THE FRENCH ARMY IN TUNIS.
THE question of the success or failure of the great effort made by the French to reconstruct their Army is of the first importance to Europe, and it is quite possible that popular opinion may be deceived about it. French experts say very little on the subject, foreign experts see very little, and the public judges by certain broad tests, which may prove to be wholly illusory. A very favourable impression was, for instance, created in England some months ago by the readiness of the French Reserves to obey a summons to the ranks ; but in reality that proved very little, except that the Reserve men were much afraid of the law. Since the Convention first im- posed it, the Conscription, except in La Vendee, has never been seriously resisted in France, not even when, as in 1814, re- cruits have been summoned before reaching the legal age ; and the summons to the Reserves is as irresistible, except by civil war, as the summons to the conscripts. Just now, the failure in North Africa has produced the contrary impression, an idea that the French Army is as ineffective under the Republic as under the Empire. This idea is so strong that it has spread in France itself, where any statement hostile to the Army is held to be unpatriotic, and has been mentioned in the Chamber, and though repudiated by the Minister of War, has been repudiated in a somewhat apologetic fashion. The Army when seriously employed will, says General Champenon, have the older Reserves in it, and will not therefore be so "young." That sounds very like a confession that the Army in North Africa, which is without Reserve men, has proved feeble for its work. It is quite possible, however, that the scene in Tunis may be deceptive. That the Army has failed in North Africa is certainly true, and we can hardly imagine a position much worse than that of the French Government. They have employed 80,000 men, have lost 1,200—a whole British regiment—by death, have invalided temporarily
or permanently 27,000 men, and haye accomplished nothing of serious moment beyond the occupation of the city of Tunis, which, again, entails on them direct responsibility for the government of the country. The capture of Kairouan has been useless. The Moorish tribes were not panic-stricken by the fall of their Holy City, which they knew was indefensible, and they have suffered no other serious defeat. The French troops have made long and wearisome marches, and have defeated any cavalry who resisted them ; but they have only been cutting water with a knife. The tribes, when hard pressed, have fled into Tripoli, or into the extreme south, or into Morocco, where they are setting up a Sultan of their own ; and when not hard pressed, have closed round the departing Frenchmen so determinedly, that even in sight of the coast the Generals are always skirmishing. It has been necessary, for example, to inflict cruel fines upon the Arabs round Sfax, fines which will have no effect, except to make them retreat into the interior. It will take years merely to reach the distant tribes effectually, much more subdue them ; and we question if it can be done at all without those invasions of Morocco to the west, and Tripoli to the east, which will bring Spain and Italy and Turkey—and, indeed, the whole world—angrily into the field, and which even the Gambetta Government dreads. What is the use of defeating tribes which, the moment they are pressed, move tents and cattle across an imaginary frontier and laugh at their pursuers ? All this is not victory, is very like defeat ; and we do not wonder that the accounts have raised in England an impression that the French Army is in bad order,—but that impression may be erroneous.
The law which regulates the conquest of half-civilised peoples by civilised States is, as yet, only half understood in England. We are accustomed to think of India, where the people fight in armies, where the population is as thick as in Belgium, where outside the Desert of Bikaneer water and food can never fail, and forget that all places do not present the Indian conditions. We take the true law to be this. Wherever the people are accustomed to fight by deputy, or are accustomed to live by tillage, or build cities, or are for any other reason immobile, a civilised army, however small, can usually conquer a semi-civilised people. Draught and commissariat are not diffi- cult in countries so inhabited ; the people will not face artillery, and, except when locked up in city streets, the little civilised army is always stronger than the force actually opposed to it. No matter for multitudes, the natives who get within fighting distance are beaten, and the rest grow hopeless. But wherever the population from any cause is mobile, and fights for itself, however badly, conquest in a half-civilised country is enor- mously difficult, more difficult than in a civilised land. It is not considered very patriotic to say so, but there must be a hundred experienced officers in London who know quite well that the British Army has never subdued the raiding tribes of the Suleiman, and that it would be easier work to conquer all Burmah than to keep the Pass which separates Peshawur from Bunnoo in reasonable safety by force. We do it, but not by military means. It would take us fifty years and 100,000 men to make the Suleiman as quiet as the Vindhya Range is. The gigantic strength of Russia, with all her reckless expenditure of men, was wasted in vain for twenty years on Schamyl and his comparatively few followers in the Caucasus. The Turks, who fight very well indeed, and have no scruples about extermination, have, in four hundred years, never tamed the Koords. The Chilians excepted, the Spanish Republicans, who die in battle as the Peruvians recently did, with magni- ficent pluck and self-devotion, can do nothing with the " untamed" Indians, although the Spaniards have the aid of masses of tame Indians, who, whether they fight well or not, die readily in heaps. The Argentines, who are very com- petent in their way, have not really subdued the Guachos. The Chilians are an exception, but, we believe, the able pluto- crats who under Bentham's constitution govern that State so steadily, have conciliated, not conquered, their Araucanians, who now, like our own Highlanders, form the flower of their army. Even the " limitless strength," as Mr. Blaine calls it, of the United States, is often baffled and perplexed by the few and scattered Sioux and Cheyennes. In all these cases, the mobility of the threatened people, the nature of their territory, and the absence of cities, reduce the civilised army to the same conditions as the uncivilised one ; it loses the advantages of its organisation, because it cannot reach the foe, and then conquest becomes very nearly impos- sible, except after losses such be Russia alone suffers without a pang. The rule is absolute, or if broken, is broken only in Asiatic Russia. The White Czar does con- trive to master nomad tribes of Tartars, who should be able to defend themselves by perpetual retreat ; but it is done partly by money, partly by cultivating discords between the clans, and partly by a direct expenditure of time, treasure, and valuable leaders, of which the world hears nothing. It has cost England nothing in money to conquer India. It has cost Russia at least £200,000,000 to spread from the Ural to the
Amour. It is not that the half-civilised anywhere fight so very well. They are brave, and sometimes devoted, but they cannot overcome a nervous dread of artillery, which, when- ever the invaders can use it, gives them, whenever they can come up with their opponents, an ultimate though useless victory on the field. But the half-civilised are not broken by flight ; they can move without European supplies, and they can, when shells are absent, use every advantage of ground. The French are no more despicable for not conquering Moors quickly than General Napier was for not conquering Afreedees, or than the Emperor Nicholas was for failing so often before Schamyl. We should do no better in North Africa in the field, though we should con- ciliate through our civil government, which, though leaden, is gentle, and developes the passion for prosperity ; nor would Prince Bismarck's favourite Pomeranians. They could not catch Moorish tribes of cavalry, any more than Frenchmen can. That the French are specially disqualified by tempera- ment for such work as that in Tunis is possibly true. They have a sort of horror of thankless and inglorious, but long- continued effort in a bad climate, which dispirits them, and makes them a ready prey to disease. The statistics of invalid- ing in Mexico were, we believe, concealed under the Empire with extraordinary rigour, as State secrets, and any doctor who revealed the facts would have undergone a risk no one ventured to face. But we must not forget that our own men, who are volunteers, and not conscripts, did not love Afghan service ; while service in the Caucasus was so detested by the obedient Russian Army that the Czar at last formed penal regiments, which were kept full by devices not always just, and very often cruel. Discipline under all this suffering has not failed in the French Army, though we note some most impolitic outbreaks of ill-temper against half- submissive Arabs, and observe that returned invalids are con- firmed croakers ; and in a European war, the" young" soldiers might prove as efficient as Wellington's new army, half of which had never seen a shot fired, did at Waterloo. Of course, if the enemy were German, confidence would have to be re- gained ; but if the first collision terminated in favour of the French, we should, we believe, speedily see the French Army once more pronounced one of the most formidable in Europe.
There is nothing less easily explicable in the whole history of War than the superior mobility of uncivilised races. They move, as a broad rule, three miles to their enemy's one, and the difference is not wholly due to the absence of impedi- menta. No English infantry regiment, even if reduced to the barest fighting trim, and with its baggage left behind, would seriously hope to catch an Afghan regiment in full flight. The European cavalry would catch the native cavalry, because the horses would be better and better fed ; but the infantry, except in the rarest cases, would be eluded. The native regiment, no doubt, makes sacrifices of its weaker soldiers, deserting them with a recklessness no British officer would imitate ; but still there must be some positive difference in the capacity of the men, which, as the European is the stronger and the better fed, must be due to training. The one thing a civilised soldier is not taught to do is to march to the ex- tent of his powers for days on end, and the consequence is that when called on he cannot do it. The uncivilised soldier has been compelled from boyhood, by the conditions of his life, to do it constantly ; and this, therefore, is the one thing in which he defeats his rival. He can, on an emergency, march fifty miles without breaking down, and he can march thirty miles a day for ten days running. The European cannot, and as the first business in war is to reach your enemy, the con- quest of a foe always in front and never visible unless he pleases, becomes the most heartbreaking of tasks. We did not con- quer Hyder Ali, even in a country so favourable to civilised armies as Madras, and unless the French can conciliate, that is, practically, boy, the Moorish tribes—a possibility, though a costly one—the President of the French Republic may, in 1900, be pursuing them from the new city of Gabes as he is now from the city of Tunis, and may own nothing twenty miles beyond the city's walls. The notion that "France must win in the end," is only a phrase. France may win, if she can in- duce the tribes to settle or to come to terms of peace, but all Europe tried for two hundred years to conquer the petty coun- try of Syria in successive Crusades, and the Arabs kept it, for all that. The French have no advantage over the Crusaders except an artillery, which they find, in a land without roads or folage, nearly impossible to drag.
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