MODERN WAR AND CONTINENTAL ARMIES.
WE trust that our chief statesmen and leading politicians, and also those who help to form and direct public opinion in the Press, will give a very careful study to the introduction written to a book on the Boer War published this week. The book is called "My Experiences of the Boer War," by Count Sternberg, and is a translation of a very curious and interesting record of the war from the Boer sis3e kept by a gallant but wholly impartial Austrian soldier of fortune who happened to place his services at the disposal of the Boers, but who would have been quite willing to take the British side had he been able to obtain an entrance into our Army. But though the book is good reading enough, it is the intro- duction to which we desire to call special attention. It is written by that able soldier and military bistorian,Colonel Henderson, the author of the Life of Stonewall Jackson, and late the Director of Intelligence to the Headquarter Staff in South Africa, and it deals not so much with the book to which it happens to be attached as with the vastly more significant problem of the judgment that must be passed on the Continental armies in view of the experi- ences of war under modern conditions gained by us during the past year and a half. It is the first serious attempt to take stock of the tactical and general organisation of the great foreign armies in the light of recent events made by a person fully competent to express a judgment. Hence its very great interest and importance. The general result of Colonel Henderson's survey can be roughly and shortly summed up in a single phrase. The Continental armies are what the Americans call "back numbers" as far as modern fighting is concerned. They have not moved since the war of 1870. Every- thing in them is judged by that standard. That war is studied to the exclusion of all others, and what was right then and what was done in the Franco-German War is for them the universal touchstone. In a word, the great Continental armies have become petrified. They rely upon the experiences of the past in something the same way that the Prussian and Austrian armies relied upon the wars of Frederick the Great—there was about the same interval of time—when they met the armies of the French Republic. They do not recognise the change in the conditions wrought by really long-range weapons, both rifles and artillery, and by smokeless powder.
Needless to say, it would not be worth our while to insist upon this fact merely in order to depreciate the German, or French, or other Continental armies,'or to show that we have gained an experience withheld from them. Such depreciation would be both foolish and discourteous. We dwell on the fact, and desire that our rulers and leaders should take most serious note of it, for a very different reason. We are going to reform and reorganise our military system, and this being so v;te are most anxious that we should not choose a bad and misleading model, and copy it in a fit of blind adulation, instead of having the courage and the good sense to make use of our own experience, and to let reason and knowledge guide us. There is a real danger that we may adopt the hasty popular view, often to be heard in conversation, that we did badly in South Africa, because we had not sufficiently studied and assimilated Continental methods, and that our reforms may take the shape of a servile copying of some German or French model. In reality, a great many of our mistakes came from an attempt to apply the old-fashioned ideas of war to circumstances to which they had ceased to be applicable. As we often felt during the bad period of the war, our officers constantly went wrong because, instead of using their own common- sense, they tried to think what Von Somebody-or-other would have done or said ought to be done. Let us then by all means avoid the danger of considering that the Continental armies can afford us a standard by which to correct our fighting organisation. They afford us nothing of the kind, and the sooner and more clearly this fact is recognised the better it will be for the British Army. That there is am immense improvement needed in the British Army we do not doubt for a moment, but let us put our house in order in the right, not in the wrong, way. We must not, of course, fall into the monstrous error of despising foreign arrangements because they are foreign, or of refusing to imitate the armies of the Con tinent when reason tells us they are in the right. On the contrary, we must "trade both with the living and the dead" for the perfection of our Army, but while doing so we must avoid the making of fetishes and the substitution of slavish copying for the exercise of thought and care and knowledge.
After repelling, and as we hold with absolute success, the paradox that conscription or compulsion gives you a. better army than the voluntary system, Colonel Henderson goes on to show how greatly petrified is the system on which the armies, of the Continent are based. It is true that Colonel Henderson does not always put the matter so bluntly or in such plain language as we have done, and very likely he may say that we have somewhat over-emphasised or even slightly exaggerated his view. Still, the general effect of his cautious and well-balanced essay is that which we have given. No reader can rise from it and carry away any other impression. Take, for example, the .following passage. After declaring that the flat trajectory of the small-bore rifle, together with the invisibility of the men behind who use it, have pro- duced a complete revolution, he goes on to say of the Continental soldiers :—" To have to confess that the organi- sation and training of their gigantic armies is based on antiquated principles would be more than humiliating : it would be the signal for most costly and laborious reforms. Yet the phenomena of the South African conflict permit no doubt whatever that the revolution is an accom- plished fact." Colonel Henderson then sums up the revolution that we have just seen accomplished :—" (1) Infantry, attacking over open ground, must move in suc- cessive lines of skirmishers extended at wide intervals. (2) Cavalry, armed, trained, and equipped as the cavalry of the Continent, is as obsolete as the Crusaders. (3) Reconnaissance, even more important than heretofore, is far more difficult." To the first two of these propositions, we are told, the theorists will take desperate exception. "They have already proclaimed that the attack in line of skir- mishers was simply adopted, both by ourselves and by the Boers, because neither we nor they knew better, and that Continental soldiers would have found no need to change their ordinary formations. The truth is, however, that our ordinary formations, previous to the war, were almost identically the same as those of other armies ; but that our officers, thanks to the experience of the Tirah cam- paign, and to a very general instinct in favour of less rigid methods, recognised, before even a shot was fired, that what they had practised in peace was utterly un- suited to the Mauser-swept battlefield. On hardly a single occasion was the usage of the manceuvre-ground adhered to. At least five paces between skirmishers, with supports and reserves in the same open order, was the rule from the very first; and the fact that the normal formations were so unanimously discarded speaks as highly for the resourcefulness of the British officer as the fact that the formations so unanimously substi- tuted proved admirably adapted to the new conditions." Yet Colonel Henderson notes that at the last autumn manceuvres of the Continental armies the old system of attack was still adhered to ;—" Thick firing lines, sup- ported by closed bodies and offering ideal targets, stolidly advanced, without the slightest attempt to make use of the advantages of the ground, against the most for- midable positions. It is still, too, an article of faith that four things only are necessary to success in the infantry attack—viz., discipline, energy, unity, and numbers. Such has been the opinion of Continental soldiers since the close of the Fra,nco-German war, and until their experi- ence has been enlarged they are not likely t5 abandon it. Nevertheless, it contains two fatal flaws. First, that in these days of a flat trajectory and the magazine, mere weight of numbers, and the piling of battalion on bat- talion, will have the same effect as in the days of Napoleon. Second, that a dense line, formed of as many rifles as can find room, halting at intervals, will pour in so heavy and effective a fire as to render the return fire of the defenders comparatively innocuous." We wish we could quote more of Colonel Henderson's brilliant and convincing words, and especially his remarks on cavalry tactics and on the blindness with which the Continental armies retain the old ideas as to cavalry, and his pulverisation of the foreign critics who declared that our troops lost their morale with too small a percent- age of loss. They never lost their morale at all and their losses were often enormous. Unfortunately, to indulge in such quotations is quite impossible. We can only put up a signpost to Colonel Henderson's introduc- tion and insist on the need for its perusal by all who care that we should obtain an efficient Army. Before, however, we leave the subject we must find room for the following admirable passage of general criticism :— "If the truth be told, the tactics of certain foreign armies, of which the chief characteristic is that they rely on the momentum of the mass rather than the skill of the individual, are as degenerate and out of date as the Prussian tactics in 1806, and from the same cause. A long peace is generally fatal to military efficiency. Too little experience of war and too much experience of field- days have always the same results—rigid and unvarying formations, attacks ruled by regulations instead of common-sense, and the uniformity of the drill-ground in every phase of the soldier's training. • Uniformity is simple ; it is easily taught, and it is eminently pic- turesque; it simplifies the task of inspecting officers ; it is agreeable to the centralising tendencies of human nature; and when it appears in the guise of well-ordered lines, advancing with mechanical precision, it has a specious appearance of power and discipline, especially when compared with the irregular movements of a swarm of skirmishers. Furthermore, it is far less difficult to train men to work in mass than independently. Thus order, steadiness, and uniformity become a fetish ; officers and men are drilled, not trained."
We specially desire the attention of our readers to this passage because we trust it may help them to clear their minds of the misconception that strict drill, regularity, and uniformity are bard and difficult things to obtain and ought to be cultivated for that reason. They are not hard, but easy. What is hard is to attain to true discipline and the alert and intelligent appreciation and execution of orders, not conventional and mechanical, but specific and individual. Colonel Henderson most rightly insists on the danger of having our men and officers "drilled, not trained." That is indeed the danger. Drill is too often the easy, lazy, mechanical, unthinking, and so mentally demoralising, substitute for real training. Whether the Continental Powers will at last open their eyes to the lessons of the war we do not know. That, after all, is their affair, and not ours, but we may note that their compulsory service makes it harder for them to substitute training for drill. It is easy enough to drill a passive man whose only desire is to get finished with his two years. He readily lends himself to the anmsthesia of drill. But training the unwilling, un- interested, and unpaid man is far harder than training the volunteer or professional soldier who has come to the colours of his own free will. But whatever the Continental Powers do or leave undone, our duty is clear,—i.e., to remodel our military system in deference to reason and experience, not blindly to copy the Continental models. Fortunately we have plenty of good material both in officers and men. With men who can "hold on" as our men held on at Spion Kop, and officers who can use their brains like Colonel Henderson, we ought not to have any difficulty in arriving at a sound military system.
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