Talk:Cavalry

Surplus

• The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that 'the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars', dismissing motorized weapons as mere 'accessories to the man and horse'. Haig's brother concurred: the cavalry would 'never be scrapped to make room for the tanks'. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart's work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of 'a new type of warfare on the largest scale' that he learned the importance of 'the concentration of armour'.
  • Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2006), pp. 386-387 -- unpacked quote Ficaia (talk) 09:09, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

• From their black tents, long files of horse, they stream’d:
  As when, some grey November morn, the files,
  In marching order spread, of long-neck’d cranes
  Stream over Casbin, and the southern slopes
  Of Elburz, from the Aralian estuaries,
  Or some frore Caspian reed-bed, southward bound
  For the warm Persian sea-board: so they stream’d
  The Tartars of the Oxus, the King’s guard,
  First, with black sheep-skin caps and with long spears;
  Large men, large steeds; who from Bokhara come
  And Khiva, and ferment the milk of mares.
  Next the more temperate Toorkmuns of the south,
  The Tukas, and the lances of Salore,
  And those from Attruck and the Caspian sands;
  Light men, and on light steeds, who only drink
  The acrid milk of camels, and their wells.
  And then a swarm of wandering horse, who came
  From far, and a more doubtful service own’d;
  The Tartars of Ferghana, from the banks
  Of the Jaxartes, men with scanty beards
  And close-set skull-caps; and those wilder hordes
  Who roam o’er Kipchak and the northern waste,
  Kalmuks and unkemp’d Kuzzaks, tribes who stray
  Nearest the Pole, and wandering Kirghizzes,
  Who come on shaggy ponies from Pamere.
  • Matthew Arnold, "Sohrab and Rustum" (1853)