In ordinary circumstances this summary would open the book, but any account of the part played by a British Cavalry regiment in the late war must of necessity have some bearing upon the larger question of the part likely to be played by the mounted arm in any wars of the future; and just now this question is of special interest, for it has been freely asserted that recent changes in military conditions, notably the vast increase in the size of armies and the development of the aeroplane, have made Cavalry an obsolete and useless arm; and it is important for us to know whether they have done so, or are likely to do so. Therefore it has been thought desirable to give at the beginning a brief review of the history of Cavalry before this war, and at the close a few remarks upon the lessons of the war with regard to the value of the arm under present conditions.
Perhaps the services of the Thirteenth Hussars will not lose in interest if considered to some exten/spat from this point of view.
CHAPTER II.
CAVALRY BEFORE THE GREAT WAR.
For thousands of years the horse has been the companion of man in war.
It is significant that when Job gives us his wonderful description of the strong things of earth and sea and air, he speaks of the horse in this connection, as rejoicing in the sound of the trumpet, and smelling the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. “He goeth out to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not dismayed; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the flashing spear and the javelin. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage.” And in many passages of the Bible, in poetry and in narrative, we have mention of the chariot and the horseman.
Representations of them are to be found in the carvings and tablets of long-vanished dynasties and nations. To take a single instance, they are shown in Assyrian carvings dating nearly a thousand years before Christ, which can be seen now in the British Museum.
Apparently the chariot came into the field earlier than the horseman usually so called, and the first use of the horse in war was to take up to the front in chariots warriors who got down to fight on foot, as the Greek chiefs did in the siege of Troy. But ere long Scythians or other nomads learned to mount the horse himself, and then began that close conjunction and sympathy between man and horse which made the two almost one creature, the Centaur of the fable.
The subject has been touched by many writers. There is perhaps no need to consider here the uses and gradual disappearance of the war-chariot. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that long before the historical age the armed hosts of the great Eastern Empires were composed in part of mounted men, who marched, and often fought, on horseback. The chariots and the people attached to them may have been the first “Cavalry”; but the word as used in this book refers to mounted men only—riders,—and riders who did some part at least of their fighting from the backs of horses.
If the use of mounted men in war began in the East, to which Western nations owe so much, including even their religion, it soon extended to Europe. In the first conflict between East and West on a large scale of which we have any real knowledge, nearly five hundred years before Christ, the Persian invaders of Greece found that the Greeks had little Cavalry to oppose to the thousands of horsemen whom they brought with them. The men of Athens and Sparta fought on foot at Marathon and Thermopylæ. Even at Mount Cithæron, where Masistius in his golden cuirass charged and died, the Greek army was an army of footmen. Nevertheless there were some horsemen in Greece even then, especially on the plains of Thessaly; and the frieze of the Parthenon, of not much later date, shows helmeted Greek soldiers riding spirited horses. The horses are small, apparently not more than thirteen or at most fourteen hands, and are ridden barebacked, but they are evidently war horses. Then we have Xenophon’s well-known treatise on Cavalry, a thoroughly practical work, which must have been written in the first half of the next century; and after that the organisation of the Greek Cavalry is fairly well known.
It was Alexander the Great who first showed what horsemen could do in war if properly trained and led. Until his time Cavalry seem to have fought mostly in loose swarms, rather as skirmishers and bowmen than as solid squadrons using the weight of the horse itself to overthrow and destroy bodies of footmen. He saw the value of “shock tactics,” and taught his Cavalry to use them, so that when he invaded Persia in 334 B.C. the famous horsemen of Persia went down again and again before his fiery onsets. They had themselves, according to Herodotus, some notion of charging in squadron on the battlefield, but they had never seen Cavalry used in mass, and neither they nor the Persian foot could stand against it.