CHAPTER X[ToC]
His Belief in Cavalry
The Lessons of the Boer War—Cavalry v. Mounted Infantry—A Plea for the Lance—The Cavalry Spirit—Shock Tactics still Useful.
It does not necessarily follow that because a man is a great cavalry leader, he therefore has ideas on the subject of cavalry. To the popular mind cavalry suggests clouds of dust and a clatter of hoofs, the flashing of swords, followed by the crash and sound of an engagement. The man who would conduct this imagined spectacle satisfactorily would therefore be dependent rather on the timely uprush of the spirit than on the mechanical certainty of the mind. He would need to act by inspiration and impulse, rather than by cold thought. Quite obviously some other and less resplendent being would have to time the rise of his curtain in the theatre of war. He would be the last man whom one would figure, like Kipling's successful General, "worrying himself bald" over a map and compasses.
But the popular version does less than justice to the modern cavalry leader in general and to French in particular. We have seen him as a subaltern poring over his books before his colleagues were out of bed. We have seen him varying the monotony of War Office administration by solving problems in tactics. Indubitably he is a student: incidentally he is an innovator. This fact of mental duality raises him in a moment out of the ruck of mere cavalry experts—of both sorts. On the one hand he is not a competent machine working out other people's ideas in the field of battle: on the other he is no blundering theorist whose ideas crumple into ineffectual dust under the stress of actual warfare. He can carry out with the ardour of the soldier the schemes which he has formulated with the cold cunning of the strategist. It is difficult indeed to say in which field of cavalry work he more greatly excels—that of theory or practice. We shall see later that he possesses qualities altogether apart from those of the theoriser or the man of action. Suffice it now to glance at the astonishingly complete theory of cavalry on which his marvellous execution is founded.
One reaches the bedrock of French's curiously sane conception of war when one asks him to define war. In dealing with those gentlemen who tell us that the Boer War was fought under such abnormal conditions that it is useless as a ground-work for conclusions as to future wars, he uttered a memorable retort. "All wars are abnormal," he observed, "because there is no such thing as normal war."[16] There we have one of the axioms both of his theory and of his practice. There can be no fixed conditions, and so there can be no final theories as to the conduct of warfare. Theory is simply a means to an end. And the successful general is he who most ably adapts the general body of theory suitable for all cases to the particular campaign on which he is engaged.
A VEXED QUESTION
Broadly, however, French has very clearly defined what he considers to be the use and the abuse of cavalry. After the Boer War, as is well known, opinion on the subject of the future of the mounted arm was bitterly divided. There were those who saw in French's success a justification for the cavalrymen of the old school, armed cap à pie. There were others who, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, saw the end of their day approaching. The author of The Great Boer War says of the charge before Kimberley: "It appears to have been one of the very few occasions during the campaign when that obsolete and absurd weapon the sword was anything but a dead weight to its bearer." And again: "The war has been a cruel one for the cavalry.... It is difficult to say that cavalry, as cavalry, have justified their existence. In the opinion of many the tendency of the future will be to convert the whole forces into mounted infantry.... A little training in taking cover, leggings instead of boots, and a rifle instead of a carbine, would give us a formidable force of 20,000 men who could do all that our cavalry does, and a great deal more besides.... The lesson both of the South African and of the American Civil War is that the light horseman who is trained to fight on foot is the type of the future."[17] This is the opinion of a very competent civilian who deeply studied the South African campaign. But it is the opinion of a civilian.