has) an extraordinary power of attracting recruits, it quickly recovers itself, and in 1801 parades with the magnificent strength of a thousand men, ten troops of the old establishment of one hundred men apiece, all superbly mounted, a sight for gods and men.

This is what a good English cavalry regiment can do if it is permitted. But the Peace of Amiens is presently signed, and the strength is at once diminished to eight troops; is indeed in process of being weakened to six, when the renewal of the war puts an end to all reduction. Thenceforward for twenty years our regiment does duty abroad, and there retains, notwithstanding appalling losses from sickness, a fixed establishment of about eight hundred men.

The period of Indian service expires; most of the men are turned over to other regiments in the country, and the remainder, a mere two hundred, sail for England. Two thirds of these are immediately discharged or invalided on landing, and with a bare fifty men for the nucleus of a new corps, the officers set to work to bring the regiment up to its new establishment of six troops, three hundred men and two hundred horses. It is the opening of the reign of George the Fourth: the country is still suffering from the exhaustion of a long war; and the Army is hidden away as far as possible and left to take care of itself in all matters except that of dress, whereon the King exhausts all the resources of a vulgar imagination. The lessons of the Peninsula are forgotten, and the training of the Cavalry, most of which is as usual scattered broadcast in detachments, consists in drill of the stiffest and absurdest kind, a legacy from that most mischievous of pedants, David Dundas, better known from his master-failing as "Old Pivot." >> 1

1 His classical work is a large quarto volume dated 1788.

Officers cry loudly for reform in the Military Magazines, but in vain; when suddenly the peace of forty years breaks up, and we are face to face with the Crimean War.

Our regiment is ordered to embark on foreign service, but, being through no fault of its own unprepared, is obliged to leave two of its six troops behind to form a depot, and finally sails, even after reinforcement by the usual drafts, with the miserable strength of two hundred and fifty men. Before it reaches the Crimean peninsula these numbers have been reduced by sickness to less than two hundred, and it goes into action at Balaklava, even so not the weakest regiment of its brigade, with less than one hundred and fifty men in the ranks. Having been practically annihilated in the battle, its establishment is raised to eight troops, and it comes home four hundred strong. Thereupon it is at once reduced to six troops, and the process of diminution is in full swing, when it receives orders to prepare for service against the mutineers in India. Up goes the establishment again to ten troops: no less than five regiments are drained to bring it up to strength; and thus reinforced by a hundred and thirty-two men, strangers to their officers and to each other, the regiment sails for Bombay four hundred and fifty strong. There for the present let us leave it.

But all this, it will be said, is an old story. What have we to do with the century from 1759 to 1859 ? Was not the army reformed in 1870 and the succeeding years? Certainly there has been reform in the Army; it is sometimes called reorganisation, but this is a mistake, for the Army after more than two centuries still awaits its first true organisation for its principal business of war. We all know how the reformers dealt with the Infantry; how they

found it an aggregate of individual battalions, incoherent as an army, and strong only in the regimental spirit, that esprit de corps which had gained for it its many victories; how finding this spirit in the way of their schemes they swept it away with the lightest of hearts, and destroyed the sole source of our former strength without reflecting what they should put in its place; so that the last state of our Infantry is on the whole perhaps even worse than the first.

But the Cavalry the reformers left severely alone. It consists, as before, of three regiments of Life-Guards, seven of Dragoon-Guards, three of Dragoons, five of Lancers, and thirteen of Hussars, with numbers, titles, and facings intact. Short service indeed was introduced, as into the whole Army. Further, in the course of the past twenty years the establishment of regiments has been fixed permanently at eight troops, or rather at four squadrons, for the organisation by squadrons has now been definitely adopted; the yoke of Old Pivot has been shaken off, and the system of drill has been altered to meet modern ideas. Finally it has been recognised by the study of the German Cavalry in 1870-71, that the functions of men and officers of modern Cavalry have a wider scope than the ideal execution of parade-movements. Thus much we have learned in a hundred years, and so far as it goes the lesson is decidedly to the good.

But for the most part, as we have said, the reformers have left the Cavalry severely alone; and, as we proceed to prove the statement, readers will see that we have not referred to past centuries without a purpose. Let us return to our typical regiment. We saw it in 1763 in Ireland dispersed in five or six detachments: in Ireland again, rather more than a century later, we find it quartered once more in detachments

1

at Ballincollig, Limerick, Cork, Fermoy, Clogheen. Coming forward twenty years or so into quite recent days, we find it scattered about in one year at Leeds, Birmingham, and Liverpool, in another at Hounslow, Kensington, and Kensington, and Hampton Court. Going deeper into the matter we find from an article in THE JOURNAL OF THE UNITED SERVICE INSTITUTION (to which we here once for all acknowledge our obligations) that though there are twenty-one regiments of Cavalry at home, there are but sixteen headquarter-stations for the whole of them, while detachments must be found for no fewer than twenty-one stations separate from headquarters. Thus half the regiments are split up into distinct bodies. What does this mean? It means that we have not yet grasped the lesson taught by Cromwell that coherent regiments are better than isolated troops; that, though improved police, railways, and telegraphs have long done away with the need for sprinkling the country with petty military bodies, we suffer our Cavalry to be ruined in order to save rich municipalities the expense of maintaining a small force of mounted constables. The gain of a few votes is weighed against the loss of an army, and the Army, in the sight of sneering Europe and of sluggish, complacent England, solemnly kicks the beam.

For these detachments are a curse to officers and men, and most mischievous, if not fatal, to efficiency and discipline. What is a regiment? It is as truly as any University, Inn, or College an ancient and honourable Society, formed for the purpose of training young men in a great and noble profession. It has its purpose to attain, its traditions to cherish, its reputation to uphold, its unity to preserve, and to this end, over and above all Queen's

1 By Colonel Graves, Twentieth Hussars; vol. xxxix. No. 210. August, 1895.

If

Regulations, it possesses its own code of laws and customs, both written and unwritten, which goes by the name of the regimental system. If a regiment have a bad system, though it may be raised for a time to the highest perfection by a good commanding officer, yet it will inevitably relapse into its former low estate as soon as an incompetent commander succeeds him. it have a good system it will maintain its efficiency through a whole generation of useless colonels. Now how is a regimental system to be kept unimpaired if the regiment is parted into small pieces for whole years together? Take the case of a public school, which in many respects affords the nearest parallel to a regiment, and let us select Harrow as one which enjoys no exceptional advantages, but is remarkable for its discipline and esprit de corps. Suppose that the head-master with his house and one or two more were left at Harrow, but was ordered to detach one house to Watford, another to St. Albans, two more to Hertford, another to London, and another to Richmond. What would be the inevitable consequence? Surely that Harrow would lose all unity, that it would cease to be a public school and sink into a congeries of private schools, differing in tone, in merit, and even in system, according to the character of the master in charge, and absolutely wanting in coherence. Moreover, every one would admit that to require of the headmaster any other result than this would be the height of absurdity and injustice.

The results are precisely the same in a regiment. If the officer in command of the detachment be lazy, the odds are overwhelming that the whole detachment will become lazy likewise. An energetic subaltern may save it, if the regimental system be good, but even so always at the cost of discipline, for the men will

turn to him as the true commander ; while, if his superior be jealous and foolish as well as lazy, he will either be driven mad or himself become lazy from sheer despair. If on the contrary the officer be a good man and a zealous soldier, there is another danger little less great. There are few men who do not enjoy the feeling of being their own masters and the sense of independent command; the abler they are the more they will delight in the feeling, and the more strongly they will impress their own idiosyncrasies upon those who serve under them. Such a man works up his detachment to the highest pitch of excellence possible to him, introducing, it may be, a few ideas of his own, new but excellent in themselves; he is justifiably proud of his little command, and grows to look upon it as a thing apart. Likely enough he has with him none but young noncommissioned officers, the old hands having been secured by his seniors who wish to be saved all trouble on other detached stations. He trains up his young ones to do the higher work entrusted to them; they catch the infection and work with a will, for, like the officer, they exult in the freedom and responsibility of holding greater office than is assigned to them at headquarters. But the day comes when the regiment is reunited. The officer sinks from superior to subordinate command. Very likely through the return of some senior from employment on the staff he loses the satisfaction even of commanding a squadron. He can no longer take his own line; his little improvements are isolated in the regiment, are scoffed at, neglected, and abolished, His interest in his work wanes, he grows impatient and discontented. The young non-commissioned officers also loathe the return from higher to lower work and the degradation, as it seems to them, to their former

dependence. There is every chance that all alike will become grumblers, and presently leave the service, which thus through sheer vice of system loses its best men. Nor, it may be guessed, can the change be without an evil and unsettling effect upon every private in the regiment.

But of the two evils the likelier is that the detachment will grow lazy, for in many both of the headquarters and outquarters that lie in large towns there is no drill-ground, and it is necessary to waste hours in marching through miles of streets before any practical work can be done at all. Whatever an officer's energy, he is always hampered by the weakness of his numbers as to the scope and variety of the instruction that he can impart, and by the consequent difficulty of interesting men in their lesson. Occasionally too he may be embarrassed by some egregious blunder at the district's headquarters. For instance, we once saw an officer sent with a detachment to Hampton Court and kept for several days without any horses. There he was, with thirty or forty men and nothing on earth for them to do, with no stables, no possibility of drill, and every temptation surrounding his men to induce them to break out from pure lightness of heart (as is very common on arrival at a small out-station), and bring trouble on themselves and disgrace to the regiment. But the idea of having a detachment at Hampton Court to guard two hundred women is an absurd anomaly. There is no means of excluding the public from the barrack-yard, and the populace has been known positively to stop the penal drill of defaulters by its hooting,-a fine encouragement to discipline !

So much for this abominable system and its effect on our Cavalry. We have asserted without fear of contradiction that a head-master whose

school should be treated like a regiment of Cavalry would be acquitted of the consequences. A colonel is not acquitted. The country may place his regiment out of his reach, but he is still responsible. Colonel Graves gives an example of a regiment which in the course of the decade 1879-1889 passed through the hands of six commanding officers, of whom the first three never had their entire regiment on parade during the whole term of their command; the fourth had them concentrated for but three months, the fifth for but five, and the sixth for a year. And this kind of thing is still going on unaltered. Any Cavalry officer can tell with little trouble the number of regiments that have not stood together in line for months and even years. From time to time, however, their turn comes for concentration; they are sent out to the yearly manœuvres, and critics complain that they are not up to the mark and that too much time, which should be devoted to higher training, has to be given up simply to drill. How can it be otherwise when their colonels never have a chance even of seeing them, and their officers have not so much as ground to drill them on?

Let us now pass to another matter on which we laid stress in reviewing the past history of our typical regiment, the strength of our various Cavalry corps when called upon for active service. We saw that on

no single occasion was it strong enough to take the field without drafts both of men and horses from other regiments. Is it otherwise now? In 1882 (we quote Colonel Graves) four regiments were required for for the Egyptian War, with four hundred and twenty-four men and horses to each, or a total of, say, seventeen hundred in all. Not a very great force, one would imagine; but it was more than we could produc

for there were not four regiments with the required strength of horses fit for active service to be found in the kingdom. Accordingly four regiments were sent out, with three hundred and sixty-five horses gathered from every quarter of the compass. One regiment was made out of the three Household Cavalry regiments, and the rest were supplied by stripping bare certain other regiments that remained at home. One of these gave up two hundred horses; another was left with a little over a hundred, and these of course the least efficient in the regiment. Drafts of men were also taken in the same fashion wherever they could be found, and in the first reinforcement sent out there were men literally from every one of the twenty-one regiments at home. In fact there was not a single real regiment there, but a collection of deputations from the British Cavalry at large; in the most ironical sense a representative force,-representative of a vicious system and of a blind and foolish British public.

In 1885, again, one regiment was required; but instead of a single regiment complete, a wing, that is to say a nominal half-regiment, was sent out from two regiments. As a matter of fact two regiments were really sent out; for when one wing had been brought up to war-strength at the expense of the other, there was little remaining but a depot. At the time of the Crimean War, which military reformers are so fond of denouncing, we had at any rate the courage to send two hundred and fifty away and confess that it represented the whole of a regiment; but in these days, though the case is precisely the same, we say that we have sent out a wing, to delude the public with the idea that we have another wing equally strong waiting at home.

So much for 1882 and 1885; is the condition of things any better now?

We greatly doubt it. It was indeed stated in the House of Commons that certain regiments on a war-footing had five hundred and eighty-one men and five hundred and eleven horses, while others had six hundred and thirty men and five hundred and thirty horses. But, as Colonel Graves says, where are they? And he answers, on paper only. The largest barracks in the kingdom can only just accommodate four hundred and twenty-four horses, and even if these barracks be full, there must needs be many horses too young or too old for active

service. Even therefore if the men be as numerous as stated (and it is certain that many of them would also be unfit for active service), there would be a difference of a hundred horses to be made up somehow with endless confusion and difficulty. If again, from want of barrack-space, these strong regiments are split up into detachments, then we unhesitatingly assert that they are unfit, for reasons already given, to take the field for

war.

As a matter of fact eleven of the Cavalry regiments at home muster between them, by admission, less than three thousand horses, from which again a proportion must be deducted of inefficients, too young or too unsound for active service. It would be an extreme assumption to suppose that these regiments could turn out more than two hundred and fifty efficient men and horses apiece in the event of a declaration of war, and then the aggregate strength of the whole eleven would barely exceed that of four French regiments. Moreover, if it were decided to send the less weak regiments abroad, these eleven would perforce be stripped of most of their horses and of a good many men in order to fill up gaps, and would be practically reduced to shadows.

But where, it may be asked, is the Reserve? Now there is an aphorism