War and the Arme Blanche

by Erskine Childers

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.