the fire-fight," that the absence of "Cavalry duels" in South Africa was caused (mark this deliciously naïve admission) by the fact of the armament and the numerical weakness of the Boers--he is on my side. And I need scarcely add that the reader will find it easy to demolish the General's whole dream of the lost opportunities of the lance and sword in South Africa or Manchuria, or of its golden chances in any future war, by passages from the General's own work, criticized in this volume, as when he implores his own Cavalry to remember that they may have to meet mounted riflemen, or even heterodox Cavalry, who, using their horses only as a means of mobility in the Boer fashion, will, in defiance of the German text-books, advance dismounted, and force the German troopers to do the same; or when he lays down that the attack or defence of any "locality," entrenched or unentrenched, and by whomsoever defended or attacked, must be accomplished through fire-action. It is true that the theoretical limitations he sets to fire-action, from sheer ignorance of what fire-action by mounted troops is, reduce that form of combat also to a nullity; but on that point anyone can test his views by facts. Although it is quite possible to prove from his premisses, if their truth be postulated, that the South African War never took place at all, without going to the trouble of proving that it was "abnormal" in the matter of the futility of the lance and sword, we know that it did take place, why lances and swords were futile, and why fire was supreme. 3. So in reality does General von Bernhardi himself, and in the title of this chapter is crystallized his explicit statement of the truth. Faithful to his habitual system of alternate adhesion to two incompatible theories, the General, after clearly enough condemning the British Cavalry for their timidity with the steel, makes the following remarkable _volte face_: "In one particular, however, I will own he [_i.e._, Mr. Childers] is correct: the firearm rules tactics. That is indisputable. Nobody can with the _arme blanche_ compel an opponent on his side tactically to use the _arme blanche_." (This last is a very dark saying, for the Boers had no _arme blanche_; but it does not affect the general sense.) "To the laws of the fire-fight everything must be subordinated in war."