Free The Iron Stallions by Max Hennessy Page A

cars so they’ll get to know more about engines in general. After all, there can be nothing worse than floating around at ten thousand feet and have the plugs oil up.’
    The prospect of mechanisation produced vehement discussion.
    ‘How the hell can we go on calling ourselves lancers?’ one of the senior captains growled. ‘A lancer’s a horsed soldier armed with a lance. Sitting in a tank you’re nothing but a blasted mechanic.’
    ‘I think I’ll resign,’ another senior officer observed. ‘I got into a tank during the war and, having got out of it, have never experienced any desire to get in another. Dammit, tanks only go at a few miles an hour and they need petrol.’
    Leduc joined in quietly. ‘And horses require fodder,’ he pointed out. ‘In 1917, the amount of fodder we needed stopped the army dead. Because we don’t understand it, we’re throwing away an opportunity. They discovered long since that by fitting an aeroplane engine they could get a Mark V tank up to twenty miles an hour. Let them do that and we’re back in business. In our present form, we’re an anachronism retained purely for traditional or sentimental reasons. And personally, having tried both, I’d far rather face machine guns surrounded by armour plate than sitting in a saddle like a tit on a mountain.’
    It stopped the argument dead.
    The great Fuller appeared, to make clear what was intended, or at least what he thought was intended.
    ‘Let’s face it,’ he said, ‘the Aldershot tattoo, though a fine spectacle, has nothing to do with soldiering and the only reason for it is the army’s love of fuss and feathers. We need tanks, but everybody’s scared stiff that one day we shall have a grubby tank man commanding a division. Should we disperse them throughout the whole of the army? Should they go at their own speed or should they go at a speed which the infantry feels they ought to go at? – the speed of a heavily-loaded soldier on foot, because if they don’t they’ll out-distance a marching man. And, anyway, how would they be supplied?’ He paused. ‘Why not put the infantry in tanks? Why not put artillery in tanks? Why not put supplies in tanks? And before anybody asks the usual question about how is it going to be afforded, let me point out that mass production’s arrived.’
    It seemed to make sense and Josh found that more and more he was beginning to accept the idea of mechanisation, and even beginning to look forward to the arrival of the first powered vehicle in front of the stables, which was where they’d have to put it because there was nowhere else.
    ‘I’m glad to see you’re showing sense, my lad,’ Leduc said quietly. ‘Because we’re going to need tactics in the next war, not cenotaphics. We need a little more thought to keep our soldiers alive and a little less to mourning those who’re dead.’ It seemed a shocking sentiment, so soon after Armistice Day, but Leduc was unrepentant. ‘There’s too much emotion,’ he insisted. ‘And most of it’s civilian emotion. Civilians could never understand how a soldier could strip the boots off a dead man and put them on his own feet. But a soldier with bare feet never saw much wrong in it. It’s an attitude we’re going to need. In 1914, it was the French who wanted revenge for 1870, now it’s the Germans who want revenge for 1918.’
    It gave Josh a lot to think about. There was still no sign of vehicles, however, and they were still dependent on the horse-drawn cart for supplies, and always there was the mind-numbing business of documentation, the filling in of forms to satisfy the War Office. Life became a round of office routine, stables, and leave. Because they hadn’t yet received vehicles, they still had to train recruits to ride. They were even still occupied with the business of breeding and choosing horses – all of which would probably end up pulling milk carts – the cost of saddlery they weren’t going to need, the fit of a