Art. 6.-SCHARNHORST AND NATIONAL DEFENCE.

1. Scharnhorst. By Max Lehmann. Two vols. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1886.

2. Königin Luise. By Paul Bailleu. Leipzig and Berlin: Giesecke and Devrient, 1908.

3. La Régéneration de la Prusse après Iena. By J. Vidal de La Blache. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1910.

4. Life and Times of Stein. By J. R. Seeley. Cambridge: University Press, 1878.

5. Jena to Eylau. By Colmar, Freiherr Von der Goltz. Translated by C. F. Atkinson. London: Kegan Paul, 1913.

And other works.

IT is strange that Englishmen in general should know so little of Scharnhorst. For he began life as a subject of our Georges; England more than once courted his services; English valour, English constancy were themes for his highest encomium; his sons fought under Wellington in the Hanoverian legion. Moreover, he wrestled, mutatis mutandis, with certain problems of military organisation which we were still actively debating when war surprised us.

The son of a modest yeoman, who had left the Hanoverian army with non-commissioned rank, Scharnhorst, from the first, aimed at a military career. Fortunately for himself and for Germany, his father consulted Count Wilhelm zu Schaumburg-Lippe, whose little State we traverse as we approach Hanover. The Count was essentially a pioneer; one of the great men of whom the world too often knows nothing. Born and bred in England, he, with his small but efficient army' of 1300 men, had earned renown under English auspices in the Seven Years' War. As Commander-in-Chief of the effete Portuguese army, a post due to British influence, he had repelled, in the brilliant Peninsular campaigns of 1761-3, superior Franco-Spanish forces. Recalled by the claims of his own modest territories, he never laid aside professional preoccupations; and the problems of defence especially absorbed him. For the honest man, so he taught, only wars to restrict warfare; and the more perfect military science, the less will war be waged.

For 'laboratory' experiments in matters military he was exceptionally well placed; his theatre being small, mistakes were neither serious nor costly. His miniature 'Woolwich,' the first of its kind in Germany, was admirably constituted. An excellent theoretic instruction, both general and technical, was tested by frequent examination, and supplemented by practical training in gunnery and fortification, in commissariat organisation and the art of teaching. Into this Academy, in the year 1771, he admitted the young Scharnhorst, then aged eighteen. The decision was momentous; for Scharnhorst's genius, assimilative rather than spontaneous, distilled and tested, transformed and applied, the initial conceptions of others, the essence of their experience and his own. It was happily fertilised by contact with the more brilliant intellect of the Count, who anticipated with extraordinary prescience the salient innovations of the Napoleonic and even subsequent eras.

The weakness of the German frontiers filled him with prophetic dismay; his own stronghold of Wilhelmstein represented the last word in 18th-century fortification. His cannon-foundry provided pieces both for England and France; he was the first to experiment in military ballistics, and to foreshadow the breech-loader. The significance of the square, the value of skirmishers, the supreme importance of marksmanship, and of cover, were the commonplaces of his teaching, and the groundwork of his annual manœuvres.

He grappled, moreover, with the recruiting problem, which, under the mercenary system, and with ever-increasing establishments, tended everywhere to become acute. Good pay, good treatment, punctual demission, and frequent pensions, rendered his service popular; the abandonment of alien enlistments brought patriotism into play. But in addition to this his little State was mapped out into districts, each bound to supply, by lot, shortages in a territorial unit, and to provide a voluntary and honorary militia, drilled in uniform, by regular officers, on Sundays in autumn and spring. And, as in Portugal he had revived the medieval levy, so in Bückeburg he revived the medieval Heerbann; every able-bodied man was enrolled in a potential reserve, liable for service in the last resort. For he had seen

in the desperate passion which defends its hearthstone and its traditions, stores of moral no less than material energy, capable of repulsing, in the hour of extremity, forces technically superior. Thus he had, as Gneisenau puts it, evolved beforehand the principles and expedients to which, in 1813, Prussia was to owe her resurrection.

On the Count's death in 1777, Scharnhorst, at the age of twenty-two, entered the Hanoverian service. The Hanover of that day (its University of Göttingen excepted) was a sleepy backwater, mildly but inertly governed by its absentee Elector, our George III, through an indolent aristocracy. But an old brother-officer of the Count discovered Scharnhorst; he was soon in charge of the military academy at Hanover, newly founded by another friend. Retiring in manner, with the abstracted gaze of the student, his tall form disfigured by an unsoldierly stoop, Scharnhorst was often derided as a mere military Professor. The estimate is singularly unjust. As combatant, as organiser, as strategist, he was to show first-rate powers; with opportunity he might have ranked among the Great Captains. Nevertheless, a studied tact, a lucid and vigorous style, an infectious if restrained enthusiasm, made him the most persuasive of instructors. Like all great teachers, he never ceased to learn. Travel broadened his outlook; reading kept him in touch with the vital issues of his time; he wrote much on military topics, then especially interesting.

The years immediately preceding the French Revolution had much in common with our own. Behind them lay the great military struggles of the century, with their territorial readjustments; great politico-social changes loomed ahead. Men's minds were restless; sentiment, cosmopolitan and revolutionary, held sway; on the eve of the Twenty Years' War anti-militarism was the fashion in economic and academic circles. To such visions Scharnhorst opposed the broad commonsense of his master. Peace perpetual seemed to him a chimera, so long as human passions survive. The selfdisarmament of a single State, and lasting international understandings, were to him alike inconceivable; they could only place the weak, in whose interest they were suggested, at the mercy of the strong. Fear of consequences alone can restrain; and the State that would

survive, and avert the horrors of invasion, must keep its weapons bright. These writers, therefore, who revile standing armies, may rear monuments to their own humanitarianism; but they prepare chains for their countrymen unless all history lies.'

But the burden of armaments' aroused others beside the professed pacificists. The standing armies of the day, our own excepted, were dynastic rather than national in their allegiance, and aroused scant patriotic pride. The victory of Colonial militias over English regulars had impressed contemporary imagination, as the long-drawn resistance of the Boers was to affect our own. Professional armies, it was said, were obsolete; they must be replaced by defensive militias; and for the close formation of machine-drilled troops must be substituted the open order and deadly marksmanship of the American volunteer.

Events encouraged such prognostications. The French Revolution burst forth. In 1793 the allied AngloHanoverian and Austro-Prussian forces threatened the new France, which thereupon flew to arms. Scharnhorst took part in the languid, unscientific operations in the Low Countries which detained the Anglo-Hanoverian contingent. His energy, his resource, his 'incomparable bravery' (shown especially in the fine defence of Menin) earned him the enthusiastic admiration of the army and the post of Quartermaster-General. But the peace of Basel, which brought the operations to a close, seemed a triumph for the militia school; for to the raw French army and the new French 'open order' its terms assigned the honours of war.

But what was Scharnhorst's verdict? The last to undervalue French success, he studied closely the ensuing offensive in Italy, Egypt, Southern Germany. So early as January 1797 he notes with grave foreboding the 'shadows cast before' of impending French supremacy. The lethargy of Prussia disgusts him; he applauds our unrelenting hostility. The new French tactics, the new French organisation, anticipated by his own master, held for him the promise of the future. But he was not shaken in his belief that it is hardly possible to improvise infantry in time of war; and that regiments in which a 'mechanical unconditioned obedience has not

become a second nature cannot, if other things are equal, defeat disciplined troops.' How then explain the success of farmers from the backwoods, and peasants from the plough, over the highly trained forces of England, Hanover, and Prussia?

In America, he replies, the British had been hampered by the difficulties of a trans-oceanic campaign, of a vast impenetrable Hinterland. And, though his recent experiences had led him to regard the British private as the finest material in the world, unequalled in daring and endurance, he found him (it was before the reforms of Moore and Wellington) dissolute, drunken, and at the mercy of incompetent officers. The colonials, on the other hand, had gained, from our errors, time in which to train; many of their officers could boast European experience; they had been assisted by French regulars.

And the French in the recent campaigns had had much in their favour-superabundant population, strong frontiers, 'interior lines,' able leaders. At Marengo, for instance, 'General Buonaparte,' the rising strategist, on whom Scharnhorst's attention was concentrating, had commanded. His forces had outnumbered their opponents by two to one; half were veterans, the remainder raw levies indeed, but led by veteran officers. Moreover, Scharnhorst, like his old teacher and the young Buonaparte, and quite unlike the Prussian pedantry of his day, reckoned psychical as well as physical factors. Fanaticism, whether religious or political, supplements, intensifies, at moments transcends the results of mechanical discipline; at a pinch it may forge an iron discipline of its own. The Revolution, giving each man his stake in the national welfare, had released and organised reserves of dormant energy. At the moment of urgent peril it had evoked an impassioned patriotism; the nation had been called to arms with almost savage intensity. And to this glowing ardour, which fused into one lava stream all the factors of national life, what could the Continent oppose? National sloth, international jealousies, an Imperialism which scotched initiative and paralysed co-operation, a dread of the French, personal rather than racial. The minutest vested interest prevailed over military exigencies. Of the great Coalition, or the national