Nevertheless, two of the officers who were present do succeed in concluding that the war proves the supreme value of the steel weapon; and if my readers wish to gauge the tyranny of a blind faith over the minds of accomplished practical men, whose Reports on any other point are lucid and convincing, let him read, in close connection with Count Wrangel’s two contradictory explanations of the absence of shock, the remarks on the Japanese Cavalry by General Sir C. J. Burnett and Colonel W. H. Birkbeck (vol. ii., pp. 542–545). It would be a comedy, if such comedies did not have tragic consequences. Colonel Birkbeck seeks an interview with General Akiyama. That vigorous employer of aggressive fire-action states that his Cavalry learnt to draw their “greatest confidence” from the firearm. Wincing, however, under a reminder from Colonel Birkbeck of the religious “cult of the sword” in Japan, he pleads defensive necessities against the enormous numerical strength of the Russians, who, however, were "incapable of forcing an issue at close quarters"! If they had been Cavalry" truly trained as such," besides being enormously superior, then—but the General is too clever to court the reductio ad absurdum—then “the case would have been different.” General Burnett’s comment I quoted on page 347, and to complete the comedy, Colonel Birkbeck, in a separate report (No. 10), has conjecturally attributed the inaction of the 25,000 Russian Cavalry at the battle of Mukden to their lack of training for shock! In his interview with the more tactful Colonel McClernand, of the United States army, Akiyama speaks the plain, unvarnished truth.
Let the reader now take a bird’s-eye view of the historical chain of authoritative comment on the performances of Cavalry.
Here is Von Moltke reporting to the King of Prussia, after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866:
“Our Cavalry failed, perhaps not so much in actual capacity as in self-confidence. All its initiative had been destroyed at manœuvres ... and it therefore shirked bold, independent action, and kept far in the rear, and as much as possible out of sight,” etc. (“Taktisch-Strategische-Aufsätze”).
General French, in his Introduction to Bernhardi (p. xxvii), actually quotes this view as a warning to our Cavalry of the present day against “ultra-caution” with the steel in the presence of Infantry fire; quotes it, I repeat, in the beginning of a volume whose central thesis is the futility of the steel in opposition to fire.
It may be added that an “Austrian officer of high rank,” who is quoted in the French translation of the Austrian Official History of that same war of 1866, attributed what he calls the “success” of the Prussian Cavalry to their reliance on the support of Infantry—that is, on fire. His compatriot Wrangel, forty years later, says the same of the Japanese Cavalry.
Bernhardi reminds his countrymen that in the war of 1870 their own Cavalry, and in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 the Russian Cavalry, only obtained the poor success they did obtain because “not even approximately equal Cavalry” opposed them, criticizes their performances severely, and passionately advocates perfection in the use of the rifle.
We come to the South African War, where the firearm inspires the best achievements of Cavalry and the steel weapon is discarded, and where we find even the most convinced upholders of the arme blanche forced to construct an elaborate and often self-contradictory scheme of explanation for the failure of the British Cavalry—qua Cavalry—in that campaign.
The Japanese Cavalry only approaches other arms in so far as it uses fire well. And we end with Kuropatkin, who has condemned the Russian Cavalry in the war of 1877, and who, in the war of 1904–5, almost in the identical words used by Von Moltke, deplores the lack of confidence and dash in the Cavalry, and regards them as having failed.
Unanimity. Censure and excuses always. Of what other class of soldiers is this invariable complaint made? And what is the common element in all these censured Cavalries? Inefficiency in fire-action. Of the wars prior to the invention of the deadly modern rifle, which is the war where Cavalry are least censured and most praised? The American Civil War, earlier than any of those I have named, where the Cavalries learnt reliance on the firearm, though their example passed unnoticed in Europe. After that invention, what type do we find winning its way to success in South Africa? The mounted rifleman. Which weapon succeeds in Manchuria? The firearm.