As to the chapter on Screens, we can only respectfully appeal to Sir John French to explain it. The ordinary reader can only give up the problem of elucidation in despair. What is the connection with his previous chapters on reconnaissance? Is the "screen" something different from or supplementary to the normal reconnoitring, patrolling, and protective duties of the Army and divisional Cavalry, as described under the headings, "Main Body of the Army Cavalry," "Reconnoitring Squadrons," "Distant Patrols," "Divisional Reconnaissance," etc.? One would infer from the opening paragraph that it is something wholly different. "The idea of the screen," runs the opening sentence, "is first touched on in the 'Field Service Manual' of 1908; it is also, however, demanded by the conditions of modern war"; and from what follows we gather that the screen means an inner and purely protective cordon of Cavalry, as distinguished from a distant offensive reconnoitring cordon. The same distinction is drawn in page 13 of the first chapter of the book. This is the kind of distinction drawn by our own Manual, which, though it does not speak of a "screen," divides the Cavalry into three bodies—one "Independent" or "strategical," the second "protective," while the third is the divisional Cavalry. Logically, of course, the distinction has but a limited value, unless, indeed, one regards the protective force as merely a chain of stationary outposts or sentries. All reconnaissance must obviously be defensive as well as offensive, because it represents a conflict between two opposing parties. If the protective Cavalry are pressed, it is their duty, as the Manual does, in fact, lay down, not only to resist the scouts and patrols of the hostile force, but to find out the strength and disposition of that force, and even in certain cases, explicitly provided for, to take the place of the Independent Cavalry; just as it is the duty of the Independent Cavalry, not only to pierce the hostile Independent Cavalry and inform themselves of the strength and disposition of the hostile Army, but to resist similar action on the part of their opponents. These principles would be taken for granted, with a vast improvement in the simplicity of regulations, if it were not for the influence of the arme blanche, impelling Cavalry writers to call their Arm a peculiarly offensive Arm, and inspiring the grotesque idea of the great preliminary shock-duel for the opposing Independent Cavalries, who are both presumed to be perpetually in offence as regards one another.
Still, within reasonable and well-understood limits, the metaphorical term "screen," as denoting the protective aspect of a widespread observing force, is both useful and illuminating. To regard it, as General von Bernhardi does, as a brand-new idea, the result of "reflection and experience" on the needs of modern war, is to convict himself of ignorance of war. Screens of a sort there always have been and always must be: the only new factor is the vastly increased efficacy of modern firearms; and if he could bring himself to concentrate on that new factor, of whose importance he shows himself in other passages to be perfectly aware, he would be able to convert into an intelligible, practical scheme his strange medley of inconsequent generalizations. He is, of course, handicapped by the official Regulations, which, unlike our own, do not formally provide for a "protective Cavalry" as distinguished from the divisional Cavalry, and which seem to be more than usually obscure and confused in their theories about "offensive" and "defensive" screens, and in their hazy suggestions as to what troops are to perform the respective functions; but he cannot or will not see the fundamental fallacy which, like Puck in the play, is tricking and distracting the minds of those who framed the Regulations, and so he himself makes confusion worse confounded. The protective aspect of the screen is no sooner insisted on than it is forgotten, and we have a disquisition on the offensive screen, which appears to be only another name for the normal activities of the Army Cavalry, behind the "veil" formed by whom a second screen is to be established by the divisional Cavalry (p. 87).
This, however, is disconcerting, because in the previous chapter (p. 74) we have been told with emphasis that the Army Cavalry "in the most usual case" will not be able to reconnoitre the whole Army front, but will be "concentrated in a decisive direction," and that the divisional Cavalry in such cases, in spite of their unfitness for the task, will have to do the "distant reconnaissance" and "strategical exploration" at all points not directly covered by the main Cavalry mass. And, sure enough, the "veil" just alluded to now disappears in its character as veil, and reappears as a "concentrated" mass. "The principal task of the offensive screen is to defeat the hostile Cavalry, and for this object all available force must be concentrated, for one cannot be strong upon the field of battle" (p. 87). It is amazing that serious exponents of any métier should write in this fashion. A concentrated screen is a contradiction in terms.
Once committed, however, the General persists. All cyclist detachments and patrols are "to be brought up to the fight" from everywhere. Roads are not to be blocked (in accordance with the screen idea) until the supreme Cavalry struggle, with its conventional "complete overthrow" of the hostile Cavalry, is over; and all this in flat contradiction of at least two-thirds of the earlier chapter on the Army Cavalry, where it was laid down that reconnoitring squadrons were from the first to be pushed forward from the "various groups of Army Cavalry," and were to be allotted reconnaissance zones; that a separation of Cavalry force was far the most probable line of action; and that reconnaissance was "an every-day task of the Cavalry," its "daily bread," a "duty which should never cease to be performed" for a single moment.
And yet on page 89 we come to the staggering, if cryptic, conclusion that "the Army Cavalry will only undertake an offensive screen when the Army is advancing and where the country does not afford suitable localities for the establishment of a defensive screen."
The writer then enlarges on the merits of the defensive screen, and, now that his mind is occupied with the idea of defence, makes it perfectly clear that the rifle is absolute master of the situation for the patrols, troops, squadrons, or any other units of both belligerent parties. Your defensive screen acts by fire, and obviously, therefore, whoever tries to pierce your screen must act by fire. These pages reduce to nullity all the romantic hints elsewhere about the charging patrol or squadron, with its "rude force" and its "determined" and "remorseless" attacks.
And what of illustrations and examples from modern war? Not one. Nothing but "speculative and theoretical reflection." For anyone who cares to study them, the facts are there—plain, hard, incontrovertible, convincing facts. Sir John French knows all about the South African facts. Screens, on a small or great scale, were matters of daily experience. He himself, with a force of all arms, sustained a screen for two months—primarily protective, but tactically offensive, as all screens must be—in the Colesberg operations of November-January, 1899-1900. He knows perfectly well that lances and swords, for all the use made of them, might as well have been in store, and that the Cavalry engaged acted on precisely the same principles as the Colonial mounted riflemen engaged.
During most of the operations from Bloemfontein to Pretoria, and from Pretoria to Komati Poort, our great force of all arms was pitted against what (if we consider relative numbers) was little more than a mounted screen, and every day's operations exemplified the fighting principles involved. The rifle was the great ruling factor. If the rifleman had a horse, so much the better—he was a more mobile rifleman; but lances and swords were useless dead-weight. Precisely the same phenomena reappear in Manchuria. On the Japanese side much excellent screening work was done by Infantry, against whom the Cossack scouts and reconnoitring squadrons, trained solely to shock, were impotent. Infantry move slowly, but their rifle is a good rifle, and it is not the horse which fires it, but the man. No infantry patrol of any Army—certainly, at any rate, of our own Army—is afraid of the lances or swords of a Cavalry patrol. It is only—strange paradox!—Cavalry patrols who are taught to fear the lances and swords of other Cavalry patrols.
I am reminded here of some remarks made in a letter to the Times of March 26, 1910, by the military correspondent of that journal, whom I had respectfully reproached with having abandoned his old hostility to shock. Cavalry patrols, unless they are to be "trussed chickens," must, he now said, have lances and swords in order, inter alia, to be able, when meeting other Cavalry patrols "in villages and lanes, or at the corner of some wood," to "tear the eyes out of" them! These "Œdipean evulsions" form a picturesque improvement even on von Bernhardi's "rude force," and strike a decidedly happier note than the patrol "charging after due reflection." But why, I asked, could not the act be performed on even one single occasion in three years of war in South Africa? Why not in one single recorded case in a year's war in Manchuria? Well, one must admit that the "corner of the wood" was an ingenious touch. It suggested a close, blind, wooded district of England, so prohibitive of shock in large bodies and for that reason so unlike South Africa and Manchuria. Yet there were many similar obstacles in both those regions: there were hundreds of villages; there were hills, mountains, ravines, dongas, sharp rocky ridges, river-beds, clumps of bush and trees, farm buildings; there were the great tracts of bush-veldt in the Transvaal, the tall millet of Northern Manchuria, and so on—quite enough, certainly, to lead to the tearing out of the eyes of at least one careless scout or patrol. Colonel Repington knows these facts as well as I do, and once more, in view of his great—and deservedly great—influence on contemporary thought, I beg him to return to his earlier manner, and speak once more in his old slashing style about the futility of "classic charges and prehistoric methods." After all, this is the very language used by von Bernhardi, whom, in the letter I have been alluding to, Colonel Repington described as a "very eminent authority."