sessed, in addition, a narrow front of some military value facing Germany, the line of the Meuse between Liège and Givet. In other words, her situation as compared with Switzerland was immensely more favorable for organizing a national defense. Even as compared with Germany, with her population compactly placed on a narrow front, and with great economic resources, it was not quite hopeless to attempt to resist her neighbor. The Swiss, we may believe, would certainly have made the attempt. But that was not the practical problem.

The practical problem was merely how to defend Belgian neutrality in case of war between other powers. It was true that the neutrality of Belgium, like that of Switzerland, was under the guaranty of treaties. But the observance of such treaties was not in the traditions of European diplomacy. A great power dealing with a little one was far more likely to consult expediency than international ethics, as even the United States had recently shown in the case of Panama. Beyond all that was the definite knowledge, tabulated on the cards of every general staff of Europe, that the railroads recently developed by Germany toward the Belgian frontier were intended for the conveyance of troops, the designation and placing of which could almost wholly be worked out. German publicists and writers on military affairs did not hesitate to inform the world that to carry out against France the envelopment on a wide strategic front of the Moltke-der Goltz school, a swinging movement through Belgium was necessary. It was also clear that the narrow frontier in Lorraine was wholly inadequate for deploying such masses as Germany possessed. The economic desirability of seizing the coal and iron resources of Belgium and northern France was probably not yet realized to be a fundamental necessity for Germany's strategic policy. But even if this last point was not generally grasped, it still remains true to say that no nation ever received more definite warning that her hour was at hand than Belgium.

How did she meet it? Her attitude was most characteristic, and had many points of resemblance with that of this country toward the military problem. She was engrossed in one of the most remarkable outbursts of industrial energy that the world has seen. Labor problems and social reforms had become urgent. She concentrated her attention on herself. Beyond her border there was nothing to interest her, for her ambitions did not lie that way. She was impatient, one is almost tempted to say naturally impatient, at any thought of spending money and foresight on anything so irreconcilable with her ideals as an army. And the upshot was a haphazard, neglectful, ineffective treatment of the problem. Then she woke up one fine morning to find her country wrecked and in ashes.

The Belgian army, costing rather more. than half again as much as the Swiss,roughly, thirteen millions of dollars to eight, was much less efficient. It stood on paper at about 48,000 men, though this number was not actually reached, and the efficiency of its infantry was ranked low. A few show regiments of the royal guard and the scientific attainments of the technical corps were good; the rest was almost negligible. There was a reserve of about the same numbers, and a garde civique of no military value. Had Belgium been. equipped with a system half as effective as the Swiss, she could have matched man for man with Germany on the LiègeGivet line, and quicker, up to half a million men or more. As it was, her small forces proved useless, notwithstanding the exaggerated views widely disseminated as to what took place at Liège and afterward.

With every country of Europe we have to deal with a similar range of factsnational policy and the armed force. And in no two countries do we find the same policy or the same expression of it in terms of arms. Some nations are wise, others foolish; some are strong, others weak; some aggressive; some pacific; some wasteful, others provident. But summing up, and looking to the future,

it may be said that unless European civilization is doomed to suffer some considerable setback, Switzerland has evolved the logical form of the national army, and placed as she is, she has been compelled to carry that form out to its largest numerical terms. Germany made of the national army first a weapon for achieving national unity, a comprehensible ambition, and later a weapon for the assertion of certain aims, largely the result of great economic expansion, that involved the coercion of her neighbors. But this, let us hope, is only a passing phase, and even the German national army may prove a stepping-stone to more pacific times and methods.1

In the United States peculiar conditions vary the shape of the general argument. These conditions will be considered shortly. But before reaching them it may be pointed out that a reluctance. to face the military problem similar to that which was shown by Belgium is manifest in the United States. Fortunately, the words Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin have not yet appeared on our walls, and the actual problem to be considered is far slighter than the one which has just ended in the catastrophe of Belgium. Yet the United States has no more rational policy than Belgium had, and has never seriously asked the question, What are the possibilities that face us, and what are the reasonable precautions to take in view of such possibilities?

II

MILITARY history is much obscured by the survivor, the historian, and the journalist. They are virtually banded in an unholy alliance to tell us everything except what we really ought to know. And even in what they do tell us, accuracy is more completely sacrificed than in almost any other branch of mental activity. This proceeds inevitably from the very nature of war.

1 As the present war continues, so do its economic factors stand out more plainly. The situation may be worse than is here indicated, and we may stand at the beginning of vast struggles for economic control.

The soldier knows too little, and the general often enough too much, about the facts. The battle is mostly smoke, confusion, and excitement, in which little is seen and all is distorted. The weary survivor, unless the event is of a very unusual or striking description, begins to get his impressions at night, sitting about the camp-fire, from comrades about as well informed as himself. But some men are natural talkers, some have imagination, and these blaze out a path, uncertainly compounded of fact and fiction, along which the rest follow. In due course the camp-fire legends become crystallized, and by the time the old soldier is fighting the old battles over for his grandchildren, the residuum of fact is usually elusive indeed.

The general sees better and knows more, yet he may be even more unreliable as a witness; for he has responsibilities and may be implicated. Military operations are in their nature full of unforeseen incidents, marked by a continuous series of errors based on misinformation or miscalculation or the failure of subordinates. The general leaves these for the most part out of his account, puts a good face on what is usually a pretty bad matter, and makes things come out as near as possible to some stock pattern of what really ought to have happened, but did not. The newspaper-man and the historian occasionally help a little, but not much. Even if not eye-witnesses, they are better situated for giving a fair account than the combatants themselves. But they have graven images of their own. They are looking for a drama, for deeds of heroism, for satisfactions of national prejudices, and all things that will enable them to mobilize their eloquence. What they will not do is to dig down into those hidden springs from which proceed the success or the failure of armies: their organization; their armament; their tactics; their supply system; the training of their regimental officers, of their staff, of their higher command; their system of command; and the national policy of which these things are just so many expressions. Such matters do not make head-lines or

motion-pictures; they require knowledge, application, and study, and consequently they are labeled militarism, and scrapped.

So what with the great difficulty of dealing with the evidence, and with the wrong proclivities of those who set it before the public, it is not difficult for a whole nation to grow up in a state of complete misconception as to its own military history. The people of the United States are precisely in that situation. To remedy it, we require the complete rewriting of our military history; a formidable task. Here there is nothing to be done save to pick out a few salient facts and to indicate their bearings.

Our worst tradition was early established that of ill-considered, wasteful, and ineffective half-measures. It is reckoned that during the War of Independence there were 395,000 enrolments for service, many of them, of course, of the same men presenting themselves again. Yet Washington was never able to place 20,000 men in line, and was generally so hopelessly inferior that he could not venture on decisive operations. His most brilliant achievements were accomplished at the head of 2500 men. Under this system it cost $170,000,000 to carry the war through, to say nothing of the pensions paid to over 95,000 persons, some of which, widows of survivors, were still living and drawing their pay a century later.

The source of the mischief lay in the fact that the control of the whole matter was with the Continental Congress, and that this body was jealous of a standing army, had no knowledge of military questions, and was inclined for cheese-paring. This was perhaps inevitable, but it was costly in lives, time, and money. Congress chose to believe, for no reasons that will bear examination, that the struggle would be short, and decided to enlist men for twelve months, which, quite apart from anything else, was not nearly long enough to give them a discipline and solidity approaching that of the king's soldiers. Washington continually protested, but in vain. He was always told that if these enlisted regulars were insufficient,

there was always the militia to fall back upon!

It is hardly too much to say that Lexington and Bunker Hill, or, rather, the false presentation of those events, were among the worst misfortunes that ever overtook this country. The legend of the minute-man, of the patriot rising in his wrath, reaching for his old gun from over the ancestral mantel, driving the mercenaries of King George before him, has done and still does an incalculable amount of mischief. Of course the farmer was patriotic, could on occasion shoot a redcoat or even give his life for the cause; but to suppose that the farmer, collectively as militia, could face British infantry in the field in any circumstances save those of surprise or irregular fighting is absurd. Even the French infantry could hardly do that, as Dettingen and Fontenoy and the Plains of Abraham had demonstrated. The militia might help with numbers in such a blockade as that of Boston or hold a breastwork against a frontal attack; beyond that it was a nuisance. Washington himself declared that the militia was worse than useless and had been the origin of all our misfortunes. And he was surely a competent witness.

After the War of Independence false economy continued to rule, with the same jealousy of a regular army and the same aberration as to the value of militia. At the time when Bonaparte became First Consul an era of expansion to the West opened, while Europe and the Atlantic witnessed gigantic struggles in which our trade interests were seriously threatened. We slowly drifted into war with Great Britain, relying meanwhile on the minuteman chimera to meet the emergency when it should burst on us. Our army consisted of 6700 men.

Congress once more attacked the situation by raising twelve-months' troops, who were to be supported by a suitable background of militia. In all, over 527,000 enrolments occurred, a greater number than that of the huge army with which Napoleon was then struggling to reach Moscow. Of these, 50,000 were

regulars. The reader may be spared the pitiful, almost incredible, details of the administrative mismanagement into which Congress plunged these forces. It need only be said that Great Britain held her own along the Canadian border with 4000 regulars, gradually increasing to 16,000, with some militia backing. Some of our performances on the frontier cannot be read without a blush. A small force of English dispersed our militia near Washington and raided the national capital with complete impunity. The cost of our military effort, one of the most disgracefully ineffective recorded in history, came to nearly two hundred and fifty millions of dollars.

The close of the war was marked by two redeeming incidents. One was the disastrous failure of an English force to carry Jackson's breastworks at New Orleans by frontal attack; the other was the discovery of that brilliant soldier, Winfield Scott, who did something toward making our troops in the North efficient.

For a few years after these illuminating events Congress maintained the army on a slightly higher level. In 1821, however, the old tendency asserted itself, and the army was reduced to 6000 men, and in another ten years we were paying the price. Indian troubles broke out in the Northwest and in Florida. We had no troops available, and for lack of a very few battalions of regulars we had to call out over 50,000 militia, to spend thirty millions, and to face seven years of war and disorder in the Southeast.

In 1846 came the Mexican War, marked by the same deplorable features as our previous enterprises, but in part redeemed by the brilliancy of our officers and the high tactical quality of our scanty battalions of regulars. But it was not until the great Civil War that the United States attacked a military problem on anything like a large scale, and it is at that point that it is best to investigate and to draw lessons.

The Civil War was quite unnecessary and preventable. The slavery question England had solved it

had to be solved.

as an economic proposition. Opinion in the United States, though inflamed on the surface, was visibly tending toward such a solution. But unfortunately every hothead in the country knew that there was no power in our institutions to enforce law and order. Our army numbered fewer than 17,000 men, widely dispersed, and with as much on its hands as it could possibly attend to. There was no force disposable to control a district that should be inclined to break away from central control.

It was not necessary that the United States should be a militarist country. We did not need a million or two of soldiers, nor half a million, nor even a hundred thousand. If we had had just sixty thousand troops at that time, it is safe to say that no civil war could have taken place. With sixty thousand men, however widely dispersed, we could presumably have collected two or three brigades with which to occupy Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans when symptoms of rebellion appeared and long before a local militia could be even assembled by the secession leaders. The fact that the Government could police the country would have been so obvious that the Southern leaders would probably never have considered secession, and that if they had, the Southern officers would not have deserted their country for their State. Even had they done so, it would not have changed the situation. The rank and file in 1861 stuck to their colors, and the only difficulty would have been to replace forty per cent. of the officers, or to get along short-handed, a minor problem.

zens to an unnecessary death, that it almost deserves to be called criminal. A few weeks sufficed to demonstrate the futility of that measure, but the whole terrible length of the war was not enough to remedy another fundamental misconception that perhaps cost the country even more in terms of time, blood, and money. Regiments were organized as units, with no system of depots for training recruits and drafting them into the battalion at the front. All the experience of every country for a hundred years past overwhelmingly demonstrates that behind the trained unit at the front there must be the mechanism for keeping its ranks full. Instead of conforming to this standard, we preferred, save for the notable exception of the State of Wisconsin, to let seasoned units gradually get weaker, and to send our raw recruits to the fray, with raw officers in raw regiments.

There were reasons, unfortunately, for all these things-political reasons. And that is one more illustration of the evil of leaving military policy to the exclusive control of Congress. The fact is that no subject is more difficult in its range of historical, psychological, and technical factors than the military art; yet by one of those strange hallucinations to which man is subject, there is none on which the layman feels so competent to pass an opinion. And the less he knows about it, the more drastic his opinion. It is only when he begins to dig into the theoretical and practical difficulties that surround the soldier that his views become more tentative.

Until we have persuaded Congress of this fact, until it has become willing to delegate some authority to boards of experts, as it might in questions of engineering, sanitation, forestry, and so on, there is little hope of wiser views prevailing.

From the time of the Civil War to the present there are more lessons to be learned, but they need not affect the final argument. Our army learned many things in the Spanish war: at first the cost of unpreparedness; then, in Cuba, how not to fight; later, in the Philippines, after a little experience, how to fight on a small

scale. This was to the good as far as it went. New blood was poured into the army. Those who were behind the scenes did a lot of thinking. And presently army reform, under the wise and patriotic guidance of Mr. Root, began to take shape. We started in to catch up with a century or so of military progress. Mr. Root created a general staff, an institution still viewed with suspicion by the conservatives. An army war college came into existence, and a reformed army school at Fort Leavenworth, and all of these were indispensable foundations for the higher control and command of the United States army. But the greatest problem. of all was left unsolved, that of the creation of a real United States army-an army fit in its relation to national policy and purposes, adequate for all and any such emergencies as might reasonably be perceived on our political horizon. How such an army should be constituted is a question that must now be approached.

HOSTILITY and inertia loom large on the horizon. Yet many, I know, realize that facts carefully observed have been placed before them, from which only moderate and reasonable deductions have been drawn, and for no purpose save to serve the country. Let us hope that all who understand will support those few gentlemen who in Congress and elsewhere are striving to improve our national defenses.

To say that war is stupid and wicked may be true,-most people nowadays are agreed on this point,-but it does not dispose of the question. It is only in the kindergarten text that it takes two to make a quarrel, as every page of history ancient and modern demonstrates, and we have some very recent cases. If war is stupid and wicked, to encourage others to make war by remaining defenseless is stupid, wicked, and criminal. And to avoid that crime it is not necessary to threaten, it is not necessary to arm to the teeth. We have merely to raise our army to a standard that will place it about on a level with those of the secondor third-rate European powers-say some