thirst, trial and fatigue, beyond even the stoutest. He was exceeding
swift of foot, but when young would not enter the Olympic games because
he had not kings’ sons to compete with. In an iron body dwelt both an
intellect clear beyond compare, and a heart full of generous impulses.
He was ambitious, but from high motives. His desire to conquer the
world was coupled with the purpose of furthering Greek civilization.
His courage was, both physically and morally, high-pitched. He actually
enjoyed the delirium of battle, and its turmoils raised his intellect
to its highest grade of clearness and activity. His instincts were
keen; his perception remarkable; his judgment all but infallible. As
an organizer of an army, unapproached; as a leader, unapproachable in
rousing the ambition and courage of his men, and in quelling their
fears by his own fearlessness. He kept his agreements faithfully.
He was a remarkable judge of men. He had the rare gift of natural,
convincing oratory, and of making men hang upon his lips as he spoke,
and do deeds of heroism after. He lavished money rather on his friends
than on himself.
While every inch a king, Alexander was friendly with his men; shared
their toils and dangers; never asked an effort he himself did not
make; never ordered a hardship of which he himself did not bear part.
During the herculean pursuit of Darius,--after a march of four hundred
miles in eleven days, on which but sixty of his men could keep beside
him, and every one was all but dying of thirst,--when a helmetful of
water was offered him, he declined to drink, as there was not enough
for all. Such things endear a leader to his men beyond the telling.
But Alexander’s temper, by inheritance quick, grew ungovernable. A
naturally excitable character, coupled with a certain superstitious
tendency, was the very one to suffer from a life which carried him
to such a giddy height, and from successes which reached beyond the
human limit. We condemn, but, looking at him as a captain, may pass
over those dark hours in his life which narrate the murder of Clitus,
the execution of Philotas and Parmenio, and the cruelties to Bessus
and to Batis. Alexander was distinctly subject to human frailties. His
vices were partly inherited, partly the outgrowth of his youth and
wonderful career. He repented quickly and sincerely of his evil deeds.
Until the last few years of his life his habits were very simple. His
adoption then of Persian dress and manners was so largely a political
requirement, that it can be hardly ascribed to personal motives, even
if we fully acknowledge his vanity.
The life-work of Philip had been transcendant. That of Alexander
surpasses anything in history. Words fail to describe the attributes
of Alexander as a soldier. The perfection of all he did was scarcely
understood by his historians. But to compare his deeds with those of
other captains excites our wonder. Starting with a handful of men
from Macedonia, in four years, one grand achievement after another,
and without a failure, had placed at his feet the kingdom of the
Great King. Leaving home with an enormous debt, in fifty moons he had
possessed himself of all the treasures of the earth. Thence, with
marvellous courage, endurance, intelligence, and skill he completed
the conquest of the entire then known world, marching over nineteen
thousand miles in his eleven years’ campaigns. And all this before he
was thirty-two. His health and strength were still as great as ever;
his voracity for conquest greater, as well as his ability to conquer.
It is an interesting question, had he not died, what would have become
of Rome. The Roman infantry was as good as his; not so their cavalry.
An annually elected consul could be no match for Alexander. But the
king never met in his campaigns such an opponent as the Roman Republic,
nor his phalanx such a rival as the Roman legion would have been. That
was reserved for Hannibal.
Greek civilization, to a certain degree, followed Alexander’s
footsteps, but this was accidental. “You are a man like all of
us, Alexander,” said the naked Indian, “except that you abandon
your home, like a meddlesome destroyer, to invade the most distant
regions, enduring hardship yourself and inflicting it on others.”
Alexander could never have erected a permanent kingdom on his theory
of coalescing races by intermarriages and forced migrations. His
Macedonian-Persian Empire was a mere dream.
Alexander was never a Greek. He had but the Greek genius and
intelligence grafted on the ruder Macedonian nature; and he became
Asiaticized by his conquests. His life-work, as cut out by himself,
was to conquer and then to Hellenize Asia. He did the one, he could
not accomplish the other aim. He did not plant a true and permanent
Hellenism in a single country of Asia. None of his cities have lived.
They were rather fortified posts than self-sustaining marts. As a
statesman, intellectual, far-seeing, and broad, he yet conceived and
worked on an impossible theory, and the immediate result of all his
genius did not last a generation.
What has Alexander done for the art of war? When Demosthenes was asked
what were the three most important qualities in an orator, he replied:
“Action, action, action!” In another sense this might well be applied
to the captain. No one can become a great captain without a mental
and physical activity which are almost abnormal, and so soon as this
exceptional power of activity wanes, the captain has come to a term of
his greatness. Genius has been described as an extraordinary capacity
for hard work. But this capacity is but the human element. Genius
implies the divine spark. It is the personality of the great captain
which makes him what he is. The maxims of war are but a meaningless
page to him who cannot apply them. They are helpful just so far as the
man’s brain and heart, as his individuality, can carry them. It is
because a great captain must first of all be a great man, and because
to the lot of but few great men belongs the peculiar ability or falls
the opportunity of being great captains, that preëminent success in war
is so rarely seen.
All great soldiers are cousins-german in equipment of heart and
head. No man ever was, no man can by any possibility blunder into
being, a great soldier without the most generous virtues of the soul,
and the most distinguished powers of the intellect. The former are
independence, self-reliance, ambition within proper bounds; that sort
of physical courage which not only does not know fear, but which is
not even conscious that there is such a thing as courage; that greater
moral quality which can hold the lives of tens of thousands of men and
the destinies of a great country or cause patiently, intelligently,
and unflinchingly in his grasp; powers of endurance which cannot be
overtaxed; the unconscious habit of ruling men and of commanding their
love and admiration, coupled with the ability to stir their enthusiasm
to the yielding of their last ounce of effort. The latter comprise
business capacity of the very highest order, essential to the care of
his troops; keen perceptions, which even in extraordinary circumstances
or sudden emergencies are not to be led astray; the ability to think
as quickly and accurately in the turmoil of battle as in the quiet of
the bureau; the power to foresee to its ultimate conclusion the result
of a strategic or tactical manœuvre; the capacity to gauge the efforts
of men and of masses of men; the many-sidedness which can respond to
the demands of every detail of the battle-field, while never losing
sight of the one object aimed at; the mental strength which weakens
not under the tax of hours and days of unequalled strain. For, in
truth, there is no position in which man can be placed which asks so
much of his intellect in so short a space as that of the general, the
failure or success, the decimation or security of whose army hangs on
his instant thought and unequivocal instruction under the furious and
kaleidoscopic ordeal of the field. To these qualities of heart and head
add one factor more--opportunity--and you have the great soldier.
Now, Alexander was the first man, the details of whose history have
been handed down to us, who possessed these qualities in the very
highest measure; whose opportunities were coextensive with his powers;
and who out of all these wrought a methodical system of warfare from
which we may learn lessons to-day. Look at what he accomplished with
such meagre means! He alone has the record of uniform success with no
failure. And this, not because he had weak opponents, for while the
Persians were far from redoubtable, except in numbers, the Tyrians, the
tribes beyond the Caucasus, and the Indians, made a bold front and good
fight.
Alexander’s movements were always made on a well-conceived,
maturely-digested plan; and this he kept in view to the end, putting
aside all minor considerations for the main object, but never losing
sight of these. His grasp was as large as his problem. His base for
his advance into the heart of the then known world was the entire
coast-line of the then known sea. He never advanced, despite his
speed, without securing flanks and rear, and properly garrisoning
the country on which he based. Having done this he marched on his
objective,--which was wont to be the enemy’s army,--with a directness
which was unerring. His fertility in ruse and stratagem was unbounded.
He kept well concentrated; his division of forces was always warranted
by the conditions, and always with a view of again concentrating. His
rapidity was unparalleled. It was this which gave him such an ascendant
over all his enemies. Neither winter cold nor summer heat, mountain
nor desert, the widest rivers nor the most elaborate defences, ever
arrested his course; and yet his troops were always well fed. He was
a master of logistics. He lived on the country he campaigned in as
entirely as Napoleon, but was careful to accumulate granaries in the
most available places. He was remarkable in being able to keep the gaps
in his army filled by recruits from home or enlistments of natives, and
in transforming the latter into excellent soldiers. Starting from home
with thirty-five thousand men, he had in the Indian campaigns no less
than one hundred and thirty-five thousand, and their deeds proved the
stuff that was in them.
Alexander’s battles are tactically splendid examples of conception
and execution. The wedge at Arbela was more splendid than Macdonald’s
column at Wagram. It was a scintillation of genius. Alexander saw where
his enemy’s strength and weakness lay, and took prompt advantage of
them. He utilized his victories to the full extent, and pursued with a
vigor which no other has ever reached. He was equally great in sieges
as in battles. The only thing he was never called on to show was the
capacity to face disaster. He possessed every remarkable military
attribute; we can discover in him no military weakness.
As a captain, he accomplished more than any man ever did. He showed
the world, first of all men, and best, how to make war. He formulated
the first principles of the art, to be elaborated by Hannibal,
Cæsar, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick, and Napoleon. His conditions
did not demand that he should approach to the requirements of modern
war. But he was easily master of his trade, as, perhaps, no one else
ever was. For, as Napoleon says, “to guess at the intentions of the
enemy; to divine his opinion of yourself; to hide from him both your
own intentions and opinion; to mislead him by feigned manœuvres; to
invoke ruse, as well as digested schemes, so as to fight under the best
conditions,--this is, and always was, the art of war.”
LECTURE II.
HANNIBAL.
Two generations after the death of Alexander, the power of the
Mediterranean world was divided between Aryan Rome and Carthage, the
vigorous daughter of Semitic Tyre. Carthage was first on the sea; Rome,
on land. But Rome, always intolerant of powerful neighbors, fell to
quarrelling with her great rival, and at the end of a twenty-three
years’ struggle,--the first Punic War,--imposed her own terms on
defeated Carthage (241 B.C.). There were two parties bred of these
hostilities in Carthage,--the war party, headed by Hamilcar Barca; the
peace party, headed by Hanno. Hamilcar knew that peace with Rome meant
oppression by Rome, and final extinction, and was ready to stake all on
renewing the struggle. But he saw that present war was impossible; that
opposition could only be in the future, and that it must be quietly
prepared for. With a view of doing this, Hamilcar got the consent of
the Carthaginian Senate to attempt the subjugation of Spain, a land of
great natural resources, in conquering and holding which an army could
be created which by and by might again cope with the Italian tyrant.
The Carthaginian fleet had been destroyed. Rome would not permit the
building of a new one. Hamilcar’s army was obliged to march overland
from Carthage along the north coast of Africa and ship across the
strait,--now Gibraltar. This was a bold thing to do, but it succeeded,
and, in a series of campaigns, Hamilcar reduced the southern half
of Spain, and (B.C. 236–227) firmly planted the Carthaginian power
there. So conciliatory as well as vigorous had been his policy, that,
on his death, the native tribes elected Hasdrubal, his son-in-law,
general-in-chief of the allied Carthaginian and Spanish forces, which
then amounted to nearly seventy thousand men and two hundred elephants.
Hasdrubal continued the policy of Hamilcar, and largely increased the
Spanish influence and territory. But as Rome had colonies in northern
Spain, the two powers were sure soon again to clash. In fact, Rome,
after awhile, woke up to this new danger, and notified Carthage that
she would extend her colonies north of the Ebro at her peril.
Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar. His father gave him the best Greek
education, and this the lad’s remarkable intellect readily assimilated.
He trained him to arms under his own eye. Hannibal received his first
schooling as a soldier at the age of nine, in his father’s camps in
Spain, and later his brother, Hasdrubal, made him his chief of cavalry
at the age of twenty-one. A pen-picture by Hannibal’s arch enemy, Livy,
tells us what he then was: “No sooner had he arrived than Hannibal drew
the whole army towards him. The old soldiers fancied they saw Hamilcar
in his youth given back to them; the same bright look, the same fire in
his eye, the same trick of countenance and features. But soon he proved
that to be his father’s son was not his highest recommendation. Never
was one and the same spirit more skilful to meet opposition, to obey
or to command. It was hard to decide whether he was more dear to the
chief or the army. Neither did Hasdrubal more readily place any one at
the head when courage or activity was required, nor were the soldiers
under any other leader so full of confidence and daring. He entered
danger with the greatest mettle, he comported himself in danger with
the greatest unconcern. By no difficulties could his body be tired,
his ardor damped. Heat and cold he suffered with equal endurance; the
amount of his food and drink was gauged by natural needs, and not by
desire. The time of waking and sleeping depended not on the distinction
of day and night. What time was left from business he devoted to rest,
and this was not brought on by either a soft couch or by quiet. Many
have often seen him covered by a short field-cloak lying on the ground
betwixt the outposts and sentinels of the soldiers. His clothing in
no wise distinguished him from his fellows; his weapons and horses
attracted every one’s eye. He was by long odds the best rider, the best
marcher. He went into battle the first, he came out of it the last....
Hannibal served three years under Hasdrubal’s supreme command, and left
nothing unobserved which he who desires to become a great leader ought
to see and to do.”
Hannibal and his brothers had been brought up with an intensity of
hatred of Rome which it is hard to describe. Every schoolboy knows
the anecdote of the lad’s swearing never to make peace with Rome. The
feeling grew with his years. When Hannibal was twenty-four, Hasdrubal
died, and he himself was unanimously elected his successor.
Hamilcar had planned an invasion of Italy by way of the Alps; but
the scheme was left inchoate at his death. Hannibal at once began
definitely to pave the way for such an enterprise by completing the
conquest of Spain. The original conception of crossing the Alps was
Hamilcar’s, just as Philip originally planned the invasion of Asia. But
it was the fertile brain of Hannibal which gave the undertaking birth.
The colossal nature of the plan, its magnificent daring, the boundless
self-confidence and contempt of difficulty and danger which it implies,
no less than the extraordinary manner of its execution, are equalled
only by Alexander’s setting forth--also but a lad--to conquer the
illimitable possessions of the Great King.
In three years (B.C. 221–218) Hannibal had subjugated all Spain,
and after a long siege captured Saguntum. He finally set out, with
fifty thousand foot, nine thousand horse, and thirty-seven elephants,
across the Pyrenees, whence his route was almost as unknown to him
as the Atlantic to Columbus. It is impossible to follow him in this
wonderful march,--the first crossing of the Alps by any but isolated
merchants,--and probably the most daring enterprise ever set on foot.
After toils and dangers impossible to gauge, even by the losses,
Hannibal reached the Po in October, B.C. 218, with but twenty-six
thousand men and a few elephants, less than half the force with
which he had left Spain. With this handful he was to face a nation
capable with its allies of raising seven hundred thousand men; and yet
the event--as well as our knowledge of Hannibal--shows that he had
contemplated even this vast odds.
But Rome was not ready. Hannibal gained numberless confederates among
the Gauls in northern Italy, and that same fall and winter won two
victories over the Romans at the Ticinus and Trebia. Next year (B.C.
217) he again defeated the Romans, by an ambuscade at Lake Trasymene,
killing or capturing their entire army of thirty thousand men. These
three victories were due to the over-eagerness of the Roman generals
to fight, their careless methods, and Hannibal’s skill in handling his
troops and his aptness at stratagem.
The campaign preceding, and the battle of Lake Trasymene, taught
the Romans two valuable lessons. The instruction given the world by
Alexander had not reached self-important, republican Rome, though
Hannibal was familiar enough with the deeds of the great Macedonian.
The Romans knew nothing of war except crude, hard knocks. The first
lesson showed them that there is something in the art of war beyond
merely marching out to meet your enemy and beating him by numbers,
better weapons, or greater discipline.
[Illustration: HANNIBAL’S FLANK MARCH. B.C. 217]
It was thus: The Romans had retired into Etruria. In March, B.C.
217, Hannibal, who was in Liguria, desired to cross the Appenines
and move upon them. There were but two roads he could pursue. The
highway would take him across the mountains, but by a long circuit.
This was the route by which the Consul Flaminius, at Aretium, with
his forty thousand men, was expecting him, and, therefore, the way
Hannibal did not choose to march, for Flaminius could easily block the
mountain roads. The other route was so difficult that Flaminius never
dreamed that Hannibal knew of, or could by any possibility pursue it.
Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps had taught Flaminius nothing of his
daring or his skill. This route lay along the coast to near the mouth
of the Arnus, and thence up the right bank. It ran through an immense
marsh, which, for an army, was all but as difficult an obstacle as the
Alps. But it was the lesser evil, and promised the greater results;
and Hannibal chose it, as Napoleon did the Great St. Bernard in 1800.
No better description of the task can be given than to say that for
four days and three nights the army marched through water where
only the wagons, dead animals, or abandoned packs afforded the men
any chance for rest. But the Carthaginian general reached his goal,
turned Flaminius’ left flank, and cut him off from Rome. Here was the
conception of turning the enemy’s strategic flank as clearly carried
out as ever Napoleon did it. Such was lesson one.
The result of this turning manœuvre was the battle of Lake
Trasymene,--where Hannibal taught the Romans, and us through them, the
second lesson. The Romans had always marched in careless open order,
without any idea of van or rear guard, or of flankers. This Hannibal
knew. He placed his whole army in hiding at both ends of a defile at
Lake Trasymene, through which the Romans must march, in such a manner
that, when he made his attack, it was on an unsuspecting column,--in
front, rear, and one flank; and the lake being on the other flank,
the result was utter annihilation. After this the Romans marched with
proper precautions. Hannibal had inflicted three staggering blows on
his enemy.
But Rome now appointed a Dictator,--Quintus Fabius,--truly surnamed
Maximus, and nicknamed Cunctator, because, recognizing that he was
not able to cope with Hannibal on the battle-field, he wisely chose
to conduct a campaign of delays and small war, the one thing Hannibal
could not afford, but also the one thing the Romans could not tolerate
or understand; for the Romans had always won by crisp fighting. Still,
it was the policy shaped by Fabius which eventually defeated Hannibal,
and next to Hannibal himself, he was the best master the Romans then
had.
It is impossible, even slightly, to touch on many of Hannibal’s
campaigns and battles. I prefer to give a short description of the
battle of Cannæ, which, in its conduct and results, is typical of
Hannibal’s methods. And first, a few words about the organization of
either army.
The Carthaginian discipline was based on the Macedonian idea, and the
formation of the troops was phalangial, that is, in close masses.
But Hannibal’s army contained troops of all kinds, from the Numidian
horseman, whose only clothing was a tiger-skin, on his tough little
runt of a pony, or the all but naked Gaul with his long, curved sword,
to the Carthaginian heavy-armed hypaspist. All these diverse tribes
had each its own manner of fighting, and it required a Hannibal to
keep up discipline or tactical efficiency in such a motley force. The
Roman army, on the contrary, was wonderfully homogeneous, carefully
disciplined, in all parts organized and drilled in the same manner, and
the legion was a body which was the very opposite of the phalanx. It
had much more mobility, the individual soldiers were more independent
in action, and instead of relying on one shock or on defence, the
several lines could relieve each other, and renew a failing battle
three or even four times with fresh troops. After Trasymene, Hannibal
not only armed his men with captured Roman weapons, but modified his
organization somewhat to the legion pattern.
The legion was at this time formed in three lines of maniples (or
companies) placed checkerwise. In front were the hastati, the least
efficient; behind this the principes; and in the rear the triarii,
or veterans. Each maniple was an excellent tactical unit. Each of
these lines could relieve the other, and thus give a succession of
hammer-like blows.
The phalanx we already know, and while it was wonderful for one shock,
it had no reserve, and if demoralization set in, it was gone. The
tendency of formation in ancient days, as now, was towards greater
mobility, and later on the Roman legion in Greece, particularly at
Pydna (168 B.C.), proved that it was superior, if properly handled, to
the phalanx.