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lie still and shoot; and the later charges of the British have been disastrous failures accompanied with terrible loss.

If the soldiers of an army have been taught to expect a charge and to expect to succeed in and by that operation, what must be the effect upon them of a series of attempts ending unfortunately? They cannot but see that something has been wrong with their training, and cannot but lose confidence either in their leaders or in those who have been responsible for their instruction. They will say to themselves either that their drillbook was wrong or that their general does not know his business; and as the general is a person whom they have seen, while the drill-book is a piece of anonymous literature, they are much more likely to lay the blame upon the man to whom they naturally look, because he is the authority in whose hands they are. This discovery, that a method of fighting which has been taught to the troops does not produce the effects which were promised from it, is a most dangerous form of surprise, and may very soon demoralise a whole army.

What is the truth about the bullet and the bayonet, and about the instruction given in peace to the British army on this subject? The bayonet has been for thirty-five years an exploded superstition. Even in the days of Brown Bess,' the actual use of the bayonet was a rare exception. Wellington, who perhaps knew something about fighting, relied mainly upon the fire of his two-deep line, which usually made an end of the attempts of his opponents to charge. Napoleon also, by no means an incompetent judge, said: 'Shooting is the thing, everything else matters little.' But there have been men in the British army ready to forget the practice of Wellington and the opinion of Napoleon because Souwaroff, a brilliant but certainly eccentric personality, is reported to have said: "The bullet is a fool, but the bayonet is wise.' The bullet of Souwaroff's time, though Napoleon and Wellington relied mainly upon it, was no doubt erratic in its ways, but under the influence of Whitworth it acquired wonderful steadiness and persistence; while Dreyse and his successors have enabled the modern soldier to discharge sixty bullets, guaranteed to go exactly where they are aimed anywhere within a mile, during the time required by Souwaroff's contemporaries to send forth one solitary bullet which had no more than a half chance of hitting a barn door at the other side of a spacious farmyard.

In 1864 the bullet was only at the beginning of its modern education. A Prussian captain, who had not been brought up in

the school of Souwaroff, was with his company in the village of Lundby, when he heard that a company of Danes was marching to attack him. He made his men lie down behind a bank and waited for the Danes, who at 700 yards from the village formed a small column and set out to attack. The Prussian captain waited until the Danes were 200 yards off, and then let his men begin to fire. A quarter of an hour later the surviving Danes were retreating, leaving 101 dead and wounded, and twelve prisoners. Three Prussians were wounded. That little skirmish made no great sensation in the newspapers at the time, but it was a decisive battle. It settled the question between the bayonet and the bullet. The moral was drawn by competent judges somewhat as follows: riflemen posted upon ground suitable for their weapon, the bullet, having in front either flat ground or ground gently sloping away from them, cannot be approached in front by men on foot intending to use cold steel. Men who want to turn them out must either shoot them down or go round them. The bayonet has no chance against the bullet, and is useful only when the bullet cannot be used against it, either because the bayonet man has come to striking distance before the bullet has had a chance, or because there are no bullets left. The first consequence of all this was to make it necessary in attacking a position to let some of your troops walk round it towards the flank or rear, while the rest occupied the attention of the defenders in their front. The reply of the defence was to prolong its line to the flank or otherwise take precautions against being outflanked or turned, and the counter-move of the attack was to put its riflemen in a circle all round the defence, and thus give the defender the choice between pure frontal attack and surrender. The theory was explained by Moltke in 1865, the practical demonstration by the same hand followed in 1870 at Sedan. The intervening five years had brought with them another development. If the assailant relied on the bullet and could use it better than the defender, frontal attack might still succeed. Its chances would be improved if the defender could have his nerves unsteadied by previous shelling while the attacking troops were protected from any such disturbing influence. Accordingly the Prussian artillery was taught that its one duty in life was to explode its shells where they were wanted, that is among the enemy's gunners, until they should be satisfied, and then among the enemy's infantry. It became an accepted maxim that an attack by riflemen could not

succeed unless two conditions were fulfilled: First, that the defender's artillery should be silenced by that of the assailant, and, secondly, that the showers of bullets fired by the attacking infantry should be more destructive to the defending infantry than the bullets of the defenders to the infantry of the attack. In later years officers whose preoccupation was war came to see more and more the necessity for an alliance, not merely between the bullet and its assistant, the shrapnel shell, but between the rifleman and the ground. The rifleman was taught to lie down so that the ground should protect him, to move so that it should conceal him and to dig heaps and holes for his protection against the enemy's bullets. It must be at least a dozen years ago that the spade was adopted as an offensive weapon to enable the advancing rifleman to hold his own against counter-attack.

These were some of the conditions of modern war, long recognised in armies in which the officer's life is devoted to the preparation of himself and his troops for war. The recent campaign seems to show that they were well understood in the Boer army, but came as a surprise to the British forces. The British soldier has indeed, during the last twenty years, been taught to shoot, and the army ought to have learnt from its own experience in the Soudan that the bravest and most athletic troops cannot possibly, however fleet and sound-winded, carry the knife or the spear within reach of a line of riflemen. But this lesson can hardly be said to have been digested. Last summer I spent a day watching a sham fight on Salisbury Plain, carried out by British troops under British generals. On both sides the men were armed with magazine rifles, but without bullets. I watched two lines of troops standing up in clusters at least as dense as the old two-deep line, facing each other at three hundred yards' distance, and making a terrific noise as they fired blank cartridge, each line apparently aiming at the other line. The generals and the umpires seemed quite satisfied. To me that part of the spectacle seemed to be a sham, for it was quite clear that all concerned had completely forgotten the existence of the one thing that reigns supreme on the modern battle-field, the bullet. But to have forgotten, in your exercises preparatory to war, the factor which in war is essential, is to guarantee for yourself a painful surprise when the troops pass from the sham fight to the battlefield.

Strategy is too often thought of as a very easy business. To British officers, at any rate to the great majority, the subject is known only from Hamley's 'Operations of War' or from Jomini's

once famous 'Précis,' and there is a considerable public which is familiar with the elementary principles which these treatises explain. But the great difficulty in strategy is the correct application of principles, a matter as hard as the principles themselves are easy, and neither of the writers just named has so presented his subject as to guard against misconception on fundamental points. They both of them analyse with great subtlety the relations between lines of operations and the lines representing the fronts of armies, and thus give undue predominance in the theory of war to what has been called the geometrical element. The utility in its place of the geometrical element has never been denied, but it is insignificant in comparison with the moral factors which have to be dealt with.

When Sir Redvers Buller reached Cape Town he had a difficult situation to meet. Sir George White's force was invested by the Boers, who were about to overrun Southern Natal. There was a ferment in the Cape Colony, and no one knew how soon there might be an extensive rising among the Cape Dutch. The small British forces in Mafeking and Kimberley were besieged. The business of strategy was out of this tangle to discover the point at which a sufficient effort would make it possible to solve all the different problems. This point was in Northern Natal, because the principal Boer army was there. Strategy said:

Defeat that army and everything else will be easy. Time is in war of the utmost importance, and to defeat the Boer army it was therefore desirable to choose the shortest way to get at it, which was the railway line from Durban to Colenso. Strategy prescribes the concentration of effort upon the main point, when that has been discovered. But instead of the British force, 50,000 strong, being taken to Colenso for a decisive attack upon the Boer army, it was split up into two halves, one for Colenso, one for the Cape Colony, with the result that one half was defeated at Colenso and the other half at Magersfontein and Stormberg. These defeats only made the importance of action in Natal more evident. The two divisions there were reinforced by a third, which has in turn met with defeat. Yet all the time the adherents of the geometrical school have thought that the mistake lay in not advancing through the Orange Free State by a roundabout route which offered no certainty in a reasonable time either of relieving Ladysmith, or of bringing the principal Boer army to a decisive battle

When Sir George White first reached Natal he found his

forces wrongly divided, and proposed to concentrate them. But because he was told that concentration would create a temporary panic, he consented to meet the enemy with his force divided. The weakness of this decision is veiled by the phrases which contrast military with political expediency, but sound strategy knows of no such distinction, at least in such a case. To have concentrated the forces and evacuated Dundee might have led to the increase of the Boer forces by a large contingent of Dutch colonists from Natal, which would no doubt have been a misfortune : but to leave the forces divided was to court defeat, and defeat was still more likely to lead the Natal Dutch into the Boer camp, and certain to expose the whole colony to Boer invasion. That being the case, there was to a clear eye no choice. The one course was right and the other wrong. But the clear eye, which in matters of this kind sees through phrases into the heart of the situation, can never be obtained except by a man who by repeated efforts has thought out to their very essence, and to their ultimate elements, all the problems of war, so that the principles of strategy have become incorporate with the fibre of his mind, and he is incapable of violating them.

No army can secure in its average general the presence of the indispensable minimum dose of strategy, unless it has the means of passing him for a number of years through a strategical school under the supervision of a master of the subject. There is in the British army no office for testing its generals as strategists, no guarantee whatever that an officer, before rising to the rank which may at any time place in his hands strategical decisions of national importance, shall have 'given any proofs of his competence to make such decisions. Thus it has come about that the army sent to South Africa was inadequately supplied, not merely with field guns, mounted troops and transport, but with the strategical direction, without which an army is as helpless as a nation without a government.

The most fatal form of surprise is the political, which occurs when one nation attacks another which is neither expecting nor ready for war. The British Government, in its innocence of the art of policy, unwittingly and unsuspectingly made the most elaborate and perfect arrangements to bring upon itself this kind of surprise. The question of the independence of the Transvaal, which was in fact involved in the questions of the franchise and of suzerainty, was raised and pressed by the British Government

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