THE MECHANISM OF WAR.

IIT.-THE OFFICER'S OFFICER.

NOTHDTG in that paradox, a democratic Monarchy, is more paradoxical than its Army, with its internal absolutism, its iron rules, and iron-bound ruled. In the midst of liberty its members are in honourable slavery, in the midst of freedom of speech they must be silent, and universal freedom of action does but impose upon them action by rote and rule the more strict the more unrestrained the general license. They are the appanages of Monarchy, yet the servants of the mob. They find themselves judged by two antithetic standards,—that of the old heroic Middle Ages when glory alone formed an meet of mankind, and that of the calm, incisive commercialism of to-day, which appraises glory solely by its increment, and requires a strictly pro rata adjustment of each. Such an Army is, indeed, a sort of go-between or link between widely dif- ferent systems, of widely different material from either, sucking virtue from both, yet liable to the vices of

neither ; essentially a clique, for men whose task is a paradox carry it inevitably to its logical place of working, the aloof- ness of their own special society, methods, and points of view. And if they call for or condemn a certain tool or material, their request or complaint must be heard, for they alone can judge of what is requisite and what useless. The roar of criticism and advice from the great unmilitary world which usually drowns the remarks of military men on military subjects is as absurd as it is well meant. As well might a mob of sailmakers surround a tailor at his board and shriek directions to him as to the cutting of his cloth. They know something of the cutting of cloth, it is true, but it is know- ledge which would be disastrous to the fine vicuna in "Snip's" hands ; far better leave him alone, and if your presence at his elbow is necessary to yourself, make it useful to him by hand- ing him his scissors, or measure, or anything he may require, with as little adverse comment on his requirements as possible.

Poor generals! they remind one of nothing so much as a line of targets on the Ash Ranges during "rapid fire" practice. No sooner are they " up " than a hundred shots fly at them from the clumsy squads at the firing point, and after a minute's uncomfortable exposure, down they go again, their fair white paint all splotched and dirty, to hide in the oblivion of the marker's gallery. The squads chuckle and chatter; did they not hear their missiles ringing against the iron, plumb in the centre no doubt ? what deadly marksmen are the louts of England! But the markers in the distant gallery are chuckling too, for there are wondrous few bulls- eyes ; indeed, not many " hits " on the targets at all, and most of the dirt on the white paint is from mud and stones thrown up by misdirected bullets, thrown up in such quantities that even the genuine hits are difficult to discern.

But general officers are not of insensate iron, but of very sensitive flesh and blood. Indeed, they appear to suffer on their professional mountain-top as climbers do from the rarefied air of lofty summits ; hearts which beat sound and true on humbler levels become fluttering, iron nerves tense and untrustworthy, limbs whose strength and activity have carried and clawed their owners through perils to the peak yield to inertness, and the whole system seems spellbound. Attacked in this plight, how feeble would be a man's resist- ance to a corporeal enemy ; not less feeble if his meta- morphosis and his foe were purely mental, and the latter came tilting at a mind already vanquished by its high and exposed situation, vanquished, but with its sensibility to wounds increasing with its inability to ward them off. If our generals have done badly in the war, they have defended themselves worse at home. Few have even attempted to do so, and of those who did attempt it, but one, fallen from his high estate to ordinary levels, did so with any skill and verve in thrust and parry.

It would no doubt surprise and pain the attackers, the thousands of unlicensed victuallers who retail the great flood of arm-chair criticism, if they were told how much of the paralysis of which they have complained in our generals was actually produced by themselves. Many a fine leader who would have risked heavy losses to deal a master-stroke (which is the essential oil of generalship) has quailed and stayed his hand when he thought of the more terrible gamble such a game involved, the gamble with his own fair name and reputation,— aye, even with his own personal character, so loaded are the dice with which his opponents play. The shout of "West- minster Abbey or Victory ! " sufficient in itself to compel the latter, dies tremulously on a commander's lips, and the dim glorious alternative fades in his heart at the whisper, "The submarine cable and evening paper !" Who will cast with Fortune for his honour ? To whom is honour so much his all as to a British general in the field ? And what shall we say of creditors who would grab at the very soul of a man whom fate may deliver to them bankrupt, his wealth squan- dered perhaps, but squandered in an honest effort for the good of his country and the countrymen who embitter his ruin ? No; we at home have not.less to answer for because there is no one to whom we need render account. We have not invariably "done our beat," but often our worst,—a para- lysing, numbing worst, answerable for who knows how many "lost opportunities" and "regrettable incidents on the far- away veld and kopjes. The list of things which have been noted as wanting in* British general is a large one, and the Index Expurgatorius, of the things he has and should not have is no less porten-. tons. This critic calls for " business capacity," that for political astuteness, the other for administrative genius. One- would have him a military chess-player remote from his pieces ;, another prefers to see him hard at it with the firing line,,

"sharing the perils of his men," he calls it. One would have him a glorified Intelligence agent, another an Addisonian minute-writer, another a great cartographer. All would have him a Hannibal, and having found him the vinegar, feel defrauded when he does not melt the rocks. He is the "sick

man" of the military society, and where all society is doctor,

the pathogeny of his ailments is a deal more formidable than they, and, as inexact science dabbled in by inexact people

must be, vastly, less intelligible. Yet it has frankly con-

demned him, and " 'tis as dangerous to be sentenced by a physician as a Judge."* But there is an Index which no man

has troubled himself to compile and fairly print, the Index of the things wherein he has done well. And any soldier setting himself to do HO finds the wish arising in him from one of its most valuable items, that he could make of it a pandect,— evidence, surely, of something at least done well and truly by the pleader's silent client, of the former's heart made prisoner if his head still roams in revolt ." outside the tabernacle." It would surprise a reader unversed in contem- porary military history if he learned how rare amongst foreign generals is the quality of commanding the affections

as well as the bodies of their subordinates, and what anxiety dogs an army which is ever imperilled not only by the inten- tional injuries inflicted by the enemy, but by the dislocation of its own head and body. British officers who have accom- panied foreign troops on recent campaigns tell curious tales in momenta of confidence, tales of chaos and the revolt of troops more disciplined than our own against generals more educated, which must remain in limbo, though one is sorely tempted to counter with the fist of truth the lies which have been kicking us below the belt from Continental savateurs.

But the moral shall be in the light of day to Englishmen; if their generals were cursed with "incompetence," they were yet blessed with qualities more difficult of attainment, and—is it absurd to say ?—more valuable than learning, qualities which bound their men to them with almost family ties, which victory could hardly tighten so firmly were they knotted even in defeat. A conqueror sweeping the earth has all men at his feet, but it is a marvel to see generals, if not actually defeated yet hesitating and astray, their old knowledge fluttering like a bat in the glare of new conditions, with their own nonplussed men, not at their feet, but in their bosoms, friends more fast in need than in the piping times of plenty. The course of time and new events is a river of oblivion ; it will soon carry us past the war to gape at other scenes transpiring on the banks. But no draught, however deep, of Lethe "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim" will make that strange friendship vanish into the haze from one who witnessed it. And armies unpossessed of it in times of trouble, though they may be generalled by men stuffed with the lore of a thousand volumes, will find that our shadow is the substance, and their substance a shadow.

" Incompetence" is a fascinating word, almost as blessed as " Mesopotamia " to the old women of the world. It may be flung as easily at financiers who fail, because they fail, or at Governments who do not fail, because they do not, as at generals who fail at first because no one else would have done anything better. Give me leave to substitute for it another of equal length and of an equal phonic comfort, and you will have in pocket form the whole treatise dealing with the sins of omission and commission of our generals in South Africa. It was not incompetence which clogged them, but inezperience : finding themselves involved in a new game, with new players and new instruments, for new stakes of appalling heaviness. It was as if Sarah Battle had sat down as usual, to find with horror that her opponents were dealing for poker! The only attribute which was present of the game they knew (and we had men in South Africa as learned in war as any in Europe) was its rigour, and indeed it pressed them hard at times, as it did their equally astonished superiors at home. When a whole nation has been caught nodding it is hard to rail at

• Sir Thomas 'Browne.

individual slumberers. We were all asleep,—people, Press, Ministers, drummer-boys, generals ; but only on the last was it incumbent to leap up and be doing and directing from the very midst of the heaviness of sleep, in the very midst of the imminent peril. We have almost forgotten already how imminent the peril was ; already there are signs that in the public mind the Transvaal Campaign is gradually subsiding to the level of our ordinary "small wars," a little longer perhaps and more tiresome, but with an issue equally un- disturbing because equally foreseen. Let us cast our minds backward to the time when the stream of Boer invasion was flowing southward into British provinces, sluggishly, fortunately for us, but gathering volume as it stole through the overcharged swamps of disaffection; let us re- member that it was just beginning to fall over country which would have transformed the stream into over- whelming, insurmountable rapids and cascades, the great ridges about Pietermaritzburg in Natal, the parallel terraces of the mountains of Cape Colony. And let us reflect that had we lost those provinces, as it may be verily believed we should have done, we would have lost that which would have left us poor indeed, nay, bankrupt to the world. The advancing flood was stopped, dammed, and rolled back, not a second too early; the stream was already rushing in rapids in parts, and our armies had to beat a way upwards in the teeth of them; and now, instead of bankruptcy, behold us with colossal riches and hereditaments for posterity whose usufruct in honour alone no man can value as yet.

"It was the men who did it," wrote a general who loved his men of the Line. It would ill become a man of the Line to filch all the credit thus generously thrown at his brethren and himself, not because it would be ungrateful, but untrue. Our generals shared the universal inexperience, but they surmounted it by a strenuous• and cheery determination which was by no means universal. And experience is their only want; they are in other respects as equal to their posi- tion as the heads of any department in any branch of busi- ness. But some system other than war must be devised which will place expert warriors instead of inexpert gentlemen at the head of our divisions and army corps when the time of our next great trial shall come. Genius is a black swan, a 31oltke is not to be expected in every campaign. But if every youthful officer were to enter the Army in the hopes, and were gripped at once by an education founded on the certainty, of his eventually becoming a general officer, all that mortals can do to produce Moltkes will have been done. At present a man becomes a General suddenly, often by a fluke, and finds it necessary to gather immediately round his unreceptive self an immensity of professional knowledge into which he has not even dipped in the receptive days of his youth. Can one wonder that such knowledge is of the inverted cone order, apparently ample above, but wobbling unstable on it dwindling basis of ignorance and unfamiliarity with the details of the whole he must now take in charge ? The sudden responsibility of so great a trust as high command in a fierce war is a heavy thing to a man who has never borne the responsibilities of little things. And that our generals discharged themselves of it with honour, dignity, and success is a thing to be proud of, and to be unwilling to risk again !

Lniirsmalf.

We publish with pleasure " Linesman's " brilliant defence of the British general. With a good deal of what he says we are in hearty agreement, for we have never sympathised with the indiscriminate censure of our commanders. Many of them—Lord Roberts, Lord Kitchener, Sir Archibald Hunter, Sir John French, to name only the chief— have done work which will never be forgotten in our military annals. What we chiefly dissent from in " Linesman's ' apologia is his initial protest against interfering with the expert. On paper and in the abstract nothing sounds more reasonable than this cry of "Hands off" in regard to the work of the expert.—" He knows and you don't; let the man have an absolutely free hand."—In reality and in practice nothing is more unwise. The unchartered expert, and in war especially, is the greatest of national dangers. No doubt the statesman will not interfere unduly with his mili- tary experts, but he will if he is wise force them to explain and justify their schemes, and will utterly refuse to take up the position of "Here's a blank cheque, do what you like with it while I go to sleep." As to the home criticism of a ruinous kind of which " Linesman " complains we are extremely sceptical. We know that there is a convention that generals are afraid of the newspapers, and that the newspapers unnerve them by their polemics. We think better of our generals, to begin with, but beyond that we know no examples, in this war at any rate, of harsh and damaging criticism by responsible and audible newspapers while the general was in the field. It is often said that generals are afraid to lose men because of newspaper hysterics. Honestly, we do not think this fair. It was not the newspapers but the generals who made the public nervous by telegrams about terrible casualties. The Press was simply amazed when the Modder was officially described as if it had been one of the bloodiest fights in our history.—En. Spectator.1