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.