A habit of enlisting for campaigns has given me some desultory training with British irregular and auxiliary forces—Horse, Foot and Guns. Without the slightest pretensions as a soldier I have enjoyed, on active service, watching the military practice in horsemastership in its amusing contrasts with the methods of frontier life.
It seems to me that the British and especially the Irish horse-breeding, and the national amusements for mounted men—hawking, stag-hunting, fox-hunting, steeplechases, flat races, and polo—for example, have given to British mounted troops the basis of a horsemastership which has been gratefully copied by civilized armies and disabled the mobility of all alike. The cult of the pleasure horse has ousted the old sober methods of war horsemanship. This may in part account for the chasing of the Spaniards and Portuguese by their lively American colonists, of the British by the Argentines, Americans and Afghans, of the French by the Mexicans, of the Germans by the Damaras, of the Italians by the peoples of Erythrea and Cyrenaica, and of the Russians by the Japanese. Three hundred thousand of my countrymen spent three-and-a-half years in persuading fifty-five thousand Boers to accept full compensation for their losses. This episode filled with unholy joy the nations which had not lately been whipped by mere outsiders because they had prudently abstained from war. One does not recall, however, so very many recent campaigns in which barbaric horsemanship has been put to shame and flight by any regular cavalry.
So, if my adventure in uncouth criticism bears incidentally upon British methods, its motive is merely to discover why civilized mounted troops are not quite a success in dealing with irregulars of the open range. If Army methods are really the best, they should have an unbroken chronicle of victory. If range methods are really the best, the military art of horsemanship needs thinking over by every civilized horseman who loves his country.
If the defeat of civilized armies is not explained by their horsemastership, it is not less in need of explanation.
Armies
I hold it as an article of faith that the British Army is not excelled, man for man, by any in Europe, but does greatly surpass all others in its power of adapting itself to new conditions, maintaining its powers at great distances from its base, and perfecting in its troops the highest ideals of manhood. And yet in all armies men are taught to obey before they think, and, thought being secondary to discipline, is rather apt to lag. The discipline which creates a mob into a weapon tends to disable men in army trades other than that of fighting, so that the departmental or thinking departments are less efficient than the executive. Character is trained to a supreme degree, and the military courts are cleaner, quicker and more direct than the civil in doing justice. Yet intellect takes its chance of surviving discipline. In a world which is managed by men too old to be receptive of new thought, the person with original ideas is looked upon as a public enemy, and the Army is always certain he must be an awful bounder. The aeroplane, for example, was more important as a military idea than anything since the invention of gunpowder, but the inventors and manufacturers in several countries went bankrupt while they waited in vain for orders from. the armies. The German War Office was the first to come to their rescue.
It is only by such reasoning as this that one understands why mounted soldiers are given breeches with buckskin straps to help them to grip a saddle specially treated with beeswax to make it slippery. Constructive thought would remove the strapping to make the breeches slippery as the saddle; or, if a grip is wanted would retain the strapping, and roughen the saddle seat and panels by using the leather inside out, or replacing the surface with buckskin.
The hunting-seat
Early in the eighteenth century British racing and fox-hunting became fully organized sports which needed bent-leg riding and a slippery, light saddle. The British Army was not officered by professional soldiers, but by sportsmen who bought commissions. The training of officers was in the hunting field, and the old straight leg, weight-distributing war saddle gave place to something really up-to-date. This was the military saddle, too cumbersome for running or jumping, too small for weight-distribution, and therefore useless either for sport or war.