Horses and donkeys
Allan Mallinson
A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH CAVALRY, 1816-1919, VOLUME VIII by the Marquess of Anglesey Leo Cooper, £40, pp. 397 Alan Clark shares, or did, Luden- dorff's opinion of British generals. 'The British soldiers fight like lions,' declared the Prussian of the 'Old Contemptibles', the regulars of 1914. 'Yes,' replied another, `but don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys?' Clark made his debut as a military historian in 1961 with The Donkeys, a book which Paul Johnson in the New Statesman said was written 'with venom and real feeling for the men whose lives the brasshats squandered'.
The 'brasshats' were all cavalrymen. Well, that anyway is the myth. And Clark has no more regard for cavalry as an arm of war than for its generals. Reviewing an earlier volume of the Anglesey history in the Daily Telegraph, he described them as `a waste of space', recalling the old Punch cartoon that the role of cavalry was merely to add tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. In this final volume Lord Anglesey takes exception to Clark (`the most arrogant and least respectable of writers on the war') and his views (`deplorable travesty'). He debunks the notion that the British cavalry were kept on the Western Front at huge opportunity-cost, that their horses stood around doing nothing but munching fodder which had to be transported at the expense of shells. But in any case, even if the cost had been significant could it have been avoided? The strategy of forcing a decision on the Western Front, rather than else- where, has never been convincingly refut- ed: the stalemate of the trenches had to be overcome. A war of manoeuvre might be restored without cavalry, but it could not be sustained. And without a means of exploitation — of winning — how could an offensive be justified? Aquinas, at least, would have understood.
The problem with Alan Clark, says the Marquess, is that he has never done his homework. Not for him Braudel's longue vue: for him, 'instant history' is enough. A. J. P. Taylor could be as bad, mind, ascribing the subsequent ascendancy of the RAF's 'bombing school' to Trenchard's having been a cavalryman — which he had not been. Lord Anglesey's homework, on the other hand, has stretched over a quar- ter of a century (Volume 1 was published in 1973). The danger of the long view, how- ever, is that it can become a case of 'to understand all is to forgive all'. Yet throughout, Anglesey seems gen- uinely to have no heroes: he weighs the great names in the balance and where they are found wanting he says so. Thus, for instance, in this latest volume there is a murmur of relief that Gough (a 'hothead') was not in charge of the cavalry at Cam- brai. Indeed, balance appears to charac- terise the Anglesey history, whereas Alan Clark never seems able to escape his preju- dices. A good example of this is the way Clark continues to pillory Philip Chetwode for a tactical fumble while commanding his brigade after the exhausting three-week withdrawal from Mons in 1914. Weighed, however, against Chetwode's brilliant plan of campaign in Palestine later, which Allenby so successfully executed, a differ- ent picture emerges. And, at the end of the day, why should Clark prize so highly Ludendorff's opinion of generalship when that general's own million-man offensive of 1918 ground to a halt with no cavalry to exploit the initial success?
For balance alone this last volume is the most important, and it must be with some satisfaction that the Angelsey pen is laid down, a satisfaction to be shared, too, by the same editor of all eight volumes, Tom Hartman. And would another publisher but Leo Cooper have taken such a long view of scholarship? But where does the story of this resplen- dent but exasperating arm end? After the War, especially after the stalemate of the Western Front, why did cavalry survive for SO long? (There was even a horsed division In the Middle East in 1940.) One of the reasons was its success in Palestine and Mesopotamia in 1917-18 (the Middle East a more likely future theatre of operations than Europe). But the principal reason was that in the 1920s tanks still had significant technical limitations. Breaking through static defences was all that could be expect- ed of them: exploitation needed something faster, with a longer range and better tacti- cal mobility. That, indeed, was the opera- tional requirement for the horse. Lack of protection was the price that had to be Paid.
There were endless regimental machina- tions to avoid mechanisation, and even greater ones to escape amalgamation (that much hasn't changed). But parting cavalry- men from their horses when tanks and armoured cars had developed sufficiently Was nothing like as difficult as feared. True, there were those in the Cavalry who were unenthusiastic, like General Sir Raleigh Egerton who, in 1927, said, I consider that the horse has a humanising effect on men, and the longer we can keep horses for artillery and for cavalry the better
it will be for the Army, because thereby you keep up the high standard of intelligence in the man from his association with the horse.
How genuine a sentiment that was is impossible to judge at this remove, and it appears to have been a minority one. An infantryman, however, put the problem thus:
The tank would never replace the horse until a sporting use could be made of it.
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