I have carried the reader of this volume through a very Wonderland of paradox. Let him collect the threads of one more paradox in our own domestic history.
In 1899, deaf to history and its most brilliant English exponent, Colonel Henderson, our Cavalry went to war equipped and trained like the present French Cavalry.
They and the nation suffered accordingly. After the war, Lord Roberts embodied in a preface to the “Cavalry Training” Manual of 1904 the ripe experience, not only of the South African War, but of a long life spent in military service. He inculcated reliance on the rifle as the principal weapon for all purposes of the Cavalry soldier. Two years later, although Manchuria had confirmed his words in every particular, the injunction was forgotten, and our Cavalry were sitting at the feet of a German writer who had nothing to tell them about the rifle which they had not already learnt by costly war experience, and who was addressing, not them, but a Cavalry ignorant of the ABC of modern fire-tactics. But, as a matter of theory, not of experience, he clung to shock, expounding it in terms irreconcilable with fire. Our Manual of 1904 was superseded by the Manual of 1907, with the directions of Lord Roberts expunged and Bernhardi’s self-contradictory counsels embodied. In the August number of the Revue des deux Mondes of 1908 many people were astonished to find set forth in full by General de Negrier, as a model to the “dreaming” French Cavalry, Lord Roberts’s preface to our Manual of 1904. That Manual is cancelled. So that to find in its living, authoritative form the verdict of our greatest living soldier, derived from facts, not from theory, on a technical and tactical question of vital importance, the student has to search the files of a French review.
CHAPTER XV
REFORM
I.—Study.
“Trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
I venture to address my first recommendation to professional soldiers, volunteer soldiers, and civilians alike. Study your own great war. Shut your ears to those who say it is abnormal. Study it with an open mind, forming your own opinion, and remembering that this is your experience.
With the facts and conditions of your own modern war thoroughly in your head, re-study other wars, including the last great war in Manchuria. Note the progress made during the last fifty years in the precision, range, and smokelessness of the firearm, compared with the unimprovable nature of the steel weapon. Ask yourself if the professional Cavalries in these various wars were alive to the lesson of this revolution, and whether their successors, judged by their own writings, are alive now to the lesson. And do not, I beseech, when you hear it said (with truth) that the “principles of war” never change, be misled into imagining that the steel weapon for horsemen is one of the “principles of war.”
Picture past wars, such as the Franco-German War, by the light of the knowledge actually then in existence, but unused, as to the possibilities of the rifle in the hands of mounted men. Reckon the opportunities lost, and ask yourself if the successes gained by the steel might not have been gained equally well even in those days by first-class mounted riflemen.
Remember all the while in constructing out of precedents this “case law” that there is a “common law” behind, a physical principle, which is independent in the last resort of all psychological and historical associations. Follow it out, as I have often suggested in terms of vulnerability and mobility, constantly using the foot-riflemen as an analogy. But realize that the bayonet, which is used as the climax of a fire-fight on foot, is not the analogue of the sword or lance, which are used from horse-back only, on a system impossible to associate with fire. Superimpose the moral and psychological factors—in one word, the spirit—bearing in mind that the best weapon will promote the best spirit, and inspire the most fear in the enemy. Lastly, take training, and reflect whether it be possible for a hybrid type to attain perfection in two highly exacting and, under modern conditions, profoundly antagonistic methods of fighting. Weigh the terrible cost of not reaching perfection, the humiliation of being impotent even against inferior Infantry, and doubly impotent against superior mounted riflemen.