Tommy (59 page)

Henriques looked back to see his gunners prostrate on the floor and the tank's sides riddled.

If a tank began to burn, as it so often did, men faced an urgent scramble to escape. The sight of terribly burned tank crew persuaded even infantrymen out in the mud that theirs was likely to be an easier death. And Germans, initially terrified by a tank's appearance, often responded viciously if they took its crew alive. When Lieutenant C. B. Arnold baled out of his stricken light tank ‘Musical Box', deep in the German position east of Amiens on 8 August 1918 he described how:

Taken to enemy divisional headquarters, he was punched in the face by an angry staff officer. Arnold recognised that his tank's achievements that day really depended on the bravery of the private soldiers in his crew, and concluded his report by affirming: ‘The conduct of Gunner Ribbans and Driver Calvey was beyond all praise throughout.' New weapon: old values

D
espite the efforts of some excellent scholars, the reputation of British cavalry in the First Wrld War remains low. Stephen Badsey ruefully concluded that:

In part this is another damaging legacy of some historians always ready to nudge a chuckle from their readers at the spectacle of silly men on funny horses galloping about amongst the mud and trenches. In part it reflects a tendency, still alive and well, to associate the British army's wartime performance with its social composition, a process bound to reflect badly on the cavalry, which demanded substantial private means for its officers. And in part it embodies the very real problem of making sense of the changing role of horsed cavalry as the military revolution gusted across the Western Front.
¹⁴⁰

In 1914 British cavalry was unquestionably the best, for its limited numbers, on either side. It had learned valuable lessons in the Boer War, and almost uniquely amongst European cavalry, carried exactly the same rifle as the infantry rather than the short and less accurate carbine in vogue elsewhere. Sergeant Percy Snelling of the 12th Lancers saw French horsemen in action in August 1914, and noted that ‘they do not fight much dismounted and their carbines are very unreliable', while Major Archibald ‘Sally' Home thought that ‘their weakness lay in the small attention that had been given to fighting on foot, and for this work the carbines they carried were an inferior weapon'.
¹⁴¹
There had been a fierce pre-war debate as to the relative merits of shock action, with sword and lance, and fire action with the rifle. Although the traditionalists had eventually won by getting the lance, briefly abolished as a weapon of war, reinstated in lancer regiments, the 1907 edition of
Cavalry Training
emphasised that ‘thorough efficiency in the use of the rifle and in dismounted tactics is an absolute necessity'. But it went on to affirm that ‘the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel'.

In one sense the controversy echoed discussions about the use of the bayonet by the infantry, and a belief in the enduring value of ‘shock action' reflected the need to give men the confidence to close with their enemy. Even Douglas Haig, cavalryman though he was, thought that fire action was nine times more likely than shock action. In 1910 Lieutenant Colonel F. M. Edwards, another cavalryman, summed up the views of many of his comrades when he observed that: ‘The
desire
to use the sabre or lance should be predominant, but it must be held in check by a thorough knowledge of the power of the firearm.'
¹⁴²

British cavalry dressed in khaki uniform like that of the infantry, but with a leather bandolier rather than webbing equipment, and had long ago eschewed the majesty of busby, lance-cap and dragoon helmet for the service-dress cap. In contrast, as Second Lieutenant Kenneth Godsell observed, the French still retained cuirassiers, with back-and breast-plates and steel and brass helmets, as their shock cavalry. These antique warriors were:

The German cavalry looked just as old-fashioned. Although German regulars had taken to wearing field-grey by 1914, their cavalry went to war in uniforms of traditional cut, with plastron tunics for uhlans, frogged jackets for hussars and spiked helmets of polished steel for cuirassiers. The inspector general of German cavalry frankly admitted that: ‘Despite the improvements made in fighting dismounted, there was nevertheless a lack of schooling in firing practice in the larger units …'.
¹⁴⁴

Some pre-war cavalrymen had envisaged that the war would start with a big cavalry battle in which one side would seize superiority. In fact there were many clashes, on a much smaller scale, as German advance guards met British rearguards. On 22 August Major Tom Bridges's squadron of the 4th Dragoon Guards ambushed a German patrol on the Mons-Brussels road, and, as Private Ted Worrell remembered, there was plenty of old-style hack and gallop when the Germans fell back after a brief firefight:

On 24 August the 9th Lancers (with Soarer Campbell in command) and two squadrons of the 4th Dragoon Guards charged German infantry and guns near Elouges to take the pressure off the infantry rearguard. The charge bought the infantry a breathing space, but did little real damage to the Germans (though this did not prevent it from featuring in a spirited and largely imaginary battlepiece by Richard Caton Woodville, now hanging in the National Army Museum in Chelsea). In contrast, on the 28th the British 3rd Cavalry Brigade, covering the gap between I and II Corps as they fell back, put in a textbook attack, with the fire of J Battery Royal Horse Artillery and machine guns and dismounted squadrons of the Royal Scots Greys covering a charge by a squadron of the 12th Lancers. The lancers went through the dragoons of the German advance guard, who had dismounted to use their carbines, rallied and returned twice more. Captain Bryant, adjutant of the 12th, had not invested in the new 1912-pattern regulation sword, the officer's version of the plainer trooper's 1908-pattern sword with its straight, slim blade and big handguard. However, his ‘Old cutting sword, well sharpened … went in and out of the German like a pat of butter'. He cut down five Germans, and another officer killed three with his sword and another with his revolver. The action ‘very effectively dampened the ardour of the German cavalry' and deterred the Guard Cavalry Division from exploiting the inter-corps gap.
¹⁴⁶

There were other cavalry actions on the retreat to the Marne and the subsequent advance to the Aisne, with that at Néry on 1 September giving L Battery RHA its niche in the military pantheon. But it was not until First Ypres that the cavalry again played a really significant role. By now it had been reorganised, and instead of the one big division which had started the war there was now a Cavalry Corps, which was to remain in existence, with occasional restructurings and a very brief disappearance, for the rest of the war. The Corps had five divisions in September 1915, and shrank thereafter to constitute just three (under 3 percent of the strength of the BEF) by the war's end. In October 1915 the Cavalry Corps generated less firepower than an infantry division because its regiments were much smaller than infantry battalions, one man in four had to hold the horses of the other three, and the Royal Horse Artillery's 13-pounder gun was less effective than the 18-pounders of the infantry divisions. But it fought dismounted to hold Messines Ridge against determined German attacks with courage and, no less to the point, marksmanship of which any infantry battalion would have been proud.

In late 1915 the Cavalry Corps furnished a Dismounted Division, created by producing a three-battalion brigade from each of the cavalry divisions. Every dismounted battalion was composed of three companies, one from each regiment in the parent brigade. The Division lost almost 1,000 men during a seven-week tour of trench duty, persuading ‘Sally' Home that ‘officers and men feel that they had done their share and there is not that restless feeling in the Corps. We are busy training now in real cavalry work in the hope that if the day comes we may be ready.'
¹⁴⁷

Some cavalry always remained outside the Cavalry Corps. There was a cavalry regiment in each corps, and a cavalry squadron which formed part of each division to provide its commander with gallopers, mounted escorts and a small mobile reserve. The 1/Northumberland Hussars, for instance, sent a squadron each to 1st, 7th and 8th Divisions. B Squadron announced in
Plum and Apple
, 1st Division's newspaper, that it constituted ‘a gallant band of mounted navvies FOR HIRE – ALL KINDS of tasks undertaken … We will dig you in cheaply or do you in for nothing.' They were as surprised at the physical appearance of French cuirassiers as were some of their regular brethren, and when they were pointed out to Private Chrystal he declared: ‘Gox! Wey, I thought them—wor German hoolans an' fired at the likes o' them aol day yesterday!' Private Daglish of the Morpeth Troop went some way towards making amends. When a pretty girl waved her handkerchief and shouted
‘Vivent les anglais'
as his troop rode by he replied politely: ‘Very canny, hoos yorsel?'

The main task confronting British cavalry and its commanders was not, however, riding errands for divisional commanders or worsening Anglo-French relations, but trying to devise ways in which the mounted arm could restore a measure of mobility to battle by capitalising on success achieved by infantry and artillery. And here its problem was wholly new. In the past cavalry had been able to find flanks to turn or gaps to exploit. On the relatively small battlefields of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries some could be kept back, under the hand of the army commander, for prompt commitment when he saw that the enemy's line was so weakened that it might be broken by a charge, or when he thought the moment ripe to launch his horsemen in pursuit. On the Western Front there were no open flanks round which cavalry could swirl, and the difficulties of moving troops, on foot or horseback, across crowded rear areas while a battle was in progress made it difficult to bring cavalry up in time to seize a fleeting opportunity.

Much has been made of the failure of cavalry to exploit the success achieved around High Wood in the night attack of 14 July 1916 on the Somme. Both the Official History and the redoubtable Marquess of Anglesey, historian of the British cavalry, maintain that the cavalry destined to exploit success, 2nd Indian Cavalry Division, led by the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade, simply took too long to get within striking distance, and that part of the problem stemmed from a smashed-up battlefield laced with trenches. In fact the war diaries of the units concerned make it clear that the leading cavalry regiment was on the old British front line by 7.00 that morning, and that the whole of the leading brigade, with its artillery, was there by 9.30 am There was no trench-crossing problem. Portable bridges to allow cavalry to cross trenches had already been developed, and a squadron of the specialist Canadian Fort Garry Horse, complete with bridges, was attached to the Secunderabad Brigade that day but did not need to use any of them.

Nor is it true to say that the attack, when it went in late that afternoon, was a catastrophe. Lyn Macdonald quotes Second Lieutenant F. W. Beadle, an artillery officer in 33rd Division, who watched the charge of the Deccan Horse and the 7th Dragoon Guards.

I must begin by declaring my admiration for anyone who fought on the Somme, but it has to be said that this vivid and compelling quotation illustrates the dangers of relying on uncorroborated oral history. Although Second Lieutenant Beadle tells us precisely what we expect to hear, it is something that did not actually take place. Firstly, British and Indian cavalry did not (for perfectly sensible reasons) use lance-pennants in action in the First World War: a photograph of the Deccan Horse shows them pennantless that very day. Next, none of the infantry in High Wood, who would have been glad to see the cavalry appear, mention them charging ‘straight into it', although it would not have been an easy thing to miss. A heavily shelled wood in full summer foliage was (as we saw in nearby Mametz) a tricky obstacle for even infantry to negotiate. What was the merit of the cavalry galloping into it, especially when part of it was British-held at the time?

Lastly, the war diary of the Secunderabad Brigade reveals that it lost eight men killed and less than 100 wounded all day: this was evidently not the Charge of the Light Brigade. The 7th Dragoon Guards had an officer wounded, two troopers killed and twenty wounded, and the Deccan Horse two Indian officers wounded, three troopers killed and fifty wounded. Both the brigade's machine-gun squadron and N battery RHA, which did not take part on the charge, lost more men than the 7th Dragoon Guards, who did. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, who use the same Beadle quote, announce that ‘the cavalry were soon dealt with by German machine-gunners', but detailed analysis of the action shows that the reverse is true. When German machine guns opened up from Longueval village, the Secunderabad Brigade's machine guns duly silenced them. The 7th Dragoon Guards speared sixteen Germans and captured another thirty-two in its charge; the Deccan Horse killed some more and captured six, and both the Royal Horse Artillery and the cavalry machine guns caused casualties, though we cannot reasonably estimate how many. However, it is already perfectly clear that the cavalry killed more, probably many more, of the enemy than the enemy killed of it.