Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/147

 expeditions, it is true; but those involved comparatively few men, only a little strain on the national resources. Britain’s expedition against the Boers was only a second-rate war. Europe never knew a period of peace so long and so profound. When the Germans marched on France, not one in ten thousand French or German soldiers had ever experienced the buzz of a bullet past his ear. From these people grown soft through peace we might have expected cowardice, timidity—whole armies breaking at the first fire. We got unexampled heroism. It was written in the old books on infantry tactics when a body of troops lost ten per cent or at most fifteen, they became an uncertain quantity—even though you had been able to replace the losses, it was time to take them out if you could. In the Battle of the Somme, the Allied Armies regularly kept divisions in the line until the replacements numbered fifty per cent—sometimes more. Whole companies, whole regiments fought so often to the traditional “last handful” that the newspapers scarcely troubled to record such performances—they had grown too common. Study, if you want concrete proof, the record of the famous French Twentieth Corps, recruited from Paris—city men, and therefore most affected by the soft influence of peace.

Militarists have answered that universal military training accounts for this unexpected hardness. Frenchmen, Germans and Italians had been