is, let him try. If the men upon the horses
are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on foot some feet ahead
(such as is the lance), the threat is more efficacious still, and no
single man (save here and there a fellow full of some religion) will meet
it.

But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the
individual man would never guess, and which is none the less
experimentally certain--which is this: that if a certain number of men on
foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will swerve
or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be
efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between the
nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the rider's
desire that his horse should go forward and the horse's training, which
teaches him that not only his rider, but men in general, are his masters.
What is true here of horses is not true of dogs, who think all men not
their masters, but their enemies, and desire to kill them, and what is
more, can do so, which a horse cannot. A charge of large mounted dogs
against unshaken infantry would succeed. A charge of mounted horses
against unshaken infantry, if that infantry be sufficiently dense, will
fail.

To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction is the
instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and hammer it
into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all will be well.
This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only with staves. It
is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they are possessed of
missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is impossible from
charging riders, and an infantry force armed with missile weapons, and
unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and still more by
experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern conditions, where
missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this goes without saying;
but even with a range of from fifty to eighty yards of a missile that will
bring down a horse or stop him, infantry can easily be made sufficiently
confident if it is unshaken. Now, to shake it, there is nothing available
(or was nothing before the art of flying was developed) save other men,
equally stationary, armed with other missiles. The long-bowman of the
Plantagenets knew that he had a missile weapon superior to anything that
his enemy could bring against him. He therefore