Mediaeval and Modern Warfare. By Professor Tout. (Man- chester University
Press and- Longmans. Is. net.)—Professor Tout's comparison between mediaeval and modem warfare is well worth reading. It is significant that our greatest niedi- cevalist should declare that " modern warfare has become infinitely more cruel and inhuman than the warfare of the Middle Ages," and that the age of chivalry is dead except for the airmen.– He shows how "history moves in circles as much as on straight lines " by pointing to the revival of national as opposed to professional service, and to the revival of hand-to- hand fighting, as in the Middle Ages. The gradual development of professional armies and navies has been checked ; in this war the civilian turned soldier and the merchant-ship was aimed for service as in the fourteenth century. Trench warfare revived the seventeenth-century grenade and the steel helmets and breastplate of the mediae'eai man-at-arms. Professor Tout says that in Palestine the Turks sometimes made lightly covered trenches with spikes at the bottom such as Bruce made for the confusion of the English cavalry at Bannockburn. He recalls the " Greek fire " that annoyed the Crusaders and the " stink-pots " of the old Chinese Army as early counterparts of German poison-gas and flame-throwers. In the fourteenth as in the twentieth century cavalry had ceased to play an important part in battles. In one respect the mediaeval army was inferior to a modern army ; though it could move faster and could safely cut itself off from its base, it could not hold the country through which it passed. Professor Tout thinks that the strategy of mediaeval commanders has been underrated ; their greatest difficulty lay in the defective organization of the mediaeval host, in which each feudal magnate led his own retainers. " War hurts more in a modern State," says the author, and ought to be made impossible. But Professor Tout doubts whether " there exists even now the right mental attitude which the new world of peace requires if it is ever to be made a reality."
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