The experience, which a child can understand, amounts to this: If you extend, and, _a fortiori_, if your enemy is extended also, you lose all hope of "shock," that is, of physical impact; and with the loss of this impact you lose the fundamental condition precedent to the successful use of steel weapons on horseback--the condition which Frederick the Great's leaders had, but which ours have not. You also lose momentum, speed, because the modern rifle, by immensely widening the bullet-swept zone, necessitates a far longer gallop for the charging force. The German Regulations realize this, for they enjoin a slower pace, expressly on the ground that "impact" is not to be aimed at. Very well: no shock; comparatively low speed. What is going to happen? Your steel charge is useless. Individual troopers, bound by their code of honour to remain in the saddle, and pitted against individual riflemen on foot, are helpless, an object of derision to gods and men. Our own Infantry Manual openly treats them as helpless and negligible, and in a few curt lines gives directions, proved in war to be sound, for the event of such a charge, should it take place. But, in fact, it does not take place. Our Cavalry in South Africa had literally thousands of chances of making such charges, supposing that they were feasible. But they were not; instinctively the leaders felt that they were not, and ceased to think of making them. At the time when, if ever, any given leader should have made up his mind to charge, he was, unfortunately, as a general rule, in that condition of painful "uncertainty as to the strength and intentions of the enemy," to which the German Regulations allude. He could not, in the German fashion, ride about in mass to reconnoitre, because the Boers, perversely refusing to believe in the tactics of Frederick the Great, did not co-operate in the game. He had, therefore, the choice between idleness and fire-action. He chose fire-action, and once engaged in fire-action, he found that he had to stick to it. It was physically impossible to "combine" fire-action and steel-action, even if there had been an opening for steel-action, which there was not. That is the whole story, and Sir John French, if he chose, could tell General von Bernhardi all about it.