THE MECHANISM OF WAR.
11.-THE MAN.
IVO more proper study for Empire-building mankind,— 11 none, at any rate, whose total neglect would be as disastrous as its partial neglect has been expensive. And of all the figures who have moved across the well-worn stage of English history there has not been one of more absorbing and vital interest than this same humble actor in the greatest show on earth, the British private soldier,—the brick of the fortress, the ultimo ratio of all the senatorial thunderings and diplomatic minacity ever spluttered and muttered from red- morocco chairs at unaccommodating "gentlemen from foreign parts."
So that being the "primitive function "—or, if you will, the precipitation of the mighty noise we make in the world— the private soldier is indisputably an interesting object to e. community which I have already assumed as being inherently concerned in integers. But one despairs of deter- minating this particular human quantity. The aggregate to which he contributes were easier to " round off" in two columns than his infinitesimal self, for within him lies a mass• of contradiction and antithesis, such as surely never con- spired in one unit to baffle its analyst. Is he or is he not a good soldier? To answer that one must first know what constitutes a good soldier. Well, then, is he or is he not a fine man in a military sense,—i.e., if not a good soldier, has he the makings of one ? When the pool is dark and muddy, he who would recover the silver coin of truth lying at the bottom will waste his time if he stand peering on the bank; he must dive boldly and take his chance, trusting only to such faint knowledge as he possesses,—the depth of the water, and how the submerged token, if he sees it, may be dis- tinguished from the valueless pebbles surrounding it. And diving in this way after the truth about our soldier, I grab at him below the surface and find him thus :—the finest man and the worst soldier of all the race of fighting men. A. terrible discovery in many ways : firstly, because it is a paradox, which
when it is true is truth in its most insupportable form; secondly, because for the life of us we cannot tell which part of it we would rather have away, and which possess; thirdly, because of the sneaking suspicion attending the con- tradiction that its opposing metals, like many good ones, are not interfusible. Of which the first two, being pure meta- physics, cannot be discussed 'here, or in any theatre of leas than three-volume dimensions. But from the third, though verging dangerously on the "ha-ha" of ontology, something— the comfort of argument at least—may perhaps be plucked, as little boys pull apples from overhanging branches without jumping over forbidden boundaries.
In South Africa our men showed many qualities whose chief surprise to a detached observer was the utter lack of surprise they elicited from the world at large, and, more striking if less curious, from their exhibitors. They were, apparently, a foregone conclusion, and as such played their vital part as unnoticed as the hydraulic machinery of the organ in the Albert Hall. Endurance, steadfastness, bravery, temperance more marvellous in victory than in defeat, cheer- fulness when the face of events bore only the grim stare of disaster, callousness when one would have thought that every nerve was being seared by the hot iron of war,—all these, and many more, did our soldiers display to friends and enemies ; not spasmodically with sudden lurid blotches on the battle - picture, but invariably, a smooth magnificent monochrome, immeasurably deep, incalculably valuable, and to one who loves his kind indescribably beautiful. There are times when one is not over-proud of one's citizenship of mankind, but few will return from this cam- paign uninspired by the thought that now he can with a firm voice proclaim what perhaps he has hitherto but whispered shamefacedly to himself,—Homo sum I And the qualities I have enumerated were but the broader tones, beneath and around which lay many so elusive and rare that there are as yet no names for them. Language lags sadly behind its genesis, the psyche its mother ; how many things can one feel for which no nomenclature is at hand! What label, for instance, shall we put on the esprit which permits a line of soldiers advancing under a devastating fire to yell with laughter and delight, and throw their helmets at a hare springing up before them, as a row of beaters does in a covert. Forgotten the enemy and the terrible position ahead, for- gotten friends falling alongside, or lying in ones and twos over the course behind, remembered only the little furry fugitive bobbing like a brown ball amidst the spits of dust of the bullets, pursued by a stentorian roar as kindly as the " Run, puss ! " of the gentle old sportsman at Altcar I I have seen that not once, but several times, and hundreds will bear me witness. So, too, with a loose and a runaway horse on the battlefield; he would delay the finest attack ever con- ceived by genius, so completely would his exciting career absorb the attention of every soldier within sight ; so, too, would a curious snake in the grass, or an apple-laden tree, or anything trivial and unconnected with the work in hand. Can it be a form of nostalgia which prompts men far from home to snatch at homely things,—the hare fleeing as he has fled a thousand times across the earth-scented furrow of the home-farm ; the loose horse as he has always galloped from his pursuer across the paddock, with stiff, uplifted head and sudden bucks and gambols ? It may be that, or it may be the effect of the strain which makes men in trouble seek unconscious relief in trifles, such as drumming tunes with feverish fingers on the table or counting the bricks in the wall. Whatever it is, it has no name, and it is there in a thousand forms, a living thing, a thing of immense power on the field of battle, and, I believe, peculiar to our of all the world's soldiers.
Those who would fully know the British private must walk with him into the gates of death, for there only is his wonder- ful, almost appalling, sameness to be seen. Lie among the supports behind the firing line, listen to the bullets wailing and whistling overhead and hammering querulously for admis- sion at your little stone shelter, and to the great shells thudding and crashing near you; you may, being an educated man, wonder at the base uses to which your education is being put, and pity those who have it not to sustain them in this hour of need. But peep over your wall (you do it at your peril), and you will swiftly inherit the earth by being
reduced to the ranks of the meek. Along the steep hillside sprawl soldiers in every position of discomfort, — Tom, Dick, and Harry in the extremity of peril. Tom is per- functorily reading a well-read letter from his mother ; Dick, careful soul, wearily casts up once more his little cash account, kept in a booklet a degree more grimy than himself ; Harry is endeavouring the impossible, to cook a scrap of bacon on a stone over a fire of cartridge-paper. These men are all achieving the impossible, to he ordinary in Hades, and once more, I believe no other men on earth could do the like.
The smaller the canvas the more the average artist should endeavour to attain to simplicity and breadth of treatment. After all, a perfect study of a hand or foot is as delightful to the true eye as a battle-piece : on a tile, at any rate, it is infinitely more intelligible. So that of all the manly qualities of our soldier I have insisted chiefly on this one of equability on the battlefield, though of others he possesses enough to render the enumeration of them a mere descriptive catalogue in the space at my command. And this one I select because of its pure manliness, and because I believe that upon it could be built the superstructure necessary to make the Army the impregnable tower of strength it should be, that of soldiership, or martial efficiency and skill. There is nothing peculiarly military in this wonderful imperturbability, indeed the whole wonder of it lies in its unmilitariness. Even if drill and discipline could stimulate it in a man, the irre- ducible minimum of both with which our soldiers are dosed certainly could not. No, it is a natural blessing common to all the common men of England ; it must be so, seeing that there is nothing in the training of the common man we call a soldier to give it to him if he had it not before. Soldier and man ! They are not interfusible, because they are
already indivisible. Heaven in giving us the half of a perfect man—a consistently brave one—has given us also the half of a perfect soldier, and it is for us to supply the rest. And what is "the rest" P
It is but little, encouragingly little, compared to what he already has,—mere tricks of the trade, which he would have learned long ago bad his apprenticeship been anything more than a farce. Primarily he must shoot,—shoot like a demon, or like the keen-eyed, steady-handed fellow he is. At present he cannot shoot, he can only fire. He must not " shoot like the Boers," but ten times better than the Boers ; he must shoot so that it is not only a gamble but a deadly peril for his foemen to lie opposite him for five minutes. Such shoot- ing was seen here and there in the war, both from Briton and Boer. On Spion Kop an irregular horseman (I think of Thorneycroft's) disabled six of his opponents with as many shots ; but his seventh, alas ! like that of Freischiltz of German legend, was " directed by the Fiend," and the equally skilful Boer marksman never gave the poor Colonial another chance. Outside Ladysmith, on the Helpmakaar Road, a single Dutch- man rendered a considerable tract of kopje-side uninhabit- able to exposed men at two thousand yards ; on the Range- worthy Heights a skeleton line of steady "shots," picked, like prize plums, from a brigade, kept a whole ridgeful of Boers in quiet terror prone in their shelters for three days. But it is needless to exemplify ; a soldier who can shoot is worth five who cannot. Any man of good eyesight can shoot, undisturbed, if thoroughly grounded in the rules of thumb which govern the simple machinery of modern rifles. Who would not wonder if such a man there be, who, being thus grounded, could bring to the battlefield the calm as well as the training of the praotice-range ? And who, of Britons, would not rejoice if his own private British soldier were he, as he indubitably is ?
Further—begging the question of his being given some- thing to ride—he must ride. A brave man's feet are but a poor weapon against even a coward's horse, and our soldiers will surely have to contend with many horsemen who are not cowards. The Boers have not invented mobility, but they have revived an interest in it which threatens to become vital, as the gold-mining companies of India are profitably reopening the shafts and workings of the ancients. Whatever may be said of the potential enemies of England, neglect of military discoveries cannot be charged to them, and indeed the immense value of mobility is more of a discovery than a venaissance. But this must be the last campaign in which our soldiers are to be seen equably, contentedly immobile in the midst of galloping foes. The spectacle is magnificent, but it is not war, and we shall find war immeasurably the cheaper of the two.
Finally, our fighting man must think. In what a maze of psychological verbiage has this simple requisite been involved; the very words employed are too long for inclusion in my rapidly decreasing space ! I do not ask for even l" indi- viduality" except in its most restricted sense, for in any wider one it is actually undesirable for troops whose whole genius is the powerful one of united effort under one control. Boer tactics have thrown a false glamour over solitary tactics; the Boers themselves have owed their defeat to the inherent and fatal weakness of such tactics. And had our troops been in possession of the weapon I would ask for them, the irresis- tible one of thought, the shrift of the selfish Dutch free. lances would have been half as short again. Teach our men to think of the task they are at, of its importance, of its pur- pose; teach them to project themselves, as it were, into the enemies' ranks, to guess the likelihood of the time and mode of the enemies' attack, and incidentally how to meet it; or if attacking himself, how best to strike under the guard he will know is up against him. Teach him to remember his own value, how that alive he is invaluable, dead but a nuisance and a moral deterrent to his side. Teach him to appraise his officers properly, not as indispensables, but as aids which he himself can supply if they are absent or destroyed. Teach him, in short, the art of fighting, of which, as I have said, be already possesses the unteachable moiety which would enable him more than any soldier in the world to remember and apply the teachable remainder which he at present lacks.
LINESMAN.
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