To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

by Adam Hochschild

Britain’s wars, the jubilant victors at Omdurman expected, would continue to be just such lopsided victories—or massacres, as a dissenter like Charlotte Despard might say—against poorly armed Arabs, Africans, and Asians. This assumption, and the confidence that weapons like the Maxim gun would always give Britain superiority, underlay a sort of ecstasy about battle that shines through the writing of this period. Lord Wolseley, army commander in chief at the time of Omdurman, wrote of “the rapture-giving delight which the attack upon an enemy affords. I cannot analyse nor weigh, nor can I justify the feeling. But once experienced, all other subsequent sensations are but as a tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben.” Both the British and Germans had already experienced that rapture while wielding Maxim guns to deadly effect elsewhere in Africa. This, to Europeans, seemed the machine gun’s logical use: “It is a weapon,” declared the Army and Navy Journal, “which is specially adapted to terrify a barbarous or semi-civilised foe.” No one imagined that either British or German soldiers would ever find themselves in the role of Sudanese Arabs, experiencing their own Omdurmans in the very heart of Europe.

British officers talked of combat as so much sport. Men ordered to advance against Boer positions, called “beaters,” were to flush the quarry from their hiding places as in pheasant hunting. A captain in the Imperial Yeomanry declared that chasing Boer horsemen across the veldt was “just like a good fox hunt.” The first British commanding general in South Africa, the paunchy, double-chinned Sir Redvers Buller, ordered his soldiers not to be unsportsmanlike “jack-in-boxes” who ducked after standing up to fire their rifles. The war, however, failed to unroll like the good hunt it was supposed to be.

On February 15, 1900, French’s scouts finished reconnoitering the last enemy stronghold between his troops and the besieged Kimberley, fortified positions held by some 900 Boer soldiers on two ridges about three-quarters of a mile apart. Then, surrounded by snorting horses, the jangle and creak of boots and spurs, and the smell of saddle leather, the impetuous general gave the order that all cavalrymen dreamed of: Charge! Successive waves of shouting British troopers in tall sun helmets galloped up the gently rising valley between the two ridges: first the lancers with pennants flying, their khaki-clad chests crisscrossed by diagonal straps, proud swordsmen next, horse-drawn artillery in the rear. French himself led the second wave of troops. It was a bold move, and it worked. Some 3,000 cavalrymen suffered fewer than two dozen casualties. “The feeling was wonderfully exciting, just as in a good run to hounds,” said a British officer. “An epoch in the history of cavalry,” enthused the London Times history of the war; the Boer foot soldiers “availed nothing against the rushing speed and sustained impetus of the wave of horsemen. . . . This was the secret French had divined.” There was, however, less to this rushing speed and sustained impetus than met the eye. To begin with, the Boer defenders on these ridges had no machine guns. Also, in the scorching Southern Hemisphere summer the British horses charging across the bone-dry veldt raised such masses of dust that Boer marks...

“I am thoroughly satisfied from what I have seen in South Africa that the necessity of training cavalry to charge is as great as it was in the days of Napoleon.” In print, Haig attacked a skeptic who dared question the usefulness of a cavalry charge in the age of the machine gun and the repeating rifle. It was as strong a tactic as ever, Haig was certain, since the “moral factor of an apparently irresistible force, coming on at highest speed . . . affects the nerves and aim of the . . . rifleman.” The horse, after all, had been central to warfare since the earliest recorded history, a position of dominance unshaken by every advance in weaponry from the crossbow to breech-loading, rapid-firing artillery. Why should it not remain central in the next war?

Haig then returned to his current post as inspector general of cavalry in India. As he traveled about the subcontinent in a special railway car, every crease and campaign ribbon in place on his uniform, he established a new cavalry school and pushed the Indian mounted regiments through a rigorous training schedule, including mock combat designed to mimic the great cavalry battle that, military theorists agreed, would open the next war. In his 1907 book, Cavalry Studies, Haig declared that “the role of Cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing,” thanks, in part, to “the introduction of the small bore rifle, the bullet from which has little stopping power against a horse.”