CHAPTER 3

NOT QUITE SUNSET

THE CAVALRY IN WORLD WAR I

By the end of the nineteenth century cavalry operations in European armies had become a matter of some doctrinal uncertainty. More powerful weapons, firing more accurately and at longer ranges, raised the question of the suitability, indeed the survivability, of the cavalry. This was no less the case in Germany than elsewhere. While the Franco-Prussian War had seemed to show that cavalry could still win a battle by means of the massed charge with cold steel, the true value of the German cavalry during that conflict had demonstrated itself in armed reconnaissance with a view to finding and fixing the enemy; screening and securing German forces; interdicting the enemy's communications; and, at war's end, foraging and anti-partisan operations. None of these missions, particularly neither of the first two, had changed by 1900, though some soon would as a result of the widespread application of internal-combustion technology.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, cavalry still possessed the unique ability to move almost at will, though not always rapidly, over the most varied terrain and in nearly all types of weather. Cavalrymen could leave the largely road- and rail-bound infantry literally in the dust. In Western Europe, however, mounted forces faced an interesting potential problem, one that had been noted as early as the late 1860s, namely the congested physical nature of the landscape over which armies might move in future. That portion of the North European Plain stretching from Normandy through France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and into northwestern Germany had a very high population-density by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With it came a significant degree of industrial urbanization and attendant infrastructure. This infrastructure constituted a set of major obstacles to the free movement of mounted troops: intensively cultivated, and therefore very soft and wet, footing; numerous canals and railway lines; mine-pits and slag heaps; and innumerable fences and garden walls, the latter a delight to fox hunters but a real hindrance for heavily laden cavalrymen and their horses. Making these obstacles even more troublesome were the increasingly vast and complex fortifications strewn right across northwestern Europe from Liège and Namur past Luxemburg to Verdun. It was the latter's job specifically to complicate the movement of armies and thereby hinder invasions or block them altogether.1

As the Franco-Prussian War had so amply demonstrated, modern war had become terribly consumptive not only of cavalrymen but also of horseflesh. Despite advances in breeding and veterinary services, lossrates rose still further as the twentieth century dawned. Nevertheless, German and other cavalrymen assumed that horsed regiments would continue to have their place in the order of battle, even in the congested regions of northwestern Europe. The Germans' experience in 1870–1871 had done little to convince them otherwise. On the contrary, German observers felt that the cavalry should be strengthened and modernized, not reduced or—worse—eliminated. For example, one of Germany's most noted military authors of the era, General Friedrich von Bernhardi, called the early-twentieth-century strength of the German cavalry lamentably weak when compared to the mounted forces of France or Great Britain. The Boer War, he wrote, had shown what highly mobile and hard-hitting cavalry columns could still do, even in an age of high-powered infantry weapons. The key, he insisted, lay in ensuring that the German cavalry possessed its own accompanying bicycle-mounted infantry and more effective artillery, as well as training cavalrymen better as marksmen. Such additions would ensure that the horsemen could, if necessary, operate independently and with sufficient firepower to cause the enemy real damage. All the while they would retain their vaunted mobility, even though he never really explained what bicyclists would do once they ran out of road. He also cautioned, however, that every new war would create new conditions and totally unforeseen circumstances to which the cavalry, as all arms, would have to be ready to adapt.2

Across the English Channel, Sir John French, who had “established his military reputation by his performance as a cavalryman in the Boer War”³ and who would later become the first commander of the British Expeditionary Force in France, shared this view. Though speaking for the British, his comments were ones that would have been widely shared in Germany. French wrote that cavalry circa 1900 were being taught to shirk exposure on the battlefield as a result of what he considered undue respect for infantry fire. “We ought,” he wrote to the contrary, “to be on our guard against false teachings of this nature…[and the] consequences of placing the weapon above the man” and, implicitly, above the horse.⁴ Of course, his own experiences in the Boer War might have taught him otherwise. Between 1899 and 1902, the British cavalry in South Africa “lost 347,000 of the 518,000 [horses] that took part, though the country abounded in good grazing” and possessed a “benign climate.” Of those lost, “no more than two per cent were lost in battle. The rest died of overwork, disease, or malnutrition, at a rate of 336 for each day of the campaign.”⁵

In the absence of motorized vehicles, however, horses remained critical for mobility in that conflict. This fact represented the only real hope for the cavalry's survival in European armies. Reinforcing the mobile importance of horse-mounted and horse-drawn forces, another feature of the Boer War stood out: among the Trek Boers, “every man was a mounted shot.”⁶ Like their earlier American counterparts in the Civil War and in the wars with the Plains Indians from 1850 to 1890, Boer horsemen were the quintessential mounted infantry. Though some of them might yet be armed with sabers, their primary weapon remained the rifle, and the horse served principally as a means of effective crosscountry transport. If there were to be a place for mounted formations at the dawn of the twentieth century, would it not have to be that of mounted infantry who would nevertheless fight dismounted? British cavalrymen increasingly thought so after 1902. Accordingly they were equipped and trained with rifles rather than carbines and achieved a level of firepower and accuracy approaching that of the British infantry.7 They were becoming essentially what in British and British imperial terminology were designated mounted rifles: skilled “horsemen trained to fight on foot, men who are mounted and intend to perform all the duties of cavalry, except that which may best be described as ‘the shock.’ It is expected of them that they should perform all the outpost [sic], reconnoitering, and patrolling of an army in a manner similar to cavalry; the only difference being that they must rely solely upon their fire power for defensive and offensive action.”⁸

Commenting on the lessons to be drawn from another war of the period, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, German and Austrian officers came to a rather different set of conclusions. Under the pseudonym “Asiaticus,” a German officer wrote that Russian cavalrymen were too ready to go to ground with their firearms. In doing so, he said, they repeatedly sacrificed the cavalry's greatest asset, namely its mobility. Similarly, Austrian count Gustav Wrangel observed that the Russian horsemen's experience demonstrated that troopers could not serve both firearms and the saber equally well and be skilled riders at the same time. In any case, Wrangel noted, too great a reliance on firearms robbed the cavalryman of his desire to charge the enemy and implicitly deprived him of his real weapons, the sword and the lance.⁹

Such arguments continued unabated, even as rapid technological change continued to force the cavalry to adapt. Combining horse-soldiers with the technology that did exist culminated in the following calculation: railways would be used for initial operational deployment, as they had been for German armies ever since 1866. Increasingly heavy artillery would be the primary offensive preparation against field positions. The latter would then be taken by infantry assault. For its part, the cavalry would still be used for reconnaissance, screening, security, encirclement, and pursuit, if no longer for the battle-winning charge with swords drawn.¹⁰ One may argue, however, there's not much terribly novel in this approach. Cavalry had often been used for precisely these tasks in the Western military tradition ever since Hannibal's charging horsemen cut off the legions' retreat at Cannae and rode down the survivors (a favor the Romans returned at Zama).11 The mounted warrior's ethos and the tradition of the cavalry's shock value nevertheless lingered up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Even then, however, missions such as long-range screening and reconnaissance or interdiction of the enemy's lines of supply had not fully displaced the assumption that at least some future battles might still be decided by the massed cavalry attack.¹² In a view no doubt shared among more than a few German cavalrymen, the British Army's Cavalry Training Manual of 1907 still pronounced as a matter of principle that rifle fire, however effective it might be, “cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel.”¹³

One prominent British officer, Colonel G. F. R. Henderson, deduced from the campaigns of the Boer War that the sentiment as expressed in the Cavalry Manual meant that the cavalry at the turn of the century was “as obsolete as the crusaders.”¹⁴ If, however, the matter of the infantry's use of the bayonet is considered, then the cavalry's retention of the sword, and even the lance, may not seem so far-fetched, whether in Germany or Great Britain. The same officer had earlier been pleased that the British Infantry Regulations of 1880 had reiterated the psychological and tactical importance of the bayonet at close quarters, despite the by-then-widespread use of smokeless powder, magazine-fed rifles, and rapid-firing field artillery. Admittedly, Henderson modified his opinion about the bayonet's efficacy as a result of the Boer War, just as he did for the sword-armed cavalry. As the events of 1914–1918 repeatedly showed, however, German, British, and other infantry routinely went over the top with bayonets fixed long after the cavalry on the Western Front was deemed utterly useless. Indeed, the success of the Japanese infantry in their costly assaults against prepared Russian positions at Mukden and Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War seemed to show that the foot soldier's cold steel could still be employed with decisive effect provided that the attacking infantry had sufficient preparatory artillery support and a sufficient reserve of raw courage while covering the fire-swept zone between the opposing trench lines. Bernhardi, as well as another influential German military writer of the period, Colonel Wilhelm Balck, shared this assessment. Both stressed the “moral factor” (i.e., morale) as much as they stressed the material factor as a determinant of victory.15 They also applied it equally to the individual soldier and the nation in whose army he served. If, therefore, prominent military thinkers still posited a useful role for the bayonet, and if cold steel really could still frighten an enemy soldier—he need only imagine a foot or more of it being plunged into his gut—then the cavalry's retention of edged weapons and even lances does not seem so odd.

Ironically, however, the massed cavalry attack was in part made more unlikely by the very masses of infantry that some cavalrymen still confidently intended to drive from the field. Railways proved to be just as efficient as prewar planners had hoped in delivering unprecedented numbers of men and equipment for battle. For example, in approximately one month's time after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, some 312 divisions of French, German, Austrian, and Russian troops had been brought by rail to the battlefronts, a number excluding hundreds of thousands of cavalry mounts and draft horses. Having reached the enemy's territory, however, those same masses of troops in a certain sense became a liability. From the railhead onward, those surging tides of men continued to have to move largely on foot even while officers, cavalry troopers, and artillerymen rode. Furthermore, such huge numbers of troops, regardless of branch of service, had to be supplied by logistics trains still relying primarily on the power of horseflesh. Therefore, horses (and mules) remained a critical element of all the European armies at war's outbreak and not merely in the putatively outmoded cavalry regiments. An indication of horses' continued necessity reveals itself in the following statistic: the single largest category of cargo unloaded in the French ports for the British army throughout the entire period of 1914–1918 was horse fodder.¹⁶ Similarly, the Director of Military Operations in the War Office from 1910 to 1914, Major-General Henry Wilson, ensured that the BEF's mobilization plan included such apparently minor, but nonetheless crucial, details as “the provision of horse-stall fittings and gangways at the French ports” for the hundreds of thousands of horses (and mules) that the British armies in France would need from the start.¹⁷ From the war's earliest days, similar numbers of horses were being mobilized all across Europe for the cavalry, artillery, and transport services: 165,000 in Britain; 600,000 in Austria; more than a million in Russia. The European-wide ratio of horses to men generally was estimated to be 1:3.¹⁸

In Germany, as in all other combatant nations in 1914, horses were called up in unprecedented numbers from their civil tasks on farms, in businesses, and field sports. On 31 July the upper house of Germany's parliament, the Imperial Federal Council (Bundesrat), issued decrees prohibiting the exportation of fodder, provisions, and livestock. Making Germany's equine mobilization even more efficient was the fact that German horses, like their human counterparts, had to be registered in peacetime; thus the military authorities knew where the horses were “at all times.”19 Inaugurated in 1900, this system “involved a regular census and inspection of all horses in the country. Beasts were graded and a picture was built up of the nation's horse stock. A horse muster commission was established in each corps [area] to draw up detailed orders for the impressment of animals. These orders would be carried out prior to the full implementation of Germany's mobilization plan.”²⁰ Augmenting civilian registration and subsequent mobilization were the various State studs. The Hanoverian State Stud based at Celle, for example, alone provided annual deliveries of some 2,500 remounts to the German army by 1914, while the East Prussian State Stud at Trakehnen shipped out fully 7,000 per annum.²¹ In addition to these private and State-sponsored resources at home, the German government also continued to look abroad for horseflesh. The U.S. Consul General in Berlin, Robert P. Skinner, was cited in the New York Times Magazine of 3 May 1914 as reporting that the German government was advertising “in certain American newspapers for 500 American thoroughbreds, 1,000 more or less pedigreed horses, and 1,000 draught horses for artillery use.”²² German purchasing agents were also reportedly active in Ireland, having evidently “contracted for every horse on the Irish landscape…up to 1916.” Other agents had even “invaded France and bought up 18,000 first-class cavalry and artillery mounts.”²³

Though the war would necessarily nullify such prewar contracts, the Germans' need for such numbers of horses remained clear. A combat-ready corps of the regular German army in 1914 required no fewer than 280 trains comprising more than 12,000 railway cars in order to move from its depot to its deployment area. Those cars included 2,960 specially outfitted to transport only horses. Similarly, the need for provender was enormous, as already indicated. Given 1914's standard daily horse ration of approximately twenty-two pounds (10 kg) of feed and fodder, the German First Army alone required approximately 840 tons of feed and fodder each day for its establishment strength of 84,000 horses of all types. That requirement compares with approximately 555 tons of daily rations for the same army's 260,000 men.24 “To put it another way, the First Army needed 50% more food for horses than for men, though it had over three times as many men as horses.”²⁵ In all, the German army of 1914 intended to move not only three million men but also fully 600,000 horses merely for the initial campaign in northwestern Europe. These staggering totals required an equally breathtaking commitment of rolling stock to get the troops, their horses, and their equipment to the frontiers. No fewer than 11,000 trains were scheduled in the mobilization plan.²⁶

Of course, from the war's opening days on the Western Front, the German army also attempted to requisition horses in occupied territory, precisely because anticipated losses of horseflesh demanded it. In southern Alsace around Belfort, not far from the battlefields of 1870, enforced requisitioning began as early as 2 August, according to reports in the British press. Naturally, such attempts did not go uncontested. One German officer, apparently acting alone, reportedly entered one locale only to be “forced hurriedly to retreat” by enraged civilians. Similarly, in other villages German troops on the same mission were said to have been driven off by pitchfork-wielding Frenchmen. Such searches could quickly escalate to skirmishing. German dragoons attempting to enter Villers-la-Montagne, for example, found themselves forced to retreat by French chasseurs, while a full German mounted regiment's attack at Montfortane failed in the face of French infantry fire.²⁷

Nevertheless, at least on the Western Front, the cavalry's tactical and operational importance diminished rapidly as the lines stabilized after the First Battle of the Marne. Well aimed rifle-fire, particularly of the British “Old Contemptibles” of 1914, machine guns, and artillery quickly showed themselves capable of bringing effective gridlock to battlefields eventually made completely inert by the construction of the trenches. Furthermore, one of the cavalry's by-now-classic functions—turning the enemy's flank—proved itself increasingly difficult given the soon-to-be static nature of the lines in France. The force-to-space ratio was so high that infantrymen were finding maneuver ever more problematic absent effective and widespread motorization. It therefore became impossible for cavalry, whether German, French, or British, to envelop flanks that were never sufficiently “in the air” after September 1914. Such a conundrum was particularly troublesome for the German army. As already noted, the army's doctrine since the late 1860s had envisioned the cavalry's playing precisely that flanking role, as it had done in 1870. Once the enemy's flanks had been overlapped and his frontal defenses smashed by fire, but only then, would his positions be taken by assault.28 If, however, flanks could not be turned, then the cavalry on the Western Front would either have to wait for the increasingly improbable great breakthrough or—the worst of fates for the cavalryman's ethos—fight permanently dismounted.

As the German cavalry rode to war in 1914, their expectations were matched by their counterparts on the Allied side. Since at least the summer of 1911, the French army's General Staff expected that in a war against Germany, the British would dispatch a force of some 150,000 men and 67,000 horses, the latter including mounts for a full cavalry division and two separate mounted brigades.²⁹ The French and British staffs also fully expected to meet German cavalry in force. Indeed, as early as 1908 the French Superior Council of War had received an analysis of likely German wartime action. That analysis predicted a German drive through at least eastern Belgium around the northern flank of France's frontier defenses. This prediction recognized the Germans' “tradition of enveloping their opponent's flanks,”³⁰ a mission almost impossible in 1914 without the employment of strong mounted forces capable of rapid, wide-ranging movement. As a consequence, no fewer than nine of the German army's eleven cavalry divisions found themselves on the Western Front in 1914. That fact alone indicated the expected importance devolving upon mounted forces in a campaign designed to defeat France before Russia could mobilize effectively.

Each of these German cavalry divisions had an establishment-strength between 4,500 and 5,200 men and some 5,600 horses, including remounts. A typical mounted division included between 3,500 and 3,600 troopers armed with carbines, sabers, and, in many cases lances, to fight specifically as cavalry. In addition, each division had an organic infantry battalion (Jäger zu Pferde, literally “hunters on horseback”) of as many as 1,000 men. Presaging future motorization, the Jäger were typically bicycle- or truck-mounted, though as their name actually indicates, they often rode as well. Frequently, however, they slogged along on the boot-leather express, just as the infantry has done since time immemorial. Interestingly enough, though no one could know it in 1914, this relationship between mounted and dismounted German troops would be exactly reversed in 1939. In World War II it would be the infantry divisions that would have a cavalry squadron in their organic reconnaissance battalions.

In 1914 the standard primary weapon for both the Jäger and mounted troopers alike was the Mauser M1898, 7.92-mm carbine. Nevertheless, some cavalrymen also still carried straight-edged swords. In the heavy cavalry regiments the sword was a thrusting, rather than a cutting, weapon having a 36-inch (91-cm) blade and known as a Pallasch. The Pallasch weighed just a few ounces less than three pounds (1.36 kg). Uhlans and other light cavalry carried a similar weapon but one slightly lighter in weight and implicitly intended more for slashing. Still others were armed with sabers as such. As for offensive heavy weapons, German cavalry divisions also possessed—in a manner similar to other European cavalry forces—their own horse-artillery detachment of twelve guns in three batteries per division. According to the German timetable at the start of the campaign in the west, the entirety of such a division was supposed to cover between twelve and twenty miles (up to 32 km) per day. The cavalry expected to cover these miles in one of four recognized gaits: the walk, trot, gallop, and “extended gallop.” The canter appears to have been used only for march-pasts. Using these gaits, German horsemen could cover between 125 (walk) and 700 (“extended gallop”) paces per minute, a “pace” being about 31 inches (78 cm). In other words, cavalry at the walk—the most frequent marching gait—would cover just over one hundred yards (91 m) per minute or about three-and-a-half miles per hour. While that is about the speed of fast-moving infantry, it must be remembered that horses could keep going for longer periods of time, particularly if the infantryman was carrying his full load of equipment. At the trot, a good ground-covering gait that spares the horse if the trooper posts, the cavalry could cover 275 paces per minute or approximately 8 miles per hour (not quite 13 km/h). In point of fact, the distance covered daily by the cavalry would almost certainly be greater. Given the constant need for reconnaissance forays and screening operations, the horsemen would of necessity have to ride many more miles than that. Thus equipped and ready to move, the German cavalry in 1914, particularly the eight divisions eventually grouped in two corps during the so-called Race to the Sea after the First Battle of the Marne, constituted “the largest body of horsemen ever to be collected in Western Europe before or since.”31 In light of their numbers and their theoretical mobility, they had at least the potential to be everywhere.

Riding West

In the opening campaigns following Germany's declaration of war, the German army's cavalry units on the Western Front played the centuries-old role envisaged for European horsemen, a role reemphasized in the Prussian army in the late 1860s by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder. No one could know it with certainty at the time, but by the end of the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914 the German cavalry would find themselves essentially out of a job as mounted warriors. The entrenchment of the front from the sea to Switzerland, a distance of some 450 miles (724 km), would make traditional cavalry operations impossible. Nevertheless, at the campaign's beginning, the German horsemen were almost always in the van and often well in advance of it. For example, General Otto von Emmich's task group, sometimes referred to as the Army of the Meuse, included General Johannes Georg von der Marwitz's II Cavalry Corps (2nd, 4th, and 9th Cavalry Divisions including the Prussian Guard Cavalry). These forces crossed the Belgian frontier on 4 August 1914 and set out straight for Liège some twenty miles to the west, with mounted “outriders distributing leaflets disclaiming aggressive intent.”³² On 5 August 1914, French general Joseph Joffre responded by authorizing French cavalry to move into Belgium, that country's neutrality now having been violated by advancing German columns. The German cavalry's movements, however, helped alert French commanders to the latter's intention of driving much farther west into Belgium than Paris had earlier anticipated. On 14 August, just before the opening of the planned French march into Belgium, Joffre learned that German mounted patrols had attempted to seize bridges over the Meuse south of Namur. For their own part, French horsemen helped discover that the German armies were in fact moving deeper into Belgium than Joffre had likely expected.33 When the French Third and Fourth Armies advanced into Belgium, they included a full cavalry corps and a separate cavalry division, along with nine infantry corps. Unfortunately, the German Fourth and Fifth Armies marching to meet them comprised not only ten infantry corps but also two cavalry divisions, as well as six reserve brigades and the garrison forces at Metz. Equally unfortunately, the French cavalry of General J. F. A. Sordet's corps failed, as the French cavalry had often failed in 1870, to find and fix the invaders. The Ardennes country into which the French horsemen advanced admittedly did not lend itself to mounted operations. This southeastern corner of Belgium is fairly rough terrain, covered as it still was at that time by heavily forested hills. Furthermore, the River Semois and its tributaries cut across the French axis of advance. Coincidentally, these same conditions would confront invading German armored forces coming from the other direction thirty-six years later. As it was, despite nine days' riding from 6 to 15 August, the French horsemen never did locate the German columns and only succeeded in breaking down their mounts.³⁴

Somewhat to the surprise of the German invaders, the Belgian army fought more tenaciously at Liège than expected. In the fighting around that important fortress-city, Belgian commanders credited the German cavalry with helping prevent a successful Belgian counterattack from Ft. Embourg, one of twelve fortresses enclosing the city, in this case on the River Ourthe southeast of that stream's confluence with the Meuse. Despite having shot down large numbers of German infantry unwisely advancing across open ground around the fort, the Belgian defenders could not follow up their success. Apparently they feared operating in the open in the face of large numbers of German horsemen hovering in the vicinity. The Germans turned this hesitation to their advantage when a detachment of hussars subsequently launched a small-scale raid of their own into a gap between several of the forts in an effort to capture the Belgian commander, General Gérard Leman. In the confusion, and no doubt to their surprise, the Germans reached Leman's headquarters but were overpowered by an enraged crowd of Belgian civilians and Civic Guards who rushed to the scene. The latter killed one German officer, two troopers, and took the rest prisoner.35

Despite this setback, German cavalry did contribute materially to Liège's fall. Striking out from Visé, hard by the border with the Maastricht Appendix of Holland, they broke into open country west of the Meuse. Leman responded by ordering detachments of his mobile troops—in this case a division and a separate brigade that had come to Liège's defense—to block the German horsemen wheeling to the southwest beyond the river. Unfortunately, Leman's action removed forces intended to hold the gaps between Liège's fortresses and left their garrisons essentially trapped inside. Laboriously, German artillery, including the massive 420-mm Krupp howitzer, came up to batter the works and their unfortunate defenders into submission.³⁶

As the German advance gathered force after the fall of Liège, in fact before the city's final submission, the cavalry continued to ride hard ahead. As early as 9 August papers were reporting the presence of mounted reconnaissance patrols, the dreaded and ubiquitous “uhlans” of 1870s vintage, as far south as Dinant. There even appears to have been apprehension that the Germans were poised to launch an all-out cavalry assault on Brussels itself. More concretely, on 12–13 August German cavalry clashed with Belgian troops as the horsemen attempted to seize bridges over the Rivers Demer and Gette at Haelen and the Velpe at Cortenachen. At Haelen, the fighting was particularly intense. There the German cavalry launched mounted attacks against entrenched Belgian infantry supported by machine guns and artillery. The attackers, the 17th (Mecklenburg) Cavalry Brigade, “fell in heaps” with their horses as they stormed the village. Precisely as had happened to the French cavalry in their attack on Morsbronn in Lorraine in 1870, the Mecklenburgers and their mounts were shot down in such numbers that they literally walled up the streets of the village and made further attacks impossible. Around the nearby village of Donck, a similar fate befell the horsemen of the German 3rd Cavalry Brigade's 9th Uhlans and the Cuirassier Regiment Königin. In the case of the 9th Uhlans, the attackers charged with couched lances against what the regimental adjutant described as “murderous” small-arms, machine-gun, and artillery fire. Though the lancers rode down several lines of Belgian infantry, continued rifle-fire eventually drove them off. As they retreated via the intervening swale through which they'd attacked, they found it filled with dead comrades and their horses. In the time it took to charge and withdraw, the regiment lost perhaps half its strength: more than 100 men and 250 horses. Among the Königin Cuirassiers only 76 officers and men were lost but fully 270 horses. Meanwhile, to the southwest at Tirlemont (modern Tienen), fully two thousand German horsemen attempted to capture the entire town but were driven off by the defenders. At Èghezèe, on the Belgian right wing near the great fortress-city of Namur on the upper Meuse, the German cavalry fared worse, at least temporarily. Here Belgian horsemen caught German cavalry bivouacked in the town. The latter retreated after a series of sharp, dismounted street fights. In all of these engagements, German cavalry were not always able to accomplish their stated missions. Even where they failed, however, they continued to play the European cavalry's traditional modern role: screening the advance of one's own forces, reconnaissance, and finding and fixing the enemy. The realization slowly dawned that despite great bravery in the attack, such missions as these were all they would very likely be able to do. How far into the future they could carry on doing them remained another question entirely. Nevertheless, in these specific cases, so well did the German cavalry perform in the war's opening days that the Belgian General Staff evidently remained “in total ignorance” of the lumbering approach of the monstrous guns that had demolished the forts of Liège and would soon do the same at Namur.37

By 20 August 1914, newspapers reported German cavalry occupying a line running from Diest to Tirlemont. They were said to be pushing out in all directions over the open country of Brabant, terrain that seemed to have been “designed for them.”³⁸ It was at this moment that German horsemen fought an interesting engagement, given what the German army's doctrine would say about cavalry in the interwar period. On 25 August near Ostend, a force of some 150 Belgian gendarmes attacked a superior force of German cavalry approaching down the Bruges road. The German riders were preceded by bicyclists acting as scouts, certainly something of a twist for the normally far-ranging troopers. When the bicycle troops were halted by Belgian rifle-fire, the cavalry dismounted in true dragoon fashion to fight on foot. Then, still more interestingly, they brought up machine guns mounted on automobiles, though reports did not indicate whether these were purpose-built or lash-ups. After about an hour's fighting, a second cavalry detachment managed to arrive and threaten to outflank the Belgians in the old style. Faced with being cut off, the Belgians withdrew into Ostend. While the Germans themselves subsequently failed to break into the town, their employment of what a later generation would call combined arms presaged the post-1918 Reichswehr's doctrine for mounted forces' organization.39

As August wore to a close, the French and British armies continued to retreat. Placed in the Allied line between the French Sixth Army to the west and Fifth Army to the east, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) withdrew in good order after the Battle of Mons and managed to break contact with the pursuing Germans. Attacked but not disabled, the BEF simply “disappeared into the countryside,” often leaving the Germans at a loss as to its whereabouts, despite occasional chance collisions such as the one on 22 August when British horsemen of the 2nd Dragoon Guards met a German patrol of the 9th Cavalry Division's 4th Cuirassier Regiment northeast of Mons.⁴⁰ Occasionally, the BEF's withdrawal was also helped by the “self-sacrificing” attacks of its own horsemen against the pursuing German First Army. For example, on 24 August at Thulin to the southeast of Condé, the British 2nd Cavalry Brigade under General H. B. de Lisle charged advancing German troops armed with machine guns. Like the Königin Cuirassiers and 9th Uhlans at Haelen earlier that same month, the British horsemen were shot down in large numbers. But in a manner reminiscent of the French cavalry in 1870, they managed to buy a bit of time for the rest of the BEF to continue its withdrawal.⁴¹ Thus, in the pursuit of the BEF, the German cavalry failed in one of its primary missions: maintaining contact with and providing information about the enemy.

The German horsemen made good the failure, however, on 4–5 September. As the Allied armies had retreated and the German armies had advanced, the right flank of General Alexander von Kluck's First Army, itself on the extreme right of the advance, became threatened with being turned by a French counterattack. Here German cavalry served von Kluck and the German cause well. The local German commander, General Hans von Gronau of the IV Reserve Corps, discovered the French threat as a result of his Corps' attached cavalry division. Doing precisely what mounted troops were supposed to do in this sort of situation, namely reconnoitering and screening the advance, Gronau's cavalry alerted him to the impending French attempt to roll up the entire German First Army. Acting decisively on the information, Gronau attacked the French, halted their flanking maneuver, and in the process alerted First Army's commander and the Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL) to the stand being prepared by the Allied armies on the Marne.42 As Kluck moved forces to counter the French, a gap opened between his First Army and General Karl von Bülow's Second Army immediately to the east-southeast. Into the gap marched the BEF and elements of the adjoining French Fifth Army. The advancing Allied troops collided with two German cavalry corps whose units were screening the German First and Second Armies' fronts.⁴³ Once again, the German cavalry were performing precisely the sort of job that Moltke the Elder had laid out for Prussian horsemen in the previous century. An admittedly already slow British advance into a vulnerable opening in the German lines was halted by the defensive firepower of the German cavalrymen, firepower made more effective by the German cavalry divisions' own integral Jäger battalions.

Clearly, however, the German horsemen had not had everything their own way. They'd had only two days for rest, farriery, and the refurbishment of weapons before what was soon to be called the Battle of the Marne began. Their horses, worn down by the month-long, fighting advance through Belgium, now also showed the cumulative effects of a lack of ready fodder.⁴⁴ Their British and French counterparts, though numerous, did not exploit this situation. The BEF's two cavalry divisions were under orders to maintain contact with the French armies on the British flanks and not go riding off in any putative pursuit of the Germans. For their part, the French cavalry, still commanded by Sordet, had not only used their horses but, in certain respects, had abused them. No watering of mounts, for example, had been permitted in rest halts during the long retreat from Belgium, ostensibly to prevent the columns' being strung out. Furthermore, French troopers evidently saw no need occasionally to dismount and spare their horses, unlike German and British horsemen. As one British second lieutenant caustically noted, and as many a German trooper would doubtless have agreed, “The French cavalrymen was [sic] rarely seen off his horse. He had a rooted objection to dismounting.” Consequently, 90 percent of French equine losses in 1914 resulted from sickness, and fully 25 percent of all of France's mobilized horses were dead by year's end. The French army's remount system, already skewed by prewar requirements in favor of Anglo-Norman draft horses rather than true cavalry mounts, could not readily make good such losses; and tactical bright spots—such as Sordet's troopers almost capturing von Kluck in his own headquarters on 8 September—could not overcome the French horsemen's deficiencies in the war's opening campaign.45

Between the Battle of the Marne and the end of 1914, the Western Front gradually extended itself to the northwest. This was the famous and somewhat erroneously named “Race to the Sea.” During these almost three months, both sides attempted to gain room for maneuver by finding and turning the flank of their opponents. Contrary to popular opinion, they did not wish to terminate the lines at the coast of the North Sea, for then maneuver would come to an effective end, as in fact it did by the end of November. “Each [side] became very much aware of the defensive strength the opponent would gain when its northern flank could be anchored against the seacoast, and not [be] subject to the fluctuations of cavalry maneuvers.”⁴⁶ During this period, cavalry actions occurred as both sides strove to turn the other's flank. On 19 September, for example, German cavalrymen of the 4th Cavalry Division acting as the corps cavalry for the IX Corps maneuvered over what two years later would be the battlefield of the Somme. There they fended off, but evidently did not heavily engage, British cavalry (including attached machine-gunners and bicyclists) advancing from the vicinity of Péronne against the Germans' lines of communication stretching from St. Quentin to Le Cateau.⁴⁷ Each of these actions, followed up or accompanied by advancing infantry, extended the lines farther to the northwest. But as the two sides approached the sea, conditions on the ground became ever more congested by the huge masses of troops operating in the semiurban industrial landscape. In early October near Arras elements of at least four German cavalry divisions jostled for passage on the narrow roads of French Flanders. Due north of Arras, around the industrial and coal-mining town of Lens, the cavalry were ordered to fight dismounted. In “bitter street fighting” against Moroccan troops of the French Tenth Army and even against armed civilian miners, cavalrymen of the 4th, 7th, and 9th Cavalry Divisions held those districts until German infantry came up.48 Of this fighting in Flanders, the later Inspector of Cavalry of the German army wrote:

The opinion of the General Staff…that the army cavalry might be employed in a swift crushing of all resistance to the north of Lens with its full force, for the purpose of taking the enemy wing in rear, was proven impracticable. In the first place, the enemy had extended his northern wing still farther in the direction of La Bassée; also, a speedy passage was impossible over this country, with its railroad embankments, field tramways [and] mine pits, coal shafts, [slag] heaps and rows of workmen's houses, so characteristic of an industrial center, all of which had been merely approximately indicated on the maps. Mounted warfare, such as the army and higher command especially required this day, was simply out of the question. Step by step, the jaegers [sic] and cavalry troopers fought their way with carbines for possession of the locality, against an enemy defending from houses and pits; lacking bayonets, no headway could be won against massive factory walls without employment of heavier ammunition.⁴⁹

As a consequence of the front's resulting stabilization in Flanders, the German cavalrymen who'd ridden the entirety of the campaign were gradually converted into infantryman.

Throughout the second half of October and the whole of November 1914, they effectively surrendered their former status and slowly became indistinguishable from the other trench-dwellers populating the lines from Ostend to the borders of Switzerland. The addition of these eight divisions' worth of troops to the trenches was, of course, advantageous for the Germans, even though abandoning their horses often meant that the troopers went into the line without greatcoats, entrenching tools, and other mundane but essential equipment. Many of them, however, evidently insisted on keeping their spurs. As for the matter of what to do with eight cavalry divisions' worth of horses, that remained “a problem well-nigh beyond conception.”50

Whether they fought mounted or not, German cavalry made a material contribution on the Western Front in 1914, a fact recognized by friend and foe alike. The commander of the German Sixth Army, Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht, paid tribute to the horsemen's valor in the trench fighting around Lille in an order of the day late in October. The cavalry, he wrote, “has proven that it could successfully use the carbine against fortified trenches without being driven away and, from the very nature of its organization has been able to cover a wide area of conflict in a series of victories. It has thereby performed a highly meritorious service on a portion of the battlefield. I wish to express warmest thanks and deepest acknowledgment to the troops for their wonderful behavior and exceptional endurance.”⁵¹ Of course, one can argue that Rupprecht merely acknowledged the truism that necessity is the mother of invention. Nevertheless, his order took account of the cavalry's real remaining strength: its potential for mobility. On a fluid front, the horsemen could still move in a way that the infantry simply could not.

Nevertheless, from the end of 1914 those German cavalrymen on the Western Front remained essentially what they'd by then become: infantry. That didn't mean, however, that the cavalry disappeared. Instead, from here on out, it was the Allied cavalry that featured prominently, if only by virtue of its relative inactivity. Despite the front's immobility in 1915 and 1916, as well as the tactical dominance of artillery and machine guns, the overall British commander, Sir Douglas Haig, still thought combat horses necessary. A former cavalryman and polo player, his attachment might have appeared merely sentimental. A more practical consideration nevertheless influenced him.

An Allied victory ultimately required driving German forces out of France and Belgium. By contrast, in midsummer 1916 the Germans had less imperative reasons to advance, especially in northwestern France. Given the fighting then still raging at Verdun, as well as Austro-German defensive efforts against the Russians' “Brusilov Offensive” on the Eastern Front, German troops on the Rivers Ancre and Somme could remain precisely where they were. Unlike 1914, the Germans no longer had a real need for mounted troops. If the Allies wanted to come on, let them come. In Haig's calculation, such an offensive stood to accomplish a number of goals. The “Big Push” on the Somme, as it came to be known colloquially, would help relieve pressure on the French at Verdun; it would complicate the Germans' efforts to contain the Russians; and—Haig confidently believed—it would provide the long-awaited opportunity to break the deadlock in the west by shattering the German lines. When that breakthrough occurred, the British cavalry would be waiting to pour through the breach and raise havoc in the German rear all the way to the Belgian border and beyond.

Consequently, as British preparations entered their final stages in the late spring 1916, fully 100,000 horses crowded behind the British front lines. All of them had to be provided with shelter, feed, and fodder, an enormous undertaking; and this number did not include the additional requirements of some 400,000 men. Equally critically, water had to be plentiful as well. To that end, pumping sets were brought in from England, water pipelines were laid, more than three hundred tanker-trucks found work hauling water to the billets, and a number of two thousand-gallon canvas water tanks were set up along the front.52 In addition to artillery and draft horses, vast numbers were contained in the three British and two Indian cavalry divisions that Haig envisioned sweeping northward through the enemy's rear areas once the German lines had been broken by the British assault. Then, as one noted historian of the battle put it, “the hunt would be on.” Haig's critics in the British government would be silenced. The German army would be run to ground and defeated. Northern France and the whole of Belgium would be liberated. The Allies would be crowned with victory.⁵³

As is only too well known, the battles on the Somme did not turn out as expected. Losses were unprecedented, little was gained, and the British cavalry never made their sweeping ride. That is not to say, however, that the mounted forces escaped unscathed. They didn't. But their collective fate exemplified what many European detractors of the cavalry—anyone's cavalry—had maintained since 1870. On the modern European battlefield there was no place for a horse, or at least for a horse carrying a combat soldier. No less a critic than then-prime minister Herbert Asquith bluntly told Haig in May 1916 that the British cavalry horses in France were “of no use” and that the British government maintained huge stocks of war horses in France for no purpose. Haig, for his part, dismissed such criticism as the mere carping of ill-informed civilians.54

Consequently, when the British offensive opened on 1 July 1916, the British cavalry stood by expectantly. They went on waiting for the next two weeks. In the afternoon of 14 July, however, Haig launched the 7th Dragoon Guards in what he thought might be the beginning of the long anticipated mounted dash through the breach in the German lines. Carrying lances, the cavalrymen charged across open ground near the village of Bazentin-le-Petit on the southeastern end of the British line not far from the boundary with the adjoining French sector of the front. They killed sixteen Germans and captured more than thirty others, only to be withdrawn to the British lines again before dawn the next day. No mounted breakthrough followed because no real breach in the German lines had been opened.⁵⁵

But, like their fathers in 1870, the cavalrymen and artillerymen on the Somme—on both sides of the lines—saw what modern warfare would do to horseflesh; and though the mounted forces didn't suffer the way the French horsemen had at Sedan forty-six years before, the carnage was every bit as sad. A new horror, beyond even poison gas, now confronted the cavalry and other horse-dependent arms: aerial attack. Though still in its infancy, the threat posed by strafing was nonetheless real whether the horses in question were cavalry mounts or ones pulling artillery and wagons. To cite but one example, two British aviators flying a reconnaissance mission over the Somme battlefield attacked German horsemen galloping forward with ammunition caissons in tow. The results were predictable. The lead mount “crumpled up, and the others, with their tremendous momentum, overran him, and whole lot piled up in the ditch, a frenzied tangle of kicking horses, wagons, and men. The second limber, following close behind…could not avoid its leader; its wagons overturned, wheels spinning, and split. Shells rolled over the road. We returned elated [to our airfield].” Not far away, on the same day that the 7th Dragoon Guards rode for Bazentin-le-Petit only a bit over a mile and a half to the west, a squadron of British horsemen was caught in the open by German artillery fire on the road leading to a contested village. “Dead and dying horses, split by shellfire with bursting entrails and torn limbs, lay astride the road that led to battle. Their fallen riders stared into the weeping skies. In front, steady bursts of machine-gun fire vibrated on the air. Caught by a barrage, these brave men and fine horses had been literally swept from the Longueval road.”56 Thus the situation remained for the British cavalry on the Somme for the rest of that months-long battle. They would eventually be withdrawn in early November 1916. As Haig told the commander of the Cavalry Corps, Lieutenant General T. C. McM. Kavanagh, on 5 November, the horsemen no longer had any real hope of a breakthrough “owing to the state of the ground,” sodden as it was with early winter rains. Consequently, the mounted forces “might now be withdrawn to more comfortable billets.”⁵⁷

In that same year, on the French end of the front at Verdun, not only men but horses too succumbed to the war's carnage in unbelievable numbers. It was noted that on one day of the fighting there fully seven thousand horses were killed by long-range artillery fire, ninety-seven alone by the detonation of a single shell fired by a French naval gun.⁵⁸ Still others were caught and killed in agony by the “terrible fumes” of a German barrage using phosgene-filled artillery shells on 22 June in the last major German attempt to capture the town. On the Western Front, as to a certain extent on the Eastern Front, the German army is generally recognized to have fought the war more effectively from a technical point of view, only to lose the Materialschlacht.⁵⁹ In such a circumstance, cavalry forces, however useful they may still have been in theory, and however effectively they were employed in the war's opening campaigns, could not affect the outcome.

Cavalry on the Eastern Front

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, the German cavalry played a more active and traditional role than in France. With localized exceptions, World War I from the Baltic coast to Rumania remained a war of movement. It could not be otherwise. Between Riga and the mouth of the Danube lay an airline distance of more than eight hundred miles (nearly 1,300 km), but the front could never be measured in airline distances because it included many hundreds of miles more in twists and turns. One theater of operations that was of central importance to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia alike, namely Russian Poland, by itself measured more than 200 by 250 miles (320 by 400 km). Completely entrenching such vast distances was simply impossible. The front would always be “in the air” somewhere. Consequently, “both sides attempt[ed] vast and daring maneuvers against the enemy's flank and rear, just as they would in a later war from 1941–1945.”60 For the success of any such maneuvers, the cavalry's mobility remained critically important.

At the war's beginning, the Russian army mobilized no fewer than thirty-seven cavalry divisions.⁶¹ On the German side, by dramatic contrast, there was only one, at least in East Prussia. This was the venerable 1st Cavalry Division, whose regiments were based at Königsberg, Insterburg, and Deutsch-Eylau. This division, along with eleven neighboring infantry divisions, comprised about one-tenth of Germany's mobilized strength in 1914. Though the numbers of German cavalry would grow enormously during the war on the Eastern Front, the initial disparity was owing not only to Russia's having to fight both Germany and Austria-Hungary and therefore needing more cavalry but also to the German General Staff's assigning East Prussia a secondary status in prewar planning. Primary attention and the accompanying resources went to the massive attack against France and Belgium in the West.⁶² This particular German cavalry division, however, not only comprised storied Prussian regiments; it would also subsequently be maintained as part of the Reichsheer during the interwar period and go to war again on horseback in 1939.

One of the very earliest events on the Eastern Front also involved cavalrymen, though in this case they weren't German. On 6 August 1914, several hundred men of a formation known as Pilsudski's Legion—carrying their saddles—marched across the frontier of Russian Poland from Austrian Galicia near Cracow in the hopes of finding mounts. Wisely, they retreated when they were approached by Cossacks and eventually found their way into the Austrian army.⁶³ The incident is revealing, for the Cossacks' presence on the Eastern Front from the war's outbreak reinforced the conflict's likely intensity over the whole of that almost immeasurably vast area. From its beginning, the fighting in the east, unlike that in the west, carried overtones of “race war,” a feature reaching its gruesome extreme in the Nazis' campaigns between 1941 and 1945. The prejudices between supposedly cultured Germans and supposedly barbarous Russians, with the Poles caught in the middle, were manifested from the beginning of the war of 1914. As early as 11 August, no less an authority than the director of the Prussian Royal Library in Berlin, Adolf von Harnack, pronounced that “Mongolian Muscovite civilization” once again loomed over the eastern horizon to threaten German lands just as had happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.64

This conjuring of the ancestral Western European fear of the horsemen of the steppe could not have been clearer. As it turned out, the very next day Cossacks of Russian general Pavel Rennenkampf's First Army crossed the East Prussian border, sacked the village of Markgrabovo, and ignited precisely the sort of panic that Harnack's “Mongolian Muscovite” hordes had created in generations past. Intensifying the German reaction was the quasi-melding of Prussia's identity with that of Germany as a whole, a process that had begun with Germany's unification under the direction of Otto von Bismarck in 1870–1871. Though certainly not universal, this identification of Prussia with Germany made East Prussia's violation by “asiatics” a national concern, not one limited to East Prussia itself. For a traditionalist unit such as the 1st Cavalry Division, Russian troops' presence on German, and especially East Prussian, soil would pose a grave emotional threat. A prominent later commander in the post-1918 Red Army (and eventual Marshal of the Soviet Union) only reinforced the apprehension accompanying such a threat by evoking the memory of Mongols' style of warfare. “The Russian Army,” boasted Mikhail Tukhachevsky, “is a horde, and its strength lies in its being a horde.” This image of rampaging barbarians who “would sweep into deutsches Kulturland” was hardly one to reassure East Prussians or other Germans either during World War I, the chaotic later days of the 1920s, or even in the 1930s or 1940s. As it was, the commander of the German I Corps in East Prussia in 1914, General Hermann von François, lamented the sorry plight of the “mad rush” of thousands of civilians away from the Russian horsemen and fretted that the refugees would impede his own armies' efforts to contain the invaders.⁶⁵ A senior staff officer who witnessed the invasion and who planned the defenders' operations, Colonel (later General) Max Hoffmann, subsequently noted in his diary that never before had war been waged with such “bestial fury.” The Russians, he wrote with brutal succinctness, “are burning everything down.” Buildings not burned were plundered. One eyewitness, a captain in the Russian 1st Cavalry Division's Sumsky Hussars, noted that in the campaign's opening days around Markgrabovo, “[the] scene on the German side of the border was quite frightening. For miles, farms, haystacks, and barns were burning. Later on, some apologists…tried to explain these fires by attributing them to the Germans, who were supposed to have started them as signals to indicate the advance of our troops. I doubt this, but even if it were so in some cases, I personally know of many others where fires were started by us.” Not surprisingly, Russian cavalrymen, including the captain quoted here, helped themselves to the fine horses of East Prussia when in need of a quick replacement for blown, wounded, lame, or dead Russian mounts. Not a few of these horses came from the Prussian State Stud at Trakehnen, which lay almost directly in the path of the invaders. Some Cossacks also took human hostages from the civilian population, many of whom were deported to the east.66

In resisting the Russian invasion, the German armies in East Prussia fought a successful series of battles between 17 and 23 August near Stallupönen and Gumbinnen. These towns lay due east of the provincial capital of Königsberg with Stallupönen being almost literally on the Russian border. Later, around Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes to the south and southwest, another string of even larger defeats would be inflicted on the Russians. In the fighting near Gumbinnen, the 1st Cavalry Division made a measurable contribution. Though they had sometimes failed to provide accurate intelligence of the Russian advance and been dismissed by the infantry as “frog stickers” because of the lances they still carried, the cavalrymen redeemed themselves. Flanking the Russians in good cavalry fashion, the German horsemen broke clear and played havoc with the Russians' logistics and lines of communication.⁶⁷ Having already served with the frontier defense (Grenzschutz) before its parent Eighth Army was activated, the 1st Cavalry Division had earlier fought at Stallupönen. Now, near Gumbinnen, it was in its element against a large but lumbering opponent advancing into the acute angle formed by the Gumbinnen-Stallupönen railway line and the River Inster. This opponent was the Russian Imperial Guard Cavalry Corps under the command of the Khan of Nakhitchevan. It had the mission of securing the Russian right wing. Fought to a standstill by German infantry and artillery around the village of Kaushen, the Russian cavalry faltered, and a gap opened in their front. Into that gap plunged the 1st Cavalry Division. The German horsemen broke through, and the ride was on—fully 120 miles (190 km) behind the Russian lines in barely three days' time.68 It was a cavalryman's waking dream for the division's older officers. The division's commander, General Brecht, had entered the Prussian army in 1867, and two of his brigadiers were well into their fifties.⁶⁹ Still, the advance occurred in a fashion never duplicated on the Western Front after the first Battle of the Marne. It also created panic in General Rennenkampf's headquarters. Proving themselves generally better horsemen than their Russian counterparts, the division's troopers moved so far so fast into the Russian rear that they lost contact with their own forces. Consequently, the cavalrymen initially failed to get the subsequent orders for the great redeployment southwestward toward Tannenberg. As that redeployment got underway, however, the division was eventually given the cavalry's other great task: to screen and protect the German movement and prevent the Russians' taking advantage. Despite exhausted mounts, insufficient water, and reduced fighting strength, the horsemen had to harass and confound the Russians to keep Rennenkampf's army from coordinating with General Alexander Samsonov's to the southwest while the Germans pounced on the latter. Even though Rennenkampf continued to advance slowly but successfully toward Königsberg, the 1st Cavalry Division nevertheless managed repeatedly to put itself in the Russians' way. Most importantly, this one cavalry division succeeded in frustrating the larger objectives of an entire enemy field army.⁷⁰

By stunning contrast, the Russian cavalry, three divisions strong between Gumbinnen and Tannenberg, not only failed to take any effective part in the former battle but also failed to exploit the real advantage of its own larger numbers in the latter. Nevertheless, and not a little unusually, it was the Russian 1st Cavalry Division that remained in constant reconnaissance-contact with the German 1st Cavalry Division's horsemen and accompanying bicycle-mounted infantry, and that over a frontage of thirty-five miles.⁷¹ Thus the battles in East Prussia in August and September 1914 not only served to maintain the apparent viability of the German cavalry. They also had a much greater resonance, for they helped propel General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff to the eventual supreme command of the German armed forces. These victories were ones that, according to one subsequent newspaper account, would for years haunt the children and the grandchildren of the Russian soldiers who'd been so thoroughly defeated there.72

Somewhat later, in November 1914, several German cavalry divisions also played prominent roles in the German Ninth Army's offensive into Russian Poland along a line stretching roughly northeast from Posen to Thorn. Aimed at the juncture between the Russian First Army and its neighbor to the southwest, the Second Army, the German offensive intended to relieve pressure on Austro-Hungarian forces to the south and simultaneously to forestall an impending Russian campaign aimed at the rich industrial region of German Silesia. While the Germans' III Cavalry Corps stood in reserve and helped screen the southern end of Ninth Army's line, the I Cavalry Corps comprising the 6th and 9th Cavalry Divisions had been assigned a more active role. Along with the accompanying 3rd Guards Infantry Division, the I Cavalry Corps had the mission of supporting Ninth Army's broad southeasterly advance through the central lowlands along the left bank of the Vistula toward the Polish city of Lodz.⁷³ Between 11 and 16 November, the Ninth Army, supporting the XXV Reserve Infantry Corps on the right wing of the German advance, covered more than fifty miles (80 km). On 17 November cavalry and reserve infantry were ordered to completely envelop Lodz to the south and west with attacks toward Pabianice. In doing so, they threatened the entire Russian Second Army at Lodz with encirclement and destruction. Unfortunately for the Germans, the Russian Fifth Army executed a heroic march northward to Lodz's relief—two of the Russian infantry corps marched more than seventy miles (112 km) in forty-eight hours—and forced the German cavalry and reserve infantry to fight their way out the way they'd come. While the Russians could claim a victory in saving Second Army from destruction, the Germans could equally claim that Silesia had been preserved from invasion.⁷⁴ In that strategic victory the horsemen of the I Cavalry Corps had played no mean part.

In 1915 the cavalry again played a significant role in a major German victory, this time in Lithuania. Having driven the Russians out of East Prussia at the beginning of the year in the Winter Battle of the Masurian Lakes, German armies joined with their Austro-Hungarian allies to expel Russian forces from almost the whole of Poland in a gargantuan offensive during the spring and summer. These offensives included the dispatching of a strong cavalry force into Courland (Latvia) toward Riga in April and May as part of Army Group Lauenstein (later redesignated the Niemen Army after the river of the same name). The cavalry moved ahead with orders to destroy the Russian railways wherever the horsemen found them. Near the town of Mitau (Jelgava), the German riders captured a baggage train, ammunition wagons, and machine guns. To the south, they also cut the Russian railway on both sides of the junction at Shavli (Siauliai) before falling back temporarily. This ride was followed up in early September with a drive farther to the southeast toward Kaunas (Kovno) and Vilnius (Vilna). Three German cavalry divisions participated in this attack on Lithuania's two largest cities. In this offensive, begun on 8–9 September, the German horsemen supported the advance on Grodno, cut the Russian railway linking Vilnius and Riga at Sventsiany, and raided into the Russian rear areas as far as Molodechno and Smorgon, though the Russians subsequently managed to drive them and other German forces back and thus avoid encirclement. Indeed, the first German troops to enter Vilnius were the troopers of the Death's Head Hussars who reminded one native of the Teutonic Knights of five hundred years before, but without the cross.75

Similarly, in Rumania in 1916 German and German-led cavalry again had a prominent part to play in a significant victory. In the immediate aftermath of Rumania's declaration of war on the Central Powers in August 1916, Rumanian offensives had not only gained the passes of the Transylvanian Alps but also the easternmost portion of the Great Hungarian Plain. Anticipating such a Rumanian invasion, however, the German and Austro-Hungarian governments, supported by a willing Bulgaria, had already planned an invasion of their own. This took the form of a combined counteroffensive starting on 18 September to drive the Rumanians out of eastern Hungary. That successful effort was followed by a push across the Transylvanian Alps into both Moldavia and Wallachia by German and Austro-Hungarian forces, as well as an invasion across the Danube by German and Bulgarian troops into the southern Dobrudja.76 Pushing the Rumanians back through the Vulcan, Red Tower, and Predeal Passes, the flank of the descending left hook of German general Erich von Falkenhayn's Ninth Army was covered in part by a mounted corps. On 10 November the force began its advance down the Jiu Valley and into the lowlands of Wallachia north of the Danube. This region of Rumania constitutes the southwestern extension of the Black Sea or Pontic Steppe, a vast, undulating grassland interspersed with trees and stretching all the way to the Volga.⁷⁷ In many respects, it was ideal horse country for the cavalry, at least as good as the Polish plains around Lodz. By 21 November the advancing German horsemen and infantry had covered the more than sixty-two miles (100 km) to the important rail junction of Craiova, which quickly fell to the Germans. By 26 November, the German horsemen and infantry had advanced another thirty miles (48 km) and captured the one remaining bridge over the Aluta River (at Stoenesti) not destroyed by the retreating Rumanians. They thereby helped open the way for the drive on Bucharest. They also once again demonstrated the cavalry's utility on the Eastern Front in a fashion impossible in France.

In spite of these successes, however, the Rumanian forces in Wallachia southwest of the capital managed to launch a fairly strong counterattack on 1 December against Falkenhayn's forces and those of General (and Death's Head Hussar) August von Mackensen attacking from below the Danube. Here, too, however, the German cavalry made a signal contribution. To help stem this Rumanian counterattack, Falkenhayn dispatched a combined cavalry-infantry force against the right wing of the Rumanians. The horsemen and their accompanying infantry struck the right flank of the Rumanians, broke through, and got into their rear areas. In true cavalry fashion the German horsemen set about sowing confusion and inflicting heavy casualties on the Rumanians. As a consequence, they created a sense of panic that forced a Rumanian withdrawal. Bucharest fell shortly thereafter, and the Rumanians evacuated the whole of the Dobrudja. Those Rumanian forces still holding the lines in the great bend of the Transylvanian Alps were thus threatened with being cut off from the south. As a result, their position became untenable, and they too were forced to retreat into Moldavia. The setting in of heavy winter rains and snow, however, prevented the Germans from pursuing their defeated enemies. The year 1916 ended with the Rumanians holding a rump territory in Moldavia adjoining the Russian frontier along the River Pruth. Nevertheless, the strategic victory to which the cavalry had contributed its fair share was enormous: Rumania was effectively knocked out of the war; German and Austro-Hungarian forces were released for service on other fronts; and, as in another war one-quarter century later, Germany now enjoyed unfettered access to large reserves of foodstuffs, oil, and other war matériel, including much needed horseflesh.

The enormous haul of goods resulting from the eastern victories of the years 1915 to 1917 was only reinforced in early 1918 by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Central Powers (read, Germany) imposed on a Russia already undone by revolution. Whatever else it did, the treaty brought to Germany a seemingly immeasurable area of conquest stretching away to the east and southeast. Included was the bulk of the Black Sea Steppe, while from the newly occupied Ukraine alone “Germany…obtained 140,000 horses during the war.”78 Bearing in mind that the Ukraine really only fell under German occupation as of March 1918, and that the armistice in France brought the fighting officially to a halt in November, the Germans' requisition-process was harsh indeed but necessary in any case. General Erich Ludendorff evidently thought so. Remarking on the acquisition of horses in the newly occupied eastern lands and the protection of that resource by German troops, he said pointedly that Germany could not carry on the war on the Western Front without the horses from the Ukraine.⁷⁹ Be that as it may, Germany's armies were nonetheless defeated. However unwillingly, Germany was eventually forced to relinquish all of her conquests and a great deal more once the Allies delivered their own punitive settlement, the Treaty of Versailles.

As regards what was still then called the Great War, one may make several observations about the German cavalry between 1914 and 1918. First of all, by 1914 the German army had more or less taken to heart the elder Moltke's admonition about the cavalry's real mission in an age of increasingly deadly infantry and artillery weapons. That is, the German cavalry had finally come to rely primarily on its own firepower, combined with its inherent mobility, rather than hard-charging speed for battlefield success. At the war's beginning, German horsemen still trained with and carried swords and lances, just as did many of their European counterparts. Nevertheless, they also trained with firearms and used them effectively.80 Consequently, German cavalrymen could realistically be used as infantry, even if they were only lightly armed. This was precisely the role they played on the Western Front. Against British and French troops in Flanders, the horsemen of Marwitz's cavalry corps found themselves in the trenches alongside their infantry brethren for various lengths of time; and, as noted above, it was precisely that service which was publicly recognized by the Bavarian Crown Prince in October 1914. This fact was perhaps indicative of their future role. That is to say, they would not be full-fledged infantry but neither would they be solely blade-wielding riders. In 1915 or 1916, particularly on the Eastern Front, they still looked quite a lot like their forebears of 1870. Nevertheless, they were already anticipating their descendants of the 1920s and 1930s.

This doctrinal and organizational evolution already showed itself in the German cavalry's organization going into the war of 1914. German (and British) cavalry regiments, for example, were routinely attached to infantry divisions and provided close reconnaissance and communications. Independent cavalry divisions could be attached to infantry corps for the same purposes at that level, and entire cavalry corps of two or three divisions each could be assigned to an army's commander in chief for the vital mission of “deep” reconnaissance and operational exploitation of the enemy's flanks and/or lines of communication.⁸¹ One sees the successful execution of the latter types of missions at Lodz in late 1914 or in Rumania in 1916. Of course, the classic screening function of the cavalry did not disappear. Arguably the best example on the German side was the 1st Cavalry Division's efforts in East Prussia between the battles of Gumbinnen and Tannenberg in late summer 1914.

Enhancing these missions' effectiveness was the fact that the German cavalry divisions between 1914 and 1918 were actually combinedarms units of a sort that would be resurrected after 1919. Each division included at least one Jäger battalion, and sometimes as many as three, providing infantry firepower and a crucial maneuver element. A typical cavalry division also included horse-drawn automatic weapons, three horse-artillery batteries of four guns each, pioneers (i.e., combat engineers), a signals detachment, and a truck column.82 Provided that all elements were up to establishment—always a crucial consideration—the German cavalry of the war of 1914–1918 was already a far cry from that of the Franco-Prussian War. While certainly not as strong in manpower or firepower as the infantry divisions of the era, the German cavalry showed that they could hold their own when pressed in an infantry fight and, when able to operate in the open on the Eastern Front, could still make a considerable contribution to victory and more than justify their existence. What, then, of swords and lances? Many small engagements occurred on both fronts, especially in the early days of the war, when edged weapons and couched lances were employed, and not only by German horsemen.⁸³ Nevertheless, the storied steel-on-steel, horse-on-horse collision of cavalry formations was almost entirely a thing of the past. But even in this respect there were exceptions, the most notable of which didn't involve German cavalry at all. In August 1914 more than two thousand Austrian and Russian cavalry fought an old-style cavalry battle near Jaroslawice in the borderlands of Austria's province of eastern Galicia. This was a day-long slugging match whose participants witnessed charges and counter-charges at the gallop, saber-swinging melees, and attacks with couched lances not only against other cavalry but also against machine guns and artillery.⁸⁴ The fighting at Jaroslawice did not notably affect the course of the war on the Eastern Front and was, by its very nature, something of an anachronism. Indeed, it was not noticeably different in spirit from the cavalry battles between the Germans and the French around Mars-la-Tour and Vionville in 1870. Anachronism or not, however, it long remained in the memories of those who fought it and managed to survive.

The German cavalry's fate, like that of German army as a whole, was sealed as the war became a Materialschlacht. Buttressed after April 1917 by the enormous and untapped resources of the United States, Germany's European enemies were assured of material reinforcement that the Central Powers could not hope to match. Not even Russia's coincidental revolutionary collapse that same spring affected this calculation. The only real hope for the Germans was to win the war in the west, the decisive front, before the Americans really began to arrive in overwhelming numbers. The result was Operation Michael, the great German spring offensive of 1918. Unlike the Germans' opening campaign four years before, the so-called Kaiserschlacht was an affair for the infantry and artillery only. The cavalry had no real role at all, even though the cavalry corps' original commander on the Western Front, General Georg von der Marwitz, commanded the Second Army. But even if the German cavalry played no great part, neither did their eventual successor, the armored forces. The Germans had only ten A7V medium tanks assigned to the battle as against the Allies' eight hundred machines. Despite this almost total lack of horse- or track-mounted units, the spring offensive initially made good ground. Between the offensive's start in March and the end of June, German forces at various points from Flanders to the Marne had once again reached many of the battlefields of September 1914. As in that year, Paris was once again taken under fire by modified German naval guns.85 After four years of supreme effort, however, the German army simply no longer possessed the reserves of manpower, material, and morale to seal the victory. By the middle of August 1918, the tide on the Western Front had turned irreversibly in the Allies' favor. By November the German forces were in full but orderly retreat. Ominously for the army's fate, however, the government in Berlin had fallen, and a revolution of sorts was under way. A new, republican Germany would have to make whatever peace it could and save whatever could be saved.

How those matters would turn out, no one could really tell as the German forces marched back across the Rhine that autumn. Still, there were indications in the armistice that any eventual peace treaty between Germany and the Allies might well be harsh.⁸⁶ Regardless of whether and in what strength the cavalry might still be found in the postwar German army, the mounted units returned to their peacetime quarters with their pride largely intact. They had on the whole conducted themselves honorably and well, if not always with distinction. As winter 1918 came on, there seemed no immediate reason for them to assume that the German horse-mounted soldier would disappear, though he might well soon serve in fewer numbers.

The tributes paid to the returning soldiers were many and fulsome. In Germany that was to be expected, despite, or perhaps because of, the quasi-revolutionary turmoil in Berlin and elsewhere. More interesting was an equally laudatory tribute paid to the German cavalry by a man who was not merely one of Germany's enemies but a Marshal of France, Henri-Philippe Pétain. In an order of the day dated 1 January 1919 on the occasion of the disbanding of the Cavalry Corps of the German army, he credited his erstwhile enemy's horsemen with having made a significant contribution to the Germans' striking success on the Western Front in 1914. “Thrown in again and again on our left wing,” he noted, “they successfully lengthened [the front] from the Aisne to the dunes [of the North Sea], during which they anticipated the adversary and permitted the timely deployment of their own infantry.”87 Such an endorsement from such a committed enemy of Germany said much about what Pétain thought of the German cavalry's wartime performance. Regardless of the static situation into which the Western Front eventually devolved, the German mounted formations had continued to bolster the German war effort, particularly on the Eastern Front. Cavalry traditionalists might well bemoan the absence of regular opportunities for the massed charge by war's end; and they did. Nevertheless, when undertaking missions within the cavalry's capabilities, German horsemen (and sometimes British and French, frequently Austrian and Russian) demonstrated that they could still be effective. They showed as much before and after Gumbinnen, in the invasion of Courland, in the campaign against Kaunas and Vilnius, and in the conquest of Rumania. In all of these operations they showed much of the same skill and tenacity as their ancestors of 1870–1871. Notwithstanding the technological changes on the battlefields of World War I, the assumption, albeit fading fast, lingered among some officers that the massed charge with cold steel might just still be possible and necessary under certain circumstances, however unlikely those circumstances might be. Such an attitude did not constitute mere intellectual blindness and doctrinal pig-headedness. Survival in combat, any combat, could sometimes be ascribed to an act of faith. For infantrymen and artillerists, or, later, airmen and tankers, believing that they would not only survive but win sometimes produced precisely that result in the face of apparently certain destruction. It was no different for cavalrymen. Particularly when, as in 1918, the technology did not yet exist that could definitively relegate them to the status of museum-pieces, the horsemen could still envision for themselves a place on future battlefields. Ultimately, the key to the German cavalry's—to any cavalry's—survival going into the post-1918 period lay in such an act of faith. It lay, in other words, “in combining the mental attitude which would encourage horsemen to take advantage of fleeting opportunities with the recognition that fire kills.”88