It is almost cruel to lift the veil from these domestic mysteries and differences, and, indeed, I am almost afraid my readers will suspect me of quoting, not from eulogies, but from skits on the _arme blanche_. But the words are there for anyone who cares to look them up, and I ask, is not it almost inconceivable that serious soldiers in the year of grace 1911, when war is a really serious matter of scientific weapons, should solemnly call a weapon with such characteristics the most important weapon of the Cavalryman? Needless to say, the author himself refutes his own proposition in a hundred passages of this very work. But Sir John French ignores those passages, and in his own Introduction pens a warm defence of the lance; though whether he believes in the "pin-prick policy" which the German authority seems to advocate, or in the plan of "striking the object heavily" at all costs, he does not inform us. After all, it matters little. The taxpayer need not quail at the expense of providing fresh lances to every regiment after every charge. The rest of the world looks on with languid interest while the Cavalry authorities carry on their solemn controversies as to the relative merits of steel weapons used from horseback. Even in the Franco-German War the killing effect of lances and swords was negligible. Six Germans were killed by the sabre, and perhaps as many by the lance. Of the total of 218 German casualties from the sabre and clubbed musket, 138 were in the Cavalry, whose total losses by fire and steel combined were 2,236. In the great civilized wars since the invention of the smokeless magazine rifle the casualties from lance and sword have reached vanishing-point. But if lances and swords are harmless to the enemy, they are emphatically harmful to those who carry them. They not only inspire the wrong spirit, but they mean extra weight and additional visibility. Sir John French (p. xvi) cheerfully defies physical laws. He scouts the idea that "a thin bamboo pole will reveal the position of a mounted man to the enemy." That is one of the fond illusions of peace. And in peace even a short-sighted layman could prove the contrary by ocular demonstration, and digest the moral, too, by watching Lancers operating among the lanes and hedges of England. In war there are field-glasses--and bullets.