War game

“ Our campaign was to our single game what a rubber is to a game of whist. We made the end of a war 200, 300, or 400 or more points up, according to the number of games we wanted to play, and we scored a hundred for each battle won, and in addition 1 for each infantry-man, 1-1/2 for each cavalry-man, 10 for each gun, 1/2 for each man held prisoner by the enemy, and 1/2 for each prisoner held at the end of the game, subtracting what the antagonist scored by the same scale. ”

“ But as the powerful princes failed to support him he was compelled to subsist his troops by pillage, an example which was followed by all the leaders during that dreadful contest.
And now began a frightful struggle, a game of war on the chess-board of a nation, in which the people were the helpless pawns and suffered alike from friends and foes. Neither side gained any decisive victory, but both sides plundered and ravaged, the savage soldiery, unrestrained and unrestrainable, committing cruel excesses wherever they came. ”

“ But, just as chess players are careful for the game’s intricacies and not for stakes, so naval officers thought of the war in terms of manœuvred battle squadrons and destroyer flotillas rather than of the destinies of nations. And they assumed that German officers, being likewise professional men, were no more interested than they were in those aspects of war that were not strictly professional. ”

“ My game is just as good as their game, and saner by reason of its size. Here is War, done down to rational proportions, and yet out of the way of mankind, even as our fathers turned human sacrifices into the eating of little images and symbolic mouthfuls. For my own part, I am prepared. I have nearly five hundred men, more than a score of guns, and I twirl my moustache and hurl defiance eastward from my home in Essex across the narrow seas. ”

“ And it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the Game becomes thereby more the image of human Life, and particularly of War; in which, if you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your Enemy's Leave to withdraw your Troops, and place them more securely, but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness. ”

“ In the great game of war the opposing generals have to deal with men of flesh and blood, and not with wooden pieces. These men are bodies of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, which do different kinds of work on the battlefield, and move at different speeds. Before the general can make his first move—which may be the successful move or the fatal move—he must study the map of the country in which he is to operate, and must choose the line or lines of his advance, always taking care to have good and well-protected communications in his rear. ”

“ War is therefore a game which tends to become more and more costly, and especially siege warfare. Are we then to conclude that nations will become disgusted with warfare on account of the frightful expense it involves? ”

“ To these able and interested people, for the most part highly seasoned by the present conditions, finished and elaborated players at the old game, this is to propose a new, crude, difficult, and unsympathetic game. They may all of them, or most of them, hate war, but they will cling to the belief that their method of operating may now, after a new settlement, be able to prevent or palliate war. ”

“ We suspect that it is chiefly young soldiers and new arrivals at the front who think of war as a game. The game must seem to be played out when winter days have to be passed in cold wet trenches, when frost bites, when wounds are inflicted, when food and other supplies are delayed. ”

“ You have either got to go back to the beginning of things, and make war a battle of wild beasts, or you have got to go forward and make it a game—a grim game, I grant you, but one that the nations can play at and shake hands afterward. We have tried the ruthless and frightful method. We used to slaughter the entire population. To shoot a selected few is to court a maximum of contempt for a minimum of advantage. ”

“ Another form of warfare is the relative burden of armaments. This may be called slow combustion, in contrast to the open flame of war. Now if there is no joint limitation—as at present—the most long-sighted and powerful nation stands to win at this game ”

“ Was it the splendid retreat of the little British army from Mons? Was it the battle of the Marne, when the French and British struck their first offensive blow? Was it the great stand at Ypres, or the defense of Verdun, or the drive on the Somme? What is your hardest battle? Is it not within, in the fight with passion? Now is the time to challenge every sin that weakens a man or the nation. How about drink? Is it a friend or foe? How about gambling? How about impurity?" Here we mass our guns on the greatest danger of the war. ”

“ The science of strategy consists, in the first place, in knowing how to choose well a theater of war and to estimate correctly that of the enemy. To do this, a general must accustom himself to decide as to the importance of decisive points,—which is not a difficult matter when he is aided by the hints I have given on the subject, particularly in Articles from XVIII. to XXII.
The art consists, next, in a proper employment of the troops upon the theater of operations, whether offensive or defensive. ”

“ The battle-line is a secret world, a world of curses. The guilty secrecy of war is shrouded in lies, and shielded by bloodstained swords; to know it you must be one of those who wage it, a party to dark and mysterious orgies of carnage. ”

“ But war's a game which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at. ”

“ It is superfluous to add that one of the great ends of strategy is to be able to assure real advantages to the army by preparing the theater of war most favorable for its operations, if they take place in its own country, by the location of fortified places, of intrenched camps, and of têtes de ponts, and by the opening of communications in the great decisive directions: these constitute not the least interesting part of the science. ”

“ War, that mad game the world so loves to play, And for it does so dearly pay; ”

“ And all the while imagine the Germans out there, creeping through the trees, crowding along the trenches, sifting out and settling down into the old favorite formation, making all ready for one more desperate trial of it, stacking the cards for yet another deep gambling plunge on the great German game—the massed attack in solid lines at close interval. ”

“ Once engaged, an army could not be withdrawn, as ours can be, under cover of artillery, whose effective use from a distance over the heads of the troops will retard or prevent the enemy’s pursuit. Battles joined had to be fought out to the end. Thus victory to one was wont to be annihilation to the other. From these simple conditions it resulted that the art of war among the ancients was confined to tactical values, or the evolutions of the battle-field, and to fortification and sieges. ”

“ Now the strategy of this new sort of war in its opening phase will consist mainly in very rapid movements of guns and men behind that thin screen of marksmen, in order to deal suddenly and unexpectedly some forcible blow, to snatch at some position into which guns and men may be thrust to outflank and turn the advantage of the ground against some portion of the enemy's line. ”

“ If your lines of operations have been skillfully chosen and your movements well concealed, and if on the other hand your enemy makes false movements which permit you to fall on fractions of his army, you maybe successful in your campaign, without fighting general battles, by the simple use of your strategic advantages. ”

“ The defensive army, on the contrary, should endeavor, by all means, to neutralize the first forward movement of its adversary, protracting operations as long as possible while not compromising the fate of the war, and deferring a decisive battle until the time when a portion of the enemy's forces are either exhausted by labors, or scattered for the purpose of occupying invaded provinces, masking fortified places, covering sieges, protecting the line of operations, depots, &c. ”

“ For example, the impetuous attack upon a hostile line of twenty thousand brave men whose feelings are thoroughly enlisted in their cause will produce a much more powerful effect than the attack of forty thousand demoralized or apathetic men upon the same point.
Strategy, as has already been explained, is the art of bringing the greatest part of the forces of an army upon the important point of the theater of war or of the zone of operations.
Tactics is the art of using these masses at the points to which they shall have been conducted by well-arranged marches ”

“ Of course, while in Little Wars there are only three or four players, in any proper Kriegspiel the game will go on over a larger area--in a drill-hall or some such place--and each arm and service will be entrusted to a particular player. This permits all sorts of complicated imitations of reality that are impossible to our parlour and playroom Little Wars. We can consider transport, supply, ammunition, and the moral effect of cavalry impact, and of uphill and downhill movements. ”

“ The enemy is also making use of the time available, inventing new kinds of weapons, levying reinforcements, and last, not least, acquiring influence with the Neutrals. The prolongation of the war may easily be taken as hesitation and weakness. ”

“ Make no mistake, we shall have to cut the German Army to pieces if we are to win. And we shall not succeed, at least not for any (p. 131) practical purpose, unless we put every man into his right place to win the war. We want the shell-makers at home, the soldiers in the field, the mere politician on the scrap-heap, and capable men at the head of affairs. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had now bought myself a variety of books on military tactics, and, without any defined purpose in the study, I spent my whole evenings in poring over these treatises of attack and defence--a greater and a nobler species of gambling than that which I had quitted, it is true, but only less mad, inasmuch as it is a game which any one nation can compel another to play, and where those must lose who have not studied to win. ”

“ The way in which the battle line is formed at a particular place, the manner in which cavalry or artillery are used for a particular purpose, and generally the methods by which marches are conducted, camps are laid out, fortifications are made, and the actual fighting is done, come under the head of tactics. It has been well said that the art of strategy consists in getting two men to a place where only one man is ready to oppose them. ”

“ The Germans attacked in masses and successive waves, and paid the penalty of their desperate strategy. For though the British, and later the French, lines were bent backward for miles, and gaps were occasionally torn in them by the foe's furious attack, the Allied defensive withstood the onslaught and after a month of the most terrific struggle the world has ever seen, both British and French forces presented an unbroken front to the disappointed enemy. ”

“ When discussing strategic operations, mention was made of the varying chances which the two systems, the defensive and the offensive, give rise to; and it was seen that especially in strategy the army taking the initiative has the great advantage of bringing up its troops and striking a blow where it may deem best, whilst the army which acts upon the defensive and awaits an attack is anticipated in every direction, is often taken unawares, and is always obliged to regulate its movements by those of the enemy. ”

“ Since the exposé was drawn up, the French and English on the Western front have carried out the predicted great offensive on a wide front, ruthlessly sacrificing masses of men and an enormous quantity of war material. The German army checked the advance of the numerically superior enemy; further attacks, as we have every reason to believe, will also be shattered by the heroism of the men and the iron will of their leaders. ”

“ This being done, he can understandingly proceed to prepare his base of operations, then to choose the most suitable zone of operations for his main efforts, and, in doing so, keep constantly before his mind the principles of the art of war relative to lines and fronts of operations. The offensive army should particularly endeavor to cut up the opposing army by skillfully selecting objective points of maneuver ”

“ Following on closely with the signs in the heavens, there appears also the awakening to national aspirations and rivalries in Europe, out of which has grown the arming of the nations. The beginning of the modern race of armaments may be dated from those stirring and eventful years of 1830 to 1848. We have seen the resources of the soil and the inventive genius of man devoted to preparations for war on a scale never before thought of. ”

“ That which has driven the masses of Europe into the trenches and to the battlefields is not their inner longing for war; it must be traced to the cut-throat competition for military equipment, for more efficient armies, for larger warships, for more powerful cannon. ”

“ But this German phrase “Stellungskrieg” is a very accurate description of the great stalemate on the western front which we, more vaguely, term “trench warfare.” It is, indeed, a constant manœuvring for positions, a kind of great game of chess in which the Germans, generally speaking, are seeking to gain the advantage for the purposes of their defensive, whilst the Allies’ aim is to obtain the best positions for an offensive when the moment for this is ripe. It is a siege in which we are the besiegers, the Germans the besieged. ”