ABSTRACT
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
Wood’s claim for its indispensability in a modern army?
