enemy's retreat, and ultimately won the battle. The frontal attack completely failed. Moreover, the events of the day produced a feeling of great depression in the British force, as the soldiers hardly realized that to have dislodged from the strongest possible position a force almost equal in numbers to their own, mobile, and provided with good artillery, was a feat reflecting the utmost credit upon their dogged endurance and courage.

At Magersfontein the Highlanders' frontal attack completely failed from a number of circumstances, some of which Lord Methuen has detailed in his despatches, others of which have been commented upon by correspondents. This failure, following so closely upon the Modder River battle, strengthened the impression in his Division as to the hopelessness of frontal assaults. Yet it must be noted that there was no real artillery preparation at Magersfontein, but only enough bombarding the night before the attack to put the Boers upon the alert. After Magersfontein came Colenso, and the disastrous actions at Spion Kop and Vaal Krantz, where, again, frontal attacks completely failed, in all probability without inflicting upon the enemy losses at all commensurate with those sustained by our own troops. In the final advance upon Ladysmith success, from the telegraphic accounts, seems to have been secured by the flank movements, not by the frontal assaults.

Dundee and Elands-laagte are, it need scarcely be said, instances in favor of the frontal assault. In these cases, as at Belmont and Enslin, the Boer positions were on high ground, on the slopes of which there was a dead angle, where our assaulting infantry were, for a considerable part of their advance, sheltered from the Boer fire.

Lord Roberts's successes have, in every case, been won by a superior force against an inferior enemy, turn

ing the enemy's position. An entrenched position which can be turned must be abandoned, unless the force holding it expects assistance and desires to gain time, when it will have to stand a siege. There is no recent instance of a force turned, enveloped and besieged, extricating itself by its own unaided endeavors. A Plevna usually proves fatal to the army inside it, just as Sir George White's force at Ladysmith must have been reduced but for Lord Roberts's diversion in the Free State and General Buller's advance with 30,000 men to his help.

In the Franco-German War frontal attacks almost invariably failed, or only succeeded where the frontal attack was accompanied by attacks on one or both of the enemy's flanks. The loss from impetuous attempts to storm frontally strong entrenched positions was so heavy in the earlier period of the war that the old King of Prussia issued an order forbidding them. Hoenig and the best school of German writers on the war hold, indeed, that even now, if only the artillery preparation is complete and the formation of the assaulting force correct, frontal attacks may succeed, but they acknowledge their difficulty, and may, to a great extent, modify their views in face of South African experience, and of the evidence that shrapnel fire does not produce the expected effect.

We are left with the third lesson of the war-the ease with which immensely long lines of works can be held by a small force. At Magersfontein the Boer lines are said to have stretched for twenty miles, and it is practically certain that they were never held by more than 10,000 men. That gives 500 men a mile. At Ladysmith the British lines were held by less than 1,000 men per mile. Yet the minimum that was allowed before the war was three men per yard of front, or over 5,000 men per mile from five to ten times as

many as experience in South Africa shows to be required. At Colenso, on a front of from ten to twelve miles, the Boers had probably about 12,000 in arms. That was about the same proportion as in the lines at Ladysmith.

And now for the application of these conclusions to the special case of France. The French Army is, we have seen, distinctly inferior to the German. If it took the offensive it would have little chance of success; but, acting on the defensive, it should be able, in the light of South African experience, to hold the frontier line without serious difficulty. The 160 miles of ground can readily be protected by field works of the same type as those employed by Cronje and Joubert.' The existing forts, with their heavy guns of position, can render valuable support to the entrenched infantry. The total force required in the first line to hold the works, allowing 2,000 men per mile, would only be slightly over 300,000, and could be concentrated on the easttern frontier in forty-eight hours. So excellent is the French railway system that, as the mobilization proceeds, immense masses of men can be directed to any threatened point. A perfect network of railways runs behind the line of

fortresses-Verdun, Toul, Epinal, Belfort-facilitating such concentrations. If it is thought best, three or four powerful armies can be distributed in suitable positions to the rear of the entrenched line, ready to move as required.

The weakness of most entrenched lines is that they can be turned. But in this case no turning movement is possible, for the reason that the French front would reach from one neutral frontier to another. The problem which would confront the German

3 Modern writers on war greatly contemn field works. Yet Napoleon said (Works, xxxi., 494), "Les fortifications de campagne sont toujours utiles, jamais nuisibles, lorsqu' elles sont bien entendues," and the experience of the American

leaders would be that which had to be faced by General Grant in his terrible campaign of 1864. The results of his frontal assaults upon Lee's entrenched infantry are nowhere so well told, from the private soldier's point of view, as in Wilkeson's "Recollections of a Private in the Army of the Potomac." He shows how speedily a succession of such attacks destroyed the fighting power of Grant's army, and demoralized the men who were certainly, at that date, the finest soldiers in the world-brave, war-trained, admirably led. Germans might well shudder if they were called upon to repeat Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. Grant only succeeded in dislodging Lee, after infinite trouble and enormous losses, when he worked round the Confederate right and broke in upon its line of communications. But on the French frontier, we have seen, no such move is possible. The assault must be frontal, and the very deepest misgivings as to its success are justified. If made in very open formation, such as that adopted by our Guards at Belmont, will two-years' service men go forward? If masses are employed, the slaughter will and must be terrible, and the probability of success by no means greater.

It is true that the defensive cannot, in the long run, hope to prevail against the offensive, but in this case, as we have seen, there are special conditions which do not exist elsewhere in Europe on the Eastern frontier of Prussia or Austria, for example. There is a relatively short length of frontier to be held and enormous numbers of men available to hold it. If the field works are to be invisible, they must be prepared beforehand, for the brown hues of South Africa are not found in Cen

Civil War seems to have been overlooked in the blind attention to the Franco-German War, as if that were the limit and measure of all things.

tral Europe. location must be ascertained by the enemy. But, as the artillery positions from which that enemy will attack must also be well known to the defenders, this is not a matter of great importance. The ranges can be measured and marked, and on the mobilization the ground in front of the line of entrenchments covered with a network of barbed wire such as was found in the operations before Colesberg to interfere so seriously with the movements of our cavalry.

Thus, in the end, their

Of course the French Army would not, like the Boers, resign itself to an absolutely passive defence. It would be ready to deliver vigorous counterstrokes, and the possibility of these being attempted would necessarily tend to augment the caution of the Germans in attacking. If the undisciplined Boer could be induced to hold his fire till the enemy was within 400 yards, the disciplined, or comparatively disciplined, French soldier could be taught to do the same. Inside 400 yards the point is very quickly reached at which, on level ground, it becomes impossible for guns in the rear to fire over the heads of advancing infantry. At Dundee and at Stormberg, in assaults upon high ground held by the enemy, the British troops suffered from their own artillery fire; at Modder River a Boer big gun on the enemy's extreme right drew the fire of the British naval and field guns right over General Pole-Carew's turning force, and is said thereby to have caused considerable confusion. If the quality of the troops had not been of the highest there would probably have been panic. As it was, this incident appears to have promptly checked General Pole-Carew's advance.

If good head cover has been prepared, the entrenched infantry can fire without heavy losses up to the moment of the final rafale of shrapnel. While this continues they lie down in the

trenches; its cessation gives the signal for the most rapid magazine-fire possible. The assaulting infantry will find itself checked again and again by barbed wire during the last hundred or two hundred yards of advance, and will have to undergo much the same experience as that of our Guards at the Modder River. Officers and sergeants will be killed or wounded at the outset, and the line deprived of leadership. The heavy losses rapidly inflicted, and the hail of bullets from all quarters, will tell upon the nerves of the young soldiers, where our seven and eight-years' service men can still go forward. The slightest check will be the signal for a counter-attack on the part of the defenders, who will have slowly gathered courage as they discover that the terrible shrapnel is, for the most part, innocuous, and note the slow progress of the enemy's assault and the advantages which cover confers upon themselves. The massing of the enemy's guns will have told the commander at the outset in which quarter the assault is to be delivered; the long artillery preparation necessary in these days will have given him time to move reinforcements by road and rail to the spot. The enemy has no advantage in numbers, for France still has as many trained men as Germany, and only as the greater German population begins to tell will the French numercial inferiority grow serious. Even as matters stand, France cannot profitably employ her whole army on the eastern frontier, for the reason that there is not space for it to deploy. Her 5,000 field, horse, mountain, and position guns deployed in one continuous line would cover nearly 100 miles. They would stretch from Verdun to a point half-way between Epinal and Belfort. What use would be made of the million or more men who could not profitably be used on the eastern frontier it is difficult to say. Were the

French control of the sea assured, some of them might be used in Denmark or in co-operation with Russia upon the eastern German frontier, where there are no such strict limitations of space as in the west-limitations which militate against a French invasion of Germany just as much as against a German invasion of France.

Still, the net result is to relieve France of that nightmare of invasion from which she has suffered for the last thirty years. Germany's striking power on the west is very much diminished, if, indeed, it does not vanish altogether, and she will have to turn her main efforts against Russia. I am assuming that Italy will not necessarily be found on the German side, as this, in view of the slowly-developing hostility between England and Germany,

The National Review.

and in view of the fear of German designs in the Mediterranean and Adriatic which the younger Italian statesmen feel is, at least, possible. That would free France from all danger in the southeast.

Whether France will be able to avail herself of the new openings offered is still doubtful. Her General Staff is far below the German in capacity; the morale of her troops is not high; her infantry shoots badly; her cavalry does not ride well, and only her artillery is very good. Frenchmen are only too painfully conscious of these deficiencies, and are aware, too, of the lower standard in duty which prevails in France as compared with Germany. Hence they distrust themselves. Whether they will regain confidence has now to be seen.

H. W. Wilson.

Rataplan!

Rataplan!

ere they knew.