THE IMPULSE OF THE PHALANX.
ALL students of war were deeply interested in reading of the immense column of troops, in an extraordinary formation, which the Germans thrust against the Russians in May. Newspaper reports compared it with the ancient Macedonian phalanx. It was said to number nearly two hundred and fifty thousand men and to be about thirty miles long, and it took with it a great amount of artillery, including large howitzers and siege guns. It moved along the Gorlice- Jaslo-Rzeszow railway, upon which it was dependent for its supplies, at a rate of only about four miles a day. Being held to the railway, it had no tactical possibilities, and its dense line was an easy mark for the Russian artillery which played on it. It is said to have suffered a loss of one hundred and fifty thousand men. Such a method of advance seemed to combine so many disadvantages that one is attracted by the question why the highly scientific soldiers of Germany came to the conclusion, as they apparently did, that some one advantage outweighed all the quite obvious disadvantages. So far as we can judge from very scanty information, the Germans were right, in practice at all events, on this particular occasion. For the phalanx forced the passage of the San. Encouraged by this success, the Germans are now said to be making preparations for thrusting a similar military ramrod against the Allies in the West. We do not know whether there is any foundation for this report—it may be nothing but a natural inference—nor can we feel quite sure that the phalanx -which forced the San was wholly such a deliberate military creation as it was reported to be. While bearing the aspect which has been attributed to it, its form may still have been to some extent accidental—the result of the lack of good parallel roads and so forth.
It is not less likely, however, that the Germans did think the thing out from the beginning and invent it after careful consideration. Given their unwavering logic, and their indifference to loss of life so long as an object be gained, the phalanx was just such a conception as we might expect from them. On what grounds did they justify it P They must have had some psychological or metaphysical reason which persuaded them that the use of the phalanx was the one certain way to cross the San, minor military drawbacks not- withstanding. The phalanx was, if this be so, an effort in military metaphysics. The philosophers and historians of the Army must have applied the lessons of military history and their observations of the conduct of men in masses to arrive at their conclusion. They knew that a mass of men, large enough to be beyond the control of any immediate words of command, is a difficult thing to stop when once it has been set in motion. It acquires a momentum of its own. The wills of individuals become submerged in the will, or what may pass for the will, of the mass. They respond to an impulse which nobody could precisely trace or define. In a very rough manner one sees the process at work when a crowd comes out of a public building. Perhaps no one is conscious of pushing—every one may rather be conscious of resisting pressure and of trying to hold back—and yet the column of people is a thing of undeniable -weight driving in one direction, and going rather faster and mom uncomfortably than any one desires. Again, we may refer to the curious example of mass-impulse in a lower stage of life provided by the Scandinavian lemmings — curious little creatures which are half mice, half voles. At irregular periods the lemmings of Norway, which live in the upland forests, descend in innumerable masses to the cultivated lower lands. Their own habitations have become over-populated, or —which is almost the same thing—under-supplied with food. The lemmings, in the grip of some ungovernable instinct, march onwards across the cultivated tracts. They eat and they breed—breed prolifically—as they go. They are a phalanx. They always follow the same direction. They do not move fast ; they are undeterred by the appalling slaughter they suffer; and they never turn back. If they start from the eastern edge of the forests they make for the Gulf of Bothnia, and if they start from the western edge of the forests they make for the Atlantic. Men kill them in thousands ; cattle trample on them; wolves harry them ; birds of prey swoop on them from the sky. But still they go on. Their journey may last a year, two years, three years. But the ending is always the same. Having successfully swum fiords, lakes, and rivers in their uncontrollable advance, they come at last to the sea and try to swim across that. Instinct, more powerful than the Elfensiegen of any Pied Piper, carries them on. Either in the Gulf of Bothnia or the Atlantic, they put off from the shore and head east or west, never to be seen again by the eyes of landsmen. We must not, of course, think of the German phalanx as an insensate body ; not for it "the silence and the calm of mute, insensate things." It answered, of course, to its officers, who were very much alive to the meaning of the operation. At the same time, nearly a quarter of a million men in a dense line infallibly possessed that automatic thrusting-power, that almost mysterious feeling of being borne along eo that the thought of return is impossible, which the military metaphysicians perhaps reckoned would belong to them.
It is not necessary to suppose that German thought went back to the Macedonian phalanx, or, indeed, that the word phalanx was ever mentioned. But if it did look back so far it may have found much to confirm its theory. Experience showed that the original Greek phalanx of hoplites could break almost any line, and when the object was to break a line there was consequently nothing like the phalanx. Philip and Alexander of Macedon, being pitiless in military logic, made the phalanx heavier than ever. One can picture the German phalanx flanked by lighter-moving troops, just as the ancient phalanx was accompanied by its wings of pellasts—, slingers, bowmen, and so on. It is true that the phalanxes of Pyrrhus virtually destroyed themselves against the adaptable Roman legions. Strength, as Gibbon says, could not contend against activity. But the German metaphysicians would know all about that, and would count on their own ability to avoid "Pyrrhic victories," or on the inability of the Russians on the San to play the part of Roman legionaries. The Germans, we may assume, had noticed that troops which move in dense columns, whatever the motive of the move- ment may be, have a singular sense of support. It matters not -whether the impulse which directs them be the exultation of advance, or the unifying despair of men who cling together for protection. The impulse may be a thirst for glory, a furious anger, or a black terror. The army of Napoleon bad relatively as much momentum when it struggled back from Moscow as when it entered Russia—relatively it probably had more. The desperate desire to escape held it on its way, and kept men on their feet long after the ordinary point of human exhaustion had been reached. In the same
way, during the panic of the Greek Army on the Thessalian Plain in 1897 the maddened troops rushed along the main road, clinging together, though fields lay on either side where a man could easily step out of the line of flying bullets, or out of the rush of riderless horses, guns, and waggons.
The Germans knew that a solid mass of men obeys its instincts. The only point about which they had to make sure was that the phalanx had a trustworthy instinct. And it certainly had. For years the hard and unceasing discipline of the German Army had been instilled until it had become instinctive. It could be trusted to work in a phalanx without fail. British officers at the front have related that German soldiers who had faced the most terrible fire without flinching in a charge seemed to be lost and not to know how to go on at the moment when they had actually reached the British trenches and were standing on the parapet. The reason for this was that the German officer commands and drives rather than leads. When a German soldier found himself almost alone, his comrades mostly fallen away from him, his officer no longer close behind him, his discipline failed him, but only then. In a phalanx there would be no question of such a failure, The soldier never would or could find himself in isolation; he would be kept to the rigid line of the railway. If necessary, the German pellasts would keep him to it. The impulse of the phalanx had been prepared in peace and was exerted in the zone of danger with success. The head of the ramrod may have been considerably blunted by impacts, but the inherent momentum of a phalanx drove it through. This is not a plan which may always succeed, but it succeeded once, and the reasons of its success may have been foreseen by German Staff officers in some such manner as we have tried to set forth, though no doubt in much more imposing military language.
Previous page
