[97] Cavalry Journal, July 1910.
[98] Experience shows that the noisiest instructors are almost invariably the worst; they are usually trying to appeal by means of their lungs to the rider’s ears instead of demonstrating their meaning by an appeal to his sense of sight.
[99] The material common-sense changes made in regard to the comfort, amusements, health, and pay of the cavalryman, in common with the other arms, is one of the most marked advances in the army of to-day.
[100] General Romer, after the American Civil War, wrote as follows: “Bad saddles destroy more horses than are lost in action.”
It is certain that wet horse blankets put on under a saddle will give more sore backs in one day’s march than will occur in a month of ordinary marching.
[101] It has been said that “it is a peace theory that mounted infantry are as good as trained cavalry; it is a war fact that their ignorance of horse-management makes them five times as costly at the commencement of a war.” However that may be, we know that under first-rate officers, a proportion of whom have since joined the cavalry to its advantage, there was exemplary horse-management in some corps of mounted infantry, not only in the late South African War of 1899–1902 but long ago in the eighties.
[102] Picard, Cavalry of the Revolution and Empire, vol. ii. p. 94.
[103] “The idea of drawing cavalry recruits from the best horse-breeding districts,” says Denison, “is not original. Zenophon says that Argesilaus did so” (p. 41). It is certain that our best cavalry soldiers come from Ireland now.
[104] Von Bernhardi, Cavalry in Peace and War, p. 273, says, speaking of German cavalry: “In the cavalry there is a want of trained instruction, and most regiments are even reduced to borrowing infantry under-officers and officers to assist in their musketry training, who are then also employed to teach the rudiments of the cavalry fight.”
[105] The Japanese realize how far strength and activity go to make up for the unsuitability of the race for cavalry work, and from the moment a recruit enters barracks, every effort is made to render him active and energetic.—Education and Training of the Japanese Divisional Cavalry, p. 13.