Chapter 17

The Russians have a reputation for good marching, and certainly Suvaroff made good time in his long march from Russia to Northern Italy in 1799; almost as good, indeed, as Bagration, Barclay de Tolly, and Kutusoff made in falling back before Napoleon when he invaded Russia in 1812. But they have not improved either in marching or in fighting at all commensurately with the improved appliances. In 1877, after dawdling two months they crossed the Danube on the 21st to the 27th of June. Osman Pasha at Plevna gave them pause until the 10th of December, at which date they were not so far into Bulgaria as they had been five months previously. After the fall of Plevna the Russian armies would have gone into winter quarters but for a private quasi-ultimatum communicated to the Tzar from a high source in England, to the effect that unpleasant consequences could not be guaranteed against if the war was not finished in one campaign. Alexander, who was quite an astute man in his way, was temporarily enraged by this restriction, but recovering his calmness, realised that nowhere in war books is any particular time specified for the termination or duration of a campaign. It appeared that so long as an army keeps the field uninterruptedly a campaign may continue until the Greek kalends. In less time than that Gourko and Skobeleff undertook to finish the business; by the vigour with which they forced their way across the Balkans in the heart of the bitter winter Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople fell into Russian hands; and the Russian troops had been halted some time almost in face of Constantinople when the treaty of San Stephano was signed on the 3rd of March 1878. It had taken the Russians of 1877-78 eight weary months to cover the distance between the Danube and the Marmora. But fifty years earlier a Russian general had marched from the Danube to the Aegean in three and a half months, nor was his journey by any means a smooth and bloodless one. Diebitch crossed the Danube in May 1828 and besieged Silistria from the 17th of May until the 1st of July. Silistria has undergone three resolute sieges during the century; it succumbed but once, and then to Diebitch. Pressing south immediately, he worsted the Turkish Grand Vizier in the fierce battle of Kuleutscha and then by diverse routes hurried down into the great Roumelian valley. Adrianople made no resistance and although his force was attenuated by hardship and disease, when the Turkish diplomatists procrastinated the audacious and gallant Diebitch marched his thin regiments forward toward Constantinople. They had traversed on a wide front half the distance between Adrianople and the capital when the dilatory Turkish negotiators saw fit to imitate the coon and come down. Whether they would have done so had they known the weakness of Diebitch may be questioned; but again it may be questioned whether, that weakness unknown, he could not have occupied Constantinople on the swagger. His master was prepared promptly to reinforce him; Constantinople was perhaps nearer its fall in 1828 than in 1878, and certainly Diebitch was much smarter than were the Grand Duke Nicholas, his fossil Nepokoitschitsky, and his pure theorist Levitsky.

The contrast between the character of our own contemporary military operations and that of those of the smooth-bore era is very strongly marked. In 1838-39 Keane marched an Anglo-Indian army from our frontier at Ferozepore over Candahar to Cabul without experiencing any serious check, and with the single important incident of taking Ghuzni by storm on the way. Our positions at and about Cabul were not seriously molested until late in 1841, when the paralysis of demoralisation struck our soldiers because of the crass follies of a wrong-headed civilian chief and the feebleness of a decrepit general. Nott throughout held Candahar firmly; the Khyber Pass remained open until faith was broken with the hillmen; Jellalabad held out until the "Retribution Column" camped under its walls. But for the awful catastrophe which befell in the passes the hapless brigade which under the influence of deplorable pusillanimity and gross mismanagement had evacuated Cabul, no serious military calamity marked our occupation of Afghanistan and certainly stubborn resistance had not confronted our arms. From 1878 to 1880 we were in Afghanistan again, this time with breech-loading far-ranging rifles, copious artillery of the newest types, and commanders physically and mentally efficient. All those advantages availed us not one whit. The Afghans took more liberties with us than they had done forty years previously. They stood up to us in fair fight over and over again: at Ali Musjid, at the Pewar Kotul, at Charasiab, on the Takt-i-Shah and the Asmai heights, at Candahar. They took the dashing offensive at Ahmed Kheyl and at the Shutur-gurdan; they drove Dunham Massy's cavalry and took British guns; they reoccupied Cabul in the face of our arms, they besieged Candahar, they hemmed Roberts within the Sherpoor cantonments and assailed him there. They destroyed a British brigade at Maiwand and blocked Gough in the Jugdulluck Pass. Finally our evacuating army had to macadamise its unmolested route down the passes by bribes to the hillmen, and the result of the second Afghan war was about as barren as that of the first.

It was in the year 1886 that, the resolution having been taken to dethrone Thebau and annex Upper Burmah, Prendergast began his all but bloodless movement on Mandalay. The Burmans of today have never adventured a battle, yet after years of desultory bushwhacking the pacification of Upper Burmah has still to be fully accomplished. On the 10th of April 1852 an Anglo-Indian expedition commanded by General Godwin landed at Rangoon. During the next fifteen months it did a good deal of hard fighting, for the Burmans of that period made a stout resistance. At midsummer of 1853 Lord Dalhousie proclaimed the war finished, announced the annexation and pacification of Lower Burmah, and broke up the army. The cost of the war of which the result was this fine addition to our Indian Empire, was two millions sterling; almost from the first the province was self-supporting and uninterrupted peace has reigned within its borders. We did not dally in those primitive smooth-bore days. Sir Charles Napier took the field against the Scinde Ameers on the 16th of February 1843. Next day he fought the battle of Meanee, entered Hyderabad on the 2Oth, and on the 24th of March won the decisive victory of Dubba which placed Scinde at his mercy, although not until June did the old "Lion of Meerpore" succumb to Jacob. But before then Napier was well forward with his admirable measures for the peaceful administration of the great province he had added to British India.

The expedition for the rescue of General Gordon was tediously boated up the Nile, with the result that the "desert column" which Sir Herbert Stewart led so valiantly across the Bayuda reached Gubat just in time to be too late, and was itself extricated from imminent disaster by the masterful promptitude of Sir Redvers Buller. Notwithstanding a general consensus of professional and expert opinion in favour of the alternative route from Souakin to Berber, 240 miles long and far from waterless, the adoption of it was condemned as impossible. In June 1801, away back in the primitive days, an Anglo-Indian brigade 5000 strong ordered from Bombay, reached Kosseir on the Red Sea bound for the Upper Nile at Kenéh thence to join Abercromby's force operating in Lower Egypt. The distance from Kosseir to Kenéh is 120 miles across a barren desert with scanty and unfrequent springs. The march was by regiments, of which the first quitted Kosseir on the 1st of July. The record of the desert-march of the 10th Foot is now before me. It left Kosseir on the 20th of July and reached Kenéh on the 29th, marching at the rate of twelve miles per day. Its loss on the march was one drummer. The whole brigade was at Kenéh in the early days of August, the period between its debarkation and its concentration on the Nile being about five weeks. The march was effected at the very worst season of the year. It was half the distance of a march from Souakin to Berber; the latter march by a force of the same strength could well have been accomplished in three months. The opposition on the march could not have been so severe as that which Stewart's desert column encountered. Nevertheless, as I have said, the Souakin-Berber route was pronounced impossible by the deciding authority.

The comparative feebleness of contemporary warfare is perhaps exceptionally manifest in relation to the reduction of fortresses. During the Franco-German War the frequency of announcements of the fall of French fortresses used to be the subject of casual jeers. The jeers were misplaced. The French fortresses, labouring under every conceivable disadvantage, did not do themselves discredit. All of them were more or less obsolete. Excluding Metz and Paris, neither fortified to date, their average age was about a century and a half and few had been amended since their first construction. They were mostly garrisoned by inferior troops, often almost entirely by Mobiles. Only in one instance was there an effective director of the defence. That they uniformly enclosed towns whose civilian population had to endure bombardment, was an obvious hindrance to desperate resistance. Yet, setting aside Bitsch which was never taken, the average duration of the defence of the seventeen fortresses which made other than nominal resistance was forty-one days. Excluding Paris and Metz which virtually were intrenched camps, the average period of resistance was thirty-three days. The Germans used siege artillery in fourteen cases; although only on two instances, Belfort and Strasburg, were formal sieges undertaken. "It appears," writes Major Sydenham Clarke in his recent remarkable work on Fortification [Footnote: _Fortification_. By Major G. Sydenham Clarke, C.M. G. (London: John Murray).] which ought to revolutionise that art, "that the average period of resistance of the (nominally obsolete) French fortresses was the same as that of besieged fortresses of the Marlborough and Peninsular periods. Including Paris and Metz, the era of rifled weapons actually shows an increase of 20 per cent in the time-endurance of permanent fortifications. Granted that a mere measurement in days affords no absolute standard of comparison, the striking fact remains that in spite of every sort of disability the French fortresses, pitted against guns that were not dreamed of when they were built, acquitted themselves quite as well as the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the Vauban school in the days of their glory." Even in the cases of fortresses whose reduction was urgently needed since they interfered with the German communications--such as Strasburg, Toul, and Soissons--the quick _ultima ratio_ of assault was not resorted to by the Germans. And yet the Germans could not have failed to recognise that but for the fortresses they would have swept France clear of all organised bodies of troops within two months of the frontier battles. During the Peninsular War Wellington made twelve assaults on breached fortresses of which five were successful; of his twelve attempts to escalade six succeeded. The Germans in 1870-71 never attempted a breach and their solitary effort at escalade, on the Basse Perche of Belfort, utterly failed.

The Russians in 1877 were even less enterprising than had been the Germans in 1870. They went against three permanently fortified places, the antediluvian little Matchin which if I remember right blew itself up; the crumbling Nicopolis which surrendered after one day's fighting; and Rustchuk which held out till the end of the war. They would not look at Silistria, ruined, but strong in heroic memories; they avoided Rasgrad, Schumla, and the Black Sea fortresses; Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople made no resistance. The earthworks of Plevna, vicious as they were in many characteristics, they found impregnable. I think Suvaroff would have carried them; I am sure Skobeleff would if he had got his way.

The vastly expensive armaments of the present--the rifled breech-loader, the magazine rifle, the machine guns, the long-range field-guns, and so forth, are all accepted and paid for by the respective nations in the frank and naked expectation that these weapons will perform increased execution on the enemy in war time. This granted, nor can it be denied, it logically follows that if this increased execution is not performed nations are entitled to regard it as a grievance that they do not get blood for their money, and this they certainly do not have; so that even in this sanguinary particular the warfare of to-day is a comparative failure. The topic, however, is rather a ghastly one and I refrain from citing evidence; which, however, is easily accessible to any one who cares to seek it.

The anticipation is confidently adventured that a great revolution will be made in warfare by the magazine rifle with its increased range, the machine gun, and the quick-firing field artillery which will speedily be introduced into every service. It does not seem likely that smokeless powder will create any very important change, except in siege operations. On the battlefield neither artillery nor infantry come into action out of sight of the enemy. When either arm opens fire within sight of the enemy its position can be almost invariably detected by the field-glass, irrespective of the smokelessness or non-smokelessness of its ammunition. Indeed, the use of smokeless powder would seem inevitably to damage the fortunes of the attack. Under cover of a bank of smoke the soldiers hurrying on to feed the fighting line are fairly hidden from aimed hostile fire. It may be argued that their aim is thus reciprocally hindered; but the reply is that their anxiety is not so much to be shooting during their reinforcing advance as to get forward into the fighting line, where the atmosphere is not so greatly obscured. Smokeless powder will no doubt advantage the defence.

It need not be remarked that a battle is a physical impossibility while both sides adhere to the passive defensive; and experience proves that battles are rare in which both sides are committed to the active offensive, whether by preference or necessity. Mars-la-Tour (16th August 1870) was the only contest of this nature in the Franco-German War. Bazaine had to be on the offensive because he was ordered to get away towards Verdun; Alvensleben took it because it was the only means whereby he could hinder Bazaine from accomplishing his purpose. But for the most part one side in battle is on the offensive; the other on the defensive. The invader is habitually the offensive person, just for the reason that the native force commonly acts on the defensive; the latter is anxious to hinder further penetration into the bowels of its land; the former's desire is to effect that penetration. The defensive of the native army need not, however, be the passive defensive; indeed, unless the position be exceptionally strong that is according to present tenets to be avoided. When, always with an underlying purpose of defence, its chief resorts to the offensive for reasons that he regards as good, his strategy or his tactics as the case may be, are expressed by the term "defensive-offensive."

It says a good deal for the peaceful predilections of the nations, that there has been no fairly balanced experience affording the material for decision as to the relative advantage of the offensive and the defensive under modern conditions. In 1866 the Prussians, opposing the needle-gun to the Austrian muzzle-loader, naturally utilised this pre-eminence by adopting uniformly the offensive and traditions of the Great Frederick doubtless seconded the needle-gun. After Sadowa controversy ran high as to the proper system of tactics when breech-loader should oppose breech-loader. A strong party maintained that "the defensive had now become so strong that true science lay in forcing the adversary to attack. Let him come on, and then one might fairly rely on victory." As Boguslawski observes--"This conception of tactics would paralyse the offensive, for how can an army advance if it has always to wait till an enemy attacks?" After much exercitation the Germans determined to adhere to the offensive. In the recent modest language of Baron von der Goltz: [Footnote: _The Nation in Arms_, by Lieutenant-Colonel Baron von der Goltz. (Allen.)] "Our modern German mode of battle aims at being entirely a final struggle, which we conceive of as being inseparable from an unsparing offensive. Temporising, waiting, and a calm defensive are very unsympathetic to our nature. Everything with us is action. Our strength lies in great decisions on the battlefield." Perhaps also the guileless Germans were quite alert to the fact that Marshal Niel had shattered the French army's tradition of the offensive, and gone counter to the French soldier's nature by enjoining the defensive in the latest official instructions. Had the Teutons suborned him the Marshal could not have done them a better turn.

Their offensive tactics against an enemy unnaturally lashed to the stake of the defensive stood the Germans in excellent stead in 1870. On every occasion they resorted to the offensive against an enemy in the field; strictly refraining, however, from that expedient when it was a fortress and not soldiers _en vive force_ that stood in the way. At St. Privat their offensive would probably have been worsted if Canrobert had been reinforced or even if a supply of ammunition had reached him; and a loss there of one-third of the combatants of the Guard Corps without result caused them to change for the better the method of their attack. But in every battle from Weissenburg to Sedan with the exception of the confused _mêlée_ of Mars-la-Tour, the French, besides being bewildered and discouraged, were in inferior strength; after Sedan the French levies in the field were scarcely soldiers. There was no fair testing of the relative advantages of defence and offence in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78; and so it remains that in an actual and practical sense no firm decision has yet been established. All civilised nations are, however, assiduously practising the methods of the offensive.

It may nevertheless be anticipated that in future warfare between evenly matched combatants the offensive will get the worst of it at the hands of the defensive. The word "anticipate" is used in preference to "apprehend," because one's sympathy is naturally for the invaded state unless it has been wantonly aggressive and insolent. The invaded army, if the term may be used, having familiar knowledge of the terrain will take up a position in the fair-way of the invader; affording strong flank _appui_ and a far-stretching clear range in front and on flanks. It will throw up several lines, or still better, tiers of shallow trenches along its front and flanks, with emplacements for artillery and machine guns. The invader must attack; he cannot turn the enemy's position and expose his communications to that enemy. He takes the offensive, doing so, as is the received practice, in front and on a flank. From the outset he will find the offensive a sterner ordeal than in the Franco-German War days. He will have to break into loose order at a greater distance, because of the longer range of small arms, and the further scope, the greater accuracy, and the quicker fire of the new artillery. He too possesses those weapons, but he cannot use them with so great effect. His field batteries suffer from the hostile cannon fire as they move forward to take up a position. His infantry cannot fire on the run; when they drop after a rush the aim of panting and breathless men cannot be of the best. And their target is fairly protected and at least partially hidden. The defenders behind their low épaulement do not pant; their marksmen only at first are allowed to fire; these make things unpleasant for the massed gunners out yonder, who share their attentions with the spraying-out infantry-men. The quick-firing cannon of the defence are getting in their work methodically. Neither its gunners nor its infantry need be nervous as to expending ammunition freely since plenteous supplies are promptly available, a convenience which does not infallibly come to either guns or rifles of the attack. The Germans report as their experience in the capacity of assailants that the rapidity and excitement of the advance, the stir of strife, the turmoil, exhilarate the soldiers, and that patriotism and fire-discipline in combination enforce a cool steady maintenance of fire; that in view of the ominous spectacle of the swift and confident advance, under torture of the storm of shell-fire and the hail of bullets which they have to endure in immobility, the defenders, previously shaken by the assailants' artillery preparation, become nervous, waver, and finally break when the cheers of the final concentrated rush strike on their ears. That this was scarcely true as regarded French regulars the annals of every battle of the Franco-German War up to and including Sedan conclusively show. It is true, however, that the French nature is intolerant of inactivity and in 1870 suffered under the deprivation of its _métier;_ but how often the Germans recoiled from the shelter trenches of the Spicheren and gave ground all along the line from St. Privat to the Bois de Vaux, men who witnessed those desperate struggles cannot forget while they live. Warriors of greater equanimity than the French soldier possesses might perhaps stand on the defensive in calm self-confidence with simple breech-loaders as their weapons, if simple breech-loaders were also weapons of the assailants. But in his magazine rifle the soldier of the future can keep the defensive not only with self-confidence, but with high elation, for in it he will possess a weapon against which it seems improbable that the attack (although armed too with a magazine or repeating rifle) can prevail.

The assailants fall fast as their advance pushes forward, thinned down by the rifle fire, the mitraille, and the shrapnel of the defence. But they are gallant men and while life lasts they will not be denied. The long bloody advance is all but over; the survivors of it who have attained thus far are lying down getting their wind for the final concentration and rush. Meanwhile, since after they once again stand up they will use no more rifle fire till they have conquered or are beaten, they are pouring forth against the defence their reserve of bullets in or attached to their rifle-butts. The defenders take this punishment, like Colonel Quagg, lying down, courting the protection of their earth-bank. The hail of the assailants' bullets ceases; already the artillery of the attack has desisted lest it should injure friend as well as foe. The word runs along the line and the clumps of men lying prostrate there out in the open. The officers spring to their feet, wave their swords, and cheer loudly. The men are up in an instant, and the swift rush focussing toward a point begins. The distance to be traversed before the attackers are _aux prises_ with the defenders is about one hundred and fifty yards.