Land warfare

“ We will now leave that melancholy region in which Britons of the Second Corps, like the ocean cliffs of their native land, have been thrusting back the furious surges of hostile attack for long and weary weeks. Melancholy indeed is the country over which the tide of war has swept. Prosperous villages and comfortable homesteads are now crumbling walls and smoking ruins, with the decaying carcasses of horses, cows, and pigs lying around. To and fro wander those wretched inhabitants who have escaped shot and shell, striving to save something from the wreckage of their homes. ”

“ So a call to fight a forest fire is a call to conflict and puts men on their mettle for a combat with the oncoming sweep of the devouring fire.
Would not the men who are inured to the work of making surveys across rugged mountains, and to quarrying the rock, laying the stone, digging the canals, and doing all the hard physical work that must be done by the men who have built the great reservoirs and canals constructed by the Reclamation Service, be toughened and hardened by it and fitted to dig trenches in actual warfare, as they have been digging them in Belgium, France, Prussia, and Poland? ”

“ Havoc is wrought, and the forest drops back across a zone of border warfare—for war belongs to borders—leaving behind it here and there a dwarfed pine or gnarled and twisted juniper which has survived the onslaught of the enemy, Now these are stragglers in the retreat, but are destined later in milder years to serve as outposts in the advance of the forest to recover its lost ground. ”

“ There was something tremendous in the forward march of the tractors, in the clatter and the rising dust, the shouts of the men at the controls and the women who ran swift-footed along the sand to urge them to greater fortitude. The women knew that endurance would be needed, for twenty-first century weapons of warfare could destroy a hundred tractors and spatter the desert with blood before retaliation could become complete and justice be fully satisfied. ”

“ To control these savages, soldiers were needed on the plains, to prevent war parties from dashing into little frontier villages, stealing horses and cattle, burning barns and houses and murdering the people who were trying to cultivate the prairies, to turn the great plains of dry, burnt grass into fields of wheat and beautiful green meadows. ”

“ An argument against convergent invasion is, that since it may be necessary to use more than one line of communication, not only will the employment of larger numbers be necessary, but more transport animals, the provision and care of which really constitutes the main difficulty in frontier warfare, will be required. ”

“ Thus all France had become like those frontier plains, those fertile ploughlands, vineyards, and orchards where two armies meet and contend to decide some mighty quarrel. The crops are ravaged by cavalry charges, the vineyards and orchards are ripped open by galloping batteries of artillery; shells blow up the villages, grape-shot cuts down the trees, and changes the plain into a lifeless desert. ”

“ You are from time to time to use your best endeavors to distress the French and their allies by sacking, burning, and destroying their houses, barns, barracks, canoes, bateaux, etc., and by killing their cattle of every kind, and at all times to endeavor to waylay, attack, and destroy their convoys of provisions, by land and by water, in any part of the country where you can find them. ”

“ In these circumstances, not only will risk of defeat in detail be even greater than in the case of concentric invasion—for small columns can better exercise mutual support, than can a large force moving in a restricted valley—but the length of the convoy train, and the seeming strength of the force, will be a direct temptation to the tribesmen to avoid battle, and have recourse to guerilla warfare. ”

“ Even among our own countrymen it must be confessed there has been no little indecision as to the end and the means of securing the conquest of a country whose outlines are counted by thousands instead of hundreds of miles, and whose whole extent, it is too generally believed, forms a series of regions where dismal swamps, bayous, lagoons, dense forests, and all manner of impenetrabilities, bid defiance to any save the natives, and where the most deadly fevers are ever being born in the jungles and wafted on the wings of every summer morn over the whole plantation land. ”

“ To the extreme left and north, near the river, the warfare became general, while toward the centre the firing became less rapid.
What a beautiful landscape lay out before us! Far in the distance lay the cultivated hills—some already yellow with grain, while on other hills and in the valleys the deep green of the trees formed the shadows in the fair landscape.
It was amid the clump of trees on the far distant hillside, that the Federal batteries could be discerned by the frequent puffings of smoke from the guns. ”

“ CHAPTER XVI On every highway, across every wood trail, footpath, and meadow streamed the wreckage of seven battle-fields. Through mud and rain crowded heavy artillery, waggons, herds of bellowing cattle, infantry, light batteries, exhausted men, wounded men, dead men on stretchers, men in straw-filled carts, some alive, some dying. Cannoneers cut traces and urged their jaded horses through the crush, cursed and screamed at by those on foot, menaced by bayonets and sabres. The infantry, drenched, starving, plastered with mud to the waists, toiled doggedly on through the darkness ”

“ He advised them to build blockhouses as our forefathers did in the olden time; to become accustomed to the use of arms, to organize at every settlement, and learn not only to repel attack but to assume the offensive, thereby instilling into the surrounding savages that wholesome fear which is the greatest safeguard.
Be brave also in the face of nature as well as in the face of the native; attack your forests, clear away the wilderness before you. Agriculture is the handmaid of commerce. You cannot have one without the other. The tiller of the soil is the nobleman of the land. ”

“ Consequently, if men come against them with firearms, when, as is usually the case, the long grass is all burned off, the tribe attacked are as helpless as a wooden ship, possessing only signal guns, would be before an iron-clad steamer. The time of year selected for this kind of warfare is nearly always that in which the grass is actually burnt off, or is so dry as readily to take fire. The dry grass in Africa looks more like ripe English wheat late in the autumn, than anything else we can compare it to. ”

“ This method of warfare, in fact, was general throughout the whole mountain front, where the hard rock carried a mere veneer of earth, and sandbags had to serve for defense until the engineers could blast trenches and galleries in the flintlike face of the slopes. ”

“ I am speaking with regard to land defenses which are assailable by land forces. I believe in the future great wars—if indeed there are to be any more great wars following after this one—that the nations involved, instead of buttoning their frontiers down with great fortresses and ringing their principal cities about with circles of protecting works, will put their trust more and more in transportable cannon of a caliber and a projecting force greater than any yet built or planned. ”

“ In the lower Valley their general, rendered desperate by his inability to maintain a hostile occupation, has resorted to the infamous expedient of converting a fruitful land into a desert by burning its mills, granaries, and homesteads, and destroying the food, standing crops, live stock, and agricultural implements of peaceful noncombatants. ”

“ Before them a thousand miles of dreary desert or wilderness, overrun by hostile savages, thirsting for the white man's blood; famine and drought, the arrows of wily hordes of Indians—and, these dangers past, the invasion of the civilised settlements of whites, the least numerous of which contained ten times their number of armed and bitter enemies,—the sudden swoop upon their countless herds of mules and horses, the fierce attack and bloody slaughter;—such were the consequences of the expedition these bold mountaineers were now engaged in. ”

“ In our many small wars of the past we have frequently been faced with desert warfare, a warfare even more difficult than hill and mountain fighting. Here again the chief difficulty is a natural one—want of water, and not an artificial one—superiority of the enemy’s weapons. ”

“ Keeping these dangers in view, the investing force will move rapidly upon the work, seize, strengthen, and occupy strong points as near the work as possible, and extend the lines to right and left as rapidly as good judgment allows, until the place is surrounded. Meanwhile detachments of greater or less size will scour the ground around the place, seizing and carrying off or destroying, so far as possible, all cattle, grain, lumber, etc., and everything else which would be of use to the attack or defence. ”

“ The possibility of invasion is the dominant anxiety of the land-frontier nations.11 Across the frontier they can see the conscripts drilling who almost at a moment's notice may be marching in to attack them. Their armies are not sent on interesting little expeditions to restrain a too-militant tribe of hill-men or to patrol the distant marches of a magnificent Empire, but must stand at attention generation after generation, year after year, maintaining the featureless routine of military life. ”

“ When a valley is to be swept in course of punitive operations, an adequate force should be left to secure the entrance, if the column is to leave by this route.
Troops, as has already been suggested, should, in respect of ammunition, food, and warm coats, be independent of transport animals, and it should be understood that units are always to be prepared to remain for the night away from camp. The men should be trained to economise water, which is often scarce across the border. ”

“ This frontier warfare, in its general results, was of no great utility to either of the powers at war, yet to those who inhabited the seat of it, its consequences were dreadful. We were continually harassed either by the fears of the invading enemy, or by the exactions and molestations of the troops of our own government. Our harvests were destroyed, our cattle dispersed, and ourselves in constant danger of being carried away prisoners. ”

“ You cannot see a yard in front of you, and so broken is the ground that the enemy's snipers were able to lie concealed within a few yards of the lines of infantry without it being possible to locate them. On the other hand, the Australians and New Zealanders have proved themselves adepts at this form of warfare, which requires the display of great endurance in climbing over the cliffs and offers scope for a display of that individuality which you find highly developed in these colonial volunteers. ”

“ We road through a gently undulating farming and grazing country to the Alle River, where we boarded a little Government tug which threaded its way through dead cows, horses, pigs, dogs, and now and then a man floating down the stream. Battered trenches, ruined farmhouses, splintered woods, the hoof marks of Russian horses that had forded the stream under German fire, showed that the struggle had been intense along the river. ”

“ We have to remember that for the first time in our history we have undertaken the responsibility of waging a land war on a national scale. That is to say, we have taken the field with nations whose armies consist literally of the nation in arms. ”

“ The streams run purple; all the peopled shore
Is wrapt in flames and trod with steps of gore.
Till colons, gathering from the shorelands far,
Stretch their new standards and oppose the war,
With muskets match the many-shafted bow,
With loud artillery stun the astonish'd foe.
When, like a broken wave, the barbarous train
Lead back the flight and scatter from the plain
Slay their weak captives, drop their shafts in haste,
Forget their spoils and scour the trackless waste;
From wood to wood in wild confusion hurl'd,
They hurry o'er the hills far thro the savage world. ”

“ That declaration was made solely with the object of calming the exasperation of my people at the wholly unjust invasion of their land and the occupation of their soil. These invaders are to-day preventing our people from carrying on their everyday affairs according to our time-honoured customs. ”

“ Few books have ever given a better description of mountain warfare and its perils, and how a rough country tends to dislocate military movements, while there are some life-like passages descriptive of the frequent raids on the British lines of communications by the wild tribesmen. ”

“ In native warfare an army might be watched into a place from which escape is hopeless, and in the dry season the grass would be then fired at the entrance and the exit; or in the rains, some small river might be partially dammed up so as to accumulate a quantity of water, which being let loose at the proper moment by the dragging out of a pole that serves as a trigger to let go the rest of the impediments, would sweep down upon and overwhelm the helpless enemy. ”

“ Four hundred volunteers sent to attack a farm, from which only seven come back! Ambuscades, barricades in the streets, loopholes cut in the cemetery walls, trenches hastily dug and filled with dead, night fighting, often hand to hand, surprises, the sudden flash of bayonets, a rain of iron, a rain of fire, mills and houses burning like torches—fields red with the dead and with the flaming corn fruit of the fields, and flower of the race!—the sacrifice consummated, the cup drunk to the lees. ”