found that when British and Americans had met, the generals on either
side were solicitous about having superior forces, and in case of odds
of two to one they made a “strategic retreat.” When either side was
beaten, the other always explained that he was overcome by superior
numbers, though perhaps the adversary had not more than ten or fifteen
per cent. advantage. Then I learned that the British had not whipped
five or six times their numbers on the Continent of Europe. The British
Expeditionary Force made as fine an effort to do so at Mons as was ever
attempted in history, but they did not succeed.
It was a regular army that fought at Mons. The only two first-class
nations which depend upon regulars to do their fighting are the British
and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the
practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth’s
spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other powerful
military nations. Before any other power could reach the United States
it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must overwhelm ours and
bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you say. That is the facile
word, so ready to the lips that we do not realise the wonder of it any
more than of the sun rising and setting.
When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The
ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must
necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services; while
the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be lukewarm.
It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may amount to
conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical appeal to his
emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction after enlistment
which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he sees others, also
young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us that there may be
virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused by the command
that all must serve, which on the Continent in this war, has meant
universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones means as much to
him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the whole nation is
called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life-giving.
For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours
have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has
policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious
tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well
understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as
our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it
bluntly, we have hired some one to do our fighting for us.
Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the average
Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking his sense
of martial superiority largely from the work of the long-service,
severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than daggers
or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man, unequipped
with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible for our
sturdy pioneering individualism gave us confidence in our physical
prowess.
Alas! modern wars are not fought with fists. A knock-kneed man who
knows how to use a machine gun and has one to use--which is also
quite important--could mow down all the leading heavy-weights of the
United States and England, with the latest champion leading the charge.
Now, this regular who won our little wars was not representative of
the people as a whole. He was the man “down on his luck,” who went to
the recruiting depot. Soldiering became his profession. He was in a
class, like priests and vagabonds. When you passed him in the street
you thought of him as a strange being, but one of the necessities of
national existence. It did not interest you to be a soldier; but as
there must be soldiers, you were glad that men who would be soldiers
were forthcoming.
When trouble broke, how you needed him! When the wires brought news of
his gallantry you accepted the deeds of this man whom you had paid as
the reflection of national courage, which thrilled you with a sense of
national superiority. To him, it was in the course of duty; what he
had been paid to do. He did not care about being called a hero; but it
pleased the public to make him one--this professional who fights for a
shilling a day in England and $17.50 a month in the United States.
Though when the campaign went well the public was ready to take the
credit as a personal tribute, when the campaign went illy they sought
a scapegoat, and the general, who might have been a hero, was sent to
the wilderness perhaps because those busy men in Congress or Parliament
thought that the army could do without that little appropriation which
was needed for some other purpose. The army had failed to deliver the
goods which it was paid to produce. The army was to blame, when, of
course, under free institutions the public was to blame, as the public
is master of the army and not the army of the public.
A first impression of the British army is always that of the regiment.
Pride of regiment sometimes appears almost more deep-seated than army
pride to the outsider. It has been so long a part of British martial
inheritance that it is bred in the blood. In the old days of small
armies and in the later days of small wars, while Europe was making
every man a soldier by conscription, regiment vying with regiment won
the battles of empire. The memory of the part each regiment played is
the inspiration of its present; its existence is inseparable from the
traditions of its long list of battle honours.
The British public loves to read of its Guards’ regiment and to watch
them in their brilliant uniforms at review. When a cadet comes out of
Sandhurst he names the regiment which he wishes to join, instead of
being ordered to a certain regiment, as in West Point. It rests with
the regimental commander whether or not he is accepted. Frequently the
young man of wealth or family serves in the Guards or another crack
regiment for a while and resigns, usually to enjoy the semi-leisurely
life which is the fortune of his inheritance.
Then there are the county line regiments, such as the Yorkshires, the
Kents, and the Durhams. In this war each county wanted to read about
its own regiments at the same time as about the Guards, just as Kansas
at home would want to read about the Kansas regiments and Georgians
about the Georgia regiments. The most trying feature of the censorship
to the British public was its refusal to allow the exploitation of
regiments. The staff was adamant on this point; for the staff was
thinking for the whole and of the interests of the whole. In the French
and the German armies, as in our regular army, the regiment was known
by a number.
The young man who lives in the big house on the hill, the son of the
man of wealth and power in the community, as a rule does not go to West
Point. None of the youth of our self-called aristocracy, which came up
the golden road in a generation past those in modest circumstances who
have generations of another sort back of them, think of going into the
First Cavalry or the First Infantry for a few years as a part of their
career. A few rich men’s sons enter our army, but only enough to prove
the rule by the exception. They do not regard the army as “the thing.”
It does not occur to them that they ought to do something for their
country. Rather, their country ought to do something for them.
But sink the plummet a little deeper and these are not our aristocracy
nor our ruling class, which is too numerous and too sound of thought
and principle for them to feel at home in their company. One boy,
however humble his origin, may go to West Point if he can pass the
competitive examination. Europe, particularly Germany, would not
approve of this; but we think it the best way. The average graduate of
the Point, whether the son of a doctor, a lawyer, or a farmer, sticks
to the army as his profession. We maintain West Point for the strict
business purpose of teaching young men how to train our army in time of
peace and to lead and direct it in time of action.
Our future officers enter West Point when they are two years younger
than is the average at Sandhurst; the course is four years compared
with two at Sandhurst. I should venture to say that West Point is the
harder grind; that the graduate of the Point has a more specifically
academic military training than the graduate of Sandhurst. This
is not saying that he may be any better in the performance of the
simple duties of a company officer. It is not a new criticism that
we train everybody at West Point to be a general, when many of the
students may never rise above the command of a battalion. However, it
is a significant fact that at the close of the Civil War every army
commander was a West Point man and so were most of the corps commanders.
The doors are open in the British army for a man to rise from the
ranks; not as wide as in our army, but open. The Chief of Staff of the
British Expeditionary Force, Sir William Robertson, was in the ranks
for ten years. No man not a West Pointer had a position equivalent in
importance to his at the close of the Civil War. His rise would have
been possible in no other European army.
But West Point sets the stamp on the American army and Sandhurst and
Woolwich, the engineering and artillery school, on the British army. At
the end of four years at West Point the men who survive the hard course
may be tried by courtmartial not for conduct unbecoming an officer, but
an officer and a gentleman. They are supposed, whatever their origin,
to have absorbed certain qualities, if they were not inborn, which are
not easily described but which we all recognise in any man. If they are
absent it is not the fault of West Point; and if a man cannot acquire
them there, then nature never meant them for him. From the time he
entered the school the government has paid his way; and he is cared for
until he dies, if he keeps step and avoids courtmartials.
His position in life is secure. His pay counting everything is better
than that of the average graduate of a university or a first-class
professional school, who practises a profession. Yet only three boys,
I remember, wanted to go to West Point from our congressional district
in my youth. Nothing could better illustrate the fact that we are not a
military people. From West Point they go out to the little army which
is to fight our wars; to the posts and the Philippines, and become a
world in themselves; an isolated caste in spite of themselves. I am
not at all certain that either the British or the American officer
works as hard as the German in time of peace. Neither has the practical
incentive nor the determined driver behind him.
For it takes a soldier Secretary of War to drive a soldier; for
example, Lord Kitchener. Those British officers, who applied themselves
in peace to the mastery of their profession and were not content with
the day’s routine requirements, had to play chess without chessmen;
practise manœuvres on a board rather than with brigades, divisions,
corps, and armies. They became the rallying points in the concourse of
untrained recruits.
German and French officers had the incentive and the chessmen. The
Great War could not take them by surprise. They took the road with a
machine whose parts had been long assembled. They had been trained
for big war; their ambition and intelligence were under the whip of a
definite anticipation.
A factor overlooked, but even more significant than training or staff
work, was that what might be called martial team-play had become an
instinct with the continental peoples through the necessity of their
situation. This the Japanese also possess. It is the right material
ready to hand for the builder. Not that it is the kind of material
one admires; but it is the right material for making a war-machine.
One had only to read the expert military criticism in the British and
the American press at the outset of the war to realise how vague was
the truth of the continental situation to the average Englishman or
American--but not to the trained British staff.
So that little British Expeditionary Force, in ratio of number one
to twenty or thirty of the French army, crossed the Channel to help
save Belgium. Gallantry it had worthy of the brightest chapter in
the immortal history of its regiments from Quebec to Kandahar,
from Waterloo to South Africa, Guards and Hussars, Highlanders and
Lowlanders, kilts and breecks, Connaught Rangers and Royal Fusiliers,
Duke of Wellingtons and Prince of Wales’ Own, come again to Flanders.
The best blood of England was leading Tommy Atkins. Whatever British
aristocracy is or is not, it never forgets its duty to the England of
its fathers. It is never ingrate to its fortune. The time had come to
go out and die for England, if need be, and these officers went as
their ancestors had gone before them, as they would go to lectures at
Oxford, to the cricket field and the polo field, in outward phlegm, but
with a mighty passion in their hearts.
The Germans affected to despise this little army. It had not been
trained in the mass tactics which hurl columns of flesh forward to gain
tactical points that have been mauled by artillery fire. You do not
use mass tactics against Boers, nor against Afridis or Filipinos. It
is difficult to combine the two kinds of efficiency. Those who were on
the march to the relief of the Peking legations recall how the Germans
were as ill at ease in that kind of work as the American and British
were at home. It made us misjudge the Germans and the Germans misjudge
us when they thought of us as trying to make war on the Continent of
Europe. A small, mobile, regular army, formed to go over seas and march
long distances, was to fight in a war where millions were engaged
and a day’s march would cover an immense stretch of territory in
international calculations of gain and loss.
For its own purposes, the British Expeditionary Force was well-nigh a
perfect instrument. As quantity of ammunition was an important factor
in transport in the kind of campaign which it was prepared for, its
guns were the most accurate on a given point and its system of fire
adapted to that end; but the French system of fire, with plentiful
ammunition from near bases over fine roads, was better adapted for a
continental campaign.
To the last button that little army was prepared. Man for man and
regiment for regiment, I should say it was the best force that ever
fired a shot in Europe; this without regard to national character. As
England must make every regular soldier count and as she depended upon
the efficiency of the few rather than on numbers, she had trained her
men in musketry. No continental army could afford to allow its soldiers
to expend the amount of ammunition on the target range that the British
had expended. Only by practise can you learn how to shoot. This gives
the soldier confidence. He stays in his trench and keeps on shooting
because he knows that he can hit those advancing figures and that this
is his best protection. The more I learn, the more I am convinced that
the Germans ought to have got the British Expeditionary Force; and
the Germans were very surprised that they did not get it. With their
surprise developed a respect for British arms, reported by all visitors
to Germany.
Mr. Thomas Atkins, none other, is the hero of that retreat from Mons.
The first statue raised in London after the war ought to be of him.
If there had been five hundred thousand of him in Belgium at the end
of the second week in August, Brussels would now be under the Belgian
flag. Like many other good things in this world, including the French
army, there were not enough of him. Many a company on that retreat
simply got tired of retreating, though orders were to fall back. It dug
a trench and lay down and kept on firing--accurately, in the regular,
business-like way, reinforced by the “stick it” British character--
until killed or engulfed. This held back the flood long enough for the
remainder of the army to retire.
Not all the generalship emanated from generals. I like best that story
of the cross-roads where, with Germans pressing hard on all sides, two
columns in retreat fell in together, uncertain which way to go. With
confusion developing for want of instructions, a lone exhausted staff
officer who happened along took charge and standing at the junction
in the midst of shell-fire told every doubting unit what to do, with
one-two-three alacrity of decision. His work finished, he and his red
cap disappeared, and I never could find any one who knew who he was.
After the retreat and after the victory of the Marne, what was
England’s position? The average Englishman had thought that England’s
part in the alliance was to send a small army to France and to take
care of the German fleet. England’s fleet was her first consideration;
that must be served; France’s demand for rifles and supplies must be
attended to before the British demand; Serbia needed supplies; Russia
needed supplies; a rebellion threatened in South Africa; the Turks
threatened the invasion of Egypt. England had to spread her energy out
over a vast empire with an army that had barely escaped annihilation.
Every soldier who fought must be supplied over seas. German officers
put a man on a railroad train and he detrained near the front. Every
British soldier had to go aboard a train and then a ship and then
disembark from the ship and go aboard another train. Every article of
ordnance, engineering, medical supply, food supply, must be handled
four times, while in Germany they need be handled but twice. Any
railway traffic manager will understand what this means. Both the
British supply system and the medical corps were marvels.
Germany was stronger than the British public thought. Germany and
Austria could put at the front in the first six months of the war
practically double the number which the Allies could maintain. Russia
had multitudes to draw from in reserve, but the need was multitudes
at the front. There she was only as strong as the number she could
feed and equip. In the first year of the war England suffered 380,000
casualties on land, six times the number of bayonets that she had at
Mons. All this wastage must be met before she could begin to increase
her forces. The length of line on the Western front that she was
holding was not the criterion of her effort. The French who shared with
the British that terrible Ypres salient realised this.
Aside from the regulars she had the Territorials, who are much the same
as our National Guard and varied in equality in the same way. Native
Indian troops were brought to France to face the diabolical shell-fire
of modern guns, and Territorials went out to India to take the place of
the British regulars, who were withdrawn for France. Every rifle that
England could bring to the assistance of the French in their heroic
stand was a rifle to the good.
Meanwhile, she was making her new army. For the first time since
Cromwell’s day, all classes in England were going to war. Making an
army out of the raw is like building a factory to be manned by expert
labour which you have to train. Let us even suppose that the factory is
ready and that the proprietor must mobilise his managers, overseers,
foremen, and labour from far and near--a force individually competent,
but which had never before worked together. It would require some time
to organise team-play, wouldn’t it? Particularly it would if you were
short of managers, overseers, and foremen. To express my meaning from
another angle in talking once with an English pottery manufacturer he
said:
“We do not train our labour in the pottery district. We breed it from
generation to generation.”
In Germany they have not only been training soldiers, but breeding them
from generation to generation. You may think that system is wrong. It
may be against your ideals. But in fighting against that system for
your ideals when war is violence and killing, you must have weapons
as effective as the enemy’s. You express only a part of Germany’s
preparedness by saying that the men who left the plough and the shop,
the factory and the office, became trained soldiers at the command of
the staff as soon as they were in uniform and had rifles. These men had
the instinct of military co-ordination bred in them and so had their
officers, while England had to take men from the plough and the shop,
the factory and the office, and equip them and teach them the rudiments
of soldiering before she could consider making them into an army.
It was one thing for the spirit of British manhood to rise to the
emergency. Another and even more important requisite went with it. If
my country ever faces such a crisis I hope that we also may have the
courage of wisdom which leaves an expert’s work to an expert. England
had Lord Kitchener, who could hold the imagination and the confidence
of the nation through the long months of preparation, when there was
little to show except repetition of drills here and there on gloomy
winter days. It required a man with a big conception and patience and
authority to carry it through, and recruits with an unflinching sense
of duty. The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military
people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and
vital details as he watched the new army forming.
“Are you learning to think in big numbers?” was Lord Kitchener’s
question to his generals.
Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded. Where the leaders?
Where the drillmasters for the new army? Old officers came out of
retirement, where they had become used to an easy life as a rule, to
twelve hours a day of hard application. “Dugouts” they were called.
Veteran non-commissioned officers had to drill new ones. It was
demonstrated that a good infantry soldier can be made in six months;
perhaps in three. But it takes seven months to build a rifle-plant;
many more months to make guns--and the navy must never be stinted.
Probably the English are slow; slow and thoroughgoing. They are good at
the finish, but not quick at the start. They are used to winning the
last battle, which they say is the one that counts. The complacency of
empire with a century’s power was a handicap, no doubt. We are inclined
to lean forward on our oars, they to lean back--which does not mean
that they cannot lean forward in an emergency or that they lack reserve
strength.
Public impatience was inevitable. It could not be kept silent; that is
the English of it--the American, too. We demand to know what is being
done. It was not silent in the Civil War. From the time that McClellan
started forming his new army until the Peninsula was six months, if I
remember rightly. Von Moltke, who built the German staff system, said
that the Civil War was a strife between two armed mobs; though I think
if he had brought his Prussians to Virginia a year later, in ’63, which
would have ended the Civil War there and then, he would have had an
interesting time before he returned to Berlin.
The British new army was not to face another new army, but the most
thoroughly organised military machine that the world has ever known.
Not only this, but the Germans, with a good start and their system
established, were not standing still and waiting for the British to
catch up, so that the two could begin again even, but were adapting
themselves to the new features of the war. They had been the world’s
arms-makers. With vast munition plants ready, their feudal socialistic
organisation could make the most of their resources in men and material.
More than two million Englishmen went to the recruiting depots, though
no invader had set foot on their soil, and offered to serve in France
or wherever they were needed over seas. If no magic could put rifles in
their hands or summon batteries of guns to follow them on the march,
the fact of their volunteering, when they knew by watching from day to
day the drudgery that it meant and what trench warfare was, shows at
least that the race is not yet decadent. Perhaps we should have done
better. No one can know until we try it. If liberal treatment by the
government and the course set by Secretary Root means anything, our
staff ought to be better equipped for such a task than the English
were; this, too, only war can decide.