I.—The Transition.
From the capture of Bloemfontein onwards, the nomenclature of mounted troops in South Africa, except as a clue to their race, origin, and professional or unprofessional character, ceases to possess practical significance. There emerges a single military type—the mounted rifleman—the man, that is, who can ride and shoot. Whether in reconnaissance, tactics, or strategy, in defence or offence, in any combination from a patrol to a commando, squadron, brigade, or division, or as a single scout; be he Boer or Briton, the better he can ride, and the better he can shoot, the better soldier he is.
In the British Army this unity of type soon becomes definitely recognized in practice. Textbook regulations as to the duties appropriate to different categories of mounted troops vanish like smoke under the irresistible logic of experience. There soon ceases to be any practical field distinction between regular Cavalry and regular Mounted Infantry. Both alike must do the same duties, alike relying on the union of firearm and the horse, and judged invariably by the same inexorable and unvarying tests. So with the numerous other categories of mounted corps, Home and Colonial, which from this time forward begin to exceed in number the horsemen drawn from professional sources. Wide distinctions, indeed, are constantly visible, and are constantly recognized between the capacities of different corps according to their country of origin, social class, length of experience, and physical and moral characteristics, and, above all, according to the stamp of officer they possess. But these are distinctions of degree, not of kind. The ideal type never varies—that of the mounted rifleman.
But the practical recognition of an ideal is one thing, and its whole-hearted assimilation another. For the bulk of the mounted troops, given the will, the way was now plain. They had nothing positively to unlearn if they had an infinite amount to learn. The regular Mounted Infantry, indeed, and to a certain extent other classes, had still to rid their minds of an idea that they were a tactical appanage of Cavalry, but the possession of a firearm superior to that of Cavalry, and the absence of any other weapon to confuse their tactical ideas, made the path easy. The regular Cavalry, on the other hand, had still something very substantial to unlearn, and that something was the immemorial tradition of their branch of the service, the theory and practice of the arme blanche. It would be idle to underrate the magnitude of the requisite revolution, which primarily was one of thought, rather than of action. Still, five months of fighting had taught a lesson which could scarcely be mistaken, a lesson which at this period of the war would have amply justified, if it did not render imperative, the systematic and universal re-arming of the Cavalry with the magazine rifle, and the return of all steel weapons to store. These changes could not have been imposed upon the Cavalry from without, they must have proceeded from within by the initiative of Cavalry leaders. French alone, perhaps, had the authority and prestige to secure their general adoption at this time; but in French the revolution of thought had not taken place, indeed, never wholly took place, even at a later period, when the necessary changes had been carried through. His very strength and vitality tend, as always, to obscure the issue. He continues to do much valuable and responsible work, and is always the keenest of the keen for ambitious enterprises. But he cannot impress the true Cavalry stamp upon the British operations, in the broadest sense of the word “Cavalry.” Big strategical conceptions are useless without high combative capacity in the troops employed, and that treasured tradition of the arm had been weakened because it was not founded on the right weapon.
Without any strong new lead from above, conservatism naturally exerted its full sway over the minds of the elder Brigadiers and regimental officers. It was among some of the younger men, where habit was weaker and enthusiasm stronger, that the new régime was warmly and sincerely welcomed. These men were now finding their most fruitful sphere in the leadership of irregular corps, where there was no tradition to combat, and no weapon but the rifle.
The Cavalry, in spite of their unsuitable armament, continued to conform to the new type—no other course was possible—but as a body they conformed reluctantly and with a lack of imaginative zeal, thereby gravely imperilling their chance of guiding and inspiring progressive mounted action. In common with all other corps they improved greatly as time went on, and always, as befitted their standing in the professional army, set a good example of the prime soldierly virtues. Their staff work, too, was a model to the rest of the army. But when we consider the unique initial advantage they possessed in building on a broad and solid foundation of drill, discipline, and esprit de corps, we are bound to admit that the results are disappointing.
The need for vigorous mounted action, always urgent, was becoming daily more urgent. With the relief of Ladysmith and the capture of Bloemfontein, the march of conquest definitely begins. With it the elements of strength and weakness in the Boer character and organization begin to assume clearer shape. Two contrary streams of tendency declare themselves: on the one hand, a progressive decline in corporate strength; on the other, new and marked symptoms of individual vitality, erratic, spasmodic, ephemeral, but of incalculable significance in determining the nature and length of the struggle, the character of the conquest, and the future political relations of the two belligerent races.
Of these two streams of tendency, the former, now and for six months to come, was the stronger and more rapid. It was hastened naturally by the overwhelming numerical superiority of the invaders at every threatened point. What to defend? where concentrate? was the distracted cry. Under this strain the old national fabric crumbled visibly, and although, by a process which was scarcely perceptible to the superficial view, the corrupt and diseased elements of the old body politic perished with it, the immediate military results were fatal. It became increasingly difficult for the Boers to maintain organized forces of any size in the field. Only one so considerable even as Cronje’s at Magersfontein ever appeared again. The opposition to our central march up the railway to Pretoria, to Buller’s advance through Natal, and to the other parallel movements, was made with miserably small forces. In the centre, before Pretoria was reached, the Free Staters had parted from their comrades of the sister State, and taken to local warfare. In June the Transvaalers rallied well at the battle of Diamond Hill outside Pretoria; then there was a reaction; then a revival, ending, after a creditable display of resistance along the line of the Delagoa Railway, in the sudden and apparently compete dissolution of the organized burgher forces on the Portuguese border in mid-September.
Such, in a few words, is the main course of events. But in the vast and thinly-peopled rural areas which constitute the great bulk of the republican territories periodical disturbances delay the main British advance. Amid the general wreck one Boer institution survives in its integrity, the territorial military system, based on the obligation of every individual citizen to serve in arms when called upon as a member of his ward and commando. Centralized forces melt, only to reappear as local bands inspired by a local patriotism, and summoned into sudden activity at the call of some trusted leader. Through the chequered drama flits the restless figure of Christian de Wet, the first Boer leader to teach his countrymen the real meaning and potency of aggressive mobility. Behind him is the sombre, passionate Steyn, and together these two men are the incarnation of that stubborn national purpose which often seemed to sleep, but which never died. All their efforts, nevertheless, are apparently unavailing. Wherever bands, by accretion or coalition, exceed a certain size, they succumb to the law of decay. The great machine of invasion and occupation rolls slowly but irresistibly forward.
Plainly, each fresh exhibition of weakness, and, a fortiori, each fresh spasm of activity, on the part of the defence, should have been an incentive to redoubled efforts on the part of the attack. I do not refer so much to our national efforts in the shape of reinforcements, horses, and the material of war; these flowed uninterruptedly and in enormous volume from the home country and the Empire at large. I refer to field efforts, and here again not so much to the higher strategy, which was uniformly worthy of the great soldier who conceived and directed it, as to that tactical fire and energy which alone could give us really substantial victories over the men opposed to us, instead of such limited successes as resulted in the occupation of towns, positions, and railways, but left the heart and will of the foe daunted, indeed, and depressed, but unsubdued. These crushing blows we never succeeded in attaining. Paardeberg, the nearest approach to such a victory, was robbed by the nine days’ investment of much of its moral value. Prinsloo’s surrender in the Brandwater basin in July of the same year produced as many prisoners as Paardeberg, but was marred by the escape of De Wet and Steyn, with the most resolute elements of the Boer forces present. Reviewing the combats of the period, we see one pattern of action recurring again and again with monotonous regularity, although with innumerable variations of local circumstance and personal performance. A very inferior Boer force defends an immensely extensive position; there are proportionately wide turning movements by our mounted troops, which fall short in vigour and completeness; frontal attacks by our Infantry; an action more or less prolonged; a Boer retreat covered by a small, but extraordinarily efficient, rear-guard; an ineffectual pursuit. The position is won, but the enemy has suffered physically very little. A time comes later when positions count for nothing, and men count for everything. Then earlier shortcomings bear bitter fruit.
If I were to enter deeply into the psychological causes of this instinctive relaxation of effort—for it was not a conscious process traceable in orders and despatches—I should travel far beyond the limits of my subject. In absolute strictness the psychology of the war is not relevant to that subject. If the student were to observe an ideal sense of mental proportion, distinguishing between the ardour inspired by a particular weapon and the ardour inspired by racial and national ambitions, there would be no need to stray beyond the purely technical aspects of the subject with which I am dealing. I have recognized from the beginning, however, that there are three objections to taking this course: first, that the line in question is often exceedingly difficult to draw; second, that in tracing and illustrating the development of mounted tactics some reference to the deeper moral causes at work tends greatly to elucidation; third, and most decisive reason, that one of the most subtle and insidious methods of discrediting the rifle and investing the arme blanche with a kind of posthumous distinction, has been to smother plain technical issues under hazy moralization. “Thought waves” are in fashion. Now, let us insist by all means on the old Napoleonic axiom that the moral forces in war count in the proportion of three to one to the physical; but when we see one weapon palpably outmatched by another let us recognize the fact as a fact. When we call the war “peculiar,” from the peculiar moral factors underlying it, let us not erase its technical lessons from our memory on the same ground. I remarked an example of this perverse tendency in the official comments on Poplar Grove, but Mr. Goldman is its most outspoken and sincere exponent. He has honestly convinced himself that the Cavalry never had any real chance of grappling with the enemy, and, consequently, no chance of proving the pre-eminent value of the arme blanche.[[42]] The picture he suggests is one of the Boers continually on the run, and running so fast that the exhausted troopers can never catch them. Their oxen, it would seem, run equally fast, or else take the most unsportsmanlike course of beginning to retreat prematurely. These are rear-guard actions, it is true, but these do not count. In some mysterious way they “make pursuit all but impracticable.” The Boers, in short, who “had no Cavalry in the proper and technical sense of the word,” by their aggravating pusillanimity did not supply the “primary conditions” for the “discharge (that is, on our side) of Cavalry duties.” That we had an enormous preponderance of force, and that it is the business of Cavalry to take advantage both of numerical and moral weakness in the enemy, Mr. Goldman does not recognize. He altogether ignores, too, that counter-current of offensive Boer activity which, throughout the war, supplies us with the most interesting and instructive examples of mounted tactics. But for the moment I need dwell no longer on this version of a war which lasted for two and a half years, cost us a heavy list of casualties and prisoners, and not a few very sad disasters. It is an unconscious insult, not merely to the army as a whole, but to the Cavalry, who did much excellent work as mounted riflemen, and to the great body of irregular mounted troops, whose existence Mr. Goldman appears to forget, and the best of whom surpassed the Cavalry in aggressive action. That a serious writer can commit to print, without qualification or reservation, the statement that the Boers “invariably beat a hasty retreat when confronted by Cavalry that could fight on horseback with carbine, lance, and sabre,” shows the fantastic lengths to which the arme blanche bias can carry those who submit to it.
Faced, however, with the fact that such travesties are extant, a writer on the arme blanche is compelled to take at least a passing account of moral factors. I need not spend any more words in proving that there was, in fact, on our side a general mildness of effort. Nearly all critics have agreed upon the fact. What were the causes?
1. About the deepest of all there is no dispute. Long years of peace and civil prosperity had softened the national fibre. We were not only unprepared for war, but forgetful of the grim meaning of war. In a general reluctance to incur heavy losses the commanders only reflected the national and social sentiment behind them.
2. Unfamiliar with wars in general, we were blind, above all, to the meaning of this particular war, whose object was not only to defeat, but to conquer, annex, and absorb a free white race. Since we became a nation, we had never before attempted to achieve such an object, and we did not realize its inherent difficulties. Signs of weakness in the enemy encouraged the delusion that the war was an ordinary war, whose events were to be estimated by ordinary standards. Signs of strength were undervalued and misinterpreted. Lord Roberts, the soul of generosity and humanity, after the fall of Bloemfontein, initiates an exceedingly indulgent civil policy which defeats its own end. He is compelled as time goes on to pass from the extreme of indulgence to the extreme of severity. But in spite of this disagreeable necessity he is always inclined to believe—and the whole army shares the feeling—that a collapse is imminent, and that no absolutely supreme and sustained efforts are required to hasten the end and seal the definitive triumph.
And what sort of triumph? The philosophic historian will discern that momentous problem already formulating itself, not merely in the minds of statesmen, but, dimly and inarticulately, in the minds of the army, which embodied in an extraordinarily representative manner the civic instincts of the British race. Did we really in our hearts desire such crushing victories as would shatter the spirit of our opponents and lay the foundation for a racial ascendancy, as opposed to a racial fusion, in South Africa? The question becomes of absorbing practical interest in later phases of the war, when the antagonistic schools of thought find expression in two equally able and determined men. For the present it is only a matter of conjecture how far a latent instinct of fraternity with our foes and future fellow-citizens, now that Majuba was at last avenged by Paardeberg and Pieter’s Hill, reacted on the vigour with which hostilities were pressed.
3. A more simple and prosaic motive for caution was the very well-founded respect entertained for the military capacity of the Boers. The sense of some absolutely overwhelming necessity for decisive blows would, doubtless, have gone far to neutralize caution, but this conviction was not present. The reverses of the early months had left an impression both on the popular mind and on the leaders in the field which subsequent successes could not wholly obliterate. Fresh reverses, on a smaller scale, were soon to mar the onward progress of success. From this time forward every action, however feebly or strongly contested, shows the Boers still highly formidable. Until the actual débâcle on the Portuguese frontier, there are no panics. Retreats are orderly, transport and guns are preserved almost intact. However dispirited the majority, there invariably reappears that manful minority of stalwarts upon whose conduct, at one or another point, the difference between repulse and defeat hangs. Numbers, indeed, almost cease to count; quality is everything.
This resisting power, with its offensive counterpart, was derived, on its military side, solely from skill and audacity in practice of the mounted rifleman’s art. And here we return again to the solid ground of our inquiry. Giving their due weight and proportion to the broader moral factors which affected both sets of belligerents and, in our own army, all branches of the service alike, we can see our technical issue sharply and vividly defined in every phase and detail of hostilities.
Against a mounted enemy, even if his strategical mobility is conditioned by heavy transport, in the last resort it is always to vigorous mounted action that we must look both for the power to give effect to the attacks of Infantry and Artillery and for retaliation against those stinging little raids and counter-strokes which so often at critical times turned the scale in the higher Boer counsels. Foot-riflemen will never develop their full aggressive power against mounted riflemen unless they are conscious that their efforts will lead to a decisive issue through the correspondingly indispensable agency of mounted riflemen.