As for cavalry, the proportion of the arme blanche to other arms was no greater in the British army than in either the French or the German forces, and it got smaller as the war went on. In September 1914 the BEF had two cavalry divisions to support six infantry divisions. By 1918 three cavalry divisions supported sixty-one infantry divisions. In 1914 each infantry division had 5,592 horses, of which only 167 belonged to the divisional cavalry squadron. A cavalry division, despite being composed entirely of mounted men, had, at 9,815, only seventy-five per cent more horses than its infantry counterpart. The fact is that only a minority of horses used by the British army were cavalry horses, and the reason for that was the lack of any other means of transporting a man or stores quickly around the battlefield. The internal combustion engine had been known about since its first experimental inception in 1884, but in 1914 the motor car was still unreliable and incapable of moving off roads. Each regular division of the BEF had, by 1915 when organisations had stabilised, eleven motor cars (used as staff cars and for postal deliveries well behind the lines); four motor lorries, nineteen motorcycles (for despatch riders) and twenty-one motor ambulances (for transport between the casualty clearing station and the hospital, or the port of embarkation). Everything else was horse-drawn.
It was not only cavalrymen who rode horses. Commanders of brigades, divisions, corps and armies rode them too, as being the fastest way to get from place to place. In an infantry battalion the commanding officer, all company commanders and the adjutant were established for horses. The movement of armies in 1914, once they had been delivered to the battle area by rail, motor lorry or bus, was restricted to the speed at which a man could march; and given that the infantryman not actually engaged with the enemy carried, on average, sixty pounds on his back, this was about two miles an hour. An infantry brigade moving out of contact with the enemy took up two and a quarter miles of road, and took over two hours to pass a given point. A division took up fifteen miles of road, and more than seven hours were needed for it to pass. All this needs to be borne in mind when it is asked why it took so long to deploy reserves, and why reactions to changes in the tactical situation seem slow by modern standards. Given that a means of moving the infantry around the battlefield, with speed and protection from small-arms fire, would take a further half-century to become a practicable proposition, and that universal radio communication was thirty years away, anyone who needed to move from place to place, to find out what was happening, to give orders to more than one unit or to deliver urgent information had to have a horse: there was no faster or more efficient way of getting about.
The field artillery had to be able to support the infantry, get its guns to a position from where it could fire at the enemy, and move forward once the infantry had moved to the limit of the guns’ range. As this movement was nearly always either off roads or along roads already damaged by shelling, the guns had to be mobile over any terrain. Traction engines were well known and widely used by 1914, but they were very slow and cumbersome. They could be, and were, used to pull the very heavy artillery pieces, those that fired from well behind the immediate area of fighting, but they were quite unsuitable for field artillery supporting the infantry. Only horses would do, and each eighteen-pounder gun was pulled by six draught horses. Horses could get through all but the worst ground, were faster than traction engines and less liable to break down. Each brigade (regiment) of field artillery had 108 horses to pull its guns, but also needed horses to pull the ammunition wagons, and for the battery commanders and observation officers. In the field artillery the gun crews might, on good firm ground, hitch a ride on the gun limbers, the cart attached to the gun and containing the immediate ammunition supply; but generally they marched. Horse artillery, on the other hand, had to be able to keep up with the horsed cavalry, and so their gun crews rode. A field-artillery regiment (with three batteries) had 748 horses, a horse-artillery regiment of only two batteries needed 779. While the use of motor transport for heavy guns underwent enormous expansion between 1914 and 1918, even by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 the French and German armies’ artillery, other than that in direct support of infantry or in the armoured units, was still largely horse-drawn.
The mule is uncomfortable to ride and cannot cover ground at the speed of a horse, but pound for pound he is a better weight-carrier, and less fussy about what he eats. Transport that did not need to be faster than the marching infantry could be provided by mules, and this included machine guns and battalion ration carts. The mule is an artificial creation, being a cross between a horse and a donkey, and although they come in the usual two sexes, they are sterile and cannot breed. Mules have a reputation for being stubborn, but once trained are capable of sustained spells of hard work, each carrying up to 600 pounds’ weight depending on type. The only drawback in war is a tendency for the mule to bray, a sound which carries for miles, particularly at night, and most army mules had their vocal cords surgically removed to prevent an unwitting bray giving their position away to the enemy.
To keep an army in the field for any length of time requires a huge logistic, and hence transportation, effort. Rations, ammunition, clothing, stores of all kinds, had to be supplied to the forward troops to keep them capable of fighting, and most of this was delivered by horse-drawn transport. It was not blind prejudice or love of the horse that made this so, but the unreliability and lack of off-road capability of mechanical transport. As motor vehicles became more reliable, so the army adopted them, and the need to reduce the amount of shipping space taken up by fodder for horses undoubtedly accelerated this process. Unlike hay and oats, petrol is not subject to the depredations of rats and mice, does not deteriorate in hot or damp conditions, and takes up far less space.
In 1912 the British government’s Board of Agriculture and Fisheries issued an updated version of its pamphlet Types of Horses Suitable for Army Remounts, and this was the bible for all purchases of horses for the army. The army needed four types of horse: for riding, for pulling field guns, for pulling heavy guns and for transport wagons. Each type was further classified according to the work that the animal was required to do. Commanders and staff officers did not have to carry all their possessions with them, so their riding horses could be lighter of bone – and hence capable of more speed – than those required to carry a cavalry trooper. Some officers brought their own horses to the war, often thoroughbreds, but these are fussy animals and in general they did not respond well to conditions in the battle area. Most officers’ riding horses were of the light hunter type, averaging fifteen hands two inches (15h. 2) and the government paid up to £100 each for them.2 Cavalry troopers required a horse that could stand up to the rigours of active service and carry weight. The mounted man had to have with him his own weapons and ammunition, rations for himself and his horse, blankets for himself and his horse, spare horseshoes, and piqueting ropes and pegs for the horse. The total weight carried by the horse could be as much as 400 pounds. These cavalry horses were generally around 15 h. to 15 h. 2 and the guide price was £40. The exceptions were the mounts needed for the Household Cavalry: these, owing to their regiments’ ceremonial role, had to be bigger and capable of carrying a man in full-dress gear, including steel breastplate and back-plate. They were 16 h. high and bought for around £70. Artillery horses were 15 h. 2 to 15 h. 3 for the field artillery, rather smaller for horse artillery, and of the light draught type: that is, capable of pulling a gun in a team of six. Again the guide price was £40. To pull the really big guns, such as the sixty-pounder, heavy draught shire horses (or carthorses) were used. They needed twice as much feed as a light hunter but were capable of prodigious amounts of work, albeit only at the walk. Transport horses used by the Army Service Corps, responsible for supplying the army, were of the ‘parcel-vanner’ type and needed to be able to pull a load at a fast trot, but were not required to canter or gallop. A typical horse of this description was 16 h. high and cost £35 to £40.
During times of peace the
army bought black horses for the Household Cavalry, grey for the Scots Greys and black, brown or bay for the rest. Grey horses are not a good idea in war as they stand out from their background, and once the war began any horse that was grey or multicoloured was dyed a dark colour with vegetable dye.
The expansion of the army’s horse establishment in August 1914 from 25,000 to 165,000 was accomplished in two weeks, by the simple expedient of impounding horses from the civilian population. Owners of horses who could not show that the animals were needed for agriculture or essential transport found them pressed into military service, with a fixed scale of compensation paid. Around seventeen per cent of the British horse population was sequestered in this way. Thereafter the army bought horses where it could, and as the supply in the UK was not inexhaustible, purchasing commissions were sent overseas to buy the type of animal the army needed. These purchasing commissions were largely civilian, made up of persons experienced in the judging of horseflesh. Any master of hounds who was not already in the Territorial Force or Yeomanry, or had not enlisted in the New Armies, was liable to find himself a member of a purchasing commission as the army strove to avoid tying up men needed in the field. Apart from the United Kingdom, the main sources of horses were Canada, the United States and the South American countries. Altogether the army bought and shipped to England 428,608 horses and 275,097 mules from Canada and the USA, and 6,000 horses and 1,500 mules from South America. Spanish and Portuguese mules had been the mainstay of Wellington’s logistic machinery a century before, and this source provided 3,700 army mules.
Once horses and mules had been purchased they were moved to England in shipping adapted for the purpose. Horses are generally good travellers, but there was an inevitable wastage through sickness and ships sunk by German submarines or surface raiders. Overall the loss on voyage ran at around three per cent, as compared to around four per cent during the South African War. The improvement in horse care is more marked when it is recalled that the Boer republics did not dispose of a navy.
On arrival in England the horses and mules were held in remount depots in Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton for three weeks’ quarantine. Once found to be disease-free, they were issued to cavalry, artillery and Army Service Corps regiments in the UK for training; eventually they were moved to smaller remount depots in the various theatres of war, for issue to units as replacements. Horses bought in the UK – 468,323 of them between 1914 and 1918 – were sent straight to training units. Remount depots in England had capacity for 1,200 equines in 1914, and this increased to 60,000 as the war went on, with around 16,000 horses held in depots in France ready for issue.
The time taken to train a horse for military purposes varied, depending on the role of the horse and its age and previous experience. An experienced hunter, carriage or draught horse had only to be trained to ignore the noise of gunfire and, in the case of artillery horses, to work in teams of six. This did not take long – a week or so – and these animals could be issued to units with little delay. An animal with no previous experience took longer. Pre-war the army bought their horses unbroken: that is, animals that had never had a human on their backs or pulled any form of wheeled conveyance. This made sense when there was time for the army to break, back and train its horses from scratch; there would be no existing bad habits, nor were there likely to be work-related injuries concealed by the vendor. Once war was declared the training time had to be reduced and many horses were bought broken and backed, that is, they had been made accustomed to a bridle and saddle, or had been taught to stand in traces (the equipment fitted to the horse to allow it to pull a cart or gun). France had a great many horses, but needed most of them for its own armies. There were few to spare for the British, but some heavy draught horses were bought, mainly of the Percheron type. Mules could be trained fairly quickly: stoical beasts in the main, they had to become accustomed to wearing pack equipment, and had to be introduced to it gradually, so that sores did not develop on shoulders and withers previously unused to bearing weight. Here a few weeks would suffice.
Even an unbroken horse could be prepared for military service in six weeks or so; the human element took a little longer. For the mounted arms in peacetime the army preferred to take recruits who could not ride – there were thus no bad habits to be ironed out – but once the war started any man who declared that he had experience in handling horses was encouraged to enlist in the cavalry, artillery or Army Service Corps. The New Armies were composed of infantry, artillery, engineers and supporting arms, but not cavalry. The British raised hardly any new cavalry regiments during the war, relying on the existing regular regiments and the Yeomanry. The Yeomanry was the cavalry equivalent of the Territorial Force, and men initially provided their own horses, replaced at government expense if they became casualties.
Alone amongst the major participants in this war, the British recognised that the roles of cavalry no longer included shock action against formed bodies of troops. Wire and the machine gun ruled that out. In mobile warfare the cavalry was intended to act as a screen, operating well forward of the infantry to give warning of enemy movement. It could also cover the flanks and gaps between formations. It was well suited for reconnaissance, patrolling and escort duty, as well as being able to provide mounted messengers at a headquarters. In static operations, into which the Great War lapsed from October 1914 onwards, cavalry could still act in the reconnaissance, message-carrying and escort roles, but its main task was to stand by to exploit a breakthrough. Once the infantry and artillery had succeeded in forcing a genuine break in the opposing lines, and had penetrated beyond the last line of fixed defences, the cavalry would pour through and, using their speed, drive well into the enemy’s territory, harassing his troops and giving him no opportunity to prepare further defence lines. That was the theory, and that the envisaged breakthrough never occurred should not lead to a conclusion that the means to exploit it should not have existed. It very nearly happened at the Battle of Cambrai in late 1917, and the cavalry were poised to thrust deep into German-held areas; but a failure in communications, and a reluctance to commit the cavalry until it was quite certain that a breakthrough had actually been achieved, prevented what might have been a great victory.
The British had absorbed the lessons of the South African War, in which both Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, the two commanders-in-chief of the BEF, had served, and the training of British cavalry, and the roles envisaged for it, were far more modern in outlook than that of enemy or ally. British cavalry by 1914 was effectively mounted infantry. That is, the cavalryman used his horse to get him to where the action was, and there he dismounted, handed his horse to a horse-holder, and fought on his feet. The British cavalry soldier was armed with a sword and a lance for mounted action, these weapons still being more reliable than a revolver or rifle fired from a moving platform; but unlike his French or German equivalent he was also equipped with the same rifle as the infantry, rather than with an inferior carbine.
The British army was the last European army to adopt the lance for its cavalry, doing so in 1816 as a result of experience fighting Napoleon’s Polish lancers. Originally sixteen feet long, later reduced to nine, the lance was withdrawn in 1903 before being reissued to all British light cavalry regiments in 1907. By then it was made of bamboo, with a ten-inch steel point. The cavalry sword, the 1908 pattern, was introduced as a result of experience in the South African War and was probably the best cavalry sabre ever issued in any army. Well balanced and with a rubber handgrip, it was withdrawn in 1915. The lance, however, remained, now being issued to all British cavalry regiments whatever their designation.3
Contrary to the impression given in paintings and Hollywood films, the lance was not couched under the armpit in the manner of medieval jousting. To strike an opponent in this way would either pull the soldier off his horse or leave him with a transfixed German sitting on the front of his saddle. Rather, the lance was held at the point of balance, slightly away from the body
, and the sheer momentum of horse and rider carried the point of the lance into the target. Once the target was pierced it was vital for the lance-wielder to ‘watch his point’: that is, to bend head and body back in the direction of the lance point as he galloped past his enemy so that the lance could be withdrawn from the target ready to be used again. Men in training quickly found that to remain upright and looking to the front as they rode on allowed the butt of the lance to strike them in the back of the head and bring them to the ground.4
Once it became clear that large-scale mounted actions would not take place, the cavalry often took their place in the line without their horses and were issued with bayonets and digging implements like the infantry. There was, of course, a penalty. A cavalry regiment, at 600 men, had 400 men fewer than an infantry battalion, and one man in four was a horse-holder. When a cavalry unit engaged in dismounted action, the horse-holder looked after his own horse and those of three of his comrades. A cavalry regiment in the trenches was therefore the equivalent of only two companies of infantry, or half a battalion. A cavalry brigade of three regiments was the equivalent of one large battalion, and was given that designation for duty in the line, being referred to by its brigade number: thus the 1st Cavalry Brigade would provide the 1st Cavalry Battalion.
The Germans produced eleven cavalry divisions on mobilisation. Rather surprisingly, given the rolling plains of Russia, which were more suited to mounted action than Belgium with its hedges and built-up areas, ten of these divisions were deployed on the Western Front. Having experienced very heavy losses in charges against the Belgians in the early days of the campaign, the German cavalry rarely operated alone, but fell back behind a screen of Jäger – light infantrymen – and artillery when threatened. The French thought this cowardly, but it was entirely practical. The French mobilised eleven cavalry divisions on the Western Front. In addition to the Cavalry Corps, of three divisions, each of the five French armies had its own cavalry division. The mounted man has always considered himself to be a cut above those who walk, and this was especially so in the French cavalry, who rarely got off their horses and had no concept of dismounted action. While British cavalry soldiers were accustomed to dismounting and leading their horses for long periods, and had care and grooming of their mounts instilled in them, the French never walked if they could possibly help it, and even when billeted at night often left the saddles on, without loosening the girths. They paid the price of neglect: girth galls, fistular withers, abscesses, sore backs and all manner of equine infections were rife in French cavalry regiments. It was said that you could smell a French cavalry regiment a mile off, echoing what had been said of them by Wellington’s soldiers in Spain a hundred years before. Nevertheless most of the animals put up with this treatment, or lack of it, for the French, with about three times as much cavalry as the British, lost only about twice as many horses during the war (roughly 500,000 to the British 250,000). This statistic may not be entirely reliable, however, as the British were much more ready to cast (declare unfit for work and retire) horses than were the French, who tended to work them until they literally dropped. The Intelligence Officer of the British 1st Cavalry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Barrow, was horrified during the move up to the concentration area in 1914 when he entered a farmyard and found a wounded French horse lying on a pile of burning bedding. It was trying, unsuccessfully, to get up, and was literally roasting to death. The yard was full of French troops who took not the slightest notice, and Barrow shot the animal with his pistol.5
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 16