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Ir is curious to note, alike in the past and the present history of England, the attitude of neglect invariably assumed by the country towards her Army. The reasons assigned for this fact are never very adequate. There is of course a traditional jealousy, handed down from the days of Cromwell and the later Stuarts, of all standing armies; a jealousy which, though utterly obsolete and absurd, is still cherished by the ignorant and foolish, and finds open expression in the Annual Army Act. For there are yet many Englishmen who try to persuade themselves that we do not possess a standing army, and could dispense with such an article if necessary. Again there is the deep-rooted prejudice among the lower classes against wearers of the red coat at large, a heritage which, in spite of the honourable estate accorded to military men during the Civil War, may be traced from the ill-treatment of our soldiers in the days of Elizabeth. Simple parents still lament over the enlistment of a son as though the barrack-yard were a convict-prison; and most unfortunately the thoughtlessness of the reformers of 1870, in turning their first batch of reservemen adrift upon the country without taking pains to prepare it for so novel an experiment, has given this prejudice a new lease of life.

No. 433.-VOL. LXXIII.

But the true reason probably lies elsewhere. All the battles of the British Army have been fought abroad. We have never been threatened, for instance, with such a wave of invasion as was rolled back by the French at Jemappes and Valmy; we have never seen the train of the victorious wounded toiling back over our own country roads, nor buried the victorious dead in our own green fields. We have had to take the histories of our wars where we could find them, and we have rarely found them well. There is in truth no military history in our language of the first rank, excepting only that of Napier. The rest are for the most part either so distinctly personal that they must be considered as autobiographies, or so purely technical as to weary and perplex the lay reader. We have no Brantôme to tell us of our great soldiers of three centuries past; and worse than that, no Smollett, no Michael Scott, no Marryat of the Army.

Recently, however, the retirement of the Duke of Cambridge has turned public attention to the imperfections of our military system. There is for the moment a real interest in the Army, and a desire to make good its defects; and this interest will probably endure for a few months until the civilian reader, choked as usual by

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a profusion of technical details, abandons in despair the task of comprehending what has been done, what is a-doing, and what remains to do. It is therefore with the perhaps too ambitious design of setting forth in intelligible language what is going forward in one branch of the military service that the present paper is written. That branch, as our title indicates, is the Cavalry.

The British Infantry has been repeatedly lauded by foreigners as the finest in the world, not (in at least one instance) without a thanksgiving that there was fortunately little of it. No one, least of all the great Wellington, has hitherto found a good word to speak of the British Cavalry. We have produced no great cavalry officer since Cromwell; and no action of our mounted troops is known to the majority of Englishmen except the charges of the Scots Greys and the Household Cavalry at Waterloo and of the two Brigades at Balaklava. Yet the recruits attracted to the mounted service have always been, and are now more than ever superior to those of the Infantry; our horses are better than those of any other nation, and our men ride them better than could any men in Europe. There is no reason why the British Cavalry should not enjoy as great a reputation as the British Infantry; but it does not, and the question naturally arises why it should not.

Let us glance for a moment at the history of our Cavalry. It may be said, for our purpose, to have been originally modelled on Cromwell's two famous regiments, and to have found its first definite form in the ten regiments of Horse and ten companies of Dragoons established by the Act of 1645.

Dismissing the Dragoons, who were only mounted Infantry, let us glance at these ten regiments, and note first that the organisation by regiments was in itself a novelty, the

Parliamentary Horse at the opening of the war having consisted of seventyfive independent units, each called a troop, and each under the command of a captain. The new regiments consisted of six hundred men under command of a Colonel; and they were organised in six troops, each one hundred strong. Each troop had three officers, Captain, Lieutenant, and Cornet, and was distributed for purposes of administration into three divisions, for each of which one of these officers was individually responsible, while the Captain of course was further responsible for the whole. Thus in the muster-rolls of the time a troop of Cavalry appears in three parallel columns; the Captain's division on the right, the Cornet's in the centre, and the Lieutenant's on the left; each officer's name standing at the head of his division with his corporal's name next below it. We ask the reader to note three points only: (1) The reform that substituted regiments for independent troops; (2) the large strength of troops, and consequently of regiments; (3) the admirable system which gave each officer command of a definite number of men, for whose efficiency he was directly answerable. Of drill we shall say nothing, for men had not yet grasped the principle that horses who have four legs require a different system for manœuvre from men who have two. Rapidity of tactical movement did not exist, because, with the current ideas of drill, it was impossible.

Let us now pass over a century to a great epoch in our military history, the time of the Seven Years' War, and briefly follow a typical regiment, which the present writer has by chance had occasion to study closely, through a part of its history. The corps was raised shortly after the victory of Minden in 1759, and its establishment was fixed at four troops of seventy-five rank and file apiece.

Recruits came in fast; in less than a month two more troops were added, and the strength was presently increased to a total of six hundred and seventy-eight non-commissioned officers and men. Here is the regiment of Cromwell's day reproduced and even enlarged; and moreover it has learned to manœuvre. For men had grown to recognise that the only feasible method of manœuvring long lines of horse is to tell off the ranks into small divisions which, wheeling off independently to right or left, break the line into a succession of small flexible columns, and these again, when the desired change of front or position has been effected, can be wheeled into line once more. But as usually happens when such novelties are introduced, the movements were far too numerous and complicated, requiring much pains to master and much practice to execute, and too apt on this account to be considered not as merely a means but as the beginning and end of all duty. The regulations also directly encouraged prettiness and precision in field-movements, and tended inevitably to degrade them into a pedantic exercise, which after a time became a positive curse. But the most deplorable of all changes was the loss of the old apportionment of responsibility among troop-officers, which had vanished in the interval since the Civil War. There was a new officer in each regiment called the Adjutant, and if there were work to be done in the regiment, he did it.

Our typical corps has hardly been put into shape when the war is ended by the Peace of Paris. Forthwith the Army is reduced, and our regiment, cut down to a fourth of its former strength, is scattered about Ireland in as many as six detachments, some of them numbering no more than thirty men. This vicious practice (as to which we shall presently

speak further) was practically a reversion to the system of independent troops, which had been found wanting in the Civil War. It was, however, usual all over the United Kingdom, and perhaps even necessary at a time when police as yet were not, and the means of communication were slow and difficult; for the military was the only force at hand to keep the peace in case of riot or disturbance.

Our corps, notwithstanding all difficulties, maintains its reputation, and at the outbreak of the American War in 1775 is selected first for

foreign service. But its strength amounts to barely one hundred and twenty men, and what is to be done? Deplete two other weak regiments to make good deficiencies; send it abroad with a total strength of two hundred and twenty-five men and one hundred and eighty-six horses, and despatch an officer to America to purchase remounts. The officer arrives, of course too late, to find that the Americans have been beforehand with him and that no horses can be procured. A second regiment of Cavalry is sent out from England with remounts, but as over four hundred horses out of four hundred and fifty die on the voyage, matters are little improved. The General clamours loudly for mounted troops, and finally the second cavalry regiment turns over the whole of its horses and many of its men to our original corps and embarks for England. Thus at last, after desperate efforts and at great sacrifice, our regiment reaches an effective strength of four hundred mounted troopers. "It was a hundred years ago," as Mrs. Shandy says. True, it was; and we beg our readers to remember it.

Twenty years pass, and our regiment returns in 1797 from the West Indies so thinned by yellow fever as to be a mere skeleton. It is strengthened by a draft from another corps, but having (as indeed it still