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Infantrymen with automobile transport, plentiful machine guns, Tanks and such-like accessories; that is the first Arm in modern war.  The factory hand and all the material of the shell route from the factory to the gun constitute the second Arm.  Thirdly comes the artillery, the guns and the photographic aeroplanes working with the guns.  Next I suppose we must count sappers and miners as a fourth Arm of greatly increased importance.  The fifth and last combatant Arm is the modern substitute for cavalry; and that also is essentially a force of aeroplanes supported by automobiles.  Several of the French leaders with whom I talked seemed to be convinced that the horse is absolutely done with in modern warfare.  There is nothing, they declared, that cavalry ever did that cannot now be done better by aeroplane.

This is something to break the hearts of the Prussian junkers and of old-fashioned British army people.  The hunt across the English countryside, the preservation of the fox as a sacred animal, the race meeting, the stimulation of betting in all classes of the public; all these things depend ultimately upon the proposition that the “breed of horses” is of vital importance to the military strength of Great Britain.  But if the arguments of these able French soldiers are sound, the cult of the horse ceases to be of any more value to England than the elegant activities of the Toxophilite Society.  Moreover, there has been a colossal buying of horses for the British army, a tremendous organisation for the purchase and supply of fodder, then employment of tens of thousands of men as grooms, minders and the like, who would otherwise have been in the munition factories or the trenches.

To what possible use can cavalry be put?  Can it be used in attack?  Not against trenches; that is better done by infantrymen following up gunfire.  Can it be used against broken infantry in the open?  Not if the enemy has one or two machine guns covering their retreat.  Against expose infantry the swooping aeroplane with a machine gun is far more deadly and more difficult to hit.  Behind it your infantry can follow to receive surrenders; in most circumstances they can come up on cycles if it is a case of getting up quickly across a wide space.  Similarly for pursuit the use of wire and use of the machine gun have abolished the possibility of a pouring cavalry charge.  The swooping aeroplane does everything that cavalry can do in the way of disorganising the enemy, and far more than it can do in the way of silencing machine guns.  It can capture guns in retreat much more easily by bombing traction engines and coming down low and shooting horses and men.  An ideal modern pursuit would be an advance of guns, automobiles full of infantry, motor cyclists and cyclists, behind a high screen of observation aeroplanes and a low screen of bombing and fighting aeroplanes.  Cavalry might advance across fields and so forth, but only as a very accessory part of the general advance....