Chapter 2877: Cavalry Training Team

Lingao had grown so fast that the Special Municipal Government had already moved on, leaving the old county seat behind. It was called Lincheng Township now, a prim administrative district where the Senate's central agencies still clung to Hainan. The Fubo Army General Staff Headquarters Building sat there too, modest among the remaining walls.

Only two old buildings still stood in the "old town": the former magistrate's yamen and the county school. The residents had gone, evacuated long ago, and within the walls now stood nothing but central organs. The General Staff occupied one of the courtyards.

Its main departments had been drifting north to Guangzhou for two years. What remained was a rear detachment, a coordinating body for army weapons development, production, and training. Today, in one of its rooms, the relevant personnel had gathered for a meeting devoted to the cavalry question.

Cavalry—that glittering branch of arms—had never amounted to much in the Fubo Army. The usual reasons were trotted out: too few horses, no suitable breeding grounds, and the fact that the Senate's wars had been fought mainly in the south, where horsemen were a luxury, not a necessity. The auxiliary cavalry of the Shandong Detachment had distinguished itself during the Dengzhou Rebellion, but once the rebels were crushed, proposals to expand the arm were shelved. Cavalry was ruinously expensive. Clausewitz had calculated that a single 150-horse cavalry squadron cost as much to equip and maintain as an 800-man infantry battalion or an eight-gun six-pounder battery. To the Senate, forever counting its copper, there was no compelling reason to enlarge it.

Yet cavalry had its military uses, and the armed forces could not be built for the south alone. Shortly after the capture of Jeju Island, the Senate established a military horse farm and a cavalry training team there. That was when Yang Ning was transferred to Jeju.

The transfer had been justified, if only barely, as a "professional match." Yang Ning's registration form listed him as "skilled in horsemanship, knows horse care," and under "personal preference" he had written that he wished to become "the pride of the Senate's cavalry." But the reassignment also smelled of being pushed aside. He had the wrong look: black hair that fell nearly to his waist, a face so pale it seemed powdered, large eyes fringed with heavy lashes, and a frame that ran to the thin side. To this he added the eccentric habit of wearing Napoleonic military uniforms. Several Germanophile Senators promptly nicknamed him the "castrated rooster." They even planned to give him a round of "spirit injection" to "strengthen his spirit and toughen his body." Other Senators, less extreme, plainly disliked his appearance too. The moment Jeju fell, a transfer order packed him off to work with Nick as a "Monkey King Lieutenant" tending horses.

Yang Ning did not mind the work itself. A horseman's first lesson is the horse, and caring for one is the beginning of that education. He had done it at his riding club back in the old world; it was, in fact, a professional match. So he followed Nick—whom he considered somewhat unhinged—rising before dawn and sleeping past midnight, working from one end of the day to the other. His cavalry saber and armor began to rust from disuse; his martial skills withered. Only later, when more hands arrived, could he spare a little time each day for practice. Yet even with thousands of horses on Jeju, no formal army establishment order came. The first horse-related unit the Senate founded on the island turned out to be an artillery and transport training team. "Thousands of horses on Jeju Island, and not one belongs to the cavalry," Yang Ning would write bitterly in his memoirs. For a long time, the so-called Fubo Army Cavalry Training Team consisted of Yang Ning himself and a dozen stable hands.

After the Dengzhou Rebellion ended, the auxiliary cavalry unit that the Shandong Detachment had raised locally crossed to Jeju for "consolidated training," and the training team finally acquired its first real combat squadron.

The cavalry squadron was the basic fighting unit of mounted arms from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. On the organizational tables of European armies, infantry had its battalion, artillery its battery, and cavalry its squadron.

A squadron was roughly two cavalry troops, or companies. Its strength ranged from seventy-five to two hundred fifty men, usually around one hundred fifty. In scale it was a company, but in the old European armies a squadron commander held the rank of an infantry battalion commander.

That size allowed a squadron commander to control his men by voice and example in the heat of battle, while the unit remained small enough to operate independently and carry out basic missions.

The auxiliary cavalry that crossed from Shandong numbered fewer than two hundred men—just enough for one squadron. That was far short of Yang Ning's ambitions. Fortunately, the Senators commanding the Shandong front all recognized the importance of cavalry in that theater, and they requested that the unit return to its parent formation as soon as its consolidated training was finished. So Yang Ning naturally applied for additional billets and organized a second squadron, with the first serving as riding instructors for the second.

Many of the Shandong horsemen were former Ming cavalrymen, and some were Mongols by origin. Still, Yang Ning was not satisfied. In the view of this "West-worshiper," as Xiao Bailang had christened him, only cavalry armed with sword and lance were true cavalry. Archery was a personal hobby; carbines and pistols were heresy upon heresy, fit only for the cavalry of riffraff nations like the Americans, and any cavalry that adopted them would degenerate at once. "In fact, the cavalry of the United States is merely mounted infantry"—Engels's remark had always been his motto. The auxiliary cavalry unit, at best, was "irregular light cavalry" of the Kalmyk, Mamluk, Sipahi, or Cossack sort.

The auxiliary cavalry had performed admirably during the Engine Operation, whether gathering refugees or countering rebel cavalry reconnaissance and harassment. But in Yang Ning's eyes, this "combat" was nothing more than amateurs pecking at each other among irregular cavalry; it did not rise to the level of a cavalry engagement. In his opinion, Kong Youde and Li Jiucheng's forces could have been torn to shreds by four well-trained cuirassier squadrons. He never dared say so. Most of the Senate, and even the officers, had no concept of heavy cavalry and were in fact hostile to it. If he rashly proposed training heavy cavalry units, he would probably be pilloried to death.

After much anxious deliberation and lengthy drafting, he cautiously submitted a report titled "The Role of Dragoons in Warfare." In it, Yang Ning used every evasion, never once mentioning heavy cavalry. Of course, anyone familiar with the Napoleonic Wars knew that dragoons could be infantry as well as cavalry, ordinary cavalry as well as heavy cavalry.

The report barely touched on "shock action," glossing over it with ambiguous terms like "breakthrough" and "raid." The "dragoons" themselves were an outright bait-and-switch: these dragoons were not equipped with rifles at all. They were purely melee shock cavalry. As envisioned, they would carry four-meter lances and French-style dragoon sabers. Apart from having only helmets and horse face armor, which made them insufficiently "heavy," they were outfitted entirely as heavy cavalry. So much so that Yang Ning himself, studying his own equipment concept drawings, more than once considered striking the lance from the list.

After much deliberation, he changed the lance to a revolver. The lance was not only conspicuous but extremely difficult to train with. Even Yang Ning was barely competent with it—able to hold it level and make a few flourishes, nothing like genuine knightly cavaliers. The revolver was better suited to the men he had.

The items still "under consideration"—cavalry breast-and-back plates, cloaks, full rigid leather boots, horse breast armor, and kilij sabers—he simply lacked the courage to include. Writing them in would render all his previous evasions pointless, though whether the report would pass at all was itself uncertain.

After several anxious months of consolidated training, Yang Ning finally received the General Staff's research opinion. "Pilot training may be conducted," it stated, to be carried out "based on existing equipment conditions." New equipment, the response added, was "pending the Planning Commission's study and arrangement."

The reply disappointed him. The Planning Commission's reputation for stinginess was well established; who knew when those equipment items would arrive? But since the door had not been slammed shut, there was still room for things to turn around.

As it turned out, he waited several years. Even the Planning Commission was reorganized into the Planning Institute, and the "dragoon" equipment plan still had not come through. He had not been idle: he trained roughly seven or eight hundred cavalrymen. Besides one cavalry squadron assigned to the Shandong Detachment, he had organized three additional squadrons. Naturally, all four were light cavalry, which he looked down upon.

"Historically, light cavalry came before heavy cavalry too. You can't build the second floor without the first," he told himself, half-consoling, half-deceiving. At least the Fubo Army's cavalry was no longer a blank slate.

"Major, please step down."

At the guard's reminder, Yang Ning returned from his memories to the present. He had visited the General Staff compound before, but this time it felt emptier. Even the sign at the gate had been changed to "General Staff Rear Detachment."

He disembarked, saluted and was saluted in return—all one fluid motion. Then he strode briskly, following the guard to a courtyard. Training Inspector Fu Sansi was waiting at the entrance. Yang Ning saluted at once.