All turns on the magical word "Cavalry," which derives its significance from the arme blanche. Those weapons give Cavalry their "proper rôle." If under stress of fire they "abandon" this rôle, they become Infantry; but they are worse off than Infantry, because they are embarrassed by their led horses, which present difficulties from which Infantry are free. The horse becomes a danger and an encumbrance, just as Sir John French tacitly assumes it to become, when he says that mounted riflemen always flee defenceless before good Cavalry, while Infantry show "tenacity and stiffness." No wonder, then, that Cavalrymen grow indignant at the criticism of their steel weapons. It is bad enough to be converted into a hybrid between good Cavalry and bad Infantry, but it is worse still to undergo a metamorphosis into a pure type of bad Infantry, that is, into mounted riflemen.
If we once grasp this point of view, we bring light into this tangled controversy, and we can bring into sharp contrast the rational point of view, as the facts of war demonstrate it. We perceive instantly the falsity of the antithesis between the weapon and the horse. The mounted rifleman is a foot rifleman plus a horse, and the horse is not an embarrassing encumbrance, but a source of enhanced power. It is the intrusion of the steel weapons, not the intrusion of the horses, which introduces "difficulties." Witness von Bernhardi's own scathing exposure of the German Regulations for combat with the steel.
Space forbids me to follow him far into his remarks upon his bugbear, the led horses. There are probably about 150,000 persons now living who, by war experience, know more than he does about this purely technical question; yet he spins feverish dreams about it out of his own brain, without a glance at the rich and varied material provided by three years of war in South Africa; without a glance at Manchuria, where the Japanese Cavalry converted themselves into excellent mounted riflemen; without a glance even at the American methods of 1861-1865, where the problems that worry him were successfully solved. As usual, he has no difficulty in exposing the absurdities of the Regulations, but his own comments and suggestions are sometimes even less admissible. Behind the incubus of the horse we perceive that additional incubus, the lance. He pictures the unhappy horse-holders wrestling ("a practical impossibility") with armfuls of lances, as the Regulations bid them (p. 137), and concludes that if you are to make these men guardians, not only of the horses, but of these precious but exacting impedimenta, it will not do to detail only one man out of four to act as horseholder. On the other hand, if you detach more, you weaken the firing line so much that the whole business becomes scarcely worth while. And yet, if you don't weaken the firing line, how are you to guard the led horses against attack from some other quarter? They, it appears, must have a complete firing line of their own. But, disregarding this necessity, the Regulations contemplate reinforcing the main firing-line from the horse-holders (p. 139), so making the armfuls of lances still bigger. And then what is to happen if, in a "real fight," the brigade wants to advance and the Brigadier is told it can't, because some of the horse-holders are fighting, and the lance-encumbered remnant cannot move? And so on. He seems, so far as I understand him, eventually to throw up in despair the problem of keeping the led horses "mobile," and to fall back on the plan of "immobility," a plan which he himself in several passages admits can be used only when there is no likelihood whatever of any sudden call upon the led horses either for advance or retreat. If the Regulations, as he says, are "not suitable for real war," neither is his counsel of despair. The chapter is quite enough to cure the most liberal-minded Cavalryman of his last lingering inclination towards fire-action, even though he is told that fire-action must be used in all but "exceptional cases." "Abandon my proper rôle for this?" he might answer. "No. My proper rôle is good enough for me, as it was good enough for Frederick the Great."
There is worse to come; but let me comment here upon the astounding fact that Sir John French should regard chapters like this as sound instruction for war. Our Cavalry profess, at any rate, to have now solved the lance-problem during fire-action by their latest method of carrying the lance. But that is a minor point. It is the ignorance of, and pessimism towards, fire-action, as disclosed in this and subsequent chapters, which ought chiefly to strike English readers. And all Sir John French has to say is that "we expose our ignorance and conceit" in accepting the teaching of our own war experience, and that our duty is to assimilate the best foreign customs.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] See "War and the Arme Blanche," Chapter XI.
THE FIGHT OF THE INDEPENDENT CAVALRY