Military History: Lectures Delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge

by Sir J. W. Fortescue

So much for the moral force that can be instilled into a community by its statesmen: I come now to that which can be inspired only by the soldier, the unity, artificial but incomparably strong, which is bound up with the name of discipline. Military discipline—how some people loathe and others worship it; and how little the majority of both have really thought about it! What is its principle? The organised abnegation of the individual self in favour of the corporate self. What is its object? That tens of thousands may act together as one under the guidance of a single will. What are its methods? Immediate and unquestioning obedience to superior command. Immediate and unquestioning obedience—that is what is the stumbling block, the skandalon to so many. There are of course a certain number of people who can obey no one, but must always be a law—and an exceedingly erratic law—unto themselves. The name of the poet Shelley will probably occur to some of you, but I am not thinking of such as Shelley. I have in my mind rather those excellent but generally unthinking persons who shrink with horror from the idea of a man's abdicating his civil rights. "What," they say, "a man must obey even an unjust command, under pain it may be of death! It is monstrous!" For purposes of civil life it might be monstrous, but not for purposes of implicit obedience, which is the thing that matters in an army. Let there be justice as far as possible by all means; but, as a general principle, it is better for an army that an injustice should be done than that an order should be disobeyed. This, however, is an argument that cannot appeal to our imaginary objector, because he has read no military history.

Then there is the unpleasant fact that immediate and unquestioning obedience is a thing not easily acquired even with the best of good will. Careful and often tedious training is necessary before the obedience becomes instinctive and a second nature; and the process is not always a pleasant one. In the first place tyrannical teachers are always to be found, who make the lesson as odious as possible; and in the second there are some natures to which nothing is so revolting as order and method in the minutest detail. The temperament that calls itself artistic is particularly impatient of this description of discipline, and attaches to it the name of soul-destroying; but I have noticed that persons who claim to possess that particular temperament discover equal mischief to their souls in the punctual keeping of their appointments, the faithful fulfilment of their contracts, and the regular payment of their debts. In fact a little drill and discipline is the very thing that they most require. However, the school of implicit obedience is no doubt a hard one, and sometimes even distressing. There is much that seems—perhaps even a little that may actually be—unnecessary and pedantic in the instruction; and in time of peace the necessity for this is not obvious. It is inexpressibly galling to some characters to find the question Why answered unchangeably by the formula "Because orders must be obeyed." They chafe against the compression of all natures into the same mould; and the conversion of one, who flatters himself (not always with reason) that he is an intelligent mortal, into a machine.

I shall deal with the weak side of military discipline presently. Meanwhile observe that its moral force is founded on one of the noblest of human, I might say of Christian, virtues. I have styled it organised self-abnegation—organised self-surrender of the individual for the sake of the general;—only possible through arduous training in self-denial, self-restraint and self-control. Observe that, although many religious orders have taken for their governance the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the most formidable of all was that founded by an old soldier, who organised it upon a military model and gave its chief the title of General. The name of the Jesuits does not smell sweet in English nostrils, and yet its members have perhaps outdone all the world in self-sacrifice. "Go," the General said from time to time to some young Jesuit in the 17th century, "Go out to the wilds of North America; spread the gospel among the Red Indians; search out the land and take it into possession for the most Christian king." Without a word the command was obeyed. The missionary went forth, alone or with a comrade, undaunted by the prospect of being tied up to roast before a slow fire, or have his fingers bitten off one by one; he dwelt among savage men, lived their lives, subsisted on their food, and, without counting the risk of being lost or starved, found his way down the great rivers from the Upper Lakes to the Gulf of Florida. You know the great examples of heroism in our own army. You know the story of the Birkenhead; and you may perhaps realise that it is this story which has inspired all English men and English women to show courage in a shipwreck. But I shall add just one story, a very short one, of the wreck of the Warren Hastings, which was carrying four companies of the King's Royal Rifle Corps and as many of the York and Lancaster Regiment, on the island of Reunion in 1897. When the ship struck, sentries of the Rifles were at once posted at various points on the lower deck, to guard the access to the spirit-room and such like; and there they remained while the boats were lowered to take the battalion ashore. The water rose steadily upon them inch by inch, and had reached their chests, when at last an officer came to summon them also, last of all, to take their place in the boats. He collected them all, as he thought, but in the noise and darkness he missed one man and left him behind. The man saw his comrades disappear up the ladder, and the officer about to follow them, and not till then did he ask, without quitting his post, "Beg pardon, sir, may I come too?" If ever you hear any man speak lightly of military discipline, tell him that story, for that Rifleman is worthy to be placed alongside the Roman sentry at Pompeii.

Yet it is very necessary that the working of military discipline should be most carefully studied in military history, in order that its defects, weaknesses and limitations may be thoroughly ascertained and realised. There is no greater mistake than to say that disciplined men are machines. They are nothing of the kind: they are flesh and blood; and it is most dangerous to treat them as anything else. Yet nothing is more common than for people to suppose that anything is good enough for soldiers because discipline forbids them to complain. Politicians in particular often appear to think that a soldier, in virtue of his discipline, can march all day and all night, dispense with food and drink, and lie out in cold and rain with no particular mischief to himself. I can assure you that in former days, within the memory of living men, English soldiers were housed in buildings and sent to sea in vessels that would have been thought too bad for valuable cattle. Tradesmen and contractors likewise presume upon the soldiers' enforced patience, and mobs will insult and pelt them, secure in the knowledge that the soldiers will not retaliate without orders. This indeed, albeit infinitely mean and cowardly, is an unconscious tribute to discipline, but may easily strain it beyond endurance. The fact is that discipline which rests wholly upon fear is not the strongest. Inelastic and unsympathetic severity, even though it may not actually amount to injustice, can produce only a passive and discontented obedience, which speedily gives way to sulky insubordination under any unusual trial. It is when officers are not in touch with their men and do not consider them, that the hearts of soldiers are stolen away by agitators and malcontents. And then follows mutiny, which if begun in some choice corps may spread to a whole army, as in the French Revolution, and bring a dynasty and the traditions of centuries to the ground. The ill-treatment of men was common enough in old days, when the gaps between social classes were wide and the distinction between them carefully marked, but you will never find an instance of a successful army in which the officers did not share the hardships of the men. Hannibal, for one, frequently slept on the ground with his outposts.

It is when, as in most modern armies, the officers put their men before anything else in the world, that military discipline shines at its brightest. This does not mean leniency to irregularity or towards insubordination—a weak or indulgent officer is neither loved nor respected—but the treatment of men as men instead of as children, attention to their wants, consideration for their feelings, zeal for their well-being, cultivation of their self-respect, forethought to train them to meet every exigency, endless endeavour to deserve their confidence. Then there arises in regiments that mysterious power which is called esprit de corps, when every soul in them from the colonel to the drummer feels that his own honour is bound up with the honour of the regiment, and that the honour of the regiment is the greatest thing in the world. And so you find—for one instance out of many thousand—such a battalion as that of the Fifty-seventh at Albuera, with two men in every three struck down, yet conscious of nothing in the dense smoke but of closing in to the colours and unquestioning resolution to die where they stood, rather than give way. So too you find a simple solitary private, in the story that I have already told you, content to go down alone in a sinking ship for the honour of the Sixtieth. Without knowledge of military history men are really unconscious of the existence of that most wonderful of moral forces, esprit de corps; and it is not a thing of which anyone can afford to be ignorant.

Lastly military history gives us insight into the character and intellectual powers of some of the most remarkable men who ever lived. I shall be told perhaps that the career of an Alexander or of a Caesar is but a paltry study compared with that of a Luther or a François Xavier. Be it so. Different characters attract different students, and great leaders of men, whether saints or soldiers, are always worthy of study. Moreover, it is a most important thing to realise that military history means the survey of administrative in at least as great a degree as strategical and tactical genius. You will all of you recall the happy phrase that was applied to Carnot—the organiser of victory; and Carnot was only one of many who have deserved the epithet. No man perhaps ever merited it better than Moses, if only through his standing order (which you will find in the book of Deuteronomy xxiii. 12-14) that when an army was in the field there should be appointed places for latrines outside the camp, and that all foul matter should be instantly buried. The regulation is justified by a noble precept, which in its essence is true for all time. "The Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp to deliver thee and to give up thine enemies before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy, that he see no unclean thing in thee and turn away from thee." Foul camps mean enteric fever and dysentery, and these diseases mean the destruction of the host. To this day it may be said that the sanitary regulations of Moses have never been superseded. How many Jewish victories may have been due to the observance of them we can only conjecture; how many hundred millions of lives have been sacrificed to the neglect of them—for it is only latterly that their value has been fully recognised—the Omniscient alone can know.

Turn from Palestine to Greece and look at the military constitution of Sparta founded by Lycurgus. Make a huge stride over the ages, and look at Chaka, the man of genius whose military organisation and training of his people would have made the Zulus masters of South Africa, had not the boundless resources of the British Empire dashed his work—though not without difficulty and defeat—at last to the ground. Look at the great men of modern times, whose names will be more familiar to you, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Wellington, and take note that from the very beginning of history the greatest generals have almost invariably been in the very first rank not merely of military but of civil administrators. It may seem heretical to say so, but I personally am inclined to think that Napoleon's work as a civil Governor transcends even in its own kind the greatest of his military achievements. I, even as many other men, have gone through most of the thirty-six volumes of his correspondence; and I confess that his reorganisation of France in the first months of the Consulate—crude and hasty as in many respects it was, owing to the urgency of the case and the desperate nature of the circumstances—appears to me the greatest thing that ever he did. But all three of these men are remarkable chiefly for the astonishing results which they achieved with small means. Frederick, in spite of terrible defeats and latterly an almost total failure of resources, contrived somehow to carry the Seven Years War to a successful end, and at its close to revive an exhausted Prussia. Napoleon took over a France demoralised by ten years of misrule, and sunk financially to a hopeless depth of bankruptcy, yet by squandering men in lieu of money he carried his eagles victoriously from end to end of Europe. Wellington had so few men that he could not squander them, and so little money that, owing to the general lack of specie, he was obliged to carry on the Peninsular War upon credit, and incidentally to administer the government of Portugal as well as direct the operations in the field, lest that credit should absolutely fail him. Yet by sheer administrative ability, patience and tenacity, he prevailed.

I have of design left the question of the technical study of strategy and tactics until the last. Strategy may, I think, be defined as the art of bringing armies up to the battle-field by the right way, in the right strength, at the right time; tactics as the art of handling them on the battle-field to the best advantage. Of what profit is the study of these two arts to the citizen at large? Well, in the first place he will learn what may be termed his strategical geography, and why battles are constantly fought century after century in or about the same places. He will understand why, for instance, endless great actions for the mastery of India have been fought within fifty miles of Delhi; the significance of Stirling on the map of Scotland, and of Acre on the coast of Syria. He will perceive why, owing to changes in transport and armament, places whose names constantly occur in old diplomatic records have ceased to be of great account and are now seldom mentioned, whereas others, as I have said, retain their importance through endless generations. He will realise, further, how far strategic considerations enter into political arrangements of all kinds, as for instance that Bismarck the civilian was against the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine as tending to perpetuate the hostility of France, but was overruled by Moltke because the new frontier was worth 100,000 men. In fact it is not too much to say that knowledge of military history is essential to the right understanding not only of domestic and foreign politics, but of the whole story, written and unwritten, of the human race—which is mainly a story of fighting.

The interest of tactics is chiefly for professional men; but it is worth while to notice its main principles, which are simple. All fighting is, and has always been, of two kinds, hand-to-hand or shock action, at a distance or missile action. Goliath challenged the Israelites to shock action, and David killed him by missile action; and I dare say that the Philistines thought it unfair. Now, whether for shock or for missile action, it is very obvious that if you can overmatch your enemy in numbers—other things being equal—you are likely to get the better of him; and that if you are on higher ground than he is you can see him better than he can see you to throw things at him, and can charge him with greater impetus down hill than he can meet you with, uphill. It may be said broadly that the art of tactics is the art of bringing stronger numbers to bear at some given point, and taking or acquiring superiority of position. This is the physical side of tactics. The moral side (apart from discipline) lies chiefly in those two eternal and undying resources, known as the ambush and the surprise. Here the leader tries to upset an enemy's physical advantage of numbers and position by taking him unawares. There is no finer example of a surprise in the world than that of Gideon. Think of it—the silent march of 300 picked men in three companies through the darkness, each with his trumpet and his torch hidden in a pitcher, the silent surrounding of the hostile camp just before dawn, when human vitality is at its lowest; and then the silence broken by the crash of three hundred pitchers, the sudden flare of the torches, the braying of three hundred trumpets as if in signal to a host of thousands unseen in the night; and the simultaneous yell "For the Lord and for Gideon." There was a wild panic in the Midianite camp, and no wonder. In the darkness they took to fighting each other, "every man's sword against his fellow." Of course they did. Exactly the same result was seen many times over during our last war in South Africa, and has been seen in every panic from Gideon's age to our own. Gideon was a man who studied moral force.