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which he told them "young men never knew their politics." That he knew his politics was evident then. It was still more evident when, having left 'The Pall Mall' with Mr Henry Cust, he presently joined the staff of 'The Daily Telegraph.' There for some fifteen years he did admirable work for his paper and for England. Though it was his fate to battle, in a superb spirit of courage and cheerfulness, with ill-health, he never renounced a cause which he had once made his own, and he fought for his friends, for Mr Balfour and Lord Milner, with a light-hearted devotion which softened the asperity of politics, and almost persuaded you that to serve one's country was not altogether the act of a scoundrel, in spite of ProBoerism and Mr Lloyd-George. As we have said, it was foreign policy which had the greatest attraction for him, and many of his friends will remember a certain "Impossible Programme," which was destined to satisfy the ambition of all the Powers and to restore the world to a state of universal peace. But foreign policy did not absorb all his energies. Few writers of our time had so wide and deep a knowledge of South Africa and its problems as Iwan-Müller. He had studied the history of that country by the light of his practical understanding; he had watched the policy of his friend, Lord Milner, on the spot; and in 1902 he packed the results of his researches into a single volume- ' Lord Milner and

VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXXXVII.

will

South Africa'- which always be a mine of gold in which the historian will dig.

A foolish journalist the other day described Iwan-Müller as "the enemy of the people." The foolish journalist knew not him of whom he spoke. IwanMüller did not share the general belief that the unfit mentally and physically were the only persons fit to govern the Empire. In other words, he had no faith in an untrammelled democracy as a form of government. With this very proper exception, Iwan-Müller was essentially democratic. He was & man singularly devoid of class-feeling, as many a fisherman knows on on the Yorkshire coast, -a friend of strength and honesty wherever they might be found. On the other hand, he was the constant enemy of the claptrap which the adroit politician uses to flatter the people withal. was not for him to acclaim the supreme wisdom and omnipotent will of the unlettered voter. He knew too much of history and of politics to be betrayed into any such folly, and he thus proved himself in the best sense the friend and champion of popular rights.

It

Moreover, he was a scholar and a man of letters before he was a journalist, and he never ceased to cherish a love of classical learning. His first experiment in literature showed clearly enough the proper bent of his mind. It was always his pride to remember, as well it might be, that he belonged to the ingenious band which, so long ago as 1874, satirised Oxford

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in The Shotover Papers.' out of it. We have spoken of

This was the first journal to which Iwan-Müller contributed, and it may be said fearlessly that only in 'The Light-Green' of Cambridge has either University produced its rival in wit and vivacity. Seldom have a better set of parodies been put together, and IwanMüller's were the best of them all. It is common enough today to parody Swinburne. It was rare in 1874, and IwanMüller's 'Procuratores' remains the masterpiece of its kind. To quote a stanza here will do him no discredit, and we quote it with the greater pleasure because it was with pleasure that he himself recalled it after many years :

"O vestment of velvet and virtue,

O venomous victors of vice, Who hurt men who never have hurt you,

O, calm, cruel, colder than ice, Why wilfully wage ye this war, is Pure pity purged out of your

breast?

O purse-prigging Procuratores,
O pitiless pest."

But beyond all that IwanMüller did, there remains what Iwan-Müller was. None that was ever his friend will ever forget his presence or his laugh. He was a large man-large in aspect, large in character. He never entered a room without bringing good-humour into it, without driving all smallness

his tireless skill in the telling of stories. A word remains to say of his genius for friendship. He counted among his intimate friends many of the most distinguished of men-Lord Milner and Mr Balfour, Mr Rhodes. and Lord Curzon. He supported them loyally, and he accepted their counsel with the frankness that was natural to him. For many years Lord Salisbury reposed a perfect confidence in his discretion, and it is hardly too much to say that he carried in his head the political secrets of five-andtwenty years. He lived a full life, and did his work almost to the end. Not long since, when a crisis was expected abroad, Iwan - Müller represented his journal in Paris; he gathered into his own hands the threads of all the correspondence in Europe, and he discharged his delicate mission with a knowledge, a precision, which showed how much of reserve there was in his heart and mind. Thus it was his good fortune to preserve, even in sickness, his courage and energy. His many friends will take comfort in the memory that he died in the plenitude of his high powers, and that, when they last spoke with him, his humour was as buoyant, his wit was as light-footed, as in his triumphant youth.

Printed by William Blackwood and Sons.

BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE.

No. MCXXXVIII.

AUGUST 1910. VOL. CLXXXVIII.

THE LOST LESSON.

The Cavalry Manual of Training of 1904 was the outcome of this consensus of opinion.

WHEN, in 1902, our troops bination of circumstances so returned from South Africa, rarely to be found in modern our military authorities pro- war, that it was decided that ceeded to modify and readjust under our new scheme of our methods of military train- training the Cavalry soldier ing in the light of the experi- was to be taught that his ence we had gained in the rifle was his first and most war. It was agreed on all trustworthy weapon, and that sides that of all our troops the sword was to occupy a the Cavalry stood most most in lower place; while the lance need of a complete revolution was to be done away with in its ideas and training; and altogether. nothing was considered to have been more conclusively proved by the war than the necessity for training our Cavalry to depend on the rifle rather than on the sword and lance. It had become necessary, in the course of the war, to discard the lance altogether, and to issue rifles to our Cavalry, as it was found to be impossible for them to carry out their duties in the field by any other means. The opportunities for using the steel were so few, and its employment demanded a com

VOL. CLXXXVIII.-NO. MCXXXVIII.

In his famous preface to that work, Lord Roberts calls upon our Cavalry soldiers to realise the immense and almost unexplored field for usefulness and distinction which the true and intelligent combination of horse and rifle offers to them. Throughout the Manual the whole scheme of training was based on this combined use of mobility and fire, and a study of the book leaves no doubt

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The explanation of, and reasons for, this whole-hearted reversion to old beliefs and abandoned methods have never been made clear. The Manchurian war had intervened, but it had contained no startling illustrations of the efficacy of shock as opposed to fire tactics. No masses of independent cavalry had, through the instrumentality of lance and sword, destroyed the opposing cavalry, and thereby laid bare the plans and dispositions of the enemy's main armies. In no case did Cavalry intervene in any battle of all arms, and by means of the charge effect momentous results. What successes the

CAVALRY TRAINING, 1904.

"Cavalry must now be considered not only the eyes of an army, and the arm by which a demoralised enemy can best be destroyed, but, equipped with the new short rifle, it will take a part in war which it never has been able to take, or indeed expected to take, in the past."-(Preface.)

"But what does the development of rifle-fire consequent on the introduction of the long range, low trajectory magazine-rifle mean? It means that,

Russian and Japanese cavalries could claim were gained in fire fight, and not with the cold steel. The reason, then, for the change in our beliefs as to the proper lines on which to train our Cavalry was not that we had received any striking proofs in war of the falseness of our deductions from our experiences in South Africa, but can probably be traced to the fact that the men who had risen to authority between 1904 and 1907 had either changed their opinions or had never believed in the lessons of the Boer War.

As many people may have no notion of how complete this volte-face has really been, and how unmistakably the rifle has been dethroned in our Cavalry training in favour of shock, I propose, by means of parallel quotations from the Manuals of 1904 and 1907, to show the extent and thoroughness of the change that has come over the spirit of our training; and to illustrate my contention, which is that the Cavalry soldier is now being taught to rely on his sword and lance — which latter has been reintroducedand to distrust his rifle.

-

CAVALRY TRAINING, 1907.

"It must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel."-(C. T., p. 187.)

"The strategic service of reconnaissance must therefore be expected to culminate in a tactical collision, in which success will depend on the assumption of a vigorous mounted offensive in co-operation with the

guns. On such occasions dismounted work will have but negative results."

instead of the fire - arm being an
adjunct of the sword, the sword must
henceforth be an adjunct of the rifle ;-(C. T., p. 193.)
and cavalry soldiers must become
expert rifle-shots, and be constantly
trained to act dismounted."-(Pre-
face.)

"Good cavalry is never idle. It must not sit down and wait for opportunities to come to it; it must ever look out for opportunities for itself. When occasion arises for acting on foot the cavalry should, by its intelligence, quickness, and straight shooting, be able to beat infantry at their own game."--(C. T., 1904, p. 202.)

"Even if the modern rifle has limited the opportunities for a successful charge, now that our cavalry will also be armed with the best rifle, they possess a weapon and a capacity for complete independence which they have never previously possessed."-(C. T., 1904, p. 176.)

These quotations place it beyond doubt that the authors of the two Manuals differ fundamentally in their conception of the true lines on which Cavalry ought to be trained; and that the Cavalry soldier which the Manual of 1904 sought to produce belongs to a totally different type to that which the later book aims at creating.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of the point at issue. As the Manual of 1907 very rightly says "Experience shows that a body of Cavalry is really only capable of executing in war what it has practised in peace." If our men are taught in peace to trust in shock and steel, and to distrust the rifle, they will attempt in war to work on these lines; and their dismounted work will be hesitating, unenterprising, and feeble in both conception and execu

"A protracted fire fight is unsuited to cavalry."-(C. T., p. 213.)

"As it may be beyond the power of cavalry to achieve success in such operations, squadrons must be able to attack on foot, when the situation imperatively demands it."-(C. T., p. 187.)

"The side, too, which is numerically weaker may be driven to dismounted tactics in order to economise its force in one part of the field while it acts with energy" (i.e., mounted) "at the decisive moment on the main line of operations."-(C. T., p. 187.)

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Every cavalry soldier must therefore be trained .. to be efficient with the sword or lance, and to supplement these with the rifle when the situation is favourable to its use."(C. T., p. 189.)

tion. The converse is of course the case, and men trained primarily to depend on fire tactics will lose their skill in shock; and the whole case resolves itself into the question of whether the horse and the rifle, or the horse and cold steel, makes the better combination in carrying out the duties in the field which our Cavalry will be called upon to perform in that great war for the existence of the Empire for which all our forces are theoretically being trained.

I need hardly say that we must assume absolute equality in all respects other than armament. There is no reason why the soldier belonging to the horse and rifle type should not be every whit as enterprising, as dashing, and as good a horse-master, as the soldier trained to shock. The American War has proved this. No one has ventured to deny dash,

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