The Brain of an Army: A Popular Account of the German General Staff

by Spenser Wilkinson

The preliminary decision, then, which may be taken as settled—for the other party if it had been in power would certainly have come to the same conclusion—is that no military officer, either within or without the Cabinet, is to have in his hands the whole management of the army; the absolute power of the Cabinet must be preserved, and therefore no military officer is to have more than departmental authority; the threads are not to be united in any hands other than those of the Secretary of State. This determination appears to me most unfortunate, for to my eye the time seems big with great events requiring a British Government to attach more importance to preparation for conflict than to the rigorous assertion of Cabinet supremacy. Be that as it may, the practical question is whether the proposed sub-division of the business of the War Office into departments is a good or a bad one. I think it incurably bad, because it follows no principle of classification inherent in the nature of the work to be done.

To find the natural and necessary classification of duties in the management of an army we must look not at the War Office but at war. Suppose the country to be engaged in a serious war, in which the army, or a large portion of it is employed against an enemy, who it may be hoped will not have succeeded in invading this island. In that case we can distinguish clearly between two functions. There must be an authority directing against the enemy the troops in the field; a general with full powers, implicitly obeyed by all the officers and officials accompanying his army. There must also be an administrative officer at home, whose function will be to procure and convey to the army in the field all that it requires—food, ammunition, clothing and pay, fresh men and fresh horses to replace casualties. This officer at home cannot be the same person as the general in the field; for the two duties must be carried on in two different places at the same time. The two functions, moreover, correspond to two different arts or branches of the military art. The commander in the field requires to excel in generalship, or the art of command; the head of the supply department at home requires to be a skilled military administrator in the sense not of a wielder of discipline or trainer of troops, but of a clever buyer, a producer and distributor on a large scale. Neither of these officers can be identical with the Secretary of State, whose principal duty in war is to mediate between the political intentions of the Government and the military action conducted by the commander in the field. This duty makes him the superior of the commander; while the officer charged with military supply, though he need not be the formal subordinate of the commander, must yet conform his efforts to the needs of the army in the field.

There are many important matters which cannot be confined either to the department of command or to that of supply. Under this head fall the terms of service for soldiers, the conditions of recruiting, the regulations for the appointment and promotion of officers. These are properly the subjects of deliberation in which not only military, but civil opinions and interests must be represented; for their definition the Secretary of State will do well to refer to a general council of his assistants, and the ultimate settlement will require the judgment of the Cabinet, and sometimes also the sanction of Parliament. In time of war it is generally necessary quickly to levy extra men, and to drain into the army a large part of the resources of the country. Such measures must be thought out and arranged in advance during peace, for the greatest care is required in all decisions which involve the appropriation by the State of more than the usual share of the energies, the time and the money of its citizens. Regulations of this kind can seldom be framed except as the result of the deliberations of a council of military and civil officers of experience. These, then, are the rational sub-divisions of army business. There is the department of command, embracing the discipline and training of the troops, their organization as combatant bodies, the arrangement of their movements and distribution in peace and war, and all that belongs to the functions of generalship. These matters form the proper domain of a Commander-in-Chief. Side by side with them is the department of supply, which procures for the commander the materials out of which his fighting machine is put together and kept in condition. Harmony between them is secured by the authority of the Government, wielded by the Secretary of State, who regulates according to the state of the national policy and of the exchequer the amount to be spent by each department, and who presides over the great council which lays down the conditions under which the services of the citizens in money, in property, or in person are to be claimed by the State for its defence.

The examination, then, of the conditions of war, and the application, during peace, of the distribution of duties which war must render necessary, lead to the true solution of the difficulty raised by Mr. Balfour. The internal affairs of the army are indeed one department, but the position of head of that department, while it could properly be filled by a Commander-in Chief, is not and cannot be identical with that of the minister who personifies the Cabinet in relation to the army. The minister ought to be concerned chiefly with the connexion between the national policy and the military means of giving it effect. The intention to make the Secretary of State head of the military department seems to me to prove that the Government really takes no account of what should be his higher duties. The lack of the conception of a national policy is thus about to embarrass the military management of the army.

It is not my object here to consider in detail how the principles of organization for war should be applied to the British army. That subject has been fully treated by Sir Charles Dilke and myself in the last chapter of our "Imperial Defence," a chapter which has not been criticised except with approval. But I am concerned to show that the German practice cannot at any point be quoted in support either of the recommendations of the Hartington Commission or of the proposals now announced by the Government, which to any one who regards them from the point of view of the nation, that is of the defence of the Empire, must appear to be at once unnecessary, rash and inopportune.

3, MADEIRA ROAD,
STREATHAM, S.W.
September 3rd, 1895.

[[1]] See in particular the passage in Moltke, Gesammelte Schriften, V. 298-9, which I have translated in an essay entitled "The Brain of the Navy," p. 28.

[[2]] It seems incredible that so important and so interesting a work as Moltke's military correspondence in relation to the Danish war of 1864 should hitherto have been ignored by English military writers.

[[3]] The reference is to a passage in the last chapter of the first edition, which has been rewritten.

[[4]] The passage which Moltke disliked was erased in the first edition, its place being supplied by words borrowed from his letter. In this edition it is printed as it was first written, in order to make the letter intelligible. The last chapter has in this edition been condensed, and I hope made simpler and clearer. One or two other slight changes in expression arise from the reconsideration of phrases which Count Moltke marked in reading the proof.