ount sappers and miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased
importance. The fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute
for cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes
supported by automobiles. Several of the French leaders with whom I
talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely done with in
modern warfare. There is nothing, they declared, that cavalry ever did
that cannot now be done better by aeroplane.

This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and
of old-fashioned British army people. The hunt across the English
countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal, the race
meeting, the stimulation of betting in all classes of the public; all
these things depend ultimately upon the proposition that the "breed
of horses" is of vital importance to the military strength of Great
Britain. But if the arguments of these able French soldiers are sound,
the cult of the horse ceases to be of any more value to England than the
elegant activities of the Toxophilite Society. Moreover, there has
been a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous
organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then employment
of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the like, who would
otherwise have been in the munition factories or the trenches.

To what possible use can cavalry be put? Can it be used in attack?
Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen following up
gunfire. Can it be used against broken infantry in the open? Not if the
enemy has one or two machine guns covering their retreat. Against expose
infantry the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun is far more deadly
and more difficult to hit. Behind it your infantry can follow to receive
surrenders; in most circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is
a case of getting up quickly across a wide space. Similarly for
pursuit the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the
possibility of a pouring cavalry charge. The swooping aeroplane does
everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising the enemy,
and far more than it can do in the way of silencing machine guns. It can
capture guns in retreat much more easily by bombing traction engines
and coming down low and shooting horses and men. An ideal modern
pursuit would be an advance of guns, automobiles full of infantry, motor
cyclists and cyclists, behind a high screen of observation aeroplanes
an