CHAPTER V

THE STUDENT OF MILITARY AFFAIRS

Mr Belloc's most important writings on the war are to be found in _Land and Water_, the _Illustrated Sunday Herald_, and _Pearson's Magazine_. To these must be added his series of books of which only one has so far appeared--_A General Sketch of the European War_. His series of articles in _Pearson's Magazine_ has also been reprinted in book-form under the title _The Two Maps_.

Of these his writings in _Land and Water_ are, at the present time, the most important. Since the earliest stages of the war Mr. Belloc has contributed to _Land and Water_ a weekly article. What is the nature of this article? In the first place, it is a commentary on the current events of the campaign. Mr. Belloc himself, when challenged recently to defend his work, said very modestly (as we think)--"My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and of energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."

With part of this description we may heartily agree; with the rest we must disagree. We agree with Mr. Belloc when he refers to his work as being accomplished "at a very great expense of time and of energy." There may be some who doubt the truth of this statement. There is undoubtedly a large section of the public which, led astray by that cynicism and that distrust of newspapers and journalists which a certain section of our Press has engendered in the public, has come to regard all newspaper reports on the war as unreliable and the writings of so-called "experts" as mere vapourings, undertaken in the hope of assisting the circulation of the paper in which they appear rather than the circulation of the truth. If, then, any reader be inclined to include Mr. Belloc in such a denunciation and to doubt that his weekly commentary in _Land and Water_ is written as he says, "at a very great expense of time and of energy," let him turn to one of Mr. Belloc's articles, reprinted in _The Two Maps_, on "What to Believe in War News."

In this article Mr. Belloc asks the question--"How is the plain man to distinguish in the news of the war what is true from what is false, and so arrive at a sound opinion?" His answer to this question is that "in the first place, the basis of all sound opinion are the official _communiques_ read with the aid of a map." And to this he adds the following explanation:

When I say "the official communiques" I do not mean those of the British Government alone, nor even of the Allies alone, but of _all_ the belligerents. You just read impartially the communiques of the Austro-Hungarian and of the German Governments together with those of the British Government and its Allies, or you will certainly miss the truth. By which statement I do not mean that each Government is equally accurate, still less equally full in its relation; but that, unless you compare all the statements of this sort, you will have most imperfect evidence; just as you would have very imperfect evidence in a court of law if you only listened to the prosecution and refused to listen to the defence.

Mr. Belloc then proceeds to show what characteristics all official _communiques_ have in common, and then to outline the peculiar characteristics of the _communiques_ of each belligerent. Although not one unnecessary sentence is included, this short summary of his own discoveries covers seven pages. The final sentence of the article is as follows: "Nevertheless, unless you do follow fairly regularly the Press of all the belligerent nations, you will obtain but an imperfect view of the war as a whole."

This comparison of the _communiques_ of the belligerents, which is seen in these pages to be no light task, naturally forms but a small part of Mr. Belloc's work; so that further proof of his own statement, that his work necessitates the expenditure of much time and energy, need hardly be adduced.

This slight insight into the nature of Mr. Belloc's work will also serve to emphasize the point in which we disagree with Mr. Belloc's own description of his work. If, let us say, a bank manager, who may be regarded as a type of citizen of considerable intelligence and leisure, were to adopt and faithfully to pursue the methods described in this article, the methods which Mr. Belloc himself has found it necessary to adopt, he would certainly find his leisure time swallowed up. In so far as this alone were the case, we might agree with Mr. Belloc when he says of himself--"I ... profess now ... to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do." But our bank manager, when he had accomplished the long process of sifting out the only war news that is reliable (and he would be only able to accomplish this much, be it noted, with the aid of Mr. Belloc) would still be unable, in all probability, to grasp the full meaning and importance of that news. To do that he would need what, in common with the majority of Englishmen, he does not possess, and what it would take him years to acquire, namely, a knowledge of military history and military science.

We see then that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in _Land and Water_, is doing for others not merely "what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do," but _what they could not do for themselves_, even had they the time and opportunity.

To undertake this task he is peculiarly qualified. In his writings on the war, indeed, Mr. Belloc appears as an expert, in the true sense of that much abused word. He says of himself, in the paragraph already quoted--"I happen to have specialized on military history and problems." That is again too modest an estimation of the facts. He has done far more than merely to specialize on military history; he has given military history its true place in relation to other branches of history. The study of history at the present time is specialized. We subdivide its various aspects, classify facts and speak of constitutional history, economic history, ecclesiastical history, military history, and so forth. Now Mr. Belloc, in addition to his study of all the branches of history, has not merely made a special study of military history, but has realized and proved, more fully than any other historian, of what tremendous importance is the study of military history in its relation to those other branches of the study of history, such as the constitutional and economic. "In writing of the military aspect of any movement," he says, "it is impossible to deal with that aspect save as a living part of the whole; so knit into national life is the business of war."

In those words, "so knit into national life is the business of war," Mr. Belloc has finely expressed his conception of war as one of the weightiest factors in human events. In accordance with this attitude Mr. Belloc has shown us, what no other historian has ever made clear, that the French Revolution, "more than any other modern period, turns upon, and is explained by, its military history." In the preface to his short thesis _The French Revolution_ there occurs this passage:

The reader interested in that capital event should further seize (and but too rarely has an opportunity for seizing) its military aspect; and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes: the first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of the military side of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as part of a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again, a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the two combine.

In this short excerpt we catch a glimpse, not only of Mr. Belloc's attitude towards military history, but also of his method in dealing with it; and since this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work is of such capital importance we may perhaps quote that passage which begins on page 142 of _The French Revolution_ and is so illuminating in regard both to Mr. Belloc's attitude and to his method:

The Revolution would never have achieved its object; on the contrary, it would have led to no less than a violent reaction against those principles which were maturing before it broke out, and which it carried to triumph, had not the armies of revolutionary France proved successful in the field; but the grasping of this mere historic fact, I mean the success of the revolutionary armies, is unfortunately no simple matter.

We all know that as a matter of fact the Revolution was, upon the whole, successful in imposing its view upon Europe. We all know that from that success as from a germ has proceeded, and is still proceeding, modern society. But the nature, the cause and the extent of the military success which alone made this possible, is widely ignored and still more widely misunderstood. No other signal military effort which achieved its object has in history ended in military disaster--yet this was the case with the revolutionary wars. After twenty years of advance, during which the ideas of the Revolution were sown throughout Western civilization, and had time to take root, the armies of the Revolution stumbled into the vast trap or blunder of the Russian campaign; this was succeeded by the decisive defeat of the democratic armies at Leipsic, and the superb strategy of the campaign of 1814, the brilliant rally of what is called the Hundred Days, only served to emphasize the completeness of the apparent failure. For that masterly campaign was followed by Napoleon's first abdication, that brilliant rally ended in Waterloo and the ruin of the French army. When we consider the spread of Grecian culture over the East by the parallel military triumph of Alexander, or the conquest of Gaul by the Roman armies under Caesar, we are met by political phenomena and a political success no more striking than the success of the Revolution. The Revolution did as much by the sword as ever did Alexander or Caesar, and as surely compelled one of the great transformations of Europe. But the fact that the great story can be read to a conclusion of defeat disturbs the mind of the student.

Again, that element fatal to all accurate study of military history, the imputation of civilian virtues and motives, enters the mind of the reader with fatal facility when he studies the revolutionary wars.

He is tempted to ascribe to the enthusiasm of the troops, nay, to the political movement itself, a sort of miraculous power. He is apt to use with regard to the revolutionary victories the word "inevitable," which, if ever it applies to the reasoned, willing and conscious action of men, certainly applies least of all to men when they act as soldiers.

There are three points which we must carefully bear in mind when we consider the military history of the Revolution.

First, that it succeeded: the Revolution, regarded as the political motive of its armies, won.

Secondly, that it succeeded through those military aptitudes and conditions which happened to accompany, but by no means necessarily accompanied, the strong convictions and the civic enthusiasm of the time.

Thirdly, that the element of chance, which every wise and prudent reasoner will very largely admit into all military affairs, worked in favour of the Revolution in the critical moments of the early wars.

The reader who could make closer acquaintance with this aspect of Mr. Belloc's work, and it is an aspect, as has been said, of capital importance, need only turn to the too few pages of _The French Revolution_, where he will find ample evidence not only of Mr. Belloc's understanding of the importance of military history, but of his vast knowledge of military science; and the same may be said of those little books Mr. Belloc has published from time to time on some of the outstanding battles of the past, such as _Blenheim_, _Malplaquet_, _Waterloo_, _Cressy_ and _Tourcoing_.

It is apparent, then, that Mr. Belloc brings to a task which the mass of the English public is quite incapable of undertaking for itself peculiar advantages, in that he has combined with a long and careful study of military history a thorough technical knowledge of military science.

In addition to this major and essential qualification he possesses, as the outcome of his pursuits and experience, other minor and subsidiary though still very necessary qualifications. In this war, as in all wars of the past, the lie of country and the fatigue of men are two of the weightiest factors; and Mr. Belloc is enormously assisted in attempting a nice appreciation of these factors by the knowledge acquired in the long pursuit of his topographical tastes and by his practical experience in the ranks of the French army.

On this latter point too much insistence should not be laid, though to ignore it entirely would be as foolish as to exaggerate its importance. We may best assess its value, perhaps, by saying that Mr. Belloc has been in possession for more than twenty years of certain definite knowledge which the vast majority of Englishmen have only acquired in the past year. More than twenty years ago he learnt the elementary rules of military organization and the ordinary facts of army life which are common knowledge in conscript countries. In England we have remained ignorant of these facts. Many of us have learnt them for the first time since August, 1914; many of us, though we have come to a consciousness of them, will never learn them. In a passage in _A General Sketch of the European War_, in which Mr. Belloc exposes "the fundamental contrast between the modern German military temper and the age-long traditions of the French service," though he brings into play much information that he has doubtless acquired in more recent years, we can see shining through, the memory of early experiences.

This contrast [he says] appears in everything, from tactical details to the largest strategical conception, and from things so vague and general as the tone of military writings, to things so particular as the instruction of the conscript in his barrack-room. The German soldier is taught--or was--that victory was inevitable, and would be as swift as it would be triumphant; the French soldier was taught that he had before him a terrible and doubtful ordeal, one that would be long, one in which he ran a fearful risk of defeat, and one in which he might, even if victorious, have to wear down his enemy by the exercise of a most burdensome tenacity.

No useful purpose would be served by entering here into details of the nature of Mr. Belloc's service in the French army. There occurs, however, in _The Path to Rome_, a short passage which is too interesting and too amusing not to quote. Arriving at Toul, Mr. Belloc is reminded of the manoeuvres of 1891:

For there were two divisions employed in that glorious and fatiguing great game, and more than a gross of guns--to be accurate 156--and of these one (the sixth piece of the tenth battery of the eighth--I wonder where you all are now; I suppose I shall not see you again, but you were the best companions in the world, my friends) was driven by three drivers, of whom I was the middle one and the worst, having on my livret the note "Conducteur mediocre."

In _Hills and the Sea_ Mr. Belloc says:

In the French Artillery it is a maxim ... that you should weight your limber (and, therefore, your horses) with useful things alone; and as gunners are useful only to fire guns, they are not carried, save into action or when some great rapidity of movement is desired.... But on the march we (meaning the French) send the gunners forward, and not only the gunners, but a reserve of drivers also. We send them forward an hour or two before the guns start; we catch them up with the guns on the road; they file up to let us pass, and commonly salute us by way of formality and ceremony. Then they come into the town of the halt an hour or two after we have reached it.

But of far more vital interest is that vast fund of special knowledge which Mr. Belloc has amassed in the indulgence of his tastes in travel and topography. Of this knowledge the evidence to be found in Mr. Belloc's writings is so voluminous and overwhelming that it is as unnecessary as it is impossible to quote freely here. A detailed examination of Mr. Belloc's books on travel will be found in another chapter; if one point more than another needs emphasis here, it is that Mr. Belloc primarily views all country over which he passes from a military standpoint. To accompany Mr. Belloc on a motor run through some part of his own county of Sussex suffices to convince one of this. Whether tramping along causeways and sidepaths, or speeding over railway lines, he cannot pass through any considerable stretch of country without exercising his mind as to the possible advantages that might be afforded opposing armies by this or that natural formation. It is fair to say that this question, if we may call it such, has been uppermost in Mr. Belloc's mind throughout every journey of an extent that he has undertaken, whether in Southern, Western or Eastern Europe. It would be false to imagine that the prime motive of all Mr. Belloc's journeys was to view country purely from the military standpoint, but it is fair to say that almost the first question Mr. Belloc asks himself when he strikes a stretch of country with which he is unfamiliar, and the question he repeatedly and continually asks himself as he traverses that country, is--"How would the natural formation of this country aid or hinder a modern army advancing or retreating through it?" That great stretches of country, notably in France and Belgium, have been visited by Mr. Belloc, moreover, with the definite object of viewing them from a purely military standpoint, it is almost unnecessary to state; no reader who will turn to the pages of _The French Revolution_ or of _Blenheim_ or _Waterloo_, can fail to realize as much for himself. Common sense, indeed, plays a great part in Mr. Belloc's study of history. He regards it as virtually essential that a historian who would describe the action of a great battle of the past should be in a position faithfully to reconstruct the conditions under which that battle was fought. Mr. Belloc himself has settled the vexed question of why the Prussians did not charge at Valmy by visiting the battlefield under the conditions of the battle and discovering that they could not have charged.

Through the vast store of knowledge acquired in this way Mr. Belloc enjoys an advantage in his treatment of the present war which cannot be overestimated. In writing of the country in which the campaigns of to-day are taking place he is not writing of country as he sees it on the map. To him that country is not, as to the majority of Englishmen it is, a conglomeration of patches, some heavily, some lightly shaded, of larger and smaller dots, joined and intersected by an almost meaningless maze of thin and thick lines. To him that country is hills and vales, woods and fields, rivers and swamps, real things he has seen and among which he has moved. As an example of this we may perhaps give his description of the line of the Argonne which occurs on page 157 of _The French Revolution_:

The Argonne is a long, nearly straight range of hills running from the south northward, a good deal to the west of north.

Their soil is clay, and though the height of the hills is only three hundred feet above the plain, their escarpment or steep side is towards the east, whence an invasion may be expected. They are densely wooded, from five to eight miles broad, the supply of water in them is bad, in many parts undrinkable; habitation with its provision for armies and roads extremely rare. It is necessary to insist upon all these details, because the greater part of civilian readers find it difficult to understand how formidable an obstacle so comparatively unimportant feature in the landscape may be to an army upon the march. It was quite impossible for the guns, the wagons, and therefore the food and the ammunition of the invading army, to pass through the forest over the drenched clay land of that wet autumn save where proper roads existed. These were only to be found wherever a sort of natural pass negotiated the range.

Three of these passes alone existed, and to this day there is very little choice in the crossing of these hills.

We may compare with this extract a most remarkable description of country given by Mr. Belloc in his article on "The Great Offensive" in the issue of _Land and Water_ of October 2, 1915. Describing the chief movement in Champagne, he points out that the French advanced on a front of seventeen and a half miles from the village of Auberive to the market town of Ville-sur-Tourbe. He continues:

The first line of the enemy's defence in this region follows for the most part a crest.... This ridge is not an even one, nor was the whole of it occupied by the German works. In places it had been seized by the French during their work last February, and has been held ever since. Generally speaking, its summits nearly reach, or just surpass, the 200 metre contour, above the sea, but the whole of this country lies so high that such a height only means a matter of 150 to 200 feet above the water levels of the little muddy brooks that run in the folds of the land. It is a country of chalk, but not of dry, turfy chalk, like those of the English Downs; rather a chalk mixed with clay, which makes for bad going after rain. It is the soil over which, further to the east, the battle of Valmy was fought, an action largely determined by the impracticable nature of the ground when wet. On the other hand, it is a soil that dries quickly. The country as a whole is remarkably open. There are no hedges, and the movement of troops is covered only by scattered, not infrequent plantations of pine trees and larches, which grow to no great height. From any one of the observation posts along the seventeen miles of line one sees the landscape before one as a whole. It is the very opposite of what is called "blind country." On the east, to the right of the French positions, there runs along the horizon the low, even-wooded ridge of the Argonne, which rises immediately behind Ville-sur-Tourbe. Far to the east, from the left, in clear weather one distinguishes the great mass of Rheims Cathedral rising above the town.

This tremendous advantage which he possesses is casually mentioned by Mr. Belloc in his Introduction to _A General Sketch of the European War_, where he says:

It is even possible, where the writer has seen the ground over which the battles have been fought (and much of it is familiar to the author of this) so to describe such ground to the reader that he will in some sort be able to see for himself the air and the view in which the things were done: thus more than through any other method will the things be made real to him.

In co-relation with these particular and highly specialized qualifications which Mr. Belloc possessed before the war, should be reckoned perhaps two other qualifications of a more general character. The first of these is the very long and thorough training which his scholarship has necessitated in the dispassionate examination of evidence. Through years of historical study he has learnt carefully to sort out strong from weak evidence and to base his judgements only on such evidence as may be regarded as thoroughly reliable. A cursory glance through the pages of _Danton_ and a quite casual perusal of a few of the foot-notes in that book will leave the reader with no doubts on this point. In course of years this careful practice naturally develops into a habit; and the value of this habit in approaching reports of actions and statistics of prisoners or effectives may easily be grasped.

The second of these two general qualifications with which we must credit Mr. Belloc is the fact of his envisagement of the possibility of this war. Europe, Mr. Belloc argues, reposes upon the foundations of nationality. Internationalism, whether it be expressed in the financial rings of Capitalism or the world-wide brotherhoods of Socialism, is only made possible by a harmony of the wills of the great European nations. Should a conflict of wills not merely exist but break out into expression in war, internationalism, though outwardly so powerful, must inevitably go by the board and the ancient foundations upon which Europe rests stand poignantly revealed. Such a conflict of wills Mr. Belloc has always seen to exist between Prussia and the rest of the nations of Europe. His knowledge of their history and character led him years ago to that idea of the Prussians which this war has shown to be the true idea, and which we find expressed on every hand to-day with remarkable sageness after the event. This view is that which recognizes fully that the Prussian spirit, "the soul of Prussia in her international relations," is expressed in what is called the "Frederician Tradition," which Mr. Belloc has put into the following terms:

The King of Prussia shall do all that may seem to advantage the kingdom of Prussia among the nations, notwithstanding any European conventions or any traditions of Christendom, or even any of those wider and more general conventions which govern the international conduct of other Christian peoples.

Mr. Belloc further explains this tradition by saying:

For instance, if a convention of international morals has arisen--as it did arise very strongly, and was kept until recent times--that hostilities should not begin without a formal declaration of war, the "Frederician Tradition" would go counter to this, and would say: "If ultimately it would be to the advantage of Prussia to attack without declaration of war, then this convention may be neglected."

Or, again, treaties solemnly ratified between two Governments are generally regarded as binding. And certainly a nation that never kept such a treaty would find itself in a position where it was impossible to make any treaties at all. Still, if upon a vague calculation of men's memories, the acuteness of the circumstance, the advantage ultimately to follow, and so on, it be to the advantage of Prussia to break such solemn treaty, then such a treaty should be broken.

To this he adds:

This doctrine of the "Frederician Tradition" does not mean that the Prussian statesmen wantonly do wrong, whether in acts of cruelty or in acts of treason and bad faith. What it means is that, wherever they are met by the dilemma, "Shall I do _this_, which is to the advantage of my country but opposed to European and common morals, or _that_, which is consonant with those morals but to the disadvantage of my country?" they choose the former and not the latter course.

That this tradition not merely existed but was the paramount influence in Prussian foreign politics Mr. Belloc had long realized, while, at the same time, he had been very well aware of the fatuous illusions about themselves under which the Prussians and a great portion of the German-speaking peoples labour--illusions which necessarily led the German national will into conflict with the will of the other European nations. Proof of the fact that Mr. Belloc had long held this view of Prussia may be found by any reader of his essays, while a passage which occurs in _Marie Antoinette_ is especially illuminating:

It is characteristic of the more deplorable forms of insurgence against civilized morals that they originate either in a race permanently alien to (though present in) the unity of the Roman Empire, or in those barbaric provinces which were admitted to the European scheme after the fall of Rome, and which for the most part enjoyed but a brief and precarious vision of the Faith between their tardy conversion and the schism of the sixteenth century. Prussia was of this latter kind, and with Prussia Frederick. To-day his successors and their advisers, when they attempt to justify the man, are compelled still to ignore the European tradition of honour. But this crime of his, the partition of Poland, the germ of all that international distrust which has ended in the intolerable armed strain of our time has another character added to it: a character which attaches invariably to ill-doing when that ill-doing is also uncivilized. It was a folly. The same folly attached to it as has attached to every revolt against the historic conscience of Europe: such blindnesses can only destroy; they possess no permanent creative spirit, and the partition of Poland has remained a peculiar and increasing curse to its promoters in Prussia....

There is not in Christian history, though it abounds in coincidence or design, a more striking example of sin suitably rewarded than the menace which is presented to the Hohenzollerns to-day by the Polish race. Not even their hereditary disease, which has reached its climax in the present generation has proved so sure a chastisement to the lineage of Frederick as have proved the descendants of those whose country he destroyed. An economic accident has scattered them throughout the dominions of the Prussian dynasty; they are a source everywhere of increasing danger and ill-will. They grow largely in representative power. They compel the government to abominable barbarities which are already arousing the mind of Europe. They will in the near future prove the ruin of that family to which was originally due the partition of Poland.

To Mr. Belloc, then, holding this view of Prussia, it was obvious that the conflict of wills between Prussia and the other nations would inevitably grow so intense as some day to result in war.

Briefly to recapitulate, we may say that Mr. Belloc, in his weekly commentary in _Land and Water_, has undertaken and carried on since the beginning of the war a task which the vast majority of the English public is quite unable to undertake for itself. He was qualified to undertake that task, and has been enabled to carry it on by the fact that he has combined with a deep study of military history an exact knowledge of military science; by the knowledge he has gained from practical experience of army service; by the wide acquaintance he has made with the vast stretches of country in the indulgence of his tastes in travel and topography; by the long and thorough training he has passed through in the dispassionate examination of evidence; and, lastly, by the fact that he had long envisaged the possibility of this war.

With this brief summary we may usefully contrast Mr. Belloc's own summary of his work already quoted in the early part of this chapter. In this he says: "My work ... is no more than an attempt to give week by week, at what I am proud to say is a very great expense of time and energy, an explanation of what is taking place. There are many men who could do the same thing. I happen to have specialized upon military history and problems, and profess now, with a complete set of maps, to be doing for others what their own occupations forbid them the time and opportunity to do."