Despite the technological advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as rapid-firing artillery, the magazine loading rifle, barbed wire and the machine-gun, all the armies of the major combatants entered World War I with substantial numbers of cavalry amongst their forces. The Germans had 11 cavalry divisions, the French 10, the Russians 36, the Austrians 11, the British two and the Belgians one. These 335,000 mounted men were, as British military historians Richard Holmes and John Keegan point out, considerably more than the number with which Genghis Khan subdued most of Eurasia in the thirteenth century. A century, perhaps a century and a half, of military experience had pointed to the vulnerability of mounted men in modern warfare, yet this was ignored almost uniformly by the European military. The 1909 German field regulations stated that: ‘Mounted action is still the predominant way in which cavalry fights.’ That very year, however. General Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, who as the Chief of the German General Staff had devised the plan for attacking France through Belgium, had baldly proclaimed that in his view of the current battlefield: ‘Not a horseman will be seen. The cavalry will have to accomplish its tasks out of the range of the infantry and artillery. Breech-loaders and machine guns will have banished the cavalry quite mercilessly from the battlefield.’ In the opening
During an advance, panzergrenadiers accompanying the tanks in armoured personnel carriers would be expected to deploy at a moment’s notice to ‘mop up’ any remaining enemy pockets of resistance.
Battles of World War I five years later, it was von Schlieffen, not his army’s field regulations, who was proved right. Whenever cavalry met well-formed infantry they were shot from their horses in droves. Within six weeks the horse was banished from the Western European battlefield. Nonetheless, all High Commands - often populated by cavalry officers - hankered after using them to exploit the elusive breakthrough. Even in 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, the British had three cavalry divisions ready to pour through the gaps that the infantry (and a few early tanks) never managed to punch through the German lines. Although cavalry remained useful in the East and in subsidiary theatres such as the Middle East, it would never again play an important role. A key element of strategic and tactical mobility was removed forever from the battlefield.
What von Schlieffen had not forecast was that the infantry would be as vulnerable as the cavalry to the developments in weaponry. The emphasis placed by Europe’s armies upon the charge and bayonet was as misplaced as the belief in the efficacy of cavalry. The outnumbered British, French and Belgians fought to a standstill what was considered by some ‘the finest army in the world’ at terrible cost to themselves. The firepower that had shattered the cavalry charges proceeded to do the same to the bayonet charges of the following weeks. The exhausted armies dug in and the war settled into stalemate, the trenches of both sides stretching from the Alps to the North Sea.
World History
