Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 127.djvu/829

Rh Now grand totals in military matters are notoriously deceptive. M. Thiers has somewhere gone so far as to assert as the result of his own study of archives, that if no commander-in-chief ever yet credited himself with the full number of men at his disposal, no war-office ever made proper deductions from that it believes itself able to put into the field. In the case of Russia such deductions must be very great. Want of good officers for instruction; want of honest administrative means for working so vast a machine; want of funds and stores at the decisive moment for equipping the reserves, to say nothing of the million and a half of field troops: all these will tend to cut the effective down. Still when every possible allowance is made, no one need be surprised that Russia's neighbour looks anxiously at her plan of reorganization; nor that those who believe most firmly in her pacific intentions discern in the wide outlines of such a scheme the fixed resolution of a mighty nation to place its military power once more on such an unquestioned footing that it shall at least have no cause to be uneasy at that neighbour's triumphs.

Such being Russia's resolve, as shown by council and action, should it make Germany tremble for her security? It is in asking this that we approach the problem we have set ourselves to discuss without pretending to literally solve. And the first answer is that if Russia and Germany alone stood face to face, the latter would neither feel, nor have serious cause to feel, the uneasiness she is reproached with. Her organization is so perfect, that at the word her peace army of 400,000 men may be trebled, including a second line of half a million soldiers, as well trained as the 700,000 that would move before them. The new Landsturm law is able — and is intended, as we have lately learnt — to provide her with 240 additional battalions, formed of men all in the prime of life, and hardly behind the Landwehr in any respect except as to supply of officers. Her war equipment is complete for every emergency beyond any other that empire ever had at command. Her staff is the most highly trained in the world's history; and if the body of officers it controls are not the men of science they are popularly imagined, they are within the strict limit of their profession more efficient than any power has possessed since Rome conquered the world. If she has no leader yet named specially as fit to wear the mantle of the veteran whom age must soon unfit for the duties of the field, the system he will bequeath is so perfect in its working that it can afford to dispense with the aid of specially great genius.

Russia might, therefore, be allowed to complete at leisure her ambitious scheme of military grandeur, and her reconstructed army would still, as we hold certain, if marched to invade her neighbour, march to defeat as decisive as overtook Benedek or Bazaine. Stubborn and strong as the Russian soldiers are, the same want of intelligence in the men, and of good leading in the officers, that sacrificed them in thousands to a handful of French and British troops at Inkerman, would be found fatal to them when opposed to the nimble tactics and skilful handling which, in peace as well as war, are made part of the education of the German army. But slightly superior in gross numbers, and barely equal in physical strength and endurance, the Muscovite would enter on the duel against the Teuton with every other condition of victory against him. It is our conviction that if this struggle came, we should see peace dictated at Moscow on German terms as certainly as we have seen it prescribed at Vienna and Paris. More than this: those who guide German military thought are perfectly conscious of their present superiority, and of the fact that no effort of Russia for a generation to come will suffice to give her, acting unaided, the power to shake it. It is not the vision of grappling with Russia alone that gives to Berlin statesmen and strategists an attitude of uneasiness, reflected in the mind of the nation that is ready to rally round them, and threatening from time to time to turn the armed camp which Europe has become, into the theatre of new campaigns. The real problem of Germany's military future lies in the dangerous contingency of her having to encounter a powerful enemy on either flank; in plain words, to meet the double attack of France and Russia leagued against her.

It is for this dread ordeal the new empire is deliberately preparing. Blind must he be to the military signs of the times who believes that the enormous chain of fortresses along the Rhine and Moselle on which so much of the French indemnity is being spent, is framed with a view to making a fresh entrance into France more easy. The German army if again called on to advance on Paris would literally desire nothing better than a fair field and no favour. Cologne, Mayence, and Strasbourg would no doubt, in such event, prove useful depots for the advancing 