There is one further point to deal with before leaving Sir John French's Introduction. He admits the necessity of a rifle for Cavalry, and we may presume him to admit that the Boer War proved the necessity for a good rifle and the futility of a bad carbine. When, in his opinion, is this rifle to be used? "I have endeavoured to impress upon all ranks," he writes on page xvii, "that _when the enemy's Cavalry is overthrown_, our Cavalry will find more opportunities of using the rifle than the cold steel, and that dismounted attacks will be more frequent than charges with the _arme blanche_. By no means do I rule out as impossible, or even unlikely, attacks by great bodies of mounted men against other arms on the battle-field; but I believe that such opportunities will occur comparatively rarely, and that undue prominence should not be given to them in our peace training." (The italics are mine.) This is a typically nebulous statement of the combat functions of Cavalry in modern war, and, like the generality of such statements, will be found to contain, if analyzed, a refutation of the writer's own views on the importance of the _arme blanche_. We ask ourselves immediately why he thought it necessary to account for the failure of the _arme blanche_ in South Africa by the elaborate accumulation of arguments for "abnormality" developed a few pages earlier. After all, it seems, the war, in its bearing upon the efficacy of weapons, was normal. The Boers had no "Cavalry" in the writer's use of the word--that is, steel-armed Cavalry. What he assumes to be the primary and most formidable objective of our own steel-armed cavalry was, therefore, by a fortunate accident, non-existent. There was no need to "overthrow" it, because there was nothing to overthrow, and our Cavalry was free from the outset to devote its attention to the "other Arms"--that is, to riflemen and Artillery--assumed evidently by the writer to be a secondary and less formidable objective. But here, apparently, "opportunities" for the _arme blanche_ are to occur "comparatively rarely" in any war, European or otherwise, whether the riflemen show "tenacity and stiffness" or "disperse for hundreds of miles"; whether the horses are perennially fresh or perennially fatigued; whether we outnumber the foe or they outnumber us; whether annexation or mere victory is our aim. If only, we cannot help exclaiming, this principle had been recognized in 1899! We knew the Boers had no swords or lances: we had always known it. If only we had prepared our Cavalry for the long-foreseen occasion, trained them to fire, given them good firearms, and impressed upon them that opportunities for shock would occur "comparatively rarely," instead of teaching them up to the last minute that fire-action was an abnormal, defensive function of their Arm, worthy of little more space in their Manual than that devoted to "Funerals," and much less than that devoted to "Ceremonial Escorts."