The British Army Regular Mounted Infantry 1880–1913

Andrew Winrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317039938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The regular Mounted Infantry was one of the most important innovations of the late Victorian and Edwardian British Army. Rather than fight on horseback in the traditional manner of cavalry, they used horses primarily to move swiftly about the battlefield, where they would then dismount and fight on foot, thus anticipating the development of mechanised infantry tactics during the twentieth century. Yet despite this apparent foresight, the mounted infantry concept was abandoned by the British Army in 1913, just at the point when it may have made the transition from a colonial to a continental force as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Exploring the historical background to the Mounted Infantry, this book untangles the debates that raged in the army, Parliament and the press between its advocates and the supporters of the established cavalry.

With its origins in the extemporised mounted detachments raised during times of crisis from infantry battalions on overseas imperial garrison duties, Dr Winrow reveals how the Mounted Infantry model, unique among European armies, evolved into a formalised and apparently highly successful organisation of non-cavalry mounted troops. He then analyses why the Mounted Infantry concept fell out of favour just eleven years after its apogee during the South African Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. As such the book will be of interest not only to historians of the nineteenth-century British army, but also those tracing the development of modern military doctrine and tactics, to which the Mounted Infantry provided successful - if short lived - inspiration.

1
The quest for mobile firepower

During a lively post-lecture debate in November 1894 at which the futures of cavalry and other mounted troops were being deliberated, His Royal Highness the Duke of Connaught summarised succinctly the historical precedence of the regular Mounted Infantry to date as being ‘a child of circumstance’.¹ If true, then the ‘circumstance’ that led to the inception of the regular Mounted Infantry as a source of mobile firepower must be considered as a pre-requisite to understand how this unique model of non-cavalry mounted troops became a ubiquitous force in the late Victorian and Edwardian British Army. Therefore this chapter reviews the search for a means of combining mobility and firepower on the battlefield until the nascent Mounted Infantry emerged as a possible solution to this conundrum – at least within the British Army. As such this chapter does not purport to be an attenuated history of the mounted soldier through the ages, a topic that is dealt with far more comprehensively by other authors.² Rather this chapter sets the scene of how an embryonic Mounted Infantry appeared to offer an answer to the army’s needs set against the backdrop of geopolitical ambition, technological change and doctrinal debate of the eighteenth, nineteenth and, arguably, early twentieth centuries. If few histories of the mounted soldier devote many pages to the Mounted Infantry model except in the context of arme blanche versus firearm debate, then similarly the varying efforts made by other armies to fuse mobility with firepower are largely overlooked, an omission that this chapter will attempt to remedy. Nonetheless, if the Mounted Infantry evolved by accident as suggested by the Duke of Connaught, for some commentators at least the emergent Mounted Infantry became an operational necessity. During a lecture titled ‘Mounted Riflemen’ delivered in March 1873, the future Field Marshal Evelyn Wood, then a lieutenant colonel in the 90th Light Infantry, pronounced, perhaps a little controversially, that Mounted Riflemen were now essential to every enterprising army.³ Wood based his prediction on a personal analysis of events in the Franco-German war of 1870–71 as well as those of recent colonial campaigns. Irrespective of the veracity of his statement, the title of Wood’s lecture also underlines the imprecision in nomenclature already addressed in the Introduction, as Wood was undoubtedly referring to Mounted Infantry rather than Mounted Rifles even if his professional bias was to promote preferentially the use of riflemen from Light Infantry regiments. Therefore, can the Mounted Infantry’s apparent unplanned pedigree be reconciled with Evelyn Wood’s claim for its indispensability in a modern army?

As mentioned in the Introduction, the concept of Mounted Infantry was not new and can be traced back to the dragoons of the seventeenth century. In his history of the mounted soldier, Louis DiMarco traces these origins back at least to the 1600s, when French infantry were mounted and armed with a blunderbuss-type firearm called a dragon.⁴ Other possible derivations for the appellation ‘dragoon’ have included the term dracones, perhaps stemming from the dragon motifs emblazoned on late medieval French military banners.⁵ In the seventeenth century, while other types of ‘horse’ existed including cuirassiers, who were bona fide cavalrymen armed with both a long cavalry sword and a brace of primitive pistols, and others such as arquebusiers and carbineers, the latter carrying small-calibre carbines slung on their backs, it was the dragoon who most clearly matched the concept of Mounted Infantry, being armed with both a long musket and a short infantry sword. The dragoon was tactically committed to fighting dismounted and seldom fired his weapon from the saddle.⁶ As a byproduct, if dismounted combat was the preferred fighting tactic of the dragoon, it also necessitated the delegation of holding the reins of riderless horses to a number of dragoons who were then lost in terms of firepower to the firing line. It was estimated that ten horses could be managed by a single dragoon.⁷ This optimistic ratio differed significantly to the one man to four horses that would be laid down two centuries later in Mounted Infantry drill. Nevertheless, for British mounted troops, despite their doctrinal preference for dismounted tactics, dragoons were witnessed charging like cavalry during the second year of the English Civil War, a forerunner of the impromptu charges of Mounted Infantry and Mounted Rifles using bayonet and rifle as substitutes for a lance during the South African War of 1899–1902. During the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48, such types of ‘horse’ were juxtaposed against ‘light cavalry’, a broad descriptor that included a number of styles of fast and highly mobile mounted warriors, usually characterised by their natural inherent horsemanship and preference for mounted combat, which included ethnic hussars, Croat irregular cavalry and so-called light dragoons.⁸ Therefore, delineation into heavy cavalry, dragoons and light cavalry occurred in mounted branches of armies, a delineation that would be challenged by the advent of Mounted Infantry and its perceived competition for traditional cavalry roles. This became most acute with regards to responsibility for scouting and reconnaissance, quintessential light cavalry duties where rivalry later risked organisational friction and institutional discord.

Presaging roles later assumed by the regular Mounted Infantry, tactically the dragoon was deployed in the vanguard during the advance, securing bridges and vantage points until reinforced by foot infantry, and conversely in the rearguard covering retirement where they, as erstwhile musketeers, would cooperate with the cavalry.⁹ The need to cooperate closely with cavalry while remaining a separate mounted arm would re-emerge as a doctrinal canker affecting the Mounted Infantry in the nineteenth century. Similarly the experiences of the seventeenth-century dragoon would also foreshadow a number of other controversies that would later trouble the Mounted Infantry movement. Significant cost savings identified through the formation and deployment of dragoons in comparison to more costly cavalry would later influence the Mounted Infantry’s organisation and deployment. Additionally, the dragoon was mounted relatively easily and cheaply through local sourcing of remounts, as he did not require mounting on large cavalry horses considered necessary for the kinetic momentum of a full-blown cavalry charge. As Mounted Infantry, like these early dragoons, rarely used the tactics of the horsed charge, merely relying on their mounts for enhanced mobility over that of foot infantry, this principle of local sourcing of remounts would become an axiom of Mounted Infantry doctrine.¹⁰ Previously, this apparent acceptability of equine mediocrity gave rise to the phrase ‘a nag for a dragoon’ as a description of the passable or indifferent. Clearly, the principle of using animals procured locally had a number of further benefits including, as broad generalisations, lower purchase costs, natural acclimatisation to local conditions and terrain and the welcome avoidance of the depredations of a long sea voyage that risked excessive equine losses when embarked from Britain, an operational consideration that impacted on British campaign planning over the next two centuries.

By way of example of some of these extant factors, in the eighteenth century during the American Revolutionary War of 1775–83, the British Army’s use of cavalry dispatched from Britain was limited initially to only the 16th and 17th Light Dragoons. Again, this is explained partly by the logistical difficulties of transporting cavalry regiments across the Atlantic. Most importantly cavalry were thought to be poorly suited to the densely forested hilly terrain encountered in the northern theatre of the campaign, an assessment shared by the American Continental Army’s General George Washington – at least initially. To these factors must be added the numerical paucity of cavalry regiments within the British Army, judged later as being too scanty to play anything but a very minor part in this war.¹¹ At this time, the strength of the cavalry at home, including the Household cavalry, did not exceed 4,000 men, of whom several hundred were unavoidably dismounted due to fiscal restrictions.¹² The cavalry’s weak establishment contributed to the relative infrequency with which cavalry regiments were dispatched overseas. Thus the solution for the British Army in America was to use ponies, procured locally, that displayed excellent endurance but little speed and were considered by prevailing military opinion as suitable only for Mounted Infantry duties and not as cavalry mounts. Without any prior training, the 63rd Foot was deployed as Mounted Infantry, sourcing its mounts locally, and fought a number of small engagements near Charleston before participating in the British victory at Camden.¹³ Such successful extemporisation of Mounted Infantry in America contributed to the durable belief that Mounted Infantry could be formed with both ease and speed, needing only the briefest of equitation training. Later, Lord Cornwallis increased his Mounted Infantry numbers by 700 to 800 men in the southern theatre predicated on the increased availability of ponies and the more opportune open countryside. Furthermore, an increasing awareness of a need for improved musketry to combat the superior marksmanship of the colonial backwoodsman, itself presaging lessons to be re-learned in South Africa in 1899–1902, meant that senior officers realised that Mounted Infantry, all fully trained infantrymen, could confer benefits absent from traditional cavalry under certain operational circumstances.¹⁴

Conversely, at the beginning of the conflict in 1775, despite fielding forty-one infantry battalions, the American Continental Army did not adopt British methods, and none of these infantry battalions were horsed even though the need for light or mobile infantry was not overlooked.¹⁵ However, tactical successes attributed to British mounted troops spurred the Continental Army to institute regiments of light dragoons, albeit cavalry undertaking all possible roles of arme blanche, raiding, scouting and reconnaissance and not confined to the classic European functional differentiation of heavy or light cavalry. In his assessment of European influences on the Continental cavalry, Lee McGee concludes that it was Prussian doctrine that impacted most on the American cavalry, in part through the efforts of European cavalry officers attached to Washington’s army with their respective experiences in French, Prussian, Polish and Austrian cavalries, but also because Prussian doctrine, at least as far as cavalry matters were concerned, remained then and later a pre-eminent influence on mounted warfare.¹⁶ As will be discussed later, this Prussian (and later German) cavalry partiality for arme blanche rather than firepower would militate against the adoption of the Mounted Infantry paradigm by other nations’ mounted forces.

Returning to the American Revolutionary War, neither army’s mounted arms were decisive operationally ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The quest for mobile firepower
• 2 Foundations
• 3 Doctrine
• 4 Forging an identity
• 5 Training the Mounted Infantry
• 6 Imperial perspectives
• 7 Colonial warfare and the Mounted Infantry paradigm
• 8 A wild goose chase: South Africa 1899–1902
• 9 Remonstrance, renaissance and re-designation
• 10 Demise
• 11 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index