and now, what in great britain is the real theory on this question? let us go to sir john french again. the south african war, he says, is no guide for the future. it is abnormal, for the reasons stated above. the manchurian war he has also stated to be abnormal. where, then, is the theoretical advantage of the lance and sword over the modern rifle? we are left in ignorance. the physical problem is untouched. all we have is the bare dogmatic assertion that the steel weapon can impose tactics on the rifle. this is how sir john french expresses the theory on p. xi of his introduction: "were we to do so" (i.e., to "throw our cold steel away as useless lumber"), "we should invert the r?le of cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm, and make it a prey to the first foreign cavalry that it meets; for good cavalry can always compel a dismounted force of mounted riflemen to mount and ride away, and when such riflemen are caught on[pg 37] their horses, they have power neither of offence nor defence, and are lost."
eight years have elapsed since the boer war. memories are short, and it is possible now to print a statement of this sort, which, if promulgated during the dust and heat of the war itself, when the lance and sword fell into complete and well-merited oblivion, and when mounted men on both sides were judged rigidly by their proficiency in the use of the horse and the rifle, would have excited universal derision. the words which follow recall one of the writer's "abnormalities" already commented on: "if in european warfare such mounted riflemen were to separate and scatter, the enemy would be well pleased, for he could then reconnoitre and report every movement, and make his plans in all security. in south africa the mounted riflemen were the hostile army itself, and when they had dispersed there was nothing left to reconnoitre; but when will these conditions recur?" when, indeed? there was nothing, it seems, to reconnoitre, because the enemy always "scattered and dispersed." and the generals were "well pleased"! "nothing left to reconnoitre"! one can only marvel at the courage of sir john french in breathing the word "reconnoitre" in connection with cavalry work in south africa.
[pg 38]
he ought to admit that cavalry reconnaissance was bad, and that the army suffered for it. no historian has ever defended it. it was the despair of generals who wanted information as to the position of the enemy. wits apart, the rifle ruled reconnaissance, as it obviously always must rule it. ceteris paribus, the best rifleman is the best scout. the cavalry were not good riflemen, and were therefore not good scouts. not a single boer scout from the beginning to the end of the war was hurt by a sword or lance. those weapons were a laughing-stock to foe and friend alike. and sir john french's proposition is, not so much that the reconnaissance was good—presumably, that goes without saying—but that there was nothing to reconnoitre, thanks, apparently, to the terror spread by the lance and sword.
such a travesty of the war may be left to speak for itself. but it is very important to comprehend the root idea which underlies it, an idea which, as we shall see, reappears in a less extreme form in general von bernhardi's writings. it is expressed in the words "we should invert the r?le of cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm." the rifle, it will be seen, is regarded as a defensive weapon, in contradistinction to the lance and sword, which are offensive weapons. to sustain this theory,[pg 39] it is absolutely necessary, of course, to proceed to the lengths to which sir john french proceeds—to declare, in effect, that there was no war and no fighting; for if once we concede that there was a war, study its combats and compute their statistical results, we are forced to the conclusion that the rifle must have been used in offence as well as in defence. abstract reflection might well anticipate this conclusion by suggesting that a defensive weapon and a defensive class of soldiers are contradictions in terms.
there must be two parties to every combat, and, unless there is perfect equilibrium in combat, one side or the other must definitely be playing an offensive r?le; and, even in equilibrium, both sides may be said to be as much in offence as in defence, whatever weapons they are using. the facts mainly illustrate the abstract principle. the boers could not have taken guns and prisoners while acting on the defensive. talana hill, nicholson's nek, spion kop, stormberg, sannah's post, nooitgedacht, zilikat's nek, bakenlaagte, were not defensive operations from the boer point of view. nor were magersfontein, colenso, elandslaagte, paardeberg defensive operations from the british point of view. whether the rifles were in the hands of infantry or mounted troops is immaterial. a rifle is a rifle, who[pg 40]ever holds it. it is just as absurd to say that the boers who rode to and stormed on foot helvetia and dewetsdorp belonged to a defensive class of soldiers as it is to say that the infantry who walked to and stormed pieter's hill belonged to a defensive class of soldiers. it is still more absurd to say that the boers who charged home mounted at sannah's post, vlakfontein, bakenlaagte, roodewal, blood river poort, and many other actions, and the british mounted riflemen who did similar things at bothaville, were performing a defensive function, while the cavalry who pursued at elandslaagte were performing an offensive function. take this action of elandslaagte, the solitary genuine example of a successful charge with the arme blanche. by whom was the real offensive work done? by the infantry and by the imperial light horse acting dismounted, and by the artillery. after hours of hard and bloody fighting, these men stormed the ridge and forced the boers to retreat. in the act of retreat they were charged by the cavalry, who had hitherto been spectators of the action.
it might be objected that i am taking a verbal advantage of sir john french. he is guilty, it may be argued, only of the lesser fallacy—that of thinking that the rifle is a defensive weapon for[pg 41] mounted men as distinguished from infantry. not so. he perceives the logical peril of admitting that the rifle is an offensive weapon for any troops, and in another passage, when deprecating attacks on the "cavalry spirit" (p. vii), makes use of the following words: "were we to seek to endow cavalry with the tenacity and stiffness of infantry, or take from the mounted arm the mobility and the cult of the offensive which are the breath of its life, we should ruin not only the cavalry, but the army besides." (the italics are mine.) it may be pointed out that, but for their firearms and the mobility and offensive power derived from them, the cavalry in south africa would indeed have been "ruined" beyond hope of rehabilitation.
but let us look at the underlying principle expressed. infantry are "stiff and tenacious" (that is, obviously, in defence). cavalry have the "cult of the offensive." those are the distinctive "spirits" of the two arms. the bitter irony of it! which arm really displayed the most "offensive spirit" in south africa? study the lists of comparative casualties in the two arms during that period of the war in which infantry were mainly engaged. if at talana, the battle of ladysmith, colenso, dronfield, poplar grove, karee siding, sannah's post, zand river, doorn[pg 42]kop, or diamond hill, the cavalry in their own sphere of work had shown the offensive power displayed by the infantry in the battles on the tugela, or in methuen's campaign from orange river to magersfontein, or at driefontein, doornkop, bergendal, and diamond hill, the war would have showed different results. there was no distinction in point of bravery between any branches of the services. fire-power and fire-efficiency were the tests, and lack of a good firearm and of fire-efficiency on only too many occasions fatally weakened the offensive spirit of the cavalry.
and what of the "tenacity and stiffness" with which we must not "seek to endow" cavalry? ominous words, redolent of disaster! have not they fully as much need of those qualities as infantry? imagine our cavalry doing the work that the boers had to do on so many score of occasions—to fight delaying rearguard actions against immensely superior numbers, with no reserves, and a heavy convoy to protect. we shall be fortunate if, through reliance on and skill in the use of the rifle, they display as much tenacity and stiffness as botha's men at pieter's hill or koch's men at elandslaagte against forces four times their superior in strength, to say nothing of such incidents as dronfield, where 150 boers defied a whole division of cavalry and several batteries;[pg 43] of poplar grove and zand river, where small hostile groups virtually paralyzed whole brigades; or of bergendal, where seventy-four men held up a whole army. there was nothing abnormal tactically or topographically about any of these incidents. any function performed by the boer mounted riflemen may be demanded from our cavalry in any future war. suppose them, for example, vested with the strictly normal duty of covering a retreat against a superior force of all arms; suppose a squadron, like the seventy-four zarps at bergendal, ordered to hold the cardinal hill of an extended position, and their leader replying: "this is not our business. we are an offensive arm. we cannot entrench, and we have not the tenacity and stiffness of infantry. our business is to charge with the lance and sword." would the general be well pleased?
the reader will ask for the key to this curious discrimination between the "spirits" of cavalry and infantry. it is this: the lance and sword, when pitted against the rifle, can, if they are used at all, only be used in offence. men sitting on horseback, using steel weapons with a range of a couple of yards, plainly cannot defend themselves against riflemen. even the cavalry tacitly admit this principle, and if they accepted its logical consequence, a logical consequence completely con[pg 44]firmed by the facts of modern war, they would admit, too, that the sword and lance cannot be used for offence against riflemen in modern war. but they will not admit that. "tant pis pour les faits," they say. "all modern war is abnormal. our steel weapons dominate combat. without them we are nothing."
in these circumstances they are forced to set up this strange theory—that cavalry is a peculiarly "offensive" arm, a theory which the reader will find expressed in all cavalry writings. on the face of it the theory is meaningless. it is a mere verbal juggle, because, as i said before, there are two parties to every combat, and defence is the necessary and invariable counterpart of offence. all combatant soldiers, including cavalry, carry firearms, and if cavalry choose to use these firearms in offence, by hypothesis they will impose fire-action on the defence, whether the defence consists of cavalry or any other class of troops. conversely, if they use their rifles in defence, as by hypothesis they must, they will impose fire-action on the attacking force, be it cavalry or any other arm. in other words, the rifle governs combat. that is why the lance and sword disappeared in south africa. both in offence and defence the boer riflemen forced the cavalry to accept combat on terms of fire.
[pg 45]
and what kind of cavalry do our cavalrymen count upon meeting in our next war? they count, incredible as it seems, upon meeting cavalry not superior, but inferior, to the boer mounted riflemen, inferior because, as i shall show from von bernhardi, they defy science, shut their eyes to the great principle of the supremacy of fire, are prepared deliberately to abdicate their fire-power, and hope to engage, by mutual agreement, as it were, and on the understanding that suitable areas of level ground can be found, in contests of crude bodily weight.
and what of the action of cavalry against other arms? we know sir john french's opinion about mounted riflemen. they will gallop for their lives "defenceless" at the approach of "good" cavalry. but infantry, riflemen without horses, who cannot gallop, but can only run? their case, it would seem, must be still more desperate. they are not only defenceless, but destitute even of the means of flight. and yet even sir john french credits them, if not with an offensive spirit, at least with "tenacity and stiffness," derived, of course, from their rifles. but their mounted comrades, armed with these same rifles, lack these soldierly qualities. we arrive thus at the conclusion that the horse, which one would naturally suppose to be a source of[pg 46] immensely enhanced mobility and power, is a positive source of danger to a rifleman unless he also carries a lance or sword.
here is the reductio ad absurdum of the arme blanche theory, and i beg for the reader's particular attention to it. of course, the conclusion is in reality too absurd; for sir john french himself does not really believe that infantry are a defensive arm. in point of fact, no serious man believes that infantry in modern war have anything whatever to fear from the lance and sword, and their training-book is written on that assumption. nor does sir john french really believe that mounted infantry are a defensive arm who run from cavalry; otherwise, he would never rest until he had secured the complete abolition of our mounted infantry, who are now, under his official sanction, designed to act, not only as divisional mounted troops against steel-armed continental cavalry, but to co-operate with, and in certain events take the place of, our own regular cavalry in far wider functions, and are presumably not going to be whipped off the field at the distant glimpse of a lance or sword. and i may say here that the reader can obtain no better and more searching sidelight on the steel theory than by studying the mounted infantry manual (1909) for the rules given about similar[pg 47] and analogous functions. nor, if sir john french went the whole length of the theory, would he, as inspector-general, have permitted our colonial mounted riflemen to think that they might be of some imperial value in a future war. it is only in order to sustain his a priori case for the steel weapons that he finds himself forced into the logical impasses to which i have drawn attention.
there is one further point to deal with before leaving sir john french's introduction. he admits the necessity of a rifle for cavalry, and we may presume him to admit that the boer war proved the necessity for a good rifle and the futility of a bad carbine. when, in his opinion, is this rifle to be used? "i have endeavoured to impress upon all ranks," he writes on page xvii, "that when the enemy's cavalry is overthrown, our cavalry will find more opportunities of using the rifle than the cold steel, and that dismounted attacks will be more frequent than charges with the arme blanche. by no means do i rule out as impossible, or even unlikely, attacks by great bodies of mounted men against other arms on the battle-field; but i believe that such opportunities will occur comparatively rarely, and that undue prominence should not be given to them in our peace training." (the italics are mine.)
[pg 48]
this is a typically nebulous statement of the combat functions of cavalry in modern war, and, like the generality of such statements, will be found to contain, if analyzed, a refutation of the writer's own views on the importance of the arme blanche. we ask ourselves immediately why he thought it necessary to account for the failure of the arme blanche in south africa by the elaborate accumulation of arguments for "abnormality" developed a few pages earlier. after all, it seems, the war, in its bearing upon the efficacy of weapons, was normal. the boers had no "cavalry" in the writer's use of the word—that is, steel-armed cavalry. what he assumes to be the primary and most formidable objective of our own steel-armed cavalry was, therefore, by a fortunate accident, non-existent. there was no need to "overthrow" it, because there was nothing to overthrow, and our cavalry was free from the outset to devote its attention to the "other arms"—that is, to riflemen and artillery—assumed evidently by the writer to be a secondary and less formidable objective. but here, apparently, "opportunities" for the arme blanche are to occur "comparatively rarely" in any war, european or otherwise, whether the riflemen show "tenacity and stiffness" or "disperse for hundreds of miles"; whether the horses are[pg 49] perennially fresh or perennially fatigued; whether we outnumber the foe or they outnumber us; whether annexation or mere victory is our aim.
if only, we cannot help exclaiming, this principle had been recognized in 1899! we knew the boers had no swords or lances: we had always known it. if only we had prepared our cavalry for the long-foreseen occasion, trained them to fire, given them good firearms, and impressed upon them that opportunities for shock would occur "comparatively rarely," instead of teaching them up to the last minute that fire-action was an abnormal, defensive function of their arm, worthy of little more space in their manual than that devoted to "funerals," and much less than that devoted to "ceremonial escorts."
the root of the fallacy propounded by sir john french lies in his refusal to recognize that a rifle may be just as deadly a weapon in the hands of cavalry as in the hands of "other arms," and, indeed, a far more deadly weapon, thanks to the mobility conferred by the horse. if, for example, infantry can, as he tacitly admits they can, force cavalry to adopt fire-action, a fortiori can cavalry, if they choose, force cavalry to adopt fire-action. in other words, the rifle governs combat, as it did, in fact, govern combat in south africa and manchuria. but cavalry operating[pg 50] against cavalry, according to sir john french, are not so to choose. we can only speculate upon what may happen if one side is so unsportsmanlike as to break the rules and masquerade as another arm. the stratagem is simple, because the rifle kills at a mile, and the orthodox cavalry may be unaware until it is too late that the unorthodox cavalry is playing them a trick. meanwhile the best riflemen, whether they have horses or not, will win, and horsemen who have spent 80 or 90 per cent. of their time in steel-training will have cause to regret their error.
but sir john french contemplates no such awkward contingencies. we may surmise, however, that it is owing to an uncomfortable suspicion of his own fallacy that in this paragraph and elsewhere he is so careful to isolate inter-cavalry combats from mixed combats, and to postulate the complete "overthrow" of one cavalry—an overthrow effected solely by the arme blanche—before permitting the surviving cavalry, in kipling's words, to "scuffle mid unseemly smoke." he has a formula for the occasion. in this paragraph it is "when the enemy's cavalry is overthrown." on page xiv, speaking of raids, which he deprecates, he says: "every plan should be subordinate to what i consider a primary necessity—the absolute and complete[pg 51] overthrow of the hostile cavalry"; and on page xv: "if the enemy's cavalry has been overthrown, the r?le of reconnaissance will have been rendered easier," a truism upon which the boer war throws a painfully ironical sidelight.
if the reader is puzzled by this curiously superfluous insistence on the "overthrow" of the enemy analogous to the equally superfluous insistence on the "offensive" character of the cavalry arm, he will once more find an explanation in the anomalous status of the arme blanche. no one would dream of repeatedly impressing upon infantry, for example, as though it were a principle they might otherwise overlook, that their primary aim must be the absolute and complete overthrow of the hostile infantry. but the advocate of the arme blanche is always on the horns of a dilemma. he dare not admit that the rifle in the hands of cavalry is as formidable a weapon as in the hands of infantry, if not a far more formidable weapon. he therefore instinctively tends to picture steel-armed cavalry as perpetually pitted against steel-armed cavalry. both sides are always in offence until the moment when one is "completely and absolutely overthrown." then some other r?les, very vaguely delineated, open up to the victor. needless to say, this picture bears no resemblance to war.[pg 52] troops are not, by mutual agreement, sorted out into classes, like competitors in athletic sports. every arm must be prepared to meet at any moment any other arm, and any other weapon.
nor do these "complete and absolute" obliterations of one arm by its corresponding arm ever, in fact, happen. that they could ever happen through the agency of the lance and sword is the wildest supposition of all. compared with rifles, these weapons are harmless. even the most backward and ignorant cavalry, trained to rely absolutely on the lance and sword, would, if it found itself beaten in trials of shock, or, like the japanese cavalry, greatly outnumbered, resort to the despised firearm, imitate the tactics and vest itself with something of the "tenacity and stiffness," as well as with the aggressive potency, of those "other arms," which, by hypothesis, must be attacked with the rifle; and in doing so it would force its antagonist to do the same.
