There is one further point to deal with before leaving Sir John French's Introduction. He admits the necessity of a rifle for Cavalry, and we may presume him to admit that the Boer War proved the necessity for a good rifle and the futility of a bad carbine. When, in his opinion, is this rifle to be used? "I have endeavoured to impress upon all ranks," he writes on page xvii, "that when the enemy's Cavalry is overthrown, our Cavalry will find more opportunities of using the rifle than the cold steel, and that dismounted attacks will be more frequent than charges with the arme blanche. By no means do I rule out as impossible, or even unlikely, attacks by great bodies of mounted men against other arms on the battle-field; but I believe that such opportunities will occur comparatively rarely, and that undue prominence should not be given to them in our peace training." (The italics are mine.)
This is a typically nebulous statement of the combat functions of Cavalry in modern war, and, like the generality of such statements, will be found to contain, if analyzed, a refutation of the writer's own views on the importance of the arme blanche. We ask ourselves immediately why he thought it necessary to account for the failure of the arme blanche in South Africa by the elaborate accumulation of arguments for "abnormality" developed a few pages earlier. After all, it seems, the war, in its bearing upon the efficacy of weapons, was normal. The Boers had no "Cavalry" in the writer's use of the word—that is, steel-armed Cavalry. What he assumes to be the primary and most formidable objective of our own steel-armed cavalry was, therefore, by a fortunate accident, non-existent. There was no need to "overthrow" it, because there was nothing to overthrow, and our Cavalry was free from the outset to devote its attention to the "other Arms"—that is, to riflemen and Artillery—assumed evidently by the writer to be a secondary and less formidable objective. But here, apparently, "opportunities" for the arme blanche are to occur "comparatively rarely" in any war, European or otherwise, whether the riflemen show "tenacity and stiffness" or "disperse for hundreds of miles"; whether the horses are perennially fresh or perennially fatigued; whether we outnumber the foe or they outnumber us; whether annexation or mere victory is our aim.
If only, we cannot help exclaiming, this principle had been recognized in 1899! We knew the Boers had no swords or lances: we had always known it. If only we had prepared our Cavalry for the long-foreseen occasion, trained them to fire, given them good firearms, and impressed upon them that opportunities for shock would occur "comparatively rarely," instead of teaching them up to the last minute that fire-action was an abnormal, defensive function of their Arm, worthy of little more space in their Manual than that devoted to "Funerals," and much less than that devoted to "Ceremonial Escorts."
The root of the fallacy propounded by Sir John French lies in his refusal to recognize that a rifle may be just as deadly a weapon in the hands of Cavalry as in the hands of "other Arms," and, indeed, a far more deadly weapon, thanks to the mobility conferred by the horse. If, for example, Infantry can, as he tacitly admits they can, force Cavalry to adopt fire-action, a fortiori can Cavalry, if they choose, force Cavalry to adopt fire-action. In other words, the rifle governs combat, as it did, in fact, govern combat in South Africa and Manchuria. But Cavalry operating against Cavalry, according to Sir John French, are not so to choose. We can only speculate upon what may happen if one side is so unsportsmanlike as to break the rules and masquerade as another Arm. The stratagem is simple, because the rifle kills at a mile, and the orthodox Cavalry may be unaware until it is too late that the unorthodox Cavalry is playing them a trick. Meanwhile the best riflemen, whether they have horses or not, will win, and horsemen who have spent 80 or 90 per cent. of their time in steel-training will have cause to regret their error.
But Sir John French contemplates no such awkward contingencies. We may surmise, however, that it is owing to an uncomfortable suspicion of his own fallacy that in this paragraph and elsewhere he is so careful to isolate inter-cavalry combats from mixed combats, and to postulate the complete "overthrow" of one Cavalry—an overthrow effected solely by the arme blanche—before permitting the surviving Cavalry, in Kipling's words, to "scuffle mid unseemly smoke." He has a formula for the occasion. In this paragraph it is "when the enemy's Cavalry is overthrown." On page xiv, speaking of raids, which he deprecates, he says: "Every plan should be subordinate to what I consider a primary necessity—the absolute and complete overthrow of the hostile Cavalry"; and on page xv: "If the enemy's Cavalry has been overthrown, the rôle of reconnaissance will have been rendered easier," a truism upon which the Boer War throws a painfully ironical sidelight.
If the reader is puzzled by this curiously superfluous insistence on the "overthrow" of the enemy analogous to the equally superfluous insistence on the "offensive" character of the Cavalry Arm, he will once more find an explanation in the anomalous status of the arme blanche. No one would dream of repeatedly impressing upon Infantry, for example, as though it were a principle they might otherwise overlook, that their primary aim must be the absolute and complete overthrow of the hostile Infantry. But the advocate of the arme blanche is always on the horns of a dilemma. He dare not admit that the rifle in the hands of Cavalry is as formidable a weapon as in the hands of Infantry, if not a far more formidable weapon. He therefore instinctively tends to picture steel-armed Cavalry as perpetually pitted against steel-armed Cavalry. Both sides are always in offence until the moment when one is "completely and absolutely overthrown." Then some other rôles, very vaguely delineated, open up to the victor. Needless to say, this picture bears no resemblance to war. Troops are not, by mutual agreement, sorted out into classes, like competitors in athletic sports. Every Arm must be prepared to meet at any moment any other Arm, and any other weapon.
Nor do these "complete and absolute" obliterations of one Arm by its corresponding Arm ever, in fact, happen. That they could ever happen through the agency of the lance and sword is the wildest supposition of all. Compared with rifles, these weapons are harmless. Even the most backward and ignorant Cavalry, trained to rely absolutely on the lance and sword, would, if it found itself beaten in trials of shock, or, like the Japanese Cavalry, greatly outnumbered, resort to the despised firearm, imitate the tactics and vest itself with something of the "tenacity and stiffness," as well as with the aggressive potency, of those "other Arms," which, by hypothesis, must be attacked with the rifle; and in doing so it would force its antagonist to do the same.