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free themselves from the invader, England had to take into account rather the course which should stimulate them to determined resistance than that which might bring her own army into speedy and hopeful collision with the French. Hence she operated from Mondego Bay, from Lisbon, from the coast of Andalusia, from the eastern coast, and from the harbours in the Bay of Biscay; by which means the insurrection was kept alive over the widest possible extent of territory, and the enemy's communications with their own country everywhere endangered.

Again, the invader will select those lines of approach to his object which are specially suited to the particular arm in which he happens to be strongest. If he be superior in infantry, he will act, if possible, in a hilly and wooded country; if in cavalry, he will choose an open and level district; if in artillery, his course will be determined by the number and condition of the roads. On the other hand the defender is, even more than the assailant, influenced in the selection of the theatre of war by considerations which are rather political than military. During the wars of the French Revolution, for example, Austrian armies were constrained sometimes to hold the line of the Rhine, when sound military reasons dictated a different course. They were reluctant to leave uncovered the German powers that bordered upon that river; knowing that these, if abandoned, must go over to the enemy or be ruined. The same reason operated in the campaign of Jena, to lead the Prussians away from the comparatively safe line of the Elbe. They were loth to leave Saxony and Hesse Cassel unguarded, and they suffered for it. And probably it was the attitude assumed by Austria, as much as the leaders and letters in the 'Times,' which induced the allies, in our recent war with Russia, to abandon their original design of operating upon the Danube, and to cross over into the Crimea. Had Austria thought more of Saxony and Hesse Cassel, the other day, and less of herself, she might have found her views of policy at least as sound as the military considerations by which she seems entirely to have been guided.

It belongs to the government of a country about to enter upon a war to select the theatre on which hostilities shall be carried on. It rests, or ought to rest, absolutely with the general to carry on hostilities as his own unbiassed judgment shall direct. No orders from home-not even an authoritative suggestion-ought to interfere with his arrangements. If these appear to the supreme authorities to be unwise, they may recall the general and send another to take his place; but to instruct, and even to advise, is to embarrass a general, who, being upon the spot, ought to be, and probably is, a better judge of what is required than Vol. 120.-No. 240.

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his advisers, who see things from a distance. This selection of a plan of operations, and the movements necessary to bring the army up to the point which is aimed at, constitute what is called strategy. In handling the troops on the line of march and in action, tactics consist. When two armies advance straight one upon the other, each covering its own base, there is little or no room for strategy. But when each endeavours so to manœuvre that it shall place the other at a disadvantage with regard to its communications or in the force which it can oppose to a meditated blow, the strategical abilities of the two commanders are put upon their trial. In the Crimea there was no room whatever for strategy, and scarcely the pretence of tactical skill. The French and English armies advanced from their landingplace; they fought the battle of the Alma, and placed Sebastopol in a state of very imperfect blockade. Their base was the sea, which, by dint of hard fighting, they kept open; and after a tedious siege of a year and a half, they took the place. In the Mortara campaign tactics did more for the victors than strategy. Though both sides had arranged their plans beforehand, and manœuvred to carry them into effect, each moved so as to threaten the communications of the other; Chzarnowsky with his Sardinians upon Milan, Radetsky with his Austrians upon Mortara. Chzarnowsky failed both in strategy and tactics. He overlooked the fact that the occupation of Milan would still leave open the Austrian communications with Pavia and that he himself would be still at a great distance from Lodi and Pizzighitone. On the other hand, the Austrians in occupation of Mortara would interpose between the Sardinians and Turin. Both necessarily, in making these advance movements, exposed a flank. But the Austrian right, occupying a narrow space between the Ticino and the Mortara road, could easily be defended; whereas the Sardinian right stood exposed on the open plain. Equally faulty were Chzarnowsky's tactics. Having begun his move he suspended it on hearing that the Austrians were threatening his right, and, fearful of losing his own communications, he abandoned the design of cutting in upon theirs. Other blunders occurred, such as the withdrawal of General Ramorino from the defence of the river opposite Pavia, and the unopposed passage of the Austrians upon bridges prepared and laid the night before. The results were, first, the defeat of the Sardinian right at Mortara, and, by-and-by, the decisive battle of Novara, which the Sardinians fought on a false line hastily taken up, and the loss of which cut them off entirely from Turin.

The rules here laid down may be, and sometimes are, violated with impunity; but such an isolation never occurs where a skilful

leader

leader can avoid the risk, and it is only compounded for by the superior fighting qualities of the army which allows itself to be outmanœuvred. The movements which preceded the battle of Salamanca went in favour of Marshal Marmont, and against the Duke of Wellington. Both generals manoeuvred to preserve their own while they threatened the communications of the enemy, and Marmont succeeded in forcing the English into a position of the greatest danger. It is true that this arose from the abandonment by the Spaniards of the fortress which commanded the ford at Alba de Tormes. But the results were as we have described, and the English, thrown back towards Salamanca, ran the risk of being themselves cut off from Ciudad Rodrigo and the Portuguese frontier. It was here that Wellington's tactics, seconded by the spirit of his troops, more than redeemed what had been lost by defective strategy. The English attacked the French at the fitting moment, and in forty minutes a great battle

was won.

Another grand rule in the art of war is this:-that the general who finds himself well round the flank of his adversary, his own being unthreatened, ought to follow up the advantage, even if in so doing he neglect for a time his communications. The working of this rule was fully illustrated in the Jena campaign. The Prussians, after committing the military fault of advancing in front of the Elbe, delayed too long in assuming the bolder initiative on which they had determined. They thus enabled Napoleon to anticipate them by penetrating the defiles of Thuringia, and to concentrate his columns coming from Baireuth and Lichtenfels at Schleitz, on the great road to Dresden, while a third, moving up from Coburg, occupied Saalfeld on the Saal. Perplexed by the tidings which reached him, the Duke of Brunswick hastily recalled that portion of his army which had advanced as far as Fulda, and, with a divided force, accepted two separate battles, one at Jena, the other at Auerstedt. Both went against him, and Prussia lay at the feet of the victor.

Colonel Hamley devotes two more chapters to the further illustration of this part of his subject, which we recommend to the careful study of his professional readers. They describe, with singular clearness and precision, Moreau's operations from the Rhine against the Austrian General Kray, in 1800; and Napoleon's brilliant campaigns in Italy-first, that of 1800, against Melas, and next, the struggle of 1805, which ended in the capitulation of Mack at Ulm. In telling this latter portion of his tale, Colonel Hamley very properly points out that the campaign was not one, by any means, of a series of blunders on the one side and of masterly dispositions on the other. On the contrary, he 2 N 2 shows

shows that the victor committed mistakes almost as grave as those into which the vanquished fell, which, had they been taken advantage of, must have destroyed him, and draws from the whole certain inferences which cannot be more distinctly given than in his own words:

The operations which have been described supply certain grounds for judging of the merits of any enterprise against an enemy's communications. First we learn that it is not sufficient to seize any point in the enemy's rear; the choice of this point is very important. When armies are manoeuvring near one another, and the operations are restricted to a narrow space, as in Radetzky's campaign, the assailant can determine with certainty the small area within which he will come in contact with the enemy; and he can so direct his march as at the same time to intercept and to close with him. When the Sardinians retreated from Vigevano the Austrian General might feel assured that he would find them between Novara and Vercelli. But when the turning movement is begun at a distance of several marches from the enemy, no such calculation can be made; and if the movements were directed straight on the position of the hostile army, the latter might, by a single march to the rear, evade the blow.

On the other hand, if the movement be directed against a point in the communications far to the rear, the assailant, on making it, must not only spread his forces over a space great in proportion to his distance from the hostile army, in order to close his lines which radiate from that army to its base, but must, by the obliquity of his march, leave a long line of communication open to a counterstroke. The necessity of secresy will generally prevent the assailant from making reconnaissances until the desired point is reached; and being, therefore, almost in the dark as to the adversary's movements, he cannot concentrate his army on any particular line with the certainty of meeting the shock there. Meanwhile the pressure on the communications will have informed the enemy of the general direction of the movement, which he may take steps to frustrate by moving in mass in a direction where there is no adequate force to oppose him.

'As a recent example of aiming a stroke too far from the enemy's rear, Hood's operations against Sherman's communications in 1864 are notable. When the Federal General began his march from Atlanta to the Georgian coast, Hood was operating against his communications on the Tennessee river, 200 miles off. Sherman's march was thus left unmolested; whereas had the Confederates, while menacing his communications, remained near enough to be aware of his movements, they might have followed and harassed the march through Georgia on the one side, or prevented Sherman from reaching Nashville on the other.

To give the greatest effect to such an operation, the movement should be directed not more than a march or two in rear of the rearmost point which it is calculated the enemy can reach by the time it is completed:

giving him credit for obtaining early intelligence and for retreating with promptitude when his resolution is formed, but also taking into account the motives which may induce him to delay to form that resolution.'

This is extremely well put, as are the rules which follow, showing how wise it is, when a part only of the enemy's army is intercepted, to fall upon that, rather than attempt to close with the main body; and how perfectly satisfied a general must be of his own superiority before he endeavours with an inferior force to throw himself on the line of even a defeated enemy's retreat. But it seems to us that in working up to these points Colonel Hamley has forgotten to notice certain incidents which are of the utmost importance in war as it is now waged. An able general is careful to organise an effective intelligence department, grudging no outlay of money in order to secure his end. If he succeed, as he almost always does, the enemy can hardly begin to move upon his communications before he is made aware of the fact; and it must be his own fault if, warned of the danger in time, he fail to provide against it. The Sardinians, in Radetsky's campaign, were miserably served in regard to this matter, though the people of the country in which the operations went on were all friendly to them. Except in the Talavera campaign, the Duke's intelligence department never failed him, and even then he became aware of the forcing of the Banôs Pass by Soult in time to evade the unequal battle into which he must otherwise have been hurried. In like manner, a well managed field telegraph renders movements comparatively safe now, which no man in his senses would have ventured upon before that invention was worked out. Still the general rules which our author lays down are of immense importance; it is only in the application of them to practical purposes that the command of an efficient intelligence department and a field telegraph can introduce any modifications whatever.

Having settled these matters, Colonel Hamley proceeds to discuss operations illustrating the relations between the points of opposing armies, without special reference to the communication with the bases. Under this head five distinct contingencies are included, 1st, The manner in which part of an army may hold in check or retard a superior force of the enemy; 2nd, The effect of interposing an army between the parts of an enemy's extended front; 3rd, The case of independent against combined lines of operations; 4th, The case of combined armies operating from divergent bases; 5th, The case of dislodging an army by operating with a detachment against its rear. The first of these contingencies our author illustrates by describing the movements of General

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