obedience is a thing not easily acquired even with the best of
good will. Careful and often tedious training is necessary before
the obedience becomes instinctive and a second nature; and the
process is not always a pleasant one. In the first place tyrannical
teachers are always to be found, who make the lesson as odious as
possible; and in the second there are some natures to which nothing
is so revolting as order and method in the minutest detail. The
temperament that calls itself artistic is particularly impatient
of this description of discipline, and attaches to it the name
of soul-destroying; but I have noticed that persons who claim to
possess that particular temperament discover equal mischief to
their souls in the punctual keeping of their appointments, the
faithful fulfilment of their contracts, and the regular payment
of their debts. In fact a little drill and discipline is the very
thing that they most require. However, the school of implicit
obedience is no doubt a hard one, and sometimes even distressing.
There is much that seems--perhaps even a little that may actually
be--unnecessary and pedantic in the instruction; and in time of
peace the necessity for this is not obvious. It is inexpressibly
galling to some characters to find the question _Why_ answered
unchangeably by the formula "Because orders must be obeyed." They
chafe against the compression of all natures into the same mould;
and the conversion of one, who flatters himself (not always with
reason) that he is an intelligent mortal, into a machine.
I shall deal with the weak side of military discipline presently.
Meanwhile observe that its moral force is founded on one of the
noblest of human, I might say of Christian, virtues. I have styled
it organised self-abnegation--organised self-surrender of the
individual for the sake of the general;--only possible through
arduous training in self-denial, self-restraint and self-control.
Observe that, although many religious orders have taken for their
governance the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the
most formidable of all was that founded by an old soldier, who
organised it upon a military model and gave its chief the title of
General. The name of the Jesuits does not smell sweet in English
nostrils, and yet its members have perhaps outdone all the world in
self-sacrifice. "Go," the General said from time to time to some
young Jesuit in the 17th century, "Go out to the wilds of North
America; spread the gospel among the Red Indians; search out the
land and take it into possession for the most Christian king."
Without a word the command was obeyed. The missionary went forth,
alone or with a comrade, undaunted by the prospect of being tied up
to roast before a slow fire, or have his fingers bitten off one
by one; he dwelt among savage men, lived their lives, subsisted
on their food, and, without counting the risk of being lost or
starved, found his way down the great rivers from the Upper Lakes
to the Gulf of Florida. You know the great examples of heroism
in our own army. You know the story of the _Birkenhead_; and you
may perhaps realise that it is this story which has inspired all
English men and English women to show courage in a shipwreck. But
I shall add just one story, a very short one, of the wreck of the
_Warren Hastings_, which was carrying four companies of the King's
Royal Rifle Corps and as many of the York and Lancaster Regiment,
on the island of Reunion in 1897. When the ship struck, sentries of
the Rifles were at once posted at various points on the lower deck,
to guard the access to the spirit-room and such like; and there
they remained while the boats were lowered to take the battalion
ashore. The water rose steadily upon them inch by inch, and had
reached their chests, when at last an officer came to summon them
also, last of all, to take their place in the boats. He collected
them all, as he thought, but in the noise and darkness he missed
one man and left him behind. The man saw his comrades disappear
up the ladder, and the officer about to follow them, and not till
then did he ask, _without quitting his post_, "Beg pardon, sir,
may I come too?" If ever you hear any man speak lightly of military
discipline, tell him that story, for that Rifleman is worthy to be
placed alongside the Roman sentry at Pompeii.
Yet it is very necessary that the working of military discipline
should be most carefully studied in military history, in order
that its defects, weaknesses and limitations may be thoroughly
ascertained and realised. There is no greater mistake than to
say that disciplined men are machines. They are nothing of the
kind: they are flesh and blood; and it is most dangerous to treat
them as anything else. Yet nothing is more common than for people
to suppose that anything is good enough for soldiers because
discipline forbids them to complain. Politicians in particular
often appear to think that a soldier, in virtue of his discipline,
can march all day and all night, dispense with food and drink, and
lie out in cold and rain with no particular mischief to himself.
I can assure you that in former days, within the memory of living
men, English soldiers were housed in buildings and sent to sea in
vessels that would have been thought too bad for valuable cattle.
Tradesmen and contractors likewise presume upon the soldiers'
enforced patience, and mobs will insult and pelt them, secure
in the knowledge that the soldiers will not retaliate without
orders. This indeed, albeit infinitely mean and cowardly, is an
unconscious tribute to discipline, but may easily strain it beyond
endurance. The fact is that discipline which rests wholly upon
fear is not the strongest. Inelastic and unsympathetic severity,
even though it may not actually amount to injustice, can produce
only a passive and discontented obedience, which speedily gives
way to sulky insubordination under any unusual trial. It is when
officers are not in touch with their men and do not consider them,
that the hearts of soldiers are stolen away by agitators and
malcontents. And then follows mutiny, which if begun in some choice
corps may spread to a whole army, as in the French Revolution, and
bring a dynasty and the traditions of centuries to the ground.
The ill-treatment of men was common enough in old days, when the
gaps between social classes were wide and the distinction between
them carefully marked, but you will never find an instance of a
successful army in which the officers did not share the hardships
of the men. Hannibal, for one, frequently slept on the ground with
his outposts.
It is when, as in most modern armies, the officers put their men
before anything else in the world, that military discipline shines
at its brightest. This does not mean leniency to irregularity or
towards insubordination--a weak or indulgent officer is neither
loved nor respected--but the treatment of men as men instead
of as children, attention to their wants, consideration for
their feelings, zeal for their well-being, cultivation of their
self-respect, forethought to train them to meet every exigency,
endless endeavour to deserve their confidence. Then there arises in
regiments that mysterious power which is called _esprit de corps_,
when every soul in them from the colonel to the drummer feels that
his own honour is bound up with the honour of the regiment, and
that the honour of the regiment is the greatest thing in the world.
And so you find--for one instance out of many thousand--such a
battalion as that of the Fifty-seventh at Albuera, with two men
in every three struck down, yet conscious of nothing in the dense
smoke but of closing in to the colours and unquestioning resolution
to die where they stood, rather than give way. So too you find a
simple solitary private, in the story that I have already told
you, content to go down alone in a sinking ship for the honour
of the Sixtieth. Without knowledge of military history men are
really unconscious of the existence of that most wonderful of moral
forces, _esprit de corps_; and it is not a thing of which anyone
can afford to be ignorant.
Lastly military history gives us insight into the character and
intellectual powers of some of the most remarkable men who ever
lived. I shall be told perhaps that the career of an Alexander or
of a Caesar is but a paltry study compared with that of a Luther
or a François Xavier. Be it so. Different characters attract
different students, and great leaders of men, whether saints or
soldiers, are always worthy of study. Moreover, it is a most
important thing to realise that military history means the survey
of administrative in at least as great a degree as strategical
and tactical genius. You will all of you recall the happy phrase
that was applied to Carnot--the organiser of victory; and Carnot
was only one of many who have deserved the epithet. No man perhaps
ever merited it better than Moses, if only through his standing
order (which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy xxiii. 12-14)
that when an army was in the field there should be appointed
places for latrines outside the camp, and that all foul matter
should be instantly buried. The regulation is justified by a noble
precept, which in its essence is true for all time. "The Lord thy
God walketh in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give
up thine enemies before thee; therefore _shall thy camp be holy_,
that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from thee." Foul
camps mean enteric fever and dysentery, and these diseases mean
the destruction of the host. To this day it may be said that the
sanitary regulations of Moses have never been superseded. How many
Jewish victories may have been due to the observance of them we
can only conjecture; how many hundred millions of lives have been
sacrificed to the neglect of them--for it is only latterly that
their value has been fully recognised--the Omniscient alone can
know.
Turn from Palestine to Greece and look at the military constitution
of Sparta founded by Lycurgus. Make a huge stride over the ages,
and look at Chaka, the man of genius whose military organisation
and training of his people would have made the Zulus masters of
South Africa, had not the boundless resources of the British Empire
dashed his work--though not without difficulty and defeat--at
last to the ground. Look at the great men of modern times, whose
names will be more familiar to you, Frederick the Great, Napoleon,
Wellington, and take note that from the very beginning of history
the greatest generals have almost invariably been in the very first
rank not merely of military but of civil administrators. It may
seem heretical to say so, but I personally am inclined to think
that Napoleon's work as a civil Governor transcends even in its
own kind the greatest of his military achievements. I, even as
many other men, have gone through most of the thirty-six volumes
of his correspondence; and I confess that his reorganisation of
France in the first months of the Consulate--crude and hasty as
in many respects it was, owing to the urgency of the case and the
desperate nature of the circumstances--appears to me the greatest
thing that ever he did. But all three of these men are remarkable
chiefly for the astonishing results which they achieved with small
means. Frederick, in spite of terrible defeats and latterly an
almost total failure of resources, contrived somehow to carry the
Seven Years War to a successful end, and at its close to revive
an exhausted Prussia. Napoleon took over a France demoralised by
ten years of misrule, and sunk financially to a hopeless depth of
bankruptcy, yet by squandering men in lieu of money he carried
his eagles victoriously from end to end of Europe. Wellington had
so few men that he could not squander them, and so little money
that, owing to the general lack of specie, he was obliged to carry
on the Peninsular War upon credit, and incidentally to administer
the government of Portugal as well as direct the operations in the
field, lest that credit should absolutely fail him. Yet by sheer
administrative ability, patience and tenacity, he prevailed.
I have of design left the question of the technical study of
strategy and tactics until the last. Strategy may, I think, be
defined as the art of bringing armies up to the battle-field by
the right way, in the right strength, at the right time; tactics
as the art of handling them on the battle-field to the best
advantage. Of what profit is the study of these two arts to the
citizen at large? Well, in the first place he will learn what may
be termed his strategical geography, and why battles are constantly
fought century after century in or about the same places. He
will understand why, for instance, endless great actions for the
mastery of India have been fought within fifty miles of Delhi; the
significance of Stirling on the map of Scotland, and of Acre on the
coast of Syria. He will perceive why, owing to changes in transport
and armament, places whose names constantly occur in old diplomatic
records have ceased to be of great account and are now seldom
mentioned, whereas others, as I have said, retain their importance
through endless generations. He will realise, further, how far
strategic considerations enter into political arrangements of all
kinds, as for instance that Bismarck the civilian was against the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine as tending to perpetuate the
hostility of France, but was overruled by Moltke because the new
frontier was worth 100,000 men. In fact it is not too much to
say that knowledge of military history is essential to the right
understanding not only of domestic and foreign politics, but of the
whole story, written and unwritten, of the human race--which is
mainly a story of fighting.
The interest of tactics is chiefly for professional men; but it is
worth while to notice its main principles, which are simple. All
fighting is, and has always been, of two kinds, hand-to-hand or
shock action, at a distance or missile action. Goliath challenged
the Israelites to shock action, and David killed him by missile
action; and I dare say that the Philistines thought it unfair. Now,
whether for shock or for missile action, it is very obvious that
if you can overmatch your enemy in numbers--other things being
equal--you are likely to get the better of him; and that if you are
on higher ground than he is you can see him better than he can see
you to throw things at him, and can charge him with greater impetus
down hill than he can meet you with, uphill. It may be said broadly
that the art of tactics is the art of bringing stronger numbers
to bear at some given point, and taking or acquiring superiority
of position. This is the physical side of tactics. The moral side
(apart from discipline) lies chiefly in those two eternal and
undying resources, known as the ambush and the surprise. Here the
leader tries to upset an enemy's physical advantage of numbers and
position by taking him unawares. There is no finer example of a
surprise in the world than that of Gideon. Think of it--the silent
march of 300 picked men in three companies through the darkness,
each with his trumpet and his torch hidden in a pitcher, the
silent surrounding of the hostile camp just before dawn, when human
vitality is at its lowest; and then the silence broken by the crash
of three hundred pitchers, the sudden flare of the torches, the
braying of three hundred trumpets as if in signal to a host of
thousands unseen in the night; and the simultaneous yell "For the
Lord and for Gideon." There was a wild panic in the Midianite camp,
and no wonder. In the darkness they took to fighting each other,
"every man's sword against his fellow." Of course they did. Exactly
the same result was seen many times over during our last war in
South Africa, and has been seen in every panic from Gideon's age to
our own. Gideon was a man who studied moral force.
Thus we come back to the point from which we began. Military
history is not the history of physical but of moral force, perhaps
almost of the triumph of moral over purely physical force. Let
no man say that such a subject is unworthy of our attention. It
is unfortunately impossible to study deeply any department of
the affairs of men without encountering much that is infinitely
vile and base and sordid; and military history is no exception to
this rule. But it is rich also in noble and heroic deeds, not of
valour only but of patience, self-sacrifice and endurance. I may
be wrong, but I think that I see in it grander and more frequent
examples of devotion to duty than in any other branch of history.
The opportunities, you will say, are greater; and there may be some
truth in this; but I would add that the training to self-abnegation
counts also for very much. It will harm none of us to know well
this story of duty done for duty's sake; and it may be that, as the
example of the _Birkenhead_ has nerved all our race to face with
calmness the utmost perils of the sea, so the remembrance of the
proud history of our soldiers may brace each one of us, no matter
how humble his sphere, to discipline himself in the self-denial and
self-control which triumph over adversity.
LECTURE II
BRITISH MILITARY HISTORY
In my last lecture I attempted to deal with the broad subject of
military history at large. To-day I shall treat of the narrower
subject of British military history. There is nothing arbitrary or
capricious in this; for British military history is, owing to our
insular position, a thing apart.
Foreign nations, indeed, would say that a country which has never
in the whole course of her existence put fifty thousand of her own
children in line upon any battle-field and very rarely so many even
as thirty thousand, can have no military history; but none the
less we have one, which is in many ways remarkable and worthy of
study.
Note in the first place that for five hundred years after
the Conquest England was not a purely insular power. She had
troublesome neighbours in Wales and Scotland, and her kings had
possessions, and consequently troublesome neighbours, in France.
Remember that it was not until 1558 that we lost Calais, and that,
as long as we possessed it, we had so to speak a bridge-head which
enabled us to enter France practically at any moment. This was a
sad temptation towards foolish expeditions and waste of strength;
and it was a great blessing to us really when the capture of Calais
removed it for ever.
Elizabeth, therefore, was our first purely insular sovereign.
What manner of military force did she find at her accession,
and what manner of organisation for creating and maintaining
it? The sovereign was empowered, as he still is, to call out
every able-bodied man for the defence of the country; and upon
the different classes of freemen was imposed by an Act of 1558,
which was based upon an older Act of 1285, the duty of providing
themselves with arms according to their means. Long before 1558
fire-arms had been brought to such efficiency that a compete system
of tactics had been founded for their use by the ablest soldiers
on the Continent; but in England the Statute still professed
contentment with the weapons of three centuries earlier, bows and
bills; and there were remarkably few fire-arms in the country at
all. There were, however, great traditions derived in part from
Saxon times, but strengthened, developed and enlarged by the
victories of Edward the Third, his son Edward, Prince of Wales, and
king Harry the Fifth, in France and in Spain in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.
I told you in my last lecture that all fighting, from the
earliest times to the present, is in the ultimate resort of two
kinds--hand-to-hand or shock action, at a distance or missile
action. In the hands of the English a very old missile weapon, the
bow, had become, in the form of the long bow, the most deadly and
formidable of its time. Every English boy was trained to the use
of it, and was taught to bring every muscle of his body to bear
upon it, just as in rowing you are taught not to row with your
arms only, but with your legs also and with all the weight of your
body. "My father taught me to lay my body to the bow," says Bishop
Hugh Latimer. The result was that their arrows were discharged
with great rapidity and accuracy, and with such strength that they
were effective in the matter of penetration at an astonishingly
long range. The shock action of mediaeval times, as you know, was
confined chiefly to mounted men-at-arms, clad in armour from head
to foot, and furnished with lances, who moved in dense masses at
very moderate speed, and trampled down everything that stood in
their way. How did the English archers deal with them? They aimed
mainly at their horses, which, maddened by the pain, ran away with
their riders, and carried confusion everywhere; but being accurate
shots, the archers aimed also at the joints of the harness--at the
intervals between gorget and breast-plate, between breast-plate,
or back-plate, and thigh-pieces, which were exposed by the swaying
of the body, and above all the arm-pit when the arm was raised
to strike. But how about the English men-at-arms, you will ask?
Why did not the enemy shoot their horses with arrows, and make
them unmanageable also? Here we come to the English peculiarity.
The English men-at-arms always dismounted to fight, broke off
their lances to a length that could be easily handled and, ranked
together in a dense mass, used them as pikes. So here there was
the tradition of a missile infantry, so to speak, steady and
deadly shots; and of a shock infantry which could not be broken
and, moreover, after winning a victory could mount and pursue on
horseback.
The new tactics of the Continent, which the English had to learn,
had taken much the same direction. The Swiss, in order to keep
mounted men-at-arms at a distance, had bethought them of ranging
their infantry into dense masses, armed with pikes fourteen feet
long, and this they had done with such success that they had
vindicated the position of infantry as the most important element
on the battle-field. Other nations took up the idea, either for
mercenaries or national troops; and, with the improvement of
fire-arms, missile infantry developed into musketeers, or "shot" as
they were called, who fought entirely as skirmishers, while shock
infantry was represented by dense masses of pikemen. Simultaneously
the cavalry became a missile force. Unable to make any impression
against a bristling wall of pikes, they gave up their lances and
provided themselves with pistols, so as to shoot the pikemen down
from a distance. Hence it was customary to cover the pikemen with
heavy armour on breast and thighs, which prevented them from moving
very fast. The fate of the battle, however, was determined by them.
Musketeers and cavaliers worried each other and the pikemen for as
long as they dared, but the ultimate issue was decided when pike
met pike. The chief reason for this was the system adopted for
maintaining a continuous fire. This was to range the musketeers
in ten ranks, and let these ranks fire in succession, the first
rank filing to the rear as soon as its weapons were discharged,
in order to reload, and leaving the second rank to do likewise,
and so on. In theory the system was ingenious; but in practice it
was found that men thought a great deal more about filing to the
rear rapidly, than about firing steadily and accurately. Of course
if heavy artillery could be brought within range of a square of
pikemen, it might blast them off the field; but cannon were too
cumbrous and difficult to move for this to be often possible; and
thus the decision of the day was left, as it still is, to cold
steel. You will see wonderful pictures of combats of pikemen, just
as you see the like representations of fights with the bayonet. I
doubt greatly if they ever occurred. Both sides approached each
other with the pike or bayonet no doubt; but before they closed
one side turned and ran away. All nations boast of their prowess
with the bayonet, our own among others, but few men really enjoy a
hand-to-hand fight with the bayonet, however much they may enjoy a
hand-to-hand pursuit. You remember that the Homeric heroes, after
a certain amount of close combat, invariably threw stones at each
other; and the practice has never died out. English and French both
talk much of the bayonet; but in Egypt in 1801 they threw stones
at each other when their ammunition was exhausted, and one English
sergeant was killed by a stone. At Inkerman again the British threw
stones at the Russians, not without effect; and I am told upon
good authority that the Russians and Japanese, both of whom profess
to love the bayonet, threw stones at each other, rather than close,
even in this twentieth century.