Part 1

PARIS

TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW SERIES

_DÆDALUS, or Science and the Future_ By J. B. S. Haldane

_ICARUS, or The Future of Science_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

_THE MONGOL IN OUR MIDST_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D. _Fully Illustrated_

_WIRELESS POSSIBILITIES_ By Prof. A. M. Low. _With four Diagrams_

_NARCISSUS, An Anatomy of Clothes_ By Gerald Heard. _Illustrated_

_TANTALUS, or The Future of Man_ By F. C. S. Schiller

_THE PASSING OF THE PHANTOMS_ By Prof. C. J. Patten, M.A., M.D., Sc.D., F.R.A.I.

_CALLINICUS, A Defence of Chemical Warfare_ By J. B. S. Haldane

_QUO VADIMUS? Some Glimpses of the Future_ By E. E. Fournier d’Albe, D.Sc., F.Inst.P.

_THE CONQUEST OF CANCER_ By H. W. S. Wright, M.S., F.R.C.S.

_HYPATIA, or Woman and Knowledge_ By Dora Russell (The Hon. Mrs. Bertrand Russell)

_LYSISTRATA, or Woman’s Future and Future Woman_ By A. M. Ludovici

_WHAT I BELIEVE_ By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S.

_PERSEUS, or Of Dragons_ By H. F. Scott Stokes, M.A.

_THE FUTURE OF SEX_ By Rebecca West

_THE EVOCATION OF GENIUS_ By Alan Porter

_AESCULAPIUS, or Disease and The Man_ By F. G. Crookshank, M.D.

_PROTEUS, or The Future of Intelligence_ By Vernon Lee

_THAMYRIS, or Is there a Future for Poetry?_ By R. C. Trevelyan

_PROMETHEUS, or Biology and the Advancement of Man_ By H. S. Jennings

_PARIS, or The Future of War_ By Captain B. H. Liddell Hart

_Other Volumes in Preparation_

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

PARIS OR The Future of War

BY CAPT. B. H. LIDDELL HART

[Illustration]

NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright 1925 By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

_All Rights Reserved_

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE FUTURE OF WAR 1

THE ORIGINS OF THE FALSE OBJECTIVE 10

PERMANENT NATIONAL OBJECTS 18

THE NATIONAL OBJECTIVE IN WAR 19

HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF THE MORAL OBJECTIVE 23

THE MEANS TO THE MORAL OBJECTIVE 27

THE AIR WEAPON 37

OBJECTIONS TO THE AIR-ATTACK 43

ARE ARMIES AND NAVIES OBSOLETE? 53

THE NAVAL WEAPON 56

THE ARMY WEAPON 62

THE EVOLUTION OF “NEW MODEL” ARMIES 78

EPILOGUE 84

PARIS

THE FUTURE OF WAR

It is no purpose of this little book to discuss whether a repetition of war is likely or unlikely, or to speculate on the dawn of universal peace. The writer prefers to take his stand on universal experience, as contained in history, observing that the path of history is strewn with idealistic tombstones――the Holy Alliance, the mid-Victorian Manchester School, the Hague Conventions. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was to inaugurate a Golden Age, to be the concrete symbol of the millennium, yet within a decade the four chief Powers in Europe had reconverted their ploughshares into swords, and the North American continent was torn by a fratricidal conflict. To abolish war we must remove its cause, which lies in the imperfections of human nature. The way to “peace on earth” is by the progressive and general growth of “good-will towards men,” by a transformation of the spirit of man instead of a futile attempt to bind his fists――cords from which he can easily break free, if so disposed. This changed spirit must be world-wide, for peace-loving nations, especially if prosperous and possessed of rich territory who abandon their defences, invite and indeed provoke aggression as much as a flock of well-nourished sheep with a lean and hungry wolf in the fold. In the seventeenth century the Protestant states of North Germany complaining that the expense of maintaining armed forces exceeded the possible benefit of their protection, prated thus――“let us behave with justice to all men, and all men will behave with justice towards us.” They speedily found the fallacy of this faith in an imperfect world, their protests of neutrality an inadequate shield against the rapacity of their neighbours.

In the years immediately following the Great War, idealists thought to cure the ills of the body politic, as well as human, by a monotonous repetition of the jingle, “Day by day, and in every way, we are getting better and better,” but disillusionment came, and the peoples of the world are realizing that international Couéism is as futile to cure real disease as its pseudo-medical counterpart.

Regarding war as a hard fact, as a doctor called in to a sick patient views disease, our concern here is simply with the course of the malady, our object being to gauge its future tendencies, in order, if possible, to limit its ravages and by scientific treatment ensure the speedy and complete recovery of the patient. As diagnosis comes before treatment, the first step is to examine the patient, estimate the gravity of his condition, and discover the seat of the trouble.

The Great War caused the direct sacrifice of eight million lives, to which the British Isles alone contributed three-quarters of a million. So ineffectual was the treatment prescribed by the military practitioners who were called in that the illness took over four years to run its course, during which the financial temperature mounted daily, until for this country alone it reached a cost of £8,000,000 a day. Our total war expenditure was nearly ten thousand million pounds; our National Debt has been increased tenfold. Moreover, these long years of strain and want so impaired the physical health of the peoples that they fell an easy prey to epidemic diseases, and the influenza scourge of 1918 and 1919 cost, among the civilian population of the world, more than twice as many lives as were lost in battle.

It is surely clear that any further wars conducted on similar methods must mean the breakdown of Western civilization. Is there an alternative? To answer this question the obvious course is to ascertain what were the foundations on which the military leaders of the Great War built their doctrine of war, and then to examine these in the light of reason and experience――as embodied in history. The traditional military mind is notoriously sensitive to any breath of criticism, and any attempt to tear aside the veil of its _mystery_ is apt to be greeted by the cry of “sacrilege.” Occasionally some daring soldier has done so――and has paid the penalty for exposing to lay eyes the emptiness of the shrine. Thus Marshal Saxe in his eighteenth-century _Reveries_ on the art of war, declared that “custom and prejudice confirmed by ignorance are its sole foundation and support,” for which temerity Carlyle, the disciple and mouthpiece of the Frederician dogmas, poured scorn on his book as “a strange military farrago, dictated, as I should think, under opium.”

Similarly, a generation before the Great War, Monsieur Bloch, the civilian banker of Warsaw, forecast its nature with extraordinary prescience, only to be ridiculed by the General Staffs of Europe. Yet the stalemate that he predicted would arise from the clash of “nations in arms” came true――with the sole difference that he underestimated the blind obstinacy of the leaders and the passivity of the led in continuing for four more years to run their heads against a brick wall.

Now, however, in these post-war years of disillusionment, is the time to take stock of the exorbitant cost of the war in lives and money, of the moral and economic exhaustion that is its fruit. Though professional experience in any department of life is the way to executive skill, concentration on technical problems has a notorious tendency to narrow the vision. Hence, while paying tribute to the professional ability shown in the later phases of the 1918 campaign, we are justified, standing amid the _débris_, in questioning the strategic aim and direction of the war.

What was the objective of the Allies’ strategy? The memoirs and despatches of the responsible military leaders reveal that it was the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces in the main theatre of war.

As the proverb tells us, it is no use crying over spilt milk, nor even over spilt blood and money――the price for this empty triumph has been paid by the ordinary citizens of the nations, yoked like “dumb, driven oxen” to the chariot of Mars.

What we are concerned with is the future, and it is the worst of omens that the orthodox military school, still generally in power as the advisers of governments, cling obstinately to this dogma, blind apparently to the futility of the Great War, both in its strategy and its fruits. Of these military Bourbons, restored to the seats of authority in most capitals, the saying may be echoed: “They have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”――if one may judge by the post-war manuals of the various countries, and the utterances of generals and admirals.

New weapons would seem to be regarded merely as an additional tap through which the bath of blood can be filled all the sooner. Not long ago, in _The Times_, a distinguished admiral argued that as “the first and greatest principle of war” was the destruction of the armed forces of the enemy, the only correct objective for aircraft in war must be the enemy air-force.

Thus in this new element, the air, is to be reincarnated the Napoleonic theory――for the doctrine on which the last war was fought, and the next one will be if wisdom does not prevail, is the disastrous legacy of the Corsican vampire, who drained the blood of Europe a century back.

From 1870 to 1918 the General Staffs of the Powers were obsessed with the Napoleonic legend; instead of reconnoitring the future in the light of universal history they were purely looking backward on a military Sodom and Gomorrah, until, like Lot’s wife, they and their doctrines became petrified.

What is the tenor of this doctrine? First, that there is only one true objective in war――“the _destruction_ of the enemy’s main forces on the battlefield.” Even the most hair-splitting partisan of the orthodox school cannot dispute this statement without throwing overboard all the textbooks and regulations produced by the General Staffs of Europe and America for generations past. Second, that the means of gaining this objective is to pile up greater numbers than the enemy. Obviously the surest way to achieve this is to call up and put into the field the whole manhood of a nation, and so has grown up as a complement to the Napoleonic theory of the “objective” another equally short-sighted dogma――that of the “nation in arms,” with its blind worship of quantity rather than quality.

Pacifists are fond of talking about the “armaments race.” A curious sort of race――for which ponderous cart-horses are bred instead of steeple-chasers, and where the trainers clap “mass objective” blinkers on the horses’ heads, while the jockeys ride looking back over their shoulders. Then they wonder why instead of taking their fences freely the poor horses fall at the first open ditch, and cannot be got out under four years?

There would seem to be a slight hitch somewhere in this Napoleonic doctrine.

THE ORIGINS OF THE FALSE OBJECTIVE

How arose this “blinkered” conception that the national goal in war could be attained only by mass destruction, and how did it gain so firm a hold on military thought? The decisive influence was exerted not by Napoleon himself, though his practical example of the beneficent results of “absolute war” was its inspiration, but by his great German expositor, Carl von Clausewitz. He it was who, in the years succeeding Waterloo, analysed, codified, and deified the Napoleonic method.

Clausewitz has been the master at whose feet have sat for a century the military students of Europe. From him, the German Army in particular drew the inspiration by which they evolved their stupendous, if fundamentally unsound, structure of “the nation in arms.” It achieved its triumph in 1870 and, as a result, all the Powers hurried to imitate the model, and to revive with ever greater intensity the Napoleonic tradition, until finally the gigantic edifice was put to an extended test in the years 1914–1918――with the result that in its fall it has brought low not only Germany, but, with it, the rest of Europe.

Thus, because of the unsoundness of their foundations, Clausewitz’s theories have ended by bringing his Fatherland into a more impotent and impoverished state even than when it was under the iron heel of Napoleon. Clausewitz’s was truly “a house built on sand.”

Yet, despite his main miscalculations, he had a wider understanding of the objects of war than most of his disciples. Clausewitz did at least recognize the existence of other objectives besides the armed forces. He enumerated three general objects――the military power, the country, and the will of the enemy. But his vital mistake was to place “the will” last in his list, instead of first and embracing all the others, and to maintain that the destruction of the enemy’s main armies was the best way to ensure the remaining objects. Similarly, the other most famous military teacher of the century before the Great War, Marshal Foch, admitted the existence and wisdom, under certain conditions, of other means, but, as with Clausewitz, the reservations were forgotten, and his disciples remembered only his assertion that “the true theory” of war was “that of the absolute war which Napoleon had taught Europe.”

This was but human nature, for the followers of any great teacher demand a single watchword, however narrow. The idea of preserving a broad and balanced point of view is anathema to the mass, who crave for a slogan and detest the complexities of independent thought. It is not surprising that military thought in recent generations, in its blind worship of the idol of “absolute war,” has poured scorn on the objectives of Napoleon’s predecessors――curiously forgetting that they at least gained the purpose of their policy, whereas his ended in ruin. One and all spoke and wrote with contempt of these eighteenth-century strategists, though they included such men as Marshal Saxe, whose writings bear the impress of a mind perhaps more original and unbiased by traditional prejudices than any in military history.

Here is how Foch, in his _Principes de Guerre_, contrasts the exponents of the rival theories: “Marshal de Saxe, albeit a man of undeniable ability, said: ‘I am not in favour of giving battle.... I am even convinced that a clever general can wage war his _whole life_ without being compelled to do so.’ Entering Saxony in 1806, Napoleon writes to Marshal Soult: ‘There is nothing I desire so much as a great battle.’ The one wants to avoid battle his whole life; the other demands it at the first opportunity.”

So that even a man of the intellectual calibre of Marshal Foch thinks solely of the tangible proofs of military victory, with never a reflection as to which of these two men best fulfilled ultimately the national objective of an honourable, secure, and prosperous future.

We see him greeting with approval the dictum of Clausewitz: “Blood is the price of victory. You must either resort to it or give up waging war. All reasons of humanity which you might advance will only expose you to being beaten by a less sentimental adversary.”

In the latter sentence we see the recurring delusion of the traditional military mind that the opposition to the Napoleonic theory must necessarily be dictated by mere sentimentalism. It disregards the possibility that it may be due to a far-sighted political economy, which does not lose sight of the post-war years. A prosperous and secure peace is a better monument of victory than a pyramid of skulls.

There are signs, however, that Marshal Foch, in contrast to his intellectual compeers, has gained from recent experience a wider conception of the aims of war and the true objective of military policy. In a statement since the War on the subject of air-power, he gave the weighty and illuminating judgment that “The potentialities of aircraft attack on a large scale are almost incalculable, but it is clear that such attack, owing to its crushing _moral effect on a nation, may impress public opinion to the point of disarming the Government and thus become decisive_.” Here is a dramatic and far-reaching break with the “armed forces” objective. Perhaps also his connection with the Ruhr policy is evidence of a grasp of the possibilities not only of war without bloodshed, but war without hostilities――the objective, more effective than the enemy’s military power, being control of the rival’s industrial resources.

“Saul is numbered with the prophets!” The champion and embodiment of the Napoleonic doctrine appears to have cast it overboard. We see an indisputable recognition that two other objectives exist――one moral, the other economic.

If the conversion comes a little late, when we are enjoying the happy and prosperous peace procured for us by the method of “absolute war” so eloquently preached in pre-war years by this august teacher, it may at least acquit us of _lèse-majesté_ in suggesting, that by their blind worship of the Napoleonic idol, our recent military guides not only narrowed and distorted their whole conception of war, but led us into the morass――financial, commercial, and moral――wherein the nations of Europe in greater or less degree are now engulfed――as was France after Napoleon.

When the high priest of the orthodox faith begins to have doubts, the moment is ripe for those who do not hold that the advent of Napoleon was the Year One of military history, who are disciples of earlier Great Captains, to endeavour, in all humility, to propound a wider and more scientific conception of war and its true objective.

Thus, should the millennium of Universal Peace fail to arrive, and nations still continue to settle by an appeal to force questions which vitally affect their policy, it may be that they will learn to wage war in a manner less injurious to the interwoven fabric of modern civilization, and incidentally to their own prosperity and ultimate security, than proved the case in the Great War of 1914–1918. Security――yes, because the greater the injury inflicted, the deeper are the sores of the body politic, and in these the toxins of revenge fester.

But to achieve this more scientific and economic military policy it is necessary that public opinion should be awakened not only to the results but also to the false foundations of the present theory of war.

The saying that “the onlooker sees most of the game” is as true of the broader aspects of war as of anything else, and in the unfettered common sense of the intelligent citizen, and its reaction on those entrusted with the military weapons, lies the quickest chance of deliverance from this dogma――for military authority holds with Bishop Warburton that “orthodoxy is my doxy――heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.”

Soldiers who refuse to bow in adoration of Napoleon and Clausewitz, his prophet, are condemned as heretics, and the repression of the “Protestants” has been made possible by the apathy of the public towards military questions. Men of the Anglo-Saxon race are not willing to hand over their religious or political conscience into the keeping of “authority,” yet by their lack of interest in military questions they do in fact relinquish any check on a policy which affects the security of their lives and livelihoods to an even greater extent. For, when war bursts upon the nation, it is the ordinary citizens who pay the toll either with their lives or from their pockets. Only by taking an active interest in the broad aspects of national defence, and so regaining control of their military conscience, can they avoid being driven like sheep to the shearer and slaughterhouse, as in the last war.

PERMANENT NATIONAL OBJECTS

If the citizens of a nation were asked what should be the general aim of the national policy, they would reply, in tenor if not in exact words, that it should be such as to guarantee them “an honourable, prosperous, and secure existence.”

No normal citizen of a democracy would willingly imperil this by a resort to war. Only when he considers, or it is suggested to him convincingly, that his honour, prosperity, or security are endangered by the policy of another nation, will he consent to the grave step of making war.

THE NATIONAL OBJECTIVE IN WAR

When, however, the fateful decision for war has been taken, what does common sense tell us should be the national objective? To ensure a resumption and progressive continuance of what may be termed the peace-time policy, with the shortest and least costly interruption of the normal life of the country.

What stands in the way of this? The determination of the hostile nation to enforce its contrary policy in defiance of our own aims and desires. To gain our aim or objective we have to change this adverse will into a compliance with our own policy, and the sooner and more cheaply in lives and money we can do this, the better chance is there of a continuance of national prosperity in the widest sense.

The aim of a nation in war is, therefore, to subdue the enemy’s will to resist, with the least possible human and economic loss to itself.

If we realize that this is the true objective, we shall appreciate the fact that the _destruction_ of the enemy’s armed forces is but a means――and not necessarily an inevitable or infallible one――to the attainment of our goal. It is clearly not, despite the assertion of military pundits, the sole true objective in war. Clear the air of the fog of catchwords which surrounds the conduct of war, grasp that in the human will lies the source and mainspring of all conflict, as of all other activities of man’s life, and it becomes transparently clear that our goal in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will. All _acts_, such as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centres of government and population, are seen to be but means to that end; and, instead of being tied to one fixed means, we are free to weigh the respective merits of each. To choose whichever are most suitable, most rapid, and most economic, _i.e._, which will gain the goal with the minimum disruption of our national life during and _after_ the war. Of what use is decisive victory in battle if we bleed to death as a result of it?

A single man can be beaten by the simple process of killing him. Not so a nation――for total extermination, even if it were possible, would recoil on the heads of the victors in the close-knit organization of the world’s society, and would involve their own ethical and commercial ruin――as we have had a foretaste from the attrition policy of the Great War. But besides being mutually deadly it is unnecessary, for a highly organized state is only as strong as its weakest link. In a great war the whole nation is involved, though not necessarily, or wisely, under arms. The fists and the sinews of war are mutually dependent, and, if we can demoralize one section of the nation, the collapse of its will to resist compels the surrender of the whole――as the last months of 1918 demonstrated.