brought in a bill to form a new army of Reserve, which was an utter
failure; and he then fell back on the old expedient of offering
a bounty to Militiamen to enlist in the Regulars. In this way,
which was faithfully followed until the close of the war in 1814,
he raised some semblance of an Army; but he did not know how to
use it, and he died in January, 1806, thinking the cause of Europe
hopeless. A Ministry which included most of the ablest men in
England was formed upon his death; and they introduced an Act for
national training to arms, excellent in principle but not properly
worked out in detail, and abolished the Volunteers. This was a step
in the right direction, but was taken too late. The Ministry of All
the Talents, as it was called, resigned early in 1807; and then at
last the War Office passed into the hands of a capable man, Lord
Castlereagh. He began by taking forty thousand men from the Militia
into the Regular Army, and raising as many--by extremely drastic
methods--to refill the empty ranks of the Militia. He then devised
a scheme which unfortunately was not enforced, for making national
training a reality; and finally he established a new Militia called
the Local Militia of two hundred thousand men for home defence,
keeping the old Militia to furnish recruits for the Regular Army.
Thus for the first time in our history there was a Regular Army
of from forty to fifty thousand men, fit to go anywhere and do
anything, together with the means of refilling their ranks as fast
as they were depleted by active service.
The number was small but, properly employed, it could be of great
use. In 1807 Napoleon had shamelessly and treacherously invaded
Spain and Portugal. In 1808 the people of both countries rose
against the invaders, and England's one army was sent to support
them. I told you in my first lecture that a campaign was like a
picnic; but our European campaigns of any importance had hitherto
been confined to the cockpits, where food was abundant and wars
so frequent that contractors could always be found to look to
the food-supply. The Peninsula is a very different country,
comprehending a few fertile districts only together with a vast
deal of barren mountain--a country, according to a well-known
saying, where small armies were beaten and large armies were
starved. The French armies in Spain were large armies, amounting
to three hundred thousand men, and the Spanish troops, badly led
and badly organised, could make no stand against them. How could
the British hope with forty thousand men or less to combat three
hundred thousand? In this way. The population of the Peninsula was
so bitterly hostile to the invaders that the French could not be
said to have any hold of the country, except of such part of it as
was actually occupied by their soldiers. It was therefore to the
interest of the French, in order to feed their troops as well as to
hold down the Spaniards, that their armies should be scattered as
much as possible. The very wise and sagacious soldier, Sir Arthur
Wellesley, who was charged with the command of our army, reasoned
as follows. We have a port of entry and a base of operations at
Lisbon, to which we can send by sea everything that we want. Being
also masters at sea we can prevent the French from making any use
of it; and they must bring into Spain by land everything that
they want. The roads are very bad, so that this in itself will
be a heavy task; and there are so many dangerous defiles to be
passed that the Spaniards may always lie in wait to capture French
convoys. There is one great advantage for us.
Now as long as we have forty thousand men at Lisbon, the French
must always keep rather more in a compact body to watch us, which
means that they must collect fifty or sixty thousand men together
instead of leaving them dispersed to hold the country down; which
means in its turn that so long as I remain in their front, there
must be Spaniards unsubdued and ready to do mischief to their
outlying posts and scattered detachments in their rear. Very well.
But what if the French assemble a very large force, and try to
overwhelm me once for all? They cannot take a very large force by
any one route, because they live on the country and the country
will not support them; but if they bring sixty thousand against
my forty thousand, I can stop them. Twenty-five miles north of
Lisbon is ground that can be made so strong that even Portuguese
Militia could hold it, under good leadership, especially with my
army to back them. Moreover the Portuguese have an ancient law
that provides for the desertion of all villages, the driving off
of all cattle, and the removal of all grain--in fact the laying
waste of their country--before an invader. If then the French
advance against me in Portugal, I shall retire before them to my
fortified lines, leaving the country a waste behind me. If they
attack me, all the better. I shall beat them. If they sit down in
front of me, I have no objection. I shall have all the resources
of the world behind me at Lisbon, while they will only have a
devastated wilderness behind them. They may wait for a time, but
they will have to send their troops further and further afield to
scrape together food, and the peasants will cut the throats of all
stragglers. Sickness will increase among their soldiers for want
of proper nourishment; their numbers will fall lower and lower and
lower; and at last sheer starvation will compel them to retreat.
And now, mark how I shall get the better of them. I shall provide
my army with the means of carrying victuals with it. The task
will be extraordinarily difficult, for the country is rough and
the roads so infamous that we cannot use wheeled vehicles; but I
shall organise a vast train of twelve to fifteen thousand mules to
carry everything that we want on their backs. The French, a body
of starving men, will have to hurry their retreat, for they have
to pass through a devastated country. We, with our bellies full,
shall be able to follow them up and cut off thousands of weakly
dispirited men. In time they will reach the fortresses which they
hold on the Spanish frontier, and there we must stop, while they
go back still further to some fertile district where they will
find provisions. But their army will be absolutely ruined for the
time, weakened by its losses and demoralised by its sufferings.
As I advance I shall establish magazines along the route so that
I may keep my army fed, and threaten their fortresses. They will
be obliged to revictual these fortresses from time to time, and to
do so in presence of my army they will have to collect once more
fifty or sixty thousand men, and leave the country behind them to
the mercy of the Spanish guerilla bands. If I can stop them by
fighting a general action in a strong position with good hope of
success, I shall do so. If I cannot, I shall fall back once more,
burning or emptying my magazines, to play the same game again.
But the oftener I lead them over the same country, the more it
will be exhausted. Their system of living on the country is very
wasteful. The brutality of their starving soldiers to the peasantry
is driving more and more land out of cultivation; and the time will
come when they will be unable to assemble their troops except at
harvest, but will be obliged to keep them dispersed all through
the winter in order to keep them alive. It will take them three or
four weeks to collect, with enormous difficulty, food and transport
enough for even a fortnight's campaign, and I shall use those
three or four weeks to make a swift and sudden attack upon their
fortresses; for having the means of feeding my troops, I can do so.
They will be obliged to look on helplessly until I have taken the
strong places; and, when at last they advance, they will be unable
to retake them, until they have driven me back; and I shall only
retire until they have exhausted their provisions, and shall then
advance again.
From these fortresses I shall penetrate into Spain to threaten
other fortresses, rousing the whole country more than ever against
the French; until at last I compel them to loose their hold upon
the south of Spain, and concentrate a really gigantic force
against me. I shall then retreat as before to Portugal. They will
be unable to keep their gigantic force for long together from
want of food; and I shall begin the whole game all over again;
while their men waste away by tens of thousands from fatigue and
hardship and incessant petty attacks of the Spanish guerillas. It
is only a question of time before Napoleon is distracted by serious
operations outside Spain; when once he begins to reduce his army in
the Peninsula, we shall gradually drive it into France; and then
we shall see how long Frenchmen will allow it to live on their own
country as it has lived on Spain. I for my part shall follow it
up, paying punctually for everything that I take, and allowing no
plunder; and we shall see which army gets on the better.
There in a nutshell is the history of the Peninsular War. Does it
not sound simple after the event? But think of the sagacity and
insight of the man who perceived all these possibilities before
the event; and of the courage and force of character which enabled
him to carry his policy into effect. Patience, the great attribute
of Marlborough, was the quality which shone above all others in
Wellington. And remember that he had to subdue not only himself to
patience, but his army, and the British nation, and the Spanish
nation and the Portuguese nation. Following his difficulties
through his correspondence one marvels how ever he overcame them.
The British Government, let people say what they will, supported
him well in the face of great obstacles and in the teeth of bitter
resistance from an unscrupulous Opposition; but they gained greatly
from Wellington's moral support. Spain and Portugal had practically
no government, and such authority as existed was to a great extent
distributed among fools and knaves. In truth Wellington really
administered the government of Portugal for four years, besides
commanding the British and Portuguese armies in the field. Never
allow yourselves to be abridged of your pride in Wellington by
petty detractors, British or foreign. German and French writers,
for some strange reason, unite to decry him as a commander. Do
not listen to them. Not one of them knows anything of any of his
campaigns except that of Waterloo. He was a very great commander in
every way, and beyond all doubt (at least such is my opinion) the
very greatest of his time upon the actual field of battle. He was
not a genial character. He had none of Marlborough's irresistible
charm, which made even the privates call him Corporal John. He
was never loved by man nor woman, nor by any but children not his
own. By self-imposed discipline--as I believe--rather than by
nature he was cold, hard, unsympathetic, and inclined to account
the individual man as nothing in comparison with the sanctity of a
principle. Hence he broke the heart of more than one good officer
who had served him well. But he was incapable of anything common
or mean; he was as hard to himself as to the humblest of his
subordinates; and his conception of duty to Sovereign and Country
was so high, and at the same time so spontaneous and natural, that
his must always remain the standard by which our public men will
be measured. No! if any one ever presumes to hint to you that
Wellington was not a great man, you may ask him if a small man
could constrain three nations for four years to patience, and raise
the standard of public duty for ever in his own country. This is
the centenary of his greatest campaign and most brilliant military
achievement; but long after they an forgotten men will repeat his
saying "The King's Government must be carried on."
After the twenty-three years of fighting concluded at Waterloo
people imagined that wars would cease. There was much social and
commercial distress in England; and as usual the British mind
fastened itself upon the reduction of the Army as the remedy
for all evils. There arose also a political sect which preached
the inimitably absurd doctrine that Free Trade would bring about
universal peace. The military and naval establishments were cut
down to a dangerously low figure; and all the organisation, which
Wellington had created for the feeding of an army, was allowed to
decay. At last in 1854 came the war in the Crimea; and there was a
repetition of all that had happened in 1792. A small number of very
fine regiments was with difficulty scraped together, and sent to
the East with no very definite idea as to what they should do, and
therefore necessarily without preparation of any kind. Eventually
the troops were landed in the Crimea and marched upon Sevastopol.
They fought a few magnificent actions, and perished of cold, want
and exposure within ten miles of the sea, of which we had absolute
command. It was therefore necessary to improvise a new army by the
old expedients of bounties, hiring foreign mercenaries, and so
forth. Hundreds of boys were sent out to die after the old fashion;
and the Militia were employed, with their own consent, to take over
part of the Mediterranean garrisons, and to release the regular
troops there for active service. By dint of extravagant expenditure
an efficient army was formed within the space of two years, just in
time to witness the conclusion of peace.
That was our last European war. It woke us up a little; and we
were still further roused by the triumph of the Germans over the
French in 1870. We took our army more or less in hand, improved
the organisation by substituting regiments of two battalions for
regiments of one battalion, and introduced a system of enlisting
men not for twenty-one years with the colours, but for seven
with the colours and five in the Reserve. The system worked
badly at first, when we had to provide troops for small colonial
expeditions; but the faults were gradually amended; and the
organisation stood the test fairly well in 1899 and 1900 in South
Africa. We can now send 150,000 men abroad perfectly equipped,
which is more than we could ever do before; but other nations count
their armies by millions, and in reality we are as far behindhand
as ever we were. We have no means of replacing those 150,000 within
six months, which would be necessary in case of a great war; much
less have we means of expanding their numbers to twice 150,000 and
keeping their ranks filled; and we have no efficient force of any
strength, not even the old Militia, for home defence, while our
150,000 are abroad. Do not think that I am "talking politics." I
am only stating plain facts. I cannot discuss, nor even propound,
the questions which these facts suggest; but I cannot avoid the
assertion of the facts themselves, for they are essential to our
understanding of our subject--they are indeed the pith of British
military history.
LECTURE III
BRITISH COLONIAL CAMPAIGNS
I propose in my present lecture to deal with our colonial campaigns
at large. You will recognise at once that a colonial campaign
differs from other campaigns in one essential point. One does not
attempt to form colonies in any but an empty or comparatively
empty country, first because in any other there is no room for
colonists, and secondly because a numerous native population may be
subdued but cannot be displaced. It is therefore imperative that
the indigenous inhabitants of a country, whither settlers propose
to emigrate, shall be few; and it is practically as imperative
that, unless their numbers are so scanty as to be negligible, they
shall be of inferior civilisation, so that they may not be able
to fight the settlers on equal terms. Now what do inferiority of
civilisation and paucity of numbers mean, militarily speaking, to
the civilised invader? They mean, first of all, no roads or at
the very best rough tracks, and no bridges over rivers; they mean
further rude cultivation and very small stores, if any, of cereal
food. This signifies in its turn that the great problem of the
campaign will be how to feed your force in the field, or as we now
call it the problem of transport (for the campaign will be more
than ever a picnic) and of supply. In the matter of actual combat
the uncivilised enemy will have the advantage certainly of perfect
adaptation to the climate, intimate knowledge of the country, and
generally of stronger physical endurance, greater rapidity of
movement, and decided superiority in eyesight and hearing. His
disadvantages will be inferior organisation, inferior armament, and
inexperience of the need for providing a great multitude with food
at a distance from its provision-grounds. Speaking generally the
sound principle of savage warfare is this--to equip yourself with
a good service for transport and supply, march up to your enemy,
sit down and fortify yourself in a strong position. Your enemy must
then do one of three things: attack you, in which case he is sure
to be defeated; move on; or starve. He is not likely to attempt
attack after a lesson or two, and therefore as a rule he will move
on. You then move after him and sit down again, destroying or
appropriating his provision-grounds and capturing his cattle, as
you find opportunity. By this method you must infallibly bring him
to submission. It was thus that George Monk subdued the Highlands.
It is not, however, by any means always possible to pursue this
policy. Your adversaries may be dwellers in forests, such as the
Red Indian; or in wooded mountains, such as the Kaffir and the
Carib; or defended in part by an arid wilderness, as are the
Soudanis. Moreover they may be a people of military instincts and
organisation, with their own skilful system of tactics, and a sense
of honour which prefers death to disgrace. Such were that most
gallant race, the Zulus. Or they may be of a magnificent strength
and stature with a fanatical contempt for death, as the Dervishes.
Or they may combine something of the Zulu with their own very
elaborate system of fortification, as the Maoris. Each race and
country presents its own peculiar features and problems, which
need to be considered and solved upon their merits. But speaking
generally the difference between the civilised and uncivilised
fighter is this, that the one takes care to carry his food with
him, whereas the other does not.
Now what is true of a savage country at the outset usually remains
true for some time, indeed for a very long time, after civilised
settlement has begun. The supplies of food are small, for a small
population cannot grow much produce, and has no occasion to lay
in a great store; roads and means of communication are few and
bad; and there is hardly a bridge to be found. If all the miles
of macadamised road existent in the whole of the British Empire
at this moment were added together, I doubt if they would equal,
or even nearly equal, those of the British Isles alone. Bearing
these things in mind, and remembering that two centuries ago there
were very few paved roads in Europe, and not a single macadamised
road until less than a century ago, let us look for a time at our
colonial Military History.
Our earliest settlements were made in North America and the West
Indies; the latter slightly earlier than the former but to all
intent contemporaneously; and the Dutch and French were there
very nearly as early as we ourselves, at the beginning of the
seventeenth century. In North America the settlers naturally
established themselves first on the coast, using the great rivers
as water-ways to penetrate into the back country. The Dutch in
the first instance chose one of the most important of those
rivers, building the town of New Amsterdam at the mouth of the
Hudson. The French took perhaps the most important of all, the St
Lawrence, founding Quebec near its mouth and Montreal a little
higher up. Lastly the Spaniards held the south and the mouth of the
Mississippi, so far away that they were of small concern either to
the French or the English. South of the St Lawrence the English
colonists scattered themselves in the course of the seventeenth
century along more than a thousand miles of coast from the Kennebec
to the Savannah. Quebec itself was captured in 1627 from the French
but, in spite of the protests of far-seeing men, was given back
under a treaty of peace in 1632. New Amsterdam was taken from the
Dutch in 1664, and retained as New York. In their early days most
of these settlements came into hostile collision with the Indians
at one time or another, but were able to hold their own, for they
had brought with them over the ocean the old English principle that
all able-bodied men were liable to service for domestic defence.
New York, however, did even better; for that Colony specially
cultivated the friendship of the Five Nations--the most formidable
of the Indians--for the sake not only of the fur-trade, but of
protection against other Indians and dangerous neighbours on the
north.
Those dangerous neighbours were of course the French. Their
colonies on the St Lawrence were strictly military, the settlers
being mostly old soldiers who received their grants of land in
reward for past and in consideration of future service; while
the government was despotic and centred in a military officer of
experience and ability. The younger French settlers were always
attracted by the free life of the Indians in the forest; hence
every man was a skilful woodman, a good marksman and a trained
canoe-man, in fact a better sportsman and warrior than colonist.
Moreover they and the Jesuits, who both ministered to their
spiritual needs and laboured to convert and rule the Indians, were
enterprising and intrepid explorers. They soon wandered through
the whole chain of lakes, found the rivers Illinois and Wisconsin
running out of Lake Michigan, and followed them down the whole
course of the Mississippi to New Orleans, taking possession of the
entire country in the name of Louis XIV. This they accomplished
in 1680, five years before the death of King Charles II; and we
ought always to salute the gallant French nation in honour of
the brave men who essayed and accomplished this great feat of
exploration. From that moment the French conceived the notion of
getting behind us along the entire length of the continent, and
confining us to the coast, with the power always of coming down
upon our settlements from the rear at any convenient opportunity,
and driving us into the sea. It is a very general system with the
French, which they have attempted in our own time in West Africa.
They always explore and they always make maps, being a practical
people, and the result is that they always get the better of us in
disputes over boundaries. Their strong points in America in the
seventeenth century were their unity and enterprise. Their weak
points were their numbers (for they did not exceed twelve thousand)
and the fact that they raised no great quantity of food.