War and the Arme Blanche

by Erskine Childers

There need be no doubt as to the nature of the Boer retreat. The “Official History,” indeed, speaks of “panic” (p. 201), and De Wet, when he appeared on the scene, seems to have regarded the flight as a disgraceful surrender to unreasoning fear. But the evidence does not support this extreme view. De Wet was not present on the Boer left when the Cavalry made its appearance, and did not realize that retreat was imperative. The fact that every gun and waggon was eventually saved, and that no prisoners were taken, is inconsistent with the full meaning of the word “panic.” On the other hand, it is quite certain that the greater part of the Boer force was thoroughly demoralized, determined not to fight, and deaf to the entreaties and threats of Kruger, who met them on the Poplar Grove Road, and that it was only by the valour and self-sacrifice of a very small minority, spurred on by the fiery energy of De Wet, that a thin rear-guard was formed and maintained throughout the morning and afternoon. A resolute stroke would have broken down this flimsy screen, and turned what was already a defeat into a rout.

In the efforts that have been made to explain the ineffective action of the Cavalry, much stress is laid on the condition of the horses. But the irony of the matter is that weak tactics brought their own punishment, and produced far greater exhaustion in the horses than a policy of strong offence. At 8.30, Broadwood’s brigade, on the extreme right of the division, as it deployed on the Middelpunt ridge facing north, was only seven miles from the river. French, however, contracting his front, ordered Broadwood to close in westward. Immediately a party of Boers seized some farm-buildings which Broadwood evacuated, and began to enfilade our line. Broadwood was then sent back, with an additional brigade of Mounted Infantry and a battery, and it took these troops two hours (until 11.30) to dislodge the audacious Boer detachment. Broadwood now asked for permission to pursue immediately, but French allowed another hour to elapse.[^[31]] Then an advance to the river was begun, and even now such an advance offered great possibilities of success. But again De Wet interposed a screen which checked the whole division.

The principal opposition came from a group of only forty men (“Official History,” p. 202) at Bosch Kopjes, on our extreme right. Broadwood was sent back (about 2 p.m.) by a long détour to envelop this point, while the batteries and a brigade of Mounted Infantry attacked it in front. Two hours were spent in formally carrying the position. By this time (4 p.m.) all the commandos, with their guns and waggons, had escaped. A last rear-guard was driven in at 5 p.m. by the Cavalry brigades of Gordon and Porter. What the average distance covered by the division in the course of the day amounted to it is difficult to say, but Broadwood’s brigade, as the Times History points out, must certainly have covered at least forty miles, or nearly double the distance which would have sufficed originally to place it astride the Modder. The division had suffered some fifty casualties, and the loss of 213 horses. These were almost the only casualties to the army during the day.

What of the Infantry? Here the original idea, deeply implanted on the minds of all concerned, that the Cavalry would succeed at an early hour in placing itself directly in rear of the Boer centre, produced strange results. Nobody was prepared for a premature Boer flight, and few could take it in. It will be remembered that movements were to conform to the right, where the sixth division, acting in concert with the Cavalry, was to storm Seven Kopjes. The halt of the Cavalry at Kalkfontein caused a corresponding halt of the sixth division. Repeated messages from headquarters (based on French’s reports) could not persuade the divisional Commander that the position was untenanted. It was formally attacked and occupied near noon, four hours after its evacuation. Hesitation and delay were communicated all down the line, each brigade waiting for the next.

All this indicates an atmosphere, common to the whole army, of excessive caution. The Times Historian suggests that a more resolute advance on the part of the Infantry, and especially on the part of the sixth division, might have turned the scale in promoting more vigorous action by the Cavalry. No doubt it would have had this effect. But it is surely a very poor compliment to the Cavalry arm to suggest, as Mr. Goldman does, that it is not their business to push home an active pursuit unless the enemy’s retreat has been originally brought about by Infantry and guns. The fact is, of course, that the Cavalry controlled the course of events. They had been expressly entrusted with this duty from the first, and nothing could lighten the responsibility, least of all a premature flight on the part of the enemy. They alone were in touch with what was actually happening, and in them alone lay the power to infuse vitality into the action.

What are we to conclude? First, that French, apart altogether from the capacity of his men, was below his usual form on this day, otherwise he would have risked more and tried harder, even against his own judgment, for a more energetic officer never lived. Second, that his men, in training and armament, were unequal to their work, and that at the bottom of his heart he knew it. I speak with especial reference to the regular Cavalry. The half-trained Mounted Infantry who worked with them had been brought up to believe that they lacked that highest sort of offensive power which was held to reside in Cavalry. Who can fail to detect the paralyzing influence of the arme blanche at Poplar Grove? When I suggest that French himself must have felt it, I only make the plain inference from his message to Roberts at 8 a.m. Who were these “riflemen” whose protective action forbade a direct pursuit, mounted or dismounted? Cavalry under another name, performing one of the elementary functions of Cavalry—the shielding of a retreat. Assuredly, if the steel weapon had any merit at all, then was the time to show it. Where is the “future war” against a white race, in which, all the circumstances considered, better opportunities are going to present themselves? No such war can be conceived unless, indeed, accepting the reductio ad absurdum in its entirety, we reckon arme blanche training as a disadvantage, and count on meeting mounted troops destitute of the very qualities which enabled the scanty Boer rear-guard to stave off destruction from its main body.

The Official commentary upon Poplar Grove is not well-conceived. It is difficult to reconcile with the plain narrative of facts, which is evidently written by a different hand, and in lucidity suffers only from not being constructed with a view to the obvious conclusions and from the absence of a map showing times and movements. The map shows none of the original Boer positions on the south bank—only some arrows marked “Boers retreating.” The British dispositions are those at 11.30 a.m. As a guide to the action, the map is useless, and the Times map, though topographically less perfect, must be consulted. In the text there is no practical instruction—not a hint that there was anything wrong with the equipment, armament, or tactics of the Cavalry. Overlaid with irrelevant invectives against the British public for expecting too much of its troops, and with vague moralization on the psychology of the war, we find two definite propositions recurring: that the initial failure of the Cavalry to work round the enemy’s rear before the Boers took alarm necessarily and immediately involved the failure of the whole operation, and that the root-cause lay in the condition of the Cavalry horses, which is written of here and elsewhere as though it were a circumstance attributable to an “act of God” wholly out of control of the Cavalry themselves. The narrative itself refutes both propositions.[^[32]] They are unfair to everybody concerned—to Lord Roberts in particular, to the Infantry, to the Cavalry themselves, and to French. It is difficult to believe that brave men find any satisfaction in hearing themselves defended in this fashion. That is the vice of worshipping a fetish. A purely technical question is converted into a question personal to a branch of the service. And he who attacks the fetish is forced to risk the odious imputation of attacking persons and regiments.

I allude with some reluctance to Mr. Goldman’s commentary on Poplar Grove. His enthusiasm for the fetish, always in excess of his discretion, here leads him into confusions and contradictions which, to an unbiassed mind, effectually destroy the case he is endeavouring to build up. His narrative, unintentionally, is not always accurate. At page 132 he represents French, soon after 7.30 a.m., when he first saw the Boer retreat, as “straining every nerve to overtake” a disorganised enemy only three miles ahead, but “crippled by broken-down animals,” failing “to bring his brigades up in time to throw them on the close ranks of the enemy.” No such scene took place. French, as his own messages and the known facts show, refrained from this sort of direct pursuit on the express ground that the enemy’s skirmishers were too strong. In any case, the suggestion is untenable. The Boer retreat was regulated by the speed of their transport. The horses, unquestionably, were in bad condition, but to paint them as too “crippled” to overtake waggons, is not only exaggerated but inconsistent with what followed. To do Mr. Goldman justice, it is also inconsistent with his own subsequent commentary; for on page 137 he restates the facts, without any criticism, but correctly.

Then he proceeds. Admitting that the occasion was one for the Cavalry arm to “turn a defeat into a rout, and capture guns and waggons,” he nevertheless fathers on French (without any authority that I can discover) the idea that such action should rightly be preceded by the enemy’s defeat at the hands of Infantry and guns. Then, combating the suggestion that the Cavalry should have charged through the enemy’s screen at Middelpunt, as they charged at Klip Drift, he reminds us that the Klip Drift charge was “mainly through flank-fire, while here the Boers were in front,” and a charge must have meant “certain destruction and probable annihilation.” After reading the Official and Times narratives, one can afford to smile at this hysterical exaggeration, but that is a small matter. What does this comment, as a whole, imply? Once more, a crushing condemnation of the steel weapon. The Boers were just as much “Cavalry,” in the broad sense of armed horsemen, as French’s troops themselves. Can a frontal charge never be made by Cavalry, in the narrow sense, upon mounted riflemen? Here, if ever, was the opportunity. It is the old reductio ad absurdum—an unconscious but unreserved admission that the rifle dictates mounted tactics, not the steel. For, of course, Mr. Goldman means by “charge” a charge with the steel weapon. No other charge is recognized by him, and I hope the reader will note the tardy but instructive sidelight on the Klip Drift episode, where, as I showed, the steel weapon was not in question at all.

Still, Mr. Goldman is always candid, and, in spite of his hypothesis of “certain destruction,” we find him admitting in the next breath that French was unduly delayed by a small number of audacious skirmishers. Immediately after he is qualifying this admission by attributing failure mainly to the condition of the horses. Finally, he concludes that “failure was clearly attributable, not in any degree to defects in executive operations on the field, but to the details of the plan as a whole not having been evolved in the first instance with sufficient preciseness of calculation.” Of all lessons to be drawn from Poplar Grove this is the least helpful, and, if only Mr. Goldman knew it, the most damaging to the arm whose interests he has so warmly and genuinely at heart. Of all arms in the service it least becomes the Cavalry to complain of lack of precision in a Commander-in-Chief’s calculations. Their mobility invests them with the duty and privilege of correcting and turning to advantage errors in calculation, especially when the error arises in the first instance from an overestimate of the strength and morale of the enemy.