No doubt a man who has been highly trained in
the use of the sword will use it better than the man who has not bad that training, but because there is not time for acquiring the niceties of swordsmanship it is little short of madness to sterilise some twenty-six thousand men for half the purposes of war. That, in truth, is the practical result of not allowing the Yeomanry to have swords. The moral effect of depriving them of the sword must not be forgotten. Men who are not given a sword, and are not given it because they are told that they are never to charge (that is, never to attack), are in danger of acquiring the most fatal lesson that a soldier can possibly learn,—the lesson that it is his business to give way to those who rush down on him, and never to rush down on them himself. As one, also, of our own poets has said,
"Men who wait to be charged
When you gallop will run."
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