does cemetery mean? Etymology replies that
it means dormitory. It is a bedroom—nothing
more.

THE HORSE GUARDS RAMPANT

If Sense were duly installed at the
Horse Guards as commander-in-chief for a
twelve month, vice Tradition invalided, there
would soon be bustle in the British army.
Almost everything needs to be changed
except the courage and spirit of the men. We
have brave soldiers who go hampered into
battle, and are never beaten —fighting often,
it is true, with other bodies of men hampered
absurdly like themselves. They wear coats of
the brightest colour, that they may be easy
marks for the shot of the enemy; they
are half-strangled with stocks which prevent
the free passage of venous blood out of the
head, and hinder the brain from working
clearly, or the eye from keeping its sight
keen. The infantry are ill-clothed, and
march with their chests oppressed by the
ill-arranged belt of a clumsy and heavy
knapsack which is a direct cause of disease.
The cavalry are perched on military saddles,
and taught to ride in a military style, which
is not half so free and firm as the style usually
adopted by the same men when they go out
after the hounds and ride like English gentlemen
—the best riders in all Europe. Their
swords, grated down in steel scabbards,
are scarcely more capable of cutting, than
policemen's truncheons; their carbines are
so slung as to gall the wearer's hips if
his horse trots; and the rider is so heavily
weighted with encumbrances of arms and
armour, that the best horse cannot sustain
a pace of seven miles an hour. We could fill
some columns with a mere bald list of the
things that require alteration in the British
army.

We are certainly not fighting men
ourselves, and we cannot read in a cold-blooded
way about hacking and hewing. Inevitable
as war for some time must continue to be,
we are never able to leave out of sight its
misery and horror. No feeling of humanity,
however, can induce us to remain contented
with the fact that thousands of our English
soldiers, and many foreign soldiers, are
sent into a battle trussed for slaughter,
and deprived of at least half the use of
their limbs, and that their lives are sacrificed
to antiquated notions of correct military
"style".

We invite attention to the two remarkably
fine men on show daily on each side of the
Horse Guards. With the permission of the
police, let us have a battle in Whitehall: let
us mount a street boy on an active pony, put
a pistol into his hand and bid him fight
them. He snaps his powder in the face of
one by way of challenge. Out they come,
brave fellows, able in themselves to crush
the ragamuffin; but, outside themselves there
is their handsome armour, and there are all
their ponderous equipments. By the time
their horses have made such a rush as the
great loads upon their backs will permit,
and have carried them abreast of the
Treasury doors, the ragamuffin has reached
Westminster Bridge —where he has time to
load quietly —and comes back to the charge.
One handsome trooper strikes at him; and
if he could reach the nimble enemy (though
his sword probably would not draw blood),
the boy would be knocked down. The
enemy is off, however, and has shot the other
trooper in his right arm just as he was
lifting up his carbine. Away gallops the
pony, then, to Charing Cross, the troopers
lumbering behind. The unwounded soldier
takes to his carbine, but it is so much
encumbered with the belt and hook, that he is
unable to bring it freely to his shoulder; he
cannot take good aim and misses. The boy
has reloaded his one pistol once more behind
the Opera Colonnade; and, galloping round
the two soldiers at Charing Cross, inflicts a
second wound upon the one whose arm is
shot, and retreats; slowly pursued by one
guardsman, whose horse is already at a loss
for wind. Soon finding time to load again,
he inflicts a wound so serious on the
pursuer, that he reels, and by the very
weight of his impediments, is overbalanced
and unseated. Galloping back to Charing
Cross, the boy finds that the other man in
armour has already toppled off his horse's
back. He makes the two handsome Horse
Guards both his prisoners.

Very absurd, perhaps; but not impossible.
Call the street boy a Cossack, with a lance—
so blunt that twenty blows from it have been
borne without fatal hurt —and such a
Cossack, mounted on a pony, is the man who
was the terror of magnificent French
cuirassiers, and killed or captured them at the
rate of about two a day. Call the boy a Sikh,
with free limbs and a sharp sword; and such
a Sikh is the man who cuts down English
soldiers at a blow. The Swiss, going on
foot only with pikes and halberds against
heavy French gendarmerie, almost
annihilated them at the battle of Novara.
Marshal Saxe said, "Cavalry which cannot
charge at speed over a couple of thousand
yards, to pounce upon the foe, is good for
nothing." Charge at speed! In the last
war the fine French cuirassiers were
compelled to charge at a trot, because their
horses could not work under their weight;
and awful was the execution done upon
them. The effect of improved artillery on
cavalry of that kind in the present day
would be terrible. If the French cavalry
at Waterloo had been a little lighter; if it
could, after Marshal Saxe's plan, have
pounced upon the British squares, leaving
the men little time for second loading;
Waterloo might have been our disaster, not our
victory.