Mn. FORTESCUE may be congratulated on his decision to reprint
the lectures and papers comprised within this little
volume. We are generally inclined to regard the pre.. Wellington period of the great struggle with France, so far at least as the British land forces are concerned, as a barren and unprofitable record of disaster and disgrace, only partially relieved by the brilliant little victory of Maida, and by Aber- cromby's Egyptian Expedition. Mr. Fortescue's able and suggestive history of the British Army down to the second Peace of Paris has already done much to popularise and increase our interest in the military side of our national record, particularly in the eighteenth century. These lectures and papers now carry us a stage further, and show us that there was much to admire in the British Army even under the administration of the Duke of York and of Mary Anne Clarke. Who, for instance, has ever heard of brilliant episodes like the cavalry actions of Villers-en-Cauchees, Beaumont, and Willems in the Low Countries in 1793, or of Medow's light infantry and their defence of the Vigie in the West Indies in 1778 ?
Mr. Fortescue of course holds a brief for the Army, and as
its unwavering champion and apologist he is most attractive reading. But he always appears to be somewhat unduly inclined to favour the soldier at the expense of the politician, and to forget that the Army is after all the servant of the nation, and not the nation of the Army. We do not believe, for instance, that in respect of corruption or of hard drinking there was much to choose between the soldier and the politician at the end of the eighteenth century, and whatever our views of the younger Pitt as a War Minister, it is difficult to admit the complete justice of the following strictures on the great statesman for what Mr. Fortescue boldly calls his "criminal neglect of both Army and Navy"
"Let us not forgive him," he says—" let us never forgive to any Minister—the scandalous neglect which plunges a country unprepared into war. Common humanity, if he had not common- sense [the italics are ours], might have moved him to save unhappy men from the lash, whom he had driven to desertion by refusing them bread. Pitt showed neither humanity nor sense.
Partly as a tool, partly as a principal, ho passed from blunder to blunder, defeat to defeat, disaster to disaster. It was not Austerlitz that killed Pitt. The poor man was crushed by the ever-increasing burden of his incapacity for war."
No doubt the contrary view as urged by no less a person than Mr. Lecky—that "Pitt was of the school of Palmerston,
he never allowed the armaments of the country to sink into neglect "—is almost equally untenable ; but Mr. Fortescue's invectives surpass even those of Macaulay, and smacking as they do of the platform in the Staff College where the lectures were delivered, they hardly carry conviction as the well- considered verdict of the unbiassed student.
We do not mean, of course, that there is not much to be urged, if more moderate language were used, against the military policy of Pitt and his War Secretary, Dundas. One is familiar with the forcible protests of Sheridan against the policy of "filching sugar-islands." The West Indies, which, according to Mr. Fortescue's calculations, cost us in three years alone over one hundred thousand men dead or disabled, were the natural dowry of sea-power, and it made no differ- ence to the general situation whether we took them early or late in the war. Meanwhile, had the whole available Army, instead of a few hundreds of men only, been despatched, say, to Toulon in 1793, the formidable Royalist revolt of the South might have struck a blow at the heart from which the Convention could never have recovered, and the little French gunner might against the whole British Army never have got his opportunity at all. It is, of course, perfectly true that the administration of the Army was terribly neglected by a Minister who was a War Minister only by force of
• The British Army, 1783-1804 By the Hon. J. W. Fortesone. London s Macmillan and Co. [4e. Gd. not.]
circumstances, and, as its were, under protest. It is true that the men were miserably paid, the discipline of the officers deplorable, and most regiments in a chaotic condition. Half the strength of the Army was down with fever contracted in the West Indies, and expedition after expedition failed absolutely from want of reinforcements. Mr. Fortescue makes the very most of his case ; we certainly share his astonish- ment that in the circumstances the Army should have behaved, as it invariably did, with splendid gallantly in the face of the enemy, and he shows the desperate straits to which, as the war continued, Pitt was reduced in his frantic endeavours to obtain fresh recruits. And there is a charm in the vigour and clearness with which Mr. Fortescue expresses his views which carries us away in spite of ourselves. And, besides, any condemnation of Ministers who in peace-time suffer the armaments of the country to sink into neglect is very seasonable at the present juncture.
But we are not sure, and his eulogy of the Duke of York as an Army reformer increases our doubt, whether Mr. Fortescue has not failed in his review of the period, as Macaulay undoubtedly failed, to observe just that which Pitt overlooked, and so found himself unable ever to bring the war to a successful conclusion. The condition of the British standing Army in the early "nineties," though bad indeed, was certainly not worse than that of the other armies of Europe, with the exception perhaps of that of Austria. And the system of Colonial war and of cash subsidies to Europe which failed with the younger had been an unqualified success under the elder Pitt.
What William Pitt failed to realise, and what Mr. Fortescue has not emphasised, was the momentous character of the change in the conditions of war which was the outcome of the French letul,e en masse. The causes of the Duke of York's fiasco in 1793 did not lie primarily in the lack of organisation in our Army itself; the Austrian and Prussian Armies were troops of the old traditional type, and their failure was nearly as complete as our own. The real fact was that a professional standing Army like the British Army could not in any way compete against the new and resistless force of a people who, as a nation in arms, threw its whole might, resources, and intelligence into the conduct of a national war. It may well be doubted, as an able contemporary writer points out, whether, if Pitt had really been able to break away from the traditions of the eighteenth century, and to form any conception of the character of modern war, "the Convention might not have been strangled at its birth, and Europe saved from the thraldom of Napoleon's dominion." We may find fault with Pitt, if we will, for clinging to a paid standing Army and to a policy of Colonial expeditions and insignificant raids ; but it was not till after his death that Spain and Prussia, and to a certain degree Russia, found their salvation in the creation of national armies on the French model.
Amongst the many interesting tactical points touched upon in this volume is the much-vexed question of the influence upon our Army of the lessons of the American War. The interesting little fight at Vigie, in St. Lucia, which Mr. Fortescue describes in one of his papers, furnishes us with an interesting link between the loose formations forced upon us by the American rifleman, and the tactics of the famous Light Division. The whole question of our tactical debt to the revolted Colonies, and the extent to which we made use of the experiences of the American War, is doubly interesting just now when a reaction is taking place against extreme Boer theories. We cannot enter into any full discussion of the question here. It will be remembered, however, that the corresponding theory of the evolution of the French amateur from Lafayette, and the Volunteers who returned from this American War, has been considerably questioned of late, and it is at least arguable that the tactics of the tirailleur were the result of his own undisciplined courage and of the pressure of circumstance, rather than of the teaching of Lafayette. However this may be, we think Mr. Fortescue furnishes us with sufficient evidence to prove that the soldiers of the time went through the same kind of psycho- logical process after the American War as we are now experiencing after South Africa. In both cases the bayonet appeared, immediately after the war, to be an anachronism, and to have been superseded for ever by the skirmisher and the rifleman. But in both cases the first new war under European conditions re-established the supremacy of the arms blanche and the virtue of closer formations.
How unchangeable are the base principles of tactics, and how old so many even of the most up to date of our own theories, will be never more obvious than when we consider the case of the cavalry. In the American War we really learnt, under Tarleton and Simcoe, what light cavalry should be, and woe to the horseman in America who had not his eyes and ears open, his horse always fit, who did not know how to make use of ground, or despised dismounted fire. Yet by Peninsular times we had no light cavalry worthy of the name, —so stubbornly did the old cavalry prejudices survive. Nevertheless, the forward school appears, even in those days, to have had its advocates. Witness the protests of one Colonel Money against training the Yeomanry as cavalry instead of as mounted rifles. "Is there," asks the Colonel, "any ground between London and Ipswich on which three squadrons can form without being in reach of musketry from the hedge-rows in their front and flanks P Of what use, then, in God's name, is cavalry where they cannot form to charge ? For if they cannot form, they cannot charge. But till this new system be adopted by Prussia, whom we copy in most things I suppose we shall remain where we are." And he goes on to urge that the cavalry should be trained and armed as dismountable Dragoons with a rifle or a short carbine, while a proportion of each regiment should be trained as chasseurs on foot, that is, as light infantry ; for, according to him, "the victory will rest with that side which has missile weapons of the longest range." We rub our eyes as we read this, and wonder do we dream. Every recent monthly review has published an article on the pressing question of shock v. dismounted action, or of the lance v. the rifle. But Colonel Money wrote in 1798!
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