Sir J. W. Fortescue

“ Then the Hind and Calf passed on, and she led him into a great deep wood of oak-coppice, where there was hardly a tree that was not oak, except now and again a mountain-ash. And they passed through the bright silver stems of the young trees and under the heavy foliage of the old ones; till they saw a mountain-ash shake its golden berries over their heads, and came to a hollow where a tiny stream came trickling down, almost hidden among hart's-tongues. ”

“ As if a nation had ever risen to great empire that did not possess the military spirit, and as if England herself had not won her vast dominions by the sword. We are accustomed to speak of our rule as an earnest for the eternal furtherance of civilisation; but we try to conceal the fact that the first step to empire is conquest. It is because we are a fighting people that we have risen to greatness, and it is as a fighting people that we stand or fall. Arms rule the world ”

“ First I should say what Wellington termed his strong cool common-sense. This sounds perhaps a small matter to you; but what after all is common-sense? It is above all the faculty of seeing things as they are, and of framing your action accordingly. The faculty of seeing things as they are, swift, true and penetrating insight into the heart of things, undistracted [69] by their outward semblance—this, whether it be the attribute of statesman, general, poet or painter, is genius. And to frame your actions, as a man of action, upon real insight, what does that mean? ”

“ Twenty-five couples of great solemn hounds trotting soberly over the heather with a horseman in a white coat at their heads and another at their sterns, and the coats of hounds and horses shining as glossy as their own. A fresh puff of wind bore a wave of strange scent to the nostrils of the Deer, and our little Calf snuffed it and thought it the most unpleasant that he had ever tasted. "Remember it, my son," whispered his mother to him, "nasty though it be, and beware of it."
But Aunt Yeld stood always a little in advance, talking to herself. ”

“ Partly no doubt the victory of the British was due to the traditions that kept archer and man-at-arms together at Crecy, and may be ascribed to peculiarities of social and political organisation. But beyond this there appears to be something in the national character which makes it difficult for a Frenchman, outside the borders of France, to assume high station without dangerous exaggeration of his self-esteem; while the Briton, for all his energetic and imperious nature, has the grim humour and the deep melancholy of his kind, ever whispering to him of the vanity of great place. ”

“ Men no longer pray for his soul in the chapel which he founded in the crypt of the cathedral; but morning and evening the voice of the trumpet, calling English soldiers to their work and dismissing them to their rest, peals forth from the barracks without and pierces faintly into the silence of the sanctuary, no unfitting requiem for the great warrior who, waiting for the sound of a louder trumpet, sleeps peacefully beneath the shadow of his shield. ”

“ It is customary to look upon the attack of the Light Brigade as a mere desperate ride into the Russian battery. It was far more than this. The advance down the valley through the murderous fire from front and both flanks was but the prelude to a brilliant attack. Discipline never failed even among the scattered fragments of the first line. Where their own officers were still alive with them, the men of the Seventeenth, however trifling in numbers, rallied, as under Captain Morris, and followed them to the attack on the Russian cavalry. ”

“ I have in my mind rather those excellent but generally unthinking persons who shrink with horror from the idea of a man's abdicating his civil rights. "What," they say, "a man must obey even an unjust command, under pain it may be of death! It is monstrous!" For purposes of civil life it might be monstrous, but not for purposes of implicit obedience, which is the thing that matters in an army. ”

“ Before the rock itself stood the French Sepoys with the grenadiers in support; on either flank of them the French artillery was playing on his own troops, in rear of the rock was the battalion of French, with the entire Mysorean army drawn up a cannon-shot behind him, while the Mahratta horse scoured the plain in small parties, continually menacing Lawrence's flanks and rear. The courage of the British rose to the occasion. After the tedious disappointing work with the French entrenchments on the Pennar they asked for nothing better than a brush with their old enemy in the open field. ”

“ Five years after the battle of Agincourt the religious wars in Bohemia had given birth to one of the great soldiers of the world's history, John Zizka, the blind general of the Hussites. His military genius, quickened by fanaticism and spurred by the stern necessity of encountering an enemy always superior in numbers and equipment, had led him to ideas which were far in advance of his age. A master in organisation and discipline, he had evolved literally out of nothing the most famous army of its day in Europe, and by inexhaustible activity and resource had rendered it invincible. ”

“ Warned by the horns of the scouts that an enemy was approaching, the Maroons hid themselves in ambush behind rocks and trees, selected each his man, shot him down, and then vanished to some fresh position. Turn whither he might, the unlucky pursuer was met always by a fresh volley from an invisible foe, who never fired in vain. ”

“ But to return to a question which I have still left unanswered, wherein lies the profit for men not of the military profession, of studying the principles and the history of war, with the terrible details in which the history abounds so frequently? One chief profit, as I take it, is to learn the nature of the supreme test to which a nation may be subjected, so that she may equip herself morally and physically to pass through the ordeal with success. Let me repeat to you that war is less a matter of courage than of endurance. ”

“ And he looked upon it with his great round eyes, and pricked his ears and tossed his little head; for the sun was shining warm above him, and the soft west wind blew fresh and untainted over the sea and flew across the moor, catching up all that was sweetest on its way from grass and gorse and heather, and bearing it straight to his nostrils. And he threw his little nose into the air and snuffed up the full, rich breeze; for no creature has a finer scent than a deer ”

“ The greatest leader of free companies was an Englishman, a pupil of the Black Prince but greater even than his master, John Hawkwood. It is true that he did his work for foreign nations and in a foreign land, but even so his name must not be omitted from a history of the British Army. The company which he commanded, English almost to a man, was the terror of Italy, and not only the most formidable in the field but the smartest to the eye, for its arms were burnished till they shone like silver. ”

“ Silent and inexorable the scarlet lines strode on. They came abreast of village and redoubt, and the shot which had hitherto swept away files now swept away ranks. Then the first line passed beyond redoubt and village, and the French cannon took it in reverse. The gaps grew wider and more frequent, the front grew narrower as the men closed up, but still the proud battalions advanced, strewing the sward behind them with scarlet, like some mass of red [115] blossoms that floats down a lazy stream and sheds its petals as it goes. ”

“ They rode on silently for a time, when Colonel George said, "That poor woman looked nearly as ill as her son. She went through terrible things before Corunna, but the last few days must have been almost worse. The strain of carrying him all that distance from Bracefort must have been more than she could really stand. She has no one except him in the world, and if he be taken from her, I cannot think how she will struggle on alone."
"Yes," said Lady Eleanor, as if talking to herself, "it is terrible to be left alone." ”

“ Exaggerated esteem for our Parliamentary institutions has led us to attach too much importance to speeches. Their original purpose was to persuade men to a common course of action; but they have never been very efficacious, and in this country have long been superseded by political organisation or, in plain English, wire-pulling. People have a strange notion that, without much chatter, there can be no liberty. But liberty (whatever liberty may be) is a small thing to a nation compared with discipline; and in fact liberty of any kind is impossible without discipline. ”

“ But whatever his merit as a general and a leader, he, like all of his kind, is a man of whom we take leave without regret, turning gladly from the fitful, if dazzling flashes of his eccentric genius, to the steady glowing light which illuminates every action of the great Duke of Marlborough. ”

“ Military history is not the history of physical but of moral force, perhaps almost of the triumph of moral over purely physical force. Let no man say that such a subject is unworthy of our attention. It is unfortunately impossible to study deeply any department of the affairs of men without encountering much that is infinitely vile and base and sordid; and military history is no exception to this rule. But it is rich also in noble and heroic deeds, not of valour only but of patience, self-sacrifice and endurance. ”

“ The British horse on the left, one regiment in particular burning to wipe out the humiliation of its first failure, pressed the French Household Cavalry harder than ever in front, and the Scots Greys plunging in upon their flank threw them into utter rout. The whole French army now made headlong for the fords and bridges of the Main, the infantry in their panic plunging madly into the stream and perishing by scores if not by hundreds in the water. ”

“ In the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign we are brought face to face with an important period in our military history, with a break in old traditions, an unwilling conformity with foreign standards, in a word, with the renascence in England of the art of war. For there were memories to which the English clung with pathetic tenacity, not in Elizabeth's day only but even to the midst of the Civil War, the memories of King Harry the Fifth, of the Black Prince, of Edward the Third, and of the unconquerable infantry that had won the day at Agincourt, Poitiers, and Creçy. ”

“ Whether it be destruction or renewal in the scheme of nature we cannot tell. But let us pass to the works of man, the great destroyer. What does a field of corn mean but that the plants which originally grew there have been ruthlessly destroyed to make way for those that better suit the purposes of man, and that an unknown quantity of animal life, dependent upon the plants so destroyed, has perished with them? What does a herd of cattle in a field mean but the destruction of all wild cattle, till these became tame enough to await their turn of destruction for the service of man? ”

“ Austerlitz is a name familiar to thousands who know nothing of the capitulation of Ulm. So Amherst to the majority of Englishmen is but a name: as though it were a small thing for a colonel taken straight from the classic fields of Flanders to cross the Atlantic to a savage wilderness, assume command of disheartened troops and the direction of discordant colonists, and quietly and deliberately to organise victory. He was the greatest military administrator produced by England since the death of Marlborough, and remained the greatest until the rise of Wellington. ”

“ Chivalry, which had been growing slowly in England since the Third Crusade, burst in the fourteenth century into late but magnificent blossom. The nation woke to the beauty of a service which gave dignity to man's fighting instincts, which taught that it was not enough for him to be without fear if he were not also without reproach, and that though the government of the world must always rest upon force, yet mercy and justice may go hand in hand with it. ”

“ When officers flagrantly neglected their duty and civilians deliberately fostered indiscipline, it is hardly astonishing that there should have been much misconduct among the men. It was natural, in the circumstances, that after the Peace of Utrecht the profession of the soldier should have fallen in England into disrepute. The greatest captain of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had been rewarded for his transcendent services with exile and disgrace. Many officers had quitted the service in disgust, some of them abandoning even regiments which they loved as their own household. ”

“ I do not think we can, if we bear in mind how Spain, in virtue of a Papal bull, excluded all other nations from commerce with the new world, and how successive Englishmen for many generations insisted upon flouting her. Nor can we say that in many cases the conflict between supporters and breakers of the law is not military history. It is merely a question of degree. A fight between three drunken men and the police is a scuffle. A fight between three hundred men and the police is a riot. A fight between three hundred thousand and the police is civil war ”

“ He and the army that fought with him at Agincourt are the true precursors of Craufurd and the Light Division. His body, borne with mournful pomp from the castle of Vincennes, still rests among us in Westminster Abbey, and above it still hang his saddle, his shield blazoned with the lilies of France, and the helmet, deeply dinted by two sword-cuts, which he wore at Agincourt. Not for three centuries was another soldier to rise up in England of equal fame with the Black Prince, John Hawkwood, and King Harry the Fifth. ”

“ The French instantly turned out to man their entrenchments; and Wolfe, having kept them in suspense for a sufficient time, ordered the troops into the boats and directed them to row up and down as if in search of a landing-place. The succeeding days were employed in a series of similar feints, the ships drifting daily up to Cap Rouge with the flood tide and dropping down to Quebec with the ebb, till Bougainville, who followed every movement with increasing anxiety and bewilderment, fairly wore out his troops with incessant marching to and fro. ”