THE BICYCLE OR THE HORSE?
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Sirt,—" Linesman" is clearly not afraid of his convictions, for he plays on the literary principle of "suspense" for all that it may be worth before ending with a crash on the word which he knows will provoke a laugh,—the bicycle! So that is to be our military horse for the future. For my own part, I do not laugh ; I believe "Linesman" to be perfectly right within the reasonable limits which he has described. No doubt there was a time when a passage on the back of a dolphin was more expeditious and not more unsafe than any other means of crossing the ocean. No doubt there was a time when nothing was more efficacious in war than a good stout elephant; and of course the Roman War Office was greatly to blame for not acting on the suggestions of those who (of course) predicted that Hannibal would use elephants. But we do not use them now. The horse in its turn has become dolphinesque, elephantine. The well-brained army of the future must have a means of transport—it will not want chargers—which will
be a handy and passive instrument of its highly cultivated brain. The instrument must be a vassal and a tributary of the brain; not an agent with a will of its own which some- times plies in contrary directions, and always demands an expenditure of nerve-power to keep it straight. Bicycles and motor-cars would not have stampeded at Nicholson's Nek, nor galloped Lord Methuen's convoy into confusion. This war has shown us that the deadliest of weapons is not a big gun, nor a Mamim, nor a sabre, nor a lance, but a rifle with a good man who has a straight eye and the salt of a little judgment behind it. That being so, the next point is to provide our rifleman with seven-league boots, so that he may multiply himself by three, or, like the bird of Sir Boyle Roche's rhetoric, may be in two places at once. How to choose the boots? Obviously he must be provided with boots that fit him. Now in this country a hundred men can ride a bicycle well to every one that can ride a horse well. If we put a rifleman on a bicycle, we are letting him fulfil ten- dencies which come naturally to him. That is always a sound doctrine to act upon, for so long as we thrust foreign or artificial methods on a man, so long shall we be repaid with clumsy and artificial mental responses. The best, the only intelligent, soldier at bottom is he who has turned his natural habits of life and habits of mind to military uses. 'But," it is said, "no other war will be like the Boer War. We shall have to meet other methods by like methods." Why 9—in the name of De Wet, why? I have never heard that a Boer, even the most intelligent, argued that the burghers should be slow because we were slow; that they should appear pictur- esquely silhouetted against the sky-line because we appeared there; that they should expose their guns because we exposed ours; or that they should prefer unmounted men because we once preferred them. No ; they said, rather, that a stroke unpractised by the fencing-masters is the stroke least easily parried. These are principles to bear in mind. The bicycle may not be the best vehicle for their expression, and in any case it would only be one of many, but both the bicycle and the motor-car are, as one may say not inappropriately of them, on the right road.—I am, Sir, &c.,
J. B. ATKINS,
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