THE DEATH OR GLORY BOYS

The history of the 17th/21st Lancers 1914-1993

- Keith Nairn-Munro.

When war broke out in 1914, for the cavalry regiments, the horse was still king. This naïve and illusionary vision was quickly dispelled as the machine gun became the dominant factor on the Western Front. Trenches, not wide swaths of flat cavalry charging country became the norm and the role of the cavalry was about to change forever.

Nonetheless, the Generals were loathed to dispel with the cavalry completely and wherever possible tried to insert mounted troops into their strategic plans.

The lives of both the lancer regiments would alter dramatically during this period. The 21st Lancers were to spend most of the warfighting Afghan Tribesmen. These Pashtun tribes had been armed by Germany and threatened the security of the Punjab in India.

The 17th Lancers, by contrast, left India in October 1914, docking in Marseilles in mid-November, as part of the Indian Cavalry Corp. By the time they arrived, the mobile phase of the war was over. The Lancers were to serve in the trenches as infantry with the faint hope that, if there was a British breakthrough, they could return to their mounted role to exploit any advantage gained.

Ironically the German cavalry were suffering the same fate and what is coincidental is that one of their regiments, known as the Death’s Head or Totenkopf Hussars, shared the same cap badge with the 17th Lancers. I do not know if these two regiments ever met in battle however, utilising Britain’s Lancers, it afforded me the opportunity to enact what might have been.

Unbeknown to the cavalry at the time the introduction of a new top-secret weapon called a tank, would herald a revolution in the lives all future cavalrymen. Ironically, however, it was the tank which nearly gave the 17th Lancers the chance to feature in their mounted role.