Tel-el-Kebir furnished an incidental illustration of our shortcoming in fire-discipline, which, as I contend, has its main cause in the effects of too stringent urgency to cover. Lord Wolseley showed that discernment which is one of his most valuable characteristics, in refraining from submitting his soldiers to the strain of a “swarm attack” up to the Egyptian position in fair daylight; and in choosing instead, as a minor risk, a night advance, spite of all its contingencies of hazard, with the hoped-for culmination of a surprise at daybreak. The issue proved his wisdom; and a phase of that combat, described with soldierly frankness by Sir Edward Hamley, must have given the commanding general a thrill of relief that he had conserved the spirit of his troops for the final dash, without exposing them to a previous ordeal of fire. That dash, made while yet the gloom of the dying night lay on the sand, General Hamley tells us, was 150 yards long, and it cost the brigade that carried it out 200 casualties ere the Egyptian entrenchment was crowned. It was done with the first impulse; no check was let stop the onward impetus of the élan; fire-discipline was not called into exercise at all. The whole of Hamley’s first line pressed on into the interior of the enemy’s position. The second line followed, but Hamley, with a wise prescience, “stopped the parts of it that were nearest to him as they came up, wishing to keep a support in hand which should be more readily available than such as the brigade in rear could supply.” It was well he did this thing; but for his doing of it, the shadow of a far other issue to Tel-el-Kebir lies athwart the following quotation. “The light was increasing every moment; our own men had begun to shoot immediately after entering the entrenched position, and aim could now be taken. The fight was at its hottest, and how it might end was still doubtful, for many of our advanced troops had recoiled even to the edge of the entrenchment” (beyond which they had penetrated 200 or 300 yards into the interior); “but there I was able to stop them, and reinforcing them with a small body I had kept in hand (who had remained, I think, in the ditch) I sent in all together, and henceforth they maintained their ground.” They recoiled, and they recoiled by reason of their weakness in fire-discipline. It is a fair query—How severe was the strain? As regards its duration, but a few moments’ fighting sufficed to bring about the recoil; that is made clear by the circumstance that the supporting brigade, following close as it did, yet was not up in time to redress the dangerous situation. In regard to its severity, General Hamley permits himself to use language of the most vivid character. “A hotter fire it is impossible to imagine.” The brigade was “enclosed in a triangle of fire.” “The enemy’s breechloaders were good, his ammunition abundant, and the air was a hurricane of bullets, through which shells from the valley tore their way.” “The whole area was swept by a storm of bullets.” Stronger words could not have been used by an enthusiastic war correspondent gushing his level best about his first skirmish; General Hamley’s expressions are fuller-volumed than those used by the compilers of the German staff chronicle in describing that Titanic paroxysm the climax of Gravelotte. What stupendous damage, then, did this hottest of all hot fires, this hurricane of bullets, effect? The casualties of the whole division reached a total of 258 killed and wounded. Of these, “nearly 200,” General Hamley distinctly states, occurred exclusively in the first brigade in the rush up to the entrenchment. If we assume that the second brigade had no losses at all, and that the whole balance of casualties occurred to the first brigade when in “the triangle of fire,” the fall of some 60 men out of 2800 was hardly a loss to justify the “recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment” of troops possessed even of a moderate amount of fire-discipline. General Hamley explains that but for the darkness and the too high aim of the enemy, “the losses would have been tremendous.” In other words, if an actual loss of 2 per cent, and the turmoil of the hottest fire imaginable, yet fortunately aimed over their heads, caused the troops “to recoil even to the edge of the entrenchment,” the “tremendous losses” that a better-aimed fire would have produced, it seems pretty evident, would have caused them to “recoil” so much farther that Tel-el-Kebir would have been a defeat instead of a victory. The Egyptians did not shoot straight because they were flurried, that is, were deficient in fire-discipline; our men “recoiled” after a very brief experience of a devilish but comparatively harmless battle-din, because the ardour of the first rush having died out of them, fire-discipline was not strong enough in them to keep them braced to hold the ground the rush had won them. It was fortunate that in Hamley they had a chief who had prescience of their feebleness of constancy, and had taken measures to remedy its evil effects.
During the afternoon and evening of August 18, 1870, six regiments of the Prussian guard corps made repeated and ultimately successful efforts to storm the French position of St. Privat. What that position was like, the following authentic description sets forth. “In front of St. Privat were several parallel walls of knee-high masonry and shelter trenches. Those lines, successively commanding each other, were filled with compact rows of skirmishers, and in their rear upon the commanding height lay like a natural bastion, and girt by an almost continuous wall, the town-like village, the stone houses of which were occupied up to the roofs.” There was no shelter on the three-quarters of a mile of smooth natural glacis, over which the regiments moved steadfastly to the attack; every fold of it was searched by the dominant musketry fire. They tried and failed, but they kept on trying till they succeeded. And what did the success cost them? The six regiments (each three battalions strong) numbered roughly 18,000 men; of these, 6000 had gone down before Canrobert quitted his grip of the “town-like village.” One-third of their whole number! It was the cost of this sacrifice that caused the Germans to adopt the unprecedented step of altering their attacking tactics in the middle of a campaign. But the change was made, not because the troops had proved unequal to the task set them, but because the cost of the accomplishment of that task, in the face of the Chassepot fire, had been so terrible. Now I am not concerned to exalt the horn of the Prussian fighting men at the cost of the British soldier. I will assume, and there is full evidence in favour of the assumption, that the British soldier of the pre-dodging era could take his punishment and come through it victoriously, as stoutly as any German that ever digested Erbswürst and smelt of sour rye-bread. Of the 10,000 British fellows whom Wellington sent at Badajos, 3000 were down before the torn old rag waved over the place. Ligonier’s column was 14,000 strong when the Duke of Cumberland gave it the word to make that astounding march through the chance gap, a bare 900 paces wide, between the cannon before the village of Vezon and those in the Redoubt d’Eu, right into and behind the heart of the French centre on the bloody day of Fontenoy. There is some doubt whether those quixotic courtesies passed between Lord Charles Hay and the Count d’Auteroche, but there is no doubt whatever that when the column, thwarted of the reward of valour by deficiency of support, had sturdily marched back through the appalling cross-fire in the cramped hollow-way, and had methodically fronted into its old position, it was found that at least 4000 out of the 14,000 had been shot down. Carlyle, indeed, makes the loss much heavier. Yet a notabler example of the British soldier’s gluttony for punishment is furnished in the statistics of the Inkermann losses. The total force that kept Mount Inkermann against the Russians amounted to 7464 officers and men. Of these, when the long fierce day was done, no fewer than 2487 had fallen, just one-third of the whole number. The manner in which our soldiers successfully contended against fearful odds in this battle is a phenomenal example of fire-discipline of the grand old dogged type. It is but one, however, of the many proofs that the world has no stauncher fighting-man than is the British soldier intrinsically.
But I think it would be difficult to convince the mind of an impartial man that the British soldiers who, at Tel-el-Kebir, “recoiled even to the edge of the entrenchment” under the stress of a “hurricane of bullets” fired high and of a loss of 2 per cent, could have borne up and conquered under such a strain of sustained and terrible punishment as that through which the Prussian Guard struggled to the goal of victory at St. Privat. And if not, why not? There was a larger proportion of veterans among the Prussians at St. Privat than in the Highland Brigade at Tel-el-Kebir, and that gave a certain advantage, doubtless, to the former. Some would lean on the superior “citizenhood” of the Prussian over the British soldier; but our Highland regiments are exceptionally respectably recruited. Yet I venture to set down as the main distinction that, while the Prussian soldier of 1870 was a soldier of the “shoulder-to-shoulder” era, the British soldier of 1882 was a creature of the “get-to-cover” period. Then, it may be urged, the Prussian soldier of to-day—creature, nay, creator as he is of this new order of things—is as incapable of repeating St. Privat as the British soldier of to-day is of rivalling that stupendous feat. No. It is true the German is no longer a “shoulder-to-shoulder” man, but he is not drilled with so single an eye to cover-taking (and, I might add, cover-keeping) as is our British Thomas Atkins. He is trained to expect to be “a little shooted” as he goes forward; he has better-experienced non-commissioned officers to supervise the details of that advance than our soldier has; his individuality is more sedulously brought out. In a word, everything with him makes toward the development in him of a higher character of fire-discipline even in his first initiation into bullet-music.
It may be said that the Germans, because of the magnitude of their forces, have not so urgent need to be careful of their men as is requisite in regard to an army of scant numbers and feeble resources. They can afford, it may be said, to be a little wasteful; whereas a weaker military power must practise assiduous economy of its live material. But if the seeming wastefulness contributes to win the battle, and the economy endangers that result, the wastefulness is surely sound wisdom, the economy penny-wise. The object before either army is identical—to win the battle. If an army shall come short of success because of its reluctance to buy success at the price success exacts, the wise course for it is to refrain altogether from serious fighting. It is the old story—that there is no making of omelettes without the breaking of eggs. You may break so many eggs as to spoil the omelette; but the Germans have realised how much easier it is to spoil the omelette by not breaking eggs enough. And so they break their eggs, not lavishly, but with a discreet hand, in which there is no undue chariness. They lay their account with taking a certain amount of loss by exposure in the “swarm-advance” as preferable, for a variety of reasons, to the disadvantages of painful cover-dodging. They can afford to dig a few more graves after the battle is won, if, indeed, taking all things into consideration, that work should be among the results of the day’s doings.
Than “annihilation” there is no more favourite word with the critics of manœuvres and sham-fights. In truth it is as hard a thing to “annihilate” a body of troops as it is to kill a scandal. In a literal sense there are very few records of such a catastrophe; if used in a figurative sense to signify a loss so great as to put the force suffering it hors de combat, there is amazing testimony to the quantity of “annihilation” good troops have accepted without any such hapless result. Here are four instances taken almost at random. The Confederates, out of 68,000 men engaged at Gettysburg, lost 18,000, but Meade held his hand from interfering with their orderly retreat. Of that battle the climax was the assault of Pickett’s division, “the flower of Virginia,” against Webb’s front on the left of Cemetery Hill. Before the heroic Armistead called for the “cold steel” and carried Gibbon’s battery with a rush, the division had met with a variety of experiences during its mile-and-a-half advance over the smooth ground up to the crest. “When it first came into sight it had been plied with solid shot; then half-way across it had been vigorously shelled, and the double canisters had been reserved for its nearer approach. An enfilading fire tore through its ranks; the musketry blazed forth against it with deadly effect.” This is the evidence of an eye-witness on the opposite side, who adds, “but it came on magnificently.” Yes, it came on to cold steel and clubbed muskets, and after a desperate struggle it went back foiled, to the accompaniments which had marked its advance. But, heavy as were its losses, it was not “annihilated.” Pickett’s division survived to be once and again a thorn in the Federal side before the final day of fate came to it at Appomatox Court-House. At Mars-la-Tour, Alvensleben’s two infantry divisions, numbering certainly not over 18,000 men (for they had already lost heavily at the Spicheren Berg), sacrificed within a few of 7000 during the long summer hours while they stood all but unsupported athwart the course of the French army retreating from Metz. But so far were they from being annihilated, that forty-eight hours later they made their presence acutely felt on the afternoon of Gravelotte. In the July attack on Plevna, of the 28,000 men with whom Krüdener and Schahofskoy went in, they took out under 21,000. One regiment of the latter’s command lost 725 killed and 1200 wounded—about 75 per cent of its whole number—yet the Russian retirement was not disorderly; and next day the troops were in resolute cohesion awaiting what might befall them. In the September attack on Plevna, of 74,000 Russo-Roumanian infantry engaged, the losses reached 18,000. Skobeleff commanded 18,000 men, and at the end of his two days’ desperate fighting, not 10,000 of these were left standing. But there was no annihilation, either literally or conventionally, if one may use the term. The survivors who had fought on the 11th and 12th September were ready at the word to go in again on the 13th; and how they marched across the Balkans later is one of the marvels of modern military history.
Those examples of stoicism, of fire-discipline strained to a terrible tension, but not breaking under the strain, were exhibited by soldiers who did not carry into practice the tactics of non-exposure. The Russo-Turkish war, it is true, was within the “cover” era, but the Russians in this respect, as in a good many others—such, for instance, as in their lack of a propensity to “recoil”—were behind the times. But with a strange callousness to the effect of breechloading fire against infantry, the Russians were singularly chary of exposing their cavalry to it. Indeed, cavalry may be said to have gone out of fashion with many professors of modern war. With the most tempting opportunities we made the scantiest use of our brigade of regular cavalry in the Zulu war, and the best-known occasion on which the cavalry arm was prominently called into action in Afghanistan was the reverse of a signal success. But although the critics oracularly pronounce that the day of cavalry charges has gone by, and blame the Germans for exposing their cavalry to the breechloader in their manœuvres, the Germans adhere to the conviction that in the teeth of the breechloader a cavalry charge is not only not an impossibility, but an offensive that may still be resorted to with splendid effect. They can point back to an actual experience. I think there is no more effective yet restrained description of fighting in all the range of war literature than the official narrative of Bredow’s charge with the 7th Cuirassiers and the 16th Lancers on the afternoon of Mars-la-Tour.
“It was only 2 P.M., the day yet young; no infantry, no reserves, and the nearest support a long way off.... Now was the time to see what a self-sacrificing cavalry could do.... Bredow saw at a glance that the crisis demanded an energetic attack in which the cavalry must charge home, and, if necessary, should and must sacrifice itself. The first French line” (breechloaders and all) “is ridden over; the line of guns is broken through; teams and gunners put to the sword. The second line is powerless to check the vigorous charge of horse. The batteries on the heights farther to rear limber up and seek safety in flight. Eager to engage and thirsting for victory, the Prussian squadrons charge even through the succeeding valley, until, after a career of 3000 paces, they are met on all sides by French cavalry. Bredow sounds the recall. Breathless from the long ride, thinned by enemy’s bullets, without reserves, and hemmed in by hostile cavalry, they have to fight their way back. After some hot mêlées with the enemy’s horsemen, they once more cut their way through the previously overridden lines of artillery and cavalry, and harassed by a thick rain of bullets, and with the foe in rear, the remnant hastens back to Flavigny.... The bold attack had cost the regiments half their strength.”
They had gone in under 800 strong; the charge cost them 363 of their number, including sixteen officers. But that charge in effect wrecked France. It arrested the French advance till supports came up to Alvensleben, and to its timely effect is traceable the current of events that ended in the surrender of Metz. It was a second Balaclava charge, and a bloodier one; and there was this distinction, that it had a purpose, and that that purpose was achieved. It succeeded because of the noble valour and constancy of the troopers who made it. Balaclava proved that our troopers possessed those virtues in no feebler degree. Till the millennium comes there will be emergencies when cavalry that will “charge home” and “sacrifice itself” may be employed purposefully; and cavalry should never be allowed to forget that this is its ultimate raison d’être. There is the risk that it may do so, if it is kept always skulking around the fringes of operations, and not given any opportunity of being “a little shooted.”