Books of the Day

WAR AND SOCIETY, W. T. Wells ...

477

THE ROMAN REVOLUTION, The Warden of Wadham

478

V.r.+33, SAND AND STARS, Cecil Lewis

478

It's Too LATE Now, Anthony Powell

480

FICTION, Graham Greene ...

482

WAR AND SOCIETY

By W. T. WELLS

" IN a prison State like Prussia it was difficult to find real volunteers for anything, even pillaging." In these words Herr Ludwig Renn, a German officer before and during the last War, and an officer of the International Brigade in the Spanish

Civil War, describes the failure of Frederick the Great to form bands of irregulars to counter the methods of the Pandours. Frederick had outraged the military conventions of the time, which were based on the necessity of keeping the costs of war low, and of having a supply system which would facilitate the segregation of regular troops from contact with the civilian population, by fighting a series of pitched battles. The war chest left to him by old Frederick William enabled him, in the earlier stages of his career, to disregard questions of cost ; Maria Theresa, less happily placed, retaliated by commis- sioning Baron von Trenck to raise " a force of irregular marauders . . . amongst the robbers, bandits, and riff-raff of the Balkans." " Amongst the Pandours," says Herr Renn, " the man who did not obey orders to the letter was just strung up, but apart from that the men would ravage and plunder to their heart's content, and as they were robbers by natural inclination, there was no danger of their deserting, because nowhere could they find a better field for the exercise of their calling. Owing to the fact that they lived on the country by pillage, Trenck was able to send them far beyond the provisioning area of the army depots, and they greatly harried Frederick's rear, lying in ambush at night, or in woods for his provisioning columns."

The words in which Herr Renn explains why Frederick was unable to make an effective retort to Von Trenck might be taken as the thesis of this book. Herr Renn gives a new meaning to Clausewitz's famous dictum that war is the con- tinuation of politics by other means by showing hew the manner in which, and therefore the success with which, a nation wages war depends on the character of its social structure

and the relation of its society to its fighting forces. In simpler language, the nature of a country's war effort must depend on the sort of men whom she puts into the field—or into the fleet or the air, as the case may be, and also on the manner in which she can afford to arm and equip them.

The simplest and most effective illustration of this is the contrast between the stand:rig armies of the absolutist eighteenth century and the national army which the French Revolution brought into being, Napoleon inheriting it later. The life of the soldier under the ancien regime in Europe is described by Herr Renn with a poignancy which is all the more moving for its strict economy of language.

" The lot of the soldier had always been bad, particularly as no provision whatever was made for the day when by reason of age or incapacity he could no longer serve, but with the establishment of standing armies his life became a purgatory . . . . the soldier was made completely dependent economically by engagement for long service, and he had to submit to ruthless discipline . . .

"Discipline was so severe that many soldiers, most of whom were pressed men, took the first opportunity to desert, and as a result the treatment of the rank and file became even more 1-arbarous. In order to make desertion difficult the soldier was completely isolated from the civilian population. He was per- --lined to leave barracks only under the supervision of officers, -rd during campaigns he was never quartered on the civilian opulation, but every night camas were pitched just as the old Roman Legions had done (sic). Requisitioning was not customary, nd soldiers were never sent into the villages to obtain provisions, for they might have used the opportunity to decamp.

An army of this character was an army whose strategy, Warfare : The Relation of War to Society. By Ludwig Renn. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) tactics and internal economy were regulated by the fear of desertion. It was a body with dim eyes and insensitive hands: it could not even send out a patrol unless there were sufficient officers with it to prevent any of the men escaping. It was bound together, not by comradeship, but by fear.

When a military genius of Napoleon's calibre was placed in command of an army of emancipated Frenchmen, inspired by national enthusiasm and the hope of promotion, the effect upon the armies of absolutist Europe was overwhelming. Herr Renn takes the example of Napoleon's classic campaign of 1796.

" In this Italian campaign," he says, " he had no depots and his soldiers were tattered and hungry, but they were real volun- teers, and therefore there was no danger of their desertion, so that he was able to advance with impunity deep into enemy country." This unexpected tactic flung the Austrian generals who were his opponents into confusion.

It may be that Herr Renn has attempted to over-simplify history in order to present his thesis clearly. Wellington's men may have been " the scum of the earth," but neither he nor still less Sir John Moore commanded them solely by the methods of the slave-driver. In discussing the Russian Army and the Crimean War, he says: "This slave army had to fight against free Frenchmen and unfree Englishmen . . . " He justifies his reference to the British troops as " unfree " by saying that they were " men who had engaged themselves as mercenaries for a settled time to go anywhere and do any- thing, and is that not a very great abandonment of personal liberty? " It certainly Is, but at least the men had been engaged and not conscripted. It is true that, at any rate, at Alma the

French Army acquitted itself better than the British, but this was certainly not due to desertion among the latter. The trouble was not so much the absence of freedom as the presence of social inequality, which made the Victorian govern- ing class disinterest itself in the welfare of the troops, and therefore in the more practical aspects of the conduct of war.

Elsewhere a certain tendency to over-simplify can he dis-

cerned. For instance, when he distinguishes between the

strategy of annihilation and the strategy of attrition in relation to the War of 1914-1918, Herr Renn says:

"Both sides could have waited patiently and without taking action, but for the fact that the whole affair cost too much. . . . Almost all the offensives launched by the Entente Powers were offensives of attrition rather than offensives of annihilation. They were undertaken at all only in order to accelerate the process of attrition in Germany. . . .

The evidence does not bear this out. Haig's vision, at least, was always dazzled by the image of a grand break- through exploited by cavalry ; and many a life did it cost.

In spite of this tendency, nothing that is said in this cogent, lucid, economical book is unimportant. Herr Renn has been a front-line soldier in two wars, and his realistic account of modern fighting from the soldier's point of view can rarely have been surpassed. One interesting point which he makes is that he saw very little bayonet fighting in the Great War, and none at all in the Spanish Civil War. The book, too, is full of stimulating ideas: for instance, that all European countries except the Soviet Union would do well to revert to " the small professional army and to limited, regulated warfare." The only exception is the Soviet Union, and that, together with the character of the Nazi aims, " com- pels all the other Powers to maintain big armies." Here he probably underrates the strength of the Frenchman's senti- mental addiction to the idea of universal military service.

But it is the emphasis of the relation of social freedom to success in war which gives the book its claim to outstanding importance at the present time. Herr Renn describes how war conditions led to the humanisation of the relations be-

tween the German officer and his men, but how the advent of the Nazi$ is undoing all that ; and he also describes the bad effect which the nervousness of officers had on the troops when they tried to stop them reading English leaflets. The volunteer soldier, trusted by his officers and his Government,

who has come out of a free society, has no equal. The mes- sage of Herr Renn's book is one of hope, but also of warning. Conscription may or may not be necessary ; but freedom at home must be preserved. Those who suppress information and seek to regiment all social activities will prove themselves, in a very real sense, Hitler's fifth column. We shall over- come Hitlerism the better the more completely we reject all its methods