German Influence on British CavalryChilders, Erskine
History
German Influence on British Cavalry
Childers, Erskine
Cavalry; Cavalry drill and tactics; Great Britain. Army -- Cavalry -- History
Some measure of reform, if report is true, is to take shape in the next
revision of the Cavalry Manual. I end, as I began, with expressing the
hope that reform may be drastic. But reform cannot end with the Cavalry
Manual. It is absolutely necessary to introduce clearness, consistency
and harmony into the four Manuals: "Cavalry Training" (with its absurd
postscript for Yeomanry), "Mounted Infantry Training," "Infantry
Training," and "Combined Training." At present the contradictions
between these official Manuals is a public scandal. But I suggest that
the task of reconstruction is absolutely impossible unless the basis
taken be that fire, by whomsoever employed, is absolute arbiter of
tactics, and that the Cavalryman is for practical purposes a compound
of three factors--man, horse, and rifle.
The lance should go altogether. Whether the sword is retained, as the
American Cavalry retain it, rather as a symbol than as a factor in
tactics, or is dispensed with altogether, as our divisional mounted
troops and our Colonial mounted riflemen dispense with it, is a
matter of very small moment, provided that the correct principle be
established and worked out in practice. It was because I doubted the
possibility of establishing the correct principle in this country
without abolition that in my previous book I advocated abolition, on
the precedent of the South African War. The adoption of a bayonet or
a sword-bayonet is, in my own humble opinion, an interesting open
question.
THE END
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