I might enter into the details of a dozen other exercises which tested the indoor horse and the English equipment, but all may be summed up in a single broad generalization. The pleasure horse and his equipment are so highly specialized for running and jumping that they have ceased to possess the slightest value for civil and military working horsemanship. {222} CHAPTER VIII. THE SOLDIER HORSE. [Sidenote: Regular cavalry] A habit of enlisting for campaigns has given me some desultory training with British irregular and auxiliary forces--Horse, Foot and Guns. Without the slightest pretensions as a soldier I have enjoyed, on active service, watching the military practice in horsemastership in its amusing contrasts with the methods of frontier life. It seems to me that the British and especially the Irish horse-breeding, and the national amusements for mounted men--hawking, stag-hunting, fox-hunting, steeplechases, flat races, and polo--for example, have given to British mounted troops the basis of a horsemastership which has been gratefully copied by civilized armies and disabled the mobility of all alike. The cult of the pleasure horse has ousted the old sober methods of war horsemanship. This may in part account for the chasing of the Spaniards and Portuguese by their lively American colonists, of the British by the {223} Argentines, Americans and Afghans, of the French by the Mexicans, of the Germans by the Damaras, of the Italians by the peoples of Erythrea and Cyrenaica, and of the Russians by the Japanese. Three hundred thousand of my countrymen spent three-and-a-half years in persuading fifty-five thousand Boers to accept full compensation for their losses. This episode filled with unholy joy the nations which had not lately been whipped by mere outsiders because they had prudently abstained from war. One does not recall, however, so very many recent campaigns in which barbaric horsemanship has been put to shame and flight by any regular cavalry. So, if my adventure in uncouth criticism bears incidentally upon British methods, its motive is merely to discover why civilized mounted troops are not quite a success in dealing with irregulars of the open range. If Army methods are really the best, they should have an unbroken chronicle of victory. If range methods are really the best, the military art of horsemanship needs thinking over by every civilized horseman who loves his country. If the defeat of civilized armies is not explained by their horsemastership, it is not less in need of explanation. {224} [Sidenote: Armies]