ABSTRACT
Prior to 1881, the attraction of ad hoc Mounted Infantry to army commanders had been its ease of extemporisation, the benefits of easily available infantrymen ready to be horsed and the brevity of equitation training that they then received. For the latter, the only major requirement of the Mounted Infantry was the ability to retain their seats when riding across rough terrain, a training requirement considered by many senior officers to be amenable to improvisation while on the march. 1 Even Colonel Repington, as noted previously no friend of the Mounted Infantry model, recalled nostalgically his effective experiential training in equitation in the Burma Mounted Infantry. 2 This combination of minimal standards of equitation permitting delivery through negligible training requirements had promoted the Mounted Infantry as a quick fix for the conundrum of identifying mounted troops without either waiting for cavalry to be embarked from home or the stationing of cavalry regiments across the Empire, understandably an option restricted by their numerical paucity and the associated embarkation costs. If horsing the infantry was seemingly the pragmatic answer then the eventual transformation of the Mounted Infantry from an ad hoc improvised infantry option to a formalised organisation with prescribed training requirements, most importantly in equitation, would parallel the increasingly complex roles expected of the Mounted Infantry. It would be fundamental though to the confusion, controversy and misunderstanding that surrounded the Mounted Infantry until its abolition.
