But our latest development has been in the direction of killing hand to hand or taking prisoners.  We found it necessary to distinguish between an isolated force and a force that was merely a projecting part of a larger force.  We made a definition of isolation.  After a considerable amount of trials we decided that a man or a detachment shall be considered to be isolated when there is less than half its number of its own side within a move of it.  Now, in actual civilised warfare small detached bodies do not sell their lives dearly; a considerably larger force is able to make them prisoners without difficulty.  Accordingly we decided that if a blue force, for example, has one or more men isolated, and a red force of at least double the strength of this isolated detachment moves up to contact with it, the blue men will be considered to be prisoners.

That seemed fair; but so desperate is the courage and devotion of lead soldiers, that it came to this, that any small force that got or seemed likely to get isolated and caught by a superior force instead of waiting to be taken prisoners, dashed at its possible captors and slew them man for man.  It was manifestly unreasonable to permit this.  And in considering how best to prevent such inhuman heroisms, we were reminded of another frequent incident in our battles that also erred towards the incredible and vitiated our strategy.  That was the charging of one or two isolated horse-men at a gun in order to disable it.  Let me illustrate this by an incident.  A force consisting of ten infantry and five cavalry with a gun are retreating across an exposed space, and a gun with thirty men, cavalry and infantry, in support comes out upon a crest into a position to fire within two feet of the retreating cavalry.  The attacking player puts eight men within six inches of his gun and pushes the rest of his men a little forward to the right or left in pursuit of his enemy.  In the real thing, the retreating horsemen would go off to cover with the gun, “hell for leather,” while the infantry would open out and retreat, firing.  But see what happened in our imperfect form of Little War!  The move of the retreating player began.  Instead of retreating his whole force, he charged home with his mounted desperadoes, killed five of the eight men about the gun, and so by the rule silenced it, enabling the rest of his little body to get clean away to cover at the leisurely pace of one foot a move.  This was not like any sort of warfare.  In real life cavalry cannot pick out and kill its equivalent in cavalry while that equivalent is closely supported by other cavalry or infantry; a handful of troopers cannot gallop past well and abundantly manned guns in action, cut down the gunners and interrupt the fire.  And yet for a time we found it a little difficult to frame simple rules to meet these two bad cases and prevent such scandalous possibilities.  We did at last contrive to do so; we invented what we call the melee, and our revised rules in the event of a melee will be found set out upon a later page.  They do really permit something like an actual result to hand-to-hand encounters.  They abolish Horatius Cocles.