The practice of putting infantry on horses to increase their mobility is an ancient one. Medieval English archers were sometimes mounted to enable them to keep pace with men-at-arms, and dragoons, who eventually became cavalry proper, were initially foot soldiers mounted on cheap nags.
During the 19th century the improvement of firearms led to demands that mounted infantry (or mounted rifles, as they were sometimes called) should replace conventional cavalry in whole or in part. The case for mounted infantry was strong in armies engaged in colonial campaigning where horses were an aid to mobility off the battlefield, but when accurate shooting on it was more valuable than the charge. French and British infantry were often mounted, usually in units formed for particular campaigns, though compagnies montées were regular features of French North Africa. During the British occupation of Burma in the 1880s, for example, a mounted infantry corps was formed from men mounted on local ponies. On the Gordon relief expedition of 1884-5 some British infantry were mounted on camels. In 1888 mounted infantry training schools were set up at Aldershot and the Curragh, creating a nucleus of trained personnel who returned to their battalions able to serve on horseback.
The terrain of South Africa encouraged growing demands for mounted infantry. The 91st Regiment had a mounted company at the Cape in 1796-1802, and in 1875 the 24th Regiment created one. The British made extensive use of mounted infantry during the Second Boer War, with some units drawn from regular infantry. A company of mounted infantry was formed from each battalion and combined with companies from other battalions in the brigade to form a mounted infantry battalion. They were known as MI in contemporary slang and in Rudyard Kipling's poem of the same name:
I wish my mother could see me now, with a fence-post under my arm,
And a knife and spoon in my putties that I found on a Boer farm,
Atop of a sore-backed Argentine, with a thirst that you couldn't buy.
I used to be in the Yorkshires once
(Sussex, Lincolns and Rifles once)
Hampshires, Glosters and Scottish once!
But now I am MI.
Other units were formed for the war as mounted infantry. Thorneycroft's MI was raised from local volunteers, while Canadian and Australian units, often composed of men who could already ride and shoot, had come much further. Erskine Childers, who served with a British volunteer unit, thought that mounted riflemen from the colonies had unique frontier qualities: they ‘seemed by intuition to grasp the possibilities of a union of the rifle with the horse’. Some saw the war as proof, as FM Roberts put it, ‘that all attacks can be carried out far more effectually with the rifle than the sword’. Others, like Gen French, argued that ‘it is only by the employment of “shock tactics” and the superior morale of the highly trained horseman wielding sword and lance, that decisive success can be achieved’. The cavalry lobby eventually triumphed, but there was compromise in the process, and in 1914 British cavalry was far more proficient in dismounted action than its allies or opponents.
The logic of mounted infantry has not disappeared. Even in the second half of the 20th-century infantry have used horses in exceptional circumstances. More commonly, lorries, half-tracks, and APCs have carried the infantryman onto the battlefield, and the MICV can now carry him across it.
Bibliography
- Anglesey, Marquess of, A History of the British Cavalry 1816-1919, vol.
4 (London, 1986). - Childers, Erskine, War and the Arme Blanche (London, 1910)
— Richard Holmes
