The Army manoeuvres this year are specially important because they
are the first gathering up and piecing together by highly-trained troops of all the various and conflicting lessons of the War. There is a famous saying that an army marches upon its stomach, which means not that an army crawls, but that it cannot get on without its food. The speed of an army is the speed of its slowest unit, and that speed in all the wars has been Slower than many people believe—only between two and three miles an hour. One of the principal objects of the present manoeuvres is to see how far an army can be speeded up. The speed of cavalry, it is hoped, may be eclipsed by the infantryman—who remains the basis of every army—if infantry are conveyed from point to point in motor lorries and tanks. The speed of tanks themselves has been raised to about twenty-five miles an hour, and, of course, it is imaginable that for shock tactics they may displace cavalry.
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