ABSTRACT
In 1878 a British War Office report on the Russo-Turkish War noted the unusual nature of the Russian Army’s Cossack regiments, horsemen armed with lance, sword and rifle, but trained to fight mainly on foot.1 Six years later, it was strongly emphasised that Russian cavalry, of which the Cossacks formed a considerable part, ‘now differs in type, training and equipment from all other European cavalry, and is avowedly intended to act as mounted infantry rather than regular cavalry’.2 In 1901 the British military attaché in Pekin (as the capital city of China was then known), although chiefly concerned with the cavalry of other nationalities, noted that both Russian Cossacks and Japanese cavalry in China ‘appear to be very good mounted infantry’.3 British soldiers cramming for promotion examinations in 1903 learned that ‘the Russians alone have mainly armed their cavalry with the rifle as their sole [sic] weapon’.4 In his Small Wars, Callwell distinguished the ‘Russian dragoon’ as ‘a cavalry soldier trained especially to fight on foot and provided with a rifle and a bayonet’.5 The point, at least for the British War Office, was not in dispute. The majority of British officers reporting on the Russo-Japanese War (some of them cavalry officers) confirmed that the Russian cavalry, including the Cossacks, were trained primarily to fight on foot with a carbine or rifle.6 Even in 1910, in War and the Arme Blanche, his denunciation of British cavalry doctrine and of the new Cavalry Training 1907 that had replaced Roberts’s 1904 manual, Erskine Childers had to argue hard that the Russian experience had not undermined his case that mounted riflemen were the superior form of cavalry.7 Childers contacted Ian Hamilton, now serving as Adjutant General, for an explanation for the poor Russian cavalry performance, and Hamilton wrote back (in a letter that he copied to Roberts and to Churchill) with a long discourse on the history of cavalry tactics, ending with the Russo-Japanese War:
1 TNA WO 33/31 ‘The Russo-Turkish War 1877: Operations in Europe’ (1878). 2 Chenevix-Trench, Cavalry in Modern War, p. 14. 3 TNA WO 33/184 ‘Notes Regarding the French, German and American Cavalry in
China’ (1901). 4 Moores, Summary of Tactics for Military Operations, p. 173. 5 Callwell, Small Wars, p. 422. 6 TNA WO 33/337 Report on the Russo-Japanese War up to 15 August 1904, (1905);
‘How Not To Do It’, The Cavalry Journal, Volume 1, Number 3, p. 316; Zalesskij, ‘The Russian Cavalry in the War with the Japanese’, The Cavalry Journal, Volume 8, Number 32,
Next came the Manchurian War. Extremely awkward for the framers of the 1907 Cavalry Training, even you must admit… The upholders of the arme blanche have been driven, in discussing it, to invent the astonishing theory that Russian cavalry and Cossacks are not cavalry at all but merely mounted infantry… In their complete adherence to shock tactics and the arme blanche the Russian regular cavalry are second only to the British. As for Cossacks, a Cossack off his horse is like a duck out of water.8
