Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places Part 9
in all its pristine firmness of position. The sheep-farmers wean their lambs about the 24th of August and delivery of them is given to the buyers as soon as possible thereafter. The delivery of ewes and wethers is timed by individual arrangement. A large proportion of the old ewes--no ewes are sold but such as are old--go to England where a lamb or two is got from them before they are fattened. Most of the lambs are bought by sheep-farmers who, not keeping a ewe flock, are not themselves breeders, and are kept till they are three years old--"three shears" as they are technically called--and sold fat into the south country. There they get what Mr. M'Combie called the last dip and the butcher sells them as "prime four-year-old wedder mutton."
The size of some of the Highland sheep farms is to be reckoned by miles not by acres; and the stock, as in Australia, by the thousand. The largest sheep-owner, perhaps, that the Highlands ever knew was Cameron of Corrichollie, now dead. He was once examined before a Committee of the House of Commons, and came to be questioned on the subject of his ownership of sheep. "You may have some 1500 sheep, probably, sir?" quoth the interrogating M.P. "Aiblins," was Corrichollie's quiet reply as he took a pinch of snuff; "aiblins I have a few more nor that." "Two thousand, then?" "Yes, I pelieve I have that and a few more forpye,"
calmly responded the Highlander with another pinch. "Five thousand?" "Oh, ay, and a few more." "Twenty thousand, sir?" cried the M.P., capping with a burst his previous bid. "Oh, ay, and some more forpye," was the imperturbable response. "In Heaven's name how many sheep have you, man?"
burst out the astonished catechist. "I'm no very sure to a thousan' or two," replied Corrichollie in his dry laconic way and with an extra big pinch; "but I'm owner of forty thousan' sheep at the lowest reckoning."
Lochiel, known to the Sa.s.senach as Mr. Cameron, M.P., is perhaps the largest living sheep-owner in Scotland. He has at least 30,000 sheep on his vast tracks of moorland on the braes of Lochaber. In the Island of Skye Captain Cameron of Talisker has a flock of some 12,000; and there are several other flocks both in the islands and on the mainland of more than equal magnitude. Sheep-farming, at least in many instances, is an hereditary avocation, and some families can trace a sheep-farming ancestry very far back. The oldest sheep-farming family in Scotland are the Mackinnons of Corrie in Skye. They have been on Corrie for four hundred years and they were holding sheep-farms elsewhere even earlier. The Macraes of Achnagart in Kintail, paid rent to Seaforth for two hundred years. For as long before they had held Achnagart on the tenure of a bunch of heather exigible annually and their fighting services as good clansmen.
Two hundred years ago an annual rental of 5 was subst.i.tuted for the heather "corve"; the clansmen's service continuing and being rendered up till the '45. Now clanship is but a name: a Seaforth Mackenzie is no longer chief in Kintail, and the Macrae who has succeeded his forbears in Achnagart finds the bunch of heather and the 5 alike superseded by the very far other than nominal rent of 1000. The modern Achnagart with his broad shoulders and burly frame, looks as capable as were any of his ancestry to render personal service to his chief if a demand were made upon him; and very probably would be quite prepared to accept a reduction of his money rental if an obligation to perform feudal clan-service were subst.i.tuted. Achnagart with his 1000 a year rental by no means tops the sheep-farming rentals of his county. Perhaps Robertson of Achiltie, whose sheep-walks stretch up on to the snow-patched shoulders of Ben Wyvis and far away west to Loch Broom, pays the highest sheep-farming rental in Ross-shire, when the factor has pocketed his half-yearly check for 800.
Part of this I learn from my friend as we drive to the station; part I gather afterwards from other sources. The station for which we are bound is Elgin, the county town of Morayshire. Between Elgin and Inverness, it is true, we shall see but few of the great sheep-farmers and flock-masters of the west country, who converge on the annual tryst from other points of the compa.s.s and by various routes--by the Skye railway, by that portion of the Highland line which extends north of Inverness, through Ross into Sutherland, by the Caledonian Ca.n.a.l, etc. But it is promised to me that I shall see many of the notable agriculturists of Moray land, who go to the market as buyers; and a contingent of sheep-breeders are sure to join us at Forres, coming down the Highland line from the Inverness-shire Highlands on Upper Strathspey. There is quite an exceptional throng on the platform of the Elgin station, of farmers, factors, lawyers, and ex-coffee-planters--all very plentiful in Elgin; tanners bound for investments in prospective pelts; and men of no avocation yet as much bound to visit Inverness to-day as if they meant to invest thousands. In a corner towers the mighty form of Paterson of Mulben, famous among breeders of polls with his tribe of "Mayflowers." From beneath a kilt peep out the brawny limbs of Willie Brown of Linkwood and Morriston, nephew of stout old Sir George who commanded the light division at the Alma, son to a factor whose word in his day was as the laws of the Medes and Persians over a wide territory, and himself the feeder of the leviathan cross red ox and the beautiful gray heifer which took honours so high at one of the recent Smithfield Christmas Shows. There is the white beard and hearty face of Mr. Collie, late of Ardgay, owner erstwhile of "Fair Maid of Perth" and breeder of "Zarah." Here, too, is a fresh, sprightly gentleman in a kilt whom his companions designate "the Bourach." Requesting an explanation of the term I am told that "Bourach" is the Gaelic for "through-other," which again is the Scottish synonym for a kind of amalgam of addled and harum-scarum. A jolly tanner observes: "I'll get a compartment to oursels." The reason of the desire for this exclusive accommodation is apparent as soon as we start. A "deck" of cards is produced and a quartette betake themselves to whist with half-crown stakes on the rubber and sixpenny points. This was mild speculation to that which was engaged in on the homeward journey after the market, when a Strathspey sheep-farmer won 8 between Dalvey and Forres. As my friends shuffle and deal, I look out of window at the warm gray towers of the cathedral, beautiful still spite of the desecrating hand of the "Wolf of Badenoch."
Our road lies through the fertile "Laigh of Moray," one of the richest wheat districts in the Empire and as beautiful as fertile. At Alves we pick up a fresh, hale gentleman, who is described to me as "the laird of three properties," bought for more than 100,000 by a man who began life as the son of a hillside crofter. We pa.s.s the picturesque ruins of Kinloss Abbey and draw up at Forres station, whose platform is thronged with noted agriculturists bound for the "Character" Fair. Here is that spirited Englishman Mr. Harris of Earnhill, whose great cross ox took the cup at the Agricultural Hall seven or eight years ago; and the brothers Bruce--he of Newton Struthers, whose marvellous polled cow beat everything in Bingley Hall at the '71 Christmas Show and but for "foot and mouth" would have repeated the performance at the Smithfield Show; and he of Burnside who likewise has stamped his mark pretty deeply in the latter arena. At Forres we first hear Gaelic; for a train from Carr Bridge and Grantown in Upper Strathspey has come down the Highland Railway to join ours, and the red-haired Grants around the Rock of Craigellachie--where a man whose name is not Grant is regarded as a _lusus naturae_--are Gaelic speakers to a man. No witches accost us, and speaking personally I feel no "p.r.i.c.king of the thumbs" as we skirt the blasted heath on which Macbeth met the witches; the most graphic modern description of which on record was given to Henry Dixon in the following quaint form of Shakespearean annotation: "It's just a sort of eminence; all firs and ploughed land now; you paid a toll near it. I'm thinking, it's just a mile wast from Brodie Station."
Nairn is that town by the citation of a peculiarity of which King Jamie put to shame the boastings of the Southrons as to the superior magnitude of English towns. "I have a town," quoth the sapient James, "in my ancient kingdom of Scotland, whilk is sae lang that at ane end of it a different language is spoken from that whilk prevails at the other." To this day the monarch's words are true; one end of Nairn is Gaelic, the other Sa.s.senach.
Here we obtain a considerable accession of strength. The attributes of one kilted chieftain are described to me in curious sc.r.a.ps of ill.u.s.trative patchwork. "A great litigant, an enthusiastic agriculturist, a dealer in Hielan' nowt--something of a Hielan' nowt himself, a semi-auctioneer, a great hand as chairman at an agricultural dinner, a visitor to the Baker Street Bazaar when the Smithfield Shows were held there and where the c.o.c.kneys mistook him for one of the exhibits and began pinching and punching him." Stewart of Duntalloch swings his stalwart form into our carriage--a noted breeder of Highland cattle and as fine a specimen of a Highlander as can be seen from Reay to Pitlochrie. "Culloden! Culloden!"
chant the porters in that curious sing-song peculiar to the Scotch platform porter. The whistle of the engine and the talk about turnips and cattle contrast harshly with that bleak, lonely, moorland swell yonder-- the patches of green among the brown heather telling where moulders the dust of the chivalrous clansmen. It is but little longer than a century and a quarter ago since Charles Stuart and c.u.mberland confronted each other over against us there; and here are the descendants of the men that fought in their tartans for the "King over the Water," who are discussing the right proportion of phosphates in artificial manures and of whom one asks me confidentially for my opinion on the Leger favourite.
Here we are at Inverness at length; that city of the Clachnacudden stone.
There is quite a crowd in the s.p.a.cious station of business people who have been awaiting the arrival of the train from the east, and the buyers and sellers whom it has conveyed find themselves at once among eager friends.
Hurried announcements are made as to the conditions and prospects of the market. The card-players have plunged suddenly _in medias res_ of bargaining. The man who had volunteered to stand me a seltzer and sherry has forgotten all about his offer, and is talking energetically about clad scores and the price of lambs. I quit the station and walk up Union Street through a gradually thickening throng, till I reach Church Street and shoulder my way to the front of the Caledonian Hotel. I am now in "the heart of the market," standing as I am on the plain-stones in front of the Caledonian Hotel and looking up and down along the crowded street. What physique, what broad shoulders, what stalwart limbs, what wiry red beards and high cheek-bones there are everywhere! You have the kilt at every turn, in every tartan, and often in no tartan at all. Other men wear whole-coloured suits of inconceivably s.h.a.ggy tweed, and the breadth of the bonnets is only equalled by that of the accents. Every second man has a mighty plaid over his shoulder. It may serve as a sample of his wool, for invariably it is home made. Some carry long twisted crooks such as we see in old pastoral prints; others have ma.s.sive gnarled sticks grasped in vast sinewy hands on the back of which the wiry red hairs stand out like p.r.i.c.kles. There is falling what in the south we should reckon as a very respectable pelt of rain, but the Inverness Wool Fair heeds rain no more than thistledown. Hardly a man has thought it worth his pains to envelop his shoulders in his plaid, but stands and lets the rain take its chance.
There is a perfect babel of tongues; no bawling or shouting, however, but a perpetual gruff _susurrus_ of broad guttural conversation accentuated every now and then by a louder exclamation in Gaelic. Quite half of the throng are discoursing in this language. It is possible to note the difference in the character of the Celt and Teuton. The former gesticulates, splutters out a perfect torrent of alternately shrill, guttural, and intoned Gaelic; he shrugs his shoulders, he throws his arms about, he thrills with vivacity. The Teuton expresses quiet, sententious canniness in every gesture and every utterance; he is a cold-blooded man and keeps his breath to cool his porridge.
On the plain-stones there are a number of benches on which men sit down to gossip and chaffer. Sc.r.a.ps of dialogue float about in the moist air. If you care to be an eavesdropper you must have a knowledge of Gaelic to be one effectively. "It's to be a stout market," remarks stalwart Macrae of Invershiel, come of a fine old West Highland stock and himself a very large sheep-farmer. "Sixteen shillings is my price. I'll come down a little if you like," says the tenant of Belmaduthy to keen-faced Mr.
Mackenzie of Liverpool, one of the largest wool-dealers and sheep-buyers visiting the market. "You'll petter juist pe coming down to it at once."
"I could not meet you at all." "I'm afraid I'll pe doing what they'll pe laughing at me for." "We can't agree at all," are the words as a couple separate, probably to come together again later in the day. "An do reic thu na 'h'uainn fhathast, Coignasgailean?" "Cha neil fios again'm lieil thusa air son tavigse thoirtorra, Cnocnangraisheag?" "Thig gus ain fluich sin ambarfan." Perhaps I had better translate. Two sheep-farmers are in colloquy, and address each other by the names of their farms, as is all but universal in the north. Cnocnangraisheag asks Coignasgailean, "Have you sold your lambs?" The cautious reply is, "I don't know; are you inclined to give me an offer?" and the proposal ensues, "Come and let us take a drink on the transaction." Let us follow the two worthies into the Caledonian. Jostling goes for nothing here and you may shove as much in reason as you choose, taking your chance of reprisals from the sons of Anak. The lobbies of the Caledonian are full of men drinking and bargaining with books in hand. There is no sitting-room in all the house and we follow the Cnocnangraisheag and his friend into the billiard-room, where we are promptly served standing. What keenness of business-discussion mingled with what galore of whisky there is everywhere! The whisky seems to make no more impression than if it were ginger-beer; and yet it is over-proof Talisker, as my throat and eyes find to their cost when I recklessly attempt to imitate Coignasgailean and take a dram neat. As I pa.s.s the bar going out Willie Brown is bawling for soda with something in it, and Donald Murray of Geanies, one of the ablest men in the north of Scotland, brushes by with quick decisive step. In the doorway stands the st.u.r.dy square-built form of Macdonald of Balra.n.a.ld, the largest breeder of Highland cattle in the country. Over the heathery pasture-land of North Uist 1500 head and more of horned newt of his range in half-wild freedom. The Mundells and the Mitch.e.l.ls seem ubiquitous. The ancestors of both families came from England as shepherds when the Sutherland clearances were made toward the end of last century, and between them they now hold probably the largest acreage--or rather mileage, of sheep-farming territory in all Scotland.
It is a "very dour market," that all admit. Everybody is holding back, for it is obvious prices are to be "desperate high" and everybody wants to get the full benefit of the rise. The predetermination of the Southern dealers to "buy out" freely at big prices had been rashly revealed over-night by one of the fraternity at the after-dinner toddy-symposium in the Caledonian. He had been sedulously plied with drink by "Charlie Mitch.e.l.l"
and some others of the Ross and Sutherland sheep-farmers, till reticence had departed from his tongue. Ultimately he had leaped on the table, breaking any quant.i.ty of gla.s.s-ware in the saltatory feat, and had a.s.serted with free swearing his readiness to give 50s. all round for every three-year-old wedder in the north of Scotland. His horror-stricken partners rushed upon him and bundled him downstairs in hot haste, but the murder was out and the "dour market" was accounted for. Fancy 50s. a head for beasts that do not weigh 60 lb. apiece as they come off the hill! No wonder that we townsmen have to pay dear for our mutton.
I push my way out of the heart of the market to find the outlying neighbourhood studded all over with conversing groups. There is an all-pervading smell of whisky, and yet I see no man who has "turned a hair" by reason of the strength of the Talisker. A town-crier ringing a bell pa.s.ses me. He halts, and the burden of his cry is, "There is a large supply of fresh haddies in the market!" The walls are placarded with advertis.e.m.e.nts of sheep smearing and dipping substances; the leading ingredients of which appear to be tar and b.u.t.ter. A recruiting sergeant of the Scots Fusilier Guards is standing by the Clachnacudden Stone, apparently in some dejection owing to the little business doing in his line. Men don't come to the "Character" Fair to 'list. It strikes me that quite three-fourths of the shops of Inverness are devoted to the sale of articles of Highland costume. Their fronts are hidden by hangings of tartan cloth; the windows are decked with sporrans, dirks, cairngorm plaid-brooches, ram's-head snuff-boxes, bullocks' horns and skean dhus. If I chose I might enter the emporium of Messrs. Macdougall in my Sa.s.senach garb and re-emerge in ten minutes outwardly a full-blown Highland chief, from the eagle's feather in my bonnet to the buckles on my brogues.
Turning down High Street I reach the quay on the Ness bank, where I find in full blast a horse fair of a very miscellaneous description, and totally dest.i.tute of the features that have earned for the wool market the t.i.tle of "Character" Fair. There are blood colts running chiefly to stomach, splints and bog spavins; ponies with s.h.a.ggy manes, trim barrels, and clean legs; and slack-jointed cart-horses nearly asleep--for "ginger"
is an inst.i.tution which does not seem to have come so far north as Inverness. Business is lively here, the chronic "dourness" of a market being discounted by the scarcity of horseflesh.
At four o'clock we sit down to the market ordinary in the great room of the Caledonian. A member of Parliament occupies the chair, one of the croupiers is a baronet, the other the chief of the clan Mackintosh. There is a great collection of north-country notabilities, and tables upon tables of sheep-farmers and sheep-dealers. We have a considerable _cacoethes_ of speech-making, among the orators being Professor Blackie of Edinburgh, whose quaint comicalities convulse his audience. It is pretty late when the Professor rises to speak, and the whisky has been flowing free. Some one interjects a whiskyfied interruption into the Professor's speech, who at once in stentorian tones orders that the disturber of the harmony of the evening shall be summarily consigned to the lunatic asylum.
I see him ejected with something like the force of a stone from a catapult and have no reasonable doubt that he will spend the night an inmate of "Craig Duncan." The speeches over bargaining recommences moistened by toddy, which fluid appears to exercise an appreciable softening influence on the "dourness" of the market. Till long after midnight seasoned vessels are talking and dealing, booking sales while they sip their tenth tumbler.
I have to leave on the Sat.u.r.day morning, but I make no doubt that the skeleton programme given at the beginning of this paper will have its bones duly clothed with flesh.
THE WARFARE OF THE FUTURE
At first sight the proposition may appear startling and indeed absurd; yet hard facts, I venture to believe, will enforce the conviction on unprejudiced minds that the warfare of the present when contrasted with the warfare of the past is dilatory, ineffective, and inconclusive.
Present, or contemporary warfare may be taken to date from the general adoption of rifled firearms; the warfare of the past may fairly be limited for purposes of comparison or contrast, to the smooth-bore era; indeed, for those purposes there is no need to go outside the present century.
Roughly speaking the first five and a half decades of the century were smooth-bore decades; the three and a half later decades have been rifled decades, of which about two and a half decades const.i.tute the breechloading period. Considering the extraordinary advances since the end of the smooth-bore era in everything tending to promote celerity and decisiveness in the result of campaigns--the revolution in swiftness of shooting and length of range of firearms, the development in the science of gunnery, the increased devotion to military study, the vast additions to the military strength of the nations, looking to the facilities for rapid conveyance of troops and transportation of supplies afforded by railways and steam water-carriage, to the intensified artillery fire that can now be brought to bear on fortresses, to the manifold advantages afforded by the electric telegraph, and to the crushing cost of warfare, urging vigorous exertions toward the speedy decision of campaigns-- reviewing, I say, the thousand and one circ.u.mstances encouraging to short, sharp, and decisive action in contemporary warfare, it is a strange and bewildering fact that the wars of the smooth-bore era were for the most part, shorter, sharper, and more decisive. Spite of inferiority of weapons the battles of that period were bloodier than those of the present, and it is a mathematically demonstrable proposition that the heavier the slaughter of combatants the nearer must be the end of a war. There is no pursuit now after victory won and the vanquished draws off shaken but not broken; in the smooth-bore era a vigorous pursuit scattered him to the four winds. When Wellington in the Peninsula wanted a fortress and being in a hurry could not wait the result of a formal siege or a starvation blockade, he carried it by storm. No fortress is ever stormed now, no matter how urgent the need for its reduction, no matter how obsolete its defences. The Germans in 1871 did attempt to carry by a.s.sault an outwork of Belfort, but failed utterly. It would almost seem that in the matter of forlorn hopes the Caucasian is played out.
a.s.sertions are easy, but they go for little unless they can be proved; some examples, therefore, may be cited in support of the contentions advanced above. The Prussians are proud and with justice, of what is known as the "Seven Weeks' War of 1866" although as a matter of fact the contest with Austria did not last so long, for Prince Frederick Charles crossed the Bohemian frontier on the 23rd of June and the armistice which ended hostilities was signed at Nikolsburg on the 26th of July. The Prussian armies were stronger than their opponents by more than one-fourth and they were armed with the needle-gun against the Austrian muzzle-loading rifle.
When the armistice was signed the Prussians lay on the Marchfeld within dim sight of the Stephanien-Thurm, it is true; but with the strong and strongly armed and held lines of Florisdorf, the Danube, and the army of the Archduke Albrecht between them and the Austrian capital. On the 9th of October 1806 Napoleon crossed the Saale. On the 14th at Jena he smashed Hohenlohe's Prussian army, the contending hosts being about equal strength; on the same day Davoust at Auerstadt with 27,000 men routed Brunswick's command over 50,000 strong. On the 25th of October Napoleon entered Berlin, the war virtually over and all Prussia at his feet with the exception of a few fortresses, the last of which fell on the 8th of November. Which was the swifter, the more brilliant, and the more decisive--the campaign of 1866, or the campaign of 1806?
The Franco-German war is generally regarded as an exceptionally effective performance on the part of the Germans. The first German force entered France on the 4th of August 1870. Paris was invested on the 21st of September, the German armies having fought four great battles and several serious actions between the frontier and the French capital. An armistice, which was not conclusive since it allowed the siege of Belfort to proceed and Bourbaki's army to be free to attempt raising it, was signed at Versailles on the 28th of January 1871, but the actual conclusion of hostilities dates from the 16th of February, the day on which Belfort surrendered. The Franco-German war, therefore, lasted six and a half months. The Germans were in full preparedness except that their rifle was inferior to the French _cha.s.sepot_; they were in overwhelmingly superior numerical strength in every encounter save two with French regular troops, and they had on their banners the prestige of Sadowa. Their adversaries were utterly unready for a great struggle; the French army was in a wretched state in every sense of the word; indeed, after Sedan there remained hardly any regulars able to take the field. In August 1805 Napoleon's Grande Armee was at Boulogne looking across to the British sh.o.r.es. Those inaccessible, he promptly altered his plans and went against Austria. Mack with 84,000 Austrian soldiers was at Ulm, waiting for the expected Russian army of co-operation and meantime covering the valley of the Danube. Napoleon crossed the Rhine on the 26th of September. Just as in 1870 the Germans on the plain of Mars-la-Tour thrust themselves between Bazaine and the rest of France, so Napoleon turned Mack and from Aalen to the Tyrol stood between him and Austria. Mack capitulated Ulm and his army on the 19th of October and Napoleon was in Vienna on the 13th of November.
Although he possessed the Austrian capital, he was not, however, master of the Austrian empire. The latter result did not fall to him until the 2nd of December, when under "the sun of Austerlitz" he with 73,000 men defeated the Austro-Russian army 85,000 strong, inflicting on it a loss of 30,000 men at the cost of 12,000 of his own soldiers _hors de combat_. It took the Germans in 1870 a month and a half to get from the frontier to _outside_ Paris; just in the same time, although certainly not with so severe fighting by the way but nearly twice as long a march, Napoleon moved from the Rhine to _inside_ Vienna. From the active commencement to the cessation of hostilities the Franco-German war lasted six and a half months; reckoning from the crossing of the Rhine to the evening of Austerlitz Napoleon subjugated Austria in two and a quarter months.
Perhaps, however, his campaign of 1809 against Austria furnishes a more exact parallel with the campaign of the Germans in 1870-71. He a.s.sumed command on the 17th of April, having hurried from Spain. He defeated the Austrians five times in as many days, at Thann, Abensberg, Landshut, Eckmuhl, and Ratisbon; and he was in Vienna on the 13th of May. Balked at Aspern and Essling, he gained his point at Wagram on the 5th of July, and hostilities ceased with the armistice of Znaim on the 11th after having lasted for a period short of three months by a week.
The Russians have a reputation for good marching, and certainly Suvaroff made good time in his long march from Russia to Northern Italy in 1799; almost as good, indeed, as Bagration, Barclay de Tolly, and Kutusoff made in falling back before Napoleon when he invaded Russia in 1812. But they have not improved either in marching or in fighting at all commensurately with the improved appliances. In 1877, after dawdling two months they crossed the Danube on the 21st to the 27th of June. Osman Pasha at Plevna gave them pause until the 10th of December, at which date they were not so far into Bulgaria as they had been five months previously. After the fall of Plevna the Russian armies would have gone into winter quarters but for a private quasi-ultimatum communicated to the Tzar from a high source in England, to the effect that unpleasant consequences could not be guaranteed against if the war was not finished in one campaign. Alexander, who was quite an astute man in his way, was temporarily enraged by this restriction, but recovering his calmness, realised that nowhere in war books is any particular time specified for the termination or duration of a campaign. It appeared that so long as an army keeps the field uninterruptedly a campaign may continue until the Greek kalends. In less time than that Gourko and Skobeleff undertook to finish the business; by the vigour with which they forced their way across the Balkans in the heart of the bitter winter Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople fell into Russian hands; and the Russian troops had been halted some time almost in face of Constantinople when the treaty of San Stephano was signed on the 3rd of March 1878. It had taken the Russians of 1877-78 eight weary months to cover the distance between the Danube and the Marmora. But fifty years earlier a Russian general had marched from the Danube to the Aegean in three and a half months, nor was his journey by any means a smooth and bloodless one. Dieb.i.t.c.h crossed the Danube in May 1828 and besieged Silistria from the 17th of May until the 1st of July. Silistria has undergone three resolute sieges during the century; it succ.u.mbed but once, and then to Dieb.i.t.c.h. Pressing south immediately, he worsted the Turkish Grand Vizier in the fierce battle of Kuleutscha and then by diverse routes hurried down into the great Roumelian valley. Adrianople made no resistance and although his force was attenuated by hardship and disease, when the Turkish diplomatists procrastinated the audacious and gallant Dieb.i.t.c.h marched his thin regiments forward toward Constantinople. They had traversed on a wide front half the distance between Adrianople and the capital when the dilatory Turkish negotiators saw fit to imitate the c.o.o.n and come down. Whether they would have done so had they known the weakness of Dieb.i.t.c.h may be questioned; but again it may be questioned whether, that weakness unknown, he could not have occupied Constantinople on the swagger. His master was prepared promptly to reinforce him; Constantinople was perhaps nearer its fall in 1828 than in 1878, and certainly Dieb.i.t.c.h was much smarter than were the Grand Duke Nicholas, his fossil Nepokoitschitsky, and his pure theorist Levitsky.
The contrast between the character of our own contemporary military operations and that of those of the smooth-bore era is very strongly marked. In 1838-39 Keane marched an Anglo-Indian army from our frontier at Ferozepore over Candahar to Cabul without experiencing any serious check, and with the single important incident of taking Ghuzni by storm on the way. Our positions at and about Cabul were not seriously molested until late in 1841, when the paralysis of demoralisation struck our soldiers because of the cra.s.s follies of a wrong-headed civilian chief and the feebleness of a decrepit general. Nott throughout held Candahar firmly; the Khyber Pa.s.s remained open until faith was broken with the hillmen; Jellalabad held out until the "Retribution Column" camped under its walls.
But for the awful catastrophe which befell in the pa.s.ses the hapless brigade which under the influence of deplorable pusillanimity and gross mismanagement had evacuated Cabul, no serious military calamity marked our occupation of Afghanistan and certainly stubborn resistance had not confronted our arms. From 1878 to 1880 we were in Afghanistan again, this time with breech-loading far-ranging rifles, copious artillery of the newest types, and commanders physically and mentally efficient. All those advantages availed us not one whit. The Afghans took more liberties with us than they had done forty years previously. They stood up to us in fair fight over and over again: at Ali Musjid, at the Pewar Kotul, at Charasiab, on the Takt-i-Shah and the Asmai heights, at Candahar. They took the dashing offensive at Ahmed Kheyl and at the Shutur-gurdan; they drove Dunham Ma.s.sy's cavalry and took British guns; they reoccupied Cabul in the face of our arms, they besieged Candahar, they hemmed Roberts within the Sherpoor cantonments and a.s.sailed him there. They destroyed a British brigade at Maiwand and blocked Gough in the Jugdulluck Pa.s.s.
Finally our evacuating army had to macadamise its unmolested route down the pa.s.ses by bribes to the hillmen, and the result of the second Afghan war was about as barren as that of the first.
It was in the year 1886 that, the resolution having been taken to dethrone Thebau and annex Upper Burmah, Prendergast began his all but bloodless movement on Mandalay. The Burmans of today have never adventured a battle, yet after years of desultory bushwhacking the pacification of Upper Burmah has still to be fully accomplished. On the 10th of April 1852 an Anglo-Indian expedition commanded by General G.o.dwin landed at Rangoon.
During the next fifteen months it did a good deal of hard fighting, for the Burmans of that period made a stout resistance. At midsummer of 1853 Lord Dalhousie proclaimed the war finished, announced the annexation and pacification of Lower Burmah, and broke up the army. The cost of the war of which the result was this fine addition to our Indian Empire, was two millions sterling; almost from the first the province was self-supporting and uninterrupted peace has reigned within its borders. We did not dally in those primitive smooth-bore days. Sir Charles Napier took the field against the Scinde Ameers on the 16th of February 1843. Next day he fought the battle of Meanee, entered Hyderabad on the 2Oth, and on the 24th of March won the decisive victory of Dubba which placed Scinde at his mercy, although not until June did the old "Lion of Meerpore" succ.u.mb to Jacob.
But before then Napier was well forward with his admirable measures for the peaceful administration of the great province he had added to British India.
The expedition for the rescue of General Gordon was tediously boated up the Nile, with the result that the "desert column" which Sir Herbert Stewart led so valiantly across the Bayuda reached Gubat just in time to be too late, and was itself extricated from imminent disaster by the masterful prompt.i.tude of Sir Redvers Buller. Notwithstanding a general consensus of professional and expert opinion in favour of the alternative route from Souakin to Berber, 240 miles long and far from waterless, the adoption of it was condemned as impossible. In June 1801, away back in the primitive days, an Anglo-Indian brigade 5000 strong ordered from Bombay, reached Kosseir on the Red Sea bound for the Upper Nile at Keneh thence to join Abercromby's force operating in Lower Egypt. The distance from Kosseir to Keneh is 120 miles across a barren desert with scanty and unfrequent springs. The march was by regiments, of which the first quitted Kosseir on the 1st of July. The record of the desert-march of the 10th Foot is now before me. It left Kosseir on the 20th of July and reached Keneh on the 29th, marching at the rate of twelve miles per day. Its loss on the march was one drummer. The whole brigade was at Keneh in the early days of August, the period between its debarkation and its concentration on the Nile being about five weeks. The march was effected at the very worst season of the year. It was half the distance of a march from Souakin to Berber; the latter march by a force of the same strength could well have been accomplished in three months. The opposition on the march could not have been so severe as that which Stewart's desert column encountered.
Nevertheless, as I have said, the Souakin-Berber route was p.r.o.nounced impossible by the deciding authority.
The comparative feebleness of contemporary warfare is perhaps exceptionally manifest in relation to the reduction of fortresses. During the Franco-German War the frequency of announcements of the fall of French fortresses used to be the subject of casual jeers. The jeers were misplaced. The French fortresses, labouring under every conceivable disadvantage, did not do themselves discredit. All of them were more or less obsolete. Excluding Metz and Paris, neither fortified to date, their average age was about a century and a half and few had been amended since their first construction. They were mostly garrisoned by inferior troops, often almost entirely by Mobiles. Only in one instance was there an effective director of the defence. That they uniformly enclosed towns whose civilian population had to endure bombardment, was an obvious hindrance to desperate resistance. Yet, setting aside Bitsch which was never taken, the average duration of the defence of the seventeen fortresses which made other than nominal resistance was forty-one days.
Excluding Paris and Metz which virtually were intrenched camps, the average period of resistance was thirty-three days. The Germans used siege artillery in fourteen cases; although only on two instances, Belfort and Strasburg, were formal sieges undertaken. "It appears," writes Major Sydenham Clarke in his recent remarkable work on Fortification [Footnote: _Fortification_. By Major G. Sydenham Clarke, C.M. G. (London: John Murray).] which ought to revolutionise that art, "that the average period of resistance of the (nominally obsolete) French fortresses was the same as that of besieged fortresses of the Marlborough and Peninsular periods.
Including Paris and Metz, the era of rifled weapons actually shows an increase of 20 per cent in the time-endurance of permanent fortifications.
Granted that a mere measurement in days affords no absolute standard of comparison, the striking fact remains that in spite of every sort of disability the French fortresses, pitted against guns that were not dreamed of when they were built, acquitted themselves quite as well as the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the Vauban school in the days of their glory." Even in the cases of fortresses whose reduction was urgently needed since they interfered with the German communications--such as Strasburg, Toul, and Soissons--the quick _ultima ratio_ of a.s.sault was not resorted to by the Germans. And yet the Germans could not have failed to recognise that but for the fortresses they would have swept France clear of all organised bodies of troops within two months of the frontier battles. During the Peninsular War Wellington made twelve a.s.saults on breached fortresses of which five were successful; of his twelve attempts to escalade six succeeded. The Germans in 1870-71 never attempted a breach and their solitary effort at escalade, on the Ba.s.se Perche of Belfort, utterly failed.
The Russians in 1877 were even less enterprising than had been the Germans in 1870. They went against three permanently fortified places, the antediluvian little Matchin which if I remember right blew itself up; the crumbling Nicopolis which surrendered after one day's fighting; and Rustchuk which held out till the end of the war. They would not look at Silistria, ruined, but strong in heroic memories; they avoided Rasgrad, Schumla, and the Black Sea fortresses; Sophia, Philippopolis, and Adrianople made no resistance. The earthworks of Plevna, vicious as they were in many characteristics, they found impregnable. I think Suvaroff would have carried them; I am sure Skobeleff would if he had got his way.
The vastly expensive armaments of the present--the rifled breech-loader, the magazine rifle, the machine guns, the long-range field-guns, and so forth, are all accepted and paid for by the respective nations in the frank and naked expectation that these weapons will perform increased execution on the enemy in war time. This granted, nor can it be denied, it logically follows that if this increased execution is not performed nations are ent.i.tled to regard it as a grievance that they do not get blood for their money, and this they certainly do not have; so that even in this sanguinary particular the warfare of to-day is a comparative failure. The topic, however, is rather a ghastly one and I refrain from citing evidence; which, however, is easily accessible to any one who cares to seek it.
The antic.i.p.ation is confidently adventured that a great revolution will be made in warfare by the magazine rifle with its increased range, the machine gun, and the quick-firing field artillery which will speedily be introduced into every service. It does not seem likely that smokeless powder will create any very important change, except in siege operations.
On the battlefield neither artillery nor infantry come into action out of sight of the enemy. When either arm opens fire within sight of the enemy its position can be almost invariably detected by the field-gla.s.s, irrespective of the smokelessness or non-smokelessness of its ammunition.
Indeed, the use of smokeless powder would seem inevitably to damage the fortunes of the attack. Under cover of a bank of smoke the soldiers hurrying on to feed the fighting line are fairly hidden from aimed hostile fire. It may be argued that their aim is thus reciprocally hindered; but the reply is that their anxiety is not so much to be shooting during their reinforcing advance as to get forward into the fighting line, where the atmosphere is not so greatly obscured. Smokeless powder will no doubt advantage the defence.
It need not be remarked that a battle is a physical impossibility while both sides adhere to the pa.s.sive defensive; and experience proves that battles are rare in which both sides are committed to the active offensive, whether by preference or necessity. Mars-la-Tour (16th August 1870) was the only contest of this nature in the Franco-German War.
Bazaine had to be on the offensive because he was ordered to get away towards Verdun; Alvensleben took it because it was the only means whereby he could hinder Bazaine from accomplishing his purpose. But for the most part one side in battle is on the offensive; the other on the defensive.
The invader is habitually the offensive person, just for the reason that the native force commonly acts on the defensive; the latter is anxious to hinder further penetration into the bowels of its land; the former's desire is to effect that penetration. The defensive of the native army need not, however, be the pa.s.sive defensive; indeed, unless the position be exceptionally strong that is according to present tenets to be avoided.
When, always with an underlying purpose of defence, its chief resorts to the offensive for reasons that he regards as good, his strategy or his tactics as the case may be, are expressed by the term "defensive-offensive."
It says a good deal for the peaceful predilections of the nations, that there has been no fairly balanced experience affording the material for decision as to the relative advantage of the offensive and the defensive under modern conditions. In 1866 the Prussians, opposing the needle-gun to the Austrian muzzle-loader, naturally utilised this pre-eminence by adopting uniformly the offensive and traditions of the Great Frederick doubtless seconded the needle-gun. After Sadowa controversy ran high as to the proper system of tactics when breech-loader should oppose breech-loader. A strong party maintained that "the defensive had now become so strong that true science lay in forcing the adversary to attack.
Let him come on, and then one might fairly rely on victory." As Boguslawski observes--"This conception of tactics would paralyse the offensive, for how can an army advance if it has always to wait till an enemy attacks?" After much exercitation the Germans determined to adhere to the offensive. In the recent modest language of Baron von der Goltz: [Footnote: _The Nation in Arms_, by Lieutenant-Colonel Baron von der Goltz. (Allen.)] "Our modern German mode of battle aims at being entirely a final struggle, which we conceive of as being inseparable from an unsparing offensive. Temporising, waiting, and a calm defensive are very unsympathetic to our nature. Everything with us is action. Our strength lies in great decisions on the battlefield." Perhaps also the guileless Germans were quite alert to the fact that Marshal Niel had shattered the French army's tradition of the offensive, and gone counter to the French soldier's nature by enjoining the defensive in the latest official instructions. Had the Teutons suborned him the Marshal could not have done them a better turn.
Their offensive tactics against an enemy unnaturally lashed to the stake of the defensive stood the Germans in excellent stead in 1870. On every occasion they resorted to the offensive against an enemy in the field; strictly refraining, however, from that expedient when it was a fortress and not soldiers _en vive force_ that stood in the way. At St. Privat their offensive would probably have been worsted if Canrobert had been reinforced or even if a supply of ammunition had reached him; and a loss there of one-third of the combatants of the Guard Corps without result caused them to change for the better the method of their attack. But in every battle from Weissenburg to Sedan with the exception of the confused _melee_ of Mars-la-Tour, the French, besides being bewildered and discouraged, were in inferior strength; after Sedan the French levies in the field were scarcely soldiers. There was no fair testing of the relative advantages of defence and offence in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78; and so it remains that in an actual and practical sense no firm decision has yet been established. All civilised nations are, however, a.s.siduously practising the methods of the offensive.
It may nevertheless be antic.i.p.ated that in future warfare between evenly matched combatants the offensive will get the worst of it at the hands of the defensive. The word "antic.i.p.ate" is used in preference to "apprehend,"
because one's sympathy is naturally for the invaded state unless it has been wantonly aggressive and insolent. The invaded army, if the term may be used, having familiar knowledge of the terrain will take up a position in the fair-way of the invader; affording strong flank _appui_ and a far-stretching clear range in front and on flanks. It will throw up several lines, or still better, tiers of shallow trenches along its front and flanks, with emplacements for artillery and machine guns. The invader must attack; he cannot turn the enemy's position and expose his communications to that enemy. He takes the offensive, doing so, as is the received practice, in front and on a flank. From the outset he will find the offensive a sterner ordeal than in the Franco-German War days. He will have to break into loose order at a greater distance, because of the longer range of small arms, and the further scope, the greater accuracy, and the quicker fire of the new artillery. He too possesses those weapons, but he cannot use them with so great effect. His field batteries suffer from the hostile cannon fire as they move forward to take up a position.
His infantry cannot fire on the run; when they drop after a rush the aim of panting and breathless men cannot be of the best. And their target is fairly protected and at least partially hidden. The defenders behind their low epaulement do not pant; their marksmen only at first are allowed to fire; these make things unpleasant for the ma.s.sed gunners out yonder, who share their attentions with the spraying-out infantry-men. The quick-firing cannon of the defence are getting in their work methodically.
Neither its gunners nor its infantry need be nervous as to expending ammunition freely since plenteous supplies are promptly available, a convenience which does not infallibly come to either guns or rifles of the attack. The Germans report as their experience in the capacity of a.s.sailants that the rapidity and excitement of the advance, the stir of strife, the turmoil, exhilarate the soldiers, and that patriotism and fire-discipline in combination enforce a cool steady maintenance of fire; that in view of the ominous spectacle of the swift and confident advance, under torture of the storm of sh.e.l.l-fire and the hail of bullets which they have to endure in immobility, the defenders, previously shaken by the a.s.sailants' artillery preparation, become nervous, waver, and finally break when the cheers of the final concentrated rush strike on their ears.
That this was scarcely true as regarded French regulars the annals of every battle of the Franco-German War up to and including Sedan conclusively show. It is true, however, that the French nature is intolerant of inactivity and in 1870 suffered under the deprivation of its _metier;_ but how often the Germans recoiled from the shelter trenches of the Spicheren and gave ground all along the line from St. Privat to the Bois de Vaux, men who witnessed those desperate struggles cannot forget while they live. Warriors of greater equanimity than the French soldier possesses might perhaps stand on the defensive in calm self-confidence with simple breech-loaders as their weapons, if simple breech-loaders were also weapons of the a.s.sailants. But in his magazine rifle the soldier of the future can keep the defensive not only with self-confidence, but with high elation, for in it he will possess a weapon against which it seems improbable that the attack (although armed too with a magazine or repeating rifle) can prevail.
The a.s.sailants fall fast as their advance pushes forward, thinned down by the rifle fire, the mitraille, and the shrapnel of the defence. But they are gallant men and while life lasts they will not be denied. The long b.l.o.o.d.y advance is all but over; the survivors of it who have attained thus far are lying down getting their wind for the final concentration and rush. Meanwhile, since after they once again stand up they will use no more rifle fire till they have conquered or are beaten, they are pouring forth against the defence their reserve of bullets in or attached to their rifle-b.u.t.ts. The defenders take this punishment, like Colonel Quagg, lying down, courting the protection of their earth-bank. The hail of the a.s.sailants' bullets ceases; already the artillery of the attack has desisted lest it should injure friend as well as foe. The word runs along the line and the clumps of men lying prostrate there out in the open. The officers spring to their feet, wave their swords, and cheer loudly. The men are up in an instant, and the swift rush focussing toward a point begins. The distance to be traversed before the attackers are _aux prises_ with the defenders is about one hundred and fifty yards.
It is no mere storm of missiles which meets fair in the face those charging heroes; no, it is a moving wall of metal against which they rush to their ruin. For the infantry of the defence are emptying their magazines now at point-blank range. Emptied magazine yields to full one; the Maxims are pumping, not bullets, but veritable streams of death, with calm, devilish swiftness. The quick-firing guns are spouting radiating torrents of case. The attackers are mown down as corn falls, not before the sickle but the scythe. Not a man has reached, or can reach, the little earth-bank behind which the defenders keep their ground. The attack has failed; and failed from no lack of valour, of methodised effort, of punctilious compliance with every instruction; but simply because the defence--the defence of the future in warfare--has been too strong for the attack. One will not occupy s.p.a.ce by recounting how in the very nick of time the staunch defence flashes out into the counter-offensive; nor need one enlarge on the sure results to the invader as the una.s.sailed flank of the defence throws forward the shoulder and takes in flank the dislocated ma.s.ses of aggressors.