The battles of to-day take such a scale, last so long, and are fought under such strange conditions, that we have to invent new names for them. They are neither ‘sieges’ nor ‘battles,’ but a combination of both; and so we call them siege-battles. That ‘first and last of fights, king-making Waterloo,’ when set against the arithmetic of the present war, dwindles into a skirmish. The little shallow valley outside Brussels, where Napoleon and Wellington measured swords with each other, and one of the greatest soldiers in history ended his career, is in area three miles by two, and lies open to a single glance. Waterloo itself began at 11 o’clock in the morning, and ended before 9 o’clock at night; it might have been fought under the Factories Act.
Let there be set beside it the great siege-battle of the Aisne, which began on September 15, 1914, and is going on still, with louder thunders and vaster slaughter than ever. Its field has lengthened into a ribbon of contorted trenches stretching from the North Sea to the Alps, a distance of 500 miles, and from, or in, those strange, vast, far-running ditches, now for nearly two years, some 3,000,000 men, the best fighters in history, armed with an artillery which suggests nothing so much as the weapons with which Milton equipped Satan and his hosts in their war with the angels, have been slaying each other. The deep thunder of the guns, the tumult of fighting men, have never ceased to sound at one point or another along those five hundred miles for nearly two years. Verdun, with all its passion and slaughter, its six months’ wrestle of guns and infantry, is a mere episode in this tremendous siege-battle; a score of Waterloos and Marengos have been fought during its progress, and have scarcely found a record.
The most brilliant chapter in British military history before the present war was certainly Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsula. They lasted six years. The British forces under Wellington seldom approached, and never exceeded, 50,000 men. Napier condenses the story into a single sentence of stately and resonant prose. In that great struggle the British forces ‘fought and won nineteen pitched battles, made or sustained ten sieges, took four great fortresses; killed, wounded, and took 200,000 enemies, etc.;’ and the cost of all this is to be found in ‘the bones of 40,000 British soldiers’ which ‘lie scattered on the plains and mountains of the Peninsula.’ But Sir John French’s army in France lost in three weeks more than Wellington’s armies in the Peninsula lost in six years! In a single episode of the siege-battle beyond the Aisne Valley—say, the second battle of Ypres, which lasted four days—the British employed greater forces, and sustained greater losses, than in Wellington’s six campaigns in the Peninsula.
The most brilliant, desperate, and bloody siege of those campaigns was that of Badajos, in 1812. No one who has read the story Napier tells of how, on the night Badajos was stormed, the men of the Light Division died on its dark breach, can ever forget the tale. Now the siege of Badajos lasted twenty days; it cost Wellington 5000 men. The storming parties were let loose at 10 o’clock on the night of April 6; when morning dawned Badajos was won. Compare this with Verdun. The German attack began on February 23. Some 3000 guns—amongst them the great howitzers that destroyed Namur—poured for days and nights an unceasing tempest of high explosives on the French lines. Then the assault was launched. For nearly six months the thunder of the German guns has risen and sunk, but never ceased; again and again, now on one point, now on another, the vast grey waves of the German infantry have flung themselves in bloody ebb and flow on the French position. What the German losses have been can only be guessed; they must reach half a million men. And still the tricolour flies over Verdun.
If we take the fighting on the sea, again, there is the same tremendous increase of scale. Trafalgar is—or was, till May 31 of the present year—the greatest sea-fight under the British flag, and it is curious to set it in contrast with the fight in the North Sea. The resemblances and differences of the two great battles are alike most striking. That little, one-eyed, one-armed, weather-beaten, sun-tanned figure, Nelson, is the dominating figure in Trafalgar; and he is still the most famous of all who have led the fleets of Great Britain into battle. But if we turn to the recent battle in the North Sea—a battle so splendidly fought, and so ill-told—it is clear that, in quickness of vision to read the iron alphabet of sea-battle, and in the dash and fire with which he dared all risks to turn and hold his enemy, Sir David Beatty is of Nelson’s school, and has ‘the Nelson touch.’ Nelson himself, indeed, could hardly have done better on that foggy afternoon in the North Sea than Sir David Beatty did. For seamanship, for technical skill, and for pure valour, the North Sea fight, in brief, will compare with Trafalgar. But in its general aspect, in the scale of the forces engaged, and in the amount of destruction achieved—and the terrifying speed of that destruction—the two battles are utterly unlike each other. A comparison betwixt them shows how completely the whole physiognomy of sea-battle is changed. Beatty’s six battle-cruisers carried only 9-inch armour, but they had the hitting-power of Dreadnoughts and the pace of destroyers; and speed was the great feature of the North Sea fight. The ships engaged under both flags were amongst the swiftest afloat, and the battle was fought at full speed. At the critical moment of the fight the ships of Beatty’s squadron were travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, firing as they raced. They could head, and turn, the line of German ships because they outpaced them. But if the ships were swift, death was swifter. It was as they whirled around across the head of the German line that the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable, in turn, were destroyed, and destroyed in a space of time to be reckoned in minutes—whether by the concentrated fire of the big German Dreadnoughts, or by the misadventure of striking a floating mine, is not clear.
It is exactly at the two points of furious speed and of destructive energy that the contrast betwixt Trafalgar and the fight in the North Sea is greatest. At Trafalgar, as everyone knows, the Franco-Spanish fleet was drawn up, or had drifted, into a straggling crescent four miles from tip to tip—thirty-three great line-of-battle ships, armed with more than 3000 guns, a curving forest of masts and flags. The British in two columns—Nelson in the Victory leading one column, Collingwood in the Royal Sovereign the other—bore down on the enemy, but there was no speed in the movement. They drifted, rather than sailed, at the rate of less than two miles an hour—less than a walking-pace, that is—into this curve of hostile guns; and the coolness of the British crews and their officers was in keeping with the deliberation with which their ships approached the enemy. The Royal Sovereign was a quarter of a mile ahead of its column, and was certain to receive the concentrated fire of the enemy’s line for nearly half an hour without support, yet Collingwood was not only nibbling but paring an apple on the quarter-deck while waiting for the great game to begin.
Nelson’s three-deckers, compared with the modern Dreadnought or battle-cruiser, were tiny ships. They had an average tonnage of a little over 2000 tons—the Victory herself was of 2223 tons. Now, a ship of the Queen Elizabeth class is of 27,000 tons, equal to the tonnage of the whole column of Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar. The Victory carried 101 guns, about one-third being 32-pounders; there were only two carronades firing a shot of sixty-two pounds. If every gun on the Victory had been fired in one sudden broadside, the entire weight of metal would have been 2296 pounds, or a little over one ton of iron, and the effective range would be less than half a mile. But the Queen Elizabeth, with her 15-inch guns, could discharge, in a single broadside, twenty-seven tons of steel, and could strike her mark with that tempest of flying metal—a swarm of aerolites—once every thirty seconds, a dozen miles away.
The number of men killed at Trafalgar, leaving out the wounded, was only 449. On the Victory itself 57 were killed, on the ‘Fighting’ Téméraire 47, on the Royal Sovereign 47, on the Belle Isle 33, or a total of 184 killed in the four leading ships. But the Cressy, the Aboukir, and the Hogue were sunk in fifteen minutes—without seeing the submarine that sank them—and 680 seamen were drowned, a loss fifty per cent. greater than that of the whole of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar. Sir David Beatty’s two battle-cruisers, the Queen Mary and the Indefatigable, were sunk in a time as brief as the three unfortunate cruisers, and sunk when travelling at their highest speed, and firing as they raced. Each carried a complement of 900 men, and when they went down the loss of life was four times as great as that of Trafalgar.
A century hence what may be called the German psychology, as revealed in this war, will still puzzle the curiosity and challenge the imagination of unborn generations. For the first time in history we have the spectacle of a nation of seventy million people, Christian in faith, highly civilised, strong on the practical side, of shrewdest business capacity, with a genius for business and for organisation, a nation that has given to education, or what it thinks is education, a larger place in its life than any other in history, yet which somehow is smitten with a sort of insanity, an insanity partly moral and partly intellectual. And what heightens the wonder is the circumstance that it mistakes its very lunacy for culture. To make the tragedy complete, it is an insanity organised, armed, disciplined, terrible, equipped with all the resources of science, and having borrowed from science new engines and subtleties of destruction without precedent in the history of war.
In its essence what we are watching is the spiritual bankruptcy of a great nation; but the whole story bristles with psychological problems. Its spiritual landmarks have shifted. Good and evil are terms in its politics which have not merely lost, but—a much more terrible thing—have exchanged their significance. It mistakes might for right. It labels its vices as virtues.