May 29, 1915. 
LAND AND .WATER 
been a tendency, especially in this country, to 
forget that the particular type of military excel- 
lence the enemy displays carries with it and 
connotes corresponding weaknesses. The French 
are fully aware of this truth; and it would 
be well if public opinion in this country 
would seize it also, because upon it must 
largely be founded any just forecast of the 
future. 
Conceive of a body of British troops, even 
though deprived of their officers, thus advanc- 
ing, when they were not surrounded, simply 
because they were feeling the strain too much, 
and proposing to surrender ! Further conceive 
other bodies of British troops at the orders of 
officers surviving among them shooting down 
these defaulting members of their own body ! 
The story would not be credible. 
In the case of the North German it is per- 
fectly credible, and, indeed, we all know it to be 
true. 
Why is this? It is because the type of dis- 
cipline produced by Prussian tradition is 
mechanical. The fact that the men massacred 
were Saxons and the men massacrir)g them pre- 
sumably Prussians is of some weight, because 
the inability of the various German tribes to 
coalesce (although they are perpetually shift- 
ing and changing) is one of the chief marks 
of European history for 2,000 years. But 
we know well enough that exactly the same 
thing would have happened if the surrendering 
troops had been Prussians. What happened 
was that a body of modern German soldiers, 
having lost their officers, turned at once into an 
utterly different organism from the same body 
possessed of its officers. That means, among 
other things, that a break-up, when it began, 
would be exceedingly rapid. It means, of 
course, a great deal more than the mere func- 
tion of the officer in the Prussian system. The 
whole anecdote is enormously significant and 
must be carefully weighed for its full value to 
appear. It must be weighed especially by 
those who know the opposite pole of European 
civilisation and who are acquainted with the 
promotion from the lanks which in the French 
service has been continuous throughout this 
war. The words used by the English officer 
describing this curious scone merit textual re- 
production : 
" The remains of a battalion of Saxons . . . 
thrown into the fighting, having decided to 
surrender en bloc . . . some hundreds 
strong . . ." 
The second anecdote, equally well authen- 
ticated, is that of a body of sixty Germans who 
behaved as follows, obviously pursuant to some 
general order : — 
They first of all stripped the British dead of 
their uniforms. Then they put on these uni- 
forms. Then one of their number who knew 
English thoroughly was ordered to advance to- 
Avards a British trench and to call out : " Don't 
shoot, we are the Grenadier Guards." An Eng- 
lish officer thereupon left the British trench, 
approached the disguised Germans, and was at 
once shot at ^ luckily he was missed. The 
British then, after preliminary fire, charged 
with the bayonet and killed every one of the 
Germans who had acted in this fashion. 
Now, it would be easy to waste rhetoric 
upon this second example of the enemy's 
methods, but for the purposes of these notes I 
am concerned only with the military lesson to 
be drawn from them. It is of a jiiece with a 
thousand other details in the war, all of which 
may be combined under some such formula as 
this, upon which all the enemy's mind reposes : 
" War is nothing in itself. It is but a 
means to an end. All restraint upon it 
dve to the isolated viiUtai'y temper is a cause of 
weakness." 
That is exactly the Prussian tradition. The 
chivalric side of war (which proceeds from an 
isolation of the military temper and is a pro- 
duct of soldierly living) is regarded by the 
Prussian tradition just as a chemist regards 
some bye-product in a process of manufacture, 
which bye-product is due to the isolation of his 
material and hurtful to the object he has in view. 
That the spirit of the soldier should per- 
meate the State, as it did in Rome or in Revolu- 
tionary France, is the last thing the Prussian 
theorist desires. It would breed what are, in 
his eyes, romantic excrescences of sentiment, 
hampering the pi'ogress of the State and strang- 
ling its growth. The soldiers are, in the Prus- 
sian scheme, instruments conformable to 
mechanical formulae in the service of the State : 
they must never produce an organism develop- 
ing virtues and a savour of its own — once they 
do that they deflect the aim of the State as a 
whole. 
Now, one of the most interesting (and 
purely military) questions which the war will 
decide is whether this fashion of treat- 
ing warfare is ultimately successful. It has 
given us example after example of actions 
which have no direct military effect, which are 
intended only to impress civilians or neutrals. 
It has given us the use of poison, and may very 
well before the campaign is over give us an ex- 
ample of massacre. 
As a mere conjecture I would suggest that 
this spirit would betray a very great weakness 
in defeat, not because it is compatible with 
courage — on the contrary, we see it permeating 
men who display the utmost courage in facing 
death— but because it is the very opposite oi 
instinctive. Laborious calculation is a neces- 
sity of its existence, and in the disarray of de- 
feat it would go to pieces; at least, so I surmise. 
Hence, if a soldier can help the State best 
by spying, he must spy : by poisoning, he must 
poison : by treason, he must betray : by death, 
he must he willing and ready to die. 
It is a system productive of very great re- 
sults, as we have seen for two hundred years. 
The principal objection is that it is too simple and 
omits the incalculable part in the human affairs. 
Also, it wastes energy enormously in the repres- 
sion or elimination of subconscious, instinctive 
things; especially of those produced most 
naturally in military life, from the profound, 
such as Honour, to the superficial, such as the 
Panache. 
H. BELLOC. 
MS. HILAIRE BHL' OC^S WAR I.ECrUSES. 
Mr. BcUoc's next lecture at Queen's Hall, London, will be 
on Wednesday, June 2nd. It will be illustrated b^) coloured slides 
oj the recent fighting and will deal with the present position of 
the war. 
Mr. Belloc's next lectuie at the Winter Gardens, Bourne- 
mouth, is at 3.30, Monday^, June 28//i. 
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