Chapter IV: British Campaigns in India 150 (2)

It is when, as in most modern armies, the officers put their men before anything else in the world, that military discipline shines at its brightest. This does not mean leniency to irregularity or towards insubordination--a weak or indulgent officer is neither loved nor respected--but the treatment of men as men instead of as children, attention to their wants, consideration for their feelings, zeal for their well-being, cultivation of their self-respect, forethought to train them to meet every exigency, endless endeavour to deserve their confidence. Then there arises in regiments that mysterious power which is called _esprit de corps_, when every soul in them from the colonel to the drummer feels that his own honour is bound up with the honour of the regiment, and that the honour of the regiment is the greatest thing in the world. And so you find--for one instance out of many thousand--such a battalion as that of the Fifty-seventh at Albuera, with two men in every three struck down, yet conscious of nothing in the dense smoke but of closing in to the colours and unquestioning resolution to die where they stood, rather than give way. So too you find a simple solitary private, in the story that I have already told you, content to go down alone in a sinking ship for the honour of the Sixtieth. Without knowledge of military history men are really unconscious of the existence of that most wonderful of moral forces, _esprit de corps_; and it is not a thing of which anyone can afford to be ignorant.

Lastly military history gives us insight into the character and intellectual powers of some of the most remarkable men who ever lived. I shall be told perhaps that the career of an Alexander or of a Caesar is but a paltry study compared with that of a Luther or a François Xavier. Be it so. Different characters attract different students, and great leaders of men, whether saints or soldiers, are always worthy of study. Moreover, it is a most important thing to realise that military history means the survey of administrative in at least as great a degree as strategical and tactical genius. You will all of you recall the happy phrase that was applied to Carnot--the organiser of victory; and Carnot was only one of many who have deserved the epithet. No man perhaps ever merited it better than Moses, if only through his standing order (which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy xxiii. 12-14) that when an army was in the field there should be appointed places for latrines outside the camp, and that all foul matter should be instantly buried. The regulation is justified by a noble precept, which in its essence is true for all time. "The Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore _shall thy camp be holy_, that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from thee." Foul camps mean enteric fever and dysentery, and these diseases mean the destruction of the host. To this day it may be said that the sanitary regulations of Moses have never been superseded. How many Jewish victories may have been due to the observance of them we can only conjecture; how many hundred millions of lives have been sacrificed to the neglect of them--for it is only latterly that their value has been fully recognised--the Omniscient alone can know.

Turn from Palestine to Greece and look at the military constitution of Sparta founded by Lycurgus. Make a huge stride over the ages, and look at Chaka, the man of genius whose military organisation and training of his people would have made the Zulus masters of South Africa, had not the boundless resources of the British Empire dashed his work--though not without difficulty and defeat--at last to the ground. Look at the great men of modern times, whose names will be more familiar to you, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Wellington, and take note that from the very beginning of history the greatest generals have almost invariably been in the very first rank not merely of military but of civil administrators. It may seem heretical to say so, but I personally am inclined to think that Napoleon's work as a civil Governor transcends even in its own kind the greatest of his military achievements. I, even as many other men, have gone through most of the thirty-six volumes of his correspondence; and I confess that his reorganisation of France in the first months of the Consulate--crude and hasty as in many respects it was, owing to the urgency of the case and the desperate nature of the circumstances--appears to me the greatest thing that ever he did. But all three of these men are remarkable chiefly for the astonishing results which they achieved with small means. Frederick, in spite of terrible defeats and latterly an almost total failure of resources, contrived somehow to carry the Seven Years War to a successful end, and at its close to revive an exhausted Prussia. Napoleon took over a France demoralised by ten years of misrule, and sunk financially to a hopeless depth of bankruptcy, yet by squandering men in lieu of money he carried his eagles victoriously from end to end of Europe. Wellington had so few men that he could not squander them, and so little money that, owing to the general lack of specie, he was obliged to carry on the Peninsular War upon credit, and incidentally to administer the government of Portugal as well as direct the operations in the field, lest that credit should absolutely fail him. Yet by sheer administrative ability, patience and tenacity, he prevailed.

I have of design left the question of the technical study of strategy and tactics until the last. Strategy may, I think, be defined as the art of bringing armies up to the battle-field by the right way, in the right strength, at the right time; tactics as the art of handling them on the battle-field to the best advantage. Of what profit is the study of these two arts to the citizen at large? Well, in the first place he will learn what may be termed his strategical geography, and why battles are constantly fought century after century in or about the same places. He will understand why, for instance, endless great actions for the mastery of India have been fought within fifty miles of Delhi; the significance of Stirling on the map of Scotland, and of Acre on the coast of Syria. He will perceive why, owing to changes in transport and armament, places whose names constantly occur in old diplomatic records have ceased to be of great account and are now seldom mentioned, whereas others, as I have said, retain their importance through endless generations. He will realise, further, how far strategic considerations enter into political arrangements of all kinds, as for instance that Bismarck the civilian was against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine as tending to perpetuate the hostility of France, but was overruled by Moltke because the new frontier was worth 100,000 men. In fact it is not too much to say that knowledge of military history is essential to the right understanding not only of domestic and foreign politics, but of the whole story, written and unwritten, of the human race--which is mainly a story of fighting.

The interest of tactics is chiefly for professional men; but it is worth while to notice its main principles, which are simple. All fighting is, and has always been, of two kinds, hand-to-hand or shock action, at a distance or missile action. Goliath challenged the Israelites to shock action, and David killed him by missile action; and I dare say that the Philistines thought it unfair. Now, whether for shock or for missile action, it is very obvious that if you can overmatch your enemy in numbers--other things being equal--you are likely to get the better of him; and that if you are on higher ground than he is you can see him better than he can see you to throw things at him, and can charge him with greater impetus down hill than he can meet you with, uphill. It may be said broadly that the art of tactics is the art of bringing stronger numbers to bear at some given point, and taking or acquiring superiority of position. This is the physical side of tactics. The moral side (apart from discipline) lies chiefly in those two eternal and undying resources, known as the ambush and the surprise. Here the leader tries to upset an enemy's physical advantage of numbers and position by taking him unawares. There is no finer example of a surprise in the world than that of Gideon. Think of it--the silent march of 300 picked men in three companies through the darkness, each with his trumpet and his torch hidden in a pitcher, the silent surrounding of the hostile camp just before dawn, when human vitality is at its lowest; and then the silence broken by the crash of three hundred pitchers, the sudden flare of the torches, the braying of three hundred trumpets as if in signal to a host of thousands unseen in the night; and the simultaneous yell "For the Lord and for Gideon." There was a wild panic in the Midianite camp, and no wonder. In the darkness they took to fighting each other, "every man's sword against his fellow." Of course they did. Exactly the same result was seen many times over during our last war in South Africa, and has been seen in every panic from Gideon's age to our own. Gideon was a man who studied moral force.

Thus we come back to the point from which we began. Military history is not the history of physical but of moral force, perhaps almost of the triumph of moral over purely physical force. Let no man say that such a subject is unworthy of our attention. It is unfortunately impossible to study deeply any department of the affairs of men without encountering much that is infinitely vile and base and sordid; and military history is no exception to this rule. But it is rich also in noble and heroic deeds, not of valour only but of patience, self-sacrifice and endurance. I may be wrong, but I think that I see in it grander and more frequent examples of devotion to duty than in any other branch of history. The opportunities, you will say, are greater; and there may be some truth in this; but I would add that the training to self-abnegation counts also for very much. It will harm none of us to know well this story of duty done for duty's sake; and it may be that, as the example of the _Birkenhead_ has nerved all our race to face with calmness the utmost perils of the sea, so the remembrance of the proud history of our soldiers may brace each one of us, no matter how humble his sphere, to discipline himself in the self-denial and self-control which triumph over adversity.

LECTURE II

BRITISH MILITARY HISTORY

In my last lecture I attempted to deal with the broad subject of military history at large. To-day I shall treat of the narrower subject of British military history. There is nothing arbitrary or capricious in this; for British military history is, owing to our insular position, a thing apart.

Foreign nations, indeed, would say that a country which has never in the whole course of her existence put fifty thousand of her own children in line upon any battle-field and very rarely so many even as thirty thousand, can have no military history; but none the less we have one, which is in many ways remarkable and worthy of study.

Note in the first place that for five hundred years after the Conquest England was not a purely insular power. She had troublesome neighbours in Wales and Scotland, and her kings had possessions, and consequently troublesome neighbours, in France. Remember that it was not until 1558 that we lost Calais, and that, as long as we possessed it, we had so to speak a bridge-head which enabled us to enter France practically at any moment. This was a sad temptation towards foolish expeditions and waste of strength; and it was a great blessing to us really when the capture of Calais removed it for ever.

Elizabeth, therefore, was our first purely insular sovereign. What manner of military force did she find at her accession, and what manner of organisation for creating and maintaining it? The sovereign was empowered, as he still is, to call out every able-bodied man for the defence of the country; and upon the different classes of freemen was imposed by an Act of 1558, which was based upon an older Act of 1285, the duty of providing themselves with arms according to their means. Long before 1558 fire-arms had been brought to such efficiency that a compete system of tactics had been founded for their use by the ablest soldiers on the Continent; but in England the Statute still professed contentment with the weapons of three centuries earlier, bows and bills; and there were remarkably few fire-arms in the country at all. There were, however, great traditions derived in part from Saxon times, but strengthened, developed and enlarged by the victories of Edward the Third, his son Edward, Prince of Wales, and king Harry the Fifth, in France and in Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

I told you in my last lecture that all fighting, from the earliest times to the present, is in the ultimate resort of two kinds--hand-to-hand or shock action, at a distance or missile action. In the hands of the English a very old missile weapon, the bow, had become, in the form of the long bow, the most deadly and formidable of its time. Every English boy was trained to the use of it, and was taught to bring every muscle of his body to bear upon it, just as in rowing you are taught not to row with your arms only, but with your legs also and with all the weight of your body. "My father taught me to lay my body to the bow," says Bishop Hugh Latimer. The result was that their arrows were discharged with great rapidity and accuracy, and with such strength that they were effective in the matter of penetration at an astonishingly long range. The shock action of mediaeval times, as you know, was confined chiefly to mounted men-at-arms, clad in armour from head to foot, and furnished with lances, who moved in dense masses at very moderate speed, and trampled down everything that stood in their way. How did the English archers deal with them? They aimed mainly at their horses, which, maddened by the pain, ran away with their riders, and carried confusion everywhere; but being accurate shots, the archers aimed also at the joints of the harness--at the intervals between gorget and breast-plate, between breast-plate, or back-plate, and thigh-pieces, which were exposed by the swaying of the body, and above all the arm-pit when the arm was raised to strike. But how about the English men-at-arms, you will ask? Why did not the enemy shoot their horses with arrows, and make them unmanageable also? Here we come to the English peculiarity. The English men-at-arms always dismounted to fight, broke off their lances to a length that could be easily handled and, ranked together in a dense mass, used them as pikes. So here there was the tradition of a missile infantry, so to speak, steady and deadly shots; and of a shock infantry which could not be broken and, moreover, after winning a victory could mount and pursue on horseback.

The new tactics of the Continent, which the English had to learn, had taken much the same direction. The Swiss, in order to keep mounted men-at-arms at a distance, had bethought them of ranging their infantry into dense masses, armed with pikes fourteen feet long, and this they had done with such success that they had vindicated the position of infantry as the most important element on the battle-field. Other nations took up the idea, either for mercenaries or national troops; and, with the improvement of fire-arms, missile infantry developed into musketeers, or "shot" as they were called, who fought entirely as skirmishers, while shock infantry was represented by dense masses of pikemen. Simultaneously the cavalry became a missile force. Unable to make any impression against a bristling wall of pikes, they gave up their lances and provided themselves with pistols, so as to shoot the pikemen down from a distance. Hence it was customary to cover the pikemen with heavy armour on breast and thighs, which prevented them from moving very fast. The fate of the battle, however, was determined by them. Musketeers and cavaliers worried each other and the pikemen for as long as they dared, but the ultimate issue was decided when pike met pike. The chief reason for this was the system adopted for maintaining a continuous fire. This was to range the musketeers in ten ranks, and let these ranks fire in succession, the first rank filing to the rear as soon as its weapons were discharged, in order to reload, and leaving the second rank to do likewise, and so on. In theory the system was ingenious; but in practice it was found that men thought a great deal more about filing to the rear rapidly, than about firing steadily and accurately. Of course if heavy artillery could be brought within range of a square of pikemen, it might blast them off the field; but cannon were too cumbrous and difficult to move for this to be often possible; and thus the decision of the day was left, as it still is, to cold steel. You will see wonderful pictures of combats of pikemen, just as you see the like representations of fights with the bayonet. I doubt greatly if they ever occurred. Both sides approached each other with the pike or bayonet no doubt; but before they closed one side turned and ran away. All nations boast of their prowess with the bayonet, our own among others, but few men really enjoy a hand-to-hand fight with the bayonet, however much they may enjoy a hand-to-hand pursuit. You remember that the Homeric heroes, after a certain amount of close combat, invariably threw stones at each other; and the practice has never died out. English and French both talk much of the bayonet; but in Egypt in 1801 they threw stones at each other when their ammunition was exhausted, and one English sergeant was killed by a stone. At Inkerman again the British threw stones at the Russians, not without effect; and I am told upon good authority that the Russians and Japanese, both of whom profess to love the bayonet, threw stones at each other, rather than close, even in this twentieth century.

To this stage, then, had the art of war advanced at Elizabeth's accession, but no effort was made to train the national forces according to the latest methods. A few foreign mercenaries were imported from time to time, and a great many English went abroad, and served either in the armies of Spain--which were the most efficient of their day--or in those of the revolted Dutch which, under the Princes of the House of Nassau, were rapidly improving upon the Spanish methods. Thus some ideas of foreign practice crept into England, and a great deal of foreign nomenclature, which still remains with us. Nearly all of our military terms are foreign, drawn mostly from the French, the Italian or the Spanish. Regiment, battalion, colonel, sergeant-major, captain, lieutenant, ensign, cornet, corporal, centinel--all are words borrowed from Latin sources, and one could multiply the number of instances. Pistol and howitzer are Bohemian, relics of John Zizka. Forlorn hope (which has nothing to do with the English word _hope_) is Dutch. Even Shakespeare speaks twice of recruits by the Spanish name _bisoño_, corrupted into Bezonian.

Little progress was made in Elizabeth's time, and no more in the reign of James I; but meanwhile a great military reformer arose in the person of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who recognised that missile action was that which must triumph in the future, and set himself to improve the firing tactics of infantry. This he did by reducing the depth of the infantry to three ranks, and forming the musketeers shoulder to shoulder, the front rank kneeling. He then distributed the whole of his battalions into sections, or platoons, of twenty to thirty men each, and introduced the system of firing by volleys of platoons; the usual method being that the first, third, fifth, seventh and ninth platoons fired first in rapid succession, and then the second, fourth, sixth, eighth and tenth, by which time the odd-numbered platoons had reloaded and were prepared to begin again. Thus a continuous fire was maintained without unsteadiness or disorder; and the system was so good that it lasted until the introduction of breech-loaders. There being many Scots--even whole regiments--and a good many English in the Swedish service, the drill and tactics of Gustavus became known to a number of people in both kingdoms.

Now followed the Civil War, wherein the armies on both sides were ridiculously inefficient until Cromwell, recognising that the King had most of the gentlemen--that is to say the more efficient amateurs--upon his side, decided that he must train professional soldiers to beat them. So he raised his famous regiment of horse, and for the first time since the days of Harry the Fifth brought true military discipline to bear upon English soldiers. In 1645 the Parliament perceived that a whole army trained upon the new principle would mean the difference between triumph and defeat, and thereupon organised the famous host called the New Model Army, consisting of twelve regiments of foot, eleven regiments of horse and a train of artillery. The effect was immediate. The Royalist cause was utterly overthrown, whether upheld by English, Scots or Irish; the irresistible army displaced the Long Parliament and took from it its usurped authority; and Cromwell during five years of unrest and uneasiness kept the peace in the three kingdoms by means of regular troops and an armed constabulary. Never before or since have we been kept in such order. Scottish Highlanders, Irish Tories, English colliers--as lawless a people as the other two--were hammered and cowed into obedience. Some north-country colliers attempted a strike; "they would neither work themselves nor suffer others," said the newspapers. The Lord Protector sent a regiment of horse to the spot, and nothing more was heard of the strike. Nor was it only within the British Isles that he was feared, for, in virtue of his army, he was dreaded throughout Europe. His reign was brief, but he contrived within his five short years to strike a fatal blow at Dutch commercial supremacy, to ensure by his regulations as to trade and navigation that it should pass to England, and to call representatives from an United Kingdom to a single Assembly at Westminster.

And now pause for a moment to look at the portentous changes that had come over England in the hundred years between the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 and the death of Cromwell in 1658. In the first place England, as I have said, had been finally cut off from the Continent; in the second she had become mistress in her own house, for, though Scotland was not administratively joined to her, the two crowns had been united upon one head and closer union was only a question of time; while Ireland had been subjected to so stern a discipline that she still chafes at the remembrance of it. Insular therefore the British Isles were as never before in their history; and yet in the earlier half of the seventeenth century there had been laid by private adventurers under Royal Charter the foundations of a colonial empire in North America and the West Indies, that is to say in the temperate and in the torrid zone, as also of a great agency for foreign trade in India. Moreover Britain's powerful neighbour, France, had almost simultaneously formed settlements or trading establishments precisely in the three same quarters. Almost at the instant therefore when the British were relieved of the perils and anxieties of a land frontier at home, they began to acquire such a frontier over seas. Lastly they had evolved, in what may be called its perfected state, a scheme of commercial policy which was not likely to make for peace with their neighbours. Meanwhile, owing to the accidental circumstance of a civil war and the happy advent of a man of genius, they had produced quite casually the very thing that was needed for the new conditions, a regular army subject to proper military discipline.

When Charles II was restored, the intention was to disband the entire army of the Commonwealth, or to keep at most a regiment of foot-guards, which had fought against the forces of the Commonwealth in Flanders, and a regiment of horse-guards, composed of Royalist gentlemen. But as these showed themselves inefficient in dealing with the London mob, two of the Parliamentary regiments were also retained, Monk's of infantry--now the Coldstream Guards--and a composite body of horse, which we now know as the Blues. This sufficed for domestic police; but soon there arose the question of colonial garrisons, for Katharine of Bragança, Queen of Charles II, had brought to him as a dowry Tangier and Bombay; and there were other places, notably New York and St Kitts, where the close neighbourhood of the French made a little protection very desirable. How were these to be provided? It was a time-honoured custom in England that all fortified places should have a small permanent garrison indissolubly attached to them, rather to keep the buildings in order than to provide for their defence; and this custom was now extended. A few companies were raised for New York and St Kitts, and two regiments of foot and one of dragoons for Tangier; but even so it was necessary to send the Guards abroad from London to quell a rebellion in Virginia, and to give further assistance at Tangier. In India the East India Company pursued the same policy, keeping some companies of white troops at Bombay and Madras, and forming also companies of natives, the number of which was constantly increased, for defence of their factories.

James II who succeeded his brother in 1685 was a trained soldier and sailor who had seen much active service, and an admirable departmental administrator. He made a pretext of Monmouth's rebellion to augment the standing army considerably; and, if more time had been given to him, he would probably have established an efficient War Office and laid the foundations of a sound military system. Further, noticing the danger to the American colonies from their constant divisions and quarrels in the presence of the smaller but perfectly united and organised French settlements, he remodelled the governments of many of them, grouping them together under English Governors, who were also soldiers, so that in time of danger there might be harmonious action and efficient defence. These changes, principally, cost him his throne.

During all these years the English had never ceased to chafe at the continued existence of a standing army. The country gentlemen, who had made the Revolution of 1642, had the terror of Oliver Cromwell before their eyes, and dreaded lest the Stuarts might emulate his summary and efficient methods. They professed, some of them no doubt conscientiously, solicitude for the liberties of England, forgetting that their forerunners of the Long Parliament had abolished the Monarchy and the House of Lords and erected themselves into a permanent committee of tyrants. They protested that a standing army was unknown to the Constitution of England, but they had not awaked to the fact that there was a British Empire in the making, and that such an Empire requires police. They could not, or at any rate did not, look one inch before their noses except at one principal object, namely the supplanting of the monarchy, in substance if not in fact, by an oligarchy of their noble selves. They therefore encouraged sedition and discontent with the new arrangements in the colonies, and invited William of Orange to come with an armed force and accept the Crown from them. It suited William's policy exactly to have in his hands the resources of England for his desperate struggle against France; and he came, bringing with him the certainty of a great war.

It has been my fate to study the departmental administration of England at various periods, but I have never found it quite so corrupt and inefficient as in the early years of King William's reign. James had improved it amazingly in his three years of power; but his men were of course displaced in favour of the Whig magnates and their nominees, naturally with bad results. The administrative reforms of James in the American colonies were likewise upset by the Revolution; and this folly brought us within measurable distance of the loss of North America, besides taking the resources of England to defend people who ought to have been able to defend themselves. However there the matter was. It was necessary to raise a number of regiments and improvise an army for the pacification of Ireland, which was, I think, the very worst force ever put together under the English flag. After many disgraceful episodes Ireland was reconquered; and then the army, which was by this time beginning to improve, was transported over to Flanders for operations there. It fought in many severe actions with credit but mostly without success, for William III was not a great general. However, it learned a great deal, particularly in the matter of sieges, of which it had known very little, and being thrown into company with some good troops and into opposition against others, it was roused to emulation of the high standard of French and Dutch efficiency. In 1697 the war came to an end through the exhaustion of both parties.

Of the solid improvements effected by the incidents of this war, the first was the passing of the Mutiny Act, in consequence of the mutiny of a regiment which was faithful to King James. This Act empowered the king to punish military crimes, for which the civil law provided no penalty. A standing army being unknown to the Constitution of England, the Act was passed for twelve months only, a ridiculous piece of pedantry which is still perpetuated in the Annual Army Act. The next reform was the adoption of the bayonet, a recent invention, which united the pike and the musket into a single weapon, and made an end of the distinction between shock infantry and missile infantry. A third was the gradual disuse of the pistol by cavalry; the discarding more and more of its defensive armour and the reversion to shock action by the charge at high speed.

Immediately upon the conclusion of the peace there was a howl in the Commons for the reduction of the Army; and it was carried that the English establishment should be fixed at no more than seven thousand men, though the much poorer island of Ireland had been permanently charged by an earlier act with an establishment of twelve thousand. I must explain that until 1708 there were three separate military establishments for England, Scotland and Ireland, and after 1708 two for Great Britain and Ireland until the Act of Union in 1800. Moreover, you must remember that even within the memory of living men the infantry and cavalry were under the War Office, the artillery and engineers under the Office of Ordnance, and the commissariat and transport under the Treasury, so that, while the three kingdoms were disunited, there were nine offices concerned with the administration of the Army; and the colonels, who were responsible for the clothing, made a tenth authority. Hence it was no easy task to get the Army under way for any duty; while the creation of any new force was a most bewildering labour. The Commons, however, cared for none of these things. France was evidently only taking breath for another spring; but that they ignored, and, as I have said, cut down the Army to the ridiculous figure of nineteen thousand men. William very nearly abdicated the throne of England in disgust at their conduct.

Here then we must notice the first flagrant instance of a besetting sin, which, practically from the very beginning up to the present time, has afflicted and still afflicts the House of Commons. No sooner is the country at peace than it raises a cry for the reduction of the Army. In the eighteenth century this cry was very much a matter of faction. The Whigs had always bitterly opposed a standing army under the Stuarts, when they thought it adverse to their interests; and the Tories naturally conceived a mortal detestation of it after it had become a weapon in the hands of the Whigs. Thus both parties were committed to general discouragement of the force; and any member who desired to pose as a champion of liberty could do so effectively by denouncing the evils of a standing army. It has been my hard fate to wade through a prodigious number of speeches upon this subject, and I have been absolutely nauseated by their hollowness and cant. It is of course possible for a man to object sincerely and conscientiously to any description of army; but I have never met with such a one in the Parliamentary debates of the eighteenth century. Their abuse of standing armies, in which was generally mixed some vituperation of the military profession at large, was simply hypocrisy and cant, most mischievous and dangerous, inasmuch as it brought the calling of a soldier into contempt, and kindled the entire civil population into hostility with the military.

Compelled to reduce the Army to a mere handful of men, William sought to turn this handful to the best account by keeping the skeletons of a great many regiments, which might on emergency be filled out with additional men, rather than a very few complete regiments ready to take the field at once. He was quite right; and his example has repeatedly been followed down to our own days; but the system of skeleton regiments means always unreadiness for war. In the haste and urgency of the first hostilities all the trained men are swept into a few battalions, so as to fill up their empty ranks; those few battalions are sent into action; in six months they are so much reduced by losses as to be ineffective; and you are left with nothing but recruits who need two or three years to convert them into soldiers. This has happened again and again, and the first instance of it came in 1701. In November 1700 the acceptance of the throne of Spain for his grandson by Louis XIV roused all Europe to arms; and Louis to secure his object invaded Spanish Flanders, surrounded several towns which were occupied, under the Treaty of 1697, by Dutch troops, and so cut off fifteen thousand of William's best men. Under a former treaty of alliance with Holland England was bound to furnish to her ten thousand men, and both Houses of Parliament prepared faithfully to fulfil the obligation. Twelve battalions were accordingly ordered to the Low Countries from Ireland, eked out of course by a great many young soldiers, but with a fair leaven of old ones; and the country flattered itself that it would escape with no further burden. But, as usual, Parliament had forgotten the Empire. Bad news came just at the same moment from the West Indies, and it was imperative to send two thousand more men to that quarter. Thus at one fell swoop the garrison of Ireland was snatched away, and it was necessary to raise at once ten thousand new recruits and four new battalions. Before the end of the year Louis XIV recognised the son of James II as King of England; and Parliament, at last roused to indignation, agreed to furnish a contingent of forty thousand men--eighteen thousand British, and the rest foreigners. Thereupon orders were issued for the raising of fifteen more new regiments, at enormous expense; for, in consequence of the ill-treatment of the army by Parliament at the close of the last war, men could not be tempted to enlist except by large bounties. In 1703 the English share in the contest extended to the Spanish Peninsula, and eight new regiments were raised for the purpose. In 1704 the capture of Gibraltar and other operations demanded the levying of six more regiments; in 1706 thirteen new regiments were added; and to make a long story short, before the war ended in 1713 sixty-nine new corps of horse and foot had been formed to carry on the war.

But we must not leave that war without a sketch of the greatest of English generals who conducted it. John Churchill was born, you remember, in 1650, received his first commission in the Guards in 1667, saw active service against the Moors in Tangier a year or two later, and serious warfare in 1672 against the United Provinces under Condé, Turenne and Luxemburg, continuing to serve them under the colours of Louis XIV, as was not uncommon at the time, until 1677. In the course of those five years he learned his work under the great master Turenne, while fighting another great master, Montecuculi. In 1689 he commanded a small contingent of British troops against the French once more in Flanders; besides which, saving a little work in Ireland, he was employed no more by William until 1698; being suspected, I fear with justice, of treasonable relations with the exiled King James II. Finally in 1702 he was appointed to the command of the Allied Forces in the Low Countries, thus finding himself for the first time a general-in-chief at the age of fifty-two. In those days of bad roads there were few districts where armies could keep the field, owing to the difficulty of feeding them; for a campaign, as I told you in my first lecture, is a picnic. The delta of the Rhine and Meuse was a cock-pit because it was in the first place rich in food, and in the second traversed by navigable rivers and canals, which made the transport of victuals, of heavy guns, and of ammunition comparatively easy. But being a cock-pit, its water-ways were studded with innumerable fortresses, constructed to prevent ingress into France from the north, and into what we now call Belgium but which in Marlborough's time was known as the Austrian Netherlands, from the south. Hence it naturally followed that a war in that quarter signified a war of sieges; and the French Court was fond of sieges, because it could attend them in state and take charge of the operations with much glory and little discomfort or danger. It must be added that incessant warfare in that unfortunate country had made every feature in it so familiar, that the ordinary tactical and strategical movements in it were as well known as the moves on a chess-board.

It was a mark of Marlborough's originality of mind that on this familiar ground he contrived always to do something unexpected. Had he not been hampered by disloyal Dutch Generals and timid Dutch deputies, who controlled the Dutch contingent of his army and therefore the Commander-in-Chief also, he would have driven the French out of Flanders in two campaigns. As it was, these so-called allies deliberately foiled him again and again; and, since the French arms had been uniformly successful against the Imperial troops on the Upper Rhine and Danube, the way to Vienna was by the year 1704 practically open to the French armies. Then it was that Marlborough, seeing that the case was desperate, conceived the magnificent idea of a march of some three hundred miles from the Low Countries to join the Imperial army on the Danube. The difficulties were immense. In the first place he had to gain permission from numbers of petty princes to pass through their territory; in the second he had to provide magazines of food and clothing for his army all along the line of march, as well as money to pay them with; and all this he had to do with secrecy and circumspection for, in the third place, it was essential that the French armies should gain no inkling of his intentions, but should be absolutely deceived by his movements until he was so far advanced upon his way that he could not be caught. It seems impossible that such a thing could have been done; but done it was; and the two victories of the Schellenberg and of Blenheim were the result. Moreover, this campaign, though the most celebrated because of its extreme originality and boldness, by no means stands alone as an example of Marlborough's surpassing skill in the field. You may go through the whole of the campaigns that he fought in Flanders, ten in all; and in every one you will find some salient feature which betrays the master. The forcing of the French lines on the Geete in 1705; the feint which beguiled Vendôme into a fatal blunder at Ramillies in 1706; the wonderful march before Oudenarde in 1708; the investment of Tournay in 1709; the amazing wiles by which he turned the lines of La Bassée in 1711--any one of these achievements would suffice to make the fortune of an ordinary general.

What then were the qualities which made Marlborough so astonishingly successful in the field--and not in the field only--for you must remember that he was no less great as a diplomatist than as a general? First I should say what Wellington termed his strong cool common-sense. This sounds perhaps a small matter to you; but what after all is common-sense? It is above all the faculty of seeing things as they are, and of framing your action accordingly. The faculty of seeing things as they are, swift, true and penetrating insight into the heart of things, undistracted by their outward semblance--this, whether it be the attribute of statesman, general, poet or painter, is genius. And to frame your actions, as a man of action, upon real insight, what does that mean? It means transcendent moral courage, the courage of faith in one's own judgement, the courage to depart from beaten tracks, the courage to brave the disapprobation of those who cannot do without such tracks, the courage, in a good sense, to take liberties. It is the union of courage with insight which makes a man original. And there was another form of genius which Marlborough possessed in a supreme degree, the faculty of taking infinite pains. When his army started for the Danube not a man knew whither he was bound; yet at every stage food was ready for all, and at certain points shoes to replace those worn out on the march, and money to provide the troops with pay. For, as Marlborough well knew, soldiers who have not what they need will help themselves, and plunder means indiscipline, and indiscipline turns an army into a rabble. Any officer can flog and shoot and punish, and say that he enforces discipline; but a good officer prefers to enforce it by removing all temptation to indiscipline. Next, Marlborough possessed in a transcendent degree the divine gift of patience--patience which conquers all things. His temper was almost miraculously placid and calm. Time after time the Dutch deputies thwarted his shrewdest strokes and most brilliant combinations; and time after time he endured their maddening mischief without a murmur, without even a semblance of displeasure, waiting for better times, and preferring to bear almost any mortification rather than endanger the common cause. There are few things greater in Marlborough than this. "I would not have that man's temper for the world," he is reported to have remarked when watching a groom who was fighting his horse in the saddle. So strongly marked was this characteristic that when once, in order to deceive his enemy, he grew from day to day more cantankerous and pretended at last to lose all self-control, his army declared sorrowfully that Corporal John had lost his wits. And this epithet--Corporal John--brings me to the last great gift of Marlborough, his extraordinary personal charm. It nowhere appears that he laid himself out particularly to attract his fellow-creatures; but not one of them could resist him. His men adored him. It was not only that he enjoyed their confidence as a successful leader; but that he commanded their affection. And others shared this feeling as strongly as the soldiers. In 1705 he narrowly escaped capture by a marauding party of French. On his arrival at the Hague after the incident the whole population, high and low, turned out to welcome him, the poor crowding round him with tears of joy and kissing even his horse and his boots. Of course there is a dark side to his character, and much has been made of his avarice and his treachery. But I have noticed that men who begin with nothing and rise to great estate, as did Marlborough, are apt to be careful of sixpences to the very end; and I do not know that it is to their discredit. It is certain too that he declined even to look at an enormous bribe offered by Louis XIV to obtain an advantageous peace. Moreover, you will find that at all times and in all countries while the issue of a struggle between two dynasties is still doubtful, men tend to keep upon friendly terms with both. I do not say that this trait is a beautiful or an honourable one; but that it is the rule and not the exception is beyond doubt; and we must take poor human nature as we find it. Fortunate are we when we find this weakness redeemed by such great qualities as were possessed by Marlborough.

The Peace of Utrecht which brought the war to an end was, as you remember, the work of the Tories, who had succeeded in ousting the Whigs and disgracing Marlborough. Before the Treaty had been signed, they had reduced the British establishment to twenty-two thousand men; and, when the Whigs returned to power upon the accession of George I in 1714, they continued the evil work which the Tories had begun. By 1719 the establishment had been reduced to twelve thousand men, making with the same number in Ireland a nominal total of twenty-four thousand. Yet the Treaty had added to the Empire Gibraltar, Minorca, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, all of which required garrisons; there was no police in the British Isles; the organisation of the Militia was so antiquated that the force was absolutely useless; and there was always danger, as the country experienced in 1715, of a Jacobite rising in Scotland. Moreover, the original system of defence in the West Indies was rapidly becoming obsolete; and it was pretty evident that the burden must shortly be transferred to the Imperial forces. No consideration could move the British Parliament to accept the Army as a necessary institution. Walpole in 1722 at last insisted that the British Establishment should be raised permanently to eighteen thousand men; but even so it would have been impossible to collect ten thousand for any emergency without leaving the royal palaces and strong places unguarded. Yet Parliament, not content with keeping an inadequate army, insisted also that it should be inefficient. In Ireland, from want of billeting accommodation, barracks had been built for the troops; but nothing could persuade Parliament to extend the same system to England. No! the regiments must be broken up and scattered among ale-houses, "in order that the people might feel the burden that lay upon them." Moreover, hon. members conceived that ale-houses grew as abundantly at Gibraltar, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland as in England; and could hardly be brought to house the garrisons of these places adequately. Scores of men died in all these spots from exposure--and why? Because the nation had laid itself in bondage to a canting phrase. This ill-treatment of the soldiers, joined to perpetual reviling of the military profession, of course made the Army unpopular. Men were unwilling to enlist and very ready to desert, which led in turn to high bounties to tempt recruits; and this again led to fraudulent enlistment and hideous waste of money. Of all the cant that ever was canted in this canting world none is so cantful as the assertion that neglect of military precaution is economy. Yet the British people after two centuries' experience of its falsehood still hugs the notion passionately to its bosom.

The peace was broken in 1739 by a sudden outburst of national cupidity for the wealth of Spain; but from this point, where the struggle for Empire becomes acute, I shall in this lecture confine myself to our wars in Europe only, leaving those in the Colonies and in India for two future lectures. Before the quarrel with Spain was fairly ended, we found ourselves entangled in the War of the Austrian Succession, with an obligation to furnish sixteen thousand men to uphold the cause of Maria Theresa. British and French, by a curious fiction, were engaged at the outset only as auxiliaries upon either side; and they actually fought the battle of Dettingen before war had been formally declared between them. From the spring of 1744, however, they met as principals and, since the French had been triumphantly driven from Germany at the end of 1743, on the familiar ground of the Austrian Netherlands. The British contingent was increased from sixteen thousand men in 1743 to twenty-five thousand in 1745, the balance of the force being composed of Dutch and Austrians; but this strength in the field, trifling though it was, was only attained by reducing the garrisons of Great Britain to fifteen thousand men, mostly raw recruits. The Duke of Cumberland on the 11th of May, 1745, fought and lost a murderous battle at Fontenoy; and in July there came the astounding news that Prince Charles Edward had landed in Scotland and was gathering the Highland clans about him. In the whole of North Britain there were only three thousand untrained men who wore the red coat; and bold action combined with good fortune on the part of Prince Charles soon filled these with the spirit of panic. Within little more than two months he was at Edinburgh and, but for the garrisons of the Castle of Stirling and one or two lesser strongholds, master of the country. Urgent messengers were sent to Cumberland in Flanders for reinforcements; and not English troops only, but Dutch and Hessians, were hurried across the German Ocean to save the throne of the Guelphs. There was every reason to dread lest the remnant of the army in Flanders, reduced to utter weakness by the loss of these detachments, should be overwhelmed by the French; but fortunately the enemy took no advantage of their opportunity. Meanwhile Charles by skilful manœuvring evaded the troops opposed to him and reached Derby; and there now seemed to be nothing to prevent him from entering London. Fearing, however, the closing in of the British forces in his rear, and hearing that French troops had landed at Montrose to join him, he retired once more to Scotland; nor was it until he had won two or three further small actions, that he was finally and hopelessly defeated at Culloden. By that time, though he had landed originally with but seven companions and had never commanded more than seven or eight thousand mostly undisciplined men, he had kept the bulk of the British Army employed for over nine months, and had beaten several detachments of it handsomely. The episode is generally treated as a romantic adventure; but it is really one of the most discreditable to be found in our history; and it was due entirely to the fanatics, both Whig and Tory, who were always clamouring against a standing army.