At heart the General believes this--his whole book is a witness to this fact--but how can he expect to get his beliefs accepted if he continually stultifies those beliefs by soothing ambiguities about the "offensive spirit"? Nor does he confine himself to ambiguity. Take a passage like this from p. 19, at the very outset of his chapter on "Reconnaissance, Screening, and Raids": "The very essence of Cavalry lies in the offensive. Mounted, it is incapable of tactical defence, _but in order to defend itself_, must surrender its real character as a mounted arm, and seize the rifle on foot." (The italics are mine.) Conceive the mental chaos which can produce an expression of an opinion like this at the beginning of a work designed to reform the backward German Cavalry. Here, stated in formal, precise terms, is the very doctrine upon which that Cavalry works; which, as the author himself a hundred times assures us, is the source of all its "antiquated assumptions" and of its total unpreparedness for real war. The framers of the Regulations have only to point to this passage, and then, with perfect justice, to consign all the General's tirades first to mockery and then to oblivion. Sir John French, again more reactionary than his German confrère, seizes on this passage, to the exclusion of all which contradict it, and triumphantly produces his own analogous formula. To neglect the steel, he says, is to "invert the rôle of Cavalry, and turn it into a defensive arm." While Sir John French sticks to his point, and elaborates it even to the implicit denial of an offensive spirit to Infantry, General von Bernhardi is perfectly conscious of the absurdity of maintaining that it is only "in order to defend itself" that Cavalry "seize the rifle" on foot. We obtain, perhaps, the best insight into his method of reasoning in A II. ("Attack and Defence"). On p. 112 he says that Cavalry should "endeavour to preserve their mobility in the fight, and that mounted shock-action, _therefore_, should be regarded as its proper rôle in battle." This quotation is an excellent one for the advocates of the steel, but it would reduce to impotence any Cavalry which acted upon it. And we ask immediately, what is the sense of calling shock the "proper rôle" of Cavalry, when, according to the author himself, it is only to be used in exceptional cases, even in fights of the independent Cavalry, and when riflemen, who advance dismounted, can render it impracticable? Why not say at once that the proper or normal rôle of Cavalry is fire-action, and the exceptional or abnormal rôle shock-action?