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For thousands of years the horse has been the companion of man in war.

It is significant that when Job gives us his wonderful description of the strong things of earth and sea and air, he speaks of the horse in this connection, as rejoicing in the sound of the trumpet, and smelling the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting. “He goeth out to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not dismayed; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the flashing spear and the javelin. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage.” And in many passages of the Bible, in poetry and in narrative, we have mention of the chariot and the horseman.

Representations of them are to be found in the carvings and tablets of long-vanished dynasties and nations. To take a single instance, they are shown in Assyrian carvings dating nearly a thousand years before Christ, which can be seen now in the British Museum.

Apparently the chariot came into the field earlier than the horseman usually so called, and the first use of the horse in war was to take up to the front in chariots warriors who got down to fight on foot, as the Greek chiefs did in the siege of Troy. But ere long Scythians or other nomads learned to mount the horse himself, and then began that close conjunction and sympathy between man and horse which made the two almost one creature, the Centaur of the fable.

The subject has been touched by many writers. There is perhaps no need to consider here the uses and gradual disappearance of the war-chariot. For present purposes it is sufficient to note that long before the historical age the armed hosts of the great Eastern Empires were composed in part of mounted men, who marched, and often fought, on horseback. The chariots and the people attached to them may have been the first “Cavalry”; but the word as used in this book refers to mounted men only—riders,—and riders who did some part at least of their fighting from the backs of horses.

If the use of mounted men in war began in the East, to which Western nations owe so much, including even their religion, it soon extended to Europe. In the first conflict between East and West on a large scale of which we have any real knowledge, nearly five hundred years before Christ, the Persian invaders of Greece found that the Greeks had little Cavalry to oppose to the thousands of horsemen whom they brought with them. The men of Athens and Sparta fought on foot at Marathon and Thermopylæ. Even at Mount Cithæron, where Masistius in his golden cuirass charged and died, the Greek army was an army of footmen. Nevertheless there were some horsemen in Greece even then, especially on the plains of Thessaly; and the frieze of the Parthenon, of not much later date, shows helmeted Greek soldiers riding spirited horses. The horses are small, apparently not more than thirteen or at most fourteen hands, and are ridden barebacked, but they are evidently war horses. Then we have Xenophon’s well-known treatise on Cavalry, a thoroughly practical work, which must have been written in the first half of the next century; and after that the organisation of the Greek Cavalry is fairly well known.

It was Alexander the Great who first showed what horsemen could do in war if properly trained and led. Until his time Cavalry seem to have fought mostly in loose swarms, rather as skirmishers and bowmen than as solid squadrons using the weight of the horse itself to overthrow and destroy bodies of footmen. He saw the value of “shock tactics,” and taught his Cavalry to use them, so that when he invaded Persia in 334 B.C. the famous horsemen of Persia went down again and again before his fiery onsets. They had themselves, according to Herodotus, some notion of charging in squadron on the battlefield, but they had never seen Cavalry used in mass, and neither they nor the Persian foot could stand against it.

In the impetuous rapidity of all his movements, especially perhaps in the closeness and vigour of his pursuits, Alexander was in fact a model leader of horse, and his conquests were largely due to his Cavalry, which he not only wielded with dash and power against the Cavalry of the enemy, but kept thoroughly in hand even after a successful charge, and threw into the scale wherever they might be most required to help his foot soldiers.

Ever since those days, for more than twenty centuries, the history of war on land has been the history of a struggle for pre-eminence between horsemen and footmen. The rivalry has been complicated by the invention of Artillery, and of late years by the development of fighting in the air; but it has gone on unceasingly, and can hardly be said to have come to an end even now. In the course of it there has often been a tendency to lose sight of the fact that combined effort for one purpose by all arms, and not rivalry between them, is the secret of success in war. But the long dispute and its vicissitudes form an interesting study.

By the Romans the effective use of Cavalry was for a long time not well understood. Though they had their “Equites” from early days, they got to rely more and more for serious fighting upon their wonderful legions, and it was not until the Punic Wars that they learned their lesson. Hannibal, like Alexander, was a born leader of horse, and when a hundred years after Alexander’s death he invaded Italy by way of the Alps, he at once taught Western Europe what Alexander had taught the Greeks and Persians, that in the existing condition of military armament, Cavalry well trained and boldly used in masses could do great things on the battlefield. The successive victories which he gained in Italy, with very inferior numbers, over the proud and confident troops of Rome, were due in large measure to his skilful use of his horsemen. At Cannæ, for example, his wild Numidian light horse, riding without saddle or reins, and his heavier squadrons from Spain and the North, began by driving off the weak Roman Cavalry opposed to them, and then, wheeling inwards upon the rear of the advancing legions, enclosed them in a circle of steel from which there was no escape. Fifty thousand of them are said to have fallen, and for a time Rome seemed to be, perhaps really was, at his mercy. Every one knows the story of his long struggle against hopeless odds, and of his final defeat. When at last he was conquered the superiority in horsemen had passed to the Romans, and he was overwhelmed and crushed by his own methods. He had taught his enemies to fight.1

As time went on they forgot in a measure the lesson they had learnt from him, and they suffered some heavy reverses in consequence—for example, in their wars with the Parthians which stopped their expansion eastward; but happily such enemies were rare, and gradually the legions won for Rome the empire of the Western world. It lasted as long as the spirit and discipline of their incomparable Infantry remained unimpaired.

In the closing centuries of Imperial Rome the bulk of her enemies marched against her on horseback, and her own armies came to be composed more and more of Cavalry. Her last great battle was against Attila the Hun, whose people lived on their horses. It was a victory; but it was a Cavalry victory, and won by the help of the Goths. Her Infantry had long since failed her, and the Imperial City had been herself in the hands of the Barbarians. Her fall had been due to the woeful corruption and degeneration of the legions, not to any inherent superiority of the horseman over the footman; but the fact remains that at this time Cavalry was everywhere regarded as the more important arm of the two.

There followed a long period during which the predominance of the horseman grew more and more undisputed. With the collapse of Rome scientific warfare on a large scale became a lost art, and in the disorderly welter of the Dark Ages the fighting power of the footman, which depends so much upon organisation and discipline, sank lower and lower. To deal it a final blow came, a thousand years or so after Christ, the institution of Chivalry, which to a considerable extent undermined national feeling and exalted in its place the individual prowess of the Knight. Having its origin in a praiseworthy attempt to set up a higher standard of right and wrong, to resist cruelty and injustice, to honour woman as she should be honoured, and to make courage and courtesy the aim of men, it did much good, and has left to succeeding ages some noble aspirations and examples. Even now there is surely no better thing one can say of a man than that he is chivalrous—chevaleresque—like a knight of old. The horseman had given his name to a new social order and a splendid ideal. In practice Chivalry was not always what it should have been, but the glamour of it lies upon all our poetry and literature. Even the free-lance or the moss-trooper, unprincipled ruffian as he often was, remains to our eyes a picturesque figure. There is still a gleam on his helmet and spear that time cannot take away. The war-horse and his rider had reached in those days the climax of their power and reputation.

Then, very gradually, came a change in the opposite direction. The knights and their retainers had been practically the only fighting men who counted, and were accustomed to ride down with ease and contempt any footmen who ventured to stand against them. Bows and arrows and axes and knives seemed of little avail against the spearman with his almost impenetrable armour and his thundering steed. As Colonel Maude puts it, “the knight in full armour had borne about the same relation to the infantry as an ironclad nowadays bears to a fleet of Chinese junks.” But little by little it began to be recognised, first it is said in the Crusades, when the knights had to take or defend fortresses and otherwise fight on foot, that there were operations in war for which the heavily armoured horseman was not well fitted. Bodies of footmen began to be raised again for such purposes, and even to be brought into the open field as archers or cross-bowmen for use in broken ground. They often suffered horribly, but now and then they gained some successes, and as time went on they developed greater skill and confidence. Eventually, at Crécy and Poictiers and Agincourt, the English archers, with their cloth-yard shafts and their bristling defence of pointed stakes, won astonishing victories over the Chivalry of France, and proved to Europe that the horseman was no longer invincible on the battlefield. The lesson had very nearly been taught by the English three hundred years earlier, on the field of Hastings; but the time had not then come. Lured from their stockades, the footmen had been cut to pieces, and the French Cavalry had conquered England. At Crécy the English footmen turned the tables. And elsewhere, about the same period, the Swiss Infantry won almost equal honour.

The Cavalry of Europe nevertheless fought hard for their old pre-eminence, and it was long before they could be brought to see that they would never again be the undisputed masters in battle. But it was a lesson they had to learn. As time went on they found their charges repelled by serried squares of pikemen, from which came showers of arrows and cross-bolts; and later the invention of firearms weighted the scale still further against them. The only offensive weapons of the horsemen were the weight of their horses and the lance or sword; and if the horses failed to break the rows of eighteen-foot pikes, the arme blanche could do nothing. At last, after many attempts by the Cavalry to meet these new conditions, by using firearms themselves and other devices, it came to be generally recognised that against confident and steady infantry armed with the pike, deliberate frontal assault by horsemen was practically hopeless, and that for the future Cavalry must depend to some extent upon surprise and stratagem to give them victory. The defence had in some measure triumphed over the attack, and the essentially offensive arm had lost its pride of place.

This is not to say that for the future Cavalry was to be useless on the battlefield—far from it. The range of the unwieldy arquebus, or of the smooth-bore musket which followed it, was not so great as to keep Cavalry out of striking distance; and their speed, if they were led with decision and dash, would yet give them many opportunities of riding down the footmen. They could no longer do so whenever they pleased, but they were still a formidable part of the fighting line.

This was shown very clearly in our own Civil War. The armies of both King and Parliament were largely composed of horsemen, and in fight after fight it was they who were most conspicuous. Finally, the emergence of a great leader of Cavalry turned the scale in favour of the Roundheads. Cromwell’s Ironsides, thoroughly trained, and used as in old days the Cavalry of Alexander and Hannibal had been used, not only with dash but with coolness and self-control, proved too strong for the Royalists, cavaliers though they were. Unlike Prince Rupert, Cromwell kept his horsemen firmly in hand, throwing them into the fight wherever they were most required, and the result was to make him master of England.

On the Continent too Cavalry was still largely used in battle. The Turkish horsemen were numerous and formidable. Before our civil conflicts, in the Thirty Years’ War, Gustavus Adolphus had wielded Cavalry with much effect, and while Cromwell was fighting in England the great Condé had sprung into fame by the achievement of his horsemen at Rocroy. Under him and other commanders the French Cavalry gained an enduring reputation, and the same may be said for the Germans under Pappenheim and Montecuculi. The Infantry was now perhaps the leading arm in battle, and it was growing stronger as its firearm improved, while the rise of a more or less effective Artillery was adding to the difficulties of the Cavalry attack; but at the close of the seventeenth century the horseman was still a power in the field.

Throughout the first half of the eighteenth century this state of things continued. In Marlborough’s wars Cavalry was used in large numbers, and with great effect. At Blenheim, and other notable fights, his horsemen practically decided the issue between him and the French Marshals. How important the arm was considered may be judged from the fact that at Ramilies the forces on both sides were little stronger in foot than in horse. Between them the opposing armies numbered only 75,000 Infantry to 64,000 Cavalry.

About the same time Charles XII. of Sweden was also using Cavalry in large numbers; and when, under Peter the Great, Russia began to make her mark among the military powers of the world, not the least formidable part of her army was the Cavalry, which, including the afterwards famous Cossacks, amounted at one time to more than 80,000 men.

Then came the crowning period for Cavalry in modern war. In spite of their recognised place on the battlefield, and their many successes, the horsemen of the European armies had not until the middle of the eighteenth century attained to a full comprehension of their possible influence. Awed to some extent by the reputation which the Infantry had gained at their expense in the course of the last three centuries, the Cavalry had become a less swift and dashing arm. They had learnt to rely in large measure upon their fire, and even to fight dismounted as dragoons. “In fact,” according to their historian Denison, “the cavalry of all European States had degenerated into unwieldy masses of horsemen, who, unable to move at speed, charged at a slow trot and fought only with pistol and carbine.” Even so they were more mobile than Infantry, and had great achievements to their credit; but they had failed to see that a recent change in armaments had thrown the game into their hands. The Infantry, growing over-confident, had discarded the long pike for the bayonet—a very poor substitute—and the Cavalry had once more a chance of riding down their enemy in fair fight by the speed and weight of their horses. Their power was now to be taught them by a keen-sighted soldier, Frederick the Great of Prussia.

When he came to the throne in 1740, and began the career of unscrupulous aggression which was to make Prussia one of the leading nations of Europe, he soon saw that his Cavalry was not all it should have been. “They were,” says Denison, “large men mounted upon powerful horses, and carefully trained to fire in line both on foot and on horseback,” but they were quite incapable of rapid movement, and never attacked Infantry by the ancient method. “His first change was to prohibit absolutely the use of firearms mounted, and to rely upon the charge at full speed, sword in hand.” Marlborough had shown the advantage of using great bodies of Cavalry in mass, and Marshal Saxe had advocated their being taught to move at speed for a mile or more in good order. Frederick now took over both ideas, and by careful and incessant training evolved a Cavalry which was capable of manœuvring in thousands together at full pace, even over rough ground, without disorder or loss of control. Such a force, led by men like Seidlitz and Ziethen, proved to be almost irresistible. Against Austrians and Russians and Frenchmen alike, it had astonishing success. “Out of twenty-two great battles fought by Frederick, his Cavalry won at least fifteen of them. Cavalry at this time reached its zenith.”

Frederick’s system was copied by all the great military nations of Europe, and at the close of the eighteenth century the influence of horsemen in the field was greater than it had ever been since the battle of Crécy.

Then came Napoleon, and though the Cavalry had not such a pre-eminent place in his armies as in those of Frederick the Great, for it was not as efficient, yet it was used in vast numbers and at times with tremendous effect. Murat was perhaps the most conspicuous figure among all Napoleon’s Marshals, and other Cavalry leaders made great names for themselves. At Marengo, at Austerlitz, and in many more of Napoleon’s famous battles, the French horsemen won undying renown; and if at last his Cuirassiers had to recoil before the fire of the British squares at Waterloo, every one knows with what magnificent courage and devotion they strove again and again to cut their way to victory.

Among Napoleon’s enemies too, Prussian and Austrian, Russian and British, the Cavalry did much fine work throughout; and it is not perhaps too much to say that the Russian horsemen, especially the Cossacks, by destroying his famous squadrons in the great retreat, were among the most notable causes of his downfall. This much is certain, that when he fell the Cavalry of Europe held a high place in the battlefield. Infantry had become the backbone of most armies, and the power of Artillery had vastly increased, but Cavalry was still a powerful and necessary arm.

Then came another marked change in the conditions of war. A generation after the Conqueror’s death the rifle took the place of the smooth-bore musket in the hands of the Infantry, and the same principle was applied to cannon. The result was that the power of firearms was greatly increased in range and accuracy, and that the value of Cavalry in battle was proportionately lowered. Soon afterwards the introduction of breech-loading gave the rifled weapons a vastly greater rapidity of fire, which also told heavily against the mounted arm. It was one thing for Cavalry to remain out of range, a few hundred yards away, and then to charge against the slow and inaccurate fire of a smooth-bore musket. It was a very different thing for them to advance from a much greater distance, against a rifle which not only carried three times as far as the musket, but shot straight, and could be loaded in a quarter of the time. From the middle of the nineteenth century it began to be held, at all events in France and England, that the chance of a successful attack by Cavalry armed only with the sword or lance upon Infantry in the battlefield, except under very unusual circumstances, was practically at an end. It seemed a fatal blow to the system of Frederick, and to the hope of the horseman in his long rivalry with the foot soldier.

That conclusion was not shaken by the wars waged by European nations during the remainder of the century. Some successes were gained by Cavalry in various parts of the world outside Europe. For example, the British Cavalry did fine work against the Sikhs in 1846 and 1849; a Persian square was broken and destroyed by a charge of British Indian Cavalry in 1856; and British Cavalry were very useful in the Mutiny soon afterwards, and against the Chinese; but neither in the Crimea, nor in the war between France and Austria in 1859, nor in the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, nor in the Franco-German War of 1870, nor in the Russian War against Turkey a few years later, could the Cavalry claim to have struck such blows in battle as they had been used to strike in the days of Napoleon. Colonel Henderson in that fascinating book, ‘The Science of War,’ writing of the “shock tactics” lately prevailing, reviews the achievements of Cavalry under that system. “Such is the record,” he says: “one great tactical success gained at Custozza; a retreating army saved from annihilation at Königgratz; and five minor successes, which may or may not have influenced the ultimate issue—not one single instance of an effective and sustained pursuit; not one single instance, except Custozza, and there the Infantry was armed with muzzle-loaders, of a charge decisive of the battle; not one single instance of Infantry being scattered and cut down in panic-flight; not one single instance of a force larger than a brigade intervening at a critical moment. And how many failures! How often were the Cavalry dashed vainly in reckless gallantry against the hail of a thin line of rifles! How often were great masses held back inactive, without drawing a sabre or firing a shot, while the battle was decided by the infantry and the guns!”

Truly, the day of Cavalry seemed to be over, and this was the opinion frequently expressed at the end of the century. Their day was not over.

It will probably have been noticed that so far we have been dealing only or mainly with the question of Cavalry on the battlefield. But their work lies not only on the battlefield—indeed, it may be doubted whether their work there, however great, has not always been of less value than the services they have been able to render in other ways.

The operations of war are generally treated by military writers as consisting of two distinct branches—those leading up to battle, and those of battle itself. The former are of great variety and scope, involving all the preparations and manœuvres which will result in bringing upon the battlefield an army with “every possible advantage of numbers, ground, supplies, and moral” over the army of the enemy. These operations are the province of “strategy.” The operations of the battle itself, when the opposed armies have actually come into touch, are the province of “tactics.” The latter are the more picturesque, and naturally appeal to the fighting spirit of the soldier; but the former are often, if not usually, of the greater importance to the issue of a war. “Strategy,” says Henderson, “is at least one half, and the more important half, of the art of war”; and he says elsewhere: “An army may even be almost uniformly victorious in battle, and yet ultimately be compelled to yield.”

Now it may safely be asserted that with regard to strategical operations there has never been any serious question as to the great value of Cavalry in any war confined to the land. To quote Colonel Denison, in “their fitness for scouting, reconnoitring, raiding, &c., Cavalry have always been the foremost arm and without rival. In covering an advance, in pursuing a retreating foe, their capacity has always been unequalled.” Henderson, himself an Infantry officer, states that “the Cavalry is par excellence the strategical arm,” that “it depends on the Cavalry, and on the Cavalry alone, whether the Commander of an army marches blindfold through the ‘fog of war,’ or whether it is the opposing General who is reduced to that disastrous plight.” And Von Bernhardi, discussing the future of Cavalry, says, “It is in the strategical handling of the Cavalry that by far the greatest possibilities lie.” He admits that on the battlefield and in retreat their rôle can only be a subordinate one. “But for reconnaissance and screening, for operations against the enemy’s communications, for the pursuit of a beaten enemy, and all similar operations of warfare, the Cavalry is, and remains, the principal arm.” These passages were written before the aeroplane was used in war, but they show clearly that until then—that is, throughout the nineteenth century—Cavalry was still as necessary as ever for the proper working of a campaign.

And further, it may be pointed out that even with regard to the battlefield, horsemen armed and trained in a different way might conceivably be of greater use than horsemen depending solely or mainly upon shock and the arme blanche.

This was proved, though the majority of Continental soldiers would never open their eyes to the fact, by the fighting in the American Civil War. Henderson, with clearer vision, writes of this great conflict: “So brilliant were the achievements of the Cavalry, Federal and Confederate, that in the minds of military students they have tended in a certain measure to obscure the work of the other arms.” No doubt many of these achievements were rather of a strategical than a tactical nature, but many were not. The American Cavalry was from first to last constantly used for actual fighting, and in numberless instances its value as a battle arm was amply demonstrated. It would be impossible to enumerate them here, but Henderson expressly declares, for example, that “there is no finer instance ... of effective intervention (by Cavalry) on the field of battle than Sheridan’s handling of his divisions, an incident most unaccountably overlooked by European tacticians, when Early’s army was broken into fragments, principally by the vigour of the Cavalry, in the valley of the Shenandoah.” The fact was that, adapting themselves to the new conditions brought about by rifled firearms, the Americans had created a mounted service which could fight both on foot and on horseback, with the rifle or the sword or the pistol; “they used fire and l’arme blanche in the closest and most effective combination, against both Cavalry and Infantry.” Assuredly Cavalry was not yet a negligible arm in battle.

The closing years of the century saw the beginning of another war in which the horse and his rider were again very prominent. The Boers, who made so gallant and protracted a fight against the vast resources of England, were all mounted men, and it was not until the British forces opposed to them also consisted in a large measure of mounted men that their resistance was broken down. They differed in many respects from the American Cavalry. The latter were trained to fight on foot if necessary, but preferred fighting on horseback whenever they could, though they fought with the pistol rather than the sword. The Boers fought mainly, almost entirely, on foot. Their arms and training were inconsistent with fighting from the saddle. They were in fact rather mobile riflemen than anything else. Nevertheless the fact remains that they were mounted men, and that a large part of their value lay in their being so. For many of the essential duties of Cavalry, for scouting and collecting information, for raids on their enemy’s communications, for the capture of his trains and guns, for covering a retirement, they were exceptionally well fitted. Henderson, writing of the duties of Cavalry, says: “But most important perhaps of all its functions are the manœuvres which so threaten the enemy’s line of retreat that he is compelled to evacuate his position, and those which cut off his last avenue of escape. A Cavalry skilfully handled, as at Appomattox or Paardeberg, may bring about the crowning triumph of grand tactics—viz., the hemming in of a force so closely that it has either to attack at a disadvantage or surrender.” The example of Paardeberg is one in which the triumph was due to the British Cavalry, but the Boers had some triumphs of the same kind, for instance at Nicholson’s Nek, and they were very near to gaining one which might have shaken the Empire. If Ladysmith had fallen, with its garrison of 12,000 men, as at one time seemed probable, the disaster would undoubtedly have been due in the main to the mobility of the Boers, whose rapid movements on horseback enabled them not only to drive in and besiege White’s troops, but afterwards to hold up for months, with inferior numbers, Buller’s relieving force, while still maintaining their grip on the starving garrison. In fact it may be said that even on the actual field of battle they fought partly as Cavalry—Von Bernhardi goes so far as to say “exclusively as Cavalry,”—for though they almost invariably dismounted to use their rifles, yet it was by the speed of their horses that they were able to extend their flanks, and, galloping out to any threatened point, form a fresh front against any turning movement. Our slow-moving Infantry had no chance of getting round and enveloping them, but was forced time after time to undertake desperate frontal attacks upon the lines, often more or less entrenched, which their rapidity of manœuvre had made it possible for them to take up. Altogether, the fighting value of the 50,000 Burghers with whom Paul Kruger set out to defy Great Britain, was doubled or trebled by the fact that they were mounted men. It made them in their own country, and perhaps would have made them anywhere, a formidable fighting force.

This was not clearly understood on the Continent of Europe, but it was understood in England. It had a great effect upon the views of our leading soldiers with regard to the future of Cavalry, and the subsequent Russo-Japanese War did not in any way contradict the lessons drawn from the campaigns in America and South Africa.

To sum up this chapter, it may be said with confidence that when the Great War broke out the value of Cavalry, both as a strategical arm and on the field of battle, had been demonstrated by the experience of three thousand years. During that time it had fluctuated, especially with regard to the battlefield, but it had always been great. For some centuries, especially since the development of efficient firearms, the tendency had been for the Infantry to oust the horsemen from their pride of place in the actual shock of armies, and by the end of the nineteenth century the supremacy of the Infantry in this respect had been generally acknowledged. But even so it had not been shown that Cavalry, properly armed and trained, were incapable of joining with effect in the decision of battles, and the American and South African Wars had given reason to believe that it certainly could do so. Its great strategical value was not disputed. Clearly, therefore, Cavalry was still a necessary and important part of any efficient army—one of the most important. Whether for strategical duties or for full victory in battle, the other arms could not do without the horsemen.

No doubt the value of Cavalry might be altered in the future, as it had been in the past, by new developments in the art of war, but such was the position at that time.

We may now turn to the Thirteenth Hussars.