5

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.