effective rifle-range," and to find their place usurped by Infantry and mounted riflemen. There is very little to be known about rearguard actions which the Boers have not taught us, and yet they were, in Cavalry parlance, "defenceless"--in other words, steelless riflemen. CHAPTER VIII RECONNAISSANCE I.--WEAPONS. I COME lastly to the author's chapters on "Reconnaissance, Screening, and Raids." As I explained before, it is the critic's simplest course to leave them to the last, because, although they come first, they almost ignore the subject of weapons and combats, on the assumption, apparently, that the opposing Cavalries, at any rate in the first two of the functions in question, will, as a matter of course, fight with the lance and sword in the pure and proper fashion. But we have now considered and tested the worth of the author's views on combat and weapons, and can apply our criticisms to these chapters. Combat and weapons are not wholly overlooked. At the very outset comes the maxim which I quoted further back, to the effect that "the essence of Cavalry lies in the offensive," and that for defence they are to "abandon their proper rôle and seize the rifle on foot." The reader can appreciate now the value of this maxim, when we are dealing, as the author in these chapters is dealing, with two opposing Cavalries who are assumed to be acting against one another independently of other Arms. To tell both these Cavalries that their essence lies in the offensive is, to say the least, a superfluous platitude. To say that it is only in defence that they are to "seize the rifle" is to say something wholly meaningless. Unless by seizing it they can force their antagonists also to relinquish shock as useless and to seize the rifle, they might as well not seize it at all. If they can force their antagonists to seize it--and the whole mass of modern experience shows that they can and do--then their antagonists, whether we call their rôle proper or improper, are acting in _offence_ with the firearm, and the maxim is stultified--as, indeed, any maxim which applies medieval language to modern problems must be stultified. Experience shows that if you arm men with long-range, smokeless, accurate missile weapons, whatever their traditions of etiquette and sportsmanship in peace, they will in war use those weapons to the exclusion of lances, swords, battle-axes, scimitars, and the various other weapons which were highly formidable before the days of gunpowder, but which have steadily declined since the invention and the progressive improvement of arms of precision.