LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
WAR AND THE ARME BLANCHE. [To THE EDITOR OF Tan "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I appeal to you on a point of controversial etiquette. An author writes a book. It is reviewed favourably in the Spectator. Thereupon an anonymous correspondent writes a long letter of attack, ostensibly on the book, whose author he repeatedly names and makes the target of his criticisms throughout, but in reality upon the conclusions of the reviewer as derived from a study of the book. It is apparent on the face of the letter that the correspondent has not read a line of the book which he condemns, because his remarks show complete ignorance of the author's case and include not the remotest allusion to anything actually written by him.
At the same time he so words his letter as to convey the impression that he has studied and understood the author's views and is making a reasoned reply to them. Is this fair controversy ? Such is my situation, as the author of " War and the Arme Blanche," towards your correspondent " Common-Sense " (Spectator, July 16th). The grievance is not imaginary. Not long ago I had exactly the same experi- ence at the hands of a cavalry officer in a daily paper. When I challenged him to admit that he had not read what he pre- tended to be attacking, he owned up. I now challenge "Common-Sense," who, as his letter shows, is also a cavalry officer, in common fairness, to take the same step.
His method of attack is even less scrupulous than that of his brother-officer; for he accuses me at the outset of forming an a priori theory and " omitting inconsistent or inconvenient facts," a charge which, if it be not explicitly supported and proved, is grossly offensive to an historian. What incon- sistent and inconvenient facts have I omitted? He proceeds by innuendo to specify them, and gives over again the old cavalry version of certain incidents in South Africa, all of which are dealt with in the closest detail in my book, and adduces besides, as though they were wholly new and bad been overlooked by your reviewer and me, familiar arguments like the argument from " starvation," all of which, again, were examined and criticised, wrongly perhaps, but faithfully, in my book. And while ignoring the critical side of my case, he shows himself wholly ignorant of the constructive side. He makes this cool suggestion to you, Sir :—
"If you doubt the correctness of the cavalry views to which I subscribe, I merely suggest that you should ask Mr. Childers one question: Were there any instances in the South African War when mounted attacks were unsuccessful?' The Boors com- menced the war with purely dismounted work ; but even they found that to make successful war you must attack, and at Bakenlaagte and in the West we find them galloping over our dismounted riflemen."
I ask you to picture, Sir, the feelings of an author who finds himself parodied and travestied in this ridiculous fashion by a critic who has not taken the trouble to study what he mis- represents. As if "attack were an attribute solely of cavalry, denied even to infantry, and a fortiori to mounted riflemen !
So far from deprecating mounted attacks, it was one of the main purposes of my book to show that the deadly modern rifle is an infinitely better inspiration for attacks, mounted or
dismounted, than the lance or sword, and has in fact produced incomparably greater results ; and as part of my proof I instanced these very Boer charges which he alludes to. But that was only a part of my proof. Does " Common-Sense " suppose that our mounted riflemen in South Africa never attacked and never charged P Why at the single action of Bothaville a handful of De Lisle's Mounted Infantry, by riding into point-blank range of De Wet's laager and holding their ground until reinforced, did more damage than the steel weapon did in the whole course of the war. Does " Common-Sense " really regard the present successors of our Colonial mounted riflemen as half-soldiers, with their " right arms cut off " ? They never did and never will believe in steel weapons ; they saw the ignominious failure, not of the cavalry, but of the steel weapons carried by the cavalry, and the absolute supremacy of the rifle both in offence and defence, in the charge into close quarters, and in the slower but no less deadly forms of attack. And he tells these men that their horses are a " temptation to flight," and that they are less reliable than infantry 1
"Common-Sense" imputes to me, and then solemnly demolishes, absurdities which would never enter into the imagination of any one who had understood the significance of the rifle as a weapon for mounted men. He fathers on me his own misleading use of the word " shock," and by that easy device credits me with the strange view that horsemen, however armed, should not ride rapidly into action, while triumphantly convicting your reviewer of ignorance for saying that there had been no " shock " in the two great modern wars. Of course there has been no true shock, as now practised in the form of the knee-to-knee charge, as the " culmination " of their training, by the regular cavalry. There have been a few open-order steel-charges with almost negligible results, and a great many terribly destructive open-order rifle-charges. In his rooted conviction that the horse is a dangerous encum- brance unless the rider carries a sword, he suggests that I would have had French walk to Kimberley—backwards- instead of riding there. He ought to have read my account of the Slip Drift ride before he saddled me with such nonsense. The Colonial irregulars did not walk backwards to the relief of Mafeking. He should have read my remarks on Buller's use of cavalry and criticised those remarks instead of his own conception of what my remarks might have been. He should have read my chapter on the Manchurian War and attacked that, not what he surmised to be the " ideal of Mr. Childers" in connexion with the Russian and Japanese cavalries. Lastly, he should have read what I wrote about the bayonet before he attributed to me the aim of "a fortiori taking away the bayonets of the infantry." If his common-sense does not enable " Common-Sense" to see the difference between the lance and sword, which are wielded from horseback, and the bayonet, which is fixed to the rifle and is used as an element in fire tactics, he has not appre- hended the primary conditions of this controversy. If there is any "a fortiori" at all, it is the a fortiori of adding the bayonet to the equipment of the mounted rifleman instead of abstracting it from the equipment of the foot rifleman. For my own part, I ventured to doubt the wisdom of adding it to the mounted equipment ; but the point is subsidiary, not essential, and it has nothing whatever to do with the lance
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