A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ARMY.*

MB. FOBTESCUE need hardly have apologised, as he does in the preface of the fourth volume of his history, for the fact that the instalment with which he now presents us, and which carries us over the period from the fall of the Bastille to the Peace of Amiens, occupies two volumes and close upon a thousand pages of scholarly and thoughtful matter, with an additional volume of quite admirable maps. The period of the French Revolution and of the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte is one with which we are all of us fairly familiar. Yet readers of this volume will be the first to admit that, like Mr. Fortescue himself before he began the laborious research of which it is the result, they had " no conception of the tasks that were set by Pitt to the British Army, nor of the vast amount of work which it strove to do during the first ten years of the great war." In English military history there is no period which more required the illumination of Mr. Fortescue's pen, and though the story is by no means one in the details of which we are entitled to take much pride, it is for all that one with which we should do well to be more familiar. It is indeed most desirable that " the Peninsular War should no longer be regarded as an isolated incident, but rather as the climax of a long and deadly struggle—the solid success achieved at last after fifteen years of failure." In spite of all the failure, Mr. Fortescue has been able to show us that so far as the Army itself was concerned it almost invariably did its duty, and not seldom was fairly entitled to far more recognition than it ever received. It is good to be reminded of a Grey, a Thomas Dundas, a Malcolm, or a Charles Stuart, or to be told how the soldiers of the French army which lined the Egyptian shore when Abercromby disembarked, and was driven back and back till it was finally forced to surrender, admitted that though they had seen Arcola and Rivoli, it was not till they met Abercromby that they realised what bard fighting really meant. As the vindicator of the honour of the Army, indeed, Mr. Fortescue is without a rival.

From the point of view, again, of the practical statesman who seeks in the past the lessons and warnings which should guide him in his constructive schemes for the future, this record of failure, and often of lamentable and wasteful mis- management, merits the very closest study. Yet we cannot help feeling that Mr. Fortescue sometimes spoils a good historian by allowing himself to be too keen an advocate of the case for the Army. His condemnation of the military

• History of the British Army. By the Hon. J. W. Forteacue. Vol. IV., Parts I. and II. With Maps. London: Macmillan and Co. [42s, net.).

policy of Pitt and Dundas is over-violent, and, recurring as it does with monotonous frequency in every chapter of tho volume, is in some few cases altogether without justification.

To ignorance of tactics, and of the needs of an expedition to tropical climes, Pitt certainly, and possibly Dundas, might themselves have been prepared to plead guilty. But "folly" and "presumption " and "shameful neglect " are strong words to use in a controversy to which there are admittedly two sides. Nor could it possibly be considered that justice has been done to the motives which led Addington's Ministry to sign the Peace of Amiens by declaring, as Mr. Fortescue does, that peace was made "for the sake of a little cheap popularity." Viewed by the light of subsequent history, the Peace of Amiens no doubt appears no more than an unprofitable break in an inevitable struggle. But, far from being " an

appeal to cheap popularity," there probably never was a better demonstration of the incurably pacific proclivities of the English people. Never did we make greater sacrifices of rights, prestige, or even interests, than we did at the Peace of

Amiens. What rendered the Peace impossible was the personal ambition of Napoleon ; but that England should have been willing to sacrifice so much in the vain hope of restoring peace to Europe is a matter which redounds entirely to her credit.

The case for the Army was, indeed, quite strong enough not to have needed the support of partisan arguments. Instead of being concentrated as it would have liked for a blow at the heart of France, it had been ordered to nibble at her extremities all over the world. Outside the Low Countries, where everything was mismanaged, it had been confined to expeditions of a few hundred men, who were to perform the inglorious duty of encouraging Royalists, Yen- deans, and Neapolitans to embark upon civil war and do our fighting for us ; or else it had been tossed about from port to port upon crazy transports to be used as the handmaid of the Navy. The attempted destruction of the Spanish fleets and naval arsenals, for instance, was designed to save the Navy the trouble of blockading them ; and whole battalions were on various occasions denuded by finding their men marched off to the fleet and converted into sailors. It was not that the Army had any men to spare ; on the contrary, the need for men was so great, owing to the many and various undertakings into which Dundas entered with so light a heart,

that there was no respite for training ,a home, and battalions were hardly raised ere they found themselves shipped off with

men so raw and untrained that it was extraordinary that they were able to achieve anything at all. Often when troops were most wanted not a battalion could be found.

Mr. Fortescue shows us two occasions at least on which the Army, apparently so squandered on minor operations, might have been used with decisive results. If even a small British force had been sent to Sicily, as Charles Stuart had urged in 1798, and thence to Egypt, after the battle of the Nile, to act in concert with the Turks, there is every reasonable probability that Bonaparte himself would have been made prisoner, and his reputation so damaged that he never could have become First Consul. Again, if at the doubtful battle of Marengo it had been, not Desaix, but Stuart or Moore with a British corps who had marched up at the crisis of the battle, the First Consul would certainly never have become Emperor. Instead of this, the Government kept a force of nearly ten thousand men inactive upon their transports before they were finally despatched to Minorca, and in addition seven

or eight thousand men under Maitland were sent upon an idiotic errand against Belle Isle. " " What a disgraceful and what an expensive campaign we have made," writes Corn-

wallis. " Twenty-two thousand men floating around the greater part of Europe, the scorn and laughing-stock of friends and foes."

When he gets to the story of the West Indies Mr. Fortescue appears to be even more convincing. The secret of England's impotence during the first six years of the war may, he thinks, be said to lie in the two fatal words " Santo Domingo."'

After long and careful study he has come to the conclusion that— "The West Indian Campaigns, both to windward and leeward, which were the essence of Pitt's military policy, cost England is army and navy little fewer than 100,000 men, about half of them dead, the remainder permanently unfitted for service The actual amount of blood and treasure drained from us by the island of St. Domingo alone will never be truly known, but the expenditure admitted in the House of Commons was over four

millions sterling, and the mortality up to December, 1796, was set forth in a return at 75,000 men."

These losses, as Mr. Fortescue trenchantly points out, "exceeded the total casualties in Wellington's army from death, discharges, desertion and all causes from the beginning to the end of the Peninsular War." Nevertheless, he is forced to admit that, as soon as the Peace of Amiens left him free to act, the great Napoleon himself emulated and outdid the mistakes of the British statesmen. In the year 1803 he lost over twenty-five thousand men in the same accursed island of Santo Domingo. Yet one could hardly accuse Napoleon of military incapacity !

There is no question, indeed, that thousands of lives, both British and French, were sacrificed to the interests of trade in the West Indies. But while Captain Mahan and other naval writers have not perhaps given full consideration to the enormous losses entailed, Mr. Fortescue hardly stays to con- sider how prodigious, on the other hand, were the resulting commercial gains, and how important. Between 1792 and 1800 the commerce of Great Britain increased by sixty-five per cent., and it was this commerce which not only sustained her throughout the long struggle, but enabled her also to finance the whole resistance of Europe. Moreover, though Pitt undoubtedly laid a grievous burthen upon the Army, and in fact rendered it almost useless for any but "amphibious " expeditions, his policy was deliberately arrived at and triumphantly achieved its aim,—the establishment of an over- whelming superiority at sea. Naval supremacy was, after all, then as now, the one vital interest; and eventually, as Captain Mahan has reminded us, it enabled us to " crush France by a process of constriction which, but for Bonaparte, would have reduced her at an early period, and to free her from which Napoleon himself was driven to the measures which ruined him." Towards the great triumph in the end the regiments which perished miserably in the West Indies contributed, in no lesser degree than the nearly equal number who fell in the Peninsula or at Waterloo, or than the heroes of the Nile and Trafalgar themselves.

It is certainly a matter for regret that the best historian of the British Army we have ever had should be so conspicuously blind to the wider aspects of Imperial strategy. The military records which he has studied are, of course, full of heart- rending sacrifices silently endured by an Army that was most unjustly discredited in the popular mind, and there is every excuse for the soldiers of the time in the very decided opinions which they held upon the subject. Nevertheless, we think Mr. Fortescue should have made greater efforts to show us that the soldier should never consider himself a fair judge of the statesman. No doubt there are occasions —and Mr. Fortescue's next volume will show us one—in which the crisis will throw up a general who, like the Duke of Wellington, combines the qualities of the statesman with those of the soldier, and thereby secures the support in troops and supplies which is necessary to the success of his campaign. But the historian of the British Army has himself admitted the dangers of his own arguments when, in his excellent appre- ciation of the character and services of Abercromby, he shows us how that gallant old soldier, though he thought ill of the whole Egyptian Expedition, and was tormented by anxiety and apprehension to the end, "stands forth, in his determina- tion under all circumstances to do his best, as an example to British Generals that, by serving even a Dundas faithfully, they may serve their country well."

Mr. Fortescue is on much stronger ground when he deals with the faulty administration of the Army at home. Make- shift plans for raising recruits have not, unfortunately, been confined to the days of Pitt. The extravagant offering of bounties, the scandalous plan of allowing an unlimited number of officers to raise men for rank, the infamous scheme of contracting with individuals to supply recruits at so much a head, are all familiar to students of much later times. Some of the expedients, particularly the recruiting of boys under eighteen years of age and their shipment to im- mediate burial under tropical suns, are with us to-day. We are not altogether convinced that Pitt was wrong because "he never passed an Act for National Defence without an amendment to substitute 'you may serve' for you must serve." It may be so ; but if he was, he has erred in common with every Prime Minister that we have ever bad. But we absolutely decline to admit that in his firm

refusal to resort to conscription "he was actuated by the pro. position that his withdrawal from office would mean the ruin of England." Conscription may or may not have been possible in England; at any rate, in France it had a large share in bringing about the downfall of the Empire. Nevertheless, we are in entire agreement that a blunder was committed in enlisting the Volunteer Force independent of, and not, as previously, affiliated to, the Militia. The confusion of "regular regiments for general service, regular regiments for European service, regular regiments for home service, invalid companies and other corps for garrisoning at home and abroad, militia, provisional cavalry, yeomanry, volunteers, associations of cavalry and associations of infantry," certainly seemed to betoken "poverty of power in organisation." At the same time, if the English people then, as now, were averse to compulsory service, the only alternative was to take every man who would offer himself under the terms and under the designation that he most preferred, make the best of him, and spend upon his military training whatever it was worth to the State.

This was what Pitt did, and it should never be forgotten that the greatest triumphs of our Army during the Great War, in Egypt, in Spain, and at Waterloo were won with the assistance of thousands of men whose original terms of enlist- ment put them under no obligation whatever to die where they did. In his brilliant and most interesting defence of the Army we are inclined to think that Mr. Fortescue has been led, as many keen soldiers are often led, to underrate the real patriotism of the country during a time when, after all said and done, she did save "herself by her exertions, and Europe by her example." Want of organisation means waste, and often peril; but want of patriotism, whether in the people or the statesmen who guide them, is absolutely fatal to any nation ; and without a considerable deal of patriotism we should never have triumphed in the Great War.