TOPICS OF THE DAY.
l'ELPI WAR.
rERE is one lesson to be drawn from the history of this war as far as it has yet gone, which should be gratifying to Englishmen. It is becoming clear that for warfare in a country without railways, and especially for Asiatic warfare, a small, perfectly appointed, and perfectly mobile army, con- stantly renewed, is a more effective weapon than a huge force. There may be many explanations of the Russian slowness evident to experts, but it is difficult for men who are politicians only not to contrast their progress with the sort of progress which British armies similarly placed would have made. One may be the dupe unconsciously of national vanity, but it is hard not to believe that a first-class Indian officer, say, Sir Eyre Coote, in his best days, with thirty thousand Englishmen and a double proportion of light artillery, would have conquered Armenia by this time. The Russians seem to have no idea that a march of thirty miles a day is possible, and are bothered by the diffi- culties of transport, of supply, and of commissariat to a degree which Anglo-Indians hardly understand. Their forces fight well, manoeuvre well, and are well directed ; but there is a want of " go " about them, a disposition to have everything prepared as if an army were a watch, a tendency to wait for overwhelming masses of artillery, which reveals a certain want of self-confidence not to be anticipated in a conquering people. If English officers in the Mutiny had been as " scien- tific " as all this, we should have lost the Empire,—which, if their predecessors had been so afraid of failure, we should never have built up. Audacity goes an immense way in war, and Russian movements seem to us lacking in audacity, in the kind of energy which English soldiers derive, if you will have it so, from their very stupidity. The Russians are very brave, but they have not learnt the secret that in fighting a race not directed by scientific organisers, counting heads is of very little use ; that a bullet can kill a carcase a thousand times as big as itself ; and that no number of men will enable a General to defeat an enemy who, at the point of contact, always beats the divisions opposed to him. Of course a small army needs incessant renewals of its strength in men, but we cannot help suspecting that, granting a sufficient reservoir behind, it is a handier weapon than a great one ; that the Turks would find a British corps d'arme'e in Armenia a very different foe from the one with which they are at present contending. The Russians win, no doubt. They have clearly defeated Mehemed Pasha at Delibaba, and probably defeated him with more or less crushing effect, but they follow up their victories with a delibera- tion which deprives them of half their moral value. If they were fighting Sikhs, who seem able to move as if impedimenta were not required, they would have to fight ten battles where the English finish their work in two. Panic counts for nothing in a war so conducted, and every advantage has to be won by hard fighting, with its attendant expenditure of men. Mukhtar Pasha, we do not doubt, will in the end be crushed, but he will be crushed by an exertion which strains his far more powerful opponent, and after an expenditure of time, which in war is money, that deprives victory of much of its advantage.
There is the same slowness visible on the European side. The Russians doubtless will cross the Danube, and will eneounter the Turks, and will defeat them, but surely their pre- parations have consumed an unconscionable amount of time. They have had no enemy's country to pass through. They have had no threatened communications to protect. They know all about the Danube just as well as the Turks, and perhaps better, and they have had six months to prepare, and still, apparently, they are not quite ready, or only just ready. Suwaroff, one cannot but think, with one of his armies of sixty thousand men, would have been across long before this, if he had lost half his army in the crossing, and once across, would have resupplied himself with men with half the trouble involved in these elaborate preparations. It is not difficult to see at least one reason for all this tardiness. The Russian staff have got the campaign of 1870 on the brain ; they want to move hosts equal to the German ones with the same precision, the same unfailing success, and the same earthquaky results, and having to deal with a less perfect organisation, the task involves difficulties only to be met by a grievous expenditure of time. They forget that they are not invading France but Turkey, not fighting Marshal Bazaine but Abdul Karim, not risking destruction, but only a failure which, with their resources, it would be easily possible to repair. They want to do everything on the gigantic scale, to move men by the hundred thousand across a broad river, and find that the task of crossing with all the necessary supplies for such hosts almost overtaxes their strength and the brains of the Generals who must make so many arrangements harmonise together. The mental power required to move an army at all is great, but the mental power required for an army which requires a county to camp on, and whole provinces to feed it, is given only to two or three men in a generation. Of course, we may be told that a smaller- army,say 50,000 men, would not be safe in Bulgaria, and we bow at once to experts' opinion on the subject; but we should very muck like before bowing to hear what experts accustomed to Indian warfare, to broad rivers with crumbling banks, and huge dis- tances, and great masses of opponents, would have to say on the matter. What is there in Turks to make them so very much more formidable than Sikhs ?
This is no expression of impatience, but the statement of a question of great political importance. If the conquest of Turkey is really so mighty a work as the Russian generals evidently think, and the forces on each side approach so nearly to equality in quality that it is indispensable to bring up larger and larger hosts, then evidently Russia is not so formidable that at the conclusion of the war Europe or England cannot help to settle the terms of peace. Prince Bismarck in 1870 would not be interfered with, because he knew the Powers were too appalled by the strength of the machine he guided, to interfere. The German Army had marched on like a fate, crushing everything in its path. But if present signs do not mislead, the Russian Army, though it will win, will not march on like this, but will conquer slowly and laboriously, and will be very much exhausted before it reaches its goal, and very unfit to commence a new and still more formidable struggle. Then, and not now, will be the time to decide what British interests require; when the Turkish power, with which we cannot ally ourselves, is admitted to be broken ; when the question will be of substitutes for the Osmanli, and when, therefore, we can intervene, if intervention is necessary, with a clear conscience. To intervene now is only to help the Turk, not our own inte- rests, to convince him that he was alarmed for nothing, and to make any reasonable or just settlement an impossibility.. Russian slowness is our best guarantee that we shall have- ample time to assert ourselves when he has completed the- only benevolent task he ever undertook,—the liberation of South-Eastern Europe from the domination of Asia.
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