Sir Douglas Haig (1861–1928), Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies on the Western Front 1915–1918, has always been a controversial figure. One of the charges levelled against him is that he was obsessed with cavalry charges and opposed to tanks; and that he rejected the evidence of the Boer War — or South African War — of 1899–1902, that cavalry was obsolete.
The story of the mounted troops in the Boer War that is still found in many books is as follows. The British cavalry, although armed with carbines as well as swords or lances, came to South Africa with only one idea — to charge mounted whatever the opportunity, despite the obvious fact that the charge was obsolete in the face of new infantry and artillery firepower. In South Africa the British were taught a sharp lesson by the Boer 'Commandos', units of irregular mounted riflemen formed from farmers and homesteaders, whose success was based on using the horse as a means of transport only, and on always dismounting and taking cover to fight. After the war, a serious attempt was made by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who had commanded in South Africa in 1900 and become Commander-in-Chief of the Army 1901–1904, to force the cavalry to adopt these new dismounted tactics. Under Roberts, the British cavalry regiments replaced their carbines with the rifle issued to the British infantry, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield, and as 'rifle cavalry' they were unique among the armies of 1914. But Roberts' reforms were followed by what one historian has called 'a cavalry counter-reformation' led by Haig and others like him, which restored the obsolete charge to its central position in the cavalry's thinking.
Haig appears to be condemned even by his own book Cavalry Studies of 1907, in which he writes that 'the role of cavalry will always go on increasing' in warfare, and that one reason for this is 'the small-bore rifle, the bullet from which has little stopping power against a horse'. Haig was not a military prophet, and the deadlock on the Western Front less than ten years later proved his assessment to be wrong. But the British cavalry did very well against the Germans in the battles of 1914, employing both the mounted charge and dismounted shooting, as the tactical situation demanded. The same mixture of the mounted charge with dismounted firepower, employed by British Yeomanry (Territorial Force Cavalry), Indian Cavalry, and Australian Light Horse also proved highly effective against Turkish forces in Palestine in 1917 and 1918. The real events of the war in South Africa show that Haig, far from being mistaken about cavalry, was among the officers responsible for this later success.
The practice of supplementing regular cavalry with irregular horsemen, or mounting infantry as a means of transport, was common in 19th-century British colonial warfare. The mounted riflemen of the Governor General of Canada's Bodyguard under Colonel George Dennison, which took part in the Fenian Invasion Scare of 1865–66, received particular notice. Redvers Buller, the British commander in South Africa in 1899, made part of his reputation commanding the irregular cavalry of the Frontier Light Horse in the Zulu War twenty years earlier. A number of British infantry officers who later served as generals in the First World War also attracted attention as young men commanding irregular horsemen in colonial wars of the 1880s, including Horace Smith-Dorrien, Herbert Plumer, Henry Wilson and Ian Hamilton. The British also had extensive experience of the conditions of fighting in southern Africa, and the nature of their Boer enemies, gained during the Zulu War, the First Boer War — or Transvaal War — of 1880–81, and the Cape Frontier (or 'Kaffir') Wars.
Originally, the dispute over the value of the mounted charge against that of dismounted tactics came from the refusal of the Treasury to fund enough cavalry regiments to make the late Victorian Army's main expeditionary strategy a reality. Drawn up in 1886, the British plan was based on having one or two Army Corps together with a Cavalry Division to send overseas in the event of a major war (as happened in 1899, when only one Army Corps was sent). There were just not enough regular British cavalry regiments to fulfil this function together with the obligations of providing garrison troops for Britain and the Empire. The solution reached by Sir Garnett Wolseley as Adjutant General was the creation in 1888 at Aldershot of the first of several Mounted Infantry schools, commanded by Sir Edward 'Curly' Hutton. These schools ran training courses for a section of 33 first-class marksmen from every British line infantry battalion to qualify as 'Mounted Infantry' (or 'M. I.'), giving them sufficient riding skills to carry out elementary scouting and picquet duties. On mobilisation, these sections would come together for the first time ever from 64 different battalions to form two Mounted Infantry battalions for the Army Corps.
Meant as a supplement for the cavalry, these M. I. were obviously quite inadequately trained, and they were a failure in South Africa in 1899. But Hutton and his supporters also argued that the regular cavalry should be confined entirely to charging, leaving all other roles to better-trained M. I. or irregular troops. The issue was not one of the cavalry charge against dismounted firepower, but the institutional survival of the cavalry regiments against a challenge from the infantry to take over their role. Both sides in the dispute claimed the cavalry of the American Civil War (1861–65) as an example of the effectiveness of their particular tactics; and both sides were right, depending on exactly which of the mounted forces of that war they meant. The American Civil War had instances both of successful mounted cavalry charges with pistols and sabres, and of successful dismounted fighting.
The British also saw dismounted rifle tactics as easier to learn than cavalry charges, and therefore particularly suitable for irregular or volunteer forces. Hutton served as commandant of the New South Wales Military Forces 1893–96, and as commander of the Canadian Militia 1898–99, teaching the colonial forces his ideas that the charge was obsolete and that the mounted rifleman was the future of warfare. Attempts were also made in the 1890s in Britain to retrain the Yeomanry Cavalry in dismounted fighting, but without much success.
Given the attitude of the Treasury, it was never very likely that the British Army would have been allowed two entirely separate mounted forces: cavalry for charging and mounted riflemen for all other duties. Nor is there much evidence that these distinctions ever made any real difference on campaign. Late Victorian armies often included cavalry, irregular mounted riflemen and M. I., and in practice all of them adapted quickly to the specific requirements of the local fighting. In the later stages of the Zulu war, the improvised M. I. even took to carrying bamboo lances, while cavalry might discard their swords and carry rifles if necessary.
But the experience of colonial warfare, together with a recognition that the new breech-loading and magazine-loading firearms had made a fundamental difference to war, did lead to reforms among the British cavalry regiments, with an increased emphasis on dismounted work. This did not happen in all regiments at the same time, but depended on the attitude of individual regimental lieutenant colonels. When a British cavalry brigade paraded together in 1881 in South Africa, one soldier recorded the distinction between his own 14th Hussars, who had acquired a reforming commander four years previously, and the other two regiments:
We wore serge coats and khaki pants, with Indian puttees, or long strips of cloth bound round and round the leg, in lieu of jackboots: they were much more comfortable and supporting. Our helmets and belts were rubbed over with red clay to harmonise with the colour of the ground and our steel was all dulled. The squadrons of the Inniskillings [6th Inniskilling Dragoons] and the 15th Hussars adopted quite a different style; they were as spick and span as could be, with helmets and gloves white and clean, and steel and brass work all sparkling in the sun. It was a queer contrast altogether, and represented two widely different schools of military opinion.
Herbert Compton,
A King's Hussar (1893)
The same distinctions in appearance and performance were noticed in the reformed 10th Hussars in the Second Afghan War (1878–80) when compared to other cavalry regiments.
Even so, the mounted charge remained the great symbol of cavalry status. There was also no doubt that the irregular non-European enemies that the British fought in this period were much more vulnerable to charging cavalry than armies equipped with the latest weapons and drilled to use them properly. When the 21st Lancers made their famous mounted charge at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, it was well understood that part of the regiment's motive was to gain military glory and status. Having charged, the regiment followed up with dismounted carbine fire. Douglas Haig, who was an eyewitness, thought the charge was unnecessary.
As a young officer with the 7th Hussars, Haig worked to improve their dismounted shooting, writing in an unpublished paper on cavalry tactics in 1890, 'Every cavalry soldier must thoroughly understand that his proper place is on horseback, his proper mode of action is the charge,' but that 'unless a cavalry force is by instruction and practice ready to fight on foot its usefulness will be curtailed and it cannot be considered efficient'. This attitude, and the reform of the cavalry that went with it, became more widespread under Sir James Keith Fraser as Inspector General of Cavalry 1891-95, for whom Haig served as an ADC in 1894. Among Keith Fraser's achievements was the securing of a cavalry brigade for John French, another innovative cavalryman. Haig served as French's brigade major, and together they wrote the 1896 edition of the Cavalry Drill Book. This confirmed that in conditions of European war the mounted charge would be 'confined to conflicts between small bodies [probably not even the strength of a squadron on either side] which may endeavour to make sudden dashes'. In colonial warfare the charge had more value, but it should be accompanied by fire from artillery and machine-guns.
This was the real state of British cavalry doctrine and training in 1899; the British cavalry did not copy dismounted action from their Boer opponents, although the war forced them to rely on it to a greater extent than expected. The problems of southern Africa for cavalry, well understood by the British from previous campaigns, were its sheer size (a theatre of war almost as large as Western Europe) and the distances involved in transporting horses. The British cavalry horse in 1899 was a highly trained and very expensive beast, expected to carry 300 pounds (man and equipment) on campaign, and consuming sometimes more than a regulation 20 pounds of grain and fodder daily in order to do so. This was beyond the capacity of the transport system on most colonial campaigns. Even a slight loss of weight and condition caused the specially fitted saddlery and tack to slip and rub, producing a painful 'sore back' for the horse. Many reforming officers argued before 1899 that such overburdened horses would not last a week in a major war.
A further problem was the distance to South Africa. No practical method had ever been found to exercise horses on board ship. They arrived unfit and weak, having passed through several temperature zones. In most colonial campaigns, cavalry horses died in large numbers from starvation and mistreatment, usually disguised by the characteristic Victorian euphemism 'horse exhaustion'. South Africa also had its own particular hazard, a mysterious 'lung sickness' that could kill horses in a matter of hours. The solution was partly to recruit irregular cavalry locally, and partly to allow several weeks (at least six, according to veterinarians) for the newly arrived horses to acclimatise. Even then, the defeat at Isandhlwana in 1879 was just one example of an army advancing without adequate scouting horsemen and paying the price.
The two Afrikaner republics — the South African Republic of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State — declared war on Britain on 9 October 1899, while the British forces were still assembling in Cape Colony and Natal, and the bulk of the Army Corps under Buller was still at sea. This was a deliberate Boer move to disrupt British preparations. This first Boer initiative rapidly came to nothing except the trapping of British forces in three sieges at Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking. But this was enough to force Buller to move to relieve Ladysmith before either his transport or his scouting cavalry forces were acclimatised or adequate to the task.
The number of Boers involved in the fighting was a matter of dispute even at the start of the war, but an initial figure of 60,000 is plausible, divided into Commandos supplemented by a few regular forces including a well-equipped artillery, and by some small overseas volunteer contingents. Each man was required to bring a rifle and at least one horse to war. The most valued rifle was the 1898 Mauser, but records of captures suggest that earlier models and single-shot breech-loaders were at least as common. Horses were locally bred ponies, fully acclimatised and capable of lasting on only 8 pounds of grain a day.
Against the British regular and irregular forces in southern Africa at the war's start, the Boers had every advantage. Despite this, out of the six battles fought in the first two months of the war the British won four — Talana Hill, Elandslaagte, Belmont and Graspan — against two defeats — Lombard's Kop and Modder River. Elandslaagte on 21 October was a demonstration of what a difference an adequate number of fully acclimatised British cavalry might have made to the war. John French had been given a local command with Haig as his chief staff officer, and a well-timed charge with lances by the 5th Dragoon Guards caught the Boers as they tried to retreat. Haig, interviewing prisoners, was impressed by the Boer horror of this tactic, and its effectiveness.
Despite this successful start, within a few weeks supply problems began to wreck the British mounted forces. On 6 November, over the protests of his veterinary and supply officers, Buller ordered the standard cavalry grain ration cut to 8 lb if grazing were theoretically possible. This order was never rescinded, and meant that throughout the war British cavalry horses lived on a starvation diet. The long-term effect of this was a grim form of natural selection, whereby men learned how to keep their horses fit and alive, and increasingly preferred smaller acclimatised horses of the kind that the Boers rode. Of 487,497 horses used by the British in the war, 326,073 or 67 per cent died, almost none from enemy action. The short-term effect was that the cavalry had about three months from the day Buller gave his order before it would be rendered ineffective.
It mattered little what weapons a man was given, and how he was taught to use them, if his horse was dying underneath him and he did not know how to keep it alive. The British made the political decision not to use the troops of their Indian Army in the war, whose cavalry were used to looking after their horses in extreme conditions; but many of their officers served in South Africa. Col. Michael Rimington, commanding his irregular 'Rimington's Scouts' (or 'Tigers' from the strips of fur worn in their hats) was regarded as the best horsemaster on the British side, and his advice was often sought.
The three military defeats of 'Black Week', the battles of Stormberg on 10 December, Magersfontein on 11 December and Colenso on 15 December, also fell on three separate British armies each advancing with inadequate supplies and inadequate scouting horsemen. Buller remained in command in the eastern theatre opposite Ladysmith, but was replaced in overall command by Lord Roberts, another firm believer in firepower and M. I., with Lord Kitchener as his chief staff officer (in effect functioning as a second in command).
On arrival in Cape Town on 10 January 1900 Roberts took a bold risk to end the war quickly. Since this failed, he later tried successfully to play down its importance, but in fact it shaped the rest of the war. Roberts effectively doubled his mounted forces at a stroke by requiring every line infantry battalion in South Africa to create a company of M. I., as well as raising two further large regiments of irregulars. Requests were also made for mounted riflemen from the colonies — chiefly Australia, Canada and New Zealand — and from Britain. The Army could have asked the Yeomanry Cavalry regiments to volunteer for overseas service. Instead, a different 'Imperial Yeomanry' structure was created for the war's duration, to provide troops equipped and trained as mounted infantry. In fact many of the officers and men of the Yeomanry Cavalry volunteered for the first Imperial Yeomanry contingents, and there was little difference between the two in the public mind. So, the British created companies of 'Imperial Yeomanry' (or 'I.Y.') as mounted riflemen. Curly Hutton was given command of one of the new M. I. brigades (a mixture of British and colonial forces), as was Ian Hamilton once Ladysmith was liberated by Buller on 28 February. It was the M. I. concept, that good horsemen could be improvised virtually from nothing, taken to its greatest extreme in war. Meanwhile, in a complex and controversial move, Kitchener attempted to organise the transport system along Indian Army lines; perhaps better in the long-term, but adding to the immediate confusion. Roberts had a matter of weeks in which this mobile force could win the war for him, before there was a catastrophic collapse of supplies and horse fitness.
As part of the reorganisation, a new Cavalry Division (about 8,000 cavalry and M. I.) was formed under John French, with Haig once more running his staff. Roberts' strategy was to relieve the siege of Kimberley and press on as rapidly as possible to the two enemy capitals of Bloemfontein and Pretoria. French's Cavalry Division led the way to Kimberley, and on 15 February made a crucial mounted charge literally through a blocking position held by perhaps 2,000 Boers at Klip Drift, and on to relieve the siege. The Cavalry Division's war diary, written by Haig, puts British losses as four men wounded and two horses killed, other sources put the figure as high as 20 killed. The point was that the loss bore no relation whatsoever to the theoretical firepower of 2,000 Mauser rifles.
Immediately following the relief of Kimberley, French pushed a cavalry brigade forward to cut off the besieging Boer force of about 4,000 under Commandant Piet Cronje, now in flight before the main British infantry advance under Kitchener. The brigade overtook Cronje at Paardeberg Drift and opened fire dismounted from concealed positions. Assuming that British infantry were ahead of him, Cronje halted and dug in, allowing Kitchener to catch up. After a confused battle, Cronje surrendered on 27 February.
This was an almost perfect demonstration of the cavalry's ability to mix mounted and dismounted tactics; but it was also the end of the Cavalry Division as a fighting force. According to Haig's careful records, the horses received virtually nothing to eat on the first 15 days of the operation, nothing on the four days after relieving Kimberley, and only returned to their totally inadequate normal rations on 23 February, by which time only 4,200 horses were still alive, and many of them were unfit to ride. The improvised M. I. were in an even worse condition; and Roberts' idea of a quick victory began to slip away. The gamble was finally lost at the battle of Poplar Grove on 6 March, a promising chance to end the war by pinning the main Commando forces, together with the presidents of both republics and their leading general, the formidable Christiaan de Wet, in an enveloping attack against a river line. But much had been learned on both sides since Modder River; and rather than face a properly organised British assault the Boers began to mount up and retreat almost as the attack began, in what De Wet described as 'a panic'. French's cavalrymen, unable to get their dying horses to move faster than a trot, could not complete the envelopment, and the Boers escaped. Roberts' entry into Bloemfontein on 13 March was a hollow victory.
After a long pause during which the supply and transport system was at least partly fixed, Roberts resumed his advance towards Pretoria on 3 May. Poplar Grove had set a pattern for the battles of this part of the war. At Zand River on 10 May and again at Diamond Hill on 11 June, the British outflanked hill positions only to see the Boers escape any pursuit by their crippled mounted forces. The Boers became so concerned about the cavalry threat to their flanks that at Diamond Hill they tried to hold 25 miles of front with about 8,000 men. The firing line of Mausers was spread so thinly that the Boers could not generate enough firepower to stop a charge. Most surprisingly, veterinary research of the period confirmed Haig's assessment that the new smaller calibre bullets had less stopping power against a horse, unless lucky enough to hit a major organ or bone. Accounts are common of horses collapsing from wounds after a successful charge, but not during the charge itself.
To their own astonishment, the British cavalry found that it was possible to drive dismounted Boer defenders from a hill crest with a mounted charge, no matter how slowly or badly delivered. For the first time, at Diamond Hill the composite Household Regiment (a mere 70 riders) went further by charging a Boer hill position, and then dismounting to hold the ground with their carbines, for the cost of one wounded man and 21 wounded or collapsed horses. That cavalry trained in this fashion could take and hold ground was a revelation. As an eyewitness, Haig recorded that 'cavalry as now arrived is a new factor in tactics'. The new rifle-armed cavalry would be quite different from the cavalry arm of the 19th century.
In their enthusiasm the cavalry attributed these Boer retreats entirely to a lack of discipline and training for the charge, and were prepared to believe that such charges might be equally effective against European infantry. This view of the future importance of cavalry was shared by Roberts, who wrote in 1901 that, 'No one can have a greater belief in the value of cavalry than I do. It will, I am satisfied, be more required than ever in wartime,' as long as it also knew how to fight dismounted.
By shortly after the fall of Pretoria on 5 June, horse starvation had reduced the British mounted forces to a state of absolute collapse from which they would take about a year to recover. All that was left of the Boer forces were the 'Bitter Enders'; perhaps 20,000 experienced mounted riflemen with 430,000 square miles of veldt to hide in, who would drag the war on for almost another two years. The British reorganised their mounted troops into 'columns', or independent mounted brigades in all but name, containing any combination of cavalry, M. I., colonial or local volunteers and I.Y. The infantry and artillery role shrank to holding supply bases and strongpoints. In response to the new Boer tactics of avoiding battle, the cavalry adopted the infantry rifle, and most firefights took place at extreme ranges of 2,000 yards or more. Contacts were rare, and since swords and lances were of no value to men whose horses could not gallop, Roberts suggested that to save weight the cavalry should abandon them. The decision was left to individual column commanders: some turned a blind eye, and Haig's original regiment, the 7th Hussars, kept their swords throughout the war. This turned out to be the correct decision, since in late 1900 the Boers changed tactics once again and — in a complete reversal of the traditional picture of the war — began to charge British columns.
This departure from the normal Boer tactics of not risking heavy casualties reflected both the often very weakened state of the horses in the British columns, and a growing Boer military confidence. At Vlakfontein in May 1901 a Boer charge cost a British rearguard 186 casualties. At Blood River Poort in September a British column under Major Hubert Gough was tricked into dismounting and then rolled up by a charge from the flank, capturing most of the force. But the most famous of the Boer charges was a failure: at Rooiwall in April 1902 nearly 1,000 Boers charged a British column, which had time to dismount and receive the charge with 1,500 rifles. Even so, the Boers were only turned back 70 yards from the British line, for the loss of 51 killed, 40 wounded and 36 prisoners, which again bore no relation to the theoretical firepower that they had faced. In response, the British also resumed charging Boer positions late in the war, such as the charge of the Queen's Bays at Boschmann's Kop in April 1902.
By the war's end on 30 May 1902 the mounted troops of both sides were, effectively, mounted riflemen also capable of a mounted charge. As Haig told the Royal Commission into the conduct of the war in 1902, 'The ideal cavalry is one which can attack on foot and fight on horseback.' This was Haig's real opinion, widely shared among those who had fought in southern Africa. The successful British cavalry operations in Palestine 1917–18 were to be its legacy.
by Stephen Badsey
About the Author
Dr Stephen Badsey MA FRHistS is a senior lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
Further Reading
Gerald J. DeGroot, Douglas Haig 1861-1928 (1988)
Martin Marix Evans, The Boer War (1999)
Fransjohan Pretorius, Life on Commando during the Anglo-Boer War (1999)
Christiaan de Wet, Three Years War (1902, reprinted 1986)