A Tribute to the Cavalry

Reverse the stirrups, turn out the mounts to pasture; the cavalry has gone. The crepe is on the pommel, the mourning bow upon the sword hilt; the cavalry has gone.

No more the glint of sunlight on the saber, the sweet music of the creak of saddle harness, the champ of bits. The sound of “Boots and Saddles” sings no more across the Great Plains; the horse has retired from the field of battle. The “yellowlegs,” who won the West with carbine and with Colt; the ‘‘Gamy Owens” of the famous Seventh, who died with Custer at the Little Big Horn, ride no longer; for the cavalry has gone forever... Even the gallant name...

Today for the first time in a century and a half of “progress” there is no cavalry in the United States Army. A signature last week -that of Harry S. Truman -was its requiem. But the President’s endorsement of a bill reorganizing the Army, abolishing the cavalry as an arm and substituting armor for it represented merely legal recognition of historical fact. Nostalgia for the past, melancholy pride in great achievements, and all the panoply of jingling harness and troopers at the charge could not hide the doom of the horse on the field of battle. Inanimate mechanisms made by men were his undoing; the machine gun, the tank and the plane were the robots which inherited his world.

Not since the Twenty-sixth Cavalry, harried and bloody, tired but gallant, covered the rear guard of the Army from Damortis to Bataan had the “yellowlegs” straddled their mounts. The First Cavalry Division, a fighting outfit, was in the van of combat from Australia to Japan, but it fought dismounted, and improvised horsed commands and mule pack trains toiled in small units over the bitter mountains of Italy. In World War 11, the horse, in the United States Army, had but a small role.

And so the cavalry, like all things mortal, has died. But its soul goes marching on For the soul of the cavalry is elan, aggressiveness, the will-to-fight, dash, the debonair, reckless but ordered discipline that took The Six hundred into the Valley of Death at Balaklava, that rode with Stuart and with Sheridan, with Custer and with Lee. The spirit of the cavalry is the spirit basic to any army, a spirit not exclusive to this arm alone, but one of which it was peculiarly possessed.

For the cavalry had a sense of tradition, an awareness of its responsibility to history, to the men who have gone, to the standards of the past, to those who died that the way of life we want, the things for which we fight, might live.

It has been popular in these times of fatalism and doubt to impugn tradition, to cast aside as worthless the bright heritage of valor and hope the past has given US. No more fatal mistake to Army or Nation is possible, for tradition, sound tradition, both civic and martial, is the inspiration from the past which must light the future. The history of the cavalry, gone in name but never in spirit, provides some of the finest of our Army’s traditions. The lilt of von Borcke’s songs, he who rode with “Jeb” Stuart, long has been stilled: Pelham’s guns thunder no more: “Light Horse Harry” Lee, and Marion, “the swamp fox,” are long dead; the dragoon with brass helmets and horsehair plumes who fought with Wayne at Fallen Timbers, live only in old prints. Resaca de la palma and the wild charge with sabers are but an incident in the history books now, and the Indian Wars, when the “yellowlegs” fought from Red River and the Rio Grande to Montana and the Rockies, are but dates andfigures. The Cheyenne, the Sioux, and the Apache are mere ghosts from a dim, forgotten past. The men are dead, the graves grass-covered, the horses gone, even the monuments weather-stained and strange, a bronze or marble charger oddly out of place in this mechanized age.

But the tattered battle streamers and the silver battle rings bear the great names of the past into the future: Bull Run, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Comanches, Oklahoma, The Admiralties, Leyte, Luzon, Tokyo. And the great names will not die. From Henry Dodge, the first colonel of the “American Cavalry Service,” to George Patton, the roll call of the cavalry will live on. The cavalry is not dead; its spirit, its traditions, its immortal intangibles endure. Its tactics, its esprit are the heritage of armor and of the Army; the “yellowlegs” are gone, but they have left behind them the things that soldiers live by.