GENERALSHIP IN THE WORLD WAR

THE quotation which heads this study is taken from an interesting and very human book - A Glance at Gallipoli, by Lieut.-Colonel C. O. Head, D.S.O., from which, later on, I shall quote again. The suggestion contained in it is worth thinkIng over, especially so to-day, when our army is faced by uncommon difficulties, by radical changes, by reactionary and revolutionary influences, and by problems which if not solved correctly may spell disaster. The pressure of international politics is engendering the heat of future wars: that of national insolvency - social disintegration and military decay; and above these the progress of industrialization is forcing mechanization to the fore, whilst Western civilization itself is daily becoming more unstable and emotional.

To-day, we soldiers are like men in a dark room groping blindly for the handle of the door, for the latch of the window. Nothing is seen clearly. We know that 'the war to end all wars' is a myth; that Europe is in turmoil and Asia in travail. We know that wars will come, as they always have come when these conditions prevailed, and yet we are asked to make bricks without straw and with precious little clay. So it happens that in the words of Isaiah: 'We grope for the wall like the blind, and we grope as if we had no eyes: we stumble at noonday as in the night; we are in desolate places as dead men.'

It is because so many men are morally dead that the times are so gloomy, a spirit of defeatism is abroad, and like a mist it magnifies every difftculty. What the world of to-day is lacking in is courage, the valour of leadership and the self-sacrifice of those in command. This, I think then, is the essence of the above quotation: Neither a nation nor an army is a mechanical contrivance, but a living thing, built of flesh and blood and not of iron and steel. Courage is its driving force; for, if human history be consulted, it will immediately be discovered that in the past all things worth while began their lives by some one man, or woman, daring to do what others feared to attempt. Fear has always ended in failure, and fear is not a personal emotion only, but also the product of a man's surroundings, the outcome of a system quite as much as the reaction of a danger.

To-day, in the army we are faced with the problems of motorization and of mechanization, just as the navy was seventy-odd years ago. Some think these changes good, and others bad; but their possible virtues and vices are insignificant problems if we lose sight of the greater problem which is this: The more mechanical become the weapons with which we fight, the less mechanical must be the spirit which controls them.

Sometime before the outbreak of the World War, quite unconsciously, so it seems to me, the art of soldiership slipped into a groove and became materialized. Not increasing weapon-power alone, but the same factors which in industry have led to a separation, and, consequently, to a loss of sympathy, between employer and employed, have also, quite unseen, been at work in all modern armies from the year 1870 onwards. It was I think, ever increasing size, with its concomitant complexity of control, which more than any factors created this change both in industrial and military organizations. The more management, or command, became methodized, the more dehumanized each grew; the worker, or the soldier, becoming a cog in a vast soulless machine was de-spiritualized, the glamour of work, or of war, fading from before his eyes, until working, or fighting, became drudgery. Once, the soldier had seen those whom he obeyed, those who could order him to instant death; he had seen them standing beside him in the ranks, or not far in rear, facing death with him. He had watched Wolfe dying on the Heights of Abraham, Moore at Corunna and Wellington rallying his squares at Quatrebras and Waterloo. Then, as in the last war, he-saw them no longer; now and again, perhaps, he heard of them far away, as managing directors sitting In dug-outs, in châheaux and in offices. Frequently, he did not know their names. To him they were no more than ghosts who could terrify but who seldom materialized; hence battles degenerated into subaltern-led conflicts, just as manufacturing had degenerated into foreman controlled work. The glitter and glamour was gone, the personal factor was gone, the man was left without a master, without a true master - the general in flesh and blood, who could see, who could hear, who could watch, who could feel, who could swear and curse, praise and acclaim, and above all who risked his life with his men, and not merely issued orders mechanically from some well-hidden headquarters miles and miles to the rear.

Colonel Head speaks with force and understanding on this subject. Of Colonel Doughty Wylie, of Gallipoli fame, he says: 'He was killed, and was rewarded posthumously with the Victoria Cross, and rightly so, because his action was exceptional; but should not such an example of leadership, not in its success, but in its undtertaking, be normal rather than exceptional! It might be asked why he deserved the V.C. more than any of his men? His business was to lead; theirs to, follow.... This was our old practice even in the storming sieges of the Peninsula War, the generals in charge of the operations fought their way into the fortresses with their troops. Departure from this practice had led to unduly prolonged spasms of futile fighting, to great and unnecessary waste of precious life, and to a separation In spirit and sympathy of the generals and staff from the rest of the army. A sense of equality of sacrifices is an essential cement in a fighting force.'¹

¹A Glance at Gallipoli, Lieut.-Colonel C.O. Head, pg 87 (193). The italics are mine.

In France, as in Gallipoli, and from all accounts in every theatre of the World War, a blight fell upon generalship.

Colonel Read quotes as an example the landing at Suvla Bay. The general-in-chief having issued his plans, 'No obligation rested on him to superintend the work of his subordinates, apportion the tasks requiring discharge to those who had proved their special capacity for them or to see that his plans were executed in accordance with his design and intention! No, his part was done; now be bad only to wait in dignified seclusion on the island of Imbros for news of the result of his complicated plans and orders! Shades of Wellington, Wolseley and Roberts, how, looking down from the Olympian heights, they must have wished they could interpose to exert their authority and illume the situation with the free spirit of war!'¹

Paschendaele was much the same, and though no one in his senses would have expected the general-in-chief, or his subordinate army commanders, to lead their men over those desolate shell-blasted swamps, very little was done outside fortmulating a plan to fight an offensive battle in a most difficult defensive area, with the result that soon after this battle was launched, on July 31st, 1917, all contact between the half-drowned front and the wholly dry rear was lost. This hideous turmoil will go down to history as the most soulless battle fought in the annals of the British Army.

Worse was to come from the point of view of generalship. The army having been bled white and gutted at Ypres was, in March, the following year, thrown back in confusion by the Germans, and what do we see? Directly the British front is broken, the generals and their staffs pack up. As the enemy advances there is much buzzing on the telephone wires; then the army headquarters go back so many miles, corps headquarters so many, divisional headquarters so many, and so on, day after day, dragging the front back with them, the tall of which is covered by weary rearguards of subalterns and private soldiers. What says the shade of Marshal Ney to this - I wonder?

Is this an exaggeration? Well, I for one watched it, and it was the sorry picture which I saw: an army sliding backwards downhill, because, with one exception only, so I believe, no one of the higher commanders thought - it was no question of daring, for these men were not cowards - of rushing forward and kicking a moral stone under the backward skidding wheels. The exception I witnessed myself, a divisional commander in the picket line with his men and everyone confident and smiling. He was doing nothing outside showing himself, yet his presence acted like a charm - it maintained confidence. He was a man who knew the value of moral cement.

It to indeed pleasant in the drab dullness of this war to look back on an incident such as this. It is even encouraging to learn that whilst the British commander-in-chief¹ lay still in Imbros, 'At the first Anzac landing, Mustapha Kemal, the Turkish commander, rushed ahead of the main body of his troops up the slopes of Sari Bair to see for himself the extent and direction of his enemy's move from the landing place,' and that 'At the Anzac August attack, the German General Kannengiesser, commanding the section similarly rushed up Clianuk Bair ahead of the reserve troops. He got a bullet from a Gurkha machine-gun through his shoulder, but was able to allot the required positions to his troops before he was carried away. And Liman Yon Sanders himself, the C.-and-C., on the same day dashed forward to the Anafarta Ridge, and posted there, personally, the few troops be had available for defence.'² It is pleasant to record these actions, in spite of the fact that they are to the credit of our enemy, not only because gallantry is the common heritage of soldiers, but because they show that generalship was not quite dead.

In the War, I know only of one corps in which in spirit generalship and system of staff work antedated the 1870 epoch, and that was the British Tank Corps; a corps commanded and staffed by young men, for on the headquarter staff the oldest was under forty. No other corps, so far as I am aware, ever experienced the pride of being led into battle by its general, as Major-General Elles led the van of his tanks at the battle of Cambrai. No other corps, and of this I am certain, so persistently sent its general staff officers to the front when battle was engaged. At Arras, at Ypres, at Cambrai and at Amiens they went forward to the battlefield, and some not far from the leading tanks. During the earlier part of our disastrous defeat in March, 1918, all went forward, and many of the administrative staff as well. In this particular battle, the Second Battle of the Somme, I was convinced by personal observation on the spot, that had other corps acted as the Tank Corps acted, that is to say bad their generals and their staffs gone forwards in place of backwards, the enemy could have been halted on the Somme in place of being allowed to approach to within cannon-shot of Amiens. One thing is, however, certain, and much of this fighting in France proved it over and over again, namely, that the most rapid way to shell-shock an army is to shell-proof its generals; for once the heart of an army is severed from its head the result is paralysis. The modern system of command has in fact guillotined generalship, hence modern battles have degenerated into saurian writhings between headless monsters.

GENERALSHIP IN THE WORLD WAR

'The moral is to the physical as three to one is a catch phrase which parrotwise has been repeated a million times, and yet few soldiers pay any attention to what morality in war really means. Above all things it means heroism, for heroism is the soul of leadership, whether a man is leading himself by placing his convictions before his interests, or whether he is risking his life to save the lives of his comrades, or to help win the cause his country is fighting for. Both forms are essential in generalship, for until a man learns how to command himself it is unlikely that his command over others will prove a profitable business.

War is, or anyhow should be, an heroic undertaking; for without heroism it can be no more than an animal conflict, which in place of raising man through an ideal, debases him through brutality.

'Many years ago now this was pointed out by John Ruskin in his lecture on War which he gave at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1865,¹ the year the Civil War in America ended. I intend to quote freely from this lecture, probably the most noted ever delivered at the Royal Academy, and certainly one which we should study to-day. I intend to do so, because Ruskin gets down to the heart of this subject, showing that if war is bereft of the personal factor in command, it cannot but degenerate into a soulless conflict in which the worst and not the best in man will emerge.

An artist and a lover of peace, he said to his youthful audience:

'You may imagine that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle.'

To Ruskin war 'is the foundation of all the arts,' because 'it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of men'; then he says:

'It is very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful - but I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues of civil life flourished together, I found to be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of civil life only flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilization; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse of History coupled together: that, on her lips, the words were--peace, and sensuality--peace, and selfisliness--peace, and death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned the truth of word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by war, and betrayed by peace; in a word, that they were born in war, and expired in peace.'

But what type of war does Ruskin refer to? Not 'the rage of a barbarian wolf-flock', not wars begotten by bankers, squabbling inerebants or jealous politiclans, but wars of self-defence. 'To such war as this,' he says, 'all men are born; in such war as this any man may happily die; and out of such war as this have arisen throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of humanity.' Then turning towards his audience he said:

'If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, chose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and welcome; but set not up ... unhappy peasant pieces upon the chequer of forest and field. If the wager is to be of death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will took upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial war.'

And further on:

'First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well played, determines who the best man - who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand. You cannot test their qualities wholly, unless there is a clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by a lance thrust, a man will probably make up his accounts a little before he enters it. Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his band more in holding a sword hitl than in balancing a billiard cue; and on the whole, the habit of living lightly hearted, in daily preferred death, always has had, and negative power both in the making and testing of honest men.'

These two quotations contain within them the essence of true generalship. The true general is not a mere prompter in the wings of the stage of war, but a participant in its mighty drama, the value of whose art cannot be tested 'unless there is a clear possibility of the struggle ending in death'. If he will not, or if the system of command prohibits him from experiencing this danger, though he may feel for his men, his men cannot possibly feel for him as they would were he sharing danger with them. Morally the battle will be thrown out of tune, because Death is the bandmaster of War, and unless all, general to drummer boy, follow the beat of his baton, harmony must eventually give way to discord. On the modern battlefield Death beats one tune to the soldier, and frequently the modern general, out of sight of his baton, beats another. No single one of the great warriors of past ages has dared to be so presumptuous.

Courage is the pivotal moral virtue in the system of war expounded by Clausewitz. He writes: 'Primarily the element in which the operations of war are carried on is danger; but which of all the moral qualities is the first in danger? Courage.'¹ And again: 'War is the province of danger, and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior.'² And yet again: 'As danger is the general element in which everything moves in war, it is also chiefly by courage, the feeling of one's own power, that the judgment is differently influenced. It is to a certain extent the crystalline lens through which all appearances pass before reaching the understanding.'³

¹On War, Karl von Clausewitz, English edition, vol. 1. pg. 20 (1908).

Should the general consistently live outside the realm of danger, then, though he may show high moral courage in making decisions, by his never being called upon to breathe the atmosphere of danger his men are breathing, this lens will become blurred, and he will seldom experience the moral influences his men are experiencing. But it is the influence of his courage upon the hearts of his men in which the main deficit will exist. It is his personality which will suffer - his prestige.

'The personality of the general is indispensable,' said Napoleon; 'he is the head, he is the all of an army. The Gauls were not conquered by the Roman legions, but by Caesar. It was not before the Carthaginian soldiers that Rome was made to tremble, but before Hannibal. It was not the Macedonian phalanx which penetrated to India, but Alexander. It was not the French Army which reached the Weser and the Inn, it was Turenne. Prussia was not defended for seven years against the three most formidable European Powers by the Prussian soldiers, but by Frederick the Grent.'¹ In a similar strain Robert Jackson writes: 'Of the conquerors and eminent military characters who have at different times astonished the world, Alexander the Great and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden are two of the most singular; the latter of whom was the most heroic and most extraordinary man of whom history has left any record. An army which had Alexander or Charles in its eye was different from itself in its simple nature, it imbibed a share of their spirit, became insensible of danger, and heroic in the extreme.'²

So we see that without the personal contact of the commander with his men, whether of a subordinate general or of the general-in-chief, such enthusiasm cannot be roused and sucli heroism cannot be created, for as Thomas Carlyle says: heroism is 'the divine relation ... which in all times unites a Great Man to other men.'

There are yet other factors besides those which appertain to the heart. Marshal Saxe realizes this when be says: Though 'the first quality a general should possess is courage, without which all others are of little value; the second is brains, and the third good health.'¹ 'He must be as active in mind as in body,'² says the Prince de Ligne. Mind and body, let us see what the great soldiers have said about these.

Baron von der Goltz writes: 'One of the most important talents of a general we would call that of a "creative mind"; because to term it "inventive faculty" appears to us too shallow.' Originality, not conventionality, is one of the main pillars of generalship. To do something that the enemy does not expect, is not prepared for, something which will surprise him and disarm him morally. To be always thinking ahead and to be always peeping round corners. To spy out the soul of one's adversary, and to act in a manner which will astonish and bewilder him, this is generalship. To render the enemy's general ridiculous in the eyes of his men, this is the foundation of success. And what is the dryrot of generalship? The Archduke Albert puts his finger on it when he says:

'There are plenty of small-minded men who, in time of peace, excel in detail, are inexorable in matters of equipment and drill, and perpetually interfere with the work of their subordinates.

'They thus acquire an unmerited reputation, and render the service a burden, but they above all do mischief in preventing development of individuality, and in retarding the advancement of independent and capable spirits.

'When war arises the small minds, worn out by attention to trifles, are incapable of effort, and fail miserably. So goes the world.'¹

Frederick the Great, as may be expected, is more sarcastic. Before a gathering of generals he said:

'The great mistake in inspections is that you officers amuse yourselves with God knows what buffooneries and never dream in the least of serious service. This is a source of stupidity which would become most dangerous in case of a serious conflict. Take shoemakers and tailors and make generals of them and they will not commit worse follies!'²

What does this meticulous-mindedness lead to? MArshal Saxe gives us the answer, saying:

'Many Generals in the day of battle busy themselves in regulating the march ing of their troops, in hurrying aides-de-camp to and fro, in galloping about incessantly. They wish to do everything, and as a result do nothing.

'If he wishes to be a sergeant-major and be everywhere, he acts like the fly in the fable who thought that it was he who made the coach move.

'How does this happen? It is because few men understand war in its larger aspects. Their past life has been occupied in drilling troops, and they are apt to believe that this alone constitutes the art of war.'¹

Finally we come to the third factor, physical fitness, a factor which can more easily be cultivated and controlled, for whilst, should be lack them, it is impossible to endow a general with courage and intelligence, it is possible to pick fit men and young men who are likely to remain fit for command. Baron von der Goltz says: 'Good health and a robust constitution are invaluable to a general.... In a sick body, the mind cannot possibly remain permanently fresh and clear. It is stunted by the selfish body from the great things to which it should be entirely devoted.'¹

These, then, are the three pillars of generalship--courage, creative intelligence and physical fitness; the attributes of youth rather than of middle age.

EXAMPLES OF THE PERSONAL FACTOR

In this study of generalship I will now turn from theory to history, and will show that though most of the theory I have quoted is drawn from that epoch of war which preceded the industrialization of military power, that is the change over from the simple hand-made weapons still used during the Napoleonic Wars to the more complex and powerful weapons which followed the introduction of steam power, it is in no way incompatible with the needs of the present age. This theory is absolutely sound for all types of war, whether shock or missile weapons pre-dominate, or whether missile weapons are of short or long range, are slow to fire or rapid to load.

To prove this, which is simultaneously to disprove the quite modern impersonal theory of command, I will first select a few examples of leadership taken from British history, in order to show that with us moral leadership was once a marked characteristic of our generalship. Next, I will turn to the American Civil War, the last of the great conflicts to be waged before impersonal command was reduced to a science.

Though this war may seem remote when compared to the World War, it was a war full of extraordinary and novel dangers. The Minié rifle then used was as superior to the old flintlock musket of Napoleonic times as the magazine rifle of the last decade of the nineteenth century was superior to it; yet as we shall see the dangers it created in no way compelled the American generals, most of whom were of Anglo-Saxon blood, to emulate that Gilbertian hero, the Duke of Plaza-Toro, who led his army from behind!

In the good old days of the mid-nineteenth century, though our fox-hunting generals may not have been too intelligent, and were in most cases totally ignorant of the art of war, no one would dream of suggesting that they were lacking in courage. In spite of weapon improvement the courage of our senior officers was as it bad been in the days of Wellington and before. In 1793, in the assault of the 14th Foot on the fortified camp of Famars in Flanders, 'The French attack was so fierce that the regiment wavered for a minute, when Colonel Doyle, dashing to the front, shouted in a loud voice, "Come along my lads, let's break these scoundrels to their own d---d tune; drummers, strike up 'Ca ira."'¹ What was the result? The French were swept over the ridge!

In November, 1854, we see the same thing. When at Inkerman the great Russian trunk column advanced up the Home Ridge, what did Colonel Daubeney do? Placing himself at the head of thirty men of the 55th Regiment, he charged his massed enemy and cut big way right tbrough, him.

Like Doyle, Daubeney was only a Colonel, but what of the British Commander-in-Chief, where was he? At the very moment that Daubeney charged, 'exposed to the full blast of the Russian 'fire stood Raglan and big staff.... Through all this Raglan sat perfectly unperturbed.'²

In our next war, again look at our Commander-in-Chief, this time at the battle of Cawnpore on December 6th, 1857 - 'Sir Colin, a fine old soldier as he was, riding in front with his helmet off, cheering on his panting troops'. Then look at him in bivouac : 'I could not help admiring the toughness of old Sir Colin, who rolled himself up in a blanket, lay down, to sleep in a hole in a field, and seemed to enjoy it.'¹

Lastly step forward over forty years, to within fifteen years of the World War. At Magersfontein, where did General Wauchope fall? He fell with his orderly officer and the officer commanding the leading battalion 150 yards from the Boer trenches.

It may be said, wbat was the good of such bravery? (I believe I am right in saying that eight British generals fell at Inkerman; nor were the French behindhand in this respect, for, at the storming of the Malakoff, on June 18th, 1855, they had five generals killed and General Macmabon was one of the first to mount the scarp.) The answer to this question is given by Fortescue: at Inkerman, he says, the moral ascendancy of the British was astonishing: 'They met every attack virtually with a counter-offensive, and hesitated not to encounter any numbers whether with bullet, bayonet or butt. There never was a fight in which small parties of scores, tens, and even individuals, showed greater audacity or achieved more surprising results. They never lost heart nor, by all accounts, cheerfulness. The enemy might be in front, flanks or rear, or at all three points together: it mattered not. They flew at them quite undismayed and bored their way out.... Never have the fighting qualities of the British soldier been seen to greater advantage than at Inkerman. But it was wrong to call Inkerman, as it was styled, soldier's battle. It was a regimental officer's battle, and to the regimental offleer belongs the credit.'²

But still the question remains: Would the regimental officers have behaved as they did behave had the generals been Plaza Toro-ing it In rear? Had they been on their ships at Balaclava, would Fortescue ever have been able to write these glowing words? I doubt it.

Again, it may be said that the Crimean War was one thing and the World War another. True; but did the Plaza Toro-ing during the World War help on our battles? I doubt it more and more each time I examine these dreary, soulless, mechanical surgings. We think that generals sitting in dug-outs did help on these battles; my own opinion is that in most cases, and there are exceptions to every rule, they had no more influence on them than had they been lying in their graves.

To turn now to the American Civil War, the last of the old heroic wars, nevertheless the first of the great modern wars, for it was the first extensive conflict in which the influences of steam power in all its many forms were felt. It is true that several of them made themselves felt during the Crimean War and Napoleon III's Italian War of 1859; but the first of these wars was mainly a siege operation, and the second too restricted a struggle to be looked upon as the birth of the modern epoch.

In the American Civil War the muzzleloading percussion-capped rifle dominated every field. It had an effective range of 600 yards compared to the flintlock's 100, and a maximum range of about a mile; whilst the rifled 10-pounder and 20-pounder guns had, respectively, ranges of 6,200 and 4,500 yards, compared to the Napoleonic 12-pounders' 1,500. In this war, magazine breechloading rifles were invented and used, more particularly by the Federal cavalry, as well as bombs, grenades, and several other projectiles; gas-shells were considered and also flame projectors; armoured ships and armoured trains were employed, and in the latter stages of the War the field telegraph was seen on every battlefield. Yet, in spite of all these and many other inventions, only rivalled by those of the World War, generalship remained of a high order. Probably no war in the whole of military history produced such a galaxy of generals. In this war, the first of the modern wars, vastly increased weapon power in no way gave lie to the old theory of generalship, undoubtedly it modified it, but it in no way effaced it-the personal factor remained supreme.

To examine two cases only, namely, the generalship of Grant and Lee, for a hundred others could be cited, both these soldiership relied upon the personal factor and had one thing in common-their scorn of danger. In his first battle at Belmont, a small affair, Grant as a strategist or tactician was nonexistent; still he is the general, the true leader, for he is the last man to leave the field, risking his life to see that none of his men have been left behind. At Fort Donelson, he was not on the battlefield when his army was attacked, and upon returning to it, he found it half-routed; how did he act? General Lewis Wallace, one of his subordinate commanders and the author of that stirring romance, Ben Hur, says:

'In every great man's career there is a crisis exactly similar to that which now overtook General Grant, and it cannot be better described than as a crucial test of his nature. A mediocre person would have accepted the news as an argument for persistence in his resolution to enter upon a siege. Had General Grant done so, it is very probable his history would have been then and there concluded. His admirers and detractors are alike invited to study him at this precise juncture. It cannot be doubted that he saw with painful distinctness the effect of the disaster to his right wing. His face flushed slightly. With a sudden grip he crushed the papers in his hand. But in an instant these signs of disappointment or hesitation--as the reader pleases--cleared away. In his ordinary quiet voice be said addressing himself to both officers (McClernand and Lewis Wallace), "Gentlemen, the position on the right must be retaken"...'¹

¹Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol.i, p. 422 (1884-88).

What did he then do? Did he sit down and write an operation order? No! He galloped down the line shouting to his men: 'Fill your cartridge boxes quick, and get into line; the enemy is trying to escape, and he must not be permitted to do so, ...' 'This', as be says himself, 'acted like a charm. The men only wanted someone to give them a command.'¹ It was his presence and selfcontrol which established order. The presence of the general-in-chief, in the face of danger, at once creates confidence, for his personality is fused into the impersonal crowd, and the higher his self-control the higher does this confidence grow, it magnetizes his men and morally re-unifies them. No operation order could have accomplished this, and without this change in moral feeling, which the personality of the general-in-chief could alone effect, no operation order would have been of much use.

At the opening of the battle of Shiloh, Grant was faced by a similar though still more desperate situation, and one more difficult for him personally, for having injured his leg a day or two before he hobbled off the boat at Pittsburgh, landing on crutches. Met by 5,000 panic-stricken stragglers and every possible rumour of disaster, what does he do? He mounts his horse and gallops towards the battle front, and is here, there and everywhere. His personality at once seizes upon his men and morally shakes them out of chaos into order. Once again the general-in-chief wins the battle with that supreme weapon - the personal factor.

It is always the same with this great man, or any other great soldier. At the opening of the Wilderness Campaign, as usual, his headquarters were pitched close to the battle front. During the fighting on May 6th, 1864, the Federal line was driven back and a panic resuited, in which an excited officer rushed up to where Grant was Sitting and shouted; 'General, wouldn't it be prudent to move headquarters to the other side of the Germanna road?' To which came the answer: 'It strikes me it would be better to order up some artillery and defend the present location.'¹

With Grant, there was no turning away from danger, he always faced it. On another occasion, when Fort Harrison was captured, on September 29th, as usual Grant was well forward and came under heavy fire, one shell bursting immediately over him as he was writing a dispatch. 'The handwriting of the dispatch when finished', writes one of his staff officers, 'did not bear the slightest evidence of the uncomfortable circumstances under which it was indited.'¹ On yet another occasion when supervising an attack, he dismounted and sat down on a fallen tree to write a message. 'While thus engaged a shell exploded directly in front of him. He looked up from his paper an instant, and then, without the slightest change of countenance, went on writing the message. Some of the Fifth Wisconsin wounded were being carried past him at the time, and Major E. R. Jones of that regiment says ... that one of his men made the remark: "Ulysses don't scare worth a d--n."'² It is such generals who can lead men, who can win victories and not merely machine them out.

With his great opponent, Robert E. Lee, it is the same. It was his personality, his example, his close contact with his men which infused into the Army of Northern Virginia its astonishing heroism. When on the third day of the battle of Gettysburg his great assault failed, and his men were driven back defeated, where was Lee? Forward among the Federal Shells. Colonel Fremantle, a British officer present, says: 'If Longstreet's conduct was admirable, that of General Lee was perfectly sublime. He was engaged in rallying and in encouraging the broken troops, and was riding about a little in front of the wood, quite alone -- the whole of his staff being engaged in a similar manner further to the rear. His face, which is always placid and cheerful, did not show signs of the slightest disappointment, care or annoyance; and he was addressing to every soldier he met a few words of encouragement, such as, "All this will become right in the end: we'll talk it over afterwards; but, in the meantime, all good men must rally. We want all good and true men just now," etc.'¹

When, on May 12th, 1864, Grant's troops broke through the apex of the Confederate works at Spottsylvania and the position became critical, what did Lee do? He again rode forward. Of this incident General Gordon writes:

'Lee looked a very god of war. Calmly and grandly, he rode to a point near the center of my line and turned his horse's head to the front, evidently resolved to lead in person the desperate charge, and drive Hancock back or perish in the effort. I knew what he meant.... I resolved to arrest him in his effort, and thus save to the Confederacy the life of its great leader. I was at the center of that line when General Lee rode to it. With uncovered head, be turned his face towards Hancock's advancing column. Instantly I spurred my horse across old Traveller's (Lee's favourite charger) front, and grasping his bridle in my hand, I checked him. Then, in a voice which I hoped might reach the ears of my men and command their attention, I called out, "General Lee, you shall not lead my men in a charge. No man can do that, sir. Another is here for that purpose. These men behind you are Georgians, Virginians, and Carolinians. They have never failed you on any fleld. They will not fail you here. Will you, boys?" The response came like a mighty anthem that must have stirred his emotions as no other music could have done. ... "No, no; we'll not fail him"... I shouted to General Lee, "You must go to the rear." The echo, General Lee to the rear." "General Lee to the rear!" rolled back with tremendous emphasis from the throats of my men.'¹

When in the World War did the men in the battle front order one of our generals back, let alone the general-in-chief? Never! No general-in-chief was to be found there, sometimes, perhaps, a brigadier, but as far as I have been able to ascertain, with the solitary exception of Major-General Elles, never a corps or a divisional commander. Why? This is my next problem; these men were not cowards, far from it, for many were potentially as gallant and courageous as Grant or Lee, as Lord Raglan or Sir Colin Campbell. No, it was not cowardice, it was the amazing unconscious change which rose out of the Franco-Prussian War, and which in a few years obliterated true generalship, dehumanizing and despiritualizing the general, until he was turned into an office soldier, a telephone operator, a dug-out dweller, a mechanical presser of buttons which would detonate battles, as if armies were well tamped explosives or intricate soulless machines.

THE DISEASES DIAGNOSED

SELF-PRESERVATION is the keystone in the arch of war, because it is the keystone in that greater arch called life. No normal man wishes to be killed in battle, though he may long to die in battle rather than to die in his bed. He does not wish to do so, because there is no virtue in mere dying, for virtue is to be sought in living and living rightly. In the days of hand-to-hand fighting, it was only right for a commander to be in the front line, the battle might be decided in ten minutes, and often had he been elsewhere he might as well have been out of the picture altogether. In the days of the flintlock musket it was much the same, fire was delivered at from 100 to 50 paces, and battles were sometimes decided by a bayonet charge. Then came the rifle, and decision is prolonged; it may be dragged out to days, weeks and even months, as was the case in the World War. What does this mean? It means that generalship has been rendered more elastic. Today, the general can frequently retire from the front altogether, and the more self-protective this front becomes the more often can be do so. But when he is attacking he must be there on the spot, not to direct only but to encourage; for however exalted way be his rank, he should never forget that he is still a soldier. As I have just shown, down to 1865 this idea held good, and though the vastly increased range of the Minié rifle undoubtedly rendered generalship more hazardous, it remained essentially as it always had been. It was not weapon power alone which forced the change, though the increasing range of weapons playing consciously, or unconsciously, upon the instinct of self-preservation may have created a sentiment to avoid danger. I think it did, and as this sentiment began to rise generalship began to wane.

Other factors were, I believe, more important. I have mentioned size and complexity of organization, and to these I now add age. Old generals have always existed, but in the Napoleonic Wars, the average age of the higher commanders was under forty; at Waterloo, Napoleon was forty-six and so was Wellington. In the American Civil War it was much the same. In my book - The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant¹ - I pointed out that, in 1861, the average age of twenty Federal and Confederate officers who as generals, played leading parts in the war, was thirty-eight and a half years. In the Franco-Prussian War, the age was more advanced, but this war was so brief that little opportunity was offered for the younger men to rise in rank. It was so successful, and its success could so clearly be traced to superior organization, superior tactics and superior strategy, that after the war it was overlooked that colonels still led their battalions into action, and that all but the highest grades of generals were on the battlefield and within the bullet zone. Some years ago now, I visited the battlefield of Rezonville, and a little west of the village I came across a small bench upon which the King of Prussia was seated on the evening of August 18th, 1870, when he received a message from Moltke announcing the victory of Gravelotte. At the time it struck me that for so august a personage it was extraordinarily near to the front. To-day, the King would have been at least fifty miles further back, or more likely in Berlin.

In war it is almost impossible to exaggerate the evil effects of age upon generalship, and through generalship on the spirit of an army. In peace time it may be otherwise, but in war time the physical, intellectual and moral stresses and strains which are at once set up immediately discover the weak links in a general's harness. First, war is obviously a young man's occupation; secondly, the older a man grows the more cautious he becomes, and thirdly, the more fixed become his ideas. Age may endow a man with experience, but in peace time there can be no moral experience of war, and little physical experience. Nothing is more dangerous in war than to rely upon peace training; for in modern times, when war is declared, training has always been proved out of date. Consequently, the more elastic a man's mind is, that is the more it is able to receive and digest new impressions and experiences, the more commonsense will be the actions resulting. Youth, in every way, is not only more elastic than old age, but less cautious and far more energetic. In a moment youth will vault into the saddle of a situation, whilst old age is always looking round for someone to give it a leg up.

Physically an old man is unable to share with his men the rough and tumble of war; instinctively he shuns discomfort, he fears sleeping under dripping hedges, dining off a biscuit, or partaking of a star-lit breakfast, not because he is a coward, but because for so many years he has slept between well-aired sheets, dined off a well-laid table and breakfasted at 9 o'clock, that he instinctively feels that if these things are changed he will not be himself, and he is right, for he will be an uncomfortable old man.

Napoleon is a case in point. When a young man, as Baron von der Goltz writes, 'He passed half the day in the saddle or in his carriage, made all dispositions for his great army, and then dictated to his aides-de-camp ten, twelve, fourteen, or more long letters, a labour which alone is sufficient to keep a rapid writer fully employed. "I am in most excellent health; I have become somewhat stouter since I left," he wrote from Gera to the Empress Josephine, on October 13th, 1806, at two in the morning, "and yet I manage to do some fifty miles a day on horseback, and in my carriage. I lie down at eight, and get up again at midnight; I often think that you have not then as yet retired to rest?" Such restless activity on the part of the general is the first condition of connected and rapid action in war.'¹

¹The Nations in Arms, Colmar von der Goltz, English Edition, p. 376 (1906).

Then a few years later, when only forty-one years of age, be complained that he lacked his former vigour. 'The smallest ride is a labour to me,' he wrote; It was much the same with Frederick the Great also. When forty-eight years old he 'poured out his heart to his friend d'Argens: "I have to perform the labours of a Hercules at an age when strength forsakes me, debility increases, in one word when hope, the comforter of the distressed, begins to fail me."'¹

Thus we see how surely the physical is the foundation of the moral, and how these physical defects, for defects they are in war, react upon a generals moral sense by subordinating it to intellectual achievements. More and more do strategical, administrative and tactical details occupy his mind and pinch out the moral side of his nature. Should he be a man of ability, he becomes a thinker rather than a doer, a planner rather than a leader, until morally he is as far removed from his men as a chess player is from the chessmen on his board. The more be is thrown back upon the intellectual side of war, the more sedentary he becomes, until a kind of military scholasticism enwarps his whole life.

The repercussion of such generalship on subordinate command has always been lamentable, because whatever a general may be, he is always the example which the bulk of his subordinate commanders will follow. It be becomes an office soldier, they become office soldiers; not only because his work makes their work, but because his morale makes their morale: how can he order them into danger if he remains in safety! If the general-in-chief does not face discomfort and danger neither will they; if they do not, neither will their subordinates, until the repercussion exhausts itself in a devitalized firing line.

The years which followed the Franco-Prussian war saw many changes. Germany rapidly became industrialized, and the spirit of industry, which is essentially material and mercenary, surreptitiously crept into her army, which for forty years dominated military thought. Bulk weight of numbers, in the footsteps of bulk weight of commodities, became the prevailing doctrine of war. In France there arose what has been called the moral school of war, which in fact was not so much a moral school as an intellectual one. There was much talk of the offensive, of the will to conquer, of la gloire and à la baïonnette, of urging the men on; but there was little talk of urging the generals forward. It was in truth a demoralizing school, because, whilst the men were exhorted to die for their country, the generals were not encouraged to die for their men. In England we maintained the old idea, anyhow in its greater part, and were despised by foreign soldiers for so doing. As late as the South African War, personal contact between general and firing line was normally maintained; but when the World War broke out, so intellectually unprepared were our higher commanders, that they were at once sucked into the vortex of impersonal command which had been rotting generalship on the Continent for forty years.

The horde army paralysed generalship, not so much because it changed tactics, but because it prevented tactics changing; the one idea being, not to improve the quality of fighting, but to add to the quantity of fighters. New weapons were introduced yearly; but in its essentials the old tactics remained the same, numbers being considered the primary factor, with the result that directly a war was declared, tactics broke down and generalship became ineffective. But more detrimental still, numbers added vastly to administrative difficulties, that is the handling of the rear services; so much so, that generalship was absorbed into quartermaster generalship, until in the World War all commanders superior to a divisional commander were nothing more than commissary generals.

As the general became more and more bound to his office, and, consequently, divorced from his men, he relied for contact not upon the personal factor, but upon the mechanical telegraph and telephone. They could establish contact, but they could accomplish this only by dragging subordinate commanders out of the firing line, or more often persuading them not to go into it, so that they might be at the beck and call of their superiors. In the World War nothing was more dreadful to witness than a chain of men starting with a battalion commander and ending with an army commander sitting in telephone boxes, improvised or actual, talking, talking, talking, in place of leading, leading, leading.

A fallacy, which may be largely traced to the telephone, is that the further a commander is in rear of his men, the more general a view can lie obtain, because he will be less influenced by local considerations. It is a fallacy because, within certain limits, the further he is in rear the further lie will be away from moral actualities, and unless he can sense them he will seldom be able fully to reason things out correctly. It is true that with a large army, once contact is gained and the advanced guards are in action, a general-in-chief should not remain with the van. But supposing him to be a man who cannot control his emotions, and one so influenced by local conditions that they obliterate his intelligence, that is supposing him to be a thoroughly bad general, he will not avoid bird's-eye views by going twenty miles to the rear. For if he does so, on account of his limited self-control he will be as strongly influenced by the rear atmospbere and all it will convey to him, as he would have been by the forward atmosphere had he remained forward to breathe it. For such a man change of position is no cure, the only cure is change of appointment.

Should the general in question happen to be a subordinate, then this fallacy is still more marked; for, unless be cannot resist interfering with platoons, it is local conditions which should monopolize his attention. The more bird's-eye views -the better; the more local sensations -the better; for each is a real picture and a real sensation; that is to say each is moral and physical as well as intellectual. A man who cannot think clearly and act rationally in the bullet zone is more suited for a monastery than the battlefield.

All these many influences are accentuated by age, and drag a general, the older he gets, faster and faster, to the rear. The more cautious a general becomes, the more he likes to think over thing, and the more he thinks things over the more likely is he to seek assistance from others.

The German system saw some of these difficulties, more especially the intellectual ones. It recognized that old men do not make the best generals, and to over come age and complexity it evolved the general staff, one of the most valuable and yet one of the most detrimental innovations in modern warfare.

Such staffs are, however, not sufficient in themselves, because war has become so highly specialized and complex. Where the German system went wrong was that it superimposed a committee of irresponsible non-fighting officers on the general, creating a staff hegemony which virtually obliterated generalship. If the general was a tiger, his staff officers were selected from the lambs; if he was lamblike, then they were chosen for their tigerishness. The object not to liberate the general from non-fighting detail- and so allow him to develop his personality and exercise it; but to restrain or stimulate his personality and so establish a uniformity of doctrine and action. In brief, so that excessive size would not set up excessive strain the object was to crush out the personal factors and turn an army of millions of men into one immense smoothrunning machine. This idea was as monstrous as it was brutal, and within three weeks of the World War opening it nominiously broke down; for Moltke at Spa, 100 miles from the front, could exercise no more control over the German armies, or the vital right wing, than had he been in the moon.

No soldier can doubt the immense value of a general staff if it is the general's servant, and not the general's gaoler. I have said that the staff has no responsibilities; it has none, though it has duties; because it has no powers of decision or command. It can suggest, but it has no responsibility for actions resulting; the general alone is responsible, therefore the general alone should and must decide, and, more than this, he must elaborate his own decisions and not merely have them thrust upon him by his staff like a disc upon a gramophone. How many generals say to their staffs: 'Give me all the facts and information and then leave me alone for half an hour, find I will give you my decision.' In place they seek a decision from their staffs, and frequently the older they are the more they seek it, because they so often feel that the latest arrival from the Staff College must know more than they do--sometimes they are not wrong. How many generals work out their own appreciations, dictate the gist of their orders, or in peace time work out their own training exercises? I have been a general staff officer for over fifteen years, and my experience suggests the answer: 'Very few.' When I took over command of a brigade, my brigade major was astonished because I insisted upon doing what he considered to be his work, but which in fact was essentially mine, making out the brigade training exercises, which under former brigadiers he had always done.

How do these things affect the personal factor in generalship? They obliterate it, and why? The staff becomes an all controlling bureaucracy, a paper octopus squirting ink and wriggling its tentacles into every corner. Unless pruned with an axe it will grow like a fakir's mango tree and the more it grows the more it overshadows the general. It creates work, it creates offices, and, above all it creates the rear-spirit. No sooner is a war declared than the general-in-chief (and, many a subordinate general also) finds himself a Gulliver in Lilliput, tied down to his office stool by innumerable threads woven out of the brains of his staff and superior staffs.

In his overland campaign, in 1864, General Grant was called upon to control five armies of over half a million combatants, and to coordinate their movements in an area half the size of Europe. His headquarters staff consisted of fourteen officers. I wonder how this compares, let us say, with Sir Douglas Haig's staff at Montreuil during the last year of the World War?

All these many things, size, age, complexity, theory, staff organization, etc., rose to full growth during the years 1871-1914, and coupled with the unconscious whisperings of the instinct of self-preservation they drove the generals off the battlefields, and obliterating the personal factor in command dehumanized warfare, and, consequently, brutalized it. Let us now see how this sorry state of affairs may possibly be remedied, possibly cured.

THE REMEDIES SUGGESTED

HAVING now diagnosed the various diseases, or at least the more virulent which to-day inflict generalship, the criticism I have indulged in will be of no great value unless remedies are suggested. These can be discovered either through the costly process of trial and error, that is by leaving things to chance and letting experience point out our mistakes; or else by reflection: that is to think things out as logically as we can, and then test our conclusions during peace time as far as peace conditions will allow. If this is done, in an unprejudiced and disinterested way, though we may not be able to establish perfect health, there can be little doubt that we shall reduce disease.

How are we to begin? By analysing the problem, which a moment's consideration will show, embraces three factors, namely, the general, his staff and the army, or in other words - the brain, nervous system and muscles of any military organization.

To start with the general, for as the Chinese say, fish begins to rot at the head, how are we going to examine him? His work, like that of any other man, is cast in three spheres - the physical, the intellectual and the moral. I will examine these in turn.

Physically, health, vigour and energy are essential assets, and there can be no question, that normally they are the attributes of youth rather than of old age. When Napoleon said that no general of over forty-five years of age should be allotted an active command in the field, and that no general of over sixty should be given any but an honorary appointment, he was thinking of the physical factor in comniand.¹ Accepting these ages as the rule, a study of history will at once show us that he was not far wrong; for though there are exceptions to every rule, at least seventy-five per cent of the really great, not merely noted, generals in history, were under forty-five years of age.²

Here is our first great difficulty. Peace conditions do not permit of such a reduction in years. In our own army we find brigadiers of fifty-seven, major-generals of sixty-two, and lieutenant and full generals of sixty-seven, and though these ages could, I think, be reduced by several years, they cannot possibly be reduced to Napoleon's figure; for if the more senior ranks were, compelled to retire at forty-five or even fifty, few fathers would put their sons into the army, in fact the army would cease to exist.

The only way to tackle this problem is clearly to differentiate between peace and war conditions; to accept that during peace time the old, like the poor, will always be with us, and that consequently we must arrange things differently in war time.

The arrangement I suggest is this: accepting Napoleon's maximum of forty-five, a most carefully selected roster of officers between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, officers who have shown high powers of command, should be kept, and irrespective of what their rank may be on the declaration of war, the whole of the higher combatant commanders be selected from it; the older men being either put on the reserve list, or kept at home to raise and train new units.

At once two objections, far more obvious than real, will be raised to this suggestion, namely: (1) these officers will not possess the necessary experience in command, and (2) when war breaks out they will be strangers to their formations and know few of their officers.

As regards the first, it is perfectly true that for administrative work, experience in the routine of higher formations is of considerable value; but it is a complete myth to suppose, anyhow in our army, that extended powers of command can be cultivated by a brigadier, a divisional or an army commander, My experience is that there are only two units in which command is a real and not merely a paper expression - the company and the battalion, and of course equivalent units in the other arms, after which command is so completely absorbed by administra tion that it ceases to be command at all. As a brigadier I found unlimited time at my disposal, so little could I command, and, as a general staff officer to more than one able divisional commander, all I can say is, that were I ever to rise to to such a giddy height I should not find less. In our extremely well organized army, in which no brigadier, divisional commander, or commander-in-chief, is allowed to spend two-pence without a shilling's worth of Treasury sanction, there is no responsibility and no real higher command.

As regards the second, it is true that old age from command point of view (from forty-five upwards) does not necessarily prevent a general getting to know his officers anyhow by name, and obviously there is a real advantage in this. But if, during war time, he is going to sit in a château, or dug-out, it does not matter much whether be knows the officers in the firing line or not. Also, if he is going to go down with an attack of lumbago, or a chill on the liver, each time he sleeps under the stars, again this advantage is somewhat discounted. As I maintain that the proper place for a general is with his men, sharing their discomforts and dangers, and as I will show later on that new tendencies in war will enforce this, I consider that to put the younger men in command is anyhow the choice of the lesser of two evils, an evil which I will also show can be mitigated during peace time.

To turn to the second sphere. A man is intellectually at his best between the ages of thirty-five and forty-flve, and this is proved by the fact that the majority of the great artists, scientists, philosophers, poets, inventors, business and professional men generally have accomplished their best work before the age of forty-five; because in middle life a man's opinions become set, imagination dwindles and ambition recedes. If a roster of aspirant commanders is kept, as I have suggested, then, during peace time, these officers should be thoroughly trained in their future duties, and should, whenever possible, be attached to the formations which in the event of war they will command, so that they may get to know their future subordinates. Training should sometimes be with troops, when they can act as chief umpires, and sometimes without troops, when they can set the exercises; but sometimes, also, and often, exercise should be carried out without staft assistance - this system I will now explain.

Normally, in a higher command exercise, a scheme is set in which it is the rule and not the exception for the staff of each formation concerned to work out each problem, and every detail of each problem, whilst its general, the one man who should be tested, sits aside, often taking a dolce far niente interest in proceedings. When the pow-wow takes place, there is usually a prolonged discussion on the official form of the operation orders (incidentally a form seldom used in war), orders made out by the staff. This frequently leads to these humble servants being flayed alive whilst their masters frown opprobrium upon them even if they are not quite certain what all the trouble is about.

I have worked out scores of exercises, and taken part in dozens of staff tours, and though I am of opinion that my various generals seldom satisfied their intellectual hunger, I anyhow learnt this: that exercises set to bring out definite tactical lessons are not worth the setting. What an exercise should bring out is the personality and common sense of the generals. What do they know and what do they not know; what will they dare to do and what will they not dare to do? On such things will future victory and defeat depend, far more so than on dotting the t's and crossing the i's of operation orders. Therefore, I suggest this: that two or three times a year the generals should be assembled without their staffs, and set some quite simple Staff College exercise to work out in all its details - appreciations, operation orders, administrative instructions, etc., and that any general failing to obtain, say, fifty per cent of marks, should be compelled to resign his commission. If such a system were instituted, and it might with advantage be further elaborated, I am certain that the intellectual sphere of generalship would be vastly extended and the promotion list somewhat eased.

Again, the old system of maneuvres, since 1925 dropped by our army on the score of expense, was a very excellent one, not that it taught the regimental officers or their men much, but that it tested out the generals. Concerning Lord Kitchener we read:

'After his brilliant victory at Omdurman, Lord Kitchener informed a foreign Military Attaché that the training of British generals would be defective so long as it was not decided in England to have maneuvers on a large scale. He admired the great German maneuvres, for they afforded the sole means by which a general could have practice in handling large masses. As soon as he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in India after the war, and had a free hand, one of his farst measures was to arrange for manoeuvers for the army in India on a scale never before attempted either in England or in one of her colonies.'¹

This mental sphere, the sphere of the intellect, is a difficult one to examine and to suggest for. Schemes, exercises, maneuvres are in themselves little more than tests of knowledge; but generalship demands much more than this, for the true general is the creator quite as much as the applier of knowledge. Of what kind of knowledge? Psychological rather than operational. Here history can help us, and in place of being looked upon as a clay pit to dig brick out of, it should be considered an inexhaustible quarry of psychological ore. It does not really matter much what a certain general did at a certain date, but what is of importance is why he did it in a certain set of circumstances. The object of education is not so much to discover 'what to think', as to learn 'how to think'. What is, or was, the governing reason of an action? What is, or was, the nature of an army's machinery; what can it, or could it, make? These are the type of questions an educated mind should ask itself.

I remember once attending some French maneuvres, when after an exercise General Debeney asked a divisional commander to explain his plan to him. This officer began: 'My machine-guns, ...' whereupon he was cut short by Debeney who excitedly roared out: 'Damn your machine-guns, I want your ideas!'

A well-stored memory is a great asset, for what a general knows is bound to tone and colour all his work. But storing must be methodical, the memory must not be like a stacked up second-hand bookshop; it must be rather like a carefully arranged library, in which the printed books are the experiences of others and the manuscripts one's own experiences. Yet in war it is not so much the knowledge contained in these books and these manuscripts which is so important, it is insight into the personality of their writers including oneself. 'Know thyself' are two words of profound wisdom; yet in our existing system, though self-knowledge cannot be denied, self-expression very largely is, because it so frequently clashes with the regulations. It is not recognized that the object of regulations and rules if; to produce order in the fighting machine, and not to strangle the mind of the man who controls it.

'What is the good of experience if you do not reflect?' asked Frederick the Great - what indeed! And if reflection demands that one should be trite to oneself, surely also will it be enhanced if one has the courage to be true to others. Why are we soldiers so cretinous in this respect? Why have we such a horror for truth, for facts, for actualities, for possibilities, for probabilities and even for obvious certainties? The answer is because our system of mental discipline is cretinous. When we study the lives of the great captains, and not merely their victories and defeats, what do we discover? That the mainspring witlhin them was originality, outwardly expressing itself in unexpected actions. It is in the mental past in which most battles are lost, and lost conventionally, and our system teaches us how to lose them, because in the schoolroom it will not transcend the conventional. The soldier who thinks ahead is considered, to put it bluntly, a damned nuisance. 'Fortunate is that army whose ranks released from the burden of dead forms, are controlled by natural, untrammelled, quickening common sense.'¹ Not only fortunate, but thrice blessed! Even if its general alone possesses this essential freedom. Yet what is the use of studying genius if we are not allowed to emulate it, and in our own small way to be guided by it?

It is fear, not so much conscious or intuitive, that a corporal may, through knowledge, learn to despise his captain, and that a captain may learn to despise his colonel, and so on upwards until the hierarchs are left naked and ashamed, which is the dry-rot of generalship. Intellectual courage is the antiseptic, and though theoretically the training of the general should begin when he is in the cradle, practically it must begin when as a youth he enters his military college or academy. In these centres, of crystallized traditionalism what do we see? The inculcation of the spirit of generalship? - No! But the infiltration of what I will call the 'cricket complex'.

Games and sports have an immense value as physical relaxers and restorers; but in themselves they have no more military value than playing fiddles or painting postcards. All these pastimes and many others have some value, but no one of them has a paramount value in fashioning a general. What games did Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus, Frederick the Great or Napoleon play? Alexander, the greatest of them all, was willing to run with the sons of kings, but professional sports he considered unkingly if not contemptible. What has this 'cricket complex' inhibited us with? The comfortable theory that to amuse ourselves is the most perfect way of learning how to become soldiers. 'He who plays should be paid by promotion,' such is the unwhispered canon of this cult.

The result of this comfortable theory is mental strangulation. As the cricket ball bounds through the air the cannon ball bounds out of mind. Soldiership losing all stimulus becomes 'shop'. Things military become intensely boring, and every excuse is seized upon to regularize and methodize training and organization so that they will cease to worry us. After the World War we were told that there was not going to be another war for ten years. 'Thank God!' whispered the generals, 'we shall have retired by then; let us amuse ourselves-let us play.' This hypothetical ten years having now run their course, and though the world is flatulent with war, another comfortable theory has been propounded, namely, that our army is a 'police force'. 'Thank God!' say the generals, now quite audibly, 'what does a policeman do? He walks up and down his beat and wears out shoe-leather! Well, then, let us emulate him; our men shall go on marching; in any case they have bayonets, whilst the police bave only truncheons - and in the afternoon we can play a little game.'

From our system of 'what to think' I will turn to - 'how to think', for until we begin to think correctly there can be no radical change.

In generalship, and for all that in citizenship as well, what does 'how to think' entail? A number of most difficult factors. First there is will, which lies at the bottom of personality. Elsewhere, I have called will 'the gravity of the mind'. I wrote, 'As the aim of gravity is to bring the stone (thrown into the air) to rest at the centre of the earth, where all activity ceases, so in war the aim of a commander's will is to bring his enemy to rest, to deprive him of all power of movement.'¹ Clausewitz says: Will is not an entirely unknown quantity; it indicates what it will be to-morrow by what it is to-day ... each of the two opponents can ... form an opinion of the other, in a great measure, from what he is and what he does.'²

Quite clearly does our system realize, that will is a unknown quantity, for our regulations are never tired of reminding us that the supreme object in war is to impose our will upon our enemy; but in peace time this imposition is the perquisite of the few to the utter detriment of the many, and again very largely because of the canonization of the regulations. If what is written is holy writ, then it stands outside criticism and cannot be questioned. Those in control will not be asked awkward questions, and those under control, having to follow the regulations, do so automatically with the minimum appeal to their brains, 'How comforting,' they all instinctively cry, 'here is a book which spares us the trouble of thinking!' Thus are brains ossified and thus are battles lost, for only in the Spartan theory of war can a general know with any certainty what his opponent is going to do. 'This is why military thought always tends to get back to the 'push of pike' idea - it is as simple its pushing a 'pram' or a wheelbarrow -- the tactics of the nursery and of a primitive agricultural age.

What does imposition of will demand? Reason; for in war each of the opposing wills is attempting to express a reason in order to gain an end. 'There must be a reason for each action carried out during a war, and ... it must be a good reason or a bad reason; and if we have no reason at all, which has frequently happened in war, we reduce ourselves to the position of lunatics.

'If we understand the true reason for any single event, then we shall be able to work out the chain of cause and effect, and, if we can do this, we shall foresee 'events and so be in a position to prepare ourselves to meet them. Our reason is the director of our actions and also the spirit of our plan.... We must analyse its motive and discover where it has failed us; thus we shall turn errors to our advantage by compelling them to teach us.'¹

Why do we so persistently fail to do so? Not only because we lack imagination, but because we suppress the little that we have. The reasoning of our tactics is not based on the possibilities, or even probabilities, of the next war, not even on the actualities of the last, but on the impossibilities of the one before it. If we wish to think clearly, we must cease imitating; if we wish to cease imitating, we must make use of our imagination. We must train ourselves for the unexpected in place of training others for the cut and dried. Audacity, and not caution, must be our watchword. Safety first may make a good midwife, but it will never make a good general. Safety first is like blocking every ball at cricket; anyhow, here is something military we can learn from this game.

Lastly, to turn to the moral sphere. Here the problem, or the main problem, is a dual one, namely, to imbue a general with a sense of responsibility, which is the mainspring of decision, determination and resolution, and to free him from the trammels of his headquarters and so enable him to mix with his men, to show himself to them, to speak to them, and advertise that he is a live, a human, and a personal factor.

The first of these two problems depends upon a remodelling of our system of discipline, which is still largely eighteenth - century. In war, as in peace, individuality Is far more important than uniformity; personality than congruity, and originality than conventionality. 'War', writes Clausewitz, 'is the province of chance. In no sphere of human activity is such a margin to be left for this intruder.'¹ As this is largely true, no regulations and no rules can cover the art of generalship. Like the great artist the general should possess genius, and if he does not, then no effort should be spared to develop his natural abilities, in place of suppressing them. Our existing system is, so I think, based on suppression, suppression to a large extent of an unconscious order. The old are often suspicious of the young and do not welcome criticism, yet without criticism, both destructive and constructive, there can be no progress. As I have already mentioned, the easiest course to adopt is to lay down rules and regulations which must be implicitly obeyed; yet chance knows no compulsion, and such rules and regulations are apt to cramp intelligence and originality. This is seen clearly from the frequent use with which 'Bolshevik' is applied to anyone who dares to think independently; yet if this 'vice' will teach us how to rely upon our common sense and how to speak frankly and without fear, what matters a name if common sense and self-reliance will help us win the next war. In place, so it seems to me, our present system of discipline, which is so truly Prussian and so untruly English, is responsible for creating what I will call the 'Cringe-viki', those knock-kneed persuasive tact-ticians who gut an army not with a knife but with a honeyed word.

The second of these two problems is of far greater simplicity. As a battalion commander is given a second-in-command, who should he his understudy and not an administrative hen brooding over the headquarter eggs, so should every commander in war, from brigadier upwards to general-in-chief, be given an executive second-in-command, who being able to replace him at any moment, will enable him to spend a far greater time than he now can with his troops. In peace time, during the collective training season, the roster officers, I have suggested, might frequently carry out such work. Should the general be killed, there will be little or no disorder, as there was when Stonewall Jackson fell at Chancellorsville; the second-in command will carry on, the cry being: Le général est mort, vive le général! Such a system is so obviously necessary and so simple, that it passes my understanding why it has not long ago been adopted. The reason probably is, that in Continental armies the establishment of a chief of staff - a nonexecutive officer - has obscured the value of an executive one.

So far the head, now I will turn to the nerves - the staff.

When, a short time back, I hinted at a comparison between Grant's staff of 1864 and Sir Douglas Haig's staff of 1918, it may have seemed I suggested that the British Commander-in-Chief's staff should have in size approximated to Grant's. The answer is - 'No' and 'Yes'. 'No, because it is obvious that war to-day, is far more complex than it was during the American Civil War. 'Yes', because I am of opinion, that like practically every other headquarter staff in the war, G.H.Q. could have been reduced though certainly not to fourteen officers. Assuming, however, that it could not, it is not so much size which is the problem, as the contact which size is apt to establish with the general. Whilst in theory the idea of a staff is to relieve a general of work, in practice the last war certainly proved that the larger the staff was, the more a general became absorbed in its work. Each officer was another tentacle of the octopus.

The most practical way of overcoming this difficulty is to abolish the general staff and replace it by the old-fashioned general's staff of aides-de-camp, and place the whole staff, the experts, advisers, etc., under a chief of staff with whom individual staff officers will establish contact. If this is done, then there is no excuse whatever for a general to get absorbed in staff work. His second-in-command will be at headquarters when be is out, and the only staff officer he need come into contact with is his chief of staff, whilst his own staff - the general's staff - is there not to advise him, but to see that his orders are obeyed by his subordinate commanders - these personal liaison officers are in fact an extension of his brain.

I now arrive at the third and final problem, namely, the influence of the army, and above all the influence of its weapons upon generalship. How can we reduce size and complexity, and so modify the dangers of the battlefield that our supply of actual and potential generals and generals-in-chief will not run dry before the war is won?

If I were to ask a watchmaker to make me a watch, would he select a pickaxe, a crowbar and a steam-hammer as his tools? No - he would suit his tools to his craft. This is the point, and the most important point the theorists of war have overlooked. A general must be given an army he can command, and not merely an army he can launch into battle like a ship from her stocks. Had Alexander the Great inherited a Persian horde, he would not have got anywhere near the Indus, it is doubtful whether he would ever have got out of Greece. Give a modern general 2,000,000 soldiers, and equipped as they are to-day, such an army will possess a potential bulletpower of 15,000,000 rounds a minute. Yet in spite of this enormous fire-power, all art, strategical and tactical, will vanish; for all he can do with this mass is to advance upon his enemy, and attempt to swallow him up, as Pharaoh and his host were swallowed up by the Red Sea; for such hordes can no more be manoeuvred than could the herded multitudes of Xerxes and Darius. Yet if they stand still and fire, there is no breaking them by fire.

Our present conception of war, conceived in France, and during the last century elaborated out of all recognition by Prussia, is monstrous, costly and brutal in the extreme. It is the antithesis of Ruskin's heroic ideal; for to 'activate' it, it demands the herding together of millions of peasants and artisans, and then slaughtering them on wholesale lines. It is nothing more or less than 'the rage of a barbarian wolf-flock'.

How can we change this? By disemBarrassing our minds of the horde idea, the idea of brute masses of men and of Mongol inundations. Even if we cannot, or will not, do so, science and industry will do this for us. In their first great lap, from about 1850 until the last war, these twin world-powers gave us quantity; now they are beginning to give us quality, motorization and mechanization, which in the end are as inevitable as the superiority of infantry over cavalry once fire-arms were invented.

These two powers will not only give us quality, but they will vastly reduce the size of armies, for the cost of motorized and mechanized forces will prohibit the raising of armoured hordes. They will simplify war, for whilst at present we are complicating military organization by mixing the new and the old arms, as was done and with similar results in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, once we realize that to harness a tank to an infantryman is as foolish as harnessIng a tractor to a mule, we shall find that an armoured force is as simple to handle and command, as was the army of Marlborough when compared to the army of Gustavus Adolphus.

What repercussions will mechanization have upon generalship? First, the comparative smallness and case of movement of armoured forces will provide the average general with a far better balanced weapon than the unarmoured horde. Secondly, as armour will cut out the bullet, the danger of a country running dry of generals, if they act as generals should, will be vastly reduced. Thirdly, and this is the most important point of all, as mechanized warfare will approximate in many ways to warfare at sea, a general who does not man a tank and control his tanks from a tank, will be about as much use to his army as an admiral who, refusing to board his flagship, prefers to row about In a dinghy.

So, at length, by one of those curious, and mysterious twists in the spiral of human progress, we are, as it by a magician's wand, wafted back to the days of Henry V, Edward the Black Prince and Richard Coeur de Lion. Therefore, unless our generals show the courage of these men, as well as don their armour, in its modern form of bullet-proof steel, mechanization will prove of no more value than metallic junk.

In such wars as these, who will be the better general, that is the general the better equipped physically, intellectually and morally? Will it be the man of sixty five or of forty-five, of fifty-five or of thirty-five? for there will be no dug-outs, no fixed offices, no chateaux, in place -- a bumping belching machine, and much breakfasting under the stars. Obviously the answer is that in nine cases out of ten the younger man will beat the older man, as easily as David beat Goliathand - David was a mechanical expert.

CONCLUSION

Now to conclude this brief study of the most tremendous problem which will face us in the next war -- our generalship all I will say is this: we are not a continental nation, therefore let us cease copying continental methods of generalship, and instead follow our own. Did Wolfe and Moore die for nothing that we should forget them for Teuton and Frank? Did Wellington rally his squares at Waterloo, and Robet lead the van of his army to Kandahar merely to entertain us when we have nothing better to do than read their histories on a dull winter evening? We may be a nation of shopkeepers, but also are we not a nation of leaders? Look at the map! Every red mark and line was won for us by a band of determined and resolute men whose leaders would have scorned the idea of not sharing toils and dangers with them. Therefore, I say, let us have done with stockyard generalship, and get back to the old idea which has made us what we are: that a general, however exalted be his rank, in body, heart and mind is still a soldier.

APPENDIX
THE AGES OF 100 GENERALS

THE following list is unprejudiced by any idea of proving youth to be in itself a military virtue. The names and events mentioned in it were jotted down from memory, the ages and dates being afterwards looked up. In several cases I had to change my original selection as the date of birth was unknown. I have not included naMes of generals after 1866, because from that date onwards generalship becomes senile. The interesting points to note are: that according to this list the average age, or zenith, of generalship is 40.36 years; that 74 per cent of the generals mentioned are forty-five years old or under, and that 4 per cent only are sixty or over.

If we now make a graph of the above showing the number of generals according, to their ages (see Graph No. 1), we find that theperiod of most efficient generalship lies between the years thirty and forty-nine, and that the peak is reached between the years thirty-five and forty-five. Compare these figures with Graph No. 2, which shows the average age, year by year, between January 1914, and January 1932, of all Field- Marshals, holding appointments, Generals and. Lieutenant-Generals in the British Army (excluding India and 'Ghosts') on the active list. From this second graph the average age throughout this period works out at 59.9 years; that is approximately ten years outside the period of 'most efficient generalship. As far as generalship is concerned this shows clearly the reason why throughout history great generals have been few in number - peace conditions do not fit war requirements. Finally, Graph No. 3 is a composite diagram of the period 1919-1932 taken as a whole, showing the numbers of Generals according to age. From this graph it will be seen that the period of 'greatest employment', ranges between the years fifty-five and sixty-five and that the peak is reached between the years fifty-eight and sixty-two, which, I think, compares favourly with most foreign armies except the Russian, in which, I am told, the higher commanders average between forty and forty-five years of age. As to these figures I have no proof.

Concerning the Influence of youth on generalship, the following letter written by Bonaparte on January 20th, 1794, and addressed to the Directory is of interest:

'...As to generals of division, unless they are officers of distinction, I beg you not to send any to me; for our way of waging war is so different front other, that I do not wish to entrust a division to a general until I have tested him out in two or three operations.... It is essential for the Army and the Republic to send to me here young people (des jeunes gens) who are learning how to carry out a war of movements and manceuvres; it is wars of this nature which have enabled us to gain such great successes in this army.'

At this date Bonaparte was twenty-seven years old and already had to his credit one of the most remarkable campaigns in history.

APPENDIX
THE AGES OF 100 GENERALS