To suppose so is to insult the intelligence of our countrymen. We do not teach the ABC in our Universities. Our natural science schools do not assume that their pupils belong to the "Dark Ages," and waste two-thirds of their energy in laborious refutations of such extinct superstitions as witchcraft. The education of our sailors to modern naval war is not conducted on the assumption that the Navy consists of wooden sailing-vessels whose inadequacy to modern conditions must be elaborately demonstrated. A gunnery course--and the reader will note the analogy--does not consist mainly of arguments designed to prove that the cutlass is no longer so important a weapon as the long-range gun and the torpedo. Nor--in the military sphere--are our Infantry and Artillery instructed with a view to weaning them from the cult of the pike and the catapult. So, too, we may be quite sure that there is something radically wrong when our Cavalry, in their search for an authoritative exposition of modern Cavalry tactics, are reduced to relying on a foreign writer who writes for a Cavalry ignorant of the elements of modern Cavalry tactics, and a good half of whose work is taken up with scoldings and appeals which from our British point of view are grotesquely redundant. All that is good in what von Bernhardi says about fire-action we know from our own war experience. All his errors about fire-action we can detect also from our own war experience. We should expect Sir John French to comment on these facts, to warn his readers that the book under review was written for a Cavalry unversed in modern war and blind to its teaching. We should expect some note of pride and satisfaction in the fact that his own national Cavalry did not need these scathing and humiliating reminders that war is not a "theoretical" and "childish" pastime, but a serious and dangerous business; some hint to the effect that perhaps we, with our three years' experience of the modern rifle, may have something useful to tell General von Bernhardi about principles which he has framed in the speculative seclusion of his study. Not a word, not a hint of any such warning or criticism. The topic is too dangerous. Once admit that South Africa counts--to say nothing of Manchuria--once begin to dot the "i's" and cross the "t's" of the German's speculations, and the _arme blanche_ is lost. Instead, we have the passionless reservation from Sir John French that "he does not always approve" of those German Regulations, so many of which von Bernhardi thinks prehistoric and ludicrous, and at the end of his Introduction we have a fervent appeal to the British Cavalry not to "expose our ignorance and conceit" by overvaluing our own experience, but to "keep abreast with every change in the tendencies of Cavalry abroad," and to "assimilate the best of foreign customs" to our own. "Keep abreast!" What an expression to use in such a connection! "Best foreign customs!" Where are these customs?