German Influence on British Cavalry. Erskine Childers
was first published in German in 1899, before the Boer War broke out. There was a second edition in 1902, when the Boer War was drawing to a close, and this second edition, headed by General French's Introduction, was translated and published in England in 1906. It was a strange work, strangely sponsored. The keynote was fire-action for Cavalry, the moral drawn by the English sponsor shock-action for Cavalry. The chapters on fire-action, urging the adoption of a firearm even better than the Infantry rifle in substitution for a mere pop-gun, formed in themselves a complete refutation of shock; while the chapters on shock, so illogical and self-contradictory was the method of exposition, formed an equally complete refutation of fire-action.
It is true that the spirit of fire predominated, that fire was the General's message to his lethargic brother-officers, but the message was so strangely expounded that it is no wonder that for ten years they turned a deaf ear to it. Instead of telling them at the outset that if they themselves adopted a good firearm, and learnt to use it properly, they would immensely enhance the value of Cavalry for all the purposes of war, he opened his argument with a melancholy dirge over the departed glories of the Cavalry owing to the adoption by other classes of troops of the deadly modern firearm. They must recognize, he told them, that they had been "driven out of their place of honour on the battlefields of the plains"; that they could henceforward only attack Infantry who were already so shattered and demoralized by the fire of other Infantry as to have reached the point of throwing away their arms, and much more in the same sense. Never was such a tactless prophet! And the pity of it was that he did not really mean all he said. What he meant was that the ancient glories of the arme blanche, when pitted against the firearm, were gone past recall—a circumstance scarcely worth an elegy, one would imagine, from a scientific soldier. War is business, not romance, and if the same or better results can be produced by an intelligent and dashing use of the firearm, it is waste of breath to lament the decay of the lance and sword. It was the main purpose of the General's work to prove that these results could be so obtained, and whenever he warmed to his subject, and fell into temporary oblivion of the romantic weapons, he proved his point well enough, in theory.
But, unfortunately, his oblivion of the lance and sword lasted only as long as he was criticizing the action of Cavalry against troops not armed with those weapons. When he came to the action of Cavalry against Cavalry, both by hypothesis armed, not only with the lance and sword, but also with the best modern rifle obtainable, the principle he had just established—namely, that the rifle imposes tactics on the steel—disappeared, and the opposite principle—that the steel imposes tactics upon the rifle—took its place. I say "principle," but in this latter case no reasoned principle based on the facts of war was expounded, because it seemed never to occur to the General that Cavalry in combat with Cavalry would have the bad taste to use their rifles.
Needless to say, it was impossible to sustain this daring paradox with any semblance of logic and consistency throughout a book dealing with all the phases of war. War is not a matter of definitions, but of bullets and shells. And, in fact, the General threw logic and consistency to the winds. In his fire-mood he unconsciously covered shock-tactics with ridicule, but in his shock-mood (no doubt, much to the relief of the victims of his wrathful invective in Germany) he conclusively demolished the principle of fire.
This was easily explicable. In the first place, the General was a German writing exclusively to Germans, to whom the bare idea of relying on the prosaic firearm seemed sacrilegious. Merely to implant that idea in their heads, to persuade them that the rest of the world was moving while they were asleep, was a vast enough aim for a German reformer—too vast an aim, indeed, as the event proved. In the second place, the General, so far as the effect of modern firearms was concerned, was working wholly in the realm of theory. When he first published his book those weapons had not been tested in civilized war. The most recent relevant war experience was that of 1870 and of the other European wars of that period, when the firearm was exceedingly imperfect. But even then, as he frankly and forcibly stated, it was in consequence of their neglect of this firearm, imperfect as it was, that the European Cavalry, the German Cavalry included, gave such a painfully poor account of themselves. He looked farther back, just as Colonel Henderson and many other critics in our own country looked back, to the brilliant achievements of American Cavalry in the Civil War of 1861–1865, mainly through the agency of the firearm. But here the firearm was still more primitive—a fact of which General von Bernhardi took no account. It was enough for him that inter-Cavalry shock survived through the Civil War, though the steel came to be wholly ineffective against Infantry. That forty years of scientific progress might have produced a weapon which would have banished shock in any form did not occur to him.
Nevertheless, there seemed to be good ground for the hope that, when he came seriously to collate and examine the phenomena of the first great wars since the invention of the modern rifle—those in South Africa and Manchuria—he would find in the exact confirmation of his views on fire, and in the complete falsification of his views on shock, ground for a drastic revision of his whole work, with a view, not perhaps to a complete elimination of the steel weapons, but to their complete subordination to the rifle. It is true that the omens were not very favourable.
Between 1899 and 1902, when his second edition was published, a great mass of South African information became available, not in finished historical form, but in a form quite suitable for furnishing numberless instructive examples of the paramount influence of fire and the futility of the lance and sword. But the General made no use of these examples. He confined himself to a general allusion to the "very important data obtained in South Africa as to the employment of dismounted action by Cavalry" (p. 7), and in a later passage (p. 56) to some commendatory remarks on the "brilliant results" obtained through mounted charges made with the rifle only by the Boers in the latter part of the war. Unfortunately, it was plain that he had given no close technical study either to these charges or to the "important data" vaguely alluded to; otherwise he would have saved himself from many of the solecisms which abound in his work. Still, the fact remained that the war was unfinished when his second edition was published, while another great war broke out only two years later. It seemed not unlikely that mature reflection upon the incidents of these wars would ultimately tend to clarify and harmonize his views on shock and fire.
Meanwhile the English edition was published, with its Introduction by General Sir John French. By this time (1906) the events of our own war were fully collated and recorded, while the Manchurian War had also taken place. Instead of supplying a really useful commentary upon the German work, written from the point of view of British experience, instead of drawing attention to its deficiencies and errors, and pointing out how inevitable they were under the circumstances of its composition, General French hailed the work as a complete, final, and unanswerable statement of Cavalry doctrine. Von Bernhardi, he said, "had dealt with remarkable perspicuity and telling conviction and in an exhaustive manner with every subject demanding a Cavalry soldier's study and thought." How Sir John French's readers reconciled this effusive eulogy with the contents of the book remains a mystery. As I have said, the only really important feature of the book was the insistent advocacy of fire-tactics—and not merely defensive, but offensive fire-tactics—for Cavalry. This feature was minimized in the Introduction. In its place was a vehement attack on the advocates of fire-tactics in England, the truth of whose principles had just been signally demonstrated in our own war.
There was not a word about the "important data" to be derived from the war; not a word about the Boer charges, of whose terribly destructive effects Sir John French knew far more than General von Bernhardi. On the contrary, the war was dismissed in a few slighting and ambiguous sentences, as wholly irrelevant to the arme blanche controversy, in spite of the fact that, in direct consequence of the war, our Cavalry Manual had been rewritten and the Cavalry firearm immensely improved—facts which would naturally suggest that the war had been instructive.
Praise of Von Bernhardi, singular as the form it took, was by no means academic. In the next revision of our Cavalry Manual (1907) the compilers borrowed and quoted considerably from "Cavalry in Future Wars." And yet every sound principle in that work had years before been anticipated and expounded far more lucidly and thoroughly in the fascinating pages of our own military writer, Colonel Henderson, whose teaching had been ignored by the Cavalry of his own country.
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