“In the one case men rise from a comfortable bed, bathe, and breakfast, and even if they are exposed to weather during the day, return at night to a well-cooked dinner and comfortable bed. The horses they ride are valuable, highly-trained animals, who are expected to put out their full strength for at most two or three hours, and are perhaps not required again for two or three days, or even expected to be required. The shooting is done under the same conditions, and though requiring skill (as does the riding in fox-hunting), is not of a nature to be useful in war.
“In neither case does the ‘diversion’ conduce to the self-denying or abstemious habits so essential in war. Of course, I do not mean that sportsmen are of necessity of intemperate habits, but in war the conditions are different from those of sport. In the latter case the soldier rises, perhaps from a night of rain round a camp-fire, gets, without breakfast, on his half-starving horse, and jogs along all day at a footspace, to sleep, supposing there is no fighting and he has not been killed, once more by a camp-fire, perhaps again in rain, or in a driving wind.
“Every condition under which the sportsman plays is different from those under which the soldier works. As in the Roman times regiments of gladiators proved the most useless at the front, so I believe a regiment all composed of sportsmen would make a miserable show before a thousand quite unsporting Japanese.”
To the same effect is the opinion of Sir H. H. Johnston, as expressed in an article in the Nineteenth Century of September, 1913.
“One is told that fox-hunting is a splendid school for riders, the making of our cavalry, etc. Rubbish! Very few of our great cavalry officers have been fox-hunters, or willing fox-hunters, and practically none of the troopers. A large proportion of our mounted soldiers are recruited from townsmen who never learned to ride until they entered the riding-school. The Boers were admittedly the cunningest, most enduring riders recent warfare has known, but they, like their cousins of the Wild West, would probably show themselves duffers in the hunting-field; at any rate, they never practised in this school of steeplechasing. The last thing I desire to do is to undervalue riding as an exercise, an accomplishment, a necessary art in warfare, a school for teaching suppleness, coolness, and courage. But the fox is not a necessary ingredient in the curriculum.”
We conclude, then, that Sport, considered as a school for War, is doubly to be condemned, inasmuch as, while it breeds the aggressive and cruel spirit of militarism, it does not furnish that practical military training which is essential to successful warfare. Sport may make a man a savage; it does not make him a soldier.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Here, for example, is a suggestive heading of an article in a London paper (October 27, 1913) in reference to a meeting of the German Emperor and the Emperor Francis Joseph for the purpose of promoting peace: “Peace Emperors Meet. The Kaiser shoots 1,100 Pheasants with the Austrian Archduke.” A strange way of inaugurating peace!