German Influence on British Cavalry. Erskine Childers

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СКАЧАТЬ interminable controversy. Such nebulous arguments never are worked out in terms of actual combat on the battle-field.

      Thirdly, says Sir John French, the horses were at fault. "We did not possess any means for remounting our Cavalry with trained horses. … " "After the capture, in rear of the army, of the great convoy by De Wet, our horses were on short commons, and consequently lost condition, and never completely recovered it." This is an old argument, expressed in the old vague, misleading way. The war lasted nearly three years, beginning in October, 1899. The period referred to by Sir John French was in February, 1900. Long before this, when there was no complaint about the horses, the futility of the lance and sword, and the grave disabilities under which the Cavalry laboured owing to their inadequate carbine, had been abundantly manifest. The steel weapons may be said to have been obsolete after Elandslaagte, on the second day of the war.

      At the particular period referred to by Sir John French—the period of the operations against Cronje and Kimberley—heat and drought did undoubtedly play havoc with all the horses in both armies, with those not only of the Cavalry, but of the mounted riflemen and Artillery on both sides. In February, 1900, a third of Cronje's small force was on foot, a pretty severe disability, since his whole force was scarcely equal to our Cavalry division alone, with its gunners and mounted riflemen included, while it was less than a quarter as strong as the whole army at the disposal of Lord Roberts. Sir John French makes use of a misleading expression when he says that "the Cavalry horses lost condition, and never completely recovered it." Nine-tenths of the horses here referred to succumbed altogether within a few months, and the Cavalry, like nearly all the mounted troops engaged in the operations in question, were completely remounted in June, for the grand advance from Bloemfontein to Pretoria.

      During the succeeding two years of warfare all the mounted troops, Cavalry included, were several times remounted. So were the Boer troops, who, of course, had no remount organization at all for "trained" or untrained horses, and had to be content with anything they could pick up on the veldt. Yet, besides imposing fire-tactics on the Cavalry in every type of combat alike, they invaded the traditional sphere of Cavalry (and were imitated to some extent by our own Colonials and Mounted Infantry) by developing on their own account a most formidable type of mounted charge, which during the last year of the war alone cost us 18 guns and 2,500 men killed, wounded, and prisoners. These charges were made with little rats of starveling ponies, whose extreme speed was scarcely that of the slow canter of an ordinary Cavalry charger.

      If Sir J. French were to descend to statistics and facts, he would find it impossible to trace any causal relation between the efficacy of the lance and sword and the condition of the horses from time to time. The phenomena are precisely the same under all conditions from first to last. Everywhere and always the rifle is supreme. The better the horse, the better help for the rifle—that is all. In point of fact, he is quite aware that the principal success of the regular Cavalry was achieved when the horses were at their worst—that is to say, in the very period he refers to, when the Cavalry headed off Cronje and pinned him, purely by fire-action, to the river-bed at Paardeberg. Another good performance—though it was by no means specially a Cavalry performance; for mounted riflemen and Infantry were associated with the Cavalry—was the prolonged screening operations in front of Colesberg (November to January, 1900). There was no complaint about the horses then, but the sabre never killed or hurt a Boer. It was only once drawn from the scabbard, and was speedily resheathed, owing to hostile fire.

      I pass to the last and strangest of Sir John French's reasons for regarding the war as abnormal in the sense that it gave no opportunity for the use of the lance or sword. It is this: That, "owing to repeated and wholesale release of prisoners who had been captured and subsequently appeared in the field against us, we were called upon to fight, not 86,000 or 87,000 men, but something like double that number or more, with the additional disadvantage that the enemy possessed on his second and third appearance against us considerable experience of our methods and a certain additional seasoned fitness." Here again is a proposition which alone is sufficient to destroy the case for the lance and sword. If, as a defence of those weapons, it means anything, it must mean that the Cavalry, by means of their steel weapons, were perpetually taking prisoners, to no purpose, because these prisoners were constantly released. Gradually the enemy learnt "experience of our methods," that is, of our shock-methods with the lance and sword, and, armed with this experience and the "seasoned fitness" produced by successive spells of fighting, they eventually countered or evaded those shock-methods, with what result we are not told. But such an interpretation is inadmissible. What Sir John French surely should say is precisely the reverse of what he does imply—namely, that we started the war in an ignorance of the Boer methods which cost us scores of millions of pounds; that we slowly learnt experience of those methods, and ultimately conquered the Boers and ended the war by imitating those methods. That is the plain moral of the war, as enforced by every historian.

      Observe that, for the sake of argument, I am accepting as historically accurate Sir John French's statement about the advantage possessed by the Boers owing to the release of their prisoners. It is almost superfluous to add that the statement, in the sense he uses it, has no historical foundation. The truth is exactly the opposite. The advantage was immensely on our side. The Boers took many thousands of British prisoners, but permanently retained none, because they had no means of retaining them. During the last year of the war prisoners were released on the spot. A large proportion of these men fought again, some several times. No Boer prisoner of war—that is, captured in action—was released. In December, 1900, we had about 15,000 in our possession; in May, 1902, about 50,000.

      It was mainly by this attrition of the Boer forces that we reduced them to submission. The element of historical truth in Sir John French's proposition is this: that in 1900, after the fall of Bloemfontein, a considerable number of Boers surrendered voluntarily, not in action, and were dismissed to their farms under a pledge not to fight again—a pledge which they broke, under circumstances into which we need not enter. There are no exact statistics as to the numbers of these men, but at an outside estimate they cannot have amounted to more than 5 per cent. of the total number of Boers engaged in the war. In any case, the point is totally irrelevant to the question of shock-tactics. That is a question of combat, and in combat, as Sir John French is aware, the Boers were, nine times out of ten, greatly outnumbered.

      Such are Sir John French's reasons for the failure of the lance and sword in South Africa. They constitute an instructive revelation of the mental attitude of the advocates of those weapons. Is it not plain that we are dealing here with a matter of faith, not of reason; of dogma, not of argument; of sentiment, not of technical practice? The simple technical issue—what happens in combat?—is persistently evaded, and refuge sought in vague and inaccurate generalizations, which, when tested, turn out to throw no light upon the controversy.

      Sir John French himself manages to demonstrate in this same Introduction that the question is really one of sentiment. It is a seemingly incurable delusion with him that the whole campaign on behalf of the rifle is an attack of a personal nature on the war exploits of himself and the regular Cavalry, instead of being, what it really is, an attack on the lances and swords carried by the Cavalry. This delusion carries him to the strangest lengths of professional egotism. In the whole of this Introduction there is not a line to indicate that any British mounted rifleman unprovided with steel weapons took part in the war, or that the tactics and conduct of these men have the smallest interest for Englishmen or the smallest bearing on the present controversy. No one would gather that our Colonial mounted riflemen led the way in tactical development, and frequently, brief and rough as their training had been, excelled the Cavalry in efficiency, simply because they were trained on the right principles with the right weapon.

      "Even in South Africa," says Sir John French, "grave though the disadvantages were under which our Cavalry laboured from short commons and overwork" [as though these disadvantages were not shared equally by our mounted riflemen and by the Boers themselves!], "the Boer mounted riflemen acknowledged on many occasions the moral force of the cold steel, and gave way before it." Then follows a concrete instance, taken from the action of Zand River in May, 1900.

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