Thus we come back to the point from which we began. Military history is not the history of physical but of moral force, perhaps almost of the triumph of moral over purely physical force. Let no man say that such a subject is unworthy of our attention. It is unfortunately impossible to study deeply any department of the affairs of men without encountering much that is infinitely vile and base and sordid; and military history is no exception to this rule. But it is rich also in noble and heroic deeds, not of valour only but of patience, self-sacrifice and endurance. I may be wrong, but I think that I see in it grander and more frequent examples of devotion to duty than in any other branch of history. The opportunities, you will say, are greater; and there may be some truth in this; but I would add that the training to self-abnegation counts also for very much. It will harm none of us to know well this story of duty done for duty's sake; and it may be that, as the example of the Birkenhead has nerved all our race to face with calmness the utmost perils of the sea, so the remembrance of the proud history of our soldiers may brace each one of us, no matter how humble his sphere, to discipline himself in the self-denial and self-control which triumph over adversity.
[LECTURE II]
BRITISH MILITARY HISTORY
In my last lecture I attempted to deal with the broad subject of military history at large. To-day I shall treat of the narrower subject of British military history. There is nothing arbitrary or capricious in this; for British military history is, owing to our insular position, a thing apart.
Foreign nations, indeed, would say that a country which has never in the whole course of her existence put fifty thousand of her own children in line upon any battle-field and very rarely so many even as thirty thousand, can have no military history; but none the less we have one, which is in many ways remarkable and worthy of study.
Note in the first place that for five hundred years after the Conquest England was not a purely insular power. She had troublesome neighbours in Wales and Scotland, and her kings had possessions, and consequently troublesome neighbours, in France. Remember that it was not until 1558 that we lost Calais, and that, as long as we possessed it, we had so to speak a bridge-head which enabled us to enter France practically at any moment. This was a sad temptation towards foolish expeditions and waste of strength; and it was a great blessing to us really when the capture of Calais removed it for ever.
Elizabeth, therefore, was our first purely insular sovereign. What manner of military force did she find at her accession, and what manner of organisation for creating and maintaining it? The sovereign was empowered, as he still is, to call out every able-bodied man for the defence of the country; and upon the different classes of freemen was imposed by an Act of 1558, which was based upon an older Act of 1285, the duty of providing themselves with arms according to their means. Long before 1558 fire-arms had been brought to such efficiency that a compete system of tactics had been founded for their use by the ablest soldiers on the Continent; but in England the Statute still professed contentment with the weapons of three centuries earlier, bows and bills; and there were remarkably few fire-arms in the country at all. There were, however, great traditions derived in part from Saxon times, but strengthened, developed and enlarged by the victories of Edward the Third, his son Edward, Prince of Wales, and king Harry the Fifth, in France and in Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
I told you in my last lecture that all fighting, from the earliest times to the present, is in the ultimate resort of two kinds—hand-to-hand or shock action, at a distance or missile action. In the hands of the English a very old missile weapon, the bow, had become, in the form of the long bow, the most deadly and formidable of its time. Every English boy was trained to the use of it, and was taught to bring every muscle of his body to bear upon it, just as in rowing you are taught not to row with your arms only, but with your legs also and with all the weight of your body. "My father taught me to lay my body to the bow," says Bishop Hugh Latimer. The result was that their arrows were discharged with great rapidity and accuracy, and with such strength that they were effective in the matter of penetration at an astonishingly long range. The shock action of mediaeval times, as you know, was confined chiefly to mounted men-at-arms, clad in armour from head to foot, and furnished with lances, who moved in dense masses at very moderate speed, and trampled down everything that stood in their way. How did the English archers deal with them? They aimed mainly at their horses, which, maddened by the pain, ran away with their riders, and carried confusion everywhere; but being accurate shots, the archers aimed also at the joints of the harness—at the intervals between gorget and breast-plate, between breast-plate, or back-plate, and thigh-pieces, which were exposed by the swaying of the body, and above all the arm-pit when the arm was raised to strike. But how about the English men-at-arms, you will ask? Why did not the enemy shoot their horses with arrows, and make them unmanageable also? Here we come to the English peculiarity. The English men-at-arms always dismounted to fight, broke off their lances to a length that could be easily handled and, ranked together in a dense mass, used them as pikes. So here there was the tradition of a missile infantry, so to speak, steady and deadly shots; and of a shock infantry which could not be broken and, moreover, after winning a victory could mount and pursue on horseback.
The new tactics of the Continent, which the English had to learn, had taken much the same direction. The Swiss, in order to keep mounted men-at-arms at a distance, had bethought them of ranging their infantry into dense masses, armed with pikes fourteen feet long, and this they had done with such success that they had vindicated the position of infantry as the most important element on the battle-field. Other nations took up the idea, either for mercenaries or national troops; and, with the improvement of fire-arms, missile infantry developed into musketeers, or "shot" as they were called, who fought entirely as skirmishers, while shock infantry was represented by dense masses of pikemen. Simultaneously the cavalry became a missile force. Unable to make any impression against a bristling wall of pikes, they gave up their lances and provided themselves with pistols, so as to shoot the pikemen down from a distance. Hence it was customary to cover the pikemen with heavy armour on breast and thighs, which prevented them from moving very fast. The fate of the battle, however, was determined by them. Musketeers and cavaliers worried each other and the pikemen for as long as they dared, but the ultimate issue was decided when pike met pike. The chief reason for this was the system adopted for maintaining a continuous fire. This was to range the musketeers in ten ranks, and let these ranks fire in succession, the first rank filing to the rear as soon as its weapons were discharged, in order to reload, and leaving the second rank to do likewise, and so on. In theory the system was ingenious; but in practice it was found that men thought a great deal more about filing to the rear rapidly, than about firing steadily and accurately. Of course if heavy artillery could be brought within range of a square of pikemen, it might blast them off the field; but cannon were too cumbrous and difficult to move for this to be often possible; and thus the decision of the day was left, as it still is, to cold steel. You will see wonderful pictures of combats of pikemen, just as you see the like representations of fights with the bayonet. I doubt greatly if they ever occurred. Both sides approached each other with the pike or bayonet no doubt; but before they closed one side turned and ran away. All nations boast of their prowess with the bayonet, our own among others, but few men really enjoy a hand-to-hand fight with the bayonet, however much they may enjoy a hand-to-hand pursuit. You remember that the Homeric heroes, after a certain amount of close combat, invariably threw stones at each other; and the practice has never died out. English and French both talk much of the bayonet; but in Egypt in 1801 they threw stones at each other when their ammunition was exhausted, and one English sergeant was killed by a stone. At Inkerman again the British threw stones at the Russians, not without effect; and I am told upon good authority that the Russians and Japanese, both of whom profess to love the bayonet, threw stones at each other, rather than close, even in this twentieth century.
To this stage, then, had the art of war advanced at Elizabeth's accession, but no effort was made to train the national forces according to the latest methods. A few foreign mercenaries were imported from time to time, and a great many English went abroad, and served either in the armies of Spain—which were the most efficient of their day—or in those of the revolted Dutch which, under the Princes of the House of Nassau, were rapidly improving upon the Spanish methods. Thus some ideas of foreign practice crept into England, and a great deal of foreign nomenclature, which still remains with us. Nearly all of our military terms are foreign, drawn mostly from the French, the Italian or the Spanish. Regiment, battalion, colonel, sergeant-major, captain, lieutenant, ensign, cornet, corporal, centinel—all are words borrowed from Latin sources, and one could multiply the number of instances. Pistol and howitzer are Bohemian, relics of John Zizka. Forlorn hope (which has nothing to do with the English word hope) is Dutch. Even Shakespeare speaks twice of recruits by the Spanish name bisoño, corrupted into Bezonian.