He ought to admit that Cavalry reconnaissance was bad, and that the army suffered for it. No historian has ever defended it. It was the despair of Generals who wanted information as to the position of the enemy. Wits apart, the rifle ruled reconnaissance, as it obviously always must rule it. _Ceteris paribus_, the best rifleman is the best scout. The Cavalry were not good riflemen, and were therefore not good scouts. Not a single Boer scout from the beginning to the end of the war was hurt by a sword or lance. Those weapons were a laughing-stock to foe and friend alike. And Sir John French's proposition is, not so much that the reconnaissance was good--presumably, that goes without saying--but that there was nothing to reconnoitre, thanks, apparently, to the terror spread by the lance and sword. Such a travesty of the war may be left to speak for itself. But it is very important to comprehend the root idea which underlies it, an idea which, as we shall see, reappears in a less extreme form in General von Bernhardi's writings. It is expressed in the words "we should invert the rôle of Cavalry, turn it into a defensive arm." The rifle, it will be seen, is regarded as a _defensive_ weapon, in contradistinction to the lance and sword, which are offensive weapons. To sustain this theory, it is absolutely necessary, of course, to proceed to the lengths to which Sir John French proceeds--to declare, in effect, that there was no war and no fighting; for if once we concede that there was a war, study its combats and compute their statistical results, we are forced to the conclusion that the rifle must have been used in offence as well as in defence. Abstract reflection might well anticipate this conclusion by suggesting that a defensive weapon and a defensive class of soldiers are contradictions in terms.