small
detached bodies do not sell their lives dearly; a considerably larger
force is able to make them prisoners without difficulty. Accordingly we
decided that if a blue force, for example, has one or more men isolated,
and a red force of at least double the strength of this isolated
detachment moves up to contact with it, the blue men will be considered
to be prisoners.

That seemed fair; but so desperate is the courage and devotion of lead
soldiers, that it came to this, that any small force that got or seemed
likely to get isolated and caught by a superior force instead of waiting
to be taken prisoners, dashed at its possible captors and slew them
man for man. It was manifestly unreasonable to permit this. And in
considering how best to prevent such inhuman heroisms, we were reminded
of another frequent incident in our battles that also erred towards
the incredible and vitiated our strategy. That was the charging of
one or two isolated horse-men at a gun in order to disable it. Let me
illustrate this by an incident. A force consisting of ten infantry and
five cavalry with a gun are retreating across an exposed space, and a
gun with thirty men, cavalry and infantry, in support comes out upon a
crest into a position to fire within two feet of the retreating cavalry.
The attacking player puts eight men within six inches of his gun and
pushes the rest of his men a little forward to the right or left in
pursuit of his enemy. In the real thing, the retreating horsemen would
go off to cover with the gun, "hell for leather," while the infantry
would open out and retreat, firing. But see what happened in our
imperfect form of Little War! The move of the retreating player began.
Instead of retreating his whole force, he charged home with his mounted
desperadoes, killed five of the eight men about the gun, and so by the
rule silenced it, enabling the rest of his little body to get clean away
to cover at the leisurely pace of one foot a move. This was not like
any sort of warfare. In real life cavalry cannot pick out and kill its
equivalent in cavalry while that equivalent is closely supported by other
cavalry or infantry; a handful of troopers cannot gallop past well and
abundantly manned guns in action, cut down the gunners and interrupt
the fire. And yet for a time we found it a little difficult to frame
simple rules to meet these two bad cases and prevent such scandalous
possibilities. We did at last contrive to do so; we