I

It is probable that no war since Bannockburn democratized the battlefield has been so revolutionary in method and resource as that into which Europe was plunged last August. It was forty-four years since Germany and France were last engaged in warfare on any considerable scale; over twelve years since England was at war with the Boer republics, and ten years since Russia was at war with Japan. The echoes of the Balkan wars, it is true, had hardly died away; but those wars, bloody though they were, had the character of the wars of the past. The movements were rapid, the decisions swift, and the resources and methods employed were familiar.

Not until the Russo-Japanese war was there any suggestion that the art and conduct of war were on the eve of vital changes, consequent upon the dominating influence which artillery had established in the field. The battle of Mukden was the precursor of the new siege warfare which, with its dullness and its ugliness, was to supersede the old romantic war of swift surprise, crashing blow, and shifting scene. But in the ten years that had succeeded Mukden there had been developments whose effect could be only to differentiate still further modern warfare from that of the past. The conquest of the air, the invention of wireless communication, the improvement in motor traction, were among the most important of the factors which had come into opera

tion; and inasmuch as the practice of warfare, like the practice of anything else, is largely governed by its tools, it was clear that when war on the grand scale came, it would be marked by new possibilities which could be only dimly imagined. What would be the relation of the mobile gun and the bomb-proof fort? Would Lord Sydenham's view that the fortress was effete and that earthworks were the essential corollary of modern artillery, be justified? What place would the cavalry have in future encounters? Would it be rendered as obsolete by the motor vehicle as the cab-horse had been rendered obsolete by the 'taxi'? Would its function as the vision of the army be henceforth assumed by the aeroplane? What was the true function of the air in warfare? Would the airship prove to be an effective military instrument, or would the aeroplane, with its superiority in numbers and mobility, reduce it to a clumsy futility?

These were typical of the questions to which only practical experience could furnish decisive answers. But so far as the calculable elements were concerned, the advantage was, of course, decisively with that power which had made preparations for war its supreme function. That advantage was not limited to the specifically military equipment which Germany had organized with such astonishing thoroughness. It extended to the whole field of the national life, every department of which was developed with a view to its effective coöperation in the purposes of war.

The contempt which Germany had for the military potentialities of Great Britain was not altogether unreasonable. It was founded, not merely upon the negligible proportions of the British army, but also upon the fact that the whole conception of the state was non-warlike and its organization entirely industrial and pacific. England relied upon the sea for her protection and still believed in the maxim of Chatham that 'the standing army of England is the navy,' — a maxim in which a defensive and not an offensive attitude is implicit. Had the Prussian mind been more open to the teaching of history it would have understood, from such episodes as the American Civil War, that great military resources may be latent in a non-military people; but it has been one of the fatal mistakes of the Prussians to calculate only on the visible and the material and to ignore the human and spiritual forces that they have challenged.

But though, tested by the Continental scale, the British army was negligible, there were two points in which it was incomparable. It was small in numbers, but it was great in experience. It was the only professional army in Europe, and, apart from the Russian, it was the only army that had had the supreme qualification of actual experience of war. It may be said with almost strict truth that when the German and French armies faced each other last August there was hardly a man on either side who had seen a shot fired in battle. The English army, on the other hand, in addition to the qualities of the professional soldier who had served all over the world, had in it a powerful stiffening of seasoned men who had been through the South African War and had been inured to all the rough vicissitudes of battle.

And the second point was even more vital. The British army was generaled

by men all of whom were familiar with the practice of war and whose merits had been discovered, not in manœuvres, but on the battlefield. The importance of this fact cannot be overestimated. It is one of the paradoxes of Lord Fisher that 'disobedience is the whole art of war.' 'In peace,' he will say, 'you want a man who will obey orders. In war you want a man who knows when to disobey them. Nelson disobeyed Jervis at St. Vincent and won the battle; he disobeyed at Copenhagen and bluffed the Danes into surrender.'

Perhaps it is a perilous maxim; but it is true that war is an art as well as a science and that one may have great success in the pedantries of manœuvres and be discovered to be a great fool in the presence of realities on the battlefield. Now except for a few men like Hindenburg, Pau, and Castelnau, who as youngsters took part in the campaign of 1870, none of the generals on either the French or the German side had ever been under fire. They were theorists of war. They were the product of manœuvres and textbooks. They might be good men, but they had to be taken on trust. And the result was what might have been expected. Von Moltke was deposed within two months of the beginning of the war, and on both sides there has been a rapid displacement of inefficient generals. Forty disappeared on the French side alone.

Now the case was different with the English. There was not an officer in high command in the army who had not spent a large part of his life in active service in the field. Many of them bore the witness of old battlefields on their persons; all of them carried on their breasts the symbols of some act of valor or some display of military talent. They had fought in many fields: on the frontiers of India, in Afghanistan, in Burma, in Somaliland, in Egypt, but

The saying that South Africa is the grave of reputations is older than the second Boer War, but it was that war which gave it the significance that attaches to it to-day. Buller's failure, although most conspicuous, was only typical of what happened in the early stages of the war; and in the later stages Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, though more successful, cannot be said to have added to their reputations. There was, however, one conspicuous exception to the depressing rule - one reputation which found in South Africa not a grave but a birthplace. Sir John French went into the war unknown to the world; he emerged from it with the most secure reputation as a fighting general in the British army. This suggests no reflection on Lord Kitchener, whose success has been that of the organizer of war rather than that of the general in the field.

If we ask what was the source of that deep and confident faith in Sir John French which was the product of the war, we shall find that it was not merely the almost unvarying success which attended him, but the sense that in him there worked an original genius of a rare and indisputable kind. Now, originality in any walk of life is hard to achieve. It is most difficult of all to achieve in the military profession, in which the law of discipline makes the free play of the mind seem like the most

dangerous of all heresies. Discipline and originality are natural enemies, but they are enemies that have to be reconciled if the highest efficiency of an army is to be realized. It was this necessity which haunted Bernhardi when he was showing Germany how it was to win the next war. Prince von Bülow has said that the spirit of discipline, even without enthusiasm, had enabled Prussia to march to victory in the past; but Bernhardi, like Scharnhorst before him, saw that in the new conditions of war mere reliance upon the unquestioning discipline of the mass was fatal, and he was never tired of preaching that, with discipline, there must be the element of individual initiative.

If this element is important in the case of the man it is vastly more important in the case of the officer. But the sterilizing dominion of precedent and tradition, in his case, is most difficult to attack, because it is founded, not only in the idea of obedience, but in professional pride. It is easy to confuse loyalty to the spirit of the profession, which should be constant, with loyalty to its methods, which should be varying. 'It's a way we have in the army,' becomes an easy formula for getting rid of thinking and for treating every one who dares to think as a dangerous person.

Now Sir John French is one of those men who are not terrorized by tradition. He has an independent life of the mind which enables him to shake himself free from conventional thought, and he encourages the same freedom in others. When he was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1912, he issued a memorandum inviting officers to contribute to the pages of the new Army Review, and to give expression to original ideas even though they differed from the doctrines of the official textbooks. He has the wisdom to

For, in spite of an early predilection for preaching, he has been a soldier all his life. It is true that in obedience to the parental example - for his father, Captain French, of Ripple Vale, Kent, had been an officer in the navy young French, in 1866, at the age of fourteen, joined the senior service and served four years as a naval cadet on the Britannia. But the natural genius of the lad prevailed, and in 1874 he began his military career with a commission in the 19th Hussars. It was here that his independence of mind began to show itself, not in assertive eccentricity (for he is the most modest of men and his genius consists in the possession of common sense in an uncommon measure), but in the fresh and original thought he brought to bear on his profession. His regiment was not in those days a smart affair. It was one of those, formed after the Indian Mutiny, in which only small men were enlisted, and which, in consequence, were known as the 'Dumpies.' The atmosphere of the officers' mess in the 19th Hussars was no better and no worse than the average in those days of dry

rot. The military calling was merely a phase of the sporting equipment of a gentleman, and drill and manœuvres were rather dull and perfunctory incidents in an otherwise agreeable mode of life, while anything like the serious study of the science of war marked a man out as a curiosity, if not as rather a vulgar fellow. Soldiering was a sport which could only be degraded by study. And as for the cavalry, its chief function was to give tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. It needed a man of strong will and clear ideas to cut across such ingrained habits of thought and set up a new professional standard, and French was the man for the task. His influence prevailed, and the subsequent reputation achieved by the 19th was chiefly due to his efforts.

His success here and always was more enduring because it was won in such a human and unpretentious way. He has not the grim aloofness of commanders like Wellington or Kitchener, nor does he cultivate the Napoleonic arts of flattery. But he is not inferior to any of these men in conveying that impression which is essential to the great general, the impression that he has the secret of victory in him. Without that assurance an army goes into battle robbed of its most powerful asset. Sir John French conveys the impression, not by enveloping himself in an atmosphere of remoteness and mystery, but by giving the sense of a singularly sane, balanced, daylight mind, firm in its judgments, yet open to conviction; masterful, yet without the fatal blemish of vanity or ambition; profoundly instructed, yet wholly free from the taint of the doctrinaire. He is, in a word, the ordinary man in an extraordinary degree, fearless of danger, imperturbable in action, free alike from exaltations and despairs, cool when the temperature is highest and warm when the blast is coldest, and, in all circum

stances, human, generous, a little hottempered, and always comprehensible. One would be tempted to say that he was the beau ideal of the Englishman, but for the fact that he is Irish.

But in spite of his high personal qualities and the universal affection with which he is regarded, his path has not been unobstructed. No man who thinks independently and acts on his thinking can expect that, in a world governed by precedent; least of all can he expect it in an institution which, like the army, makes every rut sacred. He became known to the conventional as a man with rather heretical notions about the use of cavalry, - for example, he taught his men that they might have to fight on foot, and he had the distinction (and, incidentally, the good fortune) to be passed over at a critical moment in his career by the late Duke of Cambridge, to whom a new idea was perdition and the man who entertained it a peril. Even his successes were, to the pedants, gained by means so unorthodox as to rule him out as an unsafe man. Thus when, commanding the cavalry in the manœuvres of 1897, he achieved a brilliant success, his tactics were severely assailed as unsound and as involving undue risks, and his nomination to the command of the cavalry in the Boer War was opposed on the ground that he was 'inefficient to command in the field.' Fortunately, General Buller had had experience with General French in Egypt, at Abu Klea and Metemneh, and he insisted on his appointment to the cavalry command.

Now if one judged war as a science only, as the Germans do, and not as an art, as Napoleon did, there would have been a reasonable case against the selection of French. For though he has been one of the most careful students of war of his time, and though, when at the War Office as Assistant Adju

tant-General, he devoted himself daily to working out tactical problems, he is essentially a pragmatist in war. He knows that war is too irrational, too incalculable a thing to be governed by rules, that every situation is unprecedented, is made up of factors, human, material, moral, that have never occurred in the same relation before; that in the last resource it is judgment, inspiration, common sense, informed by science but not controlled by it, which must be in command. To put it in another way, it is not a man's theories that count, but his personality. It was possible to condemn French on his work in manœuvres because according to the rules he took too great risks, and manœuvres having no reality could not demonstrate that those risks were warranted. Only actual war could reveal whether audacity and caution were in due equipoise.

And that was the revelation of the Boer War in regard to Sir John French. It showed that he had the genius for seizing a situation swiftly and truly; that he was always master of the whole sum, not only the sum of his own resources, but the sum of his enemy's resources; that the risks he took, though they might ignore rules, never ignored facts.

As an example, take the best known but not the greatest of his achievements in the Boer War, the relief of Kimberley. When French hurled his cavalry division at the Boer lines he took risks which in manœuvres would have been denounced as fatal. By every theory of the textbooks he should have been destroyed. Instead, the fury, the unexpectedness, the momentum of the act carried him through the storm unscathed. The clouds of dust flung up by the flying feet of the horses enveloped the charge in obscurity, and the Boers for once lost their heads and fired confusedly. Their line was pierced,