The Thirteenth Hussars in the Great War

by H. Mortimer Durand

In the impetuous rapidity of all his movements, especially perhaps in the closeness and vigour of his pursuits, Alexander was in fact a model leader of horse, and his conquests were largely due to his Cavalry, which he not only wielded with dash and power against the Cavalry of the enemy, but kept thoroughly in hand even after a successful charge, and threw into the scale wherever they might be most required to help his foot soldiers.

Ever since those days, for more than twenty centuries, the history of war on land has been the history of a struggle for pre-eminence between horsemen and footmen. The rivalry has been complicated by the invention of Artillery, and of late years by the development of fighting in the air; but it has gone on unceasingly, and can hardly be said to have come to an end even now. In the course of it there has often been a tendency to lose sight of the fact that combined effort for one purpose by all arms, and not rivalry between them, is the secret of success in war. But the long dispute and its vicissitudes form an interesting study.

By the Romans the effective use of Cavalry was for a long time not well understood. Though they had their “Equites” from early days, they got to rely more and more for serious fighting upon their wonderful legions, and it was not until the Punic Wars that they learned their lesson. Hannibal, like Alexander, was a born leader of horse, and when a hundred years after Alexander’s death he invaded Italy by way of the Alps, he at once taught Western Europe what Alexander had taught the Greeks and Persians, that in the existing condition of military armament, Cavalry well trained and boldly used in masses could do great things on the battlefield. The successive victories which he gained in Italy, with very inferior numbers, over the proud and confident troops of Rome, were due in large measure to his skilful use of his horsemen. At Cannæ, for example, his wild Numidian light horse, riding without saddle or reins, and his heavier squadrons from Spain and the North, began by driving off the weak Roman Cavalry opposed to them, and then, wheeling inwards upon the rear of the advancing legions, enclosed them in a circle of steel from which there was no escape. Fifty thousand of them are said to have fallen, and for a time Rome seemed to be, perhaps really was, at his mercy. Every one knows the story of his long struggle against hopeless odds, and of his final defeat. When at last he was conquered the superiority in horsemen had passed to the Romans, and he was overwhelmed and crushed by his own methods. He had taught his enemies to fight.[1]

As time went on they forgot in a measure the lesson they had learnt from him, and they suffered some heavy reverses in consequence—for example, in their wars with the Parthians which stopped their expansion eastward; but happily such enemies were rare, and gradually the legions won for Rome the empire of the Western world. It lasted as long as the spirit and discipline of their incomparable Infantry remained unimpaired.

In the closing centuries of Imperial Rome the bulk of her enemies marched against her on horseback, and her own armies came to be composed more and more of Cavalry. Her last great battle was against Attila the Hun, whose people lived on their horses. It was a victory; but it was a Cavalry victory, and won by the help of the Goths. Her Infantry had long since failed her, and the Imperial City had been herself in the hands of the Barbarians. Her fall had been due to the woeful corruption and degeneration of the legions, not to any inherent superiority of the horseman over the footman; but the fact remains that at this time Cavalry was everywhere regarded as the more important arm of the two.

There followed a long period during which the predominance of the horseman grew more and more undisputed. With the collapse of Rome scientific warfare on a large scale became a lost art, and in the disorderly welter of the Dark Ages the fighting power of the footman, which depends so much upon organisation and discipline, sank lower and lower. To deal it a final blow came, a thousand years or so after Christ, the institution of Chivalry, which to a considerable extent undermined national feeling and exalted in its place the individual prowess of the Knight. Having its origin in a praiseworthy attempt to set up a higher standard of right and wrong, to resist cruelty and injustice, to honour woman as she should be honoured, and to make courage and courtesy the aim of men, it did much good, and has left to succeeding ages some noble aspirations and examples. Even now there is surely no better thing one can say of a man than that he is chivalrous—chevaleresque—like a knight of old. The horseman had given his name to a new social order and a splendid ideal. In practice Chivalry was not always what it should have been, but the glamour of it lies upon all our poetry and literature. Even the free-lance or the moss-trooper, unprincipled ruffian as he often was, remains to our eyes a picturesque figure. There is still a gleam on his helmet and spear that time cannot take away. The war-horse and his rider had reached in those days the climax of their power and reputation.

Then, very gradually, came a change in the opposite direction. The knights and their retainers had been practically the only fighting men who counted, and were accustomed to ride down with ease and contempt any footmen who ventured to stand against them. Bows and arrows and axes and knives seemed of little avail against the spearman with his almost impenetrable armour and his thundering steed. As Colonel Maude puts it, “the knight in full armour had borne about the same relation to the infantry as an ironclad nowadays bears to a fleet of Chinese junks.” But little by little it began to be recognised, first it is said in the Crusades, when the knights had to take or defend fortresses and otherwise fight on foot, that there were operations in war for which the heavily armoured horseman was not well fitted. Bodies of footmen began to be raised again for such purposes, and even to be brought into the open field as archers or cross-bowmen for use in broken ground. They often suffered horribly, but now and then they gained some successes, and as time went on they developed greater skill and confidence. Eventually, at Crécy and Poictiers and Agincourt, the English archers, with their cloth-yard shafts and their bristling defence of pointed stakes, won astonishing victories over the Chivalry of France, and proved to Europe that the horseman was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The lesson had very nearly been taught by the English three hundred years earlier, on the field of Hastings; but the time had not then come. Lured from their stockades, the footmen had been cut to pieces, and the French Cavalry had conquered England. At Crécy the English footmen turned the tables. And elsewhere, about the same period, the Swiss Infantry won almost equal honour.

The Cavalry of Europe nevertheless fought hard for their old pre-eminence, and it was long before they could be brought to see that they would never again be the undisputed masters in battle. But it was a lesson they had to learn. As time went on they found their charges repelled by serried squares of pikemen, from which came showers of arrows and cross-bolts; and later the invention of firearms weighted the scale still further against them. The only offensive weapons of the horsemen were the weight of their horses and the lance or sword; and if the horses failed to break the rows of eighteen-foot pikes, the arme blanche could do nothing. At last, after many attempts by the Cavalry to meet these new conditions, by using firearms themselves and other devices, it came to be generally recognised that against confident and steady infantry armed with the pike, deliberate frontal assault by horsemen was practically hopeless, and that for the future Cavalry must depend to some extent upon surprise and stratagem to give them victory. The defence had in some measure triumphed over the attack, and the essentially offensive arm had lost its pride of place.

This is not to say that for the future Cavalry was to be useless on the battlefield—far from it. The range of the unwieldy arquebus, or of the smooth-bore musket which followed it, was not so great as to keep Cavalry out of striking distance; and their speed, if they were led with decision and dash, would yet give them many opportunities of riding down the footmen. They could no longer do so whenever they pleased, but they were still a formidable part of the fighting line.

This was shown very clearly in our own Civil War. The armies of both King and Parliament were largely composed of horsemen, and in fight after fight it was they who were most conspicuous. Finally, the emergence of a great leader of Cavalry turned the scale in favour of the Roundheads. Cromwell’s Ironsides, thoroughly trained, and used as in old days the Cavalry of Alexander and Hannibal had been used, not only with dash but with coolness and self-control, proved too strong for the Royalists, cavaliers though they were. Unlike Prince Rupert, Cromwell kept his horsemen firmly in hand, throwing them into the fight wherever they were most required, and the result was to make him master of England.