astonishingly successful in the field--and not in the field
only--for you must remember that he was no less great as a
diplomatist than as a general? First I should say what Wellington
termed his strong cool common-sense. This sounds perhaps a small
matter to you; but what after all is common-sense? It is above
all the faculty of seeing things as they are, and of framing your
action accordingly. The faculty of seeing things as they are,
swift, true and penetrating insight into the heart of things,
undistracted by their outward semblance--this, whether it be the
attribute of statesman, general, poet or painter, is genius. And
to frame your actions, as a man of action, upon real insight,
what does that mean? It means transcendent moral courage, the
courage of faith in one's own judgement, the courage to depart
from beaten tracks, the courage to brave the disapprobation of
those who cannot do without such tracks, the courage, in a good
sense, to take liberties. It is the union of courage with insight
which makes a man original. And there was another form of genius
which Marlborough possessed in a supreme degree, the faculty
of taking infinite pains. When his army started for the Danube
not a man knew whither he was bound; yet at every stage food
was ready for all, and at certain points shoes to replace those
worn out on the march, and money to provide the troops with pay.
For, as Marlborough well knew, soldiers who have not what they
need will help themselves, and plunder means indiscipline, and
indiscipline turns an army into a rabble. Any officer can flog
and shoot and punish, and say that he enforces discipline; but
a good officer prefers to enforce it by removing all temptation
to indiscipline. Next, Marlborough possessed in a transcendent
degree the divine gift of patience--patience which conquers all
things. His temper was almost miraculously placid and calm. Time
after time the Dutch deputies thwarted his shrewdest strokes and
most brilliant combinations; and time after time he endured their
maddening mischief without a murmur, without even a semblance of
displeasure, waiting for better times, and preferring to bear
almost any mortification rather than endanger the common cause.
There are few things greater in Marlborough than this. "I would
not have that man's temper for the world," he is reported to have
remarked when watching a groom who was fighting his horse in the
saddle. So strongly marked was this characteristic that when
once, in order to deceive his enemy, he grew from day to day more
cantankerous and pretended at last to lose all self-control, his
army declared sorrowfully that Corporal John had lost his wits.
And this epithet--Corporal John--brings me to the last great gift
of Marlborough, his extraordinary personal charm. It nowhere
appears that he laid himself out particularly to attract his
fellow-creatures; but not one of them could resist him. His men
adored him. It was not only that he enjoyed their confidence as
a successful leader; but that he commanded their affection. And
others shared this feeling as strongly as the soldiers. In 1705 he
narrowly escaped capture by a marauding party of French. On his
arrival at the Hague after the incident the whole population,
high and low, turned out to welcome him, the poor crowding round
him with tears of joy and kissing even his horse and his boots.
Of course there is a dark side to his character, and much has
been made of his avarice and his treachery. But I have noticed
that men who begin with nothing and rise to great estate, as did
Marlborough, are apt to be careful of sixpences to the very end;
and I do not know that it is to their discredit. It is certain
too that he declined even to look at an enormous bribe offered
by Louis XIV to obtain an advantageous peace. Moreover, you will
find that at all times and in all countries while the issue of a
struggle between two dynasties is still doubtful, men tend to keep
upon friendly terms with both. I do not say that this trait is a
beautiful or an honourable one; but that it is the rule and not the
exception is beyond doubt; and we must take poor human nature as we
find it. Fortunate are we when we find this weakness redeemed by
such great qualities as were possessed by Marlborough.
The Peace of Utrecht which brought the war to an end was, as you
remember, the work of the Tories, who had succeeded in ousting
the Whigs and disgracing Marlborough. Before the Treaty had been
signed, they had reduced the British establishment to twenty-two
thousand men; and, when the Whigs returned to power upon the
accession of George I in 1714, they continued the evil work which
the Tories had begun. By 1719 the establishment had been reduced
to twelve thousand men, making with the same number in Ireland a
nominal total of twenty-four thousand. Yet the Treaty had added to
the Empire Gibraltar, Minorca, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, all of
which required garrisons; there was no police in the British Isles;
the organisation of the Militia was so antiquated that the force
was absolutely useless; and there was always danger, as the country
experienced in 1715, of a Jacobite rising in Scotland. Moreover,
the original system of defence in the West Indies was rapidly
becoming obsolete; and it was pretty evident that the burden must
shortly be transferred to the Imperial forces. No consideration
could move the British Parliament to accept the Army as a necessary
institution. Walpole in 1722 at last insisted that the British
Establishment should be raised permanently to eighteen thousand
men; but even so it would have been impossible to collect ten
thousand for any emergency without leaving the royal palaces and
strong places unguarded. Yet Parliament, not content with keeping
an inadequate army, insisted also that it should be inefficient.
In Ireland, from want of billeting accommodation, barracks had
been built for the troops; but nothing could persuade Parliament
to extend the same system to England. No! the regiments must be
broken up and scattered among ale-houses, "in order that the
people might feel the burden that lay upon them." Moreover, hon.
members conceived that ale-houses grew as abundantly at Gibraltar,
Nova Scotia and Newfoundland as in England; and could hardly be
brought to house the garrisons of these places adequately. Scores
of men died in all these spots from exposure--and why? Because
the nation had laid itself in bondage to a canting phrase. This
ill-treatment of the soldiers, joined to perpetual reviling of
the military profession, of course made the Army unpopular. Men
were unwilling to enlist and very ready to desert, which led in
turn to high bounties to tempt recruits; and this again led to
fraudulent enlistment and hideous waste of money. Of all the cant
that ever was canted in this canting world none is so cantful as
the assertion that neglect of military precaution is economy. Yet
the British people after two centuries' experience of its falsehood
still hugs the notion passionately to its bosom.
The peace was broken in 1739 by a sudden outburst of national
cupidity for the wealth of Spain; but from this point, where the
struggle for Empire becomes acute, I shall in this lecture confine
myself to our wars in Europe only, leaving those in the Colonies
and in India for two future lectures. Before the quarrel with
Spain was fairly ended, we found ourselves entangled in the War
of the Austrian Succession, with an obligation to furnish sixteen
thousand men to uphold the cause of Maria Theresa. British and
French, by a curious fiction, were engaged at the outset only as
auxiliaries upon either side; and they actually fought the battle
of Dettingen before war had been formally declared between them.
From the spring of 1744, however, they met as principals and,
since the French had been triumphantly driven from Germany at the
end of 1743, on the familiar ground of the Austrian Netherlands.
The British contingent was increased from sixteen thousand men in
1743 to twenty-five thousand in 1745, the balance of the force
being composed of Dutch and Austrians; but this strength in the
field, trifling though it was, was only attained by reducing the
garrisons of Great Britain to fifteen thousand men, mostly raw
recruits. The Duke of Cumberland on the 11th of May, 1745, fought
and lost a murderous battle at Fontenoy; and in July there came the
astounding news that Prince Charles Edward had landed in Scotland
and was gathering the Highland clans about him. In the whole of
North Britain there were only three thousand untrained men who
wore the red coat; and bold action combined with good fortune on
the part of Prince Charles soon filled these with the spirit of
panic. Within little more than two months he was at Edinburgh and,
but for the garrisons of the Castle of Stirling and one or two
lesser strongholds, master of the country. Urgent messengers were
sent to Cumberland in Flanders for reinforcements; and not English
troops only, but Dutch and Hessians, were hurried across the German
Ocean to save the throne of the Guelphs. There was every reason to
dread lest the remnant of the army in Flanders, reduced to utter
weakness by the loss of these detachments, should be overwhelmed by
the French; but fortunately the enemy took no advantage of their
opportunity. Meanwhile Charles by skilful manœuvring evaded the
troops opposed to him and reached Derby; and there now seemed to
be nothing to prevent him from entering London. Fearing, however,
the closing in of the British forces in his rear, and hearing
that French troops had landed at Montrose to join him, he retired
once more to Scotland; nor was it until he had won two or three
further small actions, that he was finally and hopelessly defeated
at Culloden. By that time, though he had landed originally with
but seven companions and had never commanded more than seven or
eight thousand mostly undisciplined men, he had kept the bulk of
the British Army employed for over nine months, and had beaten
several detachments of it handsomely. The episode is generally
treated as a romantic adventure; but it is really one of the most
discreditable to be found in our history; and it was due entirely
to the fanatics, both Whig and Tory, who were always clamouring
against a standing army.
After the defeat of the insurgents the war was continued in the
Low Countries, where the Allies sustained two more defeats, until
in 1748, owing to the exhaustion of all parties, it was closed
by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, leaving the French and English
at the end very much as they had been at the beginning. In a way
it might seem that the British had been dragged into the contest
mainly on account of the Kingdom of Hanover, but, as we shall see
in a future lecture, the war resolved itself into a continuation of
the struggle with France for the possession of the new world. That
struggle in fact never ceased over the seas, both east and west,
and early in 1756 it came to an issue in open war. As usual England
was unready. German troops were actually imported for the defence
of the realm; Minorca was taken by the French; everything went
wrong in America; and the state of affairs seemed to be desperate.
At last a competent Minister, William Pitt the elder, was raised to
power and from that moment things began to improve. The foreign
troops were sent back to Germany; their place was taken by Militia;
and an immense levy of recruits was begun for the increase of the
regular Army. In the year 1756 France, Austria, Russia and Sweden
leagued themselves together to crush Frederick the Great; and Pitt,
perceiving that America might be conquered in Germany, decided to
send a contingent of British troops, together with Hanoverians
and Hessians, to Frederick's assistance. Moreover, as we had no
competent general of our own, he asked Frederick to provide one;
and thus for the first time British troops were placed under the
command of a foreign general for service on the Continent. Few
people know anything of the campaigns of Ferdinand of Brunswick,
though they are distinguished by two of the finest performances of
the British soldier: of the infantry at Minden, and of the cavalry
at Warburg. And the reason of this is that, as I have said, the
expedition, so far as England was concerned, was a diversion to
help her to the conquest of the Empire. That conquest proceeded
apace during the years 1759 to 1762, and by the end of the latter
year we had expelled the French from Canada, India and the West
Indies, besides depriving the Spaniards of Havana and Manila. The
process demanded a great number of troops, for seventy-five per
cent. of the men in the West Indies died or were incapacitated for
further service, and it is here that we strike the weak point of
Pitt's military administration.
The great Minister saw the importance of reorganising the Militia,
though as a matter of fact he never enforced his own scheme
of passing all able-bodied men through the ranks--or in other
words of instituting national service. But he never matured nor
even considered (so far as we can discover) any sound scheme
for maintaining the voluntary army that was serving abroad. His
only plan was to name a certain sum for bounty, and scatter
broadcast commissions to any individuals who would undertake to
raise independent companies or regiments. In this way the nominal
strength of the Army was brought up to one hundred and fifty
battalions of infantry and thirty-two of cavalry, the numbered
regiments of infantry being as many as one hundred and twenty-four.
Comparatively few of these new regiments survived, because they
had been formed simply and solely to be broken up immediately and
drafted into other battalions. But what did this mean? It meant in
the first place that hundreds of officers went about the country
trying to make money out of the recruiting business by obtaining
recruits for less than the prescribed bounty, and pocketing the
difference. It meant secondly that crimps arose by the score who
contracted to supply recruits to these officers, of course at a
considerable profit to themselves, and that thus there were so
to speak two middlemen to be paid out of the bounty as well as
the recruit. The inevitable result was that the country paid vast
sums to obtain worn-out old men, half-witted lads and weedy boys,
who were absolutely useless in the field, and served only to fill
graves and hospitals. Moreover, it was saddled with the obligation
of giving half-pay to field-officers, captains and even subalterns,
who had gained their rank by the simple process of a bargain with
the crimps. Meanwhile the recruits, being enlisted not for some old
corps with a regimental history and a regimental pride of its own,
but for some ephemeral battalion which was dispersed as soon as
formed, felt no sentiment of honour in their calling and deserted
right and left. One consequence of this exceedingly wasteful
system was that the resources of England both in money and men
were exhausted before peace was made, and that the war could not
have been carried on for another twelve months even if it had been
necessary. But yet more fatal than this was the misfortune that
the system, owing to its supposed success, received consecration
from the great name of Pitt. In the bitter struggle with France
which began in 1793 and ended at Waterloo I have said that France
squandered men to save money, and that England squandered money to
save men. The elder Pitt squandered both money and men.
The conclusion of peace in 1763 found England in possession of
Gibraltar and Minorca in Europe; Bermuda, the Bahamas, several
West Indian Islands and practically the entire continent of North
America east of the Rocky Mountains from the mouth of the St
Lawrence in the north to the Lower Mississippi in the south. I omit
the name of India, for that is a subject to be treated separately.
The military establishment of England and Ireland for the defence
of this vast Empire was fixed at about forty-five thousand men,
two-thirds of them roughly speaking at home, and one-third abroad.
This was neither more nor less than madness; yet nevertheless many
were found, so great a man as Burke among them, to condemn the
"huge increase" as they called it of the Army. But this was not the
worst. Prices generally had risen and the pay of the soldier was
too small for his subsistence; wherefore recruits could hardly be
obtained by any shift, and the ranks of regiments were miserably
empty. Reeling under the burden of the debts bequeathed by the
late war, England proposed to the Colonies that they should share
that burden with her. The North American provinces admitted the
justice of the claim but made no effort to meet it; whereupon the
British Government, after exhausting all expedients for obtaining
a contribution from them, fell back upon the only possible solution
of the problem--impartial taxation of all the Colonies by Act of
the Imperial Parliament, with a special provision that every penny
of the money so raised should be spent in the Colonies themselves.
A faction in the Colonies raised a loud outcry over this; and the
question, owing to mismanagement in England and to the provocative
violence of the American agitators, finally issued in war between
Mother-country and Colonies.
The task of bringing America to submission by force of arms was a
military operation beyond the strength of any nation in the world
at that time, and very far beyond that of England as she was in
1775. No effort was made to augment the Army until hostilities
had actually broken out, and consequently there were no troops
at hand. Recruiting, moreover, was so difficult, owing to the
insufficiency of the pay, that the country resorted to the hiring
of German mercenaries and to the transfer of Hanoverian battalions
to Gibraltar and Minorca, so as to release four British battalions
from thence. Faction violently obstructed all military measures
until a great disaster to our arms in 1777 made it practically
certain that France would declare war; but then, in spite of all
the ravings of the King's enemies at home, patriotic feeling
prevailed, and fifteen thousand men in new regiments were raised
by private subscription alone. Troubles multiplied now on all
sides; troubles in India, in Ireland, in Great Britain, everywhere.
France declared war in 1778, Spain in 1779; Holland became an open
enemy in 1780; and the Northern Powers formed an Armed Neutrality
to curb our pretensions at sea. What with regular troops and
embodied militia we had more than one hundred and eighty thousand
British soldiers afoot, besides some twenty thousand Germans; but
this was not enough. Our preparations, thanks to Parliament's
eternal jealousy of the Army, were made too late. Our military
policy was wrong, for we dispersed our forces so as to endeavour to
hold every point; and thus we were everywhere overmatched. The war
ended with the loss of America and very nearly of India also; of
Minorca in Europe, of Senegal and Goree in West Africa, and of St
Lucia and Tobago in the West Indies.
It might be supposed that England, after such a disastrous lesson,
would have set her military house in order. Nothing was further
from the thoughts of the Ministry which governed her after the
conclusion of peace. They--Lord North and Mr Fox--were in such a
hurry to get rid of the Army that they discharged every man that
they could, and allowed the garrison of England to sink below
seven thousand men. By this time India demanded a garrison of
over six thousand men, and the Colonies still left to us, together
with Gibraltar, twelve thousand more. Besides these, the estimates
allowed for thirty-two thousand men in Great Britain and Ireland;
but not above half of them were forthcoming because recruits would
not enlist; and the reason why they did not enlist was because
their pay was insufficient to keep them from starving. William Pitt
the younger took over the administration in 1784, and did admirable
service in setting the national finance upon a sound footing, but
would do nothing for the Army. A dangerous war in India compelled
him to allow some new regiments to be raised at the expense of
the East India Company; but though thrice in seven years the
country was on the verge of an European war, he did nothing for
the British soldier until 1792 when he grudgingly doled out to him
a small pittance. He suffered the militia to decay in number and
efficiency; and he almost destroyed the discipline of the regular
troops by failing to provide them with a military head. In 1789 the
French Revolution broke out, and the course of events in France was
in itself enough to demand some increase of our military resources;
but even so late as at the close of 1792 he actually reduced the
British establishment. Within a very few months he found himself
dragged into a war which to all intents did not end until 1815.
Pitt's idea was to compel France to submission by taking all her
Colonies and ruining all her commerce; but it was necessary to send
troops at short notice to Holland in order to hearten the Dutch to
resistance; and, as there were no others to send, he despatched
the Guards. The remainder of the Army, most excellent men but very
few in number, he hurried off to the West Indies. This done, he
set to work to make the Army, which should have been ready made,
according to his father's methods by large bounties and giving
commissions to any who would raise companies and regiments. Endless
corps of weakly men were thus created, and endless bad officers
admitted to the service. The old soldiers in the West Indies did
their work admirably, but perished almost to a man, as I shall
explain to you in another lecture. In the Low Countries also, where
the British were not fairly used by the Allies under whose command
they were working, the old soldiers were soon used up; and we were
left without any Army. Even at home, where there was some peril
of invasion, Pitt did not pass the nation through the ranks of
the Militia, as he should have done, but either enlisted soldiers
voluntarily for home service only, or permitted the citizens
to enrol themselves in innumerable little useless bodies of
Volunteers. The operations in the Low Countries ended disastrously.
In the West Indies practically the whole of the captured islands
were recaptured by the French; and at the close of three years of
war Pitt had expended many millions of money, and had nothing to
show for it whatever.
By great exertions and appalling sacrifice of life the lost ground
in the West Indies was recovered by a rabble of young soldiers,
who died like flies as soon as the campaign was over; and once
again we were left without an army. The climax came in 1797 when
the Navy mutinied, owing to the small pay and ill-treatment meted
out to it; and it was thought safer, when matters were set right,
to raise the pay of the Army also. Now at last there appeared a
man who began to set things in order. The Duke of York, second
son of King George III, took the post of Commander-in-Chief at
the Horse Guards; reorganised, or rather created, a competent
staff at head-quarters, set his face steadily against Pitt's vile
methods of raising recruits, and restored the discipline of the
Army. In 1799 the declining fortunes of France and the successes
of a new coalition against her stimulated Pitt to find some new
method of recruiting the Army. He resolved to turn to the Militia
as a training ground for the regular troops; and the Duke of
York insisted that the soldiers so raised should be formed into
second battalions for existing regiments instead of being framed
into new corps. Thirty-six thousand of them were hurried off to
Holland without clothing, supplies or transport, and after three
or four barren victories and one serious reverse, were thankful
to return again under a capitulation. They had been required to
do impossibilities and had failed. In the following year the same
men, much improved in discipline, were kept idle when they ought
to have been fighting as allies with the Austrians in Italy; and
thus Napoleon was enabled to win the victory of Marengo, which made
his fortune as First Consul, and allowed him to trouble Europe for
another fifteen years. However in 1801 England at last restored
her reputation a little by a brilliant campaign in Egypt and the
capture of the French army in that country. To all intents this was
our one solid success in nine years of fighting. Never was there
more gross mismanagement of a war by any Minister.
After a short truce, war broke out again in 1803, Pitt was not
then in power, but was the patron and more or less the adviser of
Addington's weak administration. That was the period when Napoleon
made great and serious preparations for an invasion of England; and
it was necessary to take unprecedented measures for home defence.
Instead of thinking out some plan for training the entire manhood
of the nation to arms, expanding the Militia and compelling every
man to serve in it, Addington and his colleagues devised a system
which was one long tissue of absurdities. They began by instituting
a ballot for fifty thousand Militia, but permitted the ballotted
men to provide substitutes instead of serving in person. The price
of substitutes soon rose to £30, ten times the amount of the
bounty offered to recruits for the Regular Army; and as a natural
consequence all the men who should have enlisted in the Army were
drawn into the Militia, while the men who should have served in
the Militia did not serve at all. Having failed to raise fifty
thousand Militia, Ministers asked for twenty-five thousand more on
the same terms, which raised the price of substitutes still higher.
They then asked for corps of Volunteers upon very favourable
conditions, and then ordained that fifty thousand more men should
be raised by ballot, once again with substitution permitted, and
should be formed into second battalions to the Regular Army. They
next passed an Act compelling all able-bodied men to undergo
compulsory training, unless a certain proportion came forward
as Volunteers upon less favourable terms than those offered to
the first Volunteers. Thus there were three different kinds of
ballotted men and two different kinds of Volunteers. The result
was that recruiting for the Regular Army was killed, at great
expense, while the whole of the levies were failures; and the only
reason was that the Government had not the courage to insist upon
the country's undoubted right to the service of every able-bodied
citizen for her defence.