The two forces which were really prepared for this war were the British navy and the German army. The British navy has kept command of the seas and the German army has planted its trenches on foreign soil. For any nation which is separated from other nations by the sea, the military lesson of this war is that the sea is the first line of defense. You will escape bloody trenches at home if you never allow an enemy to land. He cannot land until he has driven your navy off the seas.
The other lesson is that a nation should know its method of defense and have it as complete, practicable and ready as the German army and British navies were. For three or four years, the Belgians saw the Germans constructing railroad sidings at Aix and making their preparations for the blow they struck. Yet the Belgians did not modernize their forts, or adequately strengthen their army for defense. If to the staffs of England and France war seemed inevitable, their governments refused to be convinced.
Any nation which is considering preparedness for national defense must have a national policy. It must know what it is going to defend and how it is going to defend it. The British navy was built for the specific problem of either defeating the German navy in battle or keeping it fast in its lair. The German army was organized for the purpose of the invasion of France and then of Russia; the French army for defense from Germany.
Their efficiency was not the result of the expenditure of money, for money will not buy defense. It requires training, organization, and patriotism, and courage, which are not for sale in the market places of mankind.
Until this war the opinion among English-speaking peoples was universal that the volunteer system was the best method of recruiting. This on the principle that the man who offers himself to fight, fights better than the one who is called to arms by government order. Thus England raised 3,000,000 men. But to a man who has lived much with armies, it seems an immoral method; it means hiring men to fight for you. One man's life is just as valuable to him as another's. It is the final sacrifice which he makes for the defense of his country or his home. He should make it himself and not ask others to make it for him. Those who should be the first into battle are the men of wealth, of position, the favored ones. They owe their country more than the others, because their country has done more for them.
M. Raymond Poincaré, President of France.
The courage which every Continental army has exhibited has forever destroyed the idea that universal service weakens the valor of an army. Millionaire and peasant, nobleman and workman fighting side by side in the ranks, and doing all the drudgery of the trenches in common, develop a democracy which means that a man appreciates his fellow man for his own sake.
The old idea that wars must be frequent in order to keep up a nation's virility has also been disproved. Universal service both in France and Germany through forty years of peace, had been an important influence in the better physical development of the race, which led to the fortitude, precision, and courage exhibited. At the same time, a realization of the seriousness of war on the part of all men, because they knew before this war began the punishing effect of rifle or machine-gun and artillery fire, is a powerful deterrent to making war in any spasm of emotion.
There is no more glory, there is no more sport to war. It has become scientific, businesslike, and commonplace. Never has an unprepared nation been so helpless against the prepared as to-day. The American Revolution could never have been won by untrained levies to-day against the British regulars if they possessed modern weapons. Our forefathers had their fowling pieces, taken from the walls in the days when the cannon fired a solid shot for a few hundred yards, and there were few cannon; and so far as weapons were concerned, they were almost on a level with their enemy, the enemy's only superiority being that of their drill and organization. Now the enemy would have guns and rifles which it takes many months to make, even if you have the plants.
In an era of sanitation and bodily cleanliness and popular education, it has been shown that far from men having lost their virility, they fought far better than the so-called "strong" and primitive man, and those soldiers of former ages who "drank hard six days a week and fought like the devil on Sunday" and would look down upon this age as effeminate. Physically, mentally, and morally, the soldiers who sprang to arms in the beginning of this war were superior unquestionably to any soldiers who have ever gone into any war in Europe. They had more skill, more courage, more determination. Their pride was greater, and that alone made them more gallant. Those who wanted to know what war was like, to have the experience of their first baptism of fire, soon had it in the swift processes of mobilization and attack. Then, in their stubbornness, they settled down to the long, grim business of seeing through a task that was begun. The trenches were the last places where you would hear the advocacy of war as war. There the sentiment was simply of duty that must go on until a decision was reached.
Never has war been more savagely fought, possibly because the modern mind reasons that war being force and violence and killing, this principle should be applied to the limit. Yet never have the wounded been so tenderly cared for, never has the hospital organization been so complete. Never probably in the history of European warfare have prisoners, once they were taken, been so well treated. In other wars 100,000 survivors or so returned home when the struggle was over. Here millions will go. Every home will either have its dead hero or its living veteran. These are the men who will rule Europe in the future. Behind the lines, among the civilian population, the war has acted as a scourge. It has submerged self into the whole. Fatty degeneration of the heart of the body politic has been cut away to the muscle.
THE THEATRES OF THE WAR'S CAMPAIGNS
By F. H. SIMONDS
MAIN MILITARY FEATURES
The purpose of this review is to summarize briefly the main military phases of the first year and a half of the Great War. To do this it is perhaps simplest to accept the unity supplied by the three major campaigns of the Central Powers, that of Germany against France, that of Austria and Germany against Russia, and that of Germany, Austria, and Bulgaria against Serbia.
There is no intention of discussing here any ethical or political considerations. Certain historical details are, however, of real interest and value. Thus it is worth while to recall that the present conflict differs little, if at all, from the earlier coalition wars of Europe, in which one nation, numerically weaker, has sought to impose its will upon a group of nations collectively larger, richer, and potentially capable of employing greater numbers of men. In a word, the present war is a pretty accurate repetition of the wars of Louis XIV and Napoleon I, with Germany playing the French rôle.
Now in such struggles it had always been true, and German writers, notably Bernhardi, insisted it would be true of any future war, that the single chance for a decisive victory for the smaller nation lay in crushing the several foes before they were able to get their collective strength in the field, while the superior preparedness, training, general military efficiency of the smaller nation still enabled it to put the superior numbers at the decisive point at the crucial moment.
This whole conception is made perfectly clear by a glance at the familiar and classic parallel of the Napoleonic wars. In 1805 Napoleon, facing a European coalition, which included Russia, Great Britain, and Austria, and was bound to enlist Prussia ultimately, quite as the present anti-German group enlisted Italy, had to solve the same military problem.
Consider what he did. Breaking his camp at Boulogne, which he left in September, 1805, he sent his Grand Army into southern Germany and against Ulm. On October 20 he captured Mack's army at Ulm. On December 2 he routed the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz, and on December 26 there was signed the Treaty of Pressburg, which eliminated Austria from the war. Prussia now intervening, he destroyed the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstädt on October 14, 1806. In June, 1807, he completed his task by defeating the Russians at Friedland.