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By Root 1073 0

"I am thoroughly satisfied from what I have seen in South Africa that the necessity of training cavalry to charge is as great as it was in the days of Napoleon." In print, Haig attacked a skeptic who dared question the usefulness of a cavalry charge in the age of the machine gun and the repeating rifle. It was as strong a tactic as ever, Haig was certain, since the "moral factor of an apparently irresistible force, coming on at highest speed ... affects the nerves and aim of the ... rifleman." The horse, after all, had been central to warfare since the earliest recorded history, a position of dominance unshaken by every advance in weaponry from the crossbow to breech-loading, rapid-firing artillery. Why should it not remain central in the next war?

Haig played polo for his old regiment's team, befriended wealthy and influential people like the banker and racehorse breeder Leopold de Rothschild, and served as aide-de-camp to King Edward VII, who in due course would give him a knighthood. He also formed a lasting bond with someone of his own generation, the Prince of Wales—the future King George V, who had spent more than a decade of his youth in the Royal Navy and took a great interest in military matters. Even though Britain's was a constitutional monarch with little direct power, his voice carried weight in the making of key military appointments, so being in royal favor could be of crucial help to an officer's career. Well aware of this, Haig never failed to note in his diary, after dinners and banquets, whenever he sat next to, or across from, the King. In 1905, when he was on leave, Edward invited him to Windsor Castle the week of the Ascot races, and Haig found himself playing golf with the Honorable Dorothy Maud Vivian, a lady in waiting to Queen Alexandra. He proposed to the well-placed Dorothy within 48 hours. "I have often made up my mind on more important problems than that of my own marriage in much less time," he would later say. The couple were married in the private chapel of Buckingham Palace, a privilege apparently without precedent for someone not a member of the royal family.

Haig then returned to his current post as inspector general of cavalry in India. As he traveled about the subcontinent in a special railway car, every crease and campaign ribbon in place on his uniform, he established a new cavalry school and pushed the Indian mounted regiments through a rigorous training schedule, including mock combat designed to mimic the great cavalry battle that, military theorists agreed, would open the next war. In his 1907 book, Cavalry Studies, Haig declared that "the role of Cavalry on the battlefield will always go on increasing," thanks, in part, to "the introduction of the small bore rifle, the bullet from which has little stopping power against a horse."

Except in the distant, always troubled Balkans, Europe had been enjoying nearly half a century of peace. But there were disturbing undercurrents, even beyond the escalating naval arms race. Most ominous was the existence of a pair of rival blocs, tightly tied together by mutual security treaties, which virtually guaranteed that, should an armed clash break out between two countries, others would be sucked in as well.

Fifty percent larger in land area than today, Germany was the continent's economic powerhouse and was closely allied with the sprawling Austro-Hungarian Empire, where a German-speaking elite in Vienna dominated an array of restless ethnic groups. France, where nationalists still smoldered over the mortifying loss to Germany of the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, had made a treaty with the vast, unstable empire of Tsar Nicholas II. The Franco-Russian alliance inflamed German paranoia, since both countries bordered Germany, promising that the next war would be a two-front affair. Moreover, Russia's economy was expanding rapidly and its railway network, critical for moving troops to the front, was the fastest-growing in the world. German generals and politicians feared its population—more