The Intimate Bond (33 page)

The Crimean War was the first of several small conflicts that introduced new military technologies to the battlefield. These included the rifled gun barrel, which improved the range and accuracy of infantry weapons.
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Despite the impact of industrial technologies, especially during the American Civil War of the 1860s and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, cavalry tactics changed little, despite the devastating effects of rapid firing, breech-loaded weapons in the hands of both infantry and artillery. The lessons of the American Civil War, which highlighted the flexibility of cavalry that could fight when mounted and on foot at short notice, were largely ignored in Europe. Unlike American cavalry, which relied heavily on pistols and carbines, European cavalry maintained lances as serious weapons in the hands of dragoons and lancers right up to World War I.

Nor did cavalry tactics change, despite the publicity generated by the Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea. Take, for example, the celebrated “Death Ride” charge in the Franco-Prussian War, by Major General Friedrich Wilhelm von Bredow's Twelfth Cavalry Brigade at Mars-la-Tour in August 1870. He used the smoke of the battlefield and the rolling terrain to emerge a few hundred yards in front of French infantry and artillery. Bursting out of the smoke at a gallop, the horsemen swept into the guns, but were driven back by French cuirassiers. Von Bredow lost 397 men and 403 horses, about 45 percent of his force. A later skirmish in the Vosges Mountains saw two well-aimed rifle volleys take down two-thirds of a French formation's horses. Seven elite cavalry regiments virtually ceased to exist in one day. An observer remarked that rapid-firing infantry reduced each splendid unit in turn to a line of kicking, bloodstained heaps. Surviving horses galloped wildly over the battlefield until rounded up or hunted back to their own lines by German horsemen, in what one observer called “so thorough a destruction by what may be called a single volley.”
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The deliberate sacrifice of horses and their riders was still, apparently, a valid practice. Yet hard-won experience from elsewhere stared cavalry officers in the face.

Plains Indians and Boers

Mass charges took no account of the flexibility and mobility of small groups of mounted horsemen, which paid rich dividends in the
American West and later in South Africa. Plains Indians had acquired horses during the sixteenth century soon after the Spanish
entrada
. They pursued buffalo on horseback and also acquired an expertise at raiding, which became intricately mingled with notions of acquiring prestige and honor. Inevitably, violent encounters with newcomers and settlers followed. Between 1866 and 1890, the U.S. Army fought a series of small-scale wars against Plains Indian bands scattered over an enormous area. Indian horsemen attacked with lances and bows, the latter highly effective when shot rapidly at close range—just as they had been with the Mongols on the other side of the world. Eventually, they acquired repeating rifles and other sophisticated weaponry, but tended to fight individually, a strategy deeply embedded in their raiding culture. Some bands selected their horses carefully and bred them for speed, surefootedness, and color.

The military power of Plains Indians was more a product of their skill with breeding and riding horses than it was of discipline and long-term strategy. Plains Indian boys learned to ride when they were as young as five years old, advancing to become skilled riders by the time they were seven or so. U.S. troops, with their superior weaponry, could defeat Indians in close-quarter engagements, but they had difficulty finding them across the enormous, often featureless Plains. So the army employed Indian scouts, said by one general to be worth more than six companies of mounted soldiers.

The cavalry had to cover enormous distances without wearing out their horses, a well-managed unit covering about forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) a day with regular stops and great care taken to minister to horses, loads, and riders. Under such a system, which alternated walking, trotting, and occasional gallops to stretch the horses' legs, a unit could cover as much as over 966 kilometers (600 miles) in a month in perfect order. The cavalry also gained significant advantages by campaigning with good winter clothing during the coldest months when the Indians settled in permanent camps, thereby negating their superior mobility. An English observer described army beasts as ‘stout, hard, active and wiry,' and accustomed to hardship. The troopers were, at best, working horsemen, with none of the polish of European
cavalrymen, but they knew well to look carefully after their horses. In the end their superior long-term strategy in the field prevailed.

Another defining moment in cavalry history came with the Boer War of 1899–1902. Boer horsemanship and mobility was vastly superior to that of the British, whose mounted forces numbered some eighty thousand at war's end. Many units from Australia and Canada adopted the marauding tactics so successfully employed by the Boers, such as using rifles with longer range like their enemies. The best British units engaged in thorough reconnaissance with carefully gathered intelligence; surprise with speed was acquired with good riding and overwhelming firepower. But the wastage of horses was enormous. The American Civil War saw equine casualty rates in the 50 percent range. No fewer than three hundred and fifty thousand British horses out of half a million perished in the Boer War, a casualty rate in the region of 70 percent. The demands for horseflesh were enormous, but an efficient remount system that called on sources all over the world and a well-organized shipping system kept the cavalry supplied. At one point, the British were shipping six thousand horses a month out of New Orleans, from a base near Kansas City. In South Africa itself, logistics and veterinary care were appalling. Inadequate fodder led to many beasts starving to death. The severe losses were not so much due to the rider, but to inadequate supply lines for mounted units that required elaborate backup, everything from farriers to horse masters.

“We Had to Shoot Quite a Number”

World War
I
with its trench warfare, barbed wire, and carefully sited machine guns was a rude and belated wake-up call for conventional cavalry. Mounted units did play somewhat of a role in the early months of the war in the west. Fixed, heavily wired front lines and trench warfare eventually changed the rules, despite the efforts of elderly generals whose ideas were firmly stuck in the colonial battles of Victorian times. They insisted that mounted regiments be kept in reserve, but the massed charge was finally recognized as the anachronism it had been since the Crimean War. Quite apart from the firepower of artillery and machine
guns, a few strands of barbed wire were sufficient to stop a galloping regiment in its tracks. In 1917, a British infantry officer watched two brigades of cavalry charge a village during the Battle of Arras. The Germans opened up with massive firepower. “It was a wicked waste of men and horses. . . . The horses seem to have suffered most, and for a while we put bullets into poor brutes that were aimlessly limping about on three legs or else careering around madly in their agony; like one I saw that had the whole of its muzzle blown away.”
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The psychological effects of a thundering charge had dissipated in the face of infantrymen armed with the military technology of an industrial age. Dismounting became an important cavalry tactic as the war unfolded. Occasionally, however, mounted units fought alongside tanks or cut down fleeing troops.

Horse regiments played a more significant role on the much longer Eastern Front. French war correspondent Dick de Lonlay had campaigned with the Russian army in 1877. He described the steppe-bred Don warhorse used by Cossacks as an ideal mount: “frugal to amazing degree, he lives contented with a handful of oats or barley.” A Don would munch the thatch of a peasant's hut, was impervious to cold and heat, and responded “to each caress and falls in with the mood of his owner,” to which he was devoted. “In combat he takes part with unrestrained rage: mane flowing, with bloodshot nostrils. He kicks and bites the enemy's horses with the greatest furor.”
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De Lonely commented on the deep attachment of the Cossacks to their mounts, a tradition with roots in history. They enjoyed some notable successes during World War I, especially when pursuing small groups. In the open country of the Middle East, British general Edmund Allenby used cavalry so successfully that the Turks withdrew from the war, but Allenby never attempted suicidal mass charges.

More than six million horses saw service during the war, most of them used for hauling artillery and supplies. They were better than motor vehicles at traveling through deep mud and over rough terrain. Six to twelve horses pulled heavier guns, even in deep mud, and towed captured weapons from no-man's-land. A Canadian soldier at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, in 1917, remembered how “the horses were up to their
bellies in mud. . . . We had to shoot quite a number.”
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Thousands of beasts died in artillery barrages, and suffered from poison gas and skin diseases. On the German side, fodder shortages led to widespread equine starvation. Abandoned horse carcasses, manure, and poor sanitary conditions contributed to disease in camps along both sides of the front. Chronic horse shortages developed. At the Battle of Passchendaele, also in 1917, infantrymen were told that the loss of a horse was of greater tactical concern than that of a soldier, who was, after all, replaceable. Horsemen whose mounts died were required to cut off one of the hooves and take it to their commanding officer, to prove that the animal had in fact perished. Very few horses on any front returned home. Like ammunition and stores of all kinds, they had become merely a commodity in the first modern industrial war, just like the long-suffering animals that pulled omnibuses and plowed fields back home.

The Great War showed even the most conservative strategist just how helpless horses were against modern weaponry. It was not until the 1930s that trucks, tanks, and other vehicles developed cross-country abilities and levels of reliability that made them essential. The U.S. Army led the changeover, which culminated in the development of the jeep. Only the Germans and Russians employed large cavalry units during World War II, despite the Nazis' emphasis on mechanizing their armies. The Russians deployed as many as two hundred thousand mounted troops, notably Cossacks, whose very name and habitual use of sabers put fear into the hearts of Hitler's fleeing troops. They deliberately called many of their units “Cossacks” even if they weren't, because of the terror this produced in their foes.

Enormous numbers of horses served in German artillery and supply trains. They suffered alongside men in the appalling conditions along the Eastern Front, where animals and humans alike starved to death, the former because they were unable to forage the countryside. Russian horses were much better adapted to winter conditions on the steppe. Among them, six million small horses given by the Mongolians and perfectly adapted to savage weather, being especially mobile during the winter months, gave the Soviets major strategic advantages. The last Russian cavalry units vanished in the 1950s. Except for actions against guerrillas
and in very rugged terrain such as that in Afghanistan, mounted troops have little value in today's conflicts. They appear on ceremonial occasions—Britain's Household Brigade is a famous example—and horse patrols help police forces in crowd control.

Mounted soldiers, often of great ability, participated in many great moments in history, but the same events, and many lesser violent conflicts, exposed horses to all the horror and suffering of warfare at its most violent. We should never forget that millions of them suffered, were wounded grievously, or were killed or starved to death in service to their masters, a role thrust on them whether they desired it or not. The artillery officer Cavalié Mercer spent several days on the Waterloo battlefield and was appalled by the suffering of wounded and dying horses. Some struggled, still living, with their entrails exposed, trying vainly to stand. Others lay quietly, lifting their heads, gazing wistfully until they convulsed in death. One beast had lost both its hind legs; Mercer saw it looking about and “sending forth, from time to time, long and protracted melancholy neighing.” He couldn't bring himself to put it out of its misery after so much bloodshed. His epitaph for the grievously wounded mounts echoes over two centuries in three words that say it all: “Mild, patient, enduring,”
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CHAPTER 17

Cruelty to the Indispensable

Grim, mercenary callousness—such behavior toward farm animals and the beasts that powered a rapidly industrializing world was commonplace long before James Watt developed the steam engine and the cotton gin revolutionized the cotton industry. One only had to visit the Smithfield Market, once outside the city walls but now nestled inside London, to experience the savagery addressed at farm beasts destined for the stockyard. Most people avoided the place, but witnessed cruelty to working animals almost daily.

“The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; and a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens . . . were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, two or three deep.”
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Novelist Charles Dickens gives a graphic description of London's Smithfield meat market in
Oliver Twist
in 1838, with its jostling, disorderly, and drunken crowds of butchers, drovers, thieves, and destitute vagabonds. The suffering the Smithfield beasts endured beggars description, a purgatory their predecessors had endured since medieval times. Not that anyone seemed to care, there being virtually universal apathy toward the hell for animals that was Smithfield. It took a well-publicized cholera scare in 1855 and concern over tainted meat and offal to close the live-animal meat market and move it farther from the city.