THE NINETEENTH CENTURY No. CCLXXVI-FEBRUARY 1900 THE CONFUSION WORSE CONFOUNDED AT THE WAR OFFICE [THE subjoined article by the late General Sir George Chesney on 'The "Confusion Worse Confounded" at the War Office,' which appeared in this Review in August 1891, is here reprinted on account of its valuable bearing upon the present military situation. Its warnings are being fulfilled before our eyes, and, if its advice were taken in 'the times of refreshing' which must very shortly come, we should escape the repetition of many such military disasters and difficulties as are now depressing us. Next in importance to the imperative necessity for increasing the amount of our military forces by some such means as the Militia ballot, to which public attention is obviously awaking, stands the necessity for reconstructing our system of managing those forces. What form this reconstruction should take would become clearer to the public mind if some definite and commonsensible scheme were submitted to it, instead of mere vague accusations of wrong-doing, and Sir George Chesney's plan is now again put forward with that object. Having been produced in a period of comparative tranquillity, it has the advantage of being free from the suspicion of partisan or personal bias which would attach to anything brought out for the first time at such a season of excitement as the present. This plan, in all its essentials, still holds the field' in the VOL. XLVII-No. 276 N judgment of our most competent military critics and experts, one of whom, Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, has written, by way of introduction to it, the following pages of comment and commendation. JAMES KNOWLES, Editor Nineteenth Century.] THE GENERAL MANAGEMENT OF THE ARMY SIR GEORGE CHESNEY was one of the best judges in matters of military administration whom Great Britain has ever possessed. A soldier and a student of his profession, he showed in his essays on Indian Polity a statesman's insight into many of the large questions of government. For more than a quarter of a century he was a leader among those who, knowing the weakness of British military organisation, were labouring to bring about the remedy. Had it not been that the country was spellbound in the lethargy of commercial prosperity, his Battle of Dorking, published in 1871, would surely have brought about the reform it was written to promote. From 1887 to 1891 he was Military Member of the Council of the Viceroy of India, or, in other words, administrator-general of the Indian Armies. After his return from India questions of army organisation were attracting attention at home. In 1888 Sir James Stephen's Commission had exposed with terrible force the impotence of the system. In 1890 the Hartington Commission, while further exposing the chaotic state of the military administration, proposed remedies which no one regarded as entirely satisfactory, and which have not been adopted. In 1891 Sir George Chesney contributed to this Review three articles in which, while throwing a bright light upon the dislocated joints of the condemned but still existing arrangements, he made specific proposals towards a working scheme of reform. The editor of this Review thinks that at the present moment the reproduction of Sir George Chesney's views would be useful and opportune, and has appealed to me to write an introduction to one of his papers of 1891, and at the same time to explain the outlines of a scheme of army re-organisation. I should have hesitated to undertake so delicate a task were it not that before his death I had special opportunities of becoming acquainted with Sir George Chesney's ideas on the subject, and believe that in now setting forth the main principles upon which a reconstruction of the War Office may be undertaken I may be able to render a service to his memory. At the earliest possible moment the British army, which includes the regular troops, the militia, the yeomanry, and the volunteers, has to be re-organised on the principle of duty or of the devotion of the individual to the nation. The moment is therefore opportune for a re-statement of the fundamental conditions with which a re-organisation of the army must comply, of those essentials which are above and beyond controversy, and to the necessity of which the practice of modern military nations, the opinions of great Generals, of military administrators, and of statesmen who have dealt successfully with war, combine to bear testimony. The nation will have to entrust its task to the man of its choice, who, whether he be a soldier or a civilian, will succeed if he has the single eye which is the mark of a great statesman, and if, instead of vainly trying to elicit from the discussions of the experts an average opinion which would be that of none of them, he will begin by discarding as of minor importance the subjects about which they differ, and will accept as the guiding lines of his action those judgments in which all the experts concur. Rational action is dominated by its purpose; the purpose of military action and of military organisation is victory. The choice of means must ever be dictated solely by the object in view, but there is a restriction upon the choice of means: those must be rejected the employment of which would frustrate some higher end than that immediately sought. Victory is valuable only in so far as it conduces to the nation's welfare, the one object of government, and therefore in the organisation of victory all devices which would imperil or be detrimental to the national organism are tabooed. The nation, while arming itself and putting itself in training to defend its cause, the cause of freedom or representative government, must take care not to damage or dislocate those arrangements by which the character of its government is ensured. In a word, we must not, while making ourselves an army, unmake our Constitution. The right way of treatment will be first to ascertain what is prescribed by the end in view-success in war-and then to examine how the requirements thus discovered may be adopted in the spirit of our national institutions. In every war two distinct functions are continuously and simultaneously performed. The army in the field in its action against the enemy is directed and controlled by its Commander-in-Chief. It is also continuously or intermittently supplied from home with officers, men, horses, guns, ammunition, and stores. For these two functions. Sir George Chesney used the terms 'command' and 'supply,' and the two offices by which they are performed, assuming each of them to be in the hands of one person, may be called those of the Commander and of the Administrator-General. Napoleon as Emperor had the supreme authority, but when he was commanding an army in the field he depended for all the resources supplied to him from France upon a Minister of War, just as Lord Roberts in South Africa has to look to some Administrator at the War Office for every man, horse, and gun that he may require. The local and personal distinction between these two functions during war is fundamental, for the Commander must be present with the army which he directs and controls, which during war will be in contact with the enemy, and preferably in the enemy's country; while the AdministratorGeneral must be at home, where he can best collect the nation's resources, and superintend their transformation into materials of war and their transmission to the Commander in the field. If, then, in war these two functions and the offices which perform them are necessarily distinct, it must be wise that they should be distinct during peace, because otherwise there would be a violation of the common-sense rule that every office and every officer should during peace prepare for, exercise, and rehearse the functions which it and he are destined to perform during war. The necessity for the two offices during war is the best guide to the relation between them in peace. The Commander in the field is the designer and director of the operations of his army against the enemy, and the materials supplied to him, in the shape either of troops or of weapons, should be such as will suit his purpose. The Administrator, therefore, must be guided by the requirements of the Commander, from whom as far as possible he will take his inspiration. The end, be it remembered, is always victory, and victory invariably has its source in the mind of the Commander. For that reason systems alone, however perfect, will not produce it, and the greatest merit any system can have consists in its laying no needless fetters upon the judgment and the will of officers whose hearts are in their work. He Let us consider for a moment the work of the Commander of an army, and the qualifications and qualities which it implies in him. He must be an assiduous student of the military sciences and of the military art, for in no other way can he be the embodiment of the best military judgment of his day. His first business in connection with any war is to estimate rightly the military and other resources of the enemy, and to divine the probable effect upon that enemy of the various kinds of damage which may be inflicted upon him. This implies a cultivated intelligence, such as is acquired, as a rule, only by men who have enjoyed the best education of their time. must have the habit of thinking things out for himself, without which no man can have enough confidence in his own decisions to abide by them in moments of doubt and difficulty. He must be accustomed to the exercise of authority in conditions which render him liable to be called to account; without this, it is unlikely that he can have the peculiar strength of character which enables a man to stake his reputation, his career, his life, and, what is perhaps still harder, the lives of others upon his judgment as to the prudence or imprudence of a particular course of action. The mind of every great Commander has been formed by prolonged efforts of meditation on the various problems of war carried in each case to the point of absolute decision, and of a settled conviction as to the right way to deal with each different problem. The convictions thus acquired become, in course of time, the framework or skeleton of his mind, so that he is incapable of acting in a way inconsistent with them. Napoleon, by this process of intense thought, had at a comparatively early age, perhaps as soon as 1797, thoroughly organised his military judgment, and this organised judgment he sometimes called 'my system,' though the word 'system' implies a cast-iron rigidity very different from the flexible elasticity of a man's judgment, which is a living thing. Jomini and the strategical writers devoted many years to the attempt to trace through his actions the outlines of this organised judgment of Napoleon's. Moltke's judgment was formed by effort continued throughout a long life. It was a revised modern edition of that of Napoleon, to which in all probability it was superior, though that cannot be decided until in the next generation the analysts who are now at work upon it have finished their task. The process of hard thinking, and therefore of concentration, which a Commander must go through involves a peculiar treatment by him of all matters of detail. Those that are important to him he absolutely masters and digests: the rest he ignores, although in the process of picking out those which he requires he has usually been obliged to cover the whole branch to which they belong. Concentration is impossible without leisure, which is obtained by a man in authority through the division of labour among his assistants. The Commander of an army, therefore, forms for himself a staff of assistants, among whom he distributes the multifarious business which he has to transact, giving them the power to decide questions without reference to him in proportion to his confidence in their judgment, or, what is the same thing, to his certainty that they know his mind about the questions which they will have to answer. But the great questions of all, how he will distribute hie troops, and whether he will move to the right, to the left, or straight forward, he reserves for himself. Suppose he has three divisions or three army corps, and decides to endeavour to turn his enemy's right flank, using one of the three bodies to hold the enemy in front while the two others are to march so as to bring them upon the enemy's flank at such a time that all three bodies may attack simultaneously. That being his decision, endless details must be arranged for its execution. The General commanding each body must receive a clear account of the mission entrusted to him and of his place in the framework of the movement; arrangements must be made to carry provisions and ammunition for these bodies, for screening their march from the enemy's observation, and for watching the enemy during the movement-arrangements which must be translated into the |