War and the Arme Blanche. Erskine Childers

no matter from which weapon they are taught to derive their “spirit,” or which weapon is supposed to give them the most numerous or valuable opportunities. If you favour one you prejudice the other; and the more you endeavour to trim and compromise the less efficient the hybrid you produce. As Count Wrangel truly says, you cannot serve these two masters.^[15] Both are equally exacting, and the types of education they exact are as far apart as the poles. Until quite recent times, outside a little perfunctory attention to the use of a short carbine, training based on the steel occupied almost the entire time of European Cavalries, including our own. Perfection in that training, whatever its war value, requires hard, continuous training extending over years. Manual practice in a steel weapon is an art in itself. To teach men to handle in concert steel weapons from horseback with safetysafety to themselves, to say nothing of damage to their enemy, is a long and difficult matter. To teach them the shock charge under peace conditions and on selected ground and selected horses, with no bullets flying, and with no unforeseen obstacles to mar the symmetry, speed and cohesion which are the conditions of success, can be the outcome only of immense patience and application in sheer mechanical drill. If anyone doubts this let him go to “Cavalry Training” for confirmation. Whether the charge be used rarely or often makes no difference. What is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and to train men to do this thing well is a very big business. If they cannot do it well, they will be beaten at their own game by troops who can. It is futile to postulate an ideal balance between shock-tactics and the loose fire-tactics imposed by the modern rifle. For troops trained to rely mainly on the “terror of cold steel” the shock charge cannot be a side-issue. It is, and must be, the central aim of Cavalry education. It must govern drill, and through drill its influence reacts upon and permeates all functions of Cavalry to their remotest ramifications. The ideas behind it, the impulses directing it, are ideas and impulses totally different from, and, under modern conditions, fundamentally antagonistic to, those which inspire fire-tactics.

      What is true of specializing in shock-tactics is still more true of specializing in fire-tactics. The art of the mounted rifleman, carried to the point of perfection to which by war experience we know that it can be carried, demands an exclusive education. Here, too, is a very big business, inexperience in which cost us scores of millions of pounds in South Africa. You cannot, by a stroke of the pen, as it were, graft this art on to the art of steel and shock by merely re-editing the pre-war Drill-Book. Marksmanship, though very important, is a comparatively small part of the education. Civilians can become good marksmen. Our Cavalry have proved latterly, to their high credit, that they can become good target marksmen without an excessive sacrifice of time. Nor could anyone who witnessed the general manœuvres of 1909 dream of saying that the Cavalry had not made remarkable strides in fire-tactics in the last few years. The advance, with its proof of the adaptability of our men to the art, only renders the squandering of energy on shock the more painful. We know that they can never learn enough of fire-tactics. What cannot be taught unless it be made a highly-specialized branch of study and training is the field-craft, the head, eye, and instinct for mounted work with the rifle, to say nothing of the more purely technical requirements—the special formations, the handling of led horses, fire from the saddle, and the like. The work involves a special way of looking at all field problems; it is inspired, as I have said, by ideas and impulses of an altogether different category from those which inspire shock. It requires less machine-like drill, more individual intelligence, less crude exertion of muscle, more reliance on the wits, and withal just as good riding, just as careful horsemastership, and just as much self-sacrifice, audacity, and dash. I shall prove this up to the hilt by direct illustration from modern wars; but is it not self-evident? For here are men vested with the offensive and defensive power of Infantry, together with a mobility which is several times that of Infantry. Infantry have plenty to do to become good at their trade. How imperious and exacting must be the demands upon mounted infantry! I have slipped into one of the conventional definitions. Let us give it capitals, and ask how the fire-duties of Cavalry differ essentially from those of Mounted Infantry, or any other category of mounted riflemen?

      Fog hangs heavy on that most pertinent inquiry. But the answer, of course, is that there is no difference whatever. And it follows necessarily that, however seldom or often fire-duties may be required of Cavalry, Cavalry will be excelled by mounted riflemen in the performance of those duties, just as they will be excelled in shock by troops who have more practice in shock. In either sphere the hybrid type must succumb to the pure type, and the moral is all the easier to see and enforce because the pure type of mounted rifleman, however arbitrary and fanciful the limits assigned to its utility, is actually and officially recognized at this moment, whereas no such thing as a pure type of shock horseman exists.

      Nor is it only a case of competition with other mounted riflemen or other hybrid Cavalry. Let the reader extract from “Cavalry Training,” tabulate, and analyze all the fire-duties now theoretically allotted to Cavalry. It will take some little trouble, because they are not marshalled compactly or given the emphasis they deserve. He will find that they cover almost the entire range of war, and it goes without saying that in every one of these duties the trooper must be prepared to fight approximately as well as the riflemen opposed to him, whether they be Infantry or mounted men. Otherwise he will fail. Troops cannot be manipulated in war so that each class meets only its corresponding type. Each class must be prepared to meet any other, both in defence and offence. I am not constructing an academical dilemma, but a dilemma forced upon us by the facts of modern war. Bernhardi sees it clearly, and goes much farther, accordingly, than “Cavalry Training” dares go, in postulating that utterly unattainable perfection in both weapons which is the only way out of the dilemma. More on that point later.

      The truth is that, in this country, behind all the inconsequent reasoning which pervades conventional theories of mounted training, there lies the disastrous hallucination that skill with the rifle is a comparatively easy thing to learn, a thing which is essentially appropriate to imperfectly trained troops—volunteers, irregulars of all sorts—and which can be taken in their stride, so to speak, by regulars, whose crown and glory is shock. If this view were upheld only by the regular Cavalry it would be bad enough, but there is a tendency to uphold it among the volunteers too, so that we daily have the heart-breaking spectacle of men who have not yet come to the point of realizing the tremendous possibilities of the rifle crying aloud like children for a steel weapon. The responsibility for that fatal discontent rests absolutely on the Cavalry.

      Lastly, let it be remembered that this is not merely a question of carrying weapons of debatable combat-value. It is a question of mobility, transcending weapons, but at the same time hinging on weapons. I began this chapter by insisting on the pre-combat or non-combat phases of war as distinguished from the combat phase, in which alone weapons are useful. Nobody suggests dispensing with the rifle. Can we dispense with the sword and lance? Their weight alone is something, especially when both are carried. But besides that, they are the very weapons which add to visibility and injure general mobility. The more closely you adhere to the idea of shock—and, in strict logic, you should adhere to it if you admit the steel weapon at all—the more you are bound in strict logic to favour big horses and correspondingly heavy men. If you disregard logic, as we instinctively disregard it now, except in the case of the élite of our regiments, you risk overthrow in the theoretically inevitable shock duel with a more logical Cavalry. That is a small risk, because, as I shall prove, modern war does not favour that class of encounter. The great evil is the deadening effect of the shock theory on that direct aggressive power with the firearm which modern war insists on exacting. The result is either that humiliating inaction which extorted the puzzled censure of Von Moltke as long ago as 1866, or a dissipation of the physical energy of horses and men on circumventions and evasions which only postpone without facilitating combat. It is a matter of experience, too, that in time of peace the galloping standard for the shock charge, the instinctive aversion to dismounting, and other corollaries of the artificial shock system and the “spirit” founded on it, tend to produce under real campaigning conditions defective horse management and faults of a like character.

      In the last resort the training of all our mounted troops turns on Cavalry training. If there is error there, error positive or negative will penetrate every class. Is there error? The tests of peace are illusory. Let us examine the tests of war.

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