Look once more at the great Manchurian battles. Observe, for example, the great battle of Mukden, (with its awful record of massacre by firearms), when a Japanese Cavalry brigade, acting with Nogi's turning force, endeavoured to operate on the Russian rear. It was miserably weak numerically, and it failed to accomplish anything "decisive"; but it did wonders, as it was, purely through fire. Has any critic, however enamoured of the _arme blanche_, ever suggested that, however strong, it could have accomplished anything with the lance and sword? The very suggestion is preposterous. Fire ruled that terrific struggle from first to last. Look at Mishchenko's pitiful Cavalry raid on the Japanese communications in January, 1905; and observe the shame which overtakes Cavalry who cannot fight on foot: whole brigades paralyzed by squads of isolated riflemen, reminding us only too painfully of Dronfield and Poplar Grove; Cossacks pathetically charging stone walls with drawn swords; disaster and humiliation clouding the whole sordid drama. Sir John French's contribution to our enlightenment on the Manchurian War, in his Introduction to Bernhardi's first book, "Cavalry in Future Wars," was that the Cossacks failed through excess of training as riflemen. He has not repeated that statement in his Introduction to the second book. He scarcely could. All the world knows the truth now--namely, that the Cossacks, as one who rode with them said, "once dismounted, were lost." They did not know how to handle rifles, and all their humiliations may be traced to that fact. Nor did the Japanese Cavalry at first, and they were equally impotent. But they learnt, and learnt to admirable purpose, as the records show. If he cannot repeat and confirm what he said in his first Introduction, why is Sir John French altogether silent on the point in his second Introduction? Well, it was an awkward dilemma for him; for Bernhardi himself (p. 97), in his chapter on Raids, alludes to Mishchenko's raid in highly significant, though characteristically obscure, language. And if he follows up the clue, the reader may understand why it is that only on this one solitary question of raids, out of all the multitude of topics dealt with in the two books, Sir John French "ventures to differ" from the German author, pronouncing, for his own part, against them. Von Bernhardi expressly founds his advocacy of the raid on the American Civil War. "The idea," he says naïvely, "is taken" from that war. As though the Boers who made the raids of 1901, of which he never seems to have heard, took their ideas from that war or any other! Their ideas were the fruit of their own common sense. Now, the Civil War is particularly dangerous ground in England for advocates of the _arme blanche_, although it is safe enough ground in Germany, where nobody studies it, and where there has been no Henderson to immortalize the exploits of the great Cavalry leaders.