WAR
It is doubtful how far, even if as civilians we get over our natural dislike of talking of military change as “progress,” there has been any considerable advance in the larger aspects of military science within the century. The genius of Bonaparte, working upon the foundations laid by Frederick the Great, established a century ago principles which are essentially applicable to the military matters of the present day; and although the scientific developments of artillery and musketry have affected the dispositions of battle-fields, the essential principles of the art of preparation for war and of strategy stand where they stood before.
Scharnhorst was the Prussian officer who began to reduce the Napoleonic military system to rules applicable to the use of German armies. Under Bonaparte the whole management of the army was too often concentrated in the hands of the man of genius, and the actual method of Napoleon had the defect that, failing the man of genius at the head of the army, it broke down. The main change made by the Germans, who followed Scharnhorst, in the course of the century has been to codify the Napoleonic system so that it was possible to more generally decentralize in practice without impairing its essence. They have also established a division of its supply department (under a Minister of War) from the “brain of the army,” as Mr. Spenser Wilkinson has well called it, which manages the preparation for the strategy of war and the strategy itself. These so-called Prussian principles of decentralization and “initiative” are, however, not new and not Prussian, and may be discovered in the conversations of Napoleon Bonaparte. The French in 1870 had forgotten his teaching, and the Germans had retained it. It is, nevertheless, the case that the number of men placed in the field by the military powers having increased, the intelligent initiative of corps commanders and even of generals commanding divisions has become the more essential. It is impossible that the great general staff can give orders in advance which will cover the responsibility of all the inferior generals, and brains have to be added in all ranks to obedience. The commander-in-chief in the field cannot with advantage drown himself in details, and he can only provide in his orders an outline sketch which his subordinates in various parts of the field of operations have to fill in. The “initiative of subordinates” is but the natural division of labor.
If I, a civilian student of military politics, rather than a military expert, have been called upon to write upon the military progress of the century, it must be because of a desire to bring largely into the account the changes in military organization which on the continent of Europe have made it permanently national, and which in the United States made it temporarily national during the Civil War, and would make it so again in the event of any fresh struggle on a great scale in which the North American continent might become involved.
Although the “armed nation” has replaced in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Roumania, and Bulgaria the smaller professional armies of the eighteenth century, the popular belief that the numerical strength of field armies has enormously increased is not so completely well founded as at first sight might be supposed. It is true that each nation can put into the entire field of warfare larger numbers than that nation could put into the field a century ago. But it is still not beyond the bounds of possibility that in certain cases small armies may produce results as remarkable as those which attended British operations in the Peninsula in the early part of the nineteenth century, and, on the other hand, although there will, upon the whole, in future continental wars, be larger armies in the field, no one general is likely personally to handle or to place upon a field of battle a larger army than that with which Napoleon traversed Europe before he invaded Russia.
The principles of pure military science as set forth in books have not been greatly changed during the nineteenth century. The Prussian Clausewitz only explained for us the doctrines of Bonaparte; and the latest writers—such as the Frenchmen Derrécagaix and Lewal—only continue Clausewitz. The theory of the armed nation has received extension, but, after all, the Prussian system in its essentials dates from Jena, and the steps by which it has produced the admirable existing armies of France, Austria, and Roumania have been but slow.
The United States stand apart. Their resources are so fabulously great that they and they alone are able to wait for war before making war preparations. No power will attack the United States. All powers will submit to many things and yield many strong points rather than fight the United States. The only territorial neighbors of the republic are not only not in a position to enter into military rivalry with her on the American continent, but are not advancing their military establishments with the growth of their or of her population. They are of themselves not only unable to attack, but equally unable in the long run effectively to resist her.
The whole question, then, unfortunately for us Europeans, is a European question, and I need make but little reference to happier lands across the greater seas.