Because French was a cavalryman, and because more than half the mounted troops engaged were regular Cavalry, it has often been too lightly assumed that the Colesberg operations proved the value of the training peculiar to Cavalry—that is, in the arme blanche. Mr. Goldman, for example, in the course of a contrast between the types of Cavalry and mounted riflemen, cites these operations as an example of the “successful use of Cavalry when properly employed.”[[19]]
Observe the confusion caused by nomenclature. The arme blanche was not and could not have been used, though the terrain was perfect for it.[[20]] I think I am right in saying that only on one occasion, the fight of January 3 near Maeder’s farm, was there any question of sabres, even in pursuit. The 10th Hussars and a squadron of Inniskilling Dragoons, with two horse batteries, were engaging a force under Piet de Wet, which had just failed in a surprise attack on an Infantry position. Suddenly the Boers lost heart, and bolted across the plain; the Cavalry followed in pursuit, but were checked by the fire of a small party who stopped to take cover in some rocky ground. By the time these men had been turned out their comrades were safe. This is a typical illustration of the weakness of Cavalry in pursuit.
The Cavalry, like the irregulars, acted throughout as mounted riflemen, and though, like all the troops engaged, they did well, they would have done much better if they had carried rifles instead of carbines, and had spent their professional life in practising rifle-tactics. In the same way the regular Mounted Infantry would have done better if in peace they had been regarded, not as a cross between Infantry and Cavalry, but as fully-fledged mounted troops, capable, with time and the proper education, of being of as much general practical utility as Cavalry. The 400 New Zealand Mounted Rifles, who formed the majority of the unprofessional mounted troops engaged, stood from the first on a footing of equality with the regulars, because they had nothing to unlearn, though, like everyone else, much to learn.
I must add three remarks upon the Colesberg operations:
1. Unlike the formal actions or battles we have hitherto been considering, these operations presented a multitude of minor tactical problems arising from the daily contact of small bodies of troops on a wide front. In all these small encounters down to those of patrols, the rifle, not the steel, governed tactics. If only those of our present Yeomanry officers who are asking for the sword, not so much for shock action on a big scale as for this very class of small encounters, would take the trouble to study the work of their own countrymen in such operations as those around Colesberg, they would, I believe, be converted to implicit faith in their rifles.
2. The operations, so far from being abnormal, bear a strong resemblance to the kind of work which, under our present system, Cavalry, unhelped by Infantry or mounted riflemen, will have to do in any European war, particularly during the initial stage of mobilization and concentration for a united advance. During this stage it is the duty of the Cavalry to form a screen, both protective and aggressive in character. This was exactly what French, with his composite force, did. Besides assisting to cover the rear of an existing force—Methuen’s—he was in the position of covering the front of a hitherto partially mobilized and unconcentrated army. At first most of the army he was screening was still in England, his and its primary base. Gradually it collected in force behind him, at the Cape Peninsula or secondary base, until it swelled into the force which marched under Roberts to Bloemfontein. That an ocean intervened between the primary and secondary bases does not affect the analogy. In the light of the Colesberg operations, how grotesque seems the theory of the great preliminary shock duel which, according to “Cavalry Training” and the German theorists, is to be sought by the rival Cavalry screens!
3. The “spirit” which actuated our operations around Colesberg was not the “Cavalry spirit,” which means essentially the spirit of fighting on horseback with a steel weapon. It was the spirit which should actuate all troops, but particularly mounted troops, simply because they possess horses—the spirit of aggressive mobility, backed by resource, stratagem, and dash. In French this spirit, not only now but throughout the war, was admirably exemplified, and we can only regret profoundly that it did not rest on a radical belief in the firearm as distinguished from the steel weapon, and that the Cavalry he led was not trained upon that principle.
4. That French’s personality as an able and vigorous officer was a decisive factor in the success of the Colesberg operations is proved by the narrative of other mounted work at the same period. The best mounted enterprise done by Methuen’s troops during the long halt at the Modder was Pilcher’s Sunnyside raid of January 1, 1900, by Queenslanders and Mounted Infantry. The Cavalry work, both in the reconnaissance of January 8, and at the Koedoesberg on February 7, was the reverse of vigorous.
The Relief of Kimberley.
We now approach the principal Cavalry achievements in the South African War. To explain their origin I must refer to the general military situation at the beginning of February, 1900. The only substantial change which had occurred in the Boer dispositions since their successes of mid-December, 1899, was the gradual reinforcement of the Colesberg force, which French had been containing, from a strength of 2,000 to 7,000; elsewhere they had stood in an attitude of passive defence. Cronje had sat in his trenches at Magersfontein facing Methuen at Modder River. The Stormberg force, facing Gatacre, had been almost inactive, and behind Cronje the sieges of Kimberley and Mafeking had been carried on with no great vigour. In Natal the siege of Ladysmith had been maintained with diminished energy and steadily diminishing numbers, while Louis Botha held the line of the Tugela against the repeated attacks in ever-increasing strength of Buller’s relieving force. At the beginning of February the third of these attacks, that by way of Vaal Krantz, had just failed.