by Brian Fagan
Unfortunately, few senior officers took any notice of Nolan’s teachings. Almost to a man, they were wealthy aristocrats, many of them with experience dating back to the Napoleonic Wars of now-outmoded realities of warfare. In an era of sharp class distinctions and inherited wealth, officers purchased high ranks for large sums, even when they had virtually no military experience. It was hardly surprising, then, that cavalry regiments were preoccupied by display. They dazzled an admiring public with beautifully choreographed and executed drills. They wore brilliant uniforms, often subsidized by their wealthy commanders from their own pockets. Lord Cardigan’s Eleventh Hussars were a notorious example of arrogant extravagance. Officers and troopers wore cherry-colored overalls (trousers), royal blue jackets edged with gold, and furred pelisses (short, richly adorned cloaks). Their high fur hats defied logic with their bright feathers. Everyone’s trousers were absurdly tight, the overall effect utterly gorgeous—and totally impractical. Cavalry officers had a reputation for dashing horsemanship and a passion for horses, but knew nothing about the realities of war. The London Times cynically described the Eleventh Hussars’ uniforms “as utterly unfit for war service as the garb of the female hussars in the ballet.”7 When the Crimean War broke out in October 1853, allying the British and French against the Russians on the shores of the Black Sea, Queen Victoria’s cavalry was ready for glory, her regiments commanded by aristocratic officers, most of whom had never been under fire. They embarked for the Black Sea as if starting a foxhunt. Wisely, the French sent out almost no cavalry.
Crimean Disaster
The British army’s performance in the Crimean War was a disaster, despite the bravery of the troops. Quite apart from battlefield casualties, grossly inadequate logistics and water shortages led to the deaths of hundreds of cavalrymen and their suffering, emaciated mounts. The cavalry hovered on the margins until the Battle of Balaclava, in October 1854, where two major charges marked what was ultimately an inconclusive battle on the margins of the Sebastopol fortress. But the charges of the Heavy and Light Brigades brought immortality to Balaclava. (Heavy cavalry were armored riders on heavier horses, used as shock troops. The French called them cuirassiers. A mounted cuirassier wearing his customary breastplate armor, and his horse, could weigh a ton. Light cavalry were generally faster units, using light arms, employed for scouting and patrolling, often protecting vulnerable flanks and pursuing fleeing infantry.)8
Between three thousand and four thousand Russian cavalry bore down on the Heavy Brigade under Brigadier General James Scarlett from higher ground. Without hesitation, Scarlett deployed his five hundred horsemen as the Russians trotted downhill toward them. Inexplicably, the enemy halted to redeploy. Three squadrons of the British charged, and crashed headlong into the Russians. Furious hand-to-hand combat ensued. Two other squadrons now charged to the left and right. The great mass of horsemen heaved back and forth, the bodies of the dead and wounded falling across their saddles. The outnumbered Heavy Brigade routed its foes, but that is where it ended. No one pursued the fleeing Russians, who escaped annihilation.
Then came a fateful pause, followed by the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. Inexplicably, a resplendently attired Lord Cardigan led the brigade in a headlong charge up a narrow valley against batteries of Russian guns both ahead and on the flanks. The cavalry overran the guns, but was forced to retreat in disorder. The entire engagement lasted but twenty minutes. A French general, Pierre Bosquet, famously remarked, “It is magnificent, but it is not war: it is madness.”9 And military insanity it was (see sidebar “Cavalry Folly: Into the Valley of Death”).
Cavalry Folly: Into the Valley of Death
The Charge of the Light Brigade ranks among the most futile in history. Dithering commanders and tragic misunderstandings launched about 650 officers and men armed with only lances and sabers and mounted on fast, unarmored horses, on a headlong charge against serried Russian batteries at the end of what poet Alfred Lord Tennyson called “The Valley of Death.”10
Led by a fearless and foolhardy Lord Cardigan, the Light Brigade advanced at a trot, then a canter and a gallop. Gunfire poured down on the horsemen from the higher ground on either side. The batteries of canon ahead opened fire. Round shot bounded along the valley floor, hitting horses and men. A corporal fell; his mount continued galloping with the formation. Metal shrapnel fragments tore off arms and legs. Riderless steeds tried to rejoin the formation, behaving like the herd animals they were. Deprived of the reassuring hands of their riders and crazed with fear, they sought the company of other beasts, crowding against officers and men, covering them with blood. The Russian infantry opened fire. “The very air hissed as the shower of bullets passed through us; many men were killed or wounded.”11 The survivors had to avoid horses and men lying dead or flailing on the ground. Dust and smoke masked the charging troops. Now at a gallop and only forty-six meters (fifty yards) from the batteries, the Light Brigade leveled lances and sabers. The gun crews tried to withdraw, but the cavalry were on them. Vicious hand-to-hand fights ensued as the troopers tried to spike the guns, but retreat was inevitable.
The valley floor was a scatter of dead and dying horses and men. Mangled steeds struggled to get up; walking wounded staggered toward safety. Survivors managed to corral riderless beasts, only to have them shot from under them. Troopers led wounded horses laden with suffering men. Three hundred eighty-one beasts were killed or put down. Only 195 officers and men returned to camp. Lord Cardigan was unharmed.
The Charge of the Light Brigade was but the prelude for the horses. During the ensuing winter, the chargers, in mud to their knees, stood exposed to bitter winds and drifting snow. Sometimes they received no more than a handful of barley a day, so they gnawed at saddle blankets and one another’s tails. Nearly all the Light Brigade mounts died in a tragic footnote to one of the last occasions when outmoded notions of aristocratic cavalry élan and medieval tactics confronted modern firepower.
To quote Lord Tennyson:
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell,
They that had fought so well
Came thro’ the jaws of Death
Back from the mouth of Hell
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.12
The Crimean War was the first of several small conflicts that introduced new military technologies to the battlefield. These included the rifled gun barrel, which improved the range and accuracy of infantry weapons.13 Despite the impact of industrial technologies, especially during the American Civil War of the 1860s and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, cavalry tactics changed little, despite the devastating effects of rapid firing, breech-loaded weapons in the hands of both infantry and artillery. The lessons of the American Civil War, which highlighted the flexibility of cavalry that could fight when mounted and on foot at short notice, were largely ignored in Europe. Unlike American cavalry, which relied heavily on pistols and carbines, European cavalry maintained lances as serious weapons in the hands of dragoons and lancers right up to World War I.
Nor did cavalry tactics change, despite the publicity generated by the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea. Take, for example, the celebrated “Death Ride” charge in the Franco-Prussian War, by Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Bredow’s Twelfth Cavalry Brigade at Mars-la-Tour in August 1870. He used the smoke of the battlefield and the rolling terrain to emerge a few hundred yards in front of French infantry and artillery. Bursting out of the smoke at a gallop, the horsemen swept into the guns, but were driven back by French cuirassiers. Von Bredow lost 397 men and 403 horses, about 45 percent of his force. A later skirmish in the Vosges Mountains saw two well-aimed rifle volleys take down two-thirds of a French formation’s horses. Seven elite cavalry regiments virtually ceased to exist in one day. An observer remarked that rapid-firing infantry reduced each splendid unit in turn to a line of kicking, bloodstained heaps. Surviving horses galloped wildly over the battlefield until rounded u
p or hunted back to their own lines by German horsemen, in what one observer called “so thorough a destruction by what may be called a single volley.”14 The deliberate sacrifice of horses and their riders was still, apparently, a valid practice. Yet hard-won experience from elsewhere stared cavalry officers in the face.
Plains Indians and Boers
Mass charges took no account of the flexibility and mobility of small groups of mounted horsemen, which paid rich dividends in the American West and later in South Africa. Plains Indians had acquired horses during the sixteenth century soon after the Spanish entrada. They pursued buffalo on horseback and also acquired an expertise at raiding, which became intricately mingled with notions of acquiring prestige and honor. Inevitably, violent encounters with newcomers and settlers followed. Between 1866 and 1890, the U.S. Army fought a series of small-scale wars against Plains Indian bands scattered over an enormous area. Indian horsemen attacked with lances and bows, the latter highly effective when shot rapidly at close range—just as they had been with the Mongols on the other side of the world. Eventually, they acquired repeating rifles and other sophisticated weaponry, but tended to fight individually, a strategy deeply embedded in their raiding culture. Some bands selected their horses carefully and bred them for speed, surefootedness, and color.
The military power of Plains Indians was more a product of their skill with breeding and riding horses than it was of discipline and long-term strategy. Plains Indian boys learned to ride when they were as young as five years old, advancing to become skilled riders by the time they were seven or so. U.S. troops, with their superior weaponry, could defeat Indians in close-quarter engagements, but they had difficulty finding them across the enormous, often featureless Plains. So the army employed Indian scouts, said by one general to be worth more than six companies of mounted soldiers.
The cavalry had to cover enormous distances without wearing out their horses, a well-managed unit covering about forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) a day with regular stops and great care taken to minister to horses, loads, and riders. Under such a system, which alternated walking, trotting, and occasional gallops to stretch the horses’ legs, a unit could cover as much as over 966 kilometers (600 miles) in a month in perfect order. The cavalry also gained significant advantages by campaigning with good winter clothing during the coldest months when the Indians settled in permanent camps, thereby negating their superior mobility. An English observer described army beasts as ‘stout, hard, active and wiry,’ and accustomed to hardship. The troopers were, at best, working horsemen, with none of the polish of European cavalrymen, but they knew well to look carefully after their horses. In the end their superior long-term strategy in the field prevailed.
Another defining moment in cavalry history came with the Boer War of 1899–1902. Boer horsemanship and mobility was vastly superior to that of the British, whose mounted forces numbered some eighty thousand at war’s end. Many units from Australia and Canada adopted the marauding tactics so successfully employed by the Boers, such as using rifles with longer range like their enemies. The best British units engaged in thorough reconnaissance with carefully gathered intelligence; surprise with speed was acquired with good riding and overwhelming firepower. But the wastage of horses was enormous. The American Civil War saw equine casualty rates in the 50 percent range. No fewer than three hundred and fifty thousand British horses out of half a million perished in the Boer War, a casualty rate in the region of 70 percent. The demands for horseflesh were enormous, but an efficient remount system that called on sources all over the world and a well-organized shipping system kept the cavalry supplied. At one point, the British were shipping six thousand horses a month out of New Orleans, from a base near Kansas City. In South Africa itself, logistics and veterinary care were appalling. Inadequate fodder led to many beasts starving to death. The severe losses were not so much due to the rider, but to inadequate supply lines for mounted units that required elaborate backup, everything from farriers to horse masters.
“We Had to Shoot Quite a Number”
World War I with its trench warfare, barbed wire, and carefully sited machine guns was a rude and belated wake-up call for conventional cavalry. Mounted units did play somewhat of a role in the early months of the war in the west. Fixed, heavily wired front lines and trench warfare eventually changed the rules, despite the efforts of elderly generals whose ideas were firmly stuck in the colonial battles of Victorian times. They insisted that mounted regiments be kept in reserve, but the massed charge was finally recognized as the anachronism it had been since the Crimean War. Quite apart from the firepower of artillery and machine guns, a few strands of barbed wire were sufficient to stop a galloping regiment in its tracks. In 1917, a British infantry officer watched two brigades of cavalry charge a village during the Battle of Arras. The Germans opened up with massive firepower. “It was a wicked waste of men and horses. . . . The horses seem to have suffered most, and for a while we put bullets into poor brutes that were aimlessly limping about on three legs or else careering around madly in their agony; like one I saw that had the whole of its muzzle blown away.”15 The psychological effects of a thundering charge had dissipated in the face of infantrymen armed with the military technology of an industrial age. Dismounting became an important cavalry tactic as the war unfolded. Occasionally, however, mounted units fought alongside tanks or cut down fleeing troops.
Horse regiments played a more significant role on the much longer Eastern Front. French war correspondent Dick de Lonlay had campaigned with the Russian army in 1877. He described the steppe-bred Don warhorse used by Cossacks as an ideal mount: “frugal to amazing degree, he lives contented with a handful of oats or barley.” A Don would munch the thatch of a peasant’s hut, was impervious to cold and heat, and responded “to each caress and falls in with the mood of his owner,” to which he was devoted. “In combat he takes part with unrestrained rage: mane flowing, with bloodshot nostrils. He kicks and bites the enemy’s horses with the greatest furor.”16 De Lonely commented on the deep attachment of the Cossacks to their mounts, a tradition with roots in history. They enjoyed some notable successes during World War I, especially when pursuing small groups. In the open country of the Middle East, British general Edmund Allenby used cavalry so successfully that the Turks withdrew from the war, but Allenby never attempted suicidal mass charges.
More than six million horses saw service during the war, most of them used for hauling artillery and supplies. They were better than motor vehicles at traveling through deep mud and over rough terrain. Six to twelve horses pulled heavier guns, even in deep mud, and towed captured weapons from no-man’s-land. A Canadian soldier at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, in 1917, remembered how “the horses were up to their bellies in mud. . . . We had to shoot quite a number.”17 Thousands of beasts died in artillery barrages, and suffered from poison gas and skin diseases. On the German side, fodder shortages led to widespread equine starvation. Abandoned horse carcasses, manure, and poor sanitary conditions contributed to disease in camps along both sides of the front. Chronic horse shortages developed. At the Battle of Passchendaele, also in 1917, infantrymen were told that the loss of a horse was of greater tactical concern than that of a soldier, who was, after all, replaceable. Horsemen whose mounts died were required to cut off one of the hooves and take it to their commanding officer, to prove that the animal had in fact perished. Very few horses on any front returned home. Like ammunition and stores of all kinds, they had become merely a commodity in the first modern industrial war, just like the long-suffering animals that pulled omnibuses and plowed fields back home.
The Great War showed even the most conservative strategist just how helpless horses were against modern weaponry. It was not until the 1930s that trucks, tanks, and other vehicles developed cross-country abilities and levels of reliability that made them essential. The U.S. Army led the changeover, which culminated in the development of the jeep. Only the Germans and Russians employed large cavalry units
during World War II, despite the Nazis’ emphasis on mechanizing their armies. The Russians deployed as many as two hundred thousand mounted troops, notably Cossacks, whose very name and habitual use of sabers put fear into the hearts of Hitler’s fleeing troops. They deliberately called many of their units “Cossacks” even if they weren’t, because of the terror this produced in their foes.
Enormous numbers of horses served in German artillery and supply trains. They suffered alongside men in the appalling conditions along the Eastern Front, where animals and humans alike starved to death, the former because they were unable to forage the countryside. Russian horses were much better adapted to winter conditions on the steppe. Among them, six million small horses given by the Mongolians and perfectly adapted to savage weather, being especially mobile during the winter months, gave the Soviets major strategic advantages. The last Russian cavalry units vanished in the 1950s. Except for actions against guerrillas and in very rugged terrain such as that in Afghanistan, mounted troops have little value in today’s conflicts. They appear on ceremonial occasions—Britain’s Household Brigade is a famous example—and horse patrols help police forces in crowd control.