The Club has the Household Cavalry to be the link between its two halves. Perhaps it would have been wiser, in both the last two rounds of Army cuts, to amalgamate pairs of infantry and cavalry regiments than to cling to the outmoded distinctions of those who fight mounted and those who march. After all, the Boer War, over a century ago, saw the instant creation of mounted infantry, complete with poem to celebrate them by Rudyard Kipling. These, like modern infantry, got a lift to the battlefield, and then fought on foot. And was it not a Highland regiment, in 1815, which rode to battle clinging to the stirrups of their mounted fellow-countrymen?

In the cavalry, the greatest pain was caused by losing the horse. After that, amalgamations of Hussars and Lancers, Dragoons and Cuirassiers, followed swiftly and relatively painlessly, leading to the famous fractions. The colour of the Mess waistcoat became the battlefield, they say, for petty politicking. The real and vital manoeuvre was to get a real role in battle: tanks, or armoured recce, or "breakthrough troops", but not, pray God, monitoring NBC (nuclear, biological and chemical warfare).

Once again a trick was missed, back in the 1960s and 1970s, when a great shrinking of the army was under way. The Army Air Corps had helicopters. The Hussars and Lancers had the history. The two might have been merged to form, as in the US Army, an air cavalry, but with panache. Rotors and shakos; missiles and pelisses; surveillance and reconnaissance combined. Instead, huge numbers of our scarce helicopters are used in Afghanistan as taxis for VIPs: a suitable question for PMQs, no doubt, except that Opposition leaders like posing with a backdrop of soldiers and mountains just as much as former student leaders.

When the intellectually shallow Hoon-Jackson reforms of the infantry hit the Army five years ago, the cavalry were unconcerned. But the Guards fought a blinder. They played the national card in a typically astute way. Their five single-battalion regiments, which survived the Jackson axe, represent the UK's four nations, Johnny-come-lately though the Irish and Welsh Guards may be. Loyalty first and foremost, and obedience. But "we alone guard the Crown in Parliament within the confines of our capital city, London". No coup d'état could ever work while the Guards remain in Birdcage Walk and Windsor. Armed police are one thing, and of course the Met has "primacy". But if push ever came to shove, the Guards would do a Hougoumont and save the day.