Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/383

Rh TACTICS.] WAR 359 infantry, which these men in fact were, is that, while they can ride well enough to get over such ground as is required, they waste no time in learning manoeuvres which they could not master, but look altogether to fighting with firearms and on foot whenever collision becomes neces sary. The Boers represented an almost ideal body of this kind. British wars have supplied most valuable bodies of mounted infantry, who have been always picked men, picked shots, and excellent infantry. As a general prin ciple, it is safe to say that they ought to be under infantry and not under cavalry officers, as to their immediate com mand, though very often indeed they will be a most valuable auxiliary for any cavalry commander, who will in that case of course have the whole body under his orders. In so far as their presence tends to save cavalry from the disastrous necessity which occasionally befalls them of having to employ their men in fighting on foot, their presence with cavalry is always valuable. But, as the time when all their best training is required is when they are actually fighting on foot, it is far better that they should then find themselves under the orders of an officer whose training tends to make him accustomed to handling men on foot, rather than to one all whose experience ought to have accustomed him to handle men on horseback, and to hate making them jump off their horses. The difficulty in enforcing these principles lies in the fact that it is only the experience of war on a large scale which brings home to cavalry officers the disastrous con sequences of injuring their own power by continually try ing to take up the role of mounted infantry. They find themselves at peace manoeuvres continually put hors de combat, because they have come under the fire of infantry. They can very often get into positions where, if they were infantry and in large numbers, their effect would be most telling. Their rapidity of movement enables them to do this. A narrow deduction from a very incomplete know ledge of the experiences of cavalry charges during the 1870 campaign led to the conclusion that cavalry could not be employed on a modern battle-field in their proper work. That conclusion is utterly rejected by all those authorities who have had the best means of analysing the experiences on which it was based ; yet it remains a tradition which unfortunately affects the minds of many cavalry officers as well as those of many other officers in the army. It is safe to say, in conclusion on this matter, that the two forces of cavalry and mounted infantry are each of the greatest value, provided they each adhere to their own proper function. As soon as mounted infantry begins to attempt manoeuvres on horseback it necessarily becomes a very inferior cavalry. As soon as cavalry takes to dis mounting, its equipment, its training, and usually its arms are sure to make it into a very inefficient body. Every year adds to the necessity of high shooting training for infantry, and of every hour of their work being connected with the efficient use of their arm. Every hour devoted by cavalry to shooting which subtracts anything from training in their own proper work, or which leads them to compete with the other arm in that way, weakens them. By no process can they compete with infantry if they measure themselves with them under the conditions favour able to infantry fighting. Nothing is more fallacious than the notion that because during the latter part of the 1870 campaign the German cavalry often fought on foot the Germans therefore consider that the proper employment of the arm. Prince Kraft emphatically says&quot; The circumstances of the latter campaigns of this war were so abnormal that no rules for the employment of the arms can be deduced from them.&quot; &quot;No cavalry could perform the duty&quot; the German cavalry here did, of saving their own infantry by acting on the wings against the French infantry, &quot; except in the case where they were engaged with an enemy whose hastily collected and undrilled masses had not the full value of regular troops.&quot; We may also mention as an illustration of at least the views of the German leaders that during some manoeuvres in 1879 a regiment of lancers by sudden surprise charged from behind some rising ground at four battalions of infantry, who did not see the cavalry till these were on their flank at a distance of 200 yards already in full charge. Scarcely a shot was fired before the cavalry were among the infantry. The emperor and Count Von Moltke were present, and the decision was that three battalions were hors de combat. Now, when it is remembered that a cavalry regiment numbers about 400 men and three battalions about 3000, the difference between the effect produced under such circumstances by a body of cavalry and an equivalent body of mounted infantry, who could not have dismounted at most more than 300 men, who would certainly have been destroyed, is too great not to be realized. In this case an instance occurred of what Prince Kraft mentions as a possibility continually illustrated by the experiences of the 1870 campaign. The colonel commanding the lancers, having moved personally to a well- chosen spot, had been quietly observing the movements of the infantry, himself unseen up to the moment when by a signal he gave the order for his regiment to advance at a gallop, and then charge. Artillery. Here the first point it is necessary to insist on is that the tendency to a divorce between firing practice and drill manoeuvre has been inherited by the artillery from the past as it has been by the infantry. Napoleon s formation for the battle of Austerlitz placed his artillery guns between his infantry brigades and on their flank. The artillery advanced nearly in line with the infantry and rather in advance of it. As long as it was possible for artillery thus to move up to close quarters with the infantry, exact accuracy of fire training was of little importance. The distance was so short that the round shot were bound to produce their effect. But, when the range of both infantry and artillery fire were greatly extended, a change took place which required a change of habit in the artillery, for which the long training of the past had as little prepared them as had been the case with the infantry. The horse artillery, and at a much later date the field batteries, had acquired a mobility which enabled them very rapidly to take up assigned positions. But the habit of thinking that drill movements, irrespective of accuracy of fire, were the busi ness on which a soldier s mind should be set continued to operate long after all idea of moving artillery cheek by jowl with infantry or cavalry had been abandoned. The practice grounds of artillery for actual shell fire are neces sarily much fewer and more difficult to select than the ranges for infantry. Hence what we have said of the tendency in infantry manoeuvres to separate the effective fire of the ranges and the butts from drill and manoeuvres applies with tenfold force to the artillery. Moreover, in the case of the artillery this tendency has been aggravated by a certain fear among generals and their staff officers of interfering in the detail work of a special arm. As long as a battery is seen to manoeuvre rapidly, to take up an assigned and telling position, and to fire off a puff of smoke, the superintending general is apt to think that he may assume that all has been done that ought to have been done. Unfortunately, it may happen that the battery which thus appears to have acted in the very smartest possible