“Considering your pro-Russian sympathies,” said the Timorous Reporter,
“the results of some of the fighting in the Japanese and Russian war
must have been deeply disagreeable to you—that of the great naval
engagement in the Sea of Japan, for example.”
“Yes,” replied the Bald Campaigner, “the escape of two or three Russian
ships affected me most unpleasantly.”
The reporter professed himself unable to understand.
“I had confidently expected Togo to destroy them all. He is
disappointing—Togo.”
“Please pardon me,” said the man of letters; “I thought that you had
favored the Russian cause.”
“So I did, sir, so I did, and do. But something is due to the art and
science of war. As a soldier I stand for them, deprecating any laxity
in the application of the eternal principles of strategy and tactics
by land or sea. Admiral Togo should have been dismissed for permitting
those ships to escape.”
The reporter suggested the possibility that in the uproar and obscurity
of battle the ships that got away were overlooked.
“Nothing should be overlooked,” said the Bald Campaigner. “The
commander in battle should know everything that is going on—or going
away. With the light that we have, I am unable to explain the Japanese
admiral’s lamentable failure; I can only deplore it.”
“Had he, then, so overwhelming an advantage?” the reporter asked. “It
is thought the fleets were pretty evenly matched.”
“Sir,” said the Bald Campaigner, loftily, “it was a fight between
an inland people and an insular. If Rojestvensky had had a hundred
battleships he would have been over-matched and defeated. Ships and
guns do not make a navy, and landsmen are not transmuted into sailors
by sending them to sea. The Russians are not a sea-going people. Their
country has no open ports—that is what they are always fighting to get.
They have no foreign commerce; they have no fisheries. Why, sir, it
reminds me of the reply made by a Scotch carter to an angry soldier
who had challenged him to fight. ‘Fecht wi’ ye? Na, na, fechtin’s yer
trade. But I’ll drive a cart wi’ ye.’ If command of the ocean were a
matter of planting potatoes, Russia would be a great sea power.
“The born sailor is a being of an order different from ourselves—as
different as a gull from a grouse, a seal from a cat. What, to a
landsman, is a matter of study, memory and calculation, is to him
a matter of intuition. An unstable plane is his natural, normal
and helpful footing. As a gun-pointer he sights his piece not only
consciously with his instruments and his eye, but unconsciously with
that better instrument, the sense of direction—as one plays billiards.
The rolling and pitching of the ships do not spoil his aim; he allows
for them automatically—_feels_ the auspicious instant with the sure
instinct of an expert rifleman breaking bottles in the air. It is
impossible to impart this subtle sense to a farmer’s boy, or to a
salesman in a shop, no matter how young you catch him; he cannot be
made to understand it—cannot even be made to understand that it can
be. For that matter, nobody does understand it.
“I am not unaware, sir, of the ‘modern’ methods of sea-fighting—keeping
at a safe distance from the enemy and pointing the guns by means of
range-finders and other instruments and machines, but nothing that can
be invented can eliminate the ‘personal equation’ in sea-fighting,
any more than in land-fighting parapets, casemates, turrets and other
defensive works can profitably replace the breasts of the soldiers,
or arms of precision take the place of their natural aptitude for
battle with both feet on the ground. I am not unmindful of the time
when the Romans improvised a fleet (constructed on the model of a
wrecked Carthaginian galley) and manning it with landsmen destroyed the
sea-power of Carthage in a single engagement. That exception tests the
rule (_probat regulam_) but the rule stands. Landsmen for soldiers,
sailors for the sea and to the devil with military machinery!
“Before our civil war we had a merchant marine second only to that of
Great Britain. American sails whitened every sea, the stars and stripes
glowed in every port. We were a nation of sailors. Even so long ago
as the war of 1812 we held our own with Great Britain on the ocean,
though beaten everywhere on land by inferior numbers with superior
training. To-day we could not hold our own against any maritime people,
even if we fought with full coal-bunkers near our own shores. The
American behind the gun is no longer a born sailor with the salt of
the sea in every globule of the blood of him. Our fate in encountering
a seagoing people, sailors and fishermen and the sons of sailors and
fishermen, with sea legs, sea eyes and sea souls, would be that which
has befallen inlanders against islanders, from Salamis to Tsu Shima.
The sea would be strewn with a wreckage of American ‘magnificent
fighting-machines.’”
The Timorous Reporter murmured the words “Manila Bay” and “Santiago de
Cuba,” then diffidently lifted his eyes, with a question mark in each,
to the face of his distinguished interlocutor—which darkened with a
smile.
“With regard to Manila,” he said, “I am told that Dewey’s famous
command, ‘You may fire when you are ready, Gridley,’ was not
accurately reported. According to my informant, the Spanish ships
were ingeniously wound with ropes to keep them from falling apart.
What Dewey actually said was this: ‘When you are ready, Gridley, you
may fire at those ropes.’ Anybody can cut a rope with a cannon if not
molested. At Santiago, the Spanish Admiral was ordered not to give
battle, but to escape, and ships cannot run away and fight at the same
time.
“Sir, two naval victories in which the victors lost one man killed
do not supply a reasonable presumption of invincibility. Manila and
Santiago were slaughters, not battles. They are without value.”
The reporter said he thought that they were not altogether worthless
as “horrors of war,” and visibly shuddered. The superior intelligence
flamed and thundered!
“That is all nonsense about ‘the horrors of war,’ in so far as the
detestable phrase implies that they are worse than those of peace; they
are more striking and impressive, that is all. As to the loss of life,
I submit that civilians mostly die some time, and are mourned, too,
quite as feelingly as soldiers; and the kind of death that is inflicted
by war-weapons is distinctly less objectionable than that resulting
from disease. Wars are expensive, doubtless, but somebody gets the
money; it is not thrown into the sea. In point of fact, modern nations
are never so prosperous as in the years immediately succeeding a
great war. I favor anything that will quicken our minds, elevate our
sentiments and stop our secreting selfishness, as, according to that
eminent naturalist, the late William Shakspeare, toads get venom by
sleeping under cold stones. A quarter-century of peace will make a
nation of block-heads and scoundrels. Patriotism is a vice, but it
is a larger vice, and a nobler, than the million petty ones which it
promotes in peace to swallow up in war. In the thunder of guns it
becomes respectable. I favor war, famine, pestilence—anything that will
stop the people from cheating and confine that practice to contractors
and statesmen.
“To return to Russia—”
“Which,” said the reporter, _sotto voce_, “many Russians abroad do not
care to do.”
“You said, I think, that she does not seem to be much of a power on
either sea or land. She was a power in the time of the first Napoleon.
She held out a long time at Sevastopol against the English, the French,
the Turks and the Sardinians. She defeated the Turks at Shipka Pass and
Plevna, and the Turks are the best soldiers in Europe. True, in the
war with Japan, she lost every battle. That was to be expected, for she
was all unready and her armies were outnumbered two to one from the
beginning. No one outside Russia, and few inside, has ever come within
a quarter million of a correct estimate of the Japanese strength. There
were not fewer than seven hundred thousand of these cantankerous little
devils in front of Gunshu Pass.”
“Then they are—in a military sense—‘cantankerous,’” said the reporter.
“That is about the same as saying that they are good soldiers, is it
not?”
“Oh, they fight well enough. Why shouldn’t they? They have something
to fight for; the pride of an honorable history; a government that
does not rob them; a civilization that is to them new and fascinating,
reared, as the superstructure of a glittering temple, upon an elder
one, whose stones were hewn and laid and wrought into beauty by their
forefathers, while ours were chasing one another through marshes with
flint spears. Best of all, they had a sovereign whom they adore as a
deity and love with a passionate personal attachment. What can you
do against such a people as that?—a people in whom patriotism is a
religion—a nation of poets, artists and philosophers, like the ancient
Greeks; of statesmen and warriors, like those of early Rome?”
“If the Japanese are all that you think them,” said the reporter, “how
do you justify your pro-Russian sympathies?”
“It is not the business of a student of military affairs to have
sympathies,” replied the Bald Campaigner, coldly; “but it is precisely
because they are that kind of people that their overthrow is, to
America, a military necessity. They are dangerous neighbors to so
feeble barbarians as we, with a government which all extol and none
respects—a loose unity and no illusions—a slack allegiance and no
consciousness of national life—a bickering aggregation of individuals,
man against man and class against class—a motley crowd of lawless,
turbulent and avaricious ungovernables!”
He paused from exhaustion and mopped his shining pow with his
handkerchief.
“Maybe Americans are like that,” assented the reporter, “but it is said
that we fight pretty well on occasion—in a civil war, for example.”
“Certainly, all Caucasians fight ‘pretty well’ compared with other
Caucasians. The Japs are another breed.”
The Inquiring Mind was convinced, but not silenced. “Suppose,” said he,
“that a collision ever occurs between an American and a Japanese fleet
or army on equal terms, what, in your honest judgment as a military
expert, will be the result?”
“Damn them!” shouted the man of no sympathies, “we’ll wipe them off the
face of the earth!”