This scholarly examination of how English foxhunting and European manège schooling influenced warfare as it was waged and as it evolved over the last three centuries of European conflict is extracted from the author’s forthcoming book, Horsemen, Horsesoldiers, and Grand Illusions by Professor Caramello, for the readers of Foxhunting Life.
Hunting on the Salonica Front by Lionel Edwards
An earlier article titled, “Siegfried Sassoon, Foxhunting, and the Great War” (Foxhunting Life, March 27, 2019), focused on Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and its companion volume Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1932), semi-autobiographical works of Great War fiction. It proposed that Sassoon, in those works, developed a complex and nuanced comparison and contrast between fox hunting in untroubled English “countries” and trench fighting in the “waste land” of the Western Front. It also pointed out that Sassoon did not invent this parallel between fox hunting and warfare, but, on the contrary, was visiting, intentionally and pointedly, a recurring theme in British equestrian and military writing in the 18th and 19th centuries and the first decades of the 20th century: fox-hunting as ideal preparation for cavalry service and leadership. The following article briefly sketches some aspects of that theme.
Manège to Field
Beginning with Federico Grisone’s Gli ordini di cavalcare (The Rules of Riding), the foundation of modern European horsemanship published in 1550, early masters promoted the arts of dressage and equitation as being either primarily or collaterally applicable to warfare. Over the next two centuries, the arts of dressage and equitation evolved, first, into highly refined haute école training as artistic expression with increasingly less direct military application and, next, into the counter-move of a still rigorous but more practical and less artistic form of manège, or school, training developed specifically for use in mounted warfare. Concurrently, mounted warfare evolved from its chivalric phase of heavily armored horsemen and horses either fighting one another in mounted duels or trampling infantry, into heavy cavalry, who, riding in close formation, en masse and en muraille (as a wall), charged infantry, now better trained and armed, in set battles; light cavalry, who skirmished in battles, pursued retreating enemy, and performed detached duties of scouting the enemy’s troops and protecting their own; and dragoons, at this stage mounted foot soldiers who fought unmounted and used horses simply for rapid transit.
In the mid 18th century, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, his brilliant general, brought light cavalry to a sophisticated level of mobile tactics. Evolving through the late-18th century, cavalry, especially light cavalry, became dominant in the Napoleonic Wars of 1796-1815 and remained a dominant battlefield force until faster and more accurate infantry fire power in the mid-19th century reduced the opportunity for success in charges or other battlefield maneuvers. Heavy cavalry had given way to light cavalry, and light cavalry now blended with a newer type of dragoons, who had evolved concurrently into hybrid “horse and foot soldiers,” as Captain Lewis Edward Nolan wrote in 1853. At the end of the 19th century, as Arthur Wagner would write in 1895, “the dragoon is essentially the cavalryman of the present day” (Wagner, 57). This evolution from heavy cavalry charging in formation on battlefields to light cavalry and dragoons performing multiple duties in battle and in detached and highly mobile patrols far afield and over varied terrain affected the training of military horse and rider: the former role rewarded manège training, the latter cross-country competence.
Fox hunting entered this history from two directions and for converse reasons. In the late 18th century, when cavalry maneuvers still depended on precise movements of large bodies of horsemen in closed ranks, British writers saw a problem: “I cannot help observing,” William Tyndale wrote in A Treatise on Military Equitation (1897), “how few and trifling the instructions are, which most regiments give a young officer, who though he may have led the field with fox-hounds, and rode over turnpike gates in his native country, is in all probability totally unacquainted with the method of riding which is necessarily adopted in regiments of cavalry, and which must be adopted by every individual, for one bad rider will cause such confusion as totally to prevent a squadron from moving with regularity and precision (Tyndale, 60).[1] Tyndale was following the Earl of Pembroke closely in understanding that the demands of military riding were at odds with the national style of cross-country hunt riding. The solution lay in manège training, but since England (with exceptions) lacked a robust manège tradition, its cavalry lacked trainers in the discipline.[2]
In the ensuing Napoleonic Wars, as a result, British cavalry favored charging everything at a gallop, much to the chagrin of Wellington, though he was himself a fox hunter.[3] As Louis DiMarco puts it, “British cavalry were notorious for losing control while charging. Even when they were successful . . . they took severe casualties because their commanders could not control them” (DiMarco, 204). Even cavalrymen from the period could agree on this point, though differing in their assessment of it. French Field-Marshall Excelmann, for example, quipped, “The British cavalry officer seems to be impressed with the conviction that he can dash and ride over everything; as if the art of war were precisely the same as that of fox-hunting” (quoted in Gronow, 110). But his fellow officer, Field-Marshall Augereau, at least in the later words of the British military historian Frederick Maude, ascribed the success of the British in part to their officers, “who, mounted on thoroughbreds, rode close up to their [French] columns and counted every man and gun with impunity, for their cavalry could never catch them, for at the first obstacle, which our [British] men trained in the hunting-field negotiated without difficulty, the French fell off and had to pick themselves up again” (Maude, Cavalry Versus Infantry, 125-26).[4]
Le Comte Antoine d’AureThe French, as that last quotation intimates, had the converse of the British problem. France dominated classical equitation in the 18th century, the pinnacle of its achievement arguably being François Robichon de la Guérinière’s celebrated École de Cavalrie (School of Horsemanship) (1733). The French Revolution of 1789-93, however, dismissed haute école as overly refined, aristocratic, and anti-republican, and “Napoleon and his wars accelerated [its] decline” (Poscharnigg, 95). French military horsemanship based on the classical equitation of de la Guérinière and confrères, as a result, was left to reform itself in the 19th century: classical manège training prepared horses and soldiers inadequately for modern cavalry tactics. At mid-century, the distinguished horsemen François Baucher and Le Comte Antoine d’Aure advanced dueling systems for reforming military dressage and equitation. Their rivalry not only determined the future direction of cavalry training at the École de Cavalerie at Saumur, but also introduced classical French manège training to English cross-country riding, leading eventually to their union.[5]
Baucher, a celebrated circus rider, sought to achieve a high degree of collection in his horses, and departed from the classical French tradition in his premise that position and collection precede impulsion rather than follow from it.[6] His detractors accused him of putting horses behind the bit, retarding their forward movement, and ruining them for anything but circus riding—and certainly for outdoor riding. D’Aure, by contrast, believed that classical manège schooling would prepare horses with the suppleness, lightness, and obedience needed for outdoor riding, but also that, alone, it trained neither horses nor riders for outdoor riding adequate to military purposes. He devised a system, then, that sought to combine classical French manège training with English cross-country riding as used for fox hunting and steeple chasing. D’Aure’s system reflected a mid-century French civilian vogue for breeding and training English thoroughbreds and riding them in the English style, though his system was a matter of military practicality rather than of fashion. In a word, Pembroke had brought French manège equitation to British military fox hunters, and d’Aure brought English fox hunting equitation to French cavalrymen.
The Hunting Breed of Man
Like the French military adoption of cross-country riding, the English adoption of manège equitation waited until mid 19th century. Cavalry tactics, however, had changed from the beginning to the middle of the century. British military writers, who had disparaged cross-country hunt riding as unfit for cavalry in the Napoleonic period, now saw a parallel between evolving cavalry tactics and hunting and began to argue for hunting as fit preparation for cavalry; and, like the French, they would reach consensus in the late 19th century on the principle of combining manège and cross-country training. From the start, though, their advocacy for fox hunting as preparation for cavalry had two rationales. At one level, writers emphasized the skills that hunting conferred on the cavalryman—the horsemanship skills of assessing, understanding, handling, and riding horses competently and confidently, and the field skills of “reading” terrain instinctively and accurately and “riding” terrain (as Sassoon says of his Huntsman) “as if it wasn’t there.” At a second level, they emphasized the character and mettle that hunting fostered and that cavalrymen, particularly cavalry officers, needed to possess and display.
With respect to skills, Captain Nolan, one of the earliest British advocates of manège riding and fox hunting as complementary preparations for cavalry, wrote in Cavalry: Its History and Tactics (1853) that British cavalry officers, “accustomed to ride cross country,” are not stopped by fences. By contrast, “All foreign cavalry practice at the leaping bar, yet their officers, when they meet with a wall or a gate, are pounded” (Nolan, 36).[7] A half-century later, between the Boer and Great Wars, Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, introducing Erskine Childers’ War and the Arme Blanche (1911), proposed that cavalry officers “should possess all the qualities of good sportsmen. They should be fine riders, careful horse-masters, have a keen eye for country, and be thoroughly well educated” (Childers, xiv). Childers himself asks “Was not our own possession of sporting and hunting aptitudes . . . our very salvation in South Africa?” and answers, “Of course it was” (Childers, 290). And Major-General M. F. Rimington, soon after, argued that “riding to hounds over difficult country [gives] an officer an eye for country, and a decision in crossing it, unobtainable in any other fashion” (Rimington, 197).
Panels from E.H. Alderson’s “Pink and Scarlet,” both of which urge the viewer to “Always play the game.” Dialog, left panel: “Shan’t find here?” “No, they shot it 2 days ago.” Dialog, right panel: “I say, old chap. Hadn’t we better have a sentry or two out?” “Sentry!—my dear boy, a chap at headquarters told me last night that there were none of the enemy within fifty miles.” If one were to look carefully to the right on each panel, it would be clear that both groups may have the skills, but neither had properly developed their characters.
Skills, however, were only the half of it. Character was the other half, and the rationale of fox hunting as builder of character itself had two dimensions. One, the idea had wide application that reached its full expression in E.A.H. Alderson’s Pink and Scarlet, or Hunting as a School for Soldiering (1900). As the title indicates, Alderson praised hunting not only as conferring skills and building character in cavalrymen, but also as preparing men for “soldiering” in all arms.[8] “The hunting man is already a more than half-made soldier,” Alderson contends, so addressing his other half, in effect, with the “things that hunting cannot help teaching, and the many, many things it may be made to teach if taken in the right way” (Alderson, vii, 13), should complete the job of making him whole. Two, the idea had narrower application that aligned with the concept of “cavalry spirit.” Originally derived from “the moral and physical superiority of the horseman . . . crashing through formed bodies of infantry by sheer momentum and weight of numbers” (Brereton, 68), “cavalry spirit” had evolved to mean, more broadly, an inherent and unique boldness—often called “pluck” or “dash”—attributed to cavalrymen as a fundamental character trait. Fox hunting fit the concept perfectly.
Continental adversaries may have taken exception, but British cavalry officers and writers from the Napoleonic Wars up to and following the Great War saw fox hunting as edifying. Even more important than improving skill, in the minds of these authors, hunting built character, imparted mettle, or, as Sassoon’s narrator put it, “manliness” revealed in “boldness.” Since these officers and writers were writing explicitly to and for other officers, moreover, they used the hunt and its imparted mettle to define the “type” who could meet the demands of cavalry leadership and to identify those who would qualify for it. Rimington, the most zealous of the pre-Great War British advocates for hunting, and “generally considered the best horse-master in the British Army of his time” (Jones, 198), referred in Our Cavalry (1912) to “that best of schools [for cavalry officers] the hunting-field” (Rimington, 19). He also identified his ideal officer type as “a man who combines an addiction to, and some knowledge of, field sports, involving horses, with sufficient intelligence to pass into Sandhurst . . . the hunting breed of man, because he goes into danger for the love of it” (154, 159).
Rimington’s elaboration warrants quoting at length. Under “Training of the Cavalry Officer,” he writes, “The addiction to manly, and especially to rough and dangerous, field sports must be regarded as an immense asset towards efficiency for war. Time spent in the chase, ‘the image of war,’ must not be regarded as so many hours less given to his employer by the cavalry officer” (158-59). He goes on to prescribe “that the young officer should be for choice country bred, fond of sport, a ‘trier,’ and must have some private income” (165), and to affirm that “it is a duty to his country for a cavalry officer in peace-time to take such exercise in the available sports of hunting, pig-sticking, polo, big-game shooting, and other exercises as will keep muscles and lungs in condition and training, and his nerves in order. The cavalry officer . . . who seldom gets on a horse in peace-time, will not suddenly change his nature in war; on the contrary, the enforced exercise will knock him up” (168). Rimington, moreover, extends the value of the hunt as training tool to even lower ranks: “Often arrangements have been made to take some N.C.O.’s out with a regimental pack of hounds, local pack, or on a drag-hunt or paper-chase” (207).
British nationalism—if not, indeed, exceptionalism—inflected this theme from the start. Nolan contended not only that “the Englishman beats the world in a ride after the hounds and a run across country . . . in this manly sport—the best of all to form bold riders,” but also that English women “would beat, on the field, all [the Continent’s] mathematical riding-masters, and take gates, fences, and ditches, from which foreign officers of hussars or their dragoon rough-riders would turn aside in dismay to look out for a break or gap” (Nolan, 61). Sir Evelyn Wood, likewise, boasted in 1897 that “we have one incalculable advantage which no other nation possesses, in that our officers are able to hunt” (Wood). At the same time, however, while G. T. Denison declared in Modern Cavalry (1868) that English hunting was more likely than American racing “to produce the best horseman” (96), Theodore Roosevelt, in “Riding to Hounds on Long Island” (1886), transposed the sentiment from British nationalism to American sectionalism: “If in 1860 riding to hounds had been at the North, as it was at the South, a national pastime, it would not have taken us until well on towards the middle of the war before we were able to develop a cavalry capable of withstanding the shock of the Southern horsemen” (341).[9]
Even after the Great War, the basic idea of fox hunting as cavalry preparation retained purchase.[10] In Modern Cavalry (1922), the American Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson advised, “Effort should be made to secure as reserve officers that class of young men whose interests are allied with cavalry interests—horse breeders, polo players, gentlemen jockeys, and horse enthusiasts generally” (Wheeler-Nicholson, 12), because “the man who rides into danger for the love of it, the man who keenly enjoys cross-country going and polo, contains in his disposition the germs of success as a cavalry officer” (49). In addition to disposition, moreover, requisite proficiencies in a cavalry officer include not only “as a base, the love of the horse and all that pertains to him . . . no officer who is not an enthusiastic horseman has any place in the cavalry,” but also skill in “mounted sports.” Of these, “Polo is the finest sport for the cavalry officer [but] another is almost equally valuable. That is fox-hunting” (49-50). Well into the 1930s, finally, as cavalry was replacing horses with armored vehicles, “the ‘cavalry lobby’ continued . . . to protest the mechanization of the arm, claiming that only the horse . . . could foster those qualities of boldness and initiative that were as essential to a cavalryman in the field as to a foxhunter across country” (Brereton, 143).
Wheeler-Nicholson notwithstanding, the Great War had rendered horse cavalry on a large scale, and for most practical purposes, a military anachronism; and, among other devastations, the War had decimated British fox hunting.[11] The modern horrors of the war, moreover, effectively precluded literal arguments for fox hunting as military preparation, but they did not, in the end, altogether undermine figurative uses of the parallel. While Great War poets and memoirists like Sassoon and Robert Graves treated the theme with irony, a plethora of books reaffirmed the fox hunt as iconic of a disappearing rural British culture and the traditional values instilled in its huntsmen and fields: respect for tradition in culture and for boldness in character. Whether ironic or elegiac, in the end, these books at once eulogized a lost reality and revived it as a powerful metaphor.
Notes
[1] Over a century later, Frederick Maude echoed this point in Cavalry: Its Past and Future (1903): “Hence, as all our leading cavalry soldiers copied the best models in the shires, we adopted the head freely carried, which alone renders it possible for our men to get about across country, but which lost sight of the need of control without which the action of cavalry in closed ranks is practically impossible, and by degrees an entirely false standard of military horsemanship was set up” (234).
[2] Henry Herbert, tenth Earl of Pembroke, wrote the influential treatise, Military Equitation; or, A Method of Breaking Horses, and Teaching Soldiers to Ride (1761, 1762, 1778 and 1793). Vladimir Littauer praised Pembroke as “a follower of the French school [of dressage who] was practical enough to suggest its considerable simplification for the army,” who successfully repurposed manège training for the military work at hand (Littauer, 90-91). Tyndale Pembroke’s Military Equitation as “the best work of the kind in our language,” one “beyond the comprehension of those whom it is my wish to teach and reform” (Tyndale, 1-2). Thus, as Pembroke simplified classical French dressage masters, so Tyndale simplified Pembroke.
[3] As Brereton observes of British chargers in the Napoleonic wars, “Not only did foxhunting breed a thrusting, hard-riding cavalryman, undaunted by any obstacle, but it also saw the evolution of that ideal type of cavalry horse, the hunter” (Brereton, 76).
[4] Charles Chenevix-Trench, for example, writes, “Throughout the years with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, British Army equitation adhered to no common doctrine, indeed to no doctrine at all, but was influenced mainly be the fox-hunting propensities of almost every cavalry officer, rarely sullied by prudence, discipline, or the most elementary acquaintance with tactics” (Chenevix-Trench, 159). Littauer takes a cooler and more clear-headed tack, noting that England, following the Napoleonic Wars, was a naval power that did not maintain a standing army, “so foxhunting and racing flourished rather than military reviews . . . The great majority of English 19th century riders then were civilian rather than military, and riding continued to be for sport rather than for parade or the manège” (Littauer, 137-38).
[5] Alexis-François L’Hotte, James Fillis, François Faverot de Kerbrech, and Étienne Beudant would effect that union in subsequent decades.
[6] Baucher developed and demonstrated his theory and practice of haute école in the circus—primarily Laurent Franconi’s Cirque Olympique in the Champs-Elysées. Though the circus was a respectable venue for dressage and equitation at that time, it was not a military venue
[7] A year before Cavalry, Nolan published The Training of Cavalry Remount Horses, A New System (1852), a translation, redaction, and adaptation of Baucher’s thinking and writing into an applied system for British cavalry informed by Nolan’s experiences training cavalry remounts on Baucharist principles
[8] A second edition of Alderson’s Pink and Scarlet, published in 1913, included twelve mounted color plates by Lionel Edwards, arranged in pairs, across six two-page spreads, with a hunting scene on the left, a corresponding military scene on the right, and a legend spanning the spread.
[9] Roosevelt’s sentiment is still commonly shared. Brereton writes: “On the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, and for the next couple of years, the Confederates enjoyed the advantage in horseflesh and cavalrymen. The Southern planters and farmers were born horsemen, riding to hounds like their English equivalents, at home with sporting gun and rifle, proud of their own studs, never walking when they could ride” (Brereton, 103). Introducing a recent edition of Nolan’s Cavalry: Its History and Tactics, Jon Coulston concurs: “The American Civil War famously commenced with an unequal dichotomy in opposed mounted forces, as the aristocratic, rural, horse-riding and hunting cultural traditions of the south out-performed the much-parodied urbanites of the northern armies” (Nolan, xxi).
[10] Not everyone shared this view of the value of fox hunting. Invoking the displacement of the cavalry horse by the automobile and aeroplane, for example, H. G. Wells lampooned British military nostalgia in War and the Future (1917): “This is something to break the hearts of . . . old-fashioned British army people. The hunt across the English countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal . . . all these things depend ultimately upon the proposition that the ‘breed of horses’ is of vital importance to the military strength of Great Britain” (154).
[11] The West Somerset Freepress, for example, reported on October 10, 1914, that “many of the smaller hunts would not be hunting during the winter of 1914-15 as they had lost their masters, huntsmen and whippers-in to military service” (quoted in Winton, 372-73). The Manchester Courier similarly reported in 1915: “The Masters have gone to war; the Hunting Men, the officers, have gone to war; the Hunt servants and stablemen have gone to the war, and above all the horses have gone . . .” (quoted in Dawson, 187-88).
WORKS CITED
Alderson, E.A.H. Pink and Scarlet, or Hunting as a School for Soldiering. London: William Heinemann, 1900.
Baucher, François. A Method of Horsemanship, Founded upon New Principles. Second American Edition. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852.
Brereton, J.M. The Horse in War. London: David & Charles, 1976.
Chenevix-Trench, Charles. A History of Horsemanship. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970.
Childers, Erskine. War and the Arme Blanche. London: Edward Arnold, 1910.
D’Aure, Le Comte. Cours d’équitation. 1853. Paris: Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot, 1906.
Dawson, Anthony. Real War Horses: The Experiences of the British Cavalry 1814-1914. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2016.
De la Guérinière, François Robishon. School of Horsemanship. Trans. Tracy Boucher. 1733. London: J.A. Allen, 1994.
Denison, George T. Modern Cavalry: Its Organisation, Armament, and Employment in War. London: Thomas Bosworth, 1868.
DiMarco, Louis A. War Horse: A History of the Military Horse and Rider. Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2008.
Gronow, Rees Howell. Reminiscences of Captain Gronow. London: Smith, Elder and Co. 1862.
Herbert, Henry. Tenth Earl of Pembroke. Military Equitation, or, A Method of Breaking Horses, and Teaching Soldiers to Ride. 1761. 4th ed. London and Salisbury: Printed for G. and T. Wilkie and E. and J. Easton., 1793.
Jones, Spencer. From Boer War to Great War: Tactical Reform of the British Army, 1902-1914. Norman, OK: U Oklahoma P, 2013.
Littauer, Vladimir. The Development of Modern Riding: The Story of Formal Riding from Renaissance Times to the Present. Rpt. Horseman’s Progress, 1962. New York, Macmillan, 1991.
Maude, F.N. Cavalry Versus Infantry. Kansas City, MO: Hudson-Kimberly, 1896.
Maude, F.N. Cavalry: Its Past and Future. London: William Clowes & Sons, 1903.
Nolan, Lewis Edward. Cavalry: Its History and Tactics. Rpt. 1853. Yardley, PA: Westholme 2007).
Poscharnigg, Werner. Austrian Art of Riding: Five Centuries. Franktown, VA: Xenophon, 2015.
Rimington, M. F. Our Cavalry. London: Macmillan, 1912.
Roosevelt, Theodore. “Riding to Hounds on Long Island” in “Cross-Country Riding in America.” Century Illustrated Magazine. XXXII, 3. July 1886.
Tyndale, W. A Treatise on Military Equitation. London: Printed for the Author by T. Egerton, 1797.
Wagner, Arthur L. Organization and Tactics. 1894. 5th ed. Kansas City, MO: Hudson-Kimberly, c. 1905).
Wells, H.G. War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at War. London: Cassell, 1917.
Wheeler-Nicholson, Malcolm. Modern Cavalry: Studies on Its Rôle in the Warfare of To-Day with Notes on Training for War Service. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
Winton, Graham. “Theirs Not to Reason Why”: Horsing the British Army 1875-1925. Solihull, West Midlands: Helion, 2013.
Wood, Sir Evelyn. Achievements of Cavalry. London: George Bell & Sons, 1897.
Posted June 2, 2020
Charles A. Caramello is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland and a John H. Daniels Fellow at the National Sporting Library and Museum.