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.