ABSTRACT

Despite the formal decision for peacetime planned abstraction and organisational impermanence, the Mounted Infantry lacked a clear-cut doctrine, and it was left with uncertainty how and in what way it should be deployed in the field. Its mode of deployment and the role required of it were closely linked. Should the Mounted Infantry work independently, roving in small mobile detachments, or remain closely protecting their own infantry battalions? Should they be attached to the cavalry to provide fire support or protect and serve infantry divisions in a communications role or even function as an informal reserve replacing cavalry vacancies, as suggested by some sections of the popular press? 3 Or should the Mounted Infantry range across the battlefield in large independent mobile formations? This uncertainty was unfortunate but hardly surprising in view of the lack of an overarching formal doctrine for the British Army as a whole. 4 The absence of a General Staff until the years after

overall deficiency in the army’s ability to identify, understand and promulgate lessons arising from warfare into future army planning and doctrine. The Army Review of 1911 stated that the chief objective of the General Staff was ‘continuity of policy in army administration by basing this policy on the reasoned and well-ordered thought, not of individuals, but of a collective body of experts’. 5 Hence there were drills, manuals and orders, but the lack of formal doctrine meant that for commanders at all levels, there was, at best, operational flexibility and at worst operational weakness through lack of guidance. Indeed the exculpatory official rationale for this glaring omission was cited as a conglomeration of the need for adaptability due to the different types of warfare encountered across the Empire, to avoid stereotyping military operations, to avoid restrictive practices arising from a permanent manual, to prevent unthinking adherence to so-called rules of operations and tactics and, surprisingly, the problem of identifying suitable authorship. 6 The result was a tradition of improvisation, adoption of personalised training methods and command with a tolerance of individuality leading to, in the words of Spencer Jones, an army of ‘subtly different tactics’. 7

Nevertheless, even without an overarching doctrine, the basic premise of the Mounted Infantry was described thus: ‘the essential fact to be impressed on all is that they are and are to remain infantry and that the means of locomotion provided by horse, ponies, camels or mechanical contrivances to give them an increased mobility are merely as the means to the end of their more effective service.’ 8 The Intelligence Department’s 1881 précis had asserted similarly that ‘in no case can Mounted Infantry be expected to fight on horseback, for it is insisted upon by all advocates of Mounted Infantry that the horse is merely a means of locomotion’. 9 Subsequently the Regulations for Mounted Infantry 1884, the arm’s earliest dedicated drill manual, also endorsed the infantry basis of the regular Mounted Infantry by eschewing any quasi-cavalry functionality. 10 A contemporary paper encapsulated the infantryman spirit of the Mounted Infantry, sternly cautioning that ‘no Mounted Infantryman should ever be allowed to imagine himself, or indeed should wish, to be a cavalryman’. 11 Retrospectively, this in itself lessens the veracity of Repington’s jibe of ‘cavalry of poverty’. Even the Regulations for Mounted Infantry 1897 , the nearest to a contemporary if embryonic doctrine for the Mounted Infantry, indicated that ‘it cannot be too frequently impressed upon all ranks that they are in no sense cavalry’. 12 The Regulations confirmed the Mounted Infantry’s tactics as depending upon the accuracy and efficiency of its rifle fire. However, it also advised presciently of the need for an embryonic inter-arm cooperation with cavalry. 13 Furthermore, the Regulations emphasised the importance of also working with foot infantry, particularly in the role of force protection as local scouts, as a mobile infantry reserve and as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the Infantry Division. 14 Generically, force protection through mobile firepower, whether

ing additional roles. Thus reflecting the Mounted Infantry’s ad hoc antecedents, the earliest form of doctrine cast the Mounted Infantry squarely in a supporting role. This alone should have negated much of the cavalry’s concerns that their own roles would be subsumed eventually by the Mounted Infantry. The varying requirements for training of the Mounted Infantry over the decades and the comparison with cavalry training, particularly later on when doctrinally there was some degree of cross-over in roles, will be discussed in a later chapter.