-line as covering five miles of ground. The Times History makes it nearer seven; while the German Official Historian calls it two and a half. At any rate, it was a very thin, widely extended skirmishing-line, a part of which must have been out of range of the charge. I should imagine that half of the men on the western or left-hand ridge, which ran at right angles to the line of our advance, could not have fired an effective shot at the Cavalry. With the eastern or right-hand ridge it was different. This was the more strongly held, and ran parallel to the line of our advance; but here, too, the average range must have been great, for the Boers (as on the western ridge) lined the summit, not the slopes, and (according to the official map) only the northerly half of the ridge directly overlooked the narrow part of the valley, or, rather, the exit from the amphitheatre. What was the width of this valley or amphitheatre? Again we are left in doubt. The contours of the official map represent it roughly as diminishing from three miles to one and a half; the narrative says that the Nek—that is, the narrowest point—was from 1,200 to 1,500 yards broad. No estimate is anywhere given of the average range and volume of the flank fire from the two converging ridges. One thing only is certain, that the direct frontal fire—that is, from the Nek—was insignificant. So few were the Boers at this point that the official map does not mark them at all.
Out of these scanty and conflicting data we may perhaps conclude that, allowing for the frontal extension of the Cavalry and for the position of the Boers on the summits of the ridges, the range was at no point less than 1,100 yards, and averaged about 1,300 from first to last, while the number of rifles brought into more or less effective play for a few minutes may be conjectured at 500 or 600. The ranges were long, therefore, and the rifles few, in consideration of the short time allowed for their use.
The next point to discover is: What were the physical and moral conditions under which the Boer fire was delivered? Let us note three main circumstances, all normal in character, but—in two cases, at any rate—abnormal in degree.
1. Artillery Fire.—Bombardment by fifty-six guns, although it appears to have caused little or no loss to the Boer riflemen, must have rendered accurate and steady shooting almost impossible. The German historian quotes a Boer present as saying that “the fire from the English guns was such that we were scarcely able to shoot at all at the advancing Cavalry.”
2. Dust.—This may be regarded as a normal circumstance, rightly to be counted on by any leader of horse who plans a mounted movement under fire. In later stages of the war the Boers used to fire the grass for a similar purpose.
3. Surprise.—This, everywhere and always, is the soul of offensive mounted action. It baulks the aim and daunts the spirit of the defence. French, by sure and rapid insight, obtained a tactical surprise here, and gained his object. But surprise by an approximately equal force is one thing, and surprise supported by the numbers at French’s command another. Most of the Boers present seem to have taken to their horses precipitately before the charge was over—and no wonder! The first brigade was backed by three others; these were backed by a division of Infantry and guns and a quantity of Mounted Infantry. Of the presence of this large force the Boers were perfectly aware. In giving way before the charge, they can scarcely be convicted of the “demoralization” with which some writers charge them.
At Klip Drift, then, the conditions were abnormally favourable to the offence, and when we are seeking evidence concerning the effect of modern rifle-fire upon mounted troops in rapid movement, we must be careful to have these conditions in mind. Still, the facts are there, to be noted: complete success of the horsemen, practically no loss. If Klip Drift stood alone, we should at least be justified in assuming that, under certain circumstances, a large body of troops on horseback, boldly and skilfully led, could face rifle-fire with impunity. But Klip Drift does not stand alone. It is only one—and by no means the most interesting—of a great number of episodes illustrating the same problem, and proving that, under far less favourable conditions—whether of numbers, ground, dust, or surprise, and without support from Artillery—mounted men not only can pass a fire-zone unscathed, but make genuine destructive assaults upon riflemen and guns. But—and upon this reservation hangs the whole thesis I am upholding—the mounted men who do these things must be mounted riflemen, trained to rely on rifle and horse combined, and purged of all leanings towards shock. Otherwise they will not get their opportunities, or, if they accidentally get them, will not be able to use them.
This revolution in mounted tactics was not to come from the Cavalry. It should have come from them. With the exception of our raw Mounted Infantry, the Boer Police, and the small permanent corps maintained by the South African Colonies, they were the only professional mounted troops in the field of war. In them alone lay the tradition of the mounted charge in any shape or form. They alone had, in fact, put the mounted charge into practice. Theories apart, they alone were endowed by years of training with the drill and discipline requisite for that orderly deployment and swift united movement which were exhibited at Klip Drift, and which are the essential characteristics of any charge, under fire or not under fire, by whomsoever made, with whatsoever weapon, and for whatsoever purpose. Unique as the conditions were at Klip Drift, it seems strange that the true lesson did not enter the minds of French and the other Cavalry officers present. They cannot have imagined that shock had anything to do with success. The widely extended formation deliberately adopted was not peculiar to Cavalry, nor was speed peculiar to Cavalry: both were the natural attributes of all mounted troops. They must have realized, one would have thought, that the rifle was dominating the battle-field, causing those extended formations on both sides, preventing shock, and—because it was united with the horse—enabling the enemy to get away, alarmed, but without pursuit or appreciable loss, and ready to return shortly afterwards and to put up a good fight on the following day, again against superior numbers.
The bewildering paradox is that at bottom they did realize these things, though they did not reach the point of drawing the logical inference. Otherwise it is impossible to explain either Cavalry action up to this point or the general impression prevalent at the time of this charge, that it was an extraordinarily perilous and daring performance. Why perilous and daring if the Cavalry, with their steel weapon, are superior to mounted riflemen? If these Boer mounted riflemen had been represented by an equal or even a much greater number of Continental Cavalry, armed with short carbines like our own Cavalry, and relying mainly on the sword, would the performance have been then considered extraordinarily perilous and daring?
Questions of this sort ought, I submit, to expose to any unprejudiced mind the fallacies underlying the arme blanche theory. But what does the old school say? Let us turn to the German official critic’s remarks on Klip Drift, remembering the praise which has been showered upon his work, and that it is Germany which, even at this hour, inspires our Cavalry ideas. I quote the paragraph in full, as an example of the workings of the Cavalry mind and of its blindness to realities:
“This charge of French’s Cavalry division was one of the most remarkable phenomena of the war; it was the first and last occasion during the entire campaign that Infantry was attacked by so large a body of Cavalry, and its staggering success shows that, in future wars, the charge of great masses of Cavalry will be by no means a hopeless undertaking, even against troops armed with modern rifles, although it must not be forgotten that there is a difference between charging strong Infantry in front and breaking through small and isolated groups of skirmishers.”[[25]]
It will be seen that the writer’s method of evading the true moral is to call the Boers “Infantry.” In other words, he shuts his eyes to the whole point at issue. The Boers were not Infantry. They were mounted riflemen corresponding to German Cavalry, but with many added functions, and possessing the offensive and defensive power of Infantry. They had reached the field on horses—it might well have been that they could not have reached it in time without horses—they were acting in defence, dismounted, against crushing odds; but their horses were not far behind them, available for retreat, vulnerable also to attack. They left the field safely on these horses, and a number of them soon returned on these same horses to fulfil the vitally important function of masking the flank march of their own main body. Meanwhile, few as they were, they had compelled the Cavalry to conform to conditions imposed by the rifle and to take the line of least, not of most, resistance. If they had been German Cavalry of that date, trained primarily for shock, with poor firearms and little practice in skirmishing, they would not, in the first place, have had the confidence to take up the extended position which these men took up, unsupported and facing an army. And if they had taken it up, they could not possibly have rendered even a direct frontal attack, however conducted, in any degree dangerous except to Cavalry of exactly their own stamp. If, on the other hand, they had been Infantry, nothing but a miracle could have saved them from complete destruction without any charging at all. The most indifferent operations on their rear and flanks, either by our Cavalry or Mounted Infantry or Colonials, would have sufficed to pin them to their ground, while the Infantry, six times their strength, disposed of them. But, of course, the whole supposition is visionary. If they had been Infantry, they would not have been there at all.
In any case, had they been either Infantry or Cavalry, no critic would permit himself to speak of the “staggering success” of the day’s operations. But what becomes of sanity when that unfashionable type, the mounted rifleman, is in question, particularly if he is an “irregular”? Let the reader only take the trouble to substitute the words “mounted riflemen” for the word “Infantry” wherever it occurs in the German paragraph, and note the disastrous effect upon the Cavalry theories of the writer. It is like finding the key-word to a cipher.
But I may be misleading the reader by taking advantage of the German writer’s unconsciously ambiguous use of the word “Cavalry.” To him, as to all Germans, that word means mounted troops whose distinguishing feature is a steel weapon and the capacity for shock. As I have already explained, French’s troops were not acting as “Cavalry” in this sense. If they had been, there might be some ground for the tameness and caution of the German inference—namely, that in future wars such charges will be “by no means a hopeless undertaking”; an inference further qualified by the remark (perfectly true) that this was only a case of “breaking through small and isolated groups of skirmishers,” by a whole division, be it remembered. Surely a most damaging admission for an upholder of shock! We may wonder what the critic would have thought if he had stopped to the end of the war, and had seen the situation at Klip Drift reversed—800 Boers making a direct frontal charge upon three thousand stationary troops and several batteries of guns, and coming within measurable distance of success.
Such is Cavalry comment on Cavalry action. It is typical and authoritative, or I should not spend so much space on it. Mr. Goldman[[26]] speaks of the “madness” of the charge “according to all military rules,” of the “climax of daring” which prompted it, and of the justification it gave to “the advocates of bold Cavalry action.” Note the implied syllogism: Cavalry carry the arme blanche; this was a successful charge by Cavalry; therefore the arme blanche is justified. This is not to misinterpret Mr. Goldman, for in a special appendix devoted to proving the superiority of Cavalry over mounted riflemen, and under the heading “Shock Action,” he expressly instances this charge as testimony. The “Official History” is scarcely less misleading.[[27]] Without any instructional analysis of the physical and moral factors, it describes the charge as the most “brilliant stroke of the whole war.” Such indiscriminating extravagance of praise does a world of harm. The critic, in his hazy enthusiasm, mixes up two distinct aspects of the attack—its strategical and its tactical aspects. On the assumption, upon which French acted and was compelled to act, that Kimberley needed relief, and that it was worth while to wreck the Cavalry horses and neglect Cronje’s main force in order to effect this relief, he may truly be said to have carried out his strategical task brilliantly, even with allowance for the numbers under his control and for the co-operation of the Infantry. Tactically, too, upon the same assumption, he did the right thing promptly and well, and deserves all the higher credit because he was a pioneer in the experiment of subjecting horses to modern rifle-fire. But in a serious history uncoloured by the emotions of the day, to call the charge, regarded as a tactical feat, the most brilliant stroke in the war is an abuse of language which would not be tolerated for an instant if any other class of troops but Cavalry were in question. Judged by a reasonable standard of risks, numbers, and achievements, either set of combatants in any one of the bloody and stubborn fights at this date just beginning in Natal for the final relief of Ladysmith deserved more praise. Among mounted operations the attack at Bothaville (October, 1900), many other British attacks, and many Boer attacks, were more admirable.
What must follow logically from such exaggerated laudation? That it takes a division of Cavalry to pierce merely—not to roll up or shatter—a thin skirmishing line, and even then it is a brilliant feat. What, then, of future wars—Continental wars? At Klip Drift we can scarcely dissociate the leading brigade from the three following brigades. Practically the whole division was acting as a unit for one purpose. In the whole of the Crimean, Franco-Prussian, and Austro-Prussian Wars of the last century, there is not, so far as I am aware, a single instance of a division of Cavalry charging as one homogeneous unit. Rare were the charges of more than one regiment; rarer still those of more than one brigade.[[28]] In these wars large armies, approximately equal, were arrayed against one another. And the method was shock—exerted upon substantial bodies of men—true physical shock, for which mass cannot be too dense or coherence too close. Even if we cling to shock, and persuade ourselves that Klip Drift was an example of it, where are our standards?
What, we may ask lastly, is the explanation of all this confused reasoning, and the strange conclusions to which it leads? Nothing but the fascination of the arme blanche. While giving unstinted admiration to the brave men who faced unknown dangers so steadily and resolutely in this ride at Klip Drift, we must look here for the comparative failure of their branch of the service during the war. They had felt what the training-book calls the “magnetism of the charge,” the exhilaration of swift, victorious onset under fire—sensations which they had always been taught to associate solely with the steel weapon and solely with the arm of the service to which they were proud to belong—the Cavalry. The old tradition, somewhat shaken by months of bickering with firearms and for the most part on foot, seemed at last to have been triumphantly justified. It was an error. They mistook both the causes and the extent of the triumph, and remained in the old groove of thought, which this charge, properly construed, should have taught them to discard. In reality the best part of their tradition lived in all its pristine splendour; the rest was obsolete. Clinging to the obsolete, they missed the vital part.
From this time onwards they were to do much hard and good work, not, in the Cavalry sense, as Cavalry, save on a few insignificant occasions, but as mounted carbineers, and, in the last phase, as fully developed mounted riflemen. But their hearts were never wholly in it. There were arrières-pensées; vain longings for situations which obstinately refused to recur; a tendency to throw the blame on the horses, on the higher command, on anything but their own inability to read the signs of the times and vitalize their own traditions by recognizing the uselessness of the steel weapon and the predominance of the rifle.
CHAPTER VII
PAARDEBERG AND POPLAR GROVE
February to March, 1900.