LECTURE I

MILITARY HISTORY: ITS SCOPE AND DEFINITION

When in the spring of the year 1913 my old College did me the honour to appoint me its first lecturer in Military History, I was obliged for the first time to ask myself seriously, What is military history? I confess that I have found it very difficult to furnish a satisfactory answer. Some would reply with a light heart that military history is the history of wars and warring. But what, in its turn, is war? It has been defined as an instrument of policy for the imposition of the will of one community upon another by force of arms. The definition is not a bad one. But force of arms is a very vague term, and must not be taken necessarily to imply an armed force in the ordinary acceptation of the words. You will remember that after the French fleet had been swept by us from the seas in 1805, Napoleon, unable to attack England by any other means, decreed the exclusion of British manufactures from the Continent, and endeavoured to ruin her by shutting her out of her markets. This he was able to do because his previous conquests had placed the control of many of the principal ports on the Continent in his hands. But though he strove thus to inflict his will upon England by might of arms, the armed men necessary for enforcing it were nothing more formidable than a small body of Custom-house officers. No doubt these functionaries, or some of them, carried weapons and in case of need were prepared to use them; but they cannot be considered as a military body. None the less as an act of war the Continental System was a bitter and deadly stroke, which nearly proved successful.

Is the history of the Continental System, therefore, military history? So far as concerns the invasion of Spain, Portugal and Russia to coerce those countries into the acceptance of it, undoubtedly it is. But as regards England, the power at which it was really aimed, what are we to say of it? How did we endeavour to combat it? How does any country invariably combat the commercial restrictions of any other? First by imposing retaliatory restrictions of her own, or engaging in a war of blockades or tariffs, which may be called regular commercial warfare; secondly, by the practice of smuggling, which may be called irregular commercial warfare. Is the history of a war of tariffs, then, military history? If we answer in the affirmative there is no escape from the logical conclusion that the never-ceasing contest between smugglers and revenue-officers in all countries is military history. Moreover, since revenue-officers are only departmental police, it follows that the external struggle between the breakers and the upholders of the law at large—between criminals and the police—is also military history. But this is to say that the history of social communities generally is military history; and I cannot think this to have been in the mind of the generous founder of the lecturership which I have the honour to hold.

But can we then lay down the general proposition that the breach—the forcible breach—of commercial regulations is not military history? I do not think we can, if we bear in mind how Spain, in virtue of a Papal bull, excluded all other nations from commerce with the new world, and how successive Englishmen for many generations insisted upon flouting her. Nor can we say that in many cases the conflict between supporters and breakers of the law is not military history. It is merely a question of degree. A fight between three drunken men and the police is a scuffle. A fight between three hundred men and the police is a riot. A fight between three hundred thousand and the police is civil war; and we cannot exclude civil war from military history, for it would mean the sacrifice, among the English-speaking race alone, of the campaigns of Cromwell, George Washington and Robert Lee. Altogether I think that we must abandon the attempt to define military history as the history of wars and warring. I feel tempted to ask in despair not "What is military history?" but rather "What is not military history?" since all history is but the record of the strife of men for the subsistence of their bodies or the prevalence of their opinions. But we must be patient for yet a little while, and try once more.

Let us begin, then, by laying it down provisionally that military history is the history of the strife of communities. This is not enough; for communities have been known before now to fight with anathemas, and such a conflict belongs rather to the domain of religious than of military history. Shall we say then that it is the history of the strife of communities for self-preservation or expansion? This is open to the obvious criticism that communities have fought and will fight again for many other objects than the two above-mentioned—for a woman, for a creed, for a principle moral or political, or even for nothing at all but from sheer force of habit. So it will be wiser for us to avoid any specification of the objects of strife, or we may find ourselves in trouble. It may be true in a sense to say that a tantrum of Madame de Pompadour cost the French their empire in North America and in India; but it is not the whole truth, nor nearly the whole truth. Even the best and greatest of historians are but gropers in a thick darkness, and epigrams are the most deceitful of will-o'-the-wisps.

Let us now, as we needs must, strengthen our definition a little, and say that military history is the history of the strife of communities expressed through the conflict of organised bands of armed men. I am obliged to say bands of armed men so as to exclude such a case as a duel between two or more chosen champions of quarrelling communities; and I add the word organised so as to indicate that, below a certain stage of civilisation, there can be no military history. This is a second definition, but still imperfect; and I am afraid that I cannot yet improve it. It leaves a vast field for the survey of a lecturer, far vaster than I have the knowledge to cover; and, if Trinity should endure for another ten centuries, my successors will never want material for interesting and instructive lectures. And let no man persuade you that the subject is trivial or unimportant—that the study of war is the study of a relic of barbarism to be eschewed by the serious, the devout and the humane. I am not denying that war is a terrible—from some points of view even a hideous—thing. Since its object is to compel a number of people to do what they do not wish, by making their lives a burden to them, it must sometimes be a hideous thing. But, after all, the system of forcing people to observe a certain line of conduct under penalties is that upon which all human society is founded. We are all subject to it at this moment, and have been from the beginning of our lives. You remember the mother in Punch—"Go and see what baby is doing, and tell her she mustn't." "Thou shalt not" is the basis of four-fifths of the ancient code of law which is most familiar to us, and of all other codes since. But in every community there are a certain number of individuals who answer "Thou shalt not" with a resolute "I will"; and these we ostracise, or imprison, or hang. We call such people lunatics or criminals, accordingly as we consider them responsible or not responsive for their actions, and we treat them as we think that they deserve; but, if by chance their opinions should later prevail even for a time, we proclaim them apostles or martyrs. There is, in fact, always the danger that, when we think ourselves to be merely punishing a criminal, we may really be torturing a great reformer. Hence a certain proportion of folks among us shrink from this system of coercion, and would have no government at all. Others again, looking upon the existence of private property as the main reason for the existence of the policeman, would have communities share all things in common. I mention these facts to show you that the employment of force receives from some thinkers equal condemnation, whether to impose the will of a community upon its own citizens, or upon those of some other community.

But no one on that account has ventured to stigmatize the study of penal codes, and of the organisation for putting them into force, as ignoble or unprofitable. The sheriff, for instance, and his functions are approached with respect, by some historians even with awe. "Ah," say the despisers of military history, "but the sheriff is an instrument for compelling obedience to the law, not the leader of a host whose business it is to slaughter and destroy." The law! and what is the law but the formulated will which some section of the community, possibly a majority, but always in former days and frequently, even at present, a minority, seeks to impose upon the whole? And if breakers of the law resist the sheriff or policeman, will he not if necessary slaughter them, and destroy any shelter in which they may have taken refuge? Of course he will, and "the law" will uphold him for so doing. "But," reply the objectors, "you forget that civil law is not always a mere ordinance of man; it may have the sanction of divine authority." I speak here with all reverence, but how many are the armies and the leaders that have claimed that theirs was the cause of God, and have fared forth to war in His name? I am not speaking now of modern armies, though they too invariably invoke the help of the God of Battles, and call him to witness that their cause is just. Look at the Crusades on one side, look on the other at the mighty and overwhelming conquests of Islam. Look at the extinction of Christianity in North Africa; look at the eight centuries of conflict which banished the Mohammedan faith from Spain. Look at the religious wars of Christians in Europe; and not least at our own Puritans. Look finally at the bitter struggles of Hindu and Mohammedan in India. There was not one of these parties that did not claim, that did not for the most part heartily believe, that it was fighting to uphold the Law of God.

No! in its essence there is no difference between the force that imposes the will of a man upon his neighbour, and that which imposes his will upon his enemy. In the more primitive days of England the duties of the sheriff and his posse comitatus extended to foreign enemies on English soil as well as to domestic law-breakers. Do we not to this day speak of those guilty of acts of violence as breakers of the King's Peace; men, that is, who seek to bring about a state of war and must be suppressed by the methods of war—taken prisoners, wounded or unwounded, and in the last resort killed? What was the origin of our own standing army? It was formed, as you doubtless know, out of a remnant of the victorious army of the Parliament which had overthrown the monarchy, a remnant which was saved from disbandment in order to overawe the turbulent of London, or in other words to serve as a body of police. It continued to be the only efficient instrument for imposing the will of the Government upon the people until 1829, when the present police-force was established. And the police are a standing army, neither more or less. The only essential difference between police and soldiers is that the former are employed mainly in the coercion of subjects of the State which levies them, while the function of the latter is to coerce the subjects of foreign states. It would not be inaccurate to say that police are soldiers against domestic enemies, and an army police against foreign enemies.

And now observe that we have found a second definition of military history. It is the history of the external police of communities and nations. But external police, you may object, implies the existence of something which, for want of a better word, we must call external law. Is there such a thing as external law? There is a thing called the law of nations or international law, which is concerned chiefly, though not exclusively, with the relations between belligerents and neutrals, but which it simply custom, and should not be called law, because there is no international police to enforce it. Any nation may defy it, if she thinks it worth while, and a great many have defied it in the past and will defy it in the future, not necessarily with any damage to themselves. The same may be said of the International Tribunal of Arbitration at the Hague. Its decrees and decisions may be excellent, and nations may bind themselves beforehand to accept them; but nations are not remarkable for the observance of inconvenient agreements, where there is no penalty for violating them. It is a painful fact, but in its relations to its neighbours every community is a law unto itself, the nature of that law being principally determined by the community's powers of enforcement. Police first, law afterwards, is the rule between nation and nation—a formula which may be rendered more tersely still by the phrase, Might is Right. In a sense, therefore, though not in the sense generally attached to the words, military history is the history of the law of nations, which is the law of force; or, if you prefer it, of the law of force which is the law of nations.

A revolting thought, perhaps some of you will say! Have all the efforts of countless generations of good and holy men to seek peace and ensue it, resulted in no greater success than this? Let us have the courage to face facts and answer boldly, Yes; for be very sure that no piety of aspiration can dignify nor excuse the moral cowardice that seeks to evade them. You know that late in the 17th century a company of worthy and excellent men formed the settlement of Pennsylvania in North America. They were members of the Society of Friends, who would have nothing to do with war, and consequently bought their lands from the Indians instead of taking them by force or fraud. Frugal, thrifty and industrious, they soon grew wealthy, and extended their borders further and further, until they came into collision with other tribes of Indians, who one day fell upon the outlying settlers with fire and sword. In utter dismay the sufferers appealed to the Government of the province for protection; but the Colonial Assembly would not do violence to their tenets and ignored the appeal, leaving their unhappy and inoffensive frontiersmen to be massacred. At length, goaded to desperation, the settlers came down to Philadelphia with their arms in their hands, and threatened violence unless the Assembly voted money, for supply of ammunition, and other measures of defence forthwith. Thereupon the Assembly yielded, but still they would not openly pass a vote for the purchase of gunpowder. To save their conscience they voted money only for the purchase of corn or other grain, which, as gunpowder is made up of grains, was sufficient warrant for the acquisition of the necessary but unspeakable article. To such contemptible subterfuge are men driven who refuse to face facts. I understand the feelings of those who deplore that the government of human society should rest ultimately upon force, but I have no patience with those who pretend that it does not. It can profit no man to be obliged so to shape the actions of his life that they may square with a fundamental lie.

Accepting then the fact—for such I believe it to be—that the law of nations is the law of force, let us waste no time in lamentations. In the first place they are useless; and in the second they seem to me highly presumptuous; for what are we, or what is our knowledge, that we should aspire to correct the course of this world's governance? Let us rather consider what is meant by the word force, as an element in the conflict of communities. Force, in the human creature, is of two kinds, moral and physical; and in war, as Napoleon himself said, the moral is to the physical as four to one. What is this moral force? It is an indefinable consciousness of superiority. And whence does it arise? I must summon a poet to help me with my answer.

Self-reverence, which can be based only upon high aspirations and high ideals; self-knowledge, which combines the courage to face facts, the patience to accept them, the constancy to turn them to good account; self-control, the offspring of self-denial and self-discipline. We are too much inclined to think of war as a matter of combats, demanding above all things physical courage. It is really a matter of fasting and thirsting; of toiling and waking; of lacking and enduring; which demands above all things moral courage. Yet let us hasten to add that, without bodily soundness and strength to resist privation, hardship and fatigue, an army is naught. And here we strike the peculiarity which makes war the true touch-stone of nations. It is the supreme test of their merits and demerits both moral and physical. By a community's art, literature, science and philosophy you may take the measure of its intellectual attainments; through its administrative institutions and laws you may form some judgment of its political intelligence; from the bodily structure and condition of its citizens you may form conclusions as to its physical fitness; but of the general soundness of the body politic, of the capacity of its leaders, of the devotion of their followers, of the moral force which inspires all ages and both sexes to endure hardship and sorrow with cheerfulness, and to meet adversity with confidence unshaken and with courage undaunted—for all this the trial of all trials is war.

Military history is the history of these trials. Does it seem to you a small, or ignoble, or unprofitable thing? But, it may be objected, this is an unfair way of putting the matter. No doubt it may be profitable to compare the political institutions of some effete community with those of the young, virile and vigorous communities which swept it out of existence. But the details of fire and sword, of massacre and devastation, of the blood of men and the tears of women, are they profitable? And the elaborate principles of strategy and tactics—that is to say the bringing of the armed force up to the field of decision, and the handling of it to the best advantage when there; with their ancillary sciences of fortification and poliorketics, that is to say, of setting up strong places and knocking them down again—are they profitable? What are the art of war and the science of military organisation but the art and science of destruction? Can the study of these be profitable?

Let us clear our minds of cant. What is the economy of this world, so far as we have eyes to see and intellects to understand it, but destruction and renewal, destruction and renewal? And it is really impossible, except by our petty human standards, to distinguish the one from the other. I have seen—and perhaps some of you may have seen the like—what we call a desert, of a thousand square miles of pumice-stone. This pumice-stone is a layer which varies from six to fifteen feet in depth; and below it lie the trunks of gigantic trees, all black and charred, which were scathed and overthrown by the same terrific volcanic explosion which afterwards buried them in pumice. The soil must have been fertile to raise such trees; and men lament the destruction which has made so large an area into a waste. But what they mean by destruction and waste is simply the change which has rendered it useless, so far as they can see, for purposes of producing food and exchangeable commodities immediately to the profit of men—that and nothing more. Whether it be destruction or renewal in the scheme of nature we cannot tell. But let us pass to the works of man, the great destroyer. What does a field of corn mean but that the plants which originally grew there have been ruthlessly destroyed to make way for those that better suit the purposes of man, and that an unknown quantity of animal life, dependent upon the plants so destroyed, has perished with them? What does a herd of cattle in a field mean but the destruction of all wild cattle, till these became tame enough to await their turn of destruction for the service of man? And as with plants and the inferior animals, so does man deal with man. He endeavours to destroy those that do not suit his purpose, and to replace them by others. And this he does by many other methods besides those which we group under the name of war. Within the memory of living men there were many excellent but simple gentlemen who thought that what is called Free Trade would soon be adopted by every civilised country in the world, and that then wars would cease. The prediction has not been verified, nor can I see that the world would be very much the better if it had been. For commerce is not, as is generally supposed, a peaceful pursuit. What does successful commerce mean? The under-selling of competitors; which means in turn cheaper production than is possible to competitors. But cheap production, other things being equal, depends in these days chiefly upon two things—cheap labour, which means low wages, and the best of machinery. Who can tell how many lives have been sacrificed to low wages in the winning of any commercial competition; or how many men, women and children have been starved when machinery, either absolutely or practically new, has driven a mass of bread-winners out of employment? And these are the casualties only on the victorious side. What have they been on the beaten side, when whole industries have been ruined? If we could arrive at a just estimate of the casualty lists filled by commerce, I doubt greatly if they would be lower than those filled by war. Improved machinery, in the case of a great many manufactures, is as truly an engine of destruction as a torpedo or a heavy gun. It is meant to destroy other competing machinery and to drive its workmen from it, just as a torpedo is meant to destroy a ship and send its crew to the bottom. A town deserted and falling to ruin owing to loss of trade and consequent loss of population, is as truly destroyed as if it had been battered to pieces by shot and shell.

This, it may be said, is an unkind way of stating the matter. The superior machinery supplants and replaces the inferior. Quite so. There is in a general way renewal as well as destruction; but the superior machinery does not replace the men who have perished in assuring its triumph on the one side, or in succumbing to that triumph on the other. And after all what is the general purport of war but to replace what is inferior by what is superior? What are the rise and fall of civilisations, empires, states, nations and communities, but the process of supplanting the inferior by the superior, or at any rate the subjection of the inferior to the superior? Military history is the history of that process, and it is no more the history of destruction than any other kind of history. I do not suppose that the most tender-hearted member of the Society of Friends would take exception to the study of the legislative enactments whereby, quite apart from warlike measures, we wrested their former commercial superiority from the Dutch. He would not call it a history of destruction, and yet it was so—to the Dutch. In the case of a military war the casualty lists are published, and everyone says "How shocking." In the case of a commercial war it is announced that such and such a firm has closed its works through bankruptcy; and few, unless they chance to be share-holders, think more about the matter. There may be some hundreds of people deprived of their livelihood, but few consider that. Military victors feed their prisoners of war: commercial victors leave them to starve. And yet commerce is held to be humane, and war very much the contrary; while captains of industry are held in honour by men to whom the fame of a captain in war gives sincere and conscientious affliction.

Thus you see how futile, however well-intended, are peace-societies and similar institutions, inasmuch as they recognise only one description—the military—of war. It is terrible to think how true is the saying of Erasmus, Homo homini lupus. We like to be successful ourselves, and we like our friends to be successful also, but we seldom reflect that every success is won at the cost of another's failure. Even here in Cambridge, and among those merriest of mortals, undergraduates, the stern inexorable law asserts itself. For one whom a class-list makes happy, how many does it make miserable? For one to whom it offers the prospect of food and warmth, to how many does it threaten cold and want? Homo homini lupus, that is individual history. Gentes gentibus lupi, that is universal history.

But to return to a question which I have still left unanswered, wherein lies the profit for men not of the military profession, of studying the principles and the history of war, with the terrible details in which the history abounds so frequently? One chief profit, as I take it, is to learn the nature of the supreme test to which a nation may be subjected, so that she may equip herself morally and physically to pass through the ordeal with success. Let me repeat to you that war is less a matter of courage than of endurance. Of really brave men, men who from sheer love of fighting cannot be kept out of fire, the proportion is about one in a thousand. Of real cowards, men who literally cannot be induced to face fire in any circumstances, the proportion is about the same. The remainder can by training and discipline be brought to do their duty with more or less bravery, which is sufficient—or at any rate must be considered sufficient—for the purpose. Such training and discipline are a purely military matter, to which I shall presently return. But endurance depends upon moral and physical attributes which, though a great leader or regimental pride may do much to enhance them, are principally the concern of the statesman. Let us deal first with the physical requirements of a soldier.

First and foremost he must be mature, a man and not a boy; otherwise, no matter how great his pluck, he will never be able to withstand the hard work of a campaign. There is hardly a country which has not again and again filled up its muster-rolls with children, and deceived itself into the belief that it was enlarging its armies, instead of filling up its military hospitals and graveyards. Boys can of course do the work of garrisons within certain limits; but it is (to speak brutally) cheaper to knock them on the head at once and bury them at home than to send them upon active service in the field. On the other hand, men must not be too old, otherwise they succumb to rheumatic complaints in consequence of exposure to cold and wet. For the rest, the soundness of the feet, in order that men may be able to march; of the eyes, so that they may be able to see; and of the teeth, are of the greatest importance. An enormous proportion of men on active service die of dysentery or enteric fever, due to bad and ill-cooked food; and want of teeth to masticate that food aggravates the evil immensely. Bad sight and bad teeth are very common in the inhabitants of large towns, as also of course is inferior physique generally. Such defects weaken a nation for war; and a wise government will not let them continue without endeavouring to arrest them.