War and the Arme Blanche

by Erskine Childers

In the existing state of affairs it is difficult to defend the terms of this message. All the troops had not been warned. There was no proper provision for a supreme concerted assault. Stephenson, who was Hannay’s senior, received no message till much later. The Mounted Infantry were much scattered, and the spirit of breathless urgency conveyed by the message was inconsistent with the delay involved in co-ordinating their efforts with those of Stephenson’s brigade, which was two miles from Hannay on the opposite side of the Modder.

Hannay’s mood at the moment was one of despairing exasperation, after several previous failures to act up to what he considered the unreasonable expectations of his Chief. He now sent some hasty messages to outlying detachments of Mounted Infantry, and without wasting another moment, collected fifty or sixty of the men with him, and, longing for death, rode straight for the laager. He and many others were shot down, and the little charge flickered out, though a few men actually got into the laager. Nevertheless, even this tiny mounted effort had disproportionately great results, for under its cover the main firing-line dashed forward, and a part reached a good position within 350 yards of the Boer rifles. From this we can judge of the effects which might have attended a coherent, well-planned charge on a substantial scale. It was the old question of mobility versus vulnerability, illustrated in a very pointed way. The Infantryman, a small but a slow and steady target; the horseman, a large but a rapid and unsteady target, necessitating the spasmodic resighting of rifles on the part of the defence, and, by his very impetus, exercising a coercive moral effect upon their minds. When to use the aggressive power residing in the horse and rifle combined must be determined in every particular case by local circumstances. No rules can be laid down. But few can doubt that on this occasion, apart from executive methods, Kitchener’s instinct was sound. “Gallop up if necessary, and fire into the laager.” Substitute some more general word for “laager,” and there you have embodied in a few pregnant syllables the true spirit of the modern mounted charge. Nobody on the field would have dreamed of giving the same order to Cavalry, because of the manifest absurdity of demanding this kind of work from troops whose charging efficiency was supposed to depend on remaining in the saddle from first to last and wielding a steel weapon. These limitations, if adhered to, especially with the logical corollary of shock formation, albeit there was nothing to shock, would have rendered the charge a fiasco. If not adhered to, the Cavalry would have been in no better position than unskilled and ill-armed mounted riflemen. That, in fact, is exactly what they were, technically, plus the soldierly virtues and acquirements common to all professional troops of their race. But the fact was not yet realized.

Neither was the converse realized, except intuitively by Kitchener, that under modern conditions the real power to charge resides in well-armed mounted riflemen, not in the troops conventionally known as Cavalry. Circumstances had conspired to obscure this truth. The very name “Mounted Infantry” was a source of error, and the corps so labelled was a young corps, without a charging tradition, and only at the beginning of its education in the efficient use of the horse.

2. The intervention, first, of Commandant Steyn, then of Christian de Wet, with small mounted forces, coming from outside the battle area.

Steyn, with two guns and the Bethlehem commando “a few hundred” strong (I can get no more specific details), represented the first of the reinforcements which had been summoned away from Ladysmith to assist in succouring Cronje. He came up at 9 a.m., occupied a hill in rear of our eastern attack, delayed that attack for some two hours, and retained his position during the day. How far he had ridden before entering the action I do not know, but certainly a long distance.

Christian de Wet with a small force had, like French, been working independently since the operations began. On the 15th, with 350 men, he had attacked the army’s supply column at Waterval, and destroyed or captured a third of it. On the 18th, having heard of Cronje’s peril, he rode north from Koffyfontein to the Paardeberg battle-field, a distance of thirty miles (just equal to French’s ride from Kimberley to the Drifts), with 600 men and 2 guns, and at 5 p.m., by a rapid coup de main, seized the cardinal point in our enveloping line—Kitchener’s Kopje—overlooking the rear of our central attack. The hill, with its neighbour Stinkfontein, also seized by De Wet, formed part of a chain, running north and south, of which Steyn already held the northern part. Firing in concert upon the batteries and troops below them, the two leaders developed a counter-attack, which not only put an immediate end to the British assaults upon the laager, but by the confusion which it caused, brought about the abandonment at nightfall of hardly-won positions. Whether, under any circumstances, Kitchener could have induced the troops to rush the laager that evening is very doubtful, but it is agreed on all hands that the immediate cause of failure was De Wet’s masterly intervention at the right place and the right moment. The indirect after-effects were still more important. Though a disinclination to incur further heavy losses was, no doubt, the determining factor in the decision of Lord Roberts not to renew the assault, the marked change for the worse in the tactical situation must have influenced his mind considerably. And if we follow the chain of causation backward, we shall find, in the heavy blow struck at his transport three days earlier by the same master-hand, an additional reason for postponing what the strategical situation so urgently needed—a rapid and uninterrupted advance on Bloemfontein, before Boer reinforcements had time to arrive from other quarters of the theatre of war. The Cavalry, for their part, were on starvation rations for two or three days after the 18th, owing to the loss of forage-waggons.

Now let the reader compare the work done by French and De Wet respectively in this third week of February, with a special view to the controversy which this book deals with, remembering the relative size of the armies for which each worked and the relative independent strength with which each operated. The analogy in regard to work done is in many respects close and obvious, the disparity in force equally striking. Both men alike were actuated by the Cavalry spirit in its truly wide sense of the mounted spirit: both were dashing leaders of Horse, linked in sentiment by the horse. But what could De Wet have done if he, an uneducated farmer, and his men, a rude militia, unaccustomed to drill together except at rare intervals, had been burdened with the disqualifications under which the Cavalry laboured?

There are no abnormalities here which in the least degree discount the plain lesson for future wars. But, as usual, the official critics, in discussing the Paardeberg campaign, resolutely ignore its plainest lesson. Our own Official Historian pays ample tribute to De Wet’s skill and dash, but refrains from any comparison of methods and armaments which might raise the thorny issue. The German historian (vol. i., p. 187) introduces De Wet with the observation that he “arrived from the south” with 500 men. How very simple it sounds to arrive from the south! Later on (p. 227), the Boer General is criticized for not having done more, the suggestion apparently being that he might have brought about the rout, or partial rout, of the British forces on the south side of the Modder, and have extricated Cronje there and then. I need not investigate the grounds of this hypothesis, which I take to be far-fetched, to say the least. Certainly, if De Wet had produced these results, he would have performed one of the most extraordinary feats in the history of war. My point is that the suggestion is complacently advanced without a word of explanation, express or implied, as to why such an exacting standard should be applied to Boer troops and such a relatively mild standard to British troops. If the critic were to try and equalize his standards, he would find himself writing of the previous day’s operations, that French “arrived from the west” with 1,500 men, and blocked Cronje’s advance, but that if he had shown proper resolution, he should have routed Cronje there and then. Or, to take an example from the day of the battle itself: Gordon’s brigade of Cavalry, something over 800 strong and 12 guns, arrived from Kimberley at about the same time as De Wet from Koffyfontein, and did useful work in seizing the Koodoos Heights to the north-east of the battle-field; but why not suggest that it should have intervened with crushing effect in the main battle, or that French himself, who, with Broadwood’s brigade and the Carbineers, also performed useful work in watching Cronje’s line of retreat, should have assisted actively in the assault?

To those who imagine that the relative merits of Cavalry and the pure type of mounted riflemen have been judicially weighed, or even consciously contrasted, by Germans, and that we can safely fortify ourselves with their opinion in favour of the retention of the steel as the superior weapon, I commend the study of these chapters on the Kimberley and Paardeberg operations, and especially of the passage dealing in detail with the work of the British Cavalry (pp. 163–165, 176–178). Abounding in wise and true criticism, containing scarcely a sentence which can be challenged in any direct, positive way, they constitute a perfect masterpiece in the art of begging the one really fundamental question. What is the use of demonstrating that Roberts’s strategy from the outset bore the character rather of an attempt to manœuvre Cronje away from Kimberley than of an effort to defeat him where he stood, and that it was mainly through Cronje’s own errors that his envelopment was accomplished, if no clue is given as to the underlying motives of the British General’s cautious policy? Political motives apart, the dominating military fact was the extremely formidable character of the Boers as mounted riflemen—a known, proved fact, which rightly and naturally exercised a profound influence on Roberts’s plans. Without a recognition of this fact the whole operations are unintelligible. It is impossible to understand why it was necessary to employ an Army Corps whose mounted troops alone exceeded the enemy’s main force, and to use most of these mounted troops not tactically but strategically. Nor can we understand why the operations ended so successfully as they did, unless we realize that of the two constituents of the Boer fighting strength, the horse and the rifle, Cronje, encumbered by his precious waggons and by his helpless non-combatants, persisted in relying almost wholly on the rifle, to the neglect of the horse. On the other hand, a recognition of that dominant military fact explains most of the minor shortcomings and errors upon which the German critic comments adversely. One fault only it does not explain, the imperfect system of command, but that was far worse in the Boer army than in our own. It explains why Methuen’s division was not used for a containing attack upon the Magersfontein trenches, so as to pin down Cronje at an earlier stage; why the whole of the Cavalry were used for the raid on Kimberley, to the neglect of other important duties; and it throws into vivid light the detailed criticisms passed upon the Cavalry themselves. As to these latter criticisms, one can only admire the unerring dexterity with which the critic skates over the thinnest of thin ice in avoiding even the most distant allusion to the distinguishing features of Cavalry as the standard European arm. On armament and equipment he is silent. No one could gather that the Cavalry carried steel weapons and were equipped and trained primarily for shock. In commenting on the destruction of horse-flesh (p. 176), he notices several preventable causes, but associates none with the conventional systems of peace training. He is severe on the failure in reconnaissance, and attributes it principally to the effect of the modern long-range rifle in keeping scouts and patrols at a distance, but he does not suggest that the Cavalry carbine was an inadequate weapon, or that the lack of individual skill and initiative was connected in any way with the traditional training of Cavalry.

On the fire-action of Cavalry, as at the Drifts on February 17, he would do well to study his compatriot Bernhardi. Like our own Official Historian, he regards such action as an interesting and important modern discovery, and descants sapiently on the additional value it will give to Cavalry in future wars. No writer on any other arm but Cavalry would dare to show such ignorance. As though, nearly forty years earlier and five years before his own great war against the French, the American Cavalry leaders had not in scores of similar combats proved the value of fire-action! Surely he must have heard of Sheridan’s brilliant interception of Lee’s army in April, 1865?