GREAT BRITAIN: Heroes Unhorsed

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In the swank Guards' Club, along Pall Mall and at every officers' mess in the British Empire, there was but one consuming topic of conversation last week. The new young Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden might not be doing much at the moment (see col. 3), but the new young War Secretary Alfred Duff Cooper had just signed the most drastic reorganization order the British Army has ever received. In effect this Mayfair scion, whose famed wife Lady Diana Manners played The Virgin in Max Reinhardt's The Miracle, ordered: "No more cavalry!"

Because British warriors on horseback have not lost their effectiveness against Indian tribesmen, the Indian Army will retain cavalry until 1939, but elsewhere British cavalrymen will exchange their bridles for handle bars or steering wheels, their whips for monkey wrenches, as fast as the whole new program of creating "mechanized cavalry" can be put through. For swank British cavalrymen that meant no more polo, unless they switch to motor-cycle polo. The social implications of this order burst last week like so many bombs in the messes of cavalry units slated for almost immediate mechanization: the King's Dragoon Guards; the Queen's Bays; the King's Own Hussars; the Queen's Own Hussars; the King's Own Royal Irish Hussars; the Queen's Royal Lancers; the Tenth Royal Hussars.

If the lives of even Bengal Lancers are soon to reek of gasoline & grease, handsome young War Secretary Alfred Duff Cooper had nevertheless done the best he could for his cavalry friends. He might have enlarged His Majesty's existing Tank Corps and other highly developed mechanized units gradually, while disbanding little by little the men on horseback. Instead, the horse cavalry are to dismount and step aboard machines, keeping their jobs and becoming mechanized cavalry. In the humble opinion of British technicians who today comprise the Tank Corps, it is going to be a rare sight to behold the horsy sons of generations of British cavalrymen becoming in a few months chauffeurs, mechanics and garagemen. "It takes 18 months to train a raw recruit to be a horseman," opined the technicians, "but who knows how long it will take to make anything else out of a horseman?"

Unaffected for the time being will be the Household Cavalry, without whose gleaming breastplates and nodding plumes the King &; Queen on state occasions would appear to their devoted subjects strange and forlorn indeed. The very first British cavalry to be mechanized is the brigade now in Egypt. Wrathful natives who today hurl paving stones from a safe distance at these horsed heroes will soon find them riding in British buses equipped with windows of shatterproof glass.

Not only horse cavalry but some of the Empire's choicest and most picturesque infantrymen were also ordered mechanized, including a battalion each from the famed Coldstream Guards, the Grenadier Guards, the Scots Guards, the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders and the Prince of Wales's Own West Yorkshire Regiment.