Theater of war

“ The quotations which follow are from my treatise on Great Military Operations:—
"The general configuration of the theater of war may also have a great influence upon the direction of the lines of operations, and, consequently, upon the direction of the bases.
Fig. 1.
"If every theater of war forms a figure presenting four [Pg 80] faces more or less regular, one of the armies, at the opening of the campaign, may hold one of these faces,—perhaps two,—while the enemy occupies the other, the fourth being closed by insurmountable obstacles. ”

“ If the boundary of the theater of war should be the territory of a weak state, it would be absorbed in this theater, and the square would be enlarged till it reached the frontiers of a powerful state, or the sea. ”

“ If a general desires to be a successful actor in the great drama of war, his first duty is to study carefully the theater of operations, that he may see clearly the relative advantages and disadvantages it presents for himself and his enemies. ”

“ War manifestly had its blessings, too. One met unfamiliar people in the plebeian motor-buses, who at first wrapped their evening-coats exclusively and close around them, for contact with the common clay was still new and strange. It became positively fashionable to be a cheese-parer. You were no longer considered "bad form" if you went straight home from the theater, and confessed why. ”

“ We are not brought up to care; and a sense of the national importance of the theatre is not born in mankind: the natural man, like so many of the soldiers at the beginning of the war, does not know what a theatre is. ”

“ At the first play he went to, the performance was stopped while the news of the last Crimean engagement, just issued in a supplement to the Moniteur, was read from the stage. "It made not the faintest effect upon the audience; and even the hired claqueurs, who had been absurdly loud during the piece, seemed to consider the war not at all within their contract, and were as stagnant as ditch-water. The theatre was full. It is quite impossible to see such apathy, and suppose the war to be popular, whatever may be asserted to the contrary." ”

“ Nothing was more beloved by a popular audience, especially in an historical play or one of the Tamburlaine order, than an episode of war. A war scene was often only a variety of the open-country scene. Armies come and go on the road, and a battle naturally takes place in more or less open ground. It may be in a wood, or a tree or river may be introduced. [139] Obviously large forces could not be shown on the stage. ”

“ Besides, when a great war is going on it's a national duty to try and make people forget. My theatre, you perhaps are not aware, is a favourite resort for wounded soldiers, who are never so happy as when they are there. ”

“ And after it all, out of an audience of two hundred and twenty—when they overflowed the Little Theatre they trooped to the Fine Arts Assembly Room—eighty-four stood up to announce their conviction that war is not evil, not avoidable, and should be prepared for by military methods, and some sixty others stood up to indicate their opposite conviction! ”

“ Especially the Day Theatres, places formed somewhat on the ancient model, with open roofs. In these the spectators can smoke. Here the performance begins at five or six and ends at dark. All the theatres on this season, day or night alike, burst forth into joy. The war was the universal subject. Cannon, fighting, soldiers, gunpowder, saltpetre, sulphur, fury, explosions, wounds, bombardments, grenadiers, artillery, drum, gun, trumpet, blunderbuss, and thunder! Just at that time the piece which was having the greatest run was THE VICTORY Of SOLFERINO! ”

“ Even spectators are not amused—the whole war has passed like the riotous murmurs of the upper gallery before the play begins—they have pelted the candle-snuffers, the stage has been swept, the music has played, people have taken their places—but the deuce a bit of any performance!—And when folks go home, they will have seen nothing but a farce, that has cost fifty times more than the best tragedy! ”

“ I never before heard of the possibility of witnessing a modern battle—the attack of warships, the fire of infantry and artillery, the manoeuvring of airships over the enemy's lines, the rolling up from the rear of reinforcements and supplies—all at one sweep of the eye; yet, after watching for three days the siege of Tsing-tau from a position on Prinz Heinrich Berg, 1,000 feet above the sea level and but three miles from the beleaguered city, I am sure that there is actually such a thing as a theatre of war. ”

“ Although the newspaper I read at breakfast this morning before writing these words contains a calculation that no less than twenty-three wars are at present being waged to confirm the peace, England is no longer in khaki; and a violent reaction is setting in against the crude theatrical fare of the four terrible years. Soon the rents of theatres will once more be fixed on the assumption that they cannot always be full, nor even on the average half full week in and week out. ”

“ Every night the 4th Divisional concert party gave an entertainment in the theatre, which was crowded with men. A stranger could not have told from the roars of laughter that shook the audience from time to time that we were about to face the fiercest ordeal of the war. The 2nd Brigade was quartered round us first, and one night in the theatre an officer appeared in front of the stage between the acts and ordered all the officers and men of the 5th Battalion, who were present, to report at once to their headquarters. ”

“ We think, therefore, a theatre of war, whether large or small, with its military force, whatever may be the size of that, represents a unity which maybe reduced to one centre of gravity. At this centre of gravity the decision must take place, and to be conqueror here means to defend the theatre of war in the widest sense. ”

“ Often when I have returned to my hut at night, I have stood outside in the darkness, looking over the fields towards the front, and as I saw the German flares going up, I said to myself, "Those are the foot-lights of the stage on which the world's greatest drama is being enacted." ”

“ We shall therefore still continue to advance towards the whole by one step at a time; that is, we shall consider the defence of a theatre in itself, and look for the thread by which the subjects already treated of connect themselves with it.
The defensive, according to our conception, is nothing but the stronger form of combat. The preservation of our own forces and the destruction of those of the enemy—in a word, the victory—is the aim of this contest, but at the same time not its ultimate object. ”

“ When a people can hold back England and France with one hand and the Russian avalanche with the other, and, cut off from oversea trade and living on rations almost, yet, to take but one of the first examples, maintain the art of the theatre at a level which makes that of New York or London in the most spacious time of peace seem crude and infantile, one is confronted with a fact which a reporter in his travels must record—a force which, as the saying goes, "must be reckoned with." ”

“ He will recoil at the suggestion of the horrid spectacle of two men confronting each other with gloved hands in the roped arena, and at the same time he will clamor for larger armies and larger navies, for more destructive war machines, which, with a single discharge, will disrupt and rip to pieces more human beings than have died in the whole history of prize-fighting. ”

“ But now a multitude of Germans had surrounded the theater with their swords drawn: all the spectators looked for nothing but death, and at every one coming in a fear seized upon them, as if they were to be cut in pieces immediately; and in great distress they were, as neither having courage enough to go out of the theater, nor believing themselves safe from dangers if they tarried there. ”

“ I desire with a full-hearted longing to return to that life of imagination where the most dreadful bloodshed ends at about eleven o'clock every evening, without leaving any impression on those who take part. Yes, give me again the life of the theatre and remove far away this brutal scenery of trenches and shells and bombs and quick-firers and men summoned from peace and ease to cut one another's throats because a histrion Kaiser has so willed it and none of his subjects dared to say him nay. ”

“ The stage was always guarded by United States soldiers, but in spite of this the half-naked savages would press closer and closer, hurling their sharp arrows with unerring aim, as the stage went plunging along, the horses half-mad with fear, but straining every nerve to outrun the screaming foe. The settlers of those early days were brave men and women, or they would not have risked falling into the hands of the roving bands who were always on the war-path on some pretext. Many a brave man has died defending the mail which the government intrusted to him. ”

“ The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps the masses, and the woman submits. ”

“ If we wait for the enemy within our own theatre of war, however near the border of our territory the decision takes place, still this theatre of war is entered by the enemy, which must entail a sacrifice on our part ”

“ It is a question that often confronts one at a comic opera, always (p. 097) in the near neighbourhood of a gramophone, but never with such persistent irritation as when undergoing a bombardment from high explosive shell. Nothing is more trying to the nerves, for and from it there is no escape. This war has been defined as a war, not of infantry, nor of artillery, but of effective co-operation between the two. ”

“ Even later, when I saw battles fought among villages, artillery galloping through a cornfield, garden walls breached for rifle fire, and farm-houses in flames, it always seemed as though the generals had elected to fight in such surroundings through an inexcusable striving after theatrical effect—as though they wished to furnish the war correspondents with a chance for descriptive writing. With the horrors of war as horrible as they are without any aid from these contrasts, their presence always seemed not only sinful but bad art; as unnecessary as turning a red light on the dying gladiator. ”

“ The public at home reads of battles, several of them perhaps occurring within a week; but those actions cover the entire theatre of the war, and consequently one command may rarely see two fights in succession. There is none of the glitter that the romancers depict; the glory begins and ends with the triumphal march through the streets to the transport. ”

“ The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. ”

“ The battle might not affect the stalls and dress-circle, perhaps, but there could be no possible doubt that the pit and gallery receipts would fall off terribly. To the public which supports the pit and gallery of a theatre there is an irresistible attraction about a fight on anything like a large scale. When one considers that a quite ordinary street-fight will attract hundreds of spectators, it will be plainly seen that no theatrical entertainment could hope to compete against so strong a counter-attraction as a battle between the German and Russian armies. ”

“ Then the infernal din died away, only to be renewed louder than ever, as fresh warriors took the places of those pumped out, until the exhibition reached, as it seemed, a fight in terrible reality, as man closed with man, fending off each other’s spears and clubs with their “yelamans,” showing surprising feats of agility as they sprang high into the air, shouting fiercely a sort of war-cry the whole time. ”

“ After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers. ”

“ In this chapter on the defence of a theatre of war, if no great decision is proposed, we have only shown the tendencies of the action, together with its combination, and the relations and character of the same ”

“ What they must have looked in war paint, with tangled locks over their eyes and matted beards chewed between their teeth, it was easy to imagine, and I think that the success of the performance, which was so popular that we had to interfere when we had had enough of it, was due to the fact that it was not play-acting at all, but actual warfare as it was waged in the old days ”

“ Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London, with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system—and as one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at those sturdy men behind armour. ”