CASUALTIES AND STRATEGY.
E have been arraigned for the " unfairness " with which we fastened upon a few unguarded words' in Mr. Lloyd George's Paris speech and represented him as having insinuated that our Generals had sacrificed their men. Our answer to this charge is first to ask our critics to read the Prime Minister's speech once more and to note the passages in regard to the " appalling casualty-lists " and his ironic wish that it had not been necessary to win so many victories. The speech was impregnated with this spirit. When he referred to the actions of last summer destined to give glory for all time to the British Army he spoke of " the bloody assaults of the Sonime." The word " casualties "is, it is true, not to he found in the following passage : "When we advance a kilometre into the enemy's lines, snatch a small shattered village out of his cruel grip, capture a few hundreds of his soldiers, we shout with unfeigned joy," but it lies sequestered in the taunt.
We do not, however, desire to say more on this point. As we have implied elsewhere, we want the Paris speech forgotten as soon as possible. On the general problem of Casualties and Strategy we want, however, to say something. By republish- ing what we wrote over a year ago (October 28th, 1916) on this problem we can do it without laying ourselves open to the objection that we are harping upon the Prime Minister's indiscretion. A word 'may be said as to the origin of the article in question. We had noted the beginnings of an anti-casualties campaign among the Pacificists, and even among men who should have known better. We dreaded that the politicians, always ready to take up a cry which might turn out popular, might exploit this demand for war " with as little sacrifice as possible," and we therefore deter- mined to do our best to stamp upon this most dangerous heresy before it was widely disseminated. There was cer- tainly no crime there—no injustice to the Prime Minister, no garbling of his words. Who could have thought then that the Prime Minister would fit on the cap of the PaCificist ? Unless we are to be precluded from using a line of argument on the ground that some day the Prime Minister may blunder into antagonism to it, our withers are unwrung when we are told that we were unpatriotic and unfair in dwelling on the casualties passages in the Paris speech. Here is the main portion of the article of October 28th, 1916 :—
" The good General is careful of his men, and does not' waste a single life unnecessarily. At the same time, there is no greater error possible in war than for Generals or states- men or nations to try to base their strategy or their tactics upon the avoidance of casualties. If once what we may call the casualistic ' view of war seizes hold of a nation or its rulers, and they become afraid of expending human life in order to attain their object, shrink from action because it may cause heavy losses, and thus in fact base their war policy, not upon the essential object of defeating and destroying the enemy's forces, but upon the derivative object of saving their own forces from destruction, then they have lost the war already, and had better at once snake any terms they can. If they do not, that course is sure, strange though it sounds, to become imperative on this very ground of casualties. There is nothing more certain than that the way to encourage casualties in war is to dread them, and to try to evade them. Again and again history shows us that the only result of trying to escape losses has been a prolongation of war, and therefore afar greater loss of life than would have resulted if the Generals in command had not shrunk from sacrifices and had not striven to avoid them. They lost their men's lives in endeavouring to save them.
"A capital instance of this is what happened before Lady- smith. General Buller was himself the bravest of the brave, but he could not bear the strain of the slaughter at a particular point—i.e., at Colenso. The slaughter that upset him and his plans was very possibly due to a defective battle scheme, but none the less, when once he had begun to fight, he should have persisted in his offensive and not have disengaged because of the loss of life. If he had persisted, he would have secured success. Instead, in order to avoid casualties, General Buller broke off the action, with the result which cannot be gainsaid. If he had gone On, he might have lost five or six thousand men, but he would have beaten the Boers, relieved Ladysmith, and either have ended the war at once, or at any rate have shortened it by many months, and probably have saved many thousand lives. As it was, his desire to save lives proved the bloodiest and moat expensive way of losing them. "Convinced as we are of the appalling dangers which must ensue if once the public mind goes wrong on the question of casualties, and begins to think of how to avoid them instead of how to beat the enemy, it is, in our opinion, absolutely necessary to stamp at its first appearance upon this corroding heresy. We shall therefore offer no further apology for expressing our deep regret, and, we must add, our indignation, at certain symptoms of an outbreak of the ' casualistic ' heresy which are becoming apparent. The natural instinct of a fighting people like the British is to wish to beat the enemy, not to avoid encounter, or to think of our own risks and the enemy's power to damage us rather than of our power to smash him. At the same time, ours is essentially a kind- hearted and a humane people, which shrinks from sending others into danger while it remains itself in safety. Therefore we as a people, and as distinct from the Army and the Navy, might very easily be led to take a wrong view of the principles upon which war must be waged, and to make an attempt to build upon the shifty paradoxes of sentimentalism. We might unconsciously grow to think that Don't let the enemy beat you' is a sound substitute for Beat the enemy,' or that
' Keep out of the enemy's way' is a better war signal than ` Engage the enemy more closely.'
" Perhaps the worst effect which flows from a nation being captured or influenced by the dread of casualties, or rather let us say of concentrated casualties, and adopting an attitude which if allowed to govern the war might lead to a far more dreadful leakage of human life, is the impression made on the minds of the Generals entrusted with high command. No soldier is ever in reality the cold-hearted, iron-minded man represented by the popular journalist or the writer of romance. Generals are apt to be too much, not too little, influenced by the thought of the appalling consequences of the red business in which they arc engaged. No one needs to remind them
of the horrors of war It is far more necessary to encourage them to keep their minds of those horrors and to fix their eyes solely on their main object. The useful thing is to get them to think
no more of the bloodshed and agony resulting from their operations than does the surgeon who has to hack his wav through human flesh to effect a cure, and does his work of healing and benevolence in the dread shadow of death and suffering. Think of a great operator bound to do his work with tearful or angry friends and relations standing around and calling him a butcher when the blood flows, or a monster of callousness and cruelty when the patient shows signs of pain. Yet that is what we are really doing when we begin to talk indignantly or sentimentally about casualties. Let um criticize our Generals for bad strategy, for faulty tactics, for slackness or indifference, for failure to seize great opportunities, for slowness, or for want of enterprise, but never merely because they have called upon their troops to do what those troops were raised for—to make the sacrifices by which alone the enemy can be destroyed. Of course, no sane person wants to encourage our Generals to be careless of their men or to run useless risks ; but, as we have said, no General is likely to do that. We must protect him from the thought which so often paralyses the arm of soldiers in the field-- that if they run a risk that ought to be run, and if it leads to bloodshed greater than was expected, or at any rate to blood- shed of an exceptionally heavy kind, they will be told that they are butchers or murderers, and that on them will rest the awful stain of having sent thousands of the young and the brave to untimely graves.
" We must choose the best Generals we can, but when we have chosen them we must trust them, especially in this particular. Henry, V. in Shakespeare's play prays to the God of battles to steel his soldiers' hearts.' We too must ask not only that our soldiers' hearts shall be steeled, for we know indeed that they are steeled already, but that the hearts of those who command them shall be etened for the awful duties which they are called upon to perform. Most of all, it is the duty of those who influence public opinion to call upon the nation, upon the fathers and mothers, the wives, the brothers, and the sisters of the men who are asked to risk their lives, to steel their hearts and never for a moment to allow the thought of the casualties to interfere with the due progress of the war. To teach their hearts to endure is the path of duty as it is the path of safety. Nobly have the men and women of Britain borne this most terrible part of their burden. They have refused to let their minds and their wills be deflected even for a moment by the thought of personal or national losses. But great as have been their endurance and sacrifices hitherto, they will in the future be called upon for even greater acts of courage. it is always the last pull on the rope which is the hardest. The moment, then, is one which, as we have said, calls for the instant stamping out of the false spirit. The message of the people of Britain to those who command in the field must be, and we are sure will be, if they are not drugged and deceived by false teach- ings, not—' Oh, save our husbands and our sons and all that are dear to us,' but—' Win the war and beat the enemy, and not one word of complaint shall ever cross our lips because of the sacrifices we are called upon to make. We know that you will make those sacrifices as small as you can, but remember we are not thinking of that. Our wills are set with your will to beat the enemy at all costa. Go forward and givp us victory in the sure and certain knowledge that we shall stand by you, and that as long as you do the work in the true spirit of Englishmen you have nothing to fear from us.' Who will dare to say that a Commander-in-Chief who feels that this is the spirit of the people behind hint is not far more likely to do his work wisely and well than the man who is hearing at his back, not words of noble and whole-hearted encouragement, but wails of terror and despair, and complaints of cruelty and unnecessary bloodshed, and of men's lives lost when they might have been preserved I "
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