Dr. Conan Doyle and the British Army. A Reply
Dr. Conan Doyle and the British Army' is an article written by Lieut.-Col. F. N. Maude published in The Cornhill Magazine in december 1900.
The article is a reply to Arthur Conan Doyle's article Some Military Lessons of the War (october 1900).
Dr. Conan Doyle and the British Army. A Reply.
BY LIEUT.-COL. F. N. MAUDE, Late R.E.
Dr. Conan Doyle is perfectly right in his contention that the defence of the Empire is the business of every able-bodied citizen and not only of a 'special warrior caste'; indeed, I ain prepared to go further and to maintain that it is the business of every man, woman, and child in the country and not of the able-bodied only to contribute, by their lives, to the development of those qualities on which successful warlike operations ultimately depend.
'Every nation has the army it deserves,' to paraphrase Lord Beaconsfield's dictum about the Jews. If the sense of duty lies dormant in a race, and 'every man for himself and the devil take the hindermost' is the motto of its daily life, no 'warrior caste,' however devoted, can save it. This is the teaching of all military history, and the record of the Crimea is a case in point, for, but for the fact that in that instance our enemy was many times more corrupt than we ourselves, not all the heroism so brilliantly displayed at Balaclava and Inkerman could have enabled us to hold on throughout that terrible winter.
Has Dr. Conan Doyle ever considered the close analogy that exists between the bodily health of a nation in charge of its 'special caste' of physicians, and its moral health in charge of its soldiers?
Is it not a fact that not all the skill and devotion of the 'special caste' to which he belongs could save this country from the invasion of epidemics, plague, cholera, small-pox and the like, if it were unsupported by that attention to sanitary details which daring the past century has gradually worked down into the daily practice of the whole community ? In so far as the doctors triumph in their daily struggle with disease, is it not because they are helped in that struggle by the gradual spread of a knowledge of sound sanitary principles throughout every class of society? Let the same sound principles which lie at the root of the successful application of warlike forces be spread equally throughout the nation, and the 'warrior caste,' to keep to his phrase, will soon grapple as successfully with its external human enemies as the physicians are at present in resisting, let us say, the small-pox — I wish one could add the influenza.
Let us pursue the analogy a step further. Dr. Conan Doyle is, I presume, sound on the vaccination question. Assume an outbreak of virulent small-pox, let us say at Gloucester, needing the despatch of a special corps of medical officers to combat the disease.
What would Dr. Conan Doyle and his colleagues say if a whole army of officers and other laymen descended on the town and hampered the work of the doctors by writing anti-vaccination leaflets founded on cooked statistics ; and if 'The Times,' together with nine-tenths of the daily press, devoted leader after leader to advocate such unscientific views?
Now this is precisely what Dr. Conan Doyle and the press generally have been doing with regard to the army and the recent war in South Africa, and in selecting him as a target I have been influenced by the fact that he at any rate possesses a scientific training capable of understanding the train of causation involved, whereas I know from long experience that it is as hopeless to induce the average war correspondent or leader writer to make the intellectual effort necessary to grasp these problems in their full significance as it would have been to have tried to convince the man in the street a century ago of the true sequence of cause and effect in the practice of vaccination. I do not question their intellectual capacity, but I know, as a fact, that their daily existence leaves them no time for the concentrated thought military studies require if they are to lead to any useful end.
The art of the destruction of human life for purposes of the State rests on the application of as many sciences as the art of its salvation, whether wholesale or retail, but its exponents are handicapped nowadays by the comparative infrequency of military operations and the widely varying conditions under which they take place.
An army has to be designed to meet the greatest strain that can be brought upon it, and that occurs when, as at Waterloo, it is pitted against the most highly trained and disciplined forces of Europe.
If it can meet that demand, we can afford to put up with occasional friction in the moving parts when it is set to work on a task in which its full power is never required.
It has been to meet this emergency that alt the best energies of our ablest men have been devoted for many years past, and the proportions of cavalry, infantry, and artillery, together with their tactics and armament, have been settled on this assumption. It is not therefore to be wondered at if, under the special circumstances of South Africa, the machine has been found to work stiffly. Surely we have heard of civil hospitals built to accommodate the average sickness of a district suddenly overwhelmed by an epidemic outbreak, and when that epidemic has been of a new and unusual description — influenza for instance — we know that a new method of treatment has had to be arrived at by the elementary method of trial and error.
Death, disease, and wounds, these are the only constant factors, and they are common to both professions, and however promising the use of quack remedies may seem, the wise practitioner, whether doctor or soldier, will think many times before he throws over the well tried principles of his profession.
The truth is that in war as in medicine, circumstances constantly arise in which the interests of the nation and the individual clash. It would, for instance, be very much easier to stamp out scarlet fever by the same summary methods we apply to swine fever or cattle disease — and it would not only be easier but far cheaper to the nation in human life in the end, but care for the individual overrides consideration of State, though every doctor can tell you at what a cost of suffering in the aggregate. In war the interest of the State demands the termination of the struggle in the shortest time at the least cost of life and resources. It does not in the least signify to the State whether it is John Smith or Henry Jones who loses the number of his mess, or whether he died by bullet wound or disease, but it does matter very materially whether the State has to mourn a collective less of some thousands and bear the financial losses war involves, if the tacticians on the spot, either through ignorance or yielding to the pressure of public opinion, could not end the war because they were too busily employed in caring for the safety of the individual.
Now, the experience of centuries of warfare has conclusively shown that, provided there is any approach to equality in the conditions of armament, victory will fall to that side which will endure the heaviest loss without flinching, and possesses the requisite intelligence to assure combined action between its units; and all tactics are based on the assumption that troops possess a certain amount of this endurance, which may be heightened to an almost incredible degree by the practice of certain exercises which we call drill, and which have nothing whatever to do with what volunteers call practical work, such as training at outposts, on the ranges, &c. 'This is a fundamental law of war arrived at by a chain of experiments as varied and numerous as those by which we have reached knowledge of the laws of gravity — we do not know what gravity is, neither do we yet know precisely how drill evolves discipline — it is simply a bed rock fact in human nature with which we have to reckon.
Further, we know, equally by experiment, that the most economical use of troops in battle is to exact from every unit which comes into action the maximum endurance of punishment it can bear whilst still remaining an organised entity, before yielding to its demands for reinforcements, for in no other way is it possible to ensure that when the climax of the fight arrives, fresh battalions will remain in hand to meet it. The correct appreciation of this point was the whole secret of Napoleon's success; all his strategy had but one end — to bring his adversary to a decisive battle, and then, by his mastery in the use of his reserves, to deliver the final knockout blow. What constituted him a genius as compared with the ordinary practitioner, was his gift of intuitively reading the collective will power of his own and his adversary's troops, instinctively divining the moment when reinforcement of the first became absolutely necessary, and when the latter's will power had sunk so low that the success of the final blow was assured.
These are the two fundamental principles on which the successful employment of troops in warfare must ever rest, and if you add to these a knowledge of the elementary fact well known to every physician, that 'Human suffering is not cumulative,' you have the fixed points on which to build up a scheme of training and education,
As between equally matched European armies, these two factors, disciplined troops and economy in their employment (not pennywise pound foolishness) on the part of the leaders, will always give the decision ; and this being so, it may be imagined what incredible injury may result from the style of criticism in which the press has recently indulged — the keynote of which has been the desire to shake the confidence of the men in their leaders, and to inculcate in each individual that it is his unalienable right, as an Englishman, to die when and where he pleases, not where his leader orders him.
So far from the authorities having neglected to insist on the troops being trained to take individual advantage of cover, I hold, and have always held, that we have devoted far too much attention to individual cover for many years past; you cannot take cover and advance at the same time, but it is the determination to advance which we chiefly require, and for want of this the campaign has been so unduly prolonged.
I believe that but for the action of the press, on which the reinforcements from England were nourished before and during the voyage, this determination would never have been wanting, for our successes at Talana Hill and Elaandslaagte, at Belmont and Enslin prove that troops could advance in face of the dreaded magazine rifle, and that too, with a loss, all circumstances considered, much below what experience of warfare between white races had led us to expect. Colenso and the Modder River only proved what we all knew before, that infantry cannot yet fly over an unfordable river, and Magersfontein, that night attacks were sometimes a risky business. But in spite of Colenso our men in Natal, relatively removed from the infection brought with them by the troops that left England after Christmas, showed no want of dash on the way up to Ladysmith, though every feature of the ground was against proper preparation and combination in their attacks.
Paardeberg was the blot on the whole war — that British troops put into an attack could be brought to a stand by something under three per cent. of loss was a possibility no English soldier could ever have dreamed of; and for that disgrace I hold the avoidance of loss and use of cover theory mainly responsible. I quite understand why Lord Roberts decided not to renew the attack after the first day ; he knew that once the men were snugly concealed behind the ant-heaps, no power on earth would induce them to move forward. Not because the men were cowards, but because each was firmly convinced that by taking care of his skin he was showing rare adaptability in copying the Boer model the papers had taught him to worship.
The capture of Paardeberg at the point of the bayonet might have cost us 500 killed, but it would have saved us the enteric epidemic responsible for some 5,000 lives, and would, as the Boers have since admitted, gone far to diminish the tenacity of their present resistance.
Coming now to the question of marksmanship, I should have thought that nothing could more effectively have demolished the theory of the crack-shot school than our recent experience. There can be no shadow of a doubt that the Boer is a far superior shot at game in his own country than the regular soldiers of any country can hope to become. Yet so different are the conditions of marksmanship when the target is firing back at you, that never before in history has it taken so long to inflict a certain amount of punishment.
The French are, as a nation, the worst individual shots in Europe; but in 1870, with a far inferior weapon — as regards sighting and rapidity of fire — they made far better practice against similar targets than the Boers. For instance, when the Prussian Guards blundered within range at St. Privat — by one of those accidents it is impossible ever to foresee or avoid — the French accounted for a larger percentage of men in ten minutes at 1,000 yards range, than the Boers did at Magersfontein at 200 yards in half an hour. Similarly they wiped out three batteries of the XIth Corps Artillery opposite Amanvilliers at 800 to 900 yards in less than half the time the Boers took to effect the same result on Colonel Long's batteries at 400 yards. Many other similar examples might be cited, but the explanation is the same in all cases — the French possessed discipline of a sort and the Boers had none.
Straight shooting depends on the absolute steadiness of hand and eye, which, again, is the result of the control of the nerves and muscles by a concentrated effort of will; and the same exercises on the drill ground which give the collective will power we call discipline render to the man also the control of his body and senses.
The essence of the attack as now practised lies in making the conditions of the defender such that aimed shooting becomes a physical impossibility no matter how he may be sheltered.
To hit any target with a rifle you must at least be able to see it; but if you pelt in such arain of shell that between dust, smoke, and fragments, the whole front is shrouded in an impenetrable veil, it is obvious aimed shooting is out of the question.
To do this needs, of course, a considerable number of guns, means we lacked conspicuously at Talana Hill, Elandslaagte, Belmont, Enslin, and this makes these performances so singularly remarkable, proving to my mind conclusively what we might have done when the guns were available.
When the fire to be faced is perfectly unaimed, it follows that no arrangement of men in lines, groups, or columns, can have any effect whatever on the individual's chances of getting hit. You will get just as wet walking down the road in a thunderstorm whether you are alone or in company of one, two, or a dozen; but if you stop out in the rain for an hour or two, you will certainly get more soaked than in a dash across the street: this little piece of reasoning one may see put in practice whenever a heavy shower falls in the streets of London even by quite young children; but it seems to have escaped the notice of the troops on several occasions out on the open veldt of the Free State.
Lastly, to finish the question of shooting. Ht is a well-known fact that the difficulty of hitting a target varies enormously as the distance increases; not only does the apparent size of the object diminish as the square of the distance, but a large number of other conditions arise in practice whose effect is cumulative, and which increase this difficulty to at least the cube of the distance. But for the sake of simplicity we will take it that it only increases as the square of the distance: that is to say, that for every shot that hits at 1,000 yards, four will hit at 500, and 16 at 250.
Now take a disciplined body of 1,000 men, who will make one hit in 1,000 shots at 1,000 yards, and march them into 500, losing 200 men on the way, a proportion which used not to be considered excessive until this war began — the remaining 800 will now make one hit in every 250 rounds, and if you carry them into 250, losing another 300, the remaining 500 will be scoring a hit for every 62°5 rounds, or more than five times as many hits as the 1,000 men were originally making. This is why all other nations have insisted on the resolute advance without firing to decisive ranges, when a real attack is launched, and accounts for the value we place on the drill-ground training, which alone renders such an advance possible.
That. it is drill and drill alone which confers this power is the teaching of all history, but the following example will make this evident. At the beginning of the American Civil War the Northern leaders found it impossible to make their men go in at the enemy. In the most approved modern fashion, they stuck to cover and fought as individuals but they won no victories; on the contrary, the Confederates whipped them every time. At last they realised what was lacking, and submitted themselves more or Jess willingly, but very thoroughly, to a severe course of drilling, and within a twelvemonth they were standing up to punishment as few troops had done before or since.
As it happened, during the fourth year of that war, the First Maine Heavy Artillery — a regiment that had been made on the parade ground and not gradually forged under fire — was sent up to the front; it was in action at Spottsylvania, and lost enough to shake the over-confidence of the drill-ground out of them. but the men were real grit, and when a few days later, June 18, they were ordered to carry the enemy's position at Petersburg across 1,000 yards of open glacis, their effort, unsuccessful through no fault of theirs, was universally admitted to have been the finest exhibition of disciplined courage the war had seen on the Northern side. They left seventy-seven per cent. of their numbers on the ground, almost the whole of whom fell in the advance, a figure which has only been equalled perhaps half a dozen times in British history, though it was exceeded more than once by some of the Confederate regiments.
I sincerely trust that as a result of the war steps will be taken to give us more ammunition and to abolish many of the abuses of our present system ; but the ranges alone will never give us the advantage that we know results from a disciplined advance to decisive ranges when once we commence a real attack.
As for carrying defensive armour, as Dr. Doyle suggests, if two centuries ago, when a man's chance of being put out of action was one to four, armour was thrown aside as not worth the trouble of carrying, is it likely that men would submit to the load when it is about ten to one against being hurt in a day's fighting ?
An extra 7 lb. weight might easily make a difference of an hour's time in the arrival of a column, and that hour might make all the difference of victory or defeat.
Space prevents me from dealing point by point with many of Dr. Doyle's statements, with the truth of which I fully agree, though I do not admit the methods of correction he proposes; but his remarks on the future of cavalry cannot be passed over.
Surely it is a little hasty to conclude because in this campaign local conditions have interfered to prevent a single real charge being ridden, that therefore the day of sword and lance is over. How would it have been if the Boers in the Free State had had twenty first rate squadrons of Lancers to charge home on the fleeing Highland Brigade at Magersfontein? Should not we have required cavalry to meet and prevent them? Would not a set charge have been the necessary consequence? Have any of our regiments had to endure such losses as the sword and lance have often inflicted ? In 1870, whenever cither French or Prussian lancers met cavalry with swords, every officer and thirty per cent. of the front rank went down before the lance, and most of the wounded died. That is one reason why the Germans have made the lance universal. And as an instance of what sharp swords can do, let me cite the case of Unett's squadron at Chillianwallah. It charged with seventy men a crowd of Sikh horsemen and drove them back, but forty-six out of the seventy were killed or badly wounded, and again most of the wounded died. The Sikhs used old English swords. The advantage of either sword or lance in cavalry work is that a severe wound drops the man at once. A man may be mortally wounded by revolver or rifle bullet and fight on for a couple of hours.
This is a very important point when cavalry charge infantry. It is no use hitting either man or horse if the two or even the horse alone comes on, even if he ultimately falls only twenty yards behind the object charged — he must fall in front, and there is not a military rifle in Europe which can be relied on absolutely to drop him within 100 yards. Indeed, only a direct hit through brain, heart, or spine, can be counted on to bring him down within even a quarter of a mile. It takes also a much more serious wound to disable a nan in the saddle than when on his own feet. A man cannot charge far on foot with one or more bullets through his lungs, but he can keep his seat on horseback for a considerable distance. This was the reason why Dum Dum bullets were introduced, and we shall have to go back to them if our infantry are not to be slaughtered like swine by the first European cavalry we meet.
It has been shown again and again in this campaign that infantry can lie out in the open for many hours, ten at the Modder River, for instance, exposed to a fire of 'unprecedented severity' of 'appalling intensity,' &c., &c., to quote the eye-witness testimony of war correspondents, with losses not exceeding five to ten per cent. Cavalry can cover 3,000 yards in five minutes: is it likely that a rapidly moving target would receive as many hits in that time as a stationary one in ten hours? Cavalry officers do not think so. Though I protest against the tone which Dr. Conan Doyle and most other correspondents adopt when speaking of our officers, I admit that many of them, perhaps one third, are not what they should be. You will find a similar percentage amongst all armies. The chief cause lies in the fact that we have not yet had time to eliminate the abuses which grew up in the old long service days. These abuses were common to all long service armies, and were the necessary consequences of long continued spells of peace time. The Prussian army before Jena is the most striking instance of the extent to which gross abuses may flourish without attracting the attention of those who have grown up amongst them.
Frederick the Great, in his last years, seems to have been the only man in Prussia who knew what was coming after he was gone. Even the celebrated Clausewitz, perhaps the very ablest thinker on the subject of war the last two centuries have produced, failed to realise where the danger lay a fortnight before disaster fell.
The remedy found itself when short service was introduced into the Prussian army, for now there was work enough to employ the energies of all the officers and to teach them to take responsibility young — but even sixty years after the change was made, in 1870, as I showed in a recent article in these pages, the work was little more than half accomplished.
We have had only thirty years, barely one military generation, to work out our salvation — thanks to the war we seem now to have found it, and a few strokes of a pen and five years' time will double the fighting value of the army. An order making captains of cavalry and infantry responsible for their companies as the battery commanders are for their batteries is all that is needed to secure a most economical reform.
Tam much in sympathy with Dr. Doyle's views on our army requirements. We do not want more men but better men, the proportions of the three arms being readjusted, and our garrisons in India, at home, and in the Colonies, being redistributed.
We want more cavalry and many more field and horse batteries. for these arms cannot be improvised, and in them peace training returns a far better value for time and money spent than in the infantry.
Unfortunately I must pour cold water on the idea of an Imperial Guard on the Napoleonic model. The difficulty is a psychological one well understood by experienced soldiers. You cannot select men in peace for employment in war, because no man can say how the selection will turn out in the stress of serious fighting. Napoleon's Imperial Guard were veterans, selected for approved courage under fite, five campaigns and a faultless record was the standard, but it needed a Napoleon to provide such opportunities. His campaigns were no collection of trifling skirmishes, in which many hours' firing on both sides resulted in two to five per cent. of loss, but a series of decisive battles, each brim fell of situations with which Spion Kop and Magersfontein will alone bear comparison. Dr. Conan Doyle has read Marbot. Does he recall the incident of the 14e du Ligne at Eylau — where the regiment was destroyed to the last man, only Marbot escaping, thanks to his maddened English charger bolting with him? Selection by marksmanship judged by our Bisley standards would be utterly useless. It is discipline which makes men shoot straight in action, not verniers and the theory of the trajectory.
If Dr. Conan Doyle is in earnest in his desire to help the cause which we all have at heart, let me suggest that he should induce as many of his colleagues as possible té take up the study of the psychology of a soldier's training and find out why it is that drill produces those collective qualities included in the word 'disciptine,' and then let them aid us in conquering the many extraordinary prejudices which still survive as to the purpose and object of a soldier's training. We no longer seek to turn a man into an automaton. indeed we never did so, though the abuse of a good system often ted in peace time im the old long service days to that result; but we endeavour to develop in every man that power of concentrated effort and those qualities of honesty, truthfulness and character which, in a healthy state of society, afford the best guarantee for a man's success in life — and the want of which can now be so clearly discerned in the growing deterioration of our great commercial undertakings — notably on our railway lines. It is want of smartness and discipline which make our South Eastern and London Brighton and South Coast Railways the despair of their passengers. It is want of common honesty which hampers the productive employment of capital, because men will no longer do a fair day's work for their wages, and combine together to ratten those unfortunates who endeavour to fulfil loyally their engagements,
In Germany it is admitted that the trained soldier is worth half as much again as a workman as the untrained civilian. Let that fact once be recognised in England and the recruiting problem would solve itself.
Lastly, let them pursue their crusade against overcrowding, against insanitary dwellings and all similar evils, and give our peasants and work people some chance of breeding and rearing healthy children, and let them reform our system of board school education so that those children may at least learn the elementary notions of duty, of patriotism and of honesty.
Dr. Conan Doyle praises, and rightly praises, the splendid spirit of our private soldiers and their uncomplaining fortitude under privation and suffering. May I ask him te remember what these men were when they came to the colours as recruits?
If, then, our existing system, administered by officers, many of whom we admit to be unfitted for their task, can produce such results, what may we not reasonably expect when, by placing the responsibility on the right shoulders — the captains — we have weeded out the useless, and when the nation itself has acquired a higher standard of duty and sends us better raw material to work up?
