MILITARY COURAGE.
IT is by no means easy to decide which of the races of man- kind is the bravest upon the battlefield. We are rather inclined to assign that place to the Osmanli, who, besides his natural stolidity and exemption from nerves, has the pride of a race of hereditary conquerors, exalted by an honest belief either that God is on his side or that Fate is irresistible. If he is to die, he will die, if not, not ; and he charges through the hail of shot with an imperturbable serenity which makes him the delight of disciplinarians and the despair of decent men. It is, however, most difficult even to institute a com- parison as to national courage, so much depends upon cit. cumstance, upon discipline, and, with some races, upon leadership. Very few troops fight well when they are hungry. Frenchmen are distinctly braver, by their own confession, when they are led by a Napoleon ; and Germans differ violently from themselves according to the perfection of their discipline. Slays will face any danger which approaches if they are ordered to face it, but to induce them to show fierce charging courage, the courage which sweeps away armies, they must have confidence in their General, and see him at their head. Italians have hardly been tried of late years, though they died in their tracks at Dogali ; and Spaniards, once esteemed the bravest infantry in Europe, have in more recent years appeared to have lost some confidence either in their officers or themselves. Even the evidence is imperfect. We English believe in our hearts that we make the beat soldiers in the world ; but, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence for the assertion; indeed, there is a little evidence the other way. There is plenty of proof running through all history that the class of Englishmen who take to the Army have no superiors in battle, if, indeed, they have any equals ; but the English people have never yet been tried. They have never been subjected to a conscrip- tion or anything approaching to one, and the voluntary adoption of a soldier's life naturally acts as a winnowing process. Very few men enlist who are doubtful whether they can face the shot, and of those few a large proportion would rather face the bullets than the wrath of their braver com- rades, who naturally look upon skulking by men who were under no compulsion as a selfish and shameful desertion of themselves, to be unhesitatingly visited with the discipline of the belt. On the other hand, English mobs behave badly in a riot, the writer having himself seen five hundred powerful navvies, armed with their pointed spades, scuttle like sheep before a charge of sixty Dragoons. The Americans, who are Englishmen over again, were in their Civil War conscribed on a great scale, and, as the lists of the slain sufficiently proved, behaved for the most part admirably ; but about Englishmen we can only say that, as pressed sailors fought well, as police- men often display heroism, and as there is splendid self- devotion shown by miners, firemen, bridge-builders, and other classes in civil life, there is a violent probability that if the whole people were called upon to fight, it would display exemplary courage. It has never been called on yet. Taking our self-chosen soldiers, however, as samples, it is fair to say that the English soldier seems less moved by comparative numbers than the man of any other race; that he is less alarmed by an unlucky position, probably because he does not perceive it ; and that his courage is singularly independent of leadership in his Generals. He likes to see his officers in front, but the universal testimony of his enemies, as well as his friends, to his capacity for fighting when badly led, to "making," in fact, "a soldier's battle of it," seems proof positive on that point. The same quality must be in Americans, or they could not have exhibited such courage after the dreadful massacres under McClellan; and military historians give much the same praise to Russians, who, how- ever, as was shown before Plevna, dislike being mown down without gaining a success. It is probable that Englishmen, Americans, Germans, Frenchmen, and Russians are the best troops in the world, very much in that order, that after them come the Turks, who are individually the bravest of them all, and that the remaining Latin races must be content to come next, though Spaniards when defending a city or a building have in all ages been almost incomparable.
The question of the comparative proportion of really brave men in any army will probably never be determined. Great officers on the Continent keep their knowledge on that subject rigorously as a professional secret, and assume as a certainty that all soldiers are brave. They know very well, however, that they are not, and when confidential will admit, as Marshal von Moltke once did in public, that with a great number it. takes discipline, and severe discipline too, to induce them to face shells unshrinkingly. American officers have been known to acknowledge that of their men, who are as brave as any in the world, 20 per cent. would run away if they could, and in every army, even ours, which a man enters only of free will, there is a certain proportion who literally cannot overcome their fears. They are stricken with a sort of paralysis. The proportion is probably not high in any army, the majority, if in health, being able to do their duty, and having intense motives to do it ; but neither is the proportion high of those who literally feel no fear. There are such men, who do not quite understand what the emotion is, as there are also some who have in extreme danger a sense of pleasure, which sometimes not only quickens their blood, but distinctly increases their intellectual force. This is said to have been true of General Picton, who, though a hard, rough man, was an "angel when bullets were about; " and was undoubtedly true of the first Lord Gough, who had a trick, highly disagreeable to his Staff, of seeking points of full exposure to the enemy's fire. The immense respect paid to such men in all armies shows, however, that they are ex- ceptional, and on the whole, we believe that the opinion of the first Sir Henry Havelock is very nearly the truth. The writer once had an opportunity during a discussion on the utility of the Victoria Cross of cross-questioning that famous General on the subject, and never forgot his reply. " In my experience," he said, " in any British regiment there are always a hundred men who would storm the gates of hell, eight hundred who if they did it would follow in, one hundred who want to skulk in the ditches, and about thirty who actually do skulk there or elsewhere." The averages should be higher in a conscript army, but then, also, the discipline is more severe. Why discipline should impart courage is something of a mystery, but there is no shadow of doubt that it does, and that a well - disciplined regiment is not only more obedient, but actually more indifferent to danger, probably because the continuous habit of self-suppression has positively &unshed selfishness. The popular notion that seasoned
troops are much braver than novices seems, however, to be unfounded. They are more afraid of giving way, knowing better what a hell upon earth commences if men begin running ; but Waterloo was won, in considerable measure, by young soldiers, and Speicheren was carried by regiments in which no private had ever seen a shot fired in anger. They were drilled youngsters, not old soldiers, who tramped up that dreadful bill, marching to death as if they were executing an accustomed movement on parade. Indeed, there are cynics who say that the youngsters do best, and that the old soldiers know what is before them a little too well ; a gibe which is disproved by the almost invariably splendid conduct of the non-commissioned officers. Education, it may be suspected, makes little difference in courage, for though officers die in a severe action in a number out of proportion to that of their men, that is because their business ie leading and they are conspicuous figures; but it is quite certain that courage can be materially affected by ideas. We all know how Puritans fought and how Ghazees fight, and unless all historians lie, armies have been made positively braver by their cause, and even by proclamations from Kings and Generals. That most soldiers become braver under the spell of victory is a truism, and instances have been known, both among Americans and Englishmen, when defeat, or a certainty of it, has changed ordinary men into sullen heroes. As a rule, however, hope is one of the constituents of a soldier's courage, as is also the cheerfulness so marked in most Irish and some French regiments. If we were required to pass a definite opinion, we should say that most white men, if at all trained, have the courage to pass through a battlefield with credit, those positively incapable of doing so probably not exceeding 10 per cent., but that there was in the Northern races some quality of fortitude distinguishable from courage which gave their soldiers a distinct and per- manent advantage. Nevertheless, the Macedonian phalanx, and the probably superior Roman Legion, and Kaled's cavalry were alike composed of men drawn from the sunny South.
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