Told in gallant deeds

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

When Smith-Dorrien rode in unscathed, a brother officer protested against the awful risk he had run. “Someone had to stop the Gordons! I couldn’t send anyone else to face that fire, could I?” was his only answer.

It must have been hard for so brave a man to have to organise a retreat, but he knew that it had to be done—and done fighting.

You will have heard of—you may even have known—someone whose name was included in the list sent home after a battle as “missing.”

Now there is something terrible and disturbing in the thought of a man being missing. It makes one feel that anything may have happened to him. But we must always remember that this disturbing word does not necessarily mean that any harm has come to the soldier in question, still less that he is killed. It very often means that he did not hear the order to retreat and so was left behind in the trenches to be taken prisoner by the enemy. Not a pleasant fate, but from the point of view of those who love him, better than if he had fallen, as the French proudly put it, on the Field of Honour. Also it is well to remember that the number of the missing, especially in what is called a rearguard action, is always greater than the number of killed or wounded.

A retreat has been well described as disheartening and painful, but in strategy it is an operation like any other. Very often, as in the case of Smith-Dorrien, it is the way to win in the end.

What is strategy? Strategy is another name for arranging your forces like chessmen on a chess-board with the object of winning in the end. Great strategists are born, not made. Cæsar was a great strategist, so was Napoleon, and so was Lord Roberts. Just as a composer can write a piece of music without the help of a piano or any other instrument, so the born strategist can work out the plan of a battle, and even make a shrewd guess as to who is going to win, when sitting in his study with a good map before him.

It may interest you to know that before each of his great battles Napoleon spent the night in his tent studying a number of large maps laid out on the floor. Lying flat on his stomach, and with a little stick in his hand, he would work out the dispositions of his troops and of the enemy. When he had made up his mind what was going to happen, down to every detail, he would call in his generals and explain to each of them exactly what he was to do the next day. His generals soon found that though he was not always certain what his own side would do, he could always foresee the plans of the enemy.

I have already spoken of Sir John Moore at Corunna. At the time that great soldier made his famous retreat, he was much criticised, but now all military historians regard it as having been a most wonderful piece of work, if only because it forced Napoleon to alter his whole plan of campaign.

Just as General von Kluck wished to obey the Kaiser and destroy the British Army, so Napoleon was most eager to destroy Sir John Moore’s forces. Fresh from a series of brilliant victories, at the head of a splendid host, Napoleon dashed into Spain, but Sir John Moore, by his masterly retreat, defeated all his plans.

The first of his contemporaries to realise the splendid thing Moore had done was Napoleon himself. While the British commanders—Moore’s own contemporaries and even his own friends—were criticising the dead man, for he fell at Corunna, Napoleon was putting on record his unbounded admiration of his foe.