Now, however, in these post-war years of disillusionment, is the time to take stock of the exorbitant cost of the war in lives and money, of the moral and economic exhaustion that is its fruit. Though professional experience in any department of life is the way to executive skill, concentration on technical problems has a notorious tendency to narrow the vision. Hence, while paying tribute to the professional ability shown in the later phases of the 1918 campaign, we are justified, standing amid the débris, in questioning the strategic aim and direction of the war.
What was the objective of the Allies’ strategy? The memoirs and despatches of the responsible military leaders reveal that it was the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces in the main theatre of war.
As the proverb tells us, it is no use crying over spilt milk, nor even over spilt blood and money—the price for this empty triumph has been paid by the ordinary citizens of the nations, yoked like “dumb, driven oxen” to the chariot of Mars.
What we are concerned with is the future, and it is the worst of omens that the orthodox military school, still generally in power as the advisers of governments, cling obstinately to this dogma, blind apparently to the futility of the Great War, both in its strategy and its fruits. Of these military Bourbons, restored to the seats of authority in most capitals, the saying may be echoed: “They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”—if one may judge by the post-war manuals of the various countries, and the utterances of generals and admirals.
New weapons would seem to be regarded merely as an additional tap through which the bath of blood can be filled all the sooner. Not long ago, in The Times, a distinguished admiral argued that as “the first and greatest principle of war” was the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy, the only correct objective for aircraft in war must be the enemy air-force.
Thus in this new element, the air, is to be reincarnated the Napoleonic theory—for the doctrine on which the last war was fought, and the next one will be if wisdom does not prevail, is the disastrous legacy of the Corsican vampire, who drained the blood of Europe a century back.
From 1870 to 1918 the General Staffs of the Powers were obsessed with the Napoleonic legend; instead of reconnoitring the future in the light of universal history they were purely looking backward on a military Sodom and Gomorrah, until, like Lot’s wife, they and their doctrines became petrified.
What is the tenor of this doctrine? First, that there is only one true objective in war—“the destruction of the enemy’s main forces on the battlefield.” Even the most hair-splitting partisan of the orthodox school cannot dispute this statement without throwing overboard all the textbooks and regulations produced by the General Staffs of Europe and America for generations past. Second, that the means of gaining this objective is to pile up greater numbers than the enemy. Obviously the surest way to achieve this is to call up and put into the field the whole manhood of a nation, and so has grown up as a complement to the Napoleonic theory of the “objective” another equally short-sighted dogma—that of the “nation in arms,” with its blind worship of quantity rather than quality.
Pacifists are fond of talking about the “armaments race.” A curious sort of race—for which ponderous cart-horses are bred instead of steeple-chasers, and where the trainers clap “mass objective” blinkers on the horses’ heads, while the jockeys ride looking back over their shoulders. Then they wonder why instead of taking their fences freely the poor horses fall at the first open ditch, and cannot be got out under four years?
There would seem to be a slight hitch somewhere in this Napoleonic doctrine.