Seismological Research Requirements for a Comprehensive Test-Ban Monitoring System

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1882 Excerpt: ...Cavalry, from their more rapid means of locomotion, are evidently the troops to whom this duty must fall; and the telegraph has given them a power of being useful by enabling them to receive orders or send information more rapidly than formerly. The object of cavalry employed for such a purpose is not to fight, their object is to watch and report; once the enemy is felt, the touch should never be let go, and this cannot bo better kept up than by a number of horsemen in two's and three's scattered all over the country, feeling along every road, ready to retreat the moment the enemy turns on them, never pressing or attacking hhu, but alwrays watching him. The custom in former days for an army acting on the defensive was to retreat by one or more roads, covering its line of retreat by cavalry. Now what is meant by the words covering the line of retreat by cavalry? We continually find that the covering simply meant that when an army retired along one or more roads, a mass of cavalry was placed on the road or roads used by the army, and that they closed the columns, the object of putting cavalry there being that the enemy in pursuit headed his columns with cavalry, his fastest moving force, and that therefore cavalry were requisite to meet and check that cavalry. Similarly the pursuing army advanced covered by cavalry, or in other words the heads of its columns were composed of cavalry. Such a system of covering either the advance or retreat of an army is manifestly an improper use of one of the chief weapons of cavalry, the speed and power of the horses. It requires but a slight amount of thought to perceive that the leader who follows with even a small force, and pushes on as rapidly as possible, small parties of cavalry to...