fight on foot entails. Hence, assuming that at the outset of a campaign
each side aims at securing a decisive success, both seek out an open
plain and a mounted charge, sword in hand, for the decision. When the
speed and skill of the combatants are approximately equal, collision
ensues simultaneously along parallel fronts, and the threat of the
overlapping line is the principal factor in the decision. The better the
individual training of man and horse the less will be the chances of
unsteadiness or local failures in execution, and the less the need of
reserves; hence the force which feels itself the most perfect in the
individual efficiency of both man and horse (on which therefore the
whole ultimately depends) can afford to keep fewer men in reserve and
can thus increase the width of its first line for the direct collision.
Careful preparation in peace is therefore the first guarantee of success
in action. This means that cavalry, unlike infantry, cannot be expanded
by the absorption of reserve men and horses on the outbreak of
hostilities, but must be maintained at war strength in peace, ready to
take the field at a moment's notice, and this is actually the standard
of readiness attained on the continent of Europe at the present day.

Further, uniformity of speed is the essential condition for the
execution of closed charges, and this obviously cannot be assured if big
men on little horses and small men on big horses are indiscriminately
mixed up in the same units. Horses and men have therefore been sorted
out everywhere into three categories, _light_, _medium_ and _heavy_, and
in periods when war was practically chronic, suitable duties have been
allotted to each. It is clear, on purely mechanical grounds, that the
greater the velocity of motion at the moment of collision the greater
will be the chances of success, and this greater speed will be on the
side of the bigger horses as a consequence of their longer stride. On
the other hand, these horses, by reason of their greater weight, are
used up much more rapidly than small ones. Hence, to ensure the greater
speed at the moment of contact, it is necessary to save them as much as
possible to keep them fresh for the shock only, and this has been the
practice of all great cavalry leaders all over the world, and has only
been departed from under special circumstances, as by the Germans in
France in 1870, when their cavalry practically rode everywhere
unopposed.

Col