Chapter IV: British Campaigns in India 150 (3)

After the defeat of the insurgents the war was continued in the Low Countries, where the Allies sustained two more defeats, until in 1748, owing to the exhaustion of all parties, it was closed by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, leaving the French and English at the end very much as they had been at the beginning. In a way it might seem that the British had been dragged into the contest mainly on account of the Kingdom of Hanover, but, as we shall see in a future lecture, the war resolved itself into a continuation of the struggle with France for the possession of the new world. That struggle in fact never ceased over the seas, both east and west, and early in 1756 it came to an issue in open war. As usual England was unready. German troops were actually imported for the defence of the realm; Minorca was taken by the French; everything went wrong in America; and the state of affairs seemed to be desperate. At last a competent Minister, William Pitt the elder, was raised to power and from that moment things began to improve. The foreign troops were sent back to Germany; their place was taken by Militia; and an immense levy of recruits was begun for the increase of the regular Army. In the year 1756 France, Austria, Russia and Sweden leagued themselves together to crush Frederick the Great; and Pitt, perceiving that America might be conquered in Germany, decided to send a contingent of British troops, together with Hanoverians and Hessians, to Frederick's assistance. Moreover, as we had no competent general of our own, he asked Frederick to provide one; and thus for the first time British troops were placed under the command of a foreign general for service on the Continent. Few people know anything of the campaigns of Ferdinand of Brunswick, though they are distinguished by two of the finest performances of the British soldier: of the infantry at Minden, and of the cavalry at Warburg. And the reason of this is that, as I have said, the expedition, so far as England was concerned, was a diversion to help her to the conquest of the Empire. That conquest proceeded apace during the years 1759 to 1762, and by the end of the latter year we had expelled the French from Canada, India and the West Indies, besides depriving the Spaniards of Havana and Manila. The process demanded a great number of troops, for seventy-five per cent. of the men in the West Indies died or were incapacitated for further service, and it is here that we strike the weak point of Pitt's military administration.

The great Minister saw the importance of reorganising the Militia, though as a matter of fact he never enforced his own scheme of passing all able-bodied men through the ranks--or in other words of instituting national service. But he never matured nor even considered (so far as we can discover) any sound scheme for maintaining the voluntary army that was serving abroad. His only plan was to name a certain sum for bounty, and scatter broadcast commissions to any individuals who would undertake to raise independent companies or regiments. In this way the nominal strength of the Army was brought up to one hundred and fifty battalions of infantry and thirty-two of cavalry, the numbered regiments of infantry being as many as one hundred and twenty-four. Comparatively few of these new regiments survived, because they had been formed simply and solely to be broken up immediately and drafted into other battalions. But what did this mean? It meant in the first place that hundreds of officers went about the country trying to make money out of the recruiting business by obtaining recruits for less than the prescribed bounty, and pocketing the difference. It meant secondly that crimps arose by the score who contracted to supply recruits to these officers, of course at a considerable profit to themselves, and that thus there were so to speak two middlemen to be paid out of the bounty as well as the recruit. The inevitable result was that the country paid vast sums to obtain worn-out old men, half-witted lads and weedy boys, who were absolutely useless in the field, and served only to fill graves and hospitals. Moreover, it was saddled with the obligation of giving half-pay to field-officers, captains and even subalterns, who had gained their rank by the simple process of a bargain with the crimps. Meanwhile the recruits, being enlisted not for some old corps with a regimental history and a regimental pride of its own, but for some ephemeral battalion which was dispersed as soon as formed, felt no sentiment of honour in their calling and deserted right and left. One consequence of this exceedingly wasteful system was that the resources of England both in money and men were exhausted before peace was made, and that the war could not have been carried on for another twelve months even if it had been necessary. But yet more fatal than this was the misfortune that the system, owing to its supposed success, received consecration from the great name of Pitt. In the bitter struggle with France which began in 1793 and ended at Waterloo I have said that France squandered men to save money, and that England squandered money to save men. The elder Pitt squandered both money and men.

The conclusion of peace in 1763 found England in possession of Gibraltar and Minorca in Europe; Bermuda, the Bahamas, several West Indian Islands and practically the entire continent of North America east of the Rocky Mountains from the mouth of the St Lawrence in the north to the Lower Mississippi in the south. I omit the name of India, for that is a subject to be treated separately. The military establishment of England and Ireland for the defence of this vast Empire was fixed at about forty-five thousand men, two-thirds of them roughly speaking at home, and one-third abroad. This was neither more nor less than madness; yet nevertheless many were found, so great a man as Burke among them, to condemn the "huge increase" as they called it of the Army. But this was not the worst. Prices generally had risen and the pay of the soldier was too small for his subsistence; wherefore recruits could hardly be obtained by any shift, and the ranks of regiments were miserably empty. Reeling under the burden of the debts bequeathed by the late war, England proposed to the Colonies that they should share that burden with her. The North American provinces admitted the justice of the claim but made no effort to meet it; whereupon the British Government, after exhausting all expedients for obtaining a contribution from them, fell back upon the only possible solution of the problem--impartial taxation of all the Colonies by Act of the Imperial Parliament, with a special provision that every penny of the money so raised should be spent in the Colonies themselves. A faction in the Colonies raised a loud outcry over this; and the question, owing to mismanagement in England and to the provocative violence of the American agitators, finally issued in war between Mother-country and Colonies.

The task of bringing America to submission by force of arms was a military operation beyond the strength of any nation in the world at that time, and very far beyond that of England as she was in 1775. No effort was made to augment the Army until hostilities had actually broken out, and consequently there were no troops at hand. Recruiting, moreover, was so difficult, owing to the insufficiency of the pay, that the country resorted to the hiring of German mercenaries and to the transfer of Hanoverian battalions to Gibraltar and Minorca, so as to release four British battalions from thence. Faction violently obstructed all military measures until a great disaster to our arms in 1777 made it practically certain that France would declare war; but then, in spite of all the ravings of the King's enemies at home, patriotic feeling prevailed, and fifteen thousand men in new regiments were raised by private subscription alone. Troubles multiplied now on all sides; troubles in India, in Ireland, in Great Britain, everywhere. France declared war in 1778, Spain in 1779; Holland became an open enemy in 1780; and the Northern Powers formed an Armed Neutrality to curb our pretensions at sea. What with regular troops and embodied militia we had more than one hundred and eighty thousand British soldiers afoot, besides some twenty thousand Germans; but this was not enough. Our preparations, thanks to Parliament's eternal jealousy of the Army, were made too late. Our military policy was wrong, for we dispersed our forces so as to endeavour to hold every point; and thus we were everywhere overmatched. The war ended with the loss of America and very nearly of India also; of Minorca in Europe, of Senegal and Goree in West Africa, and of St Lucia and Tobago in the West Indies.

It might be supposed that England, after such a disastrous lesson, would have set her military house in order. Nothing was further from the thoughts of the Ministry which governed her after the conclusion of peace. They--Lord North and Mr Fox--were in such a hurry to get rid of the Army that they discharged every man that they could, and allowed the garrison of England to sink below seven thousand men. By this time India demanded a garrison of over six thousand men, and the Colonies still left to us, together with Gibraltar, twelve thousand more. Besides these, the estimates allowed for thirty-two thousand men in Great Britain and Ireland; but not above half of them were forthcoming because recruits would not enlist; and the reason why they did not enlist was because their pay was insufficient to keep them from starving. William Pitt the younger took over the administration in 1784, and did admirable service in setting the national finance upon a sound footing, but would do nothing for the Army. A dangerous war in India compelled him to allow some new regiments to be raised at the expense of the East India Company; but though thrice in seven years the country was on the verge of an European war, he did nothing for the British soldier until 1792 when he grudgingly doled out to him a small pittance. He suffered the militia to decay in number and efficiency; and he almost destroyed the discipline of the regular troops by failing to provide them with a military head. In 1789 the French Revolution broke out, and the course of events in France was in itself enough to demand some increase of our military resources; but even so late as at the close of 1792 he actually reduced the British establishment. Within a very few months he found himself dragged into a war which to all intents did not end until 1815.

Pitt's idea was to compel France to submission by taking all her Colonies and ruining all her commerce; but it was necessary to send troops at short notice to Holland in order to hearten the Dutch to resistance; and, as there were no others to send, he despatched the Guards. The remainder of the Army, most excellent men but very few in number, he hurried off to the West Indies. This done, he set to work to make the Army, which should have been ready made, according to his father's methods by large bounties and giving commissions to any who would raise companies and regiments. Endless corps of weakly men were thus created, and endless bad officers admitted to the service. The old soldiers in the West Indies did their work admirably, but perished almost to a man, as I shall explain to you in another lecture. In the Low Countries also, where the British were not fairly used by the Allies under whose command they were working, the old soldiers were soon used up; and we were left without any Army. Even at home, where there was some peril of invasion, Pitt did not pass the nation through the ranks of the Militia, as he should have done, but either enlisted soldiers voluntarily for home service only, or permitted the citizens to enrol themselves in innumerable little useless bodies of Volunteers. The operations in the Low Countries ended disastrously. In the West Indies practically the whole of the captured islands were recaptured by the French; and at the close of three years of war Pitt had expended many millions of money, and had nothing to show for it whatever.

By great exertions and appalling sacrifice of life the lost ground in the West Indies was recovered by a rabble of young soldiers, who died like flies as soon as the campaign was over; and once again we were left without an army. The climax came in 1797 when the Navy mutinied, owing to the small pay and ill-treatment meted out to it; and it was thought safer, when matters were set right, to raise the pay of the Army also. Now at last there appeared a man who began to set things in order. The Duke of York, second son of King George III, took the post of Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards; reorganised, or rather created, a competent staff at head-quarters, set his face steadily against Pitt's vile methods of raising recruits, and restored the discipline of the Army. In 1799 the declining fortunes of France and the successes of a new coalition against her stimulated Pitt to find some new method of recruiting the Army. He resolved to turn to the Militia as a training ground for the regular troops; and the Duke of York insisted that the soldiers so raised should be formed into second battalions for existing regiments instead of being framed into new corps. Thirty-six thousand of them were hurried off to Holland without clothing, supplies or transport, and after three or four barren victories and one serious reverse, were thankful to return again under a capitulation. They had been required to do impossibilities and had failed. In the following year the same men, much improved in discipline, were kept idle when they ought to have been fighting as allies with the Austrians in Italy; and thus Napoleon was enabled to win the victory of Marengo, which made his fortune as First Consul, and allowed him to trouble Europe for another fifteen years. However in 1801 England at last restored her reputation a little by a brilliant campaign in Egypt and the capture of the French army in that country. To all intents this was our one solid success in nine years of fighting. Never was there more gross mismanagement of a war by any Minister.

After a short truce, war broke out again in 1803, Pitt was not then in power, but was the patron and more or less the adviser of Addington's weak administration. That was the period when Napoleon made great and serious preparations for an invasion of England; and it was necessary to take unprecedented measures for home defence. Instead of thinking out some plan for training the entire manhood of the nation to arms, expanding the Militia and compelling every man to serve in it, Addington and his colleagues devised a system which was one long tissue of absurdities. They began by instituting a ballot for fifty thousand Militia, but permitted the ballotted men to provide substitutes instead of serving in person. The price of substitutes soon rose to £30, ten times the amount of the bounty offered to recruits for the Regular Army; and as a natural consequence all the men who should have enlisted in the Army were drawn into the Militia, while the men who should have served in the Militia did not serve at all. Having failed to raise fifty thousand Militia, Ministers asked for twenty-five thousand more on the same terms, which raised the price of substitutes still higher. They then asked for corps of Volunteers upon very favourable conditions, and then ordained that fifty thousand more men should be raised by ballot, once again with substitution permitted, and should be formed into second battalions to the Regular Army. They next passed an Act compelling all able-bodied men to undergo compulsory training, unless a certain proportion came forward as Volunteers upon less favourable terms than those offered to the first Volunteers. Thus there were three different kinds of ballotted men and two different kinds of Volunteers. The result was that recruiting for the Regular Army was killed, at great expense, while the whole of the levies were failures; and the only reason was that the Government had not the courage to insist upon the country's undoubted right to the service of every able-bodied citizen for her defence.

Addington was swept out of office; and Pitt came in again. He brought in a bill to form a new army of Reserve, which was an utter failure; and he then fell back on the old expedient of offering a bounty to Militiamen to enlist in the Regulars. In this way, which was faithfully followed until the close of the war in 1814, he raised some semblance of an Army; but he did not know how to use it, and he died in January, 1806, thinking the cause of Europe hopeless. A Ministry which included most of the ablest men in England was formed upon his death; and they introduced an Act for national training to arms, excellent in principle but not properly worked out in detail, and abolished the Volunteers. This was a step in the right direction, but was taken too late. The Ministry of All the Talents, as it was called, resigned early in 1807; and then at last the War Office passed into the hands of a capable man, Lord Castlereagh. He began by taking forty thousand men from the Militia into the Regular Army, and raising as many--by extremely drastic methods--to refill the empty ranks of the Militia. He then devised a scheme which unfortunately was not enforced, for making national training a reality; and finally he established a new Militia called the Local Militia of two hundred thousand men for home defence, keeping the old Militia to furnish recruits for the Regular Army.

Thus for the first time in our history there was a Regular Army of from forty to fifty thousand men, fit to go anywhere and do anything, together with the means of refilling their ranks as fast as they were depleted by active service.

The number was small but, properly employed, it could be of great use. In 1807 Napoleon had shamelessly and treacherously invaded Spain and Portugal. In 1808 the people of both countries rose against the invaders, and England's one army was sent to support them. I told you in my first lecture that a campaign was like a picnic; but our European campaigns of any importance had hitherto been confined to the cockpits, where food was abundant and wars so frequent that contractors could always be found to look to the food-supply. The Peninsula is a very different country, comprehending a few fertile districts only together with a vast deal of barren mountain--a country, according to a well-known saying, where small armies were beaten and large armies were starved. The French armies in Spain were large armies, amounting to three hundred thousand men, and the Spanish troops, badly led and badly organised, could make no stand against them. How could the British hope with forty thousand men or less to combat three hundred thousand? In this way. The population of the Peninsula was so bitterly hostile to the invaders that the French could not be said to have any hold of the country, except of such part of it as was actually occupied by their soldiers. It was therefore to the interest of the French, in order to feed their troops as well as to hold down the Spaniards, that their armies should be scattered as much as possible. The very wise and sagacious soldier, Sir Arthur Wellesley, who was charged with the command of our army, reasoned as follows. We have a port of entry and a base of operations at Lisbon, to which we can send by sea everything that we want. Being also masters at sea we can prevent the French from making any use of it; and they must bring into Spain by land everything that they want. The roads are very bad, so that this in itself will be a heavy task; and there are so many dangerous defiles to be passed that the Spaniards may always lie in wait to capture French convoys. There is one great advantage for us.

Now as long as we have forty thousand men at Lisbon, the French must always keep rather more in a compact body to watch us, which means that they must collect fifty or sixty thousand men together instead of leaving them dispersed to hold the country down; which means in its turn that so long as I remain in their front, there must be Spaniards unsubdued and ready to do mischief to their outlying posts and scattered detachments in their rear. Very well. But what if the French assemble a very large force, and try to overwhelm me once for all? They cannot take a very large force by any one route, because they live on the country and the country will not support them; but if they bring sixty thousand against my forty thousand, I can stop them. Twenty-five miles north of Lisbon is ground that can be made so strong that even Portuguese Militia could hold it, under good leadership, especially with my army to back them. Moreover the Portuguese have an ancient law that provides for the desertion of all villages, the driving off of all cattle, and the removal of all grain--in fact the laying waste of their country--before an invader. If then the French advance against me in Portugal, I shall retire before them to my fortified lines, leaving the country a waste behind me. If they attack me, all the better. I shall beat them. If they sit down in front of me, I have no objection. I shall have all the resources of the world behind me at Lisbon, while they will only have a devastated wilderness behind them. They may wait for a time, but they will have to send their troops further and further afield to scrape together food, and the peasants will cut the throats of all stragglers. Sickness will increase among their soldiers for want of proper nourishment; their numbers will fall lower and lower and lower; and at last sheer starvation will compel them to retreat.

And now, mark how I shall get the better of them. I shall provide my army with the means of carrying victuals with it. The task will be extraordinarily difficult, for the country is rough and the roads so infamous that we cannot use wheeled vehicles; but I shall organise a vast train of twelve to fifteen thousand mules to carry everything that we want on their backs. The French, a body of starving men, will have to hurry their retreat, for they have to pass through a devastated country. We, with our bellies full, shall be able to follow them up and cut off thousands of weakly dispirited men. In time they will reach the fortresses which they hold on the Spanish frontier, and there we must stop, while they go back still further to some fertile district where they will find provisions. But their army will be absolutely ruined for the time, weakened by its losses and demoralised by its sufferings. As I advance I shall establish magazines along the route so that I may keep my army fed, and threaten their fortresses. They will be obliged to revictual these fortresses from time to time, and to do so in presence of my army they will have to collect once more fifty or sixty thousand men, and leave the country behind them to the mercy of the Spanish guerilla bands. If I can stop them by fighting a general action in a strong position with good hope of success, I shall do so. If I cannot, I shall fall back once more, burning or emptying my magazines, to play the same game again. But the oftener I lead them over the same country, the more it will be exhausted. Their system of living on the country is very wasteful. The brutality of their starving soldiers to the peasantry is driving more and more land out of cultivation; and the time will come when they will be unable to assemble their troops except at harvest, but will be obliged to keep them dispersed all through the winter in order to keep them alive. It will take them three or four weeks to collect, with enormous difficulty, food and transport enough for even a fortnight's campaign, and I shall use those three or four weeks to make a swift and sudden attack upon their fortresses; for having the means of feeding my troops, I can do so. They will be obliged to look on helplessly until I have taken the strong places; and, when at last they advance, they will be unable to retake them, until they have driven me back; and I shall only retire until they have exhausted their provisions, and shall then advance again.

From these fortresses I shall penetrate into Spain to threaten other fortresses, rousing the whole country more than ever against the French; until at last I compel them to loose their hold upon the south of Spain, and concentrate a really gigantic force against me. I shall then retreat as before to Portugal. They will be unable to keep their gigantic force for long together from want of food; and I shall begin the whole game all over again; while their men waste away by tens of thousands from fatigue and hardship and incessant petty attacks of the Spanish guerillas. It is only a question of time before Napoleon is distracted by serious operations outside Spain; when once he begins to reduce his army in the Peninsula, we shall gradually drive it into France; and then we shall see how long Frenchmen will allow it to live on their own country as it has lived on Spain. I for my part shall follow it up, paying punctually for everything that I take, and allowing no plunder; and we shall see which army gets on the better.

There in a nutshell is the history of the Peninsular War. Does it not sound simple after the event? But think of the sagacity and insight of the man who perceived all these possibilities before the event; and of the courage and force of character which enabled him to carry his policy into effect. Patience, the great attribute of Marlborough, was the quality which shone above all others in Wellington. And remember that he had to subdue not only himself to patience, but his army, and the British nation, and the Spanish nation and the Portuguese nation. Following his difficulties through his correspondence one marvels how ever he overcame them. The British Government, let people say what they will, supported him well in the face of great obstacles and in the teeth of bitter resistance from an unscrupulous Opposition; but they gained greatly from Wellington's moral support. Spain and Portugal had practically no government, and such authority as existed was to a great extent distributed among fools and knaves. In truth Wellington really administered the government of Portugal for four years, besides commanding the British and Portuguese armies in the field. Never allow yourselves to be abridged of your pride in Wellington by petty detractors, British or foreign. German and French writers, for some strange reason, unite to decry him as a commander. Do not listen to them. Not one of them knows anything of any of his campaigns except that of Waterloo. He was a very great commander in every way, and beyond all doubt (at least such is my opinion) the very greatest of his time upon the actual field of battle. He was not a genial character. He had none of Marlborough's irresistible charm, which made even the privates call him Corporal John. He was never loved by man nor woman, nor by any but children not his own. By self-imposed discipline--as I believe--rather than by nature he was cold, hard, unsympathetic, and inclined to account the individual man as nothing in comparison with the sanctity of a principle. Hence he broke the heart of more than one good officer who had served him well. But he was incapable of anything common or mean; he was as hard to himself as to the humblest of his subordinates; and his conception of duty to Sovereign and Country was so high, and at the same time so spontaneous and natural, that his must always remain the standard by which our public men will be measured. No! if any one ever presumes to hint to you that Wellington was not a great man, you may ask him if a small man could constrain three nations for four years to patience, and raise the standard of public duty for ever in his own country. This is the centenary of his greatest campaign and most brilliant military achievement; but long after they an forgotten men will repeat his saying "The King's Government must be carried on."

After the twenty-three years of fighting concluded at Waterloo people imagined that wars would cease. There was much social and commercial distress in England; and as usual the British mind fastened itself upon the reduction of the Army as the remedy for all evils. There arose also a political sect which preached the inimitably absurd doctrine that Free Trade would bring about universal peace. The military and naval establishments were cut down to a dangerously low figure; and all the organisation, which Wellington had created for the feeding of an army, was allowed to decay. At last in 1854 came the war in the Crimea; and there was a repetition of all that had happened in 1792. A small number of very fine regiments was with difficulty scraped together, and sent to the East with no very definite idea as to what they should do, and therefore necessarily without preparation of any kind. Eventually the troops were landed in the Crimea and marched upon Sevastopol. They fought a few magnificent actions, and perished of cold, want and exposure within ten miles of the sea, of which we had absolute command. It was therefore necessary to improvise a new army by the old expedients of bounties, hiring foreign mercenaries, and so forth. Hundreds of boys were sent out to die after the old fashion; and the Militia were employed, with their own consent, to take over part of the Mediterranean garrisons, and to release the regular troops there for active service. By dint of extravagant expenditure an efficient army was formed within the space of two years, just in time to witness the conclusion of peace.

That was our last European war. It woke us up a little; and we were still further roused by the triumph of the Germans over the French in 1870. We took our army more or less in hand, improved the organisation by substituting regiments of two battalions for regiments of one battalion, and introduced a system of enlisting men not for twenty-one years with the colours, but for seven with the colours and five in the Reserve. The system worked badly at first, when we had to provide troops for small colonial expeditions; but the faults were gradually amended; and the organisation stood the test fairly well in 1899 and 1900 in South Africa. We can now send 150,000 men abroad perfectly equipped, which is more than we could ever do before; but other nations count their armies by millions, and in reality we are as far behindhand as ever we were. We have no means of replacing those 150,000 within six months, which would be necessary in case of a great war; much less have we means of expanding their numbers to twice 150,000 and keeping their ranks filled; and we have no efficient force of any strength, not even the old Militia, for home defence, while our 150,000 are abroad. Do not think that I am "talking politics." I am only stating plain facts. I cannot discuss, nor even propound, the questions which these facts suggest; but I cannot avoid the assertion of the facts themselves, for they are essential to our understanding of our subject--they are indeed the pith of British military history.

LECTURE III

BRITISH COLONIAL CAMPAIGNS

I propose in my present lecture to deal with our colonial campaigns at large. You will recognise at once that a colonial campaign differs from other campaigns in one essential point. One does not attempt to form colonies in any but an empty or comparatively empty country, first because in any other there is no room for colonists, and secondly because a numerous native population may be subdued but cannot be displaced. It is therefore imperative that the indigenous inhabitants of a country, whither settlers propose to emigrate, shall be few; and it is practically as imperative that, unless their numbers are so scanty as to be negligible, they shall be of inferior civilisation, so that they may not be able to fight the settlers on equal terms. Now what do inferiority of civilisation and paucity of numbers mean, militarily speaking, to the civilised invader? They mean, first of all, no roads or at the very best rough tracks, and no bridges over rivers; they mean further rude cultivation and very small stores, if any, of cereal food. This signifies in its turn that the great problem of the campaign will be how to feed your force in the field, or as we now call it the problem of transport (for the campaign will be more than ever a picnic) and of supply. In the matter of actual combat the uncivilised enemy will have the advantage certainly of perfect adaptation to the climate, intimate knowledge of the country, and generally of stronger physical endurance, greater rapidity of movement, and decided superiority in eyesight and hearing. His disadvantages will be inferior organisation, inferior armament, and inexperience of the need for providing a great multitude with food at a distance from its provision-grounds. Speaking generally the sound principle of savage warfare is this--to equip yourself with a good service for transport and supply, march up to your enemy, sit down and fortify yourself in a strong position. Your enemy must then do one of three things: attack you, in which case he is sure to be defeated; move on; or starve. He is not likely to attempt attack after a lesson or two, and therefore as a rule he will move on. You then move after him and sit down again, destroying or appropriating his provision-grounds and capturing his cattle, as you find opportunity. By this method you must infallibly bring him to submission. It was thus that George Monk subdued the Highlands.

It is not, however, by any means always possible to pursue this policy. Your adversaries may be dwellers in forests, such as the Red Indian; or in wooded mountains, such as the Kaffir and the Carib; or defended in part by an arid wilderness, as are the Soudanis. Moreover they may be a people of military instincts and organisation, with their own skilful system of tactics, and a sense of honour which prefers death to disgrace. Such were that most gallant race, the Zulus. Or they may be of a magnificent strength and stature with a fanatical contempt for death, as the Dervishes. Or they may combine something of the Zulu with their own very elaborate system of fortification, as the Maoris. Each race and country presents its own peculiar features and problems, which need to be considered and solved upon their merits. But speaking generally the difference between the civilised and uncivilised fighter is this, that the one takes care to carry his food with him, whereas the other does not.

Now what is true of a savage country at the outset usually remains true for some time, indeed for a very long time, after civilised settlement has begun. The supplies of food are small, for a small population cannot grow much produce, and has no occasion to lay in a great store; roads and means of communication are few and bad; and there is hardly a bridge to be found. If all the miles of macadamised road existent in the whole of the British Empire at this moment were added together, I doubt if they would equal, or even nearly equal, those of the British Isles alone. Bearing these things in mind, and remembering that two centuries ago there were very few paved roads in Europe, and not a single macadamised road until less than a century ago, let us look for a time at our colonial Military History.

Our earliest settlements were made in North America and the West Indies; the latter slightly earlier than the former but to all intent contemporaneously; and the Dutch and French were there very nearly as early as we ourselves, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In North America the settlers naturally established themselves first on the coast, using the great rivers as water-ways to penetrate into the back country. The Dutch in the first instance chose one of the most important of those rivers, building the town of New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson. The French took perhaps the most important of all, the St Lawrence, founding Quebec near its mouth and Montreal a little higher up. Lastly the Spaniards held the south and the mouth of the Mississippi, so far away that they were of small concern either to the French or the English. South of the St Lawrence the English colonists scattered themselves in the course of the seventeenth century along more than a thousand miles of coast from the Kennebec to the Savannah. Quebec itself was captured in 1627 from the French but, in spite of the protests of far-seeing men, was given back under a treaty of peace in 1632. New Amsterdam was taken from the Dutch in 1664, and retained as New York. In their early days most of these settlements came into hostile collision with the Indians at one time or another, but were able to hold their own, for they had brought with them over the ocean the old English principle that all able-bodied men were liable to service for domestic defence. New York, however, did even better; for that Colony specially cultivated the friendship of the Five Nations--the most formidable of the Indians--for the sake not only of the fur-trade, but of protection against other Indians and dangerous neighbours on the north.

Those dangerous neighbours were of course the French. Their colonies on the St Lawrence were strictly military, the settlers being mostly old soldiers who received their grants of land in reward for past and in consideration of future service; while the government was despotic and centred in a military officer of experience and ability. The younger French settlers were always attracted by the free life of the Indians in the forest; hence every man was a skilful woodman, a good marksman and a trained canoe-man, in fact a better sportsman and warrior than colonist. Moreover they and the Jesuits, who both ministered to their spiritual needs and laboured to convert and rule the Indians, were enterprising and intrepid explorers. They soon wandered through the whole chain of lakes, found the rivers Illinois and Wisconsin running out of Lake Michigan, and followed them down the whole course of the Mississippi to New Orleans, taking possession of the entire country in the name of Louis XIV. This they accomplished in 1680, five years before the death of King Charles II; and we ought always to salute the gallant French nation in honour of the brave men who essayed and accomplished this great feat of exploration. From that moment the French conceived the notion of getting behind us along the entire length of the continent, and confining us to the coast, with the power always of coming down upon our settlements from the rear at any convenient opportunity, and driving us into the sea. It is a very general system with the French, which they have attempted in our own time in West Africa. They always explore and they always make maps, being a practical people, and the result is that they always get the better of us in disputes over boundaries. Their strong points in America in the seventeenth century were their unity and enterprise. Their weak points were their numbers (for they did not exceed twelve thousand) and the fact that they raised no great quantity of food.

The English settlers on the other hand were agriculturalists, and each community was distinct, jealous and self-centred. In New York there was a large trade with the Indians; and the pious Quakers of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island used to finance pirates who at one time nearly swept our East Indian trade off the seas. But for the most part they quietly tilled the soil, or in the north went fishing; nor could any power induce even a few of them to unite their forces against the French. They would invade each other, for they were a most cantankerous people, but would never make a combined effort against the common enemy. New York and New England, being nearest to the French, made endeavours from time to time to drive them out, but always failed owing to provincial jealousies, want of discipline, want of organisation, want of efficient leaders. There are two waterways, broken in places by rapids, which, as you know, lead from New York to the St Lawrence; the one by the Mohawk and Lake Ontario, the other by the Hudson and Lakes George and Champlain; and these waterways were the scene of all the fighting for the mastery of Canada. In 1690 and 1691 New York and New England made a desperate but inefficient attempt to take Quebec. They failed miserably, though New England alone could pit ninety thousand settlers against the French twelve thousand. The French, united and well commanded, took the offensive, broke down the power of the Five Indian Nations--the principal defensive barrier of the English settlements--and the Colonies were reduced to shrieking to England for help.

Queen Anne sent an expedition to the St Lawrence in 1711, which failed owing to the incompetence of the commander; but none the less at the Peace of Utrecht France ceded to us Nova Scotia. Thereupon the French proceeded to fortify all the commanding points on the lakes (remember that the waterways were the only ways by which an army could be supplied), and established a naval station on Cape Breton to harass British shipping in future wars. This was the celebrated fortress of Louisburg; and the building of it was a very costly mistake. Why? Because it was situated in a barren territory which could raise nothing and support nothing, wherefore Louisburg could only be provisioned from without and from the sea. Without superiority at sea therefore Louisburg must starve; with superiority at sea it was a superfluity. The rival settlers and their Indians continued to raid each other perpetually along their frontiers until the War of the Austrian Succession brought about overt hostilities; and then in 1745 the forces of New England, commanded by a lawyer and with the help of a British squadron, besieged and took Louisburg. This was a brilliant feat for amateurs, though of course the most difficult part of the work was done by British sailors; but upon the peace of 1748 the British Government very wisely restored Louisburg, preferring to keep Madras in the East Indies in its place. On the other hand the British established a military settlement of old soldiers at Halifax.

The French now began seriously to pursue their policy of establishing themselves in rear of the British colonies, by forcibly occupying two British settlements on the Ohio, and building a chain of forts to maintain the communications between these, Lake Erie and Montreal. The Governor of Virginia sent a young officer of Militia, named George Washington, to tell them to go, but was answered that the French had no intention of moving. The Colonies with the greatest difficulty were brought to vote a small sum of money for a force to drive the French out; and Washington advanced again to Ohio, only to be surrounded by superior numbers and forced to surrender. This might, one would have thought, have roused the Colonies; but with the exception of New England, which was burning to capture Canada, one and all showed the completest apathy. The Americans had, and still have, all the modern English indifference to national duty and military preparations. To the enduring shame of the Colonies, therefore, application was made to England for help; and two regiments were sent out under General Braddock, a capable but narrow-minded officer, who had no idea of military operations except as carried out in a European cock-pit. His difficulties were great, for his march lay for one hundred miles through dense forests, which provided neither forage for animals nor food for men; and, when animals have to carry their own food, they have little strength to carry more. The only chance was to move lightly and rapidly; whereas on the contrary Braddock encumbered himself with waggons which necessitated an advanced party of three hundred axe-men to clear away trees and obstacles. Nor did he make any effort to train his troops to bush-fighting; and hence when caught at a disadvantage by the enemy on the march, they were seized with panic and cut to pieces. An advance of the local forces of New England towards the St Lawrence was also a failure, owing to the usual indiscipline of the Colonial levies, and the entire campaign ended in disaster.

A few more troops were sent from England in the following year, 1756, together with a new general; but he could accomplish little, having inadequate forces and being unable to persuade the Colonists to provide more. The conduct of campaigns by New England lawyers was in fact most wasteful and inefficient. In 1757, as we have seen, Pitt came to the head of affairs; but he had not time to make provision for a more effective management of the war in America; and all the successes of the year were on the side of the French. At last in 1758 a new commander-in-chief, General Jeffery Amherst, was appointed; the regular soldiers were increased to the number of twenty-six thousand; and Pitt undertook to clothe, equip, feed and arm twenty-five thousand Colonial troops, leaving to the Colonies only the expense of paying them. Louisburg was besieged and taken by Amherst, and the French were driven from the Ohio; but an advance of sixteen thousand men towards the St Lawrence was checked by a disgraceful reverse, owing to the incapacity of the British commander. Amherst took personal command on this side in the following year, leaving Wolfe to attack Quebec; and in 1760 the resistance of the French entirely collapsed. It needed only careful organisation and endless pains in the troublesome work of bringing forward food for the troops to render success certain; and yet the Americans could not do it. Beyond all question there were brains in America fully equal to the business of divining exactly what would be wanted; indeed Benjamin Franklin had to do with the organisation of Braddock's expedition; but there were no disciplined men who could be trusted to do exactly what they were told. The British soldiers were no doubt, to the Colonial mind, helpless and unhandy beyond expression; but they knew how to obey. If told to do a thing to-day at ten o'clock, they did not wait till to-morrow at three--which is the Colonial way--and it is only by punctuality that a campaign can be even begun. Selfishness, jealousy and indiscipline were the causes why the Americans, notwithstanding their huge superiority in number of population, were unable to conquer the French in Canada without a British army to help them. Had the position of the two nations been reversed, the French would have driven us from Canada in twelve months.

The result of our exertions in behalf of the Colonies is well known. Having delivered them from a dangerous neighbour, we asked them to share with us the burden of Imperial defence. They admitted the justice of the claim, but declined to satisfy it. When we endeavoured to solve the problem by means of the Imperial Parliament, they resented it with furious violence. English politicians, too many of them from factious spite, but a few from higher motives, supported and encouraged them. The question of Imperial defence was lost sight of. There was mismanagement on our side, gross provocation on the side of the Colonists; and the quarrel finally issued in war. The Americans took the offensive and made a dash upon Canada, whence they were with some difficulty repulsed. We recaptured New York; and then, by extraordinary blundering at home, General Burgoyne was ordered to advance south from Canada upon the supposition that General Howe would advance northward to meet him from New York; instead of which Howe sailed to the Delaware and captured Philadelphia. Burgoyne meanwhile endeavoured to do as he was bidden; but from want of land-transport found that continued progress through the forest was impossible. His only chance was, if he could, to capture one of the enemy's magazines by surprise; and it was the miscarriage of an attempt to do this which first entangled him in serious danger. He plunged deeper and deeper into a circle of enemies, and was surrounded and compelled to surrender; but his campaign was in reality wrecked by the difficulty of transport and supply in a wild country. In one space of twenty miles, for instance, he was obliged to fell trees and build forty bridges over rivers and creeks, with the result that he took precisely twenty days to traverse the distance. Invasion on such terms, when the whole population of a country is hostile, is almost impossible of success. Yet strangely enough the whole object of the movement from north and south along the line of the Hudson was to secure the line of the river, and cut off the colonies to the east from the colonies on the west of it. For the cereal supplies of the American army were on the west bank, and the meat supplies on the east; and to deprive them of either would force them to fight or to disband themselves. Thus, you see, the question of subsistence was at the root of the whole matter.

The disaster at Saratoga brought the French as allies to the Americans; and it was the supremacy of the French fleet on the coast at a critical moment which decided the issue of the war. There was fighting, and hard fighting, in the southern colonies; but the Americans would never have beaten us without the help of the French. Had they been really in earnest they could have driven us from the country in twelve months, but they were not in earnest. They wanted other people to do their fighting for them, whether they were contending against France in 1757 or England in 1780; and by great good fortune they found such other people ready to their hand. A few noble and patriotic men did indeed their utmost duty to their country; but they were very few. The rest were unwilling to make the sacrifice demanded of them by service in the field and submission to discipline. Hence their Government was driven to cruelty and double-dealing of every kind to force their British prisoners to enter the American ranks, so as to save selfish citizens from risking their worthless skins. In fact when one compares the resistance of the three million Americans in 1776-1781 with that of the few hundred thousand Boers in 1899-1902, it is impossible to regard the American rebellion with any great respect.