Waterloo to Mons

1 The Art of War Waterloo to Mons William McElwee Pag.02 - The Legacy of Napoleon Pag.18 - War as an Instrument of Policy Pag.37 - War as a Means of Imperial Expansion Pag.55 - The impact of Technological Advances on Strategy and Tactics Pag.76 - War conducted by Amateurs: The American Civil War Pag.94 - The Aftermath of Moltke’s Great Age Pag.108 - Epilogue: South Africa and Manchuria Pag.129 - The World's Navies in the Age of Moltke Pag.151 - The Legacy of Moltke 2 The Legacy of Napoleon The Crimean War was a political watershed. From one point of it was the end of an era. For the first time for almost forty years European Great Powers had found themselves at war wiiith one another on issues which might decisively alter the map of the world and imperil that balance of power so carefully established and safeguarded by Metternich and his dancing satellites at the Vienna Congress in 1815. It thus impinged upon a world in which statesmen and soldiers alike had grown up in the belief that the fundamentals, both diplomatic and military, were safe from change. There were, of course, innumerable crises. There had been at least one temporarily successful revolutionary outbreak in every European capital save London; and the growing clamour of newly self-conscious Balkan nations for emancipation from Turkish rule was a ceaselessly boiling pot. Great Britain and France were engaged in laying the foundations of empires overseas whose significance was only to be apparent much later, and which threatened the interests of no other Great Power. The only non- European Great Power, the USA, comfortably isolated within the Monroe Doctrine, was exclusively occupied with the absorption of vast Indian territories in the far west. Thus, for forty years, none of the world's great armies had faced each other in what French writers call La Grande Guerre. The Russians had had a taste of it when they attacked the Turks, both in the Balkans and in the Caucasus, in 1828, but were never faced with any serious necessity for military rethinking. In Italy, too, the business of suppressing periodical revolutionary outbreaks did twice bring the Austrians up against the properly equipped and trained Piedmontese regular army, in 1821 and 1848. But the Italians, outnumbered, inexperienced and never very well-led, did little more than give Field-Marshal Radetzky a run for his money. He trained in the process a whole generation of Austrian officers to whom the Lombard landscape and the tactics suited to it became as familiar as those of Salisbury Plain were to be to later generations of British soldiers. Their campaigns were like a well-rehearsed play given by a repertory company in its own theatre. If the Italians were caught west of Milan they were defeated generally at Novara. If they escaped that and pushed towards the fortresses of the Quadrilateral they met disaster at Custoza. Benedek, who had served as Radetzky's Chief-of-Staff and had fought again over the same ground as a Corps Commander in 1859, underlined the fact when in 1866, at the last moment, Francis Joseph transferred him to the chief command in Bohemia. 'In Italy', he said sadly to the Emperor, 'I know every tree on the road to Milan.' In 1856, when the Congress of Paris brought the Crimean War to an end, the same sad observation could have been made by almost every serving officer in continental Europe of the stones in the streets of his own capital. Almost every army in Europe - even the smallest - had seen some form of active service. But it had all been street- fighting, in 1820, 1830, or 1848, when the Liberal intellectuals had turned out the mobs to hack up the cobbles of their streets for barricades and man the windows and cellars of their still-medieval, tortuous streets. It was all, beyond doubt, murderous fighting and, as such, valuable military experience. But it did not prepare the minds of commanders, junior officers, or soldiers for the problems of La Grande Guerre any more than did the organisation of punitive columns in the Khyber Pass or the foothills of the Atlas. Ironically, the Crimean War, though it was the first great struggle fought out for years between the regular armies and navies of three Great Powers and two lesser ones, did strikingly little to correct the imbalance of this military inexperience. The commanders were far too much of the old school to learn anything before disease or exhaustion carried them off. St Arnaud, the first Commander-in-Chief and, so Larousse proudly assures us, ' Le vainqueur des Russes a la bataille de l'Almà’ had only been an obscure, fifty-year-old Brigadier-General in North Africa when, in 1851, alone among senior French officers, he had consented to organise the military coup d'etat which destroyed the Second Republic and paved the way for the Second Empire. This he did quite brilliantly; and he may, indeed, have had the 'condottiere spirit'. But nothing in his experience fitted him for the command of a large allied army in a major pitched 3 battle. His frontal assault across the Alma river and up the heights beyond proved the splendid fighting spirit of the British infantry, and particularly of the Brigade of Guards and the Highland Brigade. But it did not promise well for future operations and it was probably just as well that he died almost immediately of disease. Of the succeeding generals, Pelissier had been born in 1794 and served under Napoleon I. Lord Raglan had fought as a subaltern at Waterloo; and his successor, General Simpson, had only frontier experience to guide him in the impossible task of maintaining an army in the field in the teeth of the incompetence of the authorities in London. For the Russian commander, Prince Menschikoff, the Crimea represented the inept climax of a disastrous career, diplomatic and military, which stretched nearly back to the Congress of Vienna. In the circumstances the lessons learnt were not of any great importance in the following period to any of the participants concerned. The French, who had done less badly than any of the other armies concerned, cashed in on what glory was going; their faith in their military machine and its higher command was, if anything, strengthened; and the glittering triumph of the Congress of Paris assauged the lingering sense of humiliation inherited from Waterloo and the Vienna settlement. The Russians were shocked by defeat into a vast, long-overdue, but also overambitious programme of social and legal reform, but did little to bring their military arrangements up to date. The almost total breakdown of their War Office administration, particularly on the medical side, had compelled the British to urgent and immediate reforms. But they, too, were slow to rethink their tactical doctrine and to remedy the shortcomings of their obsolescent equipment. Looking backwards, then, the Crimean War was just a belated epilogue to the age of Napoleon. Only a very few statesmen and soldiers perceived that it might also be the curtain-raiser for a very different sort of drama. The forty years during which there had been no major disturbance of the peace were followed by fifteen which would see the whole shape of the world altered and its future determined by five wars, and which, we can now perceive, set the stage for the great, world- wide struggles of the twentieth century. By the end of them two new Great Powers, the German Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, had appeared on the European map; and the pattern of the future development of the United States of America had been decisively settled by four years of bitter civil war. The careful balance of power established at Vienna had been destroyed for ever. Europe was to settle into two massively armed camps; and their hostilities would in the end bring all human civilisation to the brink of ruin. This was the ultimate achievement of the generals of the age of Moltke. Moreover, these generals were given no time to digest any lessons, tactical or technical, to be learnt from the Crimea. In 1859, within three years of the Congress of Paris, the French with their Italian allies were engaged in a major war against the Austrian Empire on the plains of Lombardy. The Americans found themselves locked in a great civil war in 1861. Three years after that Austria and Prussia together were to extinguish for ever the over-swollen nationalistic ambitions of the Danish monarchy; and in 1866 Prussians and Austrians were to meet at Koniggratz - a battle more decisive for the world's future than even Waterloo. By 1871 the high drama was over. The French Empire had gone and the German was in being. To guide them the commanders had only the experiences of the Napoleonic campaigns fifty years before, rationalised and annotated by Clausewitz; and their tools were still the tools of Napoleon I, Schwarzenberg, Blucher, and Wellington, last exercised in the grand manner in Belgium in 1815. The admirals were even worse off. They had to guess wildly at the modifications to the 'Nelson Touch' needed as a result of half a century of bewilderingly rapid technological advance. On the Mississippi and in the Adriatic they would have to learn the hard way the limitations and capabilities of the steam-driven, ironclad battleship, with the fates of nations at stake on the issue. All this gave to the military history of the age of Moltke a unique urgency.

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