I come to the last of the triumvirate, General von Bernhardi himself. It is a relief. We begin to breathe fresh air after an atmosphere which, I believe the reader will agree with me, becomes sometimes almost unbearably close and enervating. When censure of the Commander-in-Chief, depreciation of a brave enemy, implied depreciation of our own mounted riflemen, complaints about ground, complaints about horses, complaints about anything and everything but the one thing which really merited complaint, when apology and insinuation are carried so far, we begin to long for something stimulating and straightforward, and in Bernhardi we get it. On his work I shall have to write more fully in the next chapter. At this moment I wish only to call attention to his view of the “peculiarity” of the Boer War. It is contained in half a dozen lines on page 56 of “Cavalry in Future Wars.” He has just been praising the Boer charges as having achieved “brilliant results,” in spite of “any kind of tactical training for this particular purpose.” (What a curious sidelight that latter remark throws on official views of "training"!) He adds:
“Certainly weapons and numbers have altered materially since the days of the American Civil War, and the experiences of South Africa, largely conditioned by the peculiar topographical conditions and the out-of-door habits and sporting instincts of the Boers, cannot be transferred to European circumstances without important modifications.”
That is all he explicitly says about the Boer War. But the reader will see at once that here is a totally different point of view from that of Mr. Goldman, whose thesis is that the Boers were not formidable enough to be fit adversaries for our Cavalry, that they would not “stand,” and that their great deficiency was lack of a steel weapon and shock power. The idea underlying Bernhardi’s vague words is much more akin to that contained in the passage quoted from Sir John French, and, of course, it is essentially the right idea. I pass by the “peculiar topographical conditions.” Without further elaboration, we need not take the words to mean in set terms that South Africa was less favourable for shock manœuvre than Europe. The kernel lies in the “outdoor habits and sporting instincts,” creating conditions which “cannot be transferred to European circumstances without important modification.” These words, read in connection with the “brilliant results” of the Boer charges, can only signify that town-bred Europeans cannot hope to imitate methods, excellent in themselves, but demanding outdoor habits and sporting instincts.
This idea, expressed in one shadowy form or another, of an element of superiority in the Boers, is very common; commoner, I think, on the whole than its antitype, the idea of inferiority, though I have more than once heard both propounded, unconsciously, in the same breath by the same person. But it is never in this country voiced authoritatively; and with good reason, for it shakes to its foundations the whole fabric of the shock system and opens up a line of thought which can end only in one way. Mr. Goldman does not even hint at it, except in connection with that strange faculty for fighting defensive rear-guard actions which he regards as quite outside the topic of Cavalry. General French, while implying that the Boers were formidable, is silent about the reason.
Let us face this shadowy argument for what it is worth. What does it mean? That we cannot train our Cavalry to become genuinely mobile mounted riflemen, with the rifle charge as their tactical climax instead of the shock charge, which is not a climax at all, but an isolated species of encounter in glaring conflict with real battle conditions? The contention, if it is really made, is absurd. If we cannot artificially create inbred instincts and habits so strong as those of the Boers, we have the advantage of moral and tactical discipline, acquired only too late by the Boers. We can work in the right direction on the magnificent material we have, and instead of imbuing the wrong spirit deliberately imbue the right spirit. We can teach our men to “fight up” to the charge and rely on one and the same weapon both for the process of “fighting up” and for the charge itself, when and where the actual mounted charge is necessary. The tactical form of the Boer and British rifle charge—that is, in successive lines and with wide intervals—was precisely the same as our own open-order steel charge as practised at Klip Drift and at the present moment. The crucial difference lay in spirit and object; the spirit leading up to the charge was that of the rifle, and the object was that of overcoming the enemy with the rifle, not necessarily in a mêlée unless by way of pursuit, but at decisive range.
Is saddle-fire an accomplishment our Cavalry cannot acquire—an accomplishment which at this very moment we inculcate for “picked men and scouts” of the Mounted Infantry, a force with not a quarter of the mounted training that the Cavalry receive? For professional troops it cannot be more difficult to acquire than skill with the steel weapon on horseback. That is an art which, as everybody knows, demands long and continuous drill and practice. Indeed, it must demand longer drill and practice, because true shock—that is, heavy impact—involves close, knee-to-knee formations, rigid, mechanical, symmetrical, not only difficult to attain in themselves, but exceedingly difficult to combine with the free and effective use of steel weapons. Obviously, neither saddle-fire nor the use of steel weapons can safely be enjoined in times of peace for volunteer troops like our Yeomanry, for example, who obtain at the most a fortnight’s continuous field training in the year.
I ask the reader seriously to follow out the train of thought suggested by those pregnant words “outdoor habits and sporting instincts.” Is it not common sense that these habits and instincts, fortified by drill and discipline, must be the very foundation of mounted success in war, and is not a system of tactics founded upon them likely to be a good system? Should it not be the aim of a highly-civilized industrial people to aim at approximating as far as possible to such a system? Or, taking as their starting-point indoor habits and urban instincts, are they to persist in working in the opposite direction? Was it not the possession of these habits and instincts by such a large number of Americans at the time of the Civil War that led to the brilliant achievements of Cavalry in that war, mainly through trained reliance on the firearm, imperfect weapon as it was? Was not our own possession of sporting and hunting aptitudes, embodied in Englishmen and Colonials alike, our very salvation in South Africa? Of course it was. Wherever these natural instincts were strong enough to burst the bonds of ancient tradition, there we obtained enterprising Cavalry leaders. The same instincts called into being many good leaders among Infantrymen, gunners, and sappers, and among ordinary civilians from every quarter of the Empire.
Do we not pride ourselves on this fact? Is it not a commonplace in every Englishman’s mouth that, hard and bitter as the struggle was, “no other nation”—and among other nations Germany is often instanced—could have engaged in it so successfully as ourselves? There is sound truth in the boast. But it is the emptiest and silliest of boasts if we do not recognize the meaning behind it, which is nothing but this—that we have a greater proportion of men in our Empire who possess those outdoor habits and sporting instincts which take shape in skilled mounted riflemen. And when we envisage a European war, are we to forget this boast and, ignoring not only our own priceless experience but our own innate capacities, revert to the antiquated European system?
If there are other arguments for “peculiarity,” I do not know them. But if I have carried my readers with me, they will agree that in this chapter and every other, in investigating and combating alleged peculiarities I have, in fact, been pursuing phantom arguments round the circumference of a vicious circle. Disguise it as we may, the real peculiarity of the Boer War was that the Boer horsemen did not carry steel weapons. European Cavalries do. Let us turn to Europe.