They may also be used to reinforce threatened points, when their mobility will enable them to arrive at a distant part of the battlefield with the rapidity of cavalry. They should rarely be used in the firing line, where their fire, being dispersed, is less effective than an equal volume of rifle fire, and where they are at once the target for every rifle. Machine guns can never engage artillery, and should avoid engaging other machine guns or firing on a line of skirmishers. They are particularly useful at night with the outposts, and can be trained by day on roads, defiles, or bridges, and thus can be used in the dark to sweep the approaches with accurate fire. The Golden Rule for Machine Gun Tactics may be thus expressed: “Conceal your guns, utilise cover, and operate by surprise--for surprise is the essence of tactical success.” CHAPTER III EMPLOYMENT IN THE FIELD WITH THE INDEPENDENT CAVALRY The Germans have resolutely adopted the plan of attaching machine guns to cavalry, and they seem thus to understand the modern combination of fire and shock tactics. To the machine gun the fire action, to the horseman the morale action--so much the more easy and productive of results, as the machine gun is the more powerful.--CHIEF OF 2ND BUREAU, French General Staff. Since this was written it has been generally recognised by the leading military authorities of the world that the machine gun is essentially a cavalry weapon; and Colonel Zaleski in a recent article on the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War goes so far as to say, “Even their addition to squadrons cannot be carried out too rapidly, and this weapon would now appear to be indispensable to cavalry.” The truth of this statement is obvious to the student of modern tactics who is also acquainted with the machine gun as organised and equipped on the Continent and in the United States, where it is as mobile as the cavalryman himself and as quick in coming into action.[7] When its true rôle is understood and its tremendous fire power made full use of, it will go far to render cavalry independent of the rifle, and to restore to them that dash and independence of action which made them the terror of the battlefields of the past. The following extract from an article in _The Times_ newspaper of August 23rd, 1905, by their special correspondent with the Japanese Army in Manchuria, shows the necessity for machine guns by emphasising the danger of training cavalry to fight as infantry.