MILITARY CYCLIST TRAINING.* Tins text-book just issued from the War
Office resembles most productions of that great State Department in recent times; it is, in fact," provisional," which, being interpreted, means that its authors have little or no confidence is its permanent usefulness or in the soundness of its principles; and in respect of this particular work their want of confidence is fully justified. The fact is that the same mistaken notions which have sacrificed the eyclist companies as they existed in the Volunteer Force have inspired every page of this drill-book. The theory that the cyclist belongs to an independent arm, and is to have a role apart from the infantry, cavalry, and artillery, is, in the opinion of most soldiers, a fundamental heresy. It is a platitude of elementary tactics that military efficiency is really only possible if all arms and details are co-ordinated and learn to co-operate. But this cyclist manual, instead of dealing, as it should, with just those details of drill that are necessary for a soldier who has to ride and handle his cycle, and leaving him and his instructors to the ordinary text-books on general military matters, enters at length into what it pleases to call " The Problem of Home Defence," and instructs those responsible for the training of the cyclist to keep this narrow view of their duties before them. Part II., under the head of " Field Training," is devoted almost exclusively to the assumption that the cyclist will be engaged in coast defence, and that he will "run the show on his own" without relation to or co-operation with any other force. This part occupies forty pages out of the eighty comprising the book; it assigns to the cyclist force " being raised" duties along the coast that might well occupy a hundred thousand men, and it is positively depressing to con- template what is expected of the two thousand three hundred men who are all the new scheme has left of the eight thousand cyclists and over who formed the pick of the old Volunteer Force.
[4d.] • Cyclist Praising (Previsional). 1908. London : Published by the War Office
On the whole, one cannot congratulate either the organising branch of the War Office, which has reduced the number of cyclists available by three-fourths, or the Department respon- sible for a text-book which gives such damning evidence of lack of imagination and want of knowledge of military science on the part of its authors, and is worth reading only as a model of what should be avoided by those to whose loi it may fall to write other " Training Manuals (Provisional)."
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