Edwin A. Pratt

“ There was, in the first place, the question of the transport by rail alike of Volunteers and of the regular forces, either on the occasion of reviews or for the protection of our coasts against an invader. While it was evident that the railways could be efficiently worked only by their own officers, it was no less obvious that plans for the movement of large bodies of men, and especially of troops, with horses, guns, ammunition and stores, should be well considered and prepared long beforehand, and not left for the occasion or the emergency when the need for them would arise. ”

“ When one considers that a railway company is neither a philanthropic institution nor a patriotic society, the generous support given to this experiment by so powerful a body as the directors of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway Company is in itself some considerable evidence of the importance they themselves ascribe to this effort in the direction of the maintenance of coast defence and protection from invasion. ”

“ The share taken by the civil engineers is not confined to providing merely for the class of railway works contingent on war, whether of construction, demolition, or of reconstruction, but in supplying the military engineers with information, advice and labour. No one, for example, can be more familiar with the features and character of a district than the engineer who has constructed a line of railway through it. ”

“ In all ages the feeding of his troops in an enemy's country has been one of the gravest problems a military commander has had to solve; and though, in some instances, vast armies have succeeded in drawing sufficient support from the land they have invaded, there have been others in which an army intending to "live upon the country" has failed to get the food it needed, and has had its numbers depleted to the extent of thousands as the result of sheer starvation. ”

“ No one, however, is likely to suggest that Prussia has shown any lack of enterprise in the construction of strategical lines which would enable her to concentrate great masses of troops on her frontiers with the utmost dispatch. "The rivalry between neighbouring States," writes von der Goltz in "The Conduct of War," "has had the effect of causing perfectly new lines to be constructed solely for military reasons. Strategical railways constitute a special feature of our time"; and in no country has this fact been recognised more clearly, and acted upon more thoroughly, than in Germany. ”

“ Then a railway must be regarded as a delicate piece of transportation machinery which can easily be thrown out of order, and is capable of being worked only by railwaymen as skilled in the knowledge of its mechanism, and as experienced in the details of its complicated operation, as military officers themselves are assumed to be in the technicalities of their own particular duties. The Chief Goods Manager of a leading line of railway who offered to take the place of a General at the seat of war would arouse much mirth in the Army at his own expense. ”

“ Thanks to the pioneers of our excellent League, our plans are all matured. The League finances the scheme and the Imperial Government supplies the military forces. By cession—or otherwise—Walfisch Bay will before long be German territory; but in the meantime British Free Trade opposes no obstacle to us, and we can pursue our purpose unmolested."
"But what is that purpose?" I asked, with the object of leading him on.
"Surely you are not so blind as to need enlightenment!" was his reply. "Germany has long regarded South Africa as a future possession of her own. ”

“ The situation recalled, somewhat, the still worse position in which Russia had found herself at the time of the Crimean War when, in the absence of any rail facilities at all, her troops had to march, and their supplies and munitions had to be conveyed, hundreds of miles over dreary steppes—"huge columns that had quitted the far north and east of the interior dwindling to a few broken-down Battalions before they came in sight of Sebastopol"—whereas the allies could send their troops all the way to the Crimea by sea. ”

“ The political and military power an organised railway system will confer upon Turkey is altogether in the interest of Germany, which can only obtain a share in actual economic developments if Turkey is independent; and, besides, any attempt to increase the power and ambition of England, in any case oppressively great, is thereby effectively thwarted. To some extent, indeed, Turkey's construction of a railway system is a threat to England, for it means that an attack on the most vulnerable part of the body of England's world-empire, namely Egypt, comes well within the bounds of possibility. ”

“ Moreover, the railway cuttings, embankments and bridges presented features of importance equal or superior to the ordinary accidents of the ground, and the possession of which was hotly contested. If you go to Magenta you will see, close to the railway platform on which you alight, an excavation full of rough mounds and simple black crosses, erected to mark the resting-places of many hundred men who fell in the great fight. This first employment of railways in close connection with vast military operations would alone be enough to give a distinction to this campaign in military history. ”

“ The Orient is the only territory on earth which has not yet been taken possession of by some aspiring nation. It offers the finest opportunities for colonisation, and if Germany, taking care not to let the opportunity slip, should act before the Cossacks come along, she would, in the division of the world, get the best share.... The German Kaiser, as soon as a few hundred thousand armed German colonists bring these promising fields into cultivation, will have in his hand the fate of Asia Minor, and he can—and will—then become the Protector of Peace for the whole of Asia. ”

“ When "living on the country" is no longer practicable, the only alternative for an army is, of course, that of sending supplies after it for the feeding of the troops; but when, or where, this has had to be done by means of ordinary road services, it has involved—together with the transport of artillery, ammunition and stores— (1) the employment of an enormous number of vehicles and animals, greatly complicating the movements of the army; and (2) a limitation of the distance within which a campaign can be waged by an army depending entirely on its own resources. ”

“ It is only in respect to the important consideration as to speed that the rail-transport of troops is to be preferred to road-marching. The real advantages of marching on foot—which was formerly the rule, and had the effect of 'separating the chaff from the wheat' and of preparing the men for the toils of fighting—are not counterbalanced by the fact that the troops arrive at the theatre of war in their full numbers. When time permits, marching on foot is preferable because it accustoms the men both to their new equipment and to marching in large bodies. ”

“ Should the invading army succeed in "living on the country," the effect of leaving the troops to their own resources, in the way of collecting food, may still be not only subversive of discipline but of strategic disadvantage through their being scattered on marauding expeditions at a time when, possibly, it would be preferable to keep them concentrated. ”

“ Thanks to the railway, an army can now draw its supplies from the whole of the interior of the home country—provided [66] that the lines of communication can be kept open; and, with the help not only of regular rail services but of stores and magazines en route those supplies can be forwarded to railhead in just such quantities as they may be wanted. Under these conditions the feeding of an army in the field should be assured regardless alike of the possible scanty resources of the country in which it is engaged and of its own distance from the base of supplies. ”

“ It was, again, in the South African war that armoured trains underwent their greatest development—down to that time—for the purposes alike of line protection and of attack on the enemy, although their real usefulness and the conditions necessary to their efficient operation were not established until after certain early experiences which had tended to throw doubts upon their efficiency, and had even led to their being regarded as of little or no account for the purposes of war. ”

“ Great Britain, more fortunate, possesses already a system of railways which, though constructed entirely by private enterprise, could not, even if they had been laid out with a view to national defence, "have been better adapted for the purpose, since there are duplicated lines directed from the great centres of population and of military activity upon every point of the coast, while there are lines skirting the coast in every direction, north, east, south and west." ”

“ The railway was a single-track line; it had only a limited equipment of engines and cars; there was the prospect of further immediate requirements in other directions, and Haupt took the liberty of thinking that he had better keep his transportation for more pressing needs than a journey to a prospective battle-field only eighteen miles away—the more so as if the men were attacked whilst they were in the train they would be comparatively helpless, whereas if they were attacked when on the road—doing what amounted to no more than a single day's march—they would be ready for immediate defence. ”

“ So the development of the rail-power principle in warfare was carried still further by this construction, during the course of the Russo-Turkish conflict, of a greater length of railways, designed for military use, than had ever been built under like conditions before. The world gained a fresh lesson as to the importance of the rôle played by railways in war, and it was offered, also, a striking example of what could be done in the way of rapidly providing them in a time of emergency. ”

“ For these reasons, among others, troop movements by rail at the theatre of war, and especially in the enemy's country, are attended by a degree of risk which may render it desirable to abandon the use of the railway for the time being.
Railways are especially liable to destruction by the enemy, and, although the arrangements made in advance may permit of speedy repairs or reconstruction, the interruption of traffic for even a day or half a day may be a matter of grave importance during the concentration of the army or at some critical moment. ”

“ The part which railways are playing in the struggle has, indeed—in keeping with the magnitude of the struggle itself—assumed proportions unexampled in history. Whilst this is so it is, nevertheless, a remarkable fact that although much has been said as to the conditions of military unpreparedness in which the outbreak of hostilities in August, 1914, found the Allies, there has, so far as I am aware, been no suggestion of any inability on the part of the railways to meet, at once, from the very moment war was declared, all the requirements of military transport. ”

“ The extent to which railways are being used in the present War of the Nations has taken quite by surprise a world whose military historians, in their accounts of what armies have done or have failed to do on the battle-field in the past, have too often disregarded such matters of detail as to how the armies got there and the possible effect of good or defective transport conditions, including the maintenance of supplies and communications, on the whole course of a campaign. ”

“ It is possible that in times of peace the amount of actual traffic passing over them will be comparatively small, if not even practically nil, and that many years may elapse before the special facilities they must necessarily offer,—such as extensive siding accommodation and long platforms for the loading and unloading of troop trains—are likely to be employed to the fullest extent; but they nevertheless form an integral part both of the railway system and of the military system of the country, and, having been constructed, they are, at least, available for military purposes whenever wanted. ”

“ It does not, therefore, necessarily follow that military requirements which can be complied with on one line or in one district can be responded to as readily, if at all, under another and totally different set of conditions elsewhere; though it is conceivable that a military commander or officer who fails to realise this fact may, if he is left to deal direct with the railway people, become very angry indeed at non-compliance with his demands, and resent protests that what he asks for cannot be done at one place although it may have been done at another. ”

“ The creation, under the law of March 13, 1875, of Field Railway Sections and Railway Troops was the outcome of the obvious need of having an organised force able to [153] take up the duties of constructing, repairing, destroying or operating railways at the theatre of war, such force being established in time of peace and assured all the experience needed to qualify them for the discharge of those various duties. France, in fact, was now, in this respect, to follow the example of Germany, just as Germany had already been inspired by the example of the United States. ”

“ While, on the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war, Germany began, as we have seen in Chapter X., to improve her own system of military rail-transport, with a view to remedying the faults developed therein, France applied herself with equal, if not with even greater, determination and perseverance to the task of creating for herself a system which, in her case, had been entirely lacking. ”

“ It was the American Civil War that was to elevate railway destruction and restoration into a science and to see the establishment, in the interests of such science, of an organisation which was to become a model for European countries and influence the whole subsequent course of modern warfare. ”

“ There is, in fact, only one means possible by which Germany can resist a war of aggression by England, and that is the strengthening of Turkey.
England can, from Europe, be attacked by land and mortally wounded only in one place—Egypt. If England were to lose Egypt she would lose, not only her control over the Suez Canal and her connexions with India and the Far East, but, presumably, also, her possessions in Central and East Africa. ”

“ No sooner had the war come to an end than the French Government started on the improvement of the railway system in order to adapt it to the possible if not prospective military requirements of the future, so that they should never again be taken at a disadvantage; and in carrying on this work—in addition to the reorganisation of their military-transport system in general—they showed an unexampled energy and thoroughness. ”