THE HISTORIAN OF THE WAR AND HLS PROBLEMS.
THE historian of the war of 1914-1918 is certainly not a man to be envied. If no previous conflict affords a theme so splendid, none has ever presented a task so beset with difficulties. Its gigantic struggles have dwarfed into insignificance all previous history. The armies who overthrow Napoleon at Leipzig in the great Battle of Nations would form but a fraction of the force launched to the attack of July 1st, 1916, on the Somme. Wellington's lino at Waterloo would be but a division's frontage ; even the widely extended and thinly held battle-fronts of South Africa fall far short of the length of line covered by the Kaiserschlacht of March 21st, 1918. Encounters so vast may well baffle their would-be narrator. All previous standards of comparison and description seem inadequate ; the old nomenclature fails altogether to convey any true idea of these titanic struggles. Tho word " battle " is but a pale ghost of all that is covered by " the battle of the Somme." The struggle which began on July 1st, 1916, lasted almost uninterruptedly for nearly five months. Hardly a day in all that time but there was fierce fighting somewhere on the battle-front, varying from battalion attacks on some local Hougoumont like Mouquet Farm to efforts by a whole Army on a front of several miles. Similarly " Ypres, 1917," was not one Leipzig but many, a series of separate sledge-hammer blows, each a greater battle than any fought by British troops before 1914. But the more these month-long struggles are considered, the more inadequate the word " battle " is seen to be.
" Battle " is no doubt an elastic word, and has already covered a multitude of very different affairs, from Austerlitz and Waterloo and Gettysburg down to actions, like Sedgemoor or Ivry, in which a few thousands only were engaged. Not that the mere numbers make a battle important. Many a vast but indecisive struggle, an Eylau or an Asporn, has influenced history far less than a Quebec or a Plessey, contests between pygmy forces for the mastery of a continent. Even in this war the flank-guard which on the first day of the Retreat from Mona held up Kluck's great turning movement at Elouges and Audregnies consisted of but two battalions (the 1st Norfolks and the let Cheshires), a cavalry brigade (de Lisle's 4th Dragoon Guards, 9th Lancers, and 18th Hussars), with the 119th Battery, R.F.A., and last, but not least, the famous " L " Battery, R.H.A. ; but how far might not disaster have spread had it failed in its task ? The 2nd Munsters at Etreux, cut off and overwhelmed by seven times their numbers, did not make their splendid stand in vain : no rearguard over extricated its main body from a dangerous position more successfully. But though actions like these, both for their incidents and for their results, deserve to escape the oblivion which must, in struggles of such magnitude, overtake many gallant deeds by individuals and by units, the story of the Somme or of Arras, to be of manageable length, must be told in terms of brigades and divisions, and many episodes which would hitherto have ranked as important " battles " must receive but the scantiest notice.
The difficulties of the military historian are not to be appreciated unless the complexity of great struggles like the succession of general actions fought to the east of Ypres between July 31st and November 6th, 1917, is realized. The mass of incident which confronts him is gigantic. The naval historian is more happily placed. The inactive role adopted by the German High Seas Fleet has left him with much less actual fighting to describe than his military colleague has before him. Tho Navy's part in the war has beri of vital importance—the underlying condition of success by land ; but, thanks to tho Germans. its importance has lain mainly in what has not happened. The Navy has prevented the invasion of the United Kingdom, has prevented the interruption of the communications of the Army in every sphere of its activity, has prevented the starvation of these islands by the submarine, has crippled the import into Germany of the Means of war. But how can one write at length about what has never taken place ? There has been but one Jutland. Against the numerous destroyer and patrol-boat actions, against the work of the mine-sweepers and anti-submarine flotillas, one may fairly set the trench- warfare of the so-called " quiet periods " and " quiet areas " of the battle-front in France—a warfare full of incident, of raids and counter-attacks, mining and counter-mining, a multitude of atoms, individually and severally of little Weight, but in the mass of the utmost importance. The naval side of the war can be told in much greater detail than the military, and yet be kept within that moderate compass which is essential if the story is to be widely read.
The mind shrinks from the mere idea of a really detailed history of the war by land on the scale of the German account of 1870. Something very different must be undertaken if the reading public is to be presented with a history of British arms by land of wh eh the perusal shall be a pleasure and not a feat. The historian must reconcile two conflicting demands. To be interesting, he must speak of individuals ; to be compendious, his unit of treatment must be large. The subordination of the individual to the mass is a military virtue ; but, as all soldiers know, the individual does not therefore cease to count. Even in the long battle-fronts of modem war there are always points of crucial importance : here it was the break-through began, here the victorious advance was stayed, here again one man's courage or skill turned the day. The resistance of several hundred Germans in the Lone Tree trenches at Loos on September 25th, 1915, which delayed the First Division for several hours, the unlucky salvo which smote the Gurkhas and South Lencashires at the moment of their success on Sari Bair, were of far-reaching influence. In military history in particular it is essential to be accurate over details, since on some one incident, trifling in itself, so much may depend. And for life and colour, for everything which brings home to readers what has been done and endured, what courage and resolution, what discipline and faith, what readiness and imagination can achieve, it is the individual and the incident that tell. Yet the details must be rigorously controlled. The canvas must not be overcrowded. The broad lines of the picture must stand out clearly. It is a difficult problem. Add to this the numerous individual units engaged, each with its special characteristics and Its special part in the whole, and the temptation to tell too much appears scarcely resistible.
This last temptation, it may be remarked, or rather the cause of it, is peculiarly British. The British Army is made up of historic regiments, each with an individuality as definitely marked as that of an Oxford or Cambridge College, its own traditions, its own anniversaries. " Sobraon Day " is celebrated with good reason by the East Surreys, " Barrosa Bay " by the Irish Fusiliers, August 1st by the six regiments which immortalized themselves at Minden. There will be many more days to be kept in remembrance now. All but a very few of our regiments have behind them over a century of dis- tinguished services in every quarter of the globe ; very many have enjoyed a continuous existence of two centuries and more. Only three years before the war the Queen's had celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of their being raised for service at Tangier ; the Royal Soots are on the verge of their tercentenary, though their first half-century was spent under the Swedish and the French standards. This unbroken continuity of existence is one of the chief features which distinguish the British Army from the majority-of other armies. Even the changes of 1881, when the cherished numbers of the infantry gave place to territorial titles, are hardly in the same category as the breaches in continuity which the old regiments of the French Army suffered in the days of the Revolution and First Empire. The 87e de Ligne of the French Army to-day bears the number assigned to the Dillon Regiment of the famous Irish Brigade in the French service when in 1791 regimental names were suppressed and numbers substituted ; but the remnants of the Dillon Regiment passed, after many metamorphoses, into the present 266 de Ligne, and true continuity, as continuity is understood in the British Army, doe. not exist between Dillon's and the 878 of to-day. In the German Army, also, records like ours were rare. If in 1914
there were existing German regiments who had been at the relief of Vienna in 1683, if the Royal Scotts only beat the 115th Infantry Regiment from the Grand Duchy of Hesse by the shortest of short necks, the German regiments iii the main could not compare with ours for length or variety, or continuity of service. The majority of the regiments which began mobilizing in secret in Bleach, 1914, were mere infants compared with ours, and only a third of the 220
infantry regiments, Guard and Line, Bavarians, Saxons, Jager all included, were senior to the junior regiment of the British Line, and most of these had suffered many transformations.
Moreover, in the British Army the function of the regiment was fortunately such that even the vast expansion which began in August, 1914, only meant the addition of new glories and new achievements to the records of historic unite. The German infantry regiment was a tactical as well as an adminis-
trative unit. With us the battalion is the tactical unit, the regiment an administrative and, it may be called, a sentimental unit. While the Germans were piling up new regiment upon new regiment—mushroom units with nospecial sources from which to draw inspiration, no special standards to aim at—our new units had all these ready to hand. The raising of " K.1 " merely meant the addition of new battalions to existing regiments, and for what the traditions and examples of the old regiments meant to the newly formed " Service Battalions " we need go no further than " Ian Hay." Even if the new battalions were from the start destined to disappear, they had a chance of leaving something more than a mere memory behind them. The King's Own May in future feel just as proud of the laurels which their senior Service Battalion earned on the slopes of Sari Bair and on the road to Baghdad as of San Sebastian and Waterloo.
Here, in this regimental singularity of the British Army, lies the clue to the maze. Deeds in themselves deserving to eseape oblivion, which cannot find their way into comprehensive narratives, may be properly recorded in the regimental history. Raids, local attacks, minor operations of all kinds, in which splendid work has been done and high praise has been earned, will hardly wring a line out of the writer who, with the whole story of the Western Front to tell, must carefully measure out his space, and can afford no incidents which have not noticeably affected the general situation. He may permit himself, perhaps, wh en dealing with the Western Front in the winter of 1916-1917, to select some few of the many successful minor operations which clinched the work of the previous summer on the Somme, and treat them as typical examples of what was happening at many points up and down the whole front. To enumerate many trench raids would be to court monotony ; a detailed account of a typical operation could never be dull. Lord Haig's first des patch as Commander-in-Chief mentioned some thirty or forty un its which had particularly distinguished themselves in the fighting of the first half of 1916, but the historian who is on his way to the Somme cannot linger long by the St. Eloi craters with the "Fighting Fifth" and the Royal Fusiliers. Such exploits must fall within the province of the regimental historian. Not the battalion, but the division, must be the general historian's standard of narration, lest the wood bent seen for the trees. The despatch of January 7th, 1919, in which Lord Haig has told the most splendid story in the annals of the British Army, is Written in term!, of divisions, and only three battalions, the 1st Northamptons, 1st Cameron Highlanders, and an unspecified battalion of the Welsh Regiment, have had the distinction of being singled out for mention along with the 8th Hussars and a Canadian cavalry unit, the Fort Garry Horse. It is on these lines, with the division as his unit of narration, that the historian► of the war will be well advised to proceed, leaving to those less embarrassed with riches, like the historians of regiments, the more individual achievements with which, however tempting, he cannot hope to deal.
Previous page
