THE MECHANISM OF WAR.
VL—THE SPADE.
AS in my last I used! "the horse" as a synonym for mobility, so now "the spade" must stand for immunity, —a symbol of all tools, instruments, and manual implements' soever capable of turning Mother Earth into a protection for her sons under fire. And it is a real pleasure to have come at last upon an item of the great subject of war which is not in the least controversial. Bullets are plain, honest little entities, incapable of deceit, going straight (and straighter with every new patent) to the point, with but one aim in life —death, with but one motif in their terrible symphony— eternal silence for the fighting men who hear it.
And like all honest things, they inspire honesty even in their enemies; the objection to them, with their silence and death, is openly avowed. The general hates them because they steal his pawns and hamper his game ; if he is a British general, his dislike is intensified by the fact that he loves his pawns in quite a stupid, unscientific manner, and is uncertain which is his greater misery,—to see them lying about the field with their souls fleeing through little blue boles in their foreheads and breasts, or to have to epitomise their destruction in long columns of names for the newspapers, every name a stab to some distant heart, every initial, even, a cause of argument to groups of pale-faced, weeping folks, who declare (but know they lie) that it cannot be " Bob " because that cursed sheet has "It. N." before his name instead of "It. M." So the public hates the bullets too, and is pleased when "Bob," in the very last mail before he is laid low, swears that, imprimis, the Boers never hit anything ; and, secondly, that even if they could, his men are so handy at sangar-making that there is not the smallest fear of anything happening to him. And the soldiers hate the bullets, though you would never know it to look at them, for they hate more than they fear them ; the talk of men after a fierce battle is not the talk of people saved from a deadly peril, but of those who have flouted a great adversary in public and come away unhurt. Yet men will shout to each other in action to "take cover," and will point out handy stones and hollows to those rushing up from behind. Officers will curse their men for standing up, and the men will entreat their officers to lie down; generals will discourse with uplifted finger before a battle, and with heavy brows after ones—all this to the same tune, cover, protection from the silence and death, from the long lists and the broken hearts, from the gaps at the evening roll-call.
The Goddess of War, when she invented her great game to amuse humanity, spared no pains to make it an interesting one. She devised many cards, and arranged that each should have its value on the board,—pluck, mobility, physical strength, quickness of mind, quickness of eye, and, finally, death; all these when pitted against each other resulted in a pastime so absorbing that the world has been unable to do without it ever since. But Death, as is his wont, spoilt the game; he grew too powerful; the players devoted all their attention to him, studied him, gave him greater and greater value, and finally made him omnipotent. Nothing else could score at his approach; even pluck and strength were useless. So the Goddess set herself to balance the game again, for murmurs were beginning to be heard on earth that after all it was but a poor one, and unworthy the attention of grown men. Several nations, indeed, openly proclaimed their intention of not playing any more, and the dreadful prospect of a world with nothing to do seemed actually nigh. But the Deity had
an inspiration; Death was strong, but he could not move the. earth; he was keen of sight, but he could not see through a wall. So she invented "cover"; she stole a weapon from the potato-field and bade men dig instead of dying :---
"The skilful nymph reviews her force with care ;
'Let spades be trumps ! ' she said, and trumps they were."* And without them scarce a trick can be won against the grim Old master-card. There is, as I have said, no need to insist upon it; the necessity of entrenching tools has been recog- nised ever since the Russian troops flung them away on their first march towards the Turks, and groped about for bits of tin and iron to replace them. on every subsequent march. They are munitions of war more valuable than artillery and as indispensable as rations, for there is little use in feeding bodies which are to serve no better function than that of un- protected targets to a storm of lead. But the solution of the problem of providing them is by no means as obvious as the necessity for them. In the defence it should be easy enough ; positions are seldom manned in a hurry, never unless com- munications behind are open. The tool-carts can distribute their loads at leisure, and the troops of the defence should soon dig themselves into security against superior numbers, superior courage, superior artillery,—against everything but superior strategy. Against that no cover can be had in a world fundamentally designed for the everlasting defeat of mere industry and muscle by brains.
But it is the attack which calls loudest for protection, and the problem of providing it seems so nearly insoluble that one may well doubt whether the "attack' as now understood should not disappear altogether from the text-books as a military operation! The Boer War has given us but an inkling of the difficulties, but it is a suggestive one, and as the Collision of invisible worlds is calculated from lesser phenomena, and even described by astronomers, so by an imaginative proportion-sum one may figure to oneself the terrors of an attack on a position held by troops who, unlike the Boers, will be disciplined, numerous, possessed of multi- tudinous guns, and unpossessed of the fatal arriere pens&3 of flight implied by herds of patient, fleet little ponies waiting a few yards behind the firing line. Had I been the Boer general, I would, after seeing my faithful burghers safely into the trenches and schemes of Pieter's Hill or Driefontein, have quietly poisoned every pony behind his master's back, ex- claiming in Dutch, as Colin Campbell exclaimed when the absence of a second position for his thin line was pointed out to him, "I'll no has my Hielanders peekin' ahint ! " The Boers lost many a fine position by " peekin' ahint," and so would more educated troops were there anything to look back for. Had they stood, as European armies will stand, firing to the very last, prepared then with the final argument of the bayonet, I believe that the exposed attack would have been- swept now as finally from the Drill Book as it would have been then from the face of the earth. Not because it would be a moral, but a physical impossibility. Troops—British troops, at any rate—will charge at anything, and if they survive, will get there. Achilles was not braver than the ordinary private soldier, but the latter, unfortu- nately, is all heel, and heroism writhing paralysed on the ground is but an ethical, and no tactical, asset of a storming party.
Yet positions must be won somehow, and there is no such thing as an impregnable one. The Transvaal War has not so much proclaimed the impossibilities of frontal assaults as it has hinted at the possibility of rendering them possible. It showed us Coleus° and Magersfontein, victories of the defend- ing rifle; it showed us Paardeberg and Pieter's Hill, triumphs of the offensive spade. The two catastrophes were no more frontal attacks than the victories, but they were incurred because our troops attempted with but one weapon what can only be achieved with two. The spade is as great as the sivord ; either is helpless without the other; and if it is impos- sible for both to go into action together, there must be no action at all. In other words, an attack of which it will not be possible to entrench every stage must be declined,
• "The Baps of the Lock."
t The word " attack " may be taken to mean any advance from eon:. bivouac, or position intended to culminate in an onslaught on the enemy"4 • works on the same day. Such is the meaning implied in the Drill Book, Lind such was the practice attempted by our armies in South Africa until it is found to be impassible. always excepting, of course, an onslaught in the nature of a surprise. Even in this case only an earthwork can ensure success. The spade has had no greater trinmph than during the night before Cronje's surrender on February 27th, 1900. Ever since our wild and expensive charge of the 18th, when once again British troops had attempted the impossible at a cost of eleven hundred casualties, our men had been steadily entrenching themselves around the doomed com- mandos in the river-bed, edging in a little nearer every day, and again entrenching, sapping their way, so to speak, up to the fortress of dongas and mimosa forests in which their desperate enemies lurked. On the night of the 26th Smith- Dorrien's leading defences were within seven hundred yards of the Beer trenches. When day broke on the 27th they were within fifty yards, and enfilading them, and the white flag went up over that terrible laager ! There was no finer feat throughout the war, nor has there been in any war, than the night march of the Canadians over that deadly six hundred and fifty yards, but their bold hearts would have been still in death by sun-up had not a low but strong parapet—* risen like an exhalation" — frowned at dawn between them and the astounded Boers a stone's throw away. For the men as they stole to the advance from their trench had carried spades, and a party of engineers behind them sacks of earth. Their stealthy advance was undetected until they were within fifty yards of the great Boer trench on the flat, then the clang of a wire entanglement broke the silence, and a thousand rifles roared at them before the suspended tin cans had done rattling. Down went the sacks of earth, down went the gallant Canadians behind them, over- head into the sacks screamed and thudded the whirlwind of lead. Then when the first fierce outburst was passed, the spades went to work, the men lying prone as they dug, until before light the straggling line of battered sacks was a secure earthwork, and the grimmest, stoutest, and wickedest Boer had fought his last fight for his country.
At Pieter's, too, the apotheosis of the spade was as complete, if less sensational ; and here again 90 per cent, of the losses occurred in the " spadeless " blunders or mischances of the fight, the ungoverned rush over the Onderbrook kopjes on the night of February 22nd, the wild death-run of the Irishmen next day. But the battle was won by the little stone walls which crept nearer to the Boer stronghold every night with precious bodies and stout souls behind them, comparatively safe from the millions of bullets which lashed the outside stones two inches away throughout the days, until the debatable ground seemed narrow enough for the glorious onset ,;which made it ours.
But all these, as I say, are no new lessons, only new applica- tions of old ones. The spade has grown in importance as its great enemy the rifle has grown in power, just as the science of casting armour-plating has become more perfect with the ever-increasing perfection of projectiles. And if this war has given it any promotion, it is only a rise in the estimation of soldiers from the humble status of a campaigning luxury to the dominating one of an absolute necessity. It is madness to fight without it, and only madmen will do so in the devastation of modern fire. But madness is a gift from heaven, so the Easter= say, and our Army being full of it, will perform miracle after miracle if its fine frenzy can but be saved from being struck into nothingness. The bodies it informs must be protected as carefully as the worthless bag which holds a thousand pearls,—one hole and they are lost.
The whole life of man consists in contriving evils with which to assail his fellows and make them miserable, and in inventing antidotes to combat those with which he himself is assailed. The spade and the bullet are a typical couplet in the epic of existence; death whistles for ever in the air, not the welcome sweet death of Nature, but the multitudinous deaths cast in the arsenal of the everlasting antagonism of man to man; and the unentrenched will die. Garde a vow, it is the motto of the whole household of man, not only of the noble house which bears it. But it is ill moralising over an ounce of lead and a square foot of Birmingham steel, though these little things might be as suggestive to modern philo- sophers of the apxi of human transactions as a drop of water was to Thales of Heavenly and Universal However, every man to his trade. The military writer must cut a lonely furrow
with his spade, and he only encumbers his work by throwing flowers therein. Let me creep into my trench again, and if there be any unseemly ornament on the parapet, plead in extanuation that in South Africa the soldiers make a practice of strewing their defences with sprigs of willow and mimosa to hide their earthy ugliness from the enemy. LINESMAN.
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