[37] Even along such vast frontiers as the Russian and Austrian, for
example, where M. Bloch anticipates war will be begun with an invasion
of clouds of Russian cavalry and great cavalry battles, I am inclined to
think this deadlock of essentially defensive marksmen may still be the
more probable thing. Small bodies of cyclist riflemen would rush forward
to meet the advancing clouds of cavalry, would drop into invisible
ambushes, and announce their presence--in unknown numbers--with
carefully aimed shots difficult to locate. A small number of such men
could always begin their fight with a surprise at the most advantageous
moment, and they would be able to make themselves very deadly against a
comparatively powerful frontal attack. If at last the attack were driven
home before supports came up to the defenders, they would still be able
to cycle away, comparatively immune. To attempt even very wide flanking
movements against such a snatched position would be simply to run risks
of blundering upon similar ambushes. The clouds of cavalry would have to
spread into thin lines at last and go forward with the rifle. Invading
clouds of cyclists would be in no better case. A conflict of cyclists
against cyclists over a country too spacious for unbroken lines, would
still, I think, leave the struggle essentially unchanged. The advance of
small unsupported bodies would be the wildest and most unprofitable
adventure; every advance would have to be made behind a screen of
scouts, and, given a practical equality in the numbers and manhood of
the two forces, these screens would speedily become simply very
attenuated lines.
[38] So far, pestilence has been a feature of almost every sustained war
in the world, but there is really no reason whatever why it should be
so. There is no reason, indeed, why a soldier upon active service on the
victorious side should go without a night's rest or miss a meal. If he
does, there is muddle and want of foresight somewhere, and that our
hypothesis excludes.
[39] Lady Maud Rolleston, in her very interesting _Yeoman Service_,
complains of the Boers killing an engine-driver during an attack on a
train at Kroonstadt, "which was," she writes, "an abominable action, as
he is, in law, a non-combatant." The implicit assumption of this
complaint would cover the engineers of an ironclad or the guides of a
night attack, everybody, in fact, who was not positively weapon in hand.
[40] Experiments will probably be made in the direction of armoured
guns, armoured search-light carriages, and armoured shelters for men,
that will admit of being pushed forward over rifle-swept ground. To such
possibilities, to possibilities even of a sort of land ironclad, my
inductive reason inclines; the armoured train seems indeed a distinct
beginning of this sort of thing, but my imagination proffers nothing but
a vision of wheels smashed by shells, iron tortoises gallantly rushed by
hidden men, and unhappy marksmen and engineers being shot at as they
bolt from some such monster overset. The fact of it is, I detest and
fear these thick, slow, essentially defensive methods, either for land
or sea fighting. I believe invincibly that the side that can go fastest
and hit hardest will always win, with or without or in spite of massive
defences, and no ingenuity in devising the massive defence will shake
that belief.
[41] Or, in deference to the Rules of War, fire them out of guns of
trivial carrying power.
[42] A curious result might very possibly follow a success of submarines
on the part of a naval power finally found to be weaker and defeated.
The victorious power might decide that a narrow sea was no longer, under
the new conditions, a comfortable boundary line, and might insist on
marking its boundary along the high-water mark of its adversary's
adjacent coasts.
[43] There comes to hand as I correct these proofs a very typical
illustration of the atmosphere of really almost imbecile patronage in
which the British private soldier lives. It is a circular from some one
at Lydd, some one who evidently cannot even write English, but who is
nevertheless begging for an iron hut in which to inflict lessons on our
soldiers. "At present," says this circular, "it is pretty to see in the
Home a group of Gunners busily occupied in wool-work or learning
basket-making, whilst one of their number sings or recites, and others
are playing games or letter-writing, but even quite recently the members
of the Bible Reading Union and one of the ladies might have been seen
painfully crowded behind screens, choosing the 'Golden Text' with
lowered voices, and trying to pray 'without distraction,' whilst at the
other end of the room men were having supper, and halfway down a dozen
Irish militia (who don't care to read, but are keen on a story) were
gathered round another lady, who was telling them an amusing temperance
tale, trying to speak so that the Bible readers should not hear her and
yet that the Leinsters _should_ was a difficulty, but when the Irishmen
begged for a song--difficulty became _impossibility_, and their friend
had to say, '_No._' Yet this is just the double work required in
Soldiers' Homes, and above all at Lydd, where there is so little safe
amusement to be had in camp, and none in the village." These poor
youngsters go from this "safe amusement" under the loving care of "lady
workers," this life of limitation, make-believe and spiritual servitude
that a self-respecting negro would find intolerable, into a warfare that
exacts initiative and a freely acting intelligence from all who take
part in it, under the bitterest penalties of shame and death. What can
you expect of them? And how can you expect any men of capacity and
energy, any men even of mediocre self-respect to knowingly place
themselves under the tutelage of the sort of people who dominate these
organized degradations? I am amazed the army gets so many capable
recruits as it does. And while the private lives under these conditions,
the would-be capable officer stifles amidst equally impossible
surroundings. He must associate with the uneducated products of the
public schools, and listen to their chatter about the "sports" that
delight them, suffer social indignities from the "army woman," worry and
waste money on needless clothes, and expect to end by being shamed or
killed under some unfairly promoted incapable. Nothing illustrates the
intellectual blankness of the British army better than its absolute
dearth of military literature. No one would dream of gaining any profit
by writing or publishing a book upon such a subject, for example, as
mountain warfare in England, because not a dozen British officers would
have the sense to buy such a book, and yet the British army is
continually getting into scrapes in mountain districts. A few unselfish
men like Major Peech find time to write an essay or so, and that is all.
On the other hand, I find no less than five works in French on this
subject in MM. Chapelet & Cie.'s list alone. On guerilla warfare again,
and after two years of South Africa, while there is nothing in English
but some scattered papers by Dr. T. Miller Maguire, there are nearly a
dozen good books in French. As a supplement to these facts is the
spectacle of the officers of the Guards telegraphing to Sir Thomas
Lipton on the occasion of the defeat of his Shamrock II., "Hard luck. Be
of good cheer. Brigade of Guards wish you every success." This is not
the foolish enthusiasm of one or two subalterns, it is collective. They
followed that yacht race with emotion! is a really important thing to
them. No doubt the whole mess was in a state of extreme excitement. How
can capable and active men be expected to live and work between this
upper and that nether millstone? The British army not only does not
attract ambitious, energetic men, it repels them. I must confess that I
see no hope either in the rulers, the traditions, or the manhood of the
British regular army, to forecast its escape from the bog of ignorance
and negligence in which it wallows. Far better than any of projected
reforms would it be to let the existing army severely alone, to cease to
recruit for it, to retain (at the expense of its officers, assisted
perhaps by subscriptions from ascendant people like Sir Thomas Lipton)
its messes, its uniforms, its games, bands, entertainments, and splendid
memories as an appendage of the Court, and to create, in absolute
independence of it, battalions and batteries of efficient professional
soldiers, without social prestige or social distinctions, without bands,
dress uniforms, colours, chaplains or honorary colonels, and to embody
these as a real marching army perpetually _en route_ throughout the
empire--a reading, thinking, experimenting army under an absolutely
distinct war office, with its own colleges, depôts and training camps
perpetually ready for war. I cannot help but think that, if a hint were
taken from the _Turbinia_ syndicate, a few enterprising persons of means
and intelligence might do much by private experiment to supplement and
replace the existing state of affairs.