The Fighting-Man and "The Frocks"

Somewhere about the year 1828 the veteran Staff Officer and military writer, Carl von Clausewitz, deliberately laid it down that:

“Policy creates war; policy is the intelligent faculty, war only the instrument, not the reverse. Subordination of the military point of view to the political is therefore essential.”

Coming from so eminent an authority, the dictum must command serious attention. But to accept it in its entirety, without challenge or qualification, would be to ignore the significance attaching to the peculiar times and particular circumstances in which the judgment came to be formed.

For Clausewitz was writing in an era wherein all politico-military thought had been powerfully influenced by the complete eclipse of the Emperor Napoleon—an individual who had made himself responsible both for the framing of policy and the subsequent military activities by which it was sought to carry that policy into effect. In the circumstances it was only too easy to jump to the conclusion that his ultimate failure in the field had supervened because policy had too slavishly yielded to the dictates of an inordinate, overweening military ambition. It was an example of that practice of arguing from the particular to the general which, on occasion, can prove even more dangerously delusive than the habit of arguing from the general to the particular. Had the writer paused to reflect, for example, that Alexander the Great, self-endowed with similar stupendous powers, had invariably met with unqualified success, he would probably have come to the conclusion that, given the right man, policy-making and its successful activation in military terms can be left in the hands of one man with perfect safety. It is not, necessarily, duality of power that is at fault; it all depends on the quality of the individual by whom that double responsibility is wielded. The real danger lies in the fact that too many men of straw see in themselves a reincarnated Alexander.

In early times, of course, the tribal leader was raised on the shield of chieftainship simply and solely because his followers sensed in him the rare ability to frame policy and subsequently to carry it into effect by military means. That quality, indeed, was exactly what distinguished him from and elevated him above his fellows. If their estimate of his judgment and ability turned out to be wrong and he proved a failure, then his supersession was arbitrary and his descent into oblivion both swift and painful. For that matter, the consequences were no less disastrous for the community were they to indulge in too many errors of judgment in their selection of a leader.

The same principal prevailed when the amalgamation of a number of amplified tribal groups endowed them with the unity of nationhood. For mediaeval kings maintained their power and prestige by their successful exercise of the dual functions of civil head of the state and military leader in times of war. But as populations grew and the need arose to expand the machinery of government to deal with the increasing scope and complexity of domestic and foreign affairs, a tendency emerged for the sovereign’s informal council of advisers to take on the form of a permanent civil administration, with unchallengable powers of recommendation and restraint. The erstwhile absolutism of the monarch and the dualism of his functions found themselves progressively curbed by a junta claiming to represent,
and derive its strength from, the nation as a whole.

This was particularly true of sixteenth century England, where feudalism and all that it had meant in authoritative rule by the sovereign had declined far more rapidly than on the continental mainland. Queen Elizabeth might proclaim that she had “the heart of a king in the body of a weak and feeble woman” and fight with truly feminine obstinacy for the retention of her royal prerogatives, but she had to reckon with the modification of her policy and intentions imposed upon her by such powerful counsellors as Walsingham and Burghley. “Rule by Committee” had come into being; and its inconsistencies, its abrupt shifts of emphasis, its sudden and entirely unpredictable compromises, exerted an influence on the warlike activities of the Elizabethan sea- captains which was frequently embarrassing and sometimes little short of calamitous.

Elizabeth’s rather ostentatious Protestantism, for example, found itself perpetually at loggerheads with Catholic Spain, at that time the most formidable amongst the continental powers. But as Froude has so aptly pointed out, “the sword of Spain was forged in South America”; and to cut off the sinews of war by striking at the enemy convoys while still in Caribbean waters was the obvious strategy for maritime fighting- men, such as Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, to pursue. The trouble was that they could never rest assured that the “forward” policy prevailing at the outset of their long voyage to the Spanish Main would not have been transmogrified into a temporising—not to say definitely placatory—attitude by the time they reached home again. Rapturous welcome as a patriotic hero, or a scapegoat’s incarceration in the Tower of London, was a toss-up entirely dependent upon which alternative in their vacillating policy the civil administration happened to be pursuing at the time. Drake, as it so happened, had the ill fortune to arrive home with his holds bulging with what he justifiably regarded as legitimate spoil of war (to the value of some £67,000), some little while after the policy-makers had elected to stage one of their unconvincing charades of amity and friendship with the very nation whose colonial representatives had been so comprehensively despoiled! Fortunately for the returned seafarer, the synthetic rapprochement had worn sufficiently thin for Elizabeth slightly to anticipate the readoption of that “forward” policy which had temporarily been discarded. Instead of being beheaded, Drake was knighted. But the fact remains that a slightly earlier landfall would have brought about his sacrifice to a phase of political temporising, initiated without any consultation with the fighting-men, who had not even been advised of the change of front decided upon behind their backs.

The anti-Stuart revolution of 1688, and the wide restriction over the powers of the sovereign (William of Orange) which was its outcome, was followed by the undisguised transfer of all effective authority to a civil administration claiming the right to interfere in, and even control, activities which had hitherto been the sole responsibility of the Service chiefs, a development that was not without its influence on other Western Powers. In this move, the administration’s hand was enormously strengthened by the fact that all revenue was under the control of civilian ministers; even the money vote for the fighting services being entirely at the mercy of parliamentary caprice. In the event, this meant that far too often the provision of the monetary sinews of war was the butt of party manoeuvering, the whipping-post of envenomed factional vendetta.

Time and again, for example, the military genius of the great Duke of Marlborough was hampered by the spokes thrust in the wheel by a powerful political minority led by Robert Harley. At the same time, with exasperating frequency, his activities in the field were stultified by the intervention of the chicken-hearted parliamentary deputies the allied Dutch had insistently foisted on his field headquarters. Indeed, but for the merciful absence of speedy means of communication between the administration in London and the commander-in-chief in the field, it is doubtful if Marlborough would ever have been given the opportunity to win the flashing victories associated with his name. Ultimately, of course, the Duke was “disgraced” and stripped of all his public offices, while England was deprived of the council and services of her most outstanding military commander, as the outcome of a political cabal, led by Harley, which entirely lost sight of the country’s best interests in the envenomed pursuit of a purely personal feud.

With mere “tenants” on the throne, such as the early Georges, the British variety of “rule by committee” was given full opportunity to demonstrate both its advantages and its dangers. For with the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War, Admiral Byng was hustled off to the succour of the scanty garrison of Minorca, under vigorous siege by the French. Owing to grave neglect on the part of the civil head of the Admiralty, Byng’s command consisted of ten ill-found ships, which remained quite inadequately manned even when assigned a handful of Royal Fusiliers in lieu of the usual complement of Marines. The highly necessary reinforcements, both in craft and men, the Admiral was assured by the Duke of Newcastle, the responsible minister, could be picked up at Gibraltar, on the way to the scene of action. But, entirely owing to Newcastle’s parsimony and fumbling, the Rock was as hopelessly undergarrisoned as Byng’s fleet was criminally undermanned, while its preservation was clearly as important as that of Minorca. Without the accretion of strength he had been promised, which simply did not exist outside Newcastle’s fevered imagination, Byng made his landfall at Minorca and immediately engaged the hostile fleet already in the roads. In the action which ensued the British undoubtedly got the better of the tussle, but at heavy cost. For the novel “disabling tactics” employed by the elusive French had inflicted such injury on the British vessels that the shipwrights emphatically declared them irreparable without resort to a dockyard. At the same time, the surgeons were demanding hospital treatment for many of the wounded.

A kindly and considerate, rather than a resolutely ruthless commander, Byng was not the sort of man to turn a deaf ear to the groans of his injured, or browbeat his uneasy shipwrights into agreement that the fleet could be patched up sufficiently to hazard another encounter with the enemy. Moreover, the French armament had disappeared and might well be heading for a stroke at Gibraltar, far too feebly garrisoned to withstand a strengthened assault. Since the flag still whipped defiantly over Minorca’s crumbling battlements, Byng took the decision to return to the Rock, for the safety of which he had been endowed with a responsibility in no way less exacting than that he bore towards Minorca.

In the outcome, no assault developed against Gibraltar; while in the absence of outside help, Minorca fell after a siege of seventy days, and with hardly enough men still standing on their feet to man the few cannon left undamaged.

With the whole of England frantic with rage and shame at the disgrace inflicted on British arms, the witch-hunt for a scapegoat was guilefully canalised into a demand for the arraignment of the unfortunate Admiral. Tried and sentenced to death by the verdict of a Court Martial, Byng was shot, not, as Voltaire affirmed, “pour encouragez les autres,” but because otherwise it would have been impossible not to impeach and hang the real culprit, that bright ornament of the legislature, the Earl of Newcastle. And that would very gravely have reflected on the validity of the civil administration’s assumption of responsibility for the actual prosecution of the war.

It was a very different story with Prussia during the regime of Frederick the Great, perhaps the last really successful wielder of that duality of power which elsewhere had undergone such drastic division and redistribution. As emperor, “Old Fritz” devised the policy he subsequently carried into effect. And whatever his defects from the point of view of personal integrity and political morality, there is no gainsaying the fact that his efforts prospered mightily. For all that, he could set down the comment, “Politics and military operations are two crutches which ought to help me walk; but they never match, and make me lame on one side or the other.”

Affairs wore a very different complexion, however—on both sides—during the War of Independence. So far as Washington was concerned, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that his nomination for the supreme command was supported by John and Samuel Adams, partly because he represented a social class they were anxious to harness to the cause of revolution, but mainly because they erroneously believed that in him they had found an individual who would yield subservience to their own untrammelled control and direction of the struggle. To the fact that, however unwittingly, their choice had fallen on a man whose strength of character and exalted sense of duty was to prove the lynch-pin of American resistance can be attributed the perpetual friction between Congress and the Army which added so unnecessarily to the commander-in- chief’s stupendous burden. The mischievous irresponsibility of the Board of War, erected rather to impose a check on, than to facilitate, the Generalissimo’s plans to turn threatened defeat into demonstrable victory, was only outmatched by the stark betrayal of the common cause embodied in the attempt at Washington’s overthrow condoned, if not actually initiated by, some of its members. The measure of the Board’s capacity to fulfil the responsibility it had arrogated to itself is sufficiently demonstrated by the countenance it lent to the infantile suggestion that bows and arrows would make a cheap and equally efficient substitute for muskets, and the submission that far greater chances of success would attend activities in the field were a new set of generals to be placed in command at the end of every six months.

From first to last, the civil administration distinguished itself by ousting Schuyler, insulting Greene and Knox, reprimanding Stark, grossly snubbing Benedict Arnold, court-martialling Sullivan, St Clair, ‘Mad Antony’ Wayne and Mathews, and openly countenancing a cabal against the commander-in-chief himself. Small wonder that Washington was forced to protest that the constant high-handed interference of Congress in army affairs constituted a greater threat to the prosperity of the Revolution than all the means of conquest the British Parliament had at its disposal.

For all that, American aspirations received enormously valuable, if entirely unwitting, help from Britain’s Secretary for Colonies and War, my lord Germain. On the strength of his poltroon showing on the battlefield of Minden, this most egregious of fonctionnaires essayed the direct control of a war in active operation three thousand miles across the sea from his office in Whitehall, with no speedier means of communication than could be furnished by a sailing vessel always at the mercy of the elements and ever liable to fall a victim to hostile craft. Added to which, to a complete disregard of the professional advice offered him by his military counsellors, Germain added the folly of “playing favourites” among his field commanders. Furthermore, he was guilty of a neglect of his duties which often left the British forces without necessary reinforcements and supplies, or even orders.²

Were there such a thing as real poetic justice in the world, no sculpture-gallery dedicated to those who strove for America’s liberty would be considered to possess the grace of real completion unless it included an effigy of my lord Germain!

By the last quarter of the eighteenth century the attempts of George III to live up to his mother’s exhortation to “Be a King” had ended in his engulfment by the administration, under the younger Pitt, which he had deliberately erected as a buffer between himself and the Whigs he so violently detested. “Rule by (Cabinet) Committee” was assertively in the ascendant, a fact, however, which is prone to pass relatively unremarked save in times of war.

But by 1793 Britain, together with Austria and Prussia, found herself committed to une guerre à outrance with the swarming legions of the French Republic, intent on remedying the bankruptcy which threatened their ricketty new regime by the comprehensive pillage of a rich, supine, and bewildered Holland.

England’s contribution to the First Coalition was a modest force of redcoats under the sovereign’s second son, Frederick Duke of York—a far better field commander, when not hamstrung by orders whose lambent lunacy he was without power to question, than posterity is yet prepared to allow. The British having successfully besieged Valenciennes and helped to drive the French back over their own border, there was little but a rabble of undisciplined and thoroughly disorganised sans culottes between the victorious allies and the road which led straight to Paris. Inspired by York’s enthusiasm for an immediate “follow-up,” even the dilatory and shilly-shallying Austrians turned their gaze to the beckoning Valley of the Oise, the traditional avenue of approach to the capital of France, the route along which the French must always be most vulnerable. For as Clausewitz himself pointed out, “Between Brussels and Paris lies the pit of the French stomach.”

It was at this moment that the administration in Whitehall sent peremptory orders for York to counter-march his contingent not far short of a hundred miles right across the face of the enemy forces to undertake the siege of Dunkirk.

Now, at the outset of the campaign Dunkirk’s capture might, by a little, have shortened the British lines of communication, while at the same time threatening the flank of any reanimated French advance into Holland. But by the time Valenciennes had fallen, the only value attaching to the stronghold’s seizure was political—as an erstwhile point d’appui of the British, its recapture, so “the frocks” averred, would “help to make the war popular.”

Needless to say, the aged commander-in-chief, Jeffrey Amherst, had not been consulted in the matter; it was purely a decision of the civil administration. Indeed, the inspiration had not come even from Dundas, the Secretary of State for Colonies and War. It had originated with—of all people—Lord Chancellor Loughborough, one of the most unconscionable louts ever to intrigue his way to the Woolsack; his only claim to notoriety being based upon the fact that he had once tried to bully Benjamin Franklin with an ill-bred, hectoring rudeness which, had it been indulged in on a less privileged occasion, would have earned him a well- merited horse-whipping.³

It was quite useless for York to protest that to “potter about frontier fortresses” would be to wanton away the chance of striking a blow at the French which might well prove the prelude to speedy and decisive victory. As Dundas himself wrote complacently to a temporarily absent Pitt, “The operations of war are canvassed (i.e. debated) and adjusted in Cabinet.”⁴

But they were not sufficiently ‘adjusted’ even to give substance to their own egregious directive by sending York the necessary siege artillery he had requested, nor to cover his seaward flank by a squadron powerful enough to keep the enfilading Gallic warships at bay. In the outcome, Carnot, “the organiser of victory,” backed by the threat of the guillotine for any Revolutionary commander who muffed his opportunities, contrived not only to “stop up the hole,” but to turn almost certain defeat into a riposte that sent British, Prussians, and Austrians scuttling back in swift retreat. The road to Paris had been exchanged for the via dolorosa of a costly and painful scramble back to Bremen and the Ems: and twenty years were needed to bring to an end that upsurge of Gallic aggression which might well have been stamped out in as many months.

That the France of Napoleon was ultimately brought low in utter defeat must be attributed to the fact that the little Corsican —both architect and executant of his own policy—had been born too late. A confirmed admirer of the man who realised his own limitations, of the man imbued with le sens de choses possibles, where he himself was concerned, he conceived that all things were possible . . . and the days of Alexander the Great were past by something well over a thousand years. With Waterloo the myth of the omnicompetent ‘man on a horse’ was finally dissipated.

In plain terms, there never need have been an Emperor Napoleon at all, if only the civil administration of 1793-4 had learned to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s,” and confined their energies to affairs which came within their own comprehension. As the wife of one of York’s subordinate commanders put it in a contemporary letter to her husband:

“Why will not they [the civil administrations] satisfy themselves with forming the general outline of the campaign, and supplying men and money, without attempting to direct particular military operations; having no knowledge of the art of war, being ignorant of local circumstances, and at too great a distance to know the important and sometimes very sudden changes that arise?”

The clue to Madame Harcourt’s pertinent query may be found, perhaps, in a letter written to Lord Pelham in 1796, by Earl Camden, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, at a moment when that country was in full anticipation of a large-scale invasion by the French. Animadverting on the preparations for resistance put in hand by the military, the noble Earl permitted himself to comment; “We have often agreed that not much dependence is to be placed on our Generals”; adding a little later, “I am sure that in many parts of the military profession a man not bred to it can judge as well as one who has been so educated.”

There you have it in plain uncompromising terms—the grotesque and fatal delusion by which so many men of everyday affairs have been bemused, the fantastic belief that in his omniscience, and out of the profundity of his understanding, the politician, almost in a twinkling, can make himself master of a technique to whose acquisition the soldier devotes his lifelong energies. A profound grasp of strategy and a thorough understanding of the logistics by which it is supported, a highly-trained faculty for man- management under conditions of war, and the employment of weapons to their best advantage with regard to conditions prevailing in a given theatre of operations—all these and the multitude of other technical attributes and personal qualities, the politician, in his monstrous, overweening vanity, persuades himself he can pick up virtually overnight!

All this is bad enough, but in addition it has to be recognised that with the growth of power enjoyed by the civil administration which has characterised the last hundred and fifty years, the politician’s opportunities for mischief have enormously increased, while his egoism and complacent self-satisfaction have not noticeably diminished.

In the 1914-18 conflict, for example, Premier Lloyd George impatiently scouted, as far too laggard and costly, the grim war of attrition on the Western Front, of which Haig was the steadfast advocate. With eye alert for a little useful window-dressing, to “make the war    popular”—again that wretched cheapjack motivation!—in his craze for something spectacular, however militarily inept, the little Welchman’s flighty imagination dwelt on entirely infeasible flank attacks across the roadless Julian Alps, or toyed with equally phantasmagorical pipe-dreams of an amphibious landing on Germany’s Baltic coast. At one period he did succeed in tying up a considerable number of troops in the Struma Valley and along the Dorian marshes, where they could contribute virtually nothing to the prosecution of the war, and died off like flies from the all- pervasive malaria.

Yet in the outcome, Haig’s obduracy reaped, not only victory, but the Germans’ grudging admission that his strategy had been “careful and effective.” In effect, the fighting-man, in the teeth of the most reckless political opportunism, had clung to the inviolable principle that final victory is the result of victory on the decisive front.

Although relations were, on the whole, far more cordial and understanding between the politicians and the fighting-men in the war of 1939-45 than ever they were during the earlier conflict, that is not to say that “the frocks” entirely refrained from encroachment on the sphere of active operations, or that military enterprise was not seriously jeopardised on more than one occasion by being harnessed to ill-designed and short-sighted policy.

Fortunately for the anti-Nazi allies, where interference by the policy-maker with the technical execution of his designs was concerned, it was Hitler—the most recent example of an unsuccessful attempt to wield duality of power—who was guilty of the earliest enormity. With France already, for all practical purposes, out of the fight by direct order of the Fuehrer, General Guderian’s armoured force was held back just as it was poised to crash into the Dunkirk bridgehead and turn a fighting evacuation into an unmitigated shambles. If Hitler exercised this ill-calculated restraint with the object of conserving his field force to ensure the complete conquest of the French, then he extravagantly exaggerated such Gallic will to resist as survived. On the other hand, if he renounced a holocaust on the Dunkirk beaches in the fond belief that by so doing he could come to some accommodation with the British behind the backs of their allies, then his ignorance of the island people’s peculiar psychology even outmatched von Ribbentrop’s.

On a smaller scale, but patently disastrous in its outcome, was Britain’s military intervention in Greece, in 1941. A romantic gesture inspired by the politicians and carried through in the teeth of considerable military protest, it was unwelcomed by the Greeks themselves to the point of positive resentment. And it only served to prolong the Hellenic agony. Moreover, by denuding North Africa of much of its scanty armament, it left the way open for Rommel to lord it in the Western Desert, as it encouraged a German-dominated Persia to kick over the traces. No particular importance can be attached to the contention that the appearance of British troops in Greece retarded the German pounce on Russia by anything up to six weeks. For so trifling a delay could have made little difference to Russian preparations to meet the furor Teulonicus which had been going steadily forward for the best part of fifteen years. On the other hand, had the Western Desert forces been strengthened, instead of hopelessly weakened, Wavell might very well have been in Tripoli in 1941; whereafter the whole of the 1942 North African campaign would have been unnecessary, while the cross-Channel invasion could have been brought forward by a twelve- month.

It is not without significance, incidentally, that the recent war’s major blunders, both Axis and Allied, were made in connection with Russia; about which the majority of “the frocks” held very different views to those entertained by the bulk of the fighting- men.

For if Hitler committed his major blunder when he unleashed the Wehrmacht against the forces of Bolshevism in 1941, the allied policy-makers were guilty of equally gross an error of judgment at Yalta, when they pinned their faith to the cloudcuckooland belief that by “asking nothing and yielding everything” ruthless Asiatic opportunism would be transmogrified overnight into an Occidental sense of noblesse oblige.

It is only fair to record that amongst those to entertain this starry-eyed illusion were certain members of the fighting services, whose experience should have endowed them with a keener sense of reality. Equally, there were those amongst “the frocks” possessed of sufficient vision to oppose the creation of a situation wherein a brutal Nazi despotism would be replaced by the even more brutal tyranny of the Kremlin. In the eternal clash of outlook between the fighting-men and the politicians, here was one of those rare occasions whereon each side was divided against itself, with—surprisingly enough— a certain number of adherents to a particular point of view revealing themselves in the ranks of the other party to the dispute. In such a welter of confusion and cross-purposes it is small wonder that Stalin—the one man who knew exactly what he wanted and, without the slightest consideration for other peoples’ interests, was relentlessly determined to get it—should have swept the “kitty” into his pocket after picking everyone else’s.

Shakespeare’s advice to the cobbler to “stick to his last” is council to which the attention of both the fighting-men and “the frocks” cannot be too earnestly directed, particularly the latter, of whom it may well be said that “mere prattle without practice is all their soldiering.” This is absolutely essential now that over-all direction and control by the civil administration has been accepted as the rule of governance in all countries not domineered over by the repressive hand of dictatorship—widely as the actual modus operandi may differ in particulars. “Rule by Committee” is, indeed, a first principle of democracy; and if the system sometimes fails to achieve perfectibility, it is only in the natural order of things that any rule-of-thumb, man-devised machinery for controlling a nation’s destinies should suffer from the defects of its own qualities. It is true that in times of war this selfsame “Rule by Committee,” while preserving a facade of consultation and debate, invariably modulates to something barely distinguishable from plain, unvarnished dictatorship. During the most recent world conflict, for example, Roosevelt and Churchill wielded powers only a little less untrammelled than those exercised by Hitler and Stalin; their decisions being spared anything more than a froth of criticism by appeals to unity in the war effort, back by legislation whose powers of suppressing the too insistent voice of disagreement had the powerful backing of a majority of the press and the bulk of public opinion.

It follows, therefore, that under the sanctioned form of governance prevailing the responsibility for framing policy must rest with the civil administration and not with the Service chiefs. For, as Clausewitz has pointed out, “War is an extension of policy by other means”; or as Tallyrand more trenchantly phrased it to Marshal Ney, “When my profession fails, then yours comes in.”

But the very fact that hostilities have eventuated at all implies the gravest failure in policy-making: for nobody would attain by war what could be won peacefully. A nation which has permitted itself to get so weak as to encourage aggression has equally been guilty of a faulty policy. In these circumstances, the claim of the policy-makers to omniscience becomes more than ever suspect, and their pretensions to continued wisdom are rarely advantaged by those shallow improvisations, which come under the general heading of war aims, with which they hastily replace their shattered and discredited policy.

Obviously, the first and most important of war aims is to secure victory over the enemy. But it is equally vital that they should embody some definite concept of the shape it is intended world affairs should take after victory has been achieved. This is an imperative necessity far too often overlooked by “the frocks,” while its neglect inevitably condemns the fighting-man to those innumerable embarrassments and frustrations which beset anyone left to try and cope with a political vacuum. Moreover, should “the frocks” permit that vacuum to persist, then,faule-de mieux, the fighting-man is compelled to take steps to fill it—a regrettable but entirely ineludible encroachment by the military on the preserve of policymaking.

In effect, the military commander has every right to demand to be furnished, not with a gallimaufry of makeshifts and hollow expedients, but with a definite, clear-cut policy that has been thought right through to its ultimate equation. To which it must be added that, once he is in possession of such a plan, he should be left to get on with it without interference. No man can do a good job with one individual nagging at his elbow and another one breathing irresponsible advice down the back of his neck. In any case, it can never be anything but an impertinent folly for a guinea pig to try and instruct a squirrel in the management of its tail! And the wise old recommendation, “Don’t talk to the man at the wheel,” has a wider than a purely maritime application. In short, “the frocks” must be brought to realise that there are only two alternatives where their Supreme Commander is concerned—to trust him to the hilt, never questioning his superior judgment on military technicalities or requirements, or to dismiss him and get someone else in whom they can put their faith. About this there can be no half measures, “that way madness lies.”

Above all things, within his own technical sphere the Supreme Commander should at all times be permitted to keep his own council.

During the 1914-18 conflict Lord Kitchener earned the extreme displeasure of his Cabinet by refusing to admit them to important military secrets. “There is no man,” K. of K. grimly affirmed, “that babbles more on the matrimonial pillow than the politician—and wives talk!”

The United States, and the world in general, were furnished with a particularly painful example of the success that can attend a well-kept military secret, with the unheralded stroke hurled by the Japanese against Pearl Harbor. For, as documentary evidence has recently made clear, the decision to attempt the blow was arrived at solely and exclusively by the Japanese Naval-Air Staff, no Cabinet endorsement was solicited or required. It was an entirely unfettered resolution of the Service Chiefs, on a purely technical matter well within their general terms of reference; arrived at without any revelations of their intention to the civil administration. And it is impossible to burke the fact that the extremely limited number of those admitted to the secret contributed enormously to its preservation, as it ensured for the enterprise the very maximum of surprise.

In the framing of their designs, it is highly essential for “the frocks” to bear constantly in mind that policy can only be as strong as the means available for its enforcement— should the need for military action arise. For however urgent it might appear—to take an extreme example—for the little independent Italian republic of San Marino to back her policy against the United States with force, it is quite obvious that by no conceivable effort could her civil administration muster the necessary strength even to open hostilities, let alone to carry them to the point of victory. In effect, there are many instances when the “plan” must settle policy, not policy the “plan”; since inability —through want of means—to formulate an adequate military plan renders too “forward” a policy out of the question.

Again, almost invariably it is entirely indefensible for the civil administration to demand the execution of a policy of limited objectives. For such a course implies restraints which are nothing less than gifts of golden opportunity to the enemy; as long as effective counter-action is crippled by having one hand tied behind the back. A battle of limited objectives, if a dangerous expedient, is at least possible. A campaign of limited objectives, however ethically desirable, is not. Unless the enemy can be hit first, hit hard, and hit all the time, how, when, and where the Supreme Commander pleases, then that unfortunate individual can do nothing more than sacrifice his men in an effort which is morally impermissible because it has been robbed of its power to be effective. That is what Wellington meant when he said, “You can’t have a little war.”

Although political interference with matters military, however well-intentioned, has invariably proved disastrous, the soldier or sailor, on the other hand, when called by exceptional circumstances to deal with political matters, has invariably acquitted himself with credit. Washington’s skilful handling of his difficult Gallic allies was of little less service to his country than his command of the American forces in the field. Marlborough was an adroit and resourceful diplomat in addition to being one of the first of military commanders. Clive of India was as efficient a pro-consul as he was an outstanding leader of troops. Wellington demonstrated his skill in negotiation in India, in the Iberian peninsula, and again in the post- Waterloo days in Paris. Kitchener dealt with the highly ticklish situation which arose over Marchand of Fashoda with a tactful firmness that no ripened Foreign Secretary could have outmatched. Nor are there wanting later instances that could be adduced.

It is possible, then, that “the frocks” habitual estimate of the fighting-man as little more than a semi-literate butcher stands in serious need of revision. Maybe, when dismissal of the fighting-man who is seen to have failed is balanced by the impeachment of the administrator who is known to have blundered, there may arise a better spirit of co-operation and mutual trust. And that, fundamentally, is all that is wanted—a sense of teamwork, with everyone content to contribute his own individual talent to the game.