“War is a business and must be learned like any other profession.”—Napoleon.
The attributes which a cavalry officer of the rank of squadron leader and upwards may to advantage possess are so many as to defy enumeration; some of them really possessed in perfection are so rare and valuable that in war they may even counterbalance the fact that their owner is barely able to read or write.
It was not without reason that Napoleon said of Ney: “When a man is as brave as he is, he is worth his weight in diamonds.”
To cavalry officers of all others are the reflections of Von der Goltz applicable, when he says: “Restless activity on the part of the general is the first condition of connected and rapid action in war”; and then he details the weakening of troops exposed to hardships, “exertion, and privations of all kinds, fatiguing marches, and wet nights in bivouac, cheerfully endured for a short time, but not for months together. They damp martial ardour considerably. A few privileged natures escape the effect of such conditions, but not so the mass of men.”
To the officer it is well that it should be known that, as war goes on, he may expect to find himself weakening, but, as with any other disease, forewarned is forearmed.
It is a duty to his country for a cavalry officer in peace-time to take such exercise in the available sports of hunting, pig-sticking, polo, big-game shooting, and other exercises as will keep muscles and lungs in condition and training, and his nerves in order. The cavalry officer, and for that matter the general and staff officer, who seldom gets on a horse in peace-time, will not suddenly change his nature in war; on the contrary, the enforced exercise will knock him up. Long days in the saddle, and nights spent on the outpost line with an insufficiency of food, the constant strain of vigilance will tell on most men, in fact in some degree on all men. But the officer who knows beforehand that he may expect his initiative, firmness, zeal, and love for action to evaporate somewhat after some months or even weeks of campaigning will be on the look-out. He will school his mind and countenance in cheerfulness and lightheartedness before his subordinates:
Jog on, jog on, the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a;
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.
Winter’s Tale, iv. 3.
He will practise himself in firmly repressing all grumbling and cynicism, in assiduously performing all details of duty, and in constantly caring for the welfare of his men and horses. “Such independent persons,” says Emil Reich, “have long since learnt to stand adversity, to be, as the saying is, ‘good losers.’ This has given England her peculiar tone, her stamina, her power in adversity.”[75] With such all will go well, for war is the region of reality in which there is no place for shams; but woe betide the regiment where the senior officers set an example of cynicism, grumbling, neglect of duty, want of zeal; these faults become exaggerated in their subordinates till they result in the worst military crimes and in the disgrace of the regiment, by a state of indiscipline and neglect of duty which only the strongest measures can put right.[76]
Whatever the value of a senior officer of cavalry from the point of view of courage, horsemanship, resolution, and bodily fitness for a campaign, there are other points to which he should devote attention. Von Bernhardi (p. 288 of Cavalry in Future Wars) says: