OUR CAVALRY 63 



us was, however, in nowise more curious, and was much 

 less culpable, than our own ignorance of to-day respect- 

 ing our South American neighbors, despite even the Pan- 

 Americans. How many of us can tell the form of gov- 

 ernment of half the South American States, or their 

 geographical features or limits, or their chief products, 

 or their population, or climate, or even their capital cities, 

 unless he is still in the grammar-school. 



Our Civil War wrought a change. We hewed our- 

 selves into notice by the doughtiest blows delivered in 

 war since the era of Napoleon. Yet were the most con- 

 servative among the military autocrats of Europe unwill- 

 ing, till towards the very end, to look upon us in any 

 other light than as armed mobs, and even in the war of 

 '66 they declined to profit by our experience. But by 

 1870 the Germans, with their keen instinct for war and 

 more numerous ties with the States, had adopted many 

 of the methods we had first devised, and to-day, not 

 only are our campaigns studied as samples (of good and 

 bad alike, as almost all campaigns must be), but fair jus- 

 tice is done to our actual merit in the province of war, 

 and to the exceptional ability of some American generals. 



Among other ideas, they have borrowed from the ver- 

 satility of our cavalry arm. Cavalry which fought on 

 foot had been sneered at for generations. It could not, 

 said the ~beaux sabreurs, be even good mounted infantry. 

 A cavalryman of this ilk must "ride like a hinfantry 

 hadjutant." He was of hybrid growth neither fish, flesh, 

 nor good red-herring; and this, though history, among 

 other instances, shows us that Alexander's Companions 

 as at Sangala, modern Lahore dismounted and took in- 

 trenchments from which even his phalanx had recoiled, 

 while no body of five thousand cavalry ever held its own 

 in pitched battle so long by virtue of repeated and vigor- 



