During most of the operations from Bloemfontein to Pretoria, and from Pretoria to Komati Poort, our great force of all arms was pitted against what (if we consider relative numbers) was little more than a mounted screen, and every day's operations exemplified the fighting principles involved. The rifle was the great ruling factor. If the rifleman had a horse, so much the better--he was a more mobile rifleman; but lances and swords were useless dead-weight. Precisely the same phenomena reappear in Manchuria. On the Japanese side much excellent screening work was done by Infantry, against whom the Cossack scouts and reconnoitring squadrons, trained solely to shock, were impotent. Infantry move slowly, but their rifle is a good rifle, and it is not the horse which fires it, but the man. No infantry patrol of any Army--certainly, at any rate, of our own Army--is afraid of the lances or swords of a Cavalry patrol. It is only--strange paradox!--Cavalry patrols who are taught to fear the lances and swords of other Cavalry patrols. I am reminded here of some remarks made in a letter to the _Times_ of March 26, 1910, by the military correspondent of that journal, whom I had respectfully reproached with having abandoned his old hostility to shock. Cavalry patrols, unless they are to be "trussed chickens," must, he now said, have lances and swords in order, _inter alia_, to be able, when meeting other Cavalry patrols "in villages and lanes, or at the corner of some wood," to "tear the eyes out of" them! These "OEdipean evulsions" form a picturesque improvement even on von Bernhardi's "rude force," and strike a decidedly happier note than the patrol "charging after due reflection." But why, I asked, could not the act be performed on even one single occasion in three years of war in South Africa? Why not in one single recorded case in a year's war in Manchuria? Well, one must admit that the "corner of the wood" was an ingenious touch. It suggested a close, blind, wooded district of England, so prohibitive of shock in large bodies and for that reason so unlike South Africa and Manchuria. Yet there were many similar obstacles in both those regions: there were hundreds of villages; there were hills, mountains, ravines, dongas, sharp rocky ridges, river-beds, clumps of bush and trees, farm buildings; there were the great tracts of bush-veldt in the Transvaal, the tall millet of Northern Manchuria, and so on--quite enough, certainly, to lead to the tearing out of the eyes of at least one careless scout or patrol. Colonel Repington knows these facts as well as I do, and once more, in view of his great--and deservedly great--influence on contemporary thought, I beg him to return to his earlier manner, and speak once more in his old slashing style about the futility of "classic charges and prehistoric methods." After all, this is the very language used by von Bernhardi, whom, in the letter I have been alluding to, Colonel Repington described as a "very eminent