authority." I have the letter before me, and it is with a somewhat grim satisfaction that I observe the Nemesis which overtakes publicists who are rash enough to recant opinions founded on national experience and confirmed by the most recent facts of war. It was written just before von Bernhardi's book was published, and a large part of it took the form of an eulogy on the German Cavalry, whom he defended hotly from my charge of "sentimental conservatism," whose new regulations about fire-action he quoted with admiring approval, and whose revivification he distinctly associated with the name of that "very eminent authority" General von Bernhardi. The very eminent authority spoke a few weeks later, and said that his "writings had fallen on barren soil." His language about the sentimental conservatism of the present German Cavalry beggared any I had used. He made his own Colonel Repington's epithet "prehistoric"; his phrase "old-fashioned knightly combats" is surely an adequate counterpart to "classic charges"; in many a passage of biting invective he deplores as literal truth at the present moment what Colonel Repington scouted as a libellous myth invented by me--namely, that in peace manoeuvres "solid lines of steel-clad Cavalry are led across open plains"; and, as I have shown, he regards as utterly unprepared for war a Cavalry which Colonel Repington holds up as an example to his British readers of "the best modern Cavalries," and which, if we do not imitate their methods, would, he thinks, in the event of a war, tear the eyes out of ours. As to fire-action, perhaps Colonel Repington had not studied the German Regulations with a very critical eye before he praised them to the point of asking, "Could Botha or Delarey or De Wet ask for more?" In the light of von Bernhardi's strictures and of his still stranger alternatives, the topic, I am sure, will need different handling if Colonel Repington returns to it.