Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/373

Rh manoeuvres, as well as all regimental instruction, are adapted to the same end. 1 STRATEGY. The character of all military operations, whether those of strategy or tactics, is mainly determined by the nature of the armies engaged in them. An army as it exists in the field owes its constitution largely to those military institutions which have been fully described for each of the armies of our time under ARMY. But an army in the field differs considerably in each case from that which has been described as &quot;the machine in a state of rest.&quot; This will be obvious at once if we consider the first question which attracts the attention of a commander about to lead an army in war. He has to choose the line of operations along which his army will act. The considerations which determine his choice are mainly connected with the neces sity he is under of providing at all times for the supply of his army with food, forage, and ammunition, whilst he directs it against the point at which he is to strike. Supplies. In order that, fur actual fighting purposes and during war, &quot;that vast and complicated machine,&quot; an army, may so act &quot; that the whole aggregate force of its numerous parts may be exerted in any direction and on any point required,&quot; the necessities of the individual soldier must be so provided for as not to hamper its working. A body of even thirty thousand men occupies a very considerable space, and requires an amount of food that completely disturbs the ordinary peace arrangements of most places at which it arrives in the course of its movements. Hence, apart from the large means of transport, such as a great fleet or ample railway communication, which ma} r be sometimes used to carry a whole army to a given destina tion, an army requires what is known as &quot;transport&quot; for an altogether different purpose. The food and ammunition must be distributed to the several battalions of soldiers composing the army from the points at which it has been collected, and within the battalions it will often be neces- Trans- sary to distribute it by transport to the men. Similarly port. f or t ne conveyance of the sick and wounded of an army transport is required. In former days the arrangements which were made to provide an army with what was needed in this way were clumsy in the extreme. It will be remembered that during the Peninsular War the Duke of Wellington was necessarily so much occupied with tin question, of food and supply that he used humorously to say that he did not know that he was much of a general, but he prided himself upon being a first-rate commissariat officer. As long as all armies depended upon the service of country carts and undisciplined drivers it was always possible to carry on war by these means. An army which like the British in the Peninsula, fought continuously in the same country for six years, gained an enormous advantage by the gradual training and discipline of its transpor drivers and commissariat employes. But now that the great nations of the continent of Europe have adopted a system by which all the population is available for military service, the result is that from the moment of declaration o: war a modern army enters upon a campaign with the whole of its &quot; transport,&quot; using the term in the sense we have employed, as definitely a part of the disciplined army as its infantry, its cavalry, or artillery are. It is scarcely possibl to exaggerate the importance of this change in facilitating the operations of an army in the field. The British arm} stands at a very great disadvantage in this respect, fron the fact that the population outside the fighting ranks if 1 We are indebted to the Volunteer Tactical Society of Mancheste for by far the best essay we have seen in any language on the historj and use of the war game that by Captain Spenser Wilkinson an for the beginning of a series of translations of exercises in strateg; and tactics by some of the ablest German soldiers of the day. 349 not, like that of Germany or France, ready to take up its jlace in the departments which cater for supply and ransport. This modern perfecting of the efficiency of the nterior transport of an army is a new strategical weapon n the hands of a general, to be reckoned among those spoken of in the earlier part of this article. Whether vith the British army in an imperfect degree, or in a Con tinental army more completely, this transport must be understood to be as much a part of a modern army as any of its &quot;arms.&quot; When, during a campaign, an infantry jattalion is moved by train, it, unless for a very especial emergency, requires to have with it the waggons and carts which form what is called its &quot;regimental transport.&quot; Other transport is required to carry the more general stores needed for a brigade, a division, or an army-corps. Thus each unit of an army, if it is to remain in a condition of fighting efficiency, requires to have with it a great number of horses and carts. It is impossible to realize the nature of the problems involved in the movements of armies unless this condition is kept in mind. For instance, when the British were moving to Ismailia in 1882, it was no uncommon assumption of the critics who at home watched the operations as they went on that within a day or two at the outside the small force, not exceeding about 10,000 men, which at first moved thither from Alexandria, had effected its landing. Had it been a body of 10,000 travellers landing from a variety of ships, to be provided for by the civil arrangements of the country after they had landed, that might not have been an exaggerated estimate of what was possible. But in fact the great ships were carrying not only 10,000 travellers, 2 but great quantities of stores of all kinds, of ammunition, of railway rolling- stock, of engineer equipment, of waggons and of horses. The landing of these and their passage up a narrow causeway was necessarily a very elaborate and slow operation. The whole scheme of the campaign had to take account of the time which such work would take, and, in fact, as a conse quence of it, more than half the force to be ultimately employed was left either at Alexandria or at sea, and only arrived at Ismailia many days afterwards, when the landing of the first part had advanced considerably. The same difficulty in rapidly transferring an army, chiefly because of its attendant departments, affects all strategical movements by railway. The embarking of troops on a railway, and their disembarking from the carriages, is an operation of such slowness that for com paratively short journeys it is actually quicker for troops to march than to move by railway. The miscalculations and mistakes which were made so recently as 1870 by the French army, from failure to understand these facts, led often to the most disastrous consequences. In one instance Gambetta, insisting on sending troops by railway which Aurelle de Palladines had wished to march, hampered the operations of that veteran by the delay which was thus im posed upon certain portions of the army. There is, in fact, between the distance to be moved over and the number of troops to be moved by a line of railway a proportion which determines whether it is a more rapid operation to march or to travel by railway. In a pamphlet published shortly after the war the French emperor attributed his disasters to the general ignorance of his army as to the conditions involved in railway transport. An army in the field, however, in addition to having Contin transport present with it for distribution, needs to be ult Y of able to replenish its supplies ; and, though in fertile supl&amp;gt; u countries like France the feeding of the army may be greatly assisted by requisitions or by opening markets, it is impossible to depend for existence on these alone. 2 The entire army employed in Egypt was about 30,000 strong. Only the force which first landed at Ismailia is here spoken of.