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01:00The
01:26household cavalry on parade in Hyde Park, London.
01:29Their duties here today are purely ceremonial, as cavalry have long since been driven from
01:34the battlefield.
01:35Today's weapons have seen to that.
01:37But they are a glittering reminder of the days when cavalry was the premier arm of war,
01:42and horse soldiers the shock troops of many a victorious army.
01:47Men of course have fought on horses almost as long as there have been soldiers.
01:51Indeed, there have been several epochs in the history of warfare when the mounted warrior
01:56dominated all the other arms.
01:58And even today, in an age of howitzers and atomic bombs, there are old soldiers who can
02:03still remember the exhilarating experience of charging an enemy with sabres drawn.
02:11The strength of the charge is in the straightness of the line.
02:16Then once the alarm is sounded, draw swords.
02:20It was like riding into hell.
02:22The guns boomed, batteries smoked everywhere.
02:27As a matter of fact, half the time he was blinded by the smoke of the guns, and especially
02:34not under the shield, it exploded in the guns themselves, it was up amongst them.
02:40Harry Williams, aged 102, recalls a cavalry charge from the Great War.
02:45Well, by the time I got there, the whole mass cavalry was in line.
02:53It so coincided that the alarm had already been sounded by the trumpeters.
02:59My mount, of course, being a cavalry charger, become imbued with the excitement of the time
03:06and the electric atmosphere.
03:10He joined in.
03:12And at that very moment, the charge sounded.
03:17Do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do, do-do, they keep on until the orcs are over.
03:27Anyhow, right to that line, they broke.
03:30Germans, Bulgarians, Turks, no matter who they were, they were slashed, sundered, slaughtered.
03:38It was carnage, absolutely.
03:43Sword, slash, slash, slash, slash, see?
03:49And then somebody appears out of that, over the orc's head, dig, dig in, out again, and
03:55no one appears out, and you simply have to twist your wrist and slice at him, and then
04:02that side.
04:04And of course, everybody's doing the same thing, you see?
04:08So you've got to be careful you're not wounding your next-door neighbour.
04:13If the days of cavalry are past, it is not the irretrievable past.
04:17Not long after Harry William's charge, the mounted warrior was to have a last hurrah
04:22on the plains of Eastern Europe.
04:24The Soviet Red Cavalry, 16,000 strong, rode off to battle against Poland.
04:33Outside Warsaw, the Polish cavalry defeated the Russian invader.
04:37The Polish riders returned homeward as national heroes.
04:44It was in the same heroic spirit that they rode out in 1939, 40 regiments strong, against
04:50the German blitzkrieg.
04:52Legend has it one regiment was actually to break its lances on the armour of German tanks.
04:57The rest were strewn like chaff in the whirlwind of Hitler's advance.
05:04The Germans themselves in World War II were surprisingly dependent on horses.
05:09Nearly three million horses were rounded up to carry supplies for the advancing armies.
05:14Throughout the war, most of Germany's supporting transport was horse-drawn.
05:21But the Wehrmacht also had some cavalry.
05:27Their 1st Cavalry Division took part in the German attack on France in 1940,
05:32protecting flanks and carrying out reconnaissance duties.
05:35And when Paris was occupied, German cavalry took their place in the victory parade
05:41before bowing out of history.
05:45Right, right, right.
05:50Right, left, left.
05:52Right, left, left.
05:54Right, left, left.
05:56Right, left, left.
05:58Right, left, left.
06:00Right, left, left.
06:02Right, left, left.
06:04The Wehrmacht is among the last few military units in the world to keep alive the relationship,
06:083,000 years old, between the warrior and his horse.
06:12Horses walking on the ride. Keep the horses walking on.
06:15All you simply do is squeeze lightly on the horse's side.
06:19Today's recruits, born into a world of machines from which the horse has almost vanished,
06:24must be taught horsemanship from scratch. Few even know how to ride.
06:28Come on, catch us next week.
06:31If you ever find yourself off the ground, looking for your horse,
06:34just make a noise like a carrot, and he'll come running back to you.
06:38The traditions of this riding school and its riding masters
06:41go back over 300 years to the lifeguards of Charles II.
06:50But the tradition of the warhorse reaches much deeper into history, perhaps to 2,000 BC.
07:01Somewhere on the great sea of grass that fills Central Asia,
07:04the ancestors of one of these nomads first caught and tamed the ancestor of one of these horses.
07:10Too puny to be ridden, the early warhorses were harnessed to battle chariots.
07:16But about 900 BC, breeding produced a riding horse and the cavalry revolution.
07:22Over the next 3,000 years, the cavalry peoples from Central Asia,
07:26Scythians, Huns, Turks, Mongols, terrorized and sometimes conquered the rich lands on their borders.
07:32Greatest of all nomad conquerors was to be Genghis Khan,
07:35whose empire in the 13th century stretched from China to Russia.
07:44Among the first exponents of the cavalry revolution were the Parthians,
07:48a fierce tribe in Persia, constantly at war with the Roman Empire.
07:52Expert riders, their weapon was the bow and their archery deadly.
08:01Their special technique was to seem to break off the action,
08:04when in fact they would ride away to collect more arrows.
08:11They would then return to the attack, catching the enemy unawares.
08:14This trick has given us the expression of Parthian shot.
08:22Fiercest of all the horse tribes were the Huns.
08:25Carrying their homes wherever they went, they rampaged through Europe
08:28and under their leader Attila, threatened Rome itself in the 5th century AD.
08:33Jerome described them thus,
08:35swarms of Huns filled the whole earth with slaughter and panic
08:38as they flitted hither and thither on their swift horses.
08:42Unlike earlier horse soldiers, they were prepared to fight at close quarters in battle.
08:51Their ferocity and the destruction they wrought
09:01struck terror into the hearts of more settled people.
09:14To combat the horsemanship and tactics of these horse masters,
09:17the Romans gradually adopted the heavy armored style of cavalry.
09:21Called cataphracts, these armored riders could not save Rome itself.
09:28But for a thousand years, succeeded in defending the eastern empire
09:32against the assaults of the steppe peoples.
09:38Their breed of horse flesh and their style of heavy equipment
09:41would ultimately produce the warrior we call the knight.
09:50The wild steppe pony and his rider blended by instinct.
09:58The western warhorse needed to be trained
10:00and breaking into a warrior's will demanded special skills.
10:04They are still taught today.
10:08Fighting on horseback is enormously difficult.
10:11The Mongols, of course, and the other warrior nations of the east
10:14grew up with horses and lived their lives on horseback.
10:17In Europe, it was different.
10:19Men had to be trained to become horse soldiers.
10:22Well, it's a tradition that still continued here at Saumur,
10:25the home of France's cavalry.
10:27It was during the great French empire of Charlemagne
10:30that the Franks would have become Europe's most expert horsemen.
10:33They relied on all the devices that had been developed over the years
10:37to turn a horse into a platform for a soldier.
10:40The bit, the bridle, the rein, the saddle, the stirrup, and the spur.
10:58The medieval knight was the final flowering of Europe's mounted armoured warrior.
11:03By the 15th century, his simple chain mail was a thing of the past.
11:07Armourers had learnt to encase a man from head to foot in glittering plate
11:11and parts of his horse as well.
11:13His weight could approach 250 pounds
11:16and his armour was fashioned to show a glancing surface to any blow or arrow strike.
11:26For counter-stroke, he carried a sword.
11:29All this equipment was exorbitantly expensive,
11:32so inevitably the knight came from the rich and ruling class.
11:37The crushing power of his weapons and armour
11:40allowed the knight to dominate the battlefield for nearly 500 years.
11:46With his body braced in stirrups and supported in a rigid saddle,
11:49he was ready for battle.
11:59Throughout that period, not much changed in the style of battle.
12:03The Battle of Soissons in 923, of Bouvier 300 years later,
12:07and even of Agincourt 200 years after that, must have looked much the same.
12:19Tactics and manoeuvres played much less part than individual courage and skill at arms.
12:26Often the knight would fight dismounted,
12:29but when battle was joined on horseback, the spectacle was sensational.
12:43The knight Jean de Beville wrote of such a contest,
12:46neither in eating, drinking, nor sleeping,
12:48do I feel what I feel when I hear the shout at them from both sides
12:52and the neighing of riderless horses,
12:55or the call, help, help,
12:57or when I see great and small fall on the grass, in the ditches,
13:00or when I espy dead men who still have pen and glances in their ribs.
13:16But real combat was too infrequent and usually too chaotic for the medieval knightly class
13:21to show to the full the prowess it wanted to display to the world.
13:25Its code, which we call chivalry,
13:27emphasised the values of courage, fair play, and skill at arms.
13:31The knights found that these virtues were shown to best advantage in mock combat.
13:36The joust, to which only gentlemen were admitted,
13:40was also an excellent means of keeping the rough soldier of fortune at arm's length.
13:55By the 14th century,
14:23when the tournament had become the most popular upper-class social event in Western Europe,
14:27its purpose as a training for combat, single or collective, had almost been eclipsed.
14:39But chivalry was also imbued with a powerful religious force.
14:43The knight was not only expected to fight well, but to do good.
14:47Hence knighthood's enormous enthusiasm for the crusades.
14:51The knights of Western Europe met their greatest challenge here in the Holy Land,
14:55which they were sworn to recover for Christendom.
14:57This is Khalat Namrud, a typical castle of the crusaders.
15:01And from here and similar castles, time and again they sallied forth,
15:05testing the heavy cavalry principle which they represented
15:08against the tradition of light cavalry, which was the hallmark of the Muslims.
15:14When Muslim met Christian cavalry on equal terms,
15:17the iron people, as the Turks called the crusaders, usually prevailed.
15:21More often, the light horsemen of Islam preferred to make the Christian
15:24warriors exhaust themselves in fruitless charges before closing in for the kill.
15:47So expert did the Muslims become in cavalry tactics, that in the battle of Ain Jalut in 1260,
15:57they met and defeated the hitherto invincible horde of the Mongols
16:01on the plateau above the Sea of Galen.
16:11The Mongol pony, peerless on his own ground,
16:14was no match for a war horse on the European grasslands.
16:18Here the abundant grazing and winter hay made a mount that would always outrun a steppe scavenger.
16:25Fine horse flesh is still the raw material of good cavalry,
16:29and today special care is taken to choose horses for the British army.
16:37And this is a black wheeler.
16:42How is he meant to be?
16:43I think he's five.
16:46Yes, I'll agree with that.
16:51Just over 51.
16:53Oh, fine, fine, yeah.
16:55I think he'll muscle up.
16:56Yeah, yeah.
16:58Can we just see him trot, please?
17:10He's all right, and I think he'll go a bit.
17:12So if he won't do the regiment as an officer's charger,
17:17the king's troop will probably like him.
17:18We're galloping on, don't you think, no?
17:21He'd do anywhere, he'd do anywhere.
17:22He'd do anywhere, yes, yeah.
17:24There is more to a cavalry horse than strong bone and firm muscle.
17:28Like his rider, he must learn to move to the walk, march, trot and canter as ordered.
17:33His training begins like that of a medieval war horse on the lunging rein.
17:36But the cavalry horse has had to face something never experienced by the war horse.
18:06The cavalry charger also had to learn to endure the appalling uproar of a gunpowder battle.
18:28Horses are acutely nervous creatures.
18:31Only delicate handling and carefully measured doses of exposure
18:34would accustom them to stand and move steadily amid the din of muskets and cannon shot.
18:40Nowadays, instead of battle, the chargers and drum horses of the household cavalry
18:44must still be taught to withstand the clash of cymbals and thunder of kettle drums.
19:05But gunpowder made not merely a noise, it also made a revolution.
19:13In the 16th century, the musket and the cannon, against which no suit of armour was proof,
19:18made the man who wore it irrelevant.
19:20So after five centuries of dominance, the knight abruptly disappeared
19:24like frost from a sun-warmed battle.
19:26The horsemen who survived, like those of the English Civil War, had to find new roles.
19:32One was to act as a final shock force.
19:34The other was to pursue the enemy to destruction.
19:41Today's two units of British household cavalry, the lifeguards and the blues,
19:46descend respectively from the Royal and Parliamentary regiments of the Civil War.
19:50And the ceremonial uniform they wear, the helmet and breastplate, or cuirass,
19:54are a reminder of the age of armour, already vanishing when these regiments came into being.
20:01Can you tell this kid this?
20:02This is when it hurts.
20:12Light cavalry, the scouts and skirmishers of an army,
20:15Light cavalry, the scouts and skirmishers of an army,
20:20wore no armour at all.
20:22They made up for it by the splendour of their uniforms.
20:25There were never more magnificent soldiers than the huzzahs and lances of those days.
20:46Sword, LG94.
20:48Yeah.
20:52Front cuirass, LG143.
20:55Yeah.
20:57Back cuirass, LG47.
21:00Yeah.
21:02Helmet, LG257.
21:05Yeah.
21:07That is all your kit.
21:09There is £5,000 worth.
21:11You will look after it.
21:12If you lose it, you will pay for it.
21:14If you go over there, then, and do a song for it.
21:26The sword has always been the principal weapon of the cavalrymen.
21:29Traditionally, light cavalrymen have favoured the curved scimitar,
21:33best adapted for cutting and slashing in the confusion of a skirmish.
21:37Heavy cavalry, from the days of the armoured knight onwards,
21:41had preferred the straight, heavy, thrusting sword.
22:11For most cavalry, most of the time, their swords were completely blunt.
22:22So in the melee, it was normal to slash with the blade like a poker,
22:26or even punch with the hilt of the sword like a knuckle buster.
22:31Best of all thrusting weapons for cavalry is the lance.
22:34The light lance came back to Europe with the arrival of irregular cavalry like the Cossacks.
22:39Soon, no self-respecting army was without its lancers.
22:42The long reach of the lance made it particularly suitable for cavalry in pursuit of infantry.
23:08The lance was also used against close-ordered troops.
23:19At Omdurman in 1898, it was a regiment of British lancers
23:23who broke through a solid mass of Sudanese irregular infantry.
23:38So
24:00cavalrymen also experimented with firearms, seeking means to turn a threat into a tool.
24:09The
24:27repeating firearms, revolver and carbine, which became available to horsemen at the time of the
24:31American Civil War, seemed to promise that cavalry might at last deliver its share of firepower.
24:37But the truth was that man and horse made a better target than they ever did a fire team,
24:41and so were doomed to be victim to the skulking soldier.
25:07No weapon made by man outdid in importance to the cavalryman the weapon bred for him by sire
25:24and dam, his own horse. It was the speed and strength of his mount that gave him his attacking
25:30impulse. In a well-timed charge, the horse could be used literally as a unit of shock
25:35to batter down an enemy formation. And it was the shock action of cavalry
25:40which on occasions decided the outcome of a battle.
25:49So
26:03at Breitenfeld in the Thirty Years' War, Gustavus Adolphus used his Swedish cavalry
26:08to deliver the knockout blow. Mulder's British cavalry made the decisive charge at Ramelies,
26:14from a flank position the French had left unprotected. Napoleon's heavy cavalry
26:19won the day at Marengo and Eilam. But such charges turned on luck. Stout-hearted musketeers,
26:26formed in square or protected by artillery, could never be shaken by cavalry.
26:30The French cuirassiers failed time and again against the British squares of Waterloo.
26:47British hussars and lancers were massacred by Russian guns at Balaclava.
26:53Into the valley of death rode the 600.
27:17Magnificent, but not war. That was how a French general described the charge of the Light Brigade.
27:26Certainly throughout the 19th century, the cavalry in most European armies continued
27:30to look magnificent. And occasionally, they still did magnificent things. Here at the
27:36French Cavalry Museum at Saumur are reminders of the time when the dash of the dragoon, the
27:42shock of the charge, and the terror of cold steel were still an important feature of war.
27:47But already the writing was on the wall for the horse soldier. The increasing firepower of 19th
27:53century weapons was the beginning of the end, even if it was to take many years for the full
27:58realization to sink in. However nobly born an officer, however gorgeous his uniform,
28:04no breastplate could keep out the modern bullet.
28:34So
28:49across the Atlantic, in a society which had never known a knightly class and where a horse was just
28:54a means of getting about a vast country, soldiers were to avoid the mistake of thinking that cavalry
28:59could ignore the effects of modern firepower.
29:07First order of the day will be get your horses watered. Let's get them fed and let's get them
29:12groomed. We'll have an officer's call at 6 30. Expect to be on the road at seven o'clock.
29:20Dismiss your troops.
29:22Second platoon. Both sides in the American Civil War raised large forces of cavalry.
29:27By 1865 there were 80,000 horsemen in union services and 40,000 in confederate.
29:51So
29:58neither side committed horsemen to battle in the European style,
30:02but as skirmishers, scouts and above all raiders,
30:06American horsemen put their European counterparts to shame.
30:15At a rare cavalry battle, a complacent European observer recorded
30:19their cavalry fights are miserable affairs. They approach each other with considerable boldness
30:24and until they are within about 40 yards again at the very moment when the sword alone should be
30:30used, they hesitate, halt and commence a desultory fire with carbines and revolvers.
30:48The British learned nothing from the American example. Even in the expanses of their empire,
30:53they continue to train with sword and lance and when in South Africa they encountered enemies
30:59who rode like Mongols and shot superbly from the saddle, the price of their arrogance proved costly.
31:06All the boars were mounted, every boar possible. Certainly there were ponies compared with our
31:13cavalry horses, much smaller. So that's what we call them, boar ponies. Of course by that time
31:22the British army hadn't even got acclimatized, never mind about understanding boar ways and
31:28boar tactics. It was a difficult thing to instill into their mind. My job as a scout
31:36was to see without being seen. So I didn't have to get in the line of fire more than I could
31:43possibly help. I had to live to guide the others. I knew it was going to be a long war
31:50and our government had misjudged the strength of the boars. When British cavalry tried to clear
31:57the field by a close order charge, the boars simply melted away to reappear another day.
32:03Finally British cavalry had to swallow their pride and learn, as we see here in this rare film of
32:081900, the tactics of dismounting and fighting like infantry. It was paying the boars the flattery of
32:14imitation. The price of the boar war was also felt at home, where horses of every type were
32:31requisitioned to meet the enormous demand for riding and driving animals the war effort created.
32:37Many of these arrived in South Africa unfit, were rushed into action without climatization
32:42and were usually ridden by inexperienced horsemen. And I remember one lot that was sent out to carry
32:48these guns away, but they couldn't get them to start. No, they hadn't the faintest idea, you know.
32:55You're going to laugh at this. Somebody had a bright idea. He said, these are bus horses,
33:04tram horses. They won't go until they ring a bell. I said, where are we going to find a cycle bell?
33:14And they scuttled, I don't know where they found them, but they found a box full of
33:20bicycle bells. And these horses were sitting among the bells.
33:30By the end of the war, the British had 80,000 soldiers on horseback.
33:34Another 400,000 horses pulled the army's guns and supply wagons. Many were poor specimens to begin
33:40with, and the long sea voyage, followed by overwork in a strange climate, killed them in droves.
33:47War is always cruel to horses. Two-thirds of those sent to South Africa died in harness.
33:54I think the horses were wonderful. Many a horse dropped dead,
34:00you know, with exertion. They carried on and carried on and carried on until they couldn't anymore.
34:08Neither the pointlessness of traditional cavalry tactics revealed by the war,
34:13nor its cost in horse flesh, shook the prejudices of the European officer class
34:17one jot. It was dominated by cavalrymen, who continued to believe that training with sword
34:23and lance, in style unchanged since the Middle Ages, was all the preparation needed for a war
34:28of machine guns and quick-firing artillery.
34:43So
35:02the future of the cavalry arm itself was unquestioned.
35:06It seems probable that in 1914 there was more cavalry in existence than at any previous time
35:12in history. Britain went to war with 10,000 horses, trained in the new tactics of dismounted action.
35:23But many French regiments were still taught to charge in Waterloo style,
35:28dressed in Napoleonic helmet and cuirass, with lance and sword to the fore.
35:32Still believing in the invincibility of cavalry, the French mobilized 10 divisions.
35:53Their Russian allies had 36 divisions, some formed of Cossacks from the steppes.
36:03The Germans sent 11 divisions to war, and their Austrian allies another 11.
36:16All in all, the competent armies between them deployed over a third of a million horsemen to
36:21the front. And this cavalry was not only a negative quantity on the battlefield,
36:26they were also a positive drain on the war effort.
36:29Horses demand constant attention. Grooming, shooing, feeding, watering, exercising, corsetting.
36:42And this care is labor-intensive, each horse even having to be numbered and registered
36:47as army personnel.
36:51Make much of your horses is a cavalry drill order,
37:00because an unhappy horse may give up the ghost long before it meets the enemy.
37:10Unlike machines, horses not in action still require effort on their behalf.
37:14Horses produce waste in enormous quantities. Mucking out is the least popular of all stable
37:20duties. They also consume food in equivalent bulk. The cavalry ration is 10 pounds of hay or
37:27grass a day, and 10 pounds of grain. By the end of the war, when Britain had shipped five and a
37:32quarter million tons of ammunition to France, it had shipped five and a half of hay and oats.
37:43Generous rations have always been essential if the charger has to carry a trooper,
37:47and the great quantity of kit he and his horse need. Ted Burgess, who was a trooper as late as
37:521940 in the Syrian campaign, remembers. You carry two blankets, one for the horse, one for yourself.
37:58In fact, they were on the horses back under the saddle. You had a rifle and right in the right
38:06hand side of the saddle and a bucket, your sword on your left hand side, and the sword was in a
38:11shoe case attached to the shoe case where you carried two shoes and nails. You had a water
38:18bucket as well, grooming kit, and your mess tent strapped onto your rifle bucket. You had your
38:24great coat and a ground sheet rolled, one on the front arch of the saddle and the other on the back
38:29arch of the saddle. You had two wallets on the front of the saddle which contained your change
38:34of clothing. You had a built-up head rope and a head rope on the horse, and 90 rounds of ammunition
38:41around the horse's neck and 90 rounds around your own neck. So all in all, you had a fair way to carry.
38:53However well fed and watered, horses fall sick as often as humans
38:58and need quite as much doctoring.
39:00All right, drinking all right? Yes.
39:07That's perfectly normal. Just have a quick listen to his bark.
39:13Steady, steady, steady.
39:20Horse casualties in the First World War actually exceeded human.
39:24Of 900,000 horses enrolled by the British Army between 1914 and 1918,
39:29a quarter died. 60,000 were killed on the battlefield by bullet, shell, or gas.
39:39Just as hay and straw took up far more shipping space than shells,
39:43horses took up more train space than men. It took 250 trucks to transport an infantry division,
39:50a thousand to transport a cavalry division,
39:53and the really difficult trick was to coax the horses on board.
39:56And yet, despite all the evidence that trench warfare and the horse did not mix,
40:23the generals of all armies in the First World War
40:26persisted until 1918 in looking for ways to bring their cavalry to grips with the enemy.
40:33They clung to the belief that if only they could blast a gap in the trenches by artillery
40:38and infantry assault, the horsemen would then gallop through to complete the victory.
40:43The British called the hope looking for the G in gap.
40:47But the conditions of trench warfare made it impossible to keep cavalry within striking
40:51distance of the front. A cavalry division occupied nine miles of road,
40:56but had to wait 10 miles from the trenches, out of enemy artillery range.
41:04The tactical mathematics were nonsense. Even at Cambrai in 1917, when the British
41:09tanks at last made a gap, the cavalry failed to reach it before the Germans
41:14stopped the whole.
41:30And however great the difficulties of the approach,
41:33the dangers at the front, when horse flesh met bullet or shell fire, were far greater.
41:43At the very end of the war, however, some cavalry units at last got the chance to
41:57charge the enemy. Fred Horsenail remembers an action at Harbournier.
42:01It was hilly and trenches and whatnot. Eventually we came to the open country
42:08and the squadron leader apparently spotted the Germans jumping out of this train.
42:19We settled down in our saddles and took as much protection behind the horse's neck as possible.
42:26And we got our swords drawn and we went like the clappers.
42:31Well, of course, by the time we got to them, they were more or less in the open ground.
42:39But unfortunately, I received a clout in the back.
42:48I could see this blood coming out of my sleeve and I thought to myself,
42:52well, I've got one. Of course, I started to drop back.
42:59Well, the next thing was, how am I going to get off this ruddy horse?
43:03So, I just let my arm drop down onto my greatcoat that was on the front of the saddle
43:13and released the sword and dropped the sword, and picked this arm up and put it up here.
43:19And of course, after that, I passed out. I don't know what happened.
43:26There were a few places where the cavalry of the First World War found a space of retreat.
43:31The cavalry of the First World War found a space and immunity to manoeuvre with the freedom of the horsemen of old.
43:36Against the Turks in Palestine, the British General Allenby deployed a large mounted force.
43:42Here in the open plains of the Holy Land, familiar in the past to charioteers, steppe nomads,
43:48Saracen light horse and crusading knights,
43:50horse soldiers fought their traditional battles for the last time.
44:01Many of Allenby's desert cavalry were Australians,
44:04trained to fight like the Boers as mounted riflemen.
44:11These Australian light horsemen were countrymen from the bush and the outback,
44:15bred to horses and small arms.
44:21Dismounted, they shot like sharpshooters. In the saddle, they rode like fox hunters.
44:28At Beersheba, on October 31st, 1917, they staged one of the last great cavalry charges of history.
44:35A veteran, Martin Balserini, recalls the day.
44:38Just before we left, and we left it dark, and we'd done 40 miles that night through desert,
44:44then we camped in the daytime, and next night we started off again,
44:49and they'd done another 40 miles, and still without water.
44:54Beersheba was the only place where there was water.
44:57If we couldn't have taken Beersheba,
44:59well them horses wouldn't have, they would have had to do another 30 miles,
45:03and they wouldn't have done it.
45:11Once we got going, we got them horses, they went.
45:14We galloped them as fast as they could go.
45:20And no one tried to keep them back.
45:23And we kept as good a line as if we were on parade.
45:26I can remember that, and it was just gone sundown when we were going in.
45:33When we got in, there was no barbed wire, they were just the trenches,
45:37and the Turks were in the trenches shooting at us.
45:39The next lot of trenches, they were standing out of the trenches,
45:42shooting over the top of their own crowd.
45:44And we'd get right in amongst the others.
45:47Those that had rifles, they shot, were shooting from off their horses,
45:51and the Turks were on the ground shooting at us all.
45:54A lot of us had pistols and revolvers, and we were using them.
46:00And there was one, one Turk was lying on the ground,
46:03and he's pointing his rifle straight at me,
46:06and I jammed both spurs into the horse, and he plunged,
46:09and the Turks fired, I don't know what they were shooting at,
46:13Turks fired, I don't know where his bullets went,
46:15but I know where mine went, because I was right,
46:18he was right down on the ground below me, and I put two into him.
46:22And then it went on, and it didn't last very long,
46:25it wasn't long before they chucked it in.
46:31For the cavalry, who had resisted the implacable tide of history
46:34for longer than their usefulness justified,
46:36the sun was finally setting.
46:38It was time to say goodbye to the horses they had fought so long to keep.
46:47One by one, the cavalry regiments gave them up.
47:00From now onwards, the standard, the emblem,
47:05the standard, the emblem of the cavalry,
47:10will serve to remind you of those gallant, uncomplaining comrades
47:16who parade with you for the last time today.
47:23But it would be misleading to say the cavalry died altogether.
47:27In some armies it did, of course.
47:29In others, like the British,
47:31the cavalry showed against all the historic evidence that it could adapt.
47:35They became mechanised.
47:37They embraced the spirit of armoured warfare
47:39as warmly as they had once embraced their horses.
47:52The Household Cavalry,
47:54the last regiment who still ride horses in the British Army,
47:57fought with great gallantry in armoured cars in World War II.
48:00They led Montgomery's 21st Army Group into Brussels,
48:03past the battlefield of Waterloo,
48:05matching the offensive spirit of their cavalry predecessors
48:08in that earlier conflict.
48:21Neither in spirit nor in name has the cavalry died altogether.
48:25Many of the steel-clad warriors of today
48:27still bear the names of dragoons, lancers, hussars.
48:32In the ring of these titles,
48:34the ear can still catch the beat of a hoof
48:36on the great plains across the world.
49:31© BF-WATCH TV 2021
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