teaching based on our limited, but very costly, experience in South Africa, of which the principal warnings are that reconnaissance may be to all intents and purposes valueless, and needs great practice; that possibly the attacking artillery fire may be impotent to either silence the hostile guns or demoralise his infantry; that the power of modern rifles in defence is enormous; and that therefore a commander, who has to attack, whether he be leading an army corps or a company must act warily and with deliberation; the pure frontal attack must be his dernier ressort―the last card to be played—and it must not be played before he has had to abandon in succession all hopes in the possibility of attacking a flank, threatening the rear or making in conjunction a flank and a frontal attack. This would be topsyturveydom with a vengeance in our Drill-books, but at all events it would bring peace training up to date.

When our senior officers shall have become thoroughly impressed with the soundness of this teaching, and shall instinctively adopt it in their practice, then they will have been properly prepared as leaders in the combat in modern war, and both peace training and military education show clean hands. Our peace training for the combat and the attack shows too much of the 'frog and bull' tendency. The 'Sommernachtstraum' battle may be a reality for the Germans; it is but a 'will o' the wisp' for us. "The form of attack to be sought after by an army whose resources in war are limited, as are ours, must be one based on the gradual, but only gradual, accumulation of its destructive fire at those points where and whence can be produced a maximum of effect.' So wrote an 'armchair' critic in 1896, and it seems to me that he wide of the mark.

was not very

In the foregoing remarks I have endeavoured to depict influences which existed, but whether they affected the conduct of the operations, or to what extent, we do not know. Perhaps, in spite of these, the leaders went the right way to work.

In another branch of our peace training-namely, field entrenching the Boers have already shown themselves great adepts. With us the training has been of the most illusory character. A brother officer writes home expressing his astonishment at the surprising views held by some of our troops there on the matter.

After the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, in which Russian soldiers, in order to hold ground gained, actually used their hands and the covers of their mess tins to scrape together earth sufficient to give cover against rifle fire, the idea of field entrenching, both in the offensive and the defensive, found great favour, and for a while it flourished. But soon it died out, mainly owing to the fact that it was never practised at our tactical exercises on account of the prohibition to disturb by digging even to the slightest extent the surface of the ground on which the exercises were carried out. The

subject could not be totally ignored, so for actual trenches and parapets were substituted long strips of brown canvas, and, in lieu of diggers and tools, a few sappers, who carried the strips and unrolled them along the site of the imaginary trench, regardless of time or strength of working party required. Field entrenching came to be looked on as a mere formality, and I remember seeing, at a tactical exercise near Frensham, a trench and parapet on which much imaginary time and labour had been expended, but which was represented by the strip of canvas, lifted bodily into the air and deposited in another place because on second thoughts the original position had met with disapproval. So little is this work understood in our army, that last year at Salisbury Plain a major commanding a field company of engineers received the order to construct with his few sappers a length of shelter trench which would have required for its execution four battalions of infantry, one half of the combatant infantry about to engage in the battle. Yet the words of the present Inspector-General of Fortification, General Sir Richard Harrison, written in the United Service Magazine in June 1894, are quite true.

For some years past, thinking men have foreseen that something would be required to counteract the overwhelming power of the modern rifle, and it was for the Turks to show how, by the use of field entrenching, that result could be brought about. It is difficult, if not impossible, to tell to what extent the use of the spade may be developed in future war. But of one theory we may be sure, and that is, that great advantage will lie on the side of the nation that so equips its soldiers, so teaches its officers, as to make the best use of it on all occasions, even in the attack on the actual field of battle.

So completely, however, has field entrenching been ignored in aught but our Company Training, that it is only just now, in January 1900, that into Part v. Infantry Drill have been introduced by Army Order certain paragraphs calling attention to the existence of engineer units and to the part they can take in co-operating in the Attack and the Defence.

V

But there is one matter with regard to the tactics laid down in all European Drill-books which must always be borne in mind, as bearing on the present war. The tactics are framed on the supposition that the two armies opposed to each other are similar generally in organisation as well as equipment. But in South Africa the British force trained to act against armies organised and equipped like itself finds opposed to it an army organised and equipped in a totally different fashion. If the Boers would fight us on our own lines, as any of our friends across the Channel would do, then the defects of our peace training would soon be corrected, and we might

fairly expect to get the upper hand. But, as they will not do this, we must discard our own tactics and replace them by others more suitable; but the application of the new tactics must necessarily be postponed until our forces in South Africa are sufficiently reorganised and equipped for the purpose.

Had, however, the Government in good time regarded the Boers as probable foes in the field, there was already in our home army a nucleus of peace-trained troops ready for development, to play the Boers at their own tactical game. I refer to our mounted infantry, which for years has existed in small numbers in the army, with an organisation and training sufficient perhaps to meet the demands made on it for minor expeditions, but not for more. And at the same time, the military authorities, in order to obtain as rapidly as possible a large number of mounted men capable of fighting on foot, could have forced on our regular cavalry the task, so distasteful to that arm generally, of becoming thoroughly efficient in dismounted work. The military advisers on whom Mr. Balfour relied for the accuracy of his remarks at Manchester on mounted infantry were much at fault to allow him to say that not a single soldier, not a single military critic in England, France, Germany, or Italy had foreseen the remarkable results which mounted infantry can attain.' The late Sir George Chesney foresaw them so long ago as 1874; the American War of Secession is full of the results; in 1881 Captain Lumley of Lonsdale's Horse in South Africa, and who had served in the German cavalry in 1870-71, said, in a lecture at the Royal United Service Institution, 'It is therefore certain that, in the event of war, Russia would meet us with great numbers of mounted Cossacks, organised into flying columns which would harass our flanks and destroy our lines of communication if we are unable to meet them on equal terms.' In Russia every cavalry soldier carries a sword, a rifle, and a bayonet. Military literature is full of discussions on the value of mounted infantry. The tactics of the Boer army are not in the slightest degree a revelation of tactics to our military men or military critics. That these tactics were those of the Boer army may have, however, been to Mr. Balfour one of the unpleasant revelations of the war. Peace training had done what little it was allowed to do in tactics of this kind, and could do no

more.

As

Our peace training in the future must be something very different from that of the past. We do not want more of it, but the training must possess the qualities of intensity, thoroughness, and reality to a far greater extent than has been the case hitherto. regards the responsibility for the past, it would be difficult to single out any one in particular for hanging.' But few officers indeed have believed that we should ever engage in a war where the conditions would be those of regular warfare. The need for thorough

ness in our training for regular warfare has never really been recognised so our tactical exercises, whether on a large or a small scale, and also our attempts at manoeuvres, have been rather playing at regular war than work in earnest; and never has that war been played more amusingly than it was at the great manœuvres of 1898.

The North-West Frontier, Burmah, Abyssinia, Ashanti, Egypt, the Soudan and such like have for the last forty years furnished the British officer with full and ample opportunities for the display of professional knowledge and zeal, and for the reward of legitimate professional ambition, and there has not been any prospect of our army having to seek pastures new. To the minds of the bulk of our officers, regular warfare was so improbable, that they have taken little real interest in its mimic representation at home. Those officers who have deservedly attained high rank owing to their services in irregular war, have found that when they took up commands or staff appointments at home, the subject in which they had to give instruction was one almost new to them. An endeavour has sometimes been made to induce people to take the training really seriously, as possibly the home army might some day be called on to act for home defence: but to this there has always been the unanswerable rejoinder that the Long Valley and Salisbury Plain will never teach troops the defence of England. Consequently, taking all these adverse circumstances into consideration, any distribution of blame must be of so all-round a character that no one can be called a greater sinner than any one else. Let all concerned acknowledge the errors of the past and strive to do better now and in the future.

If my description of our training is fairly correct, and is devoid of exaggeration, as I believe it to be, the remarks I have submitted will aid the readers of this Review to form an opinion of the influence of our peace training on our practice in war, and her innocence or her guilt, in connection, not only with the operations up to the present, but also with those which may be carried out in the further course of the campaign.

LONSDALE HALE.

DR. MIVART

ON THE CONTINUITY OF CATHOLICISM

DR. MIVART's article on the Continuity of Catholicism, which appears in the January number of this Review, is one that will be read with sorrow and distress by every loyal and well-instructed Catholic throughout the English-speaking world, not so much on account of the harm that its startling and extraordinary statements are calculated to do to the cause of truth, as for the sake of the writer himself, and the very grave scandal that he has given by the wild theories and extremely ill-sounding propositions that he has put forward. It is true that he himself disclaims any personal agreement with some of the opinions contained in the article, but no one can read its pages without a strong impression that even where he does not make his own the strange doctrines that he attributes to the pious Catholics of his acquaintance, he nevertheless appears as their patron, if not their advocate, and as one who sympathises with the difficulties to which they give rise in the minds of those who hold them.

There is one statement near the commencement of the article, with which its theological readers will be in perfect agreement. 'I am not a theologian,' says Dr. Mivart on page 54, and would that he had acted on this conviction! For never was a bolder raid attempted on the theologian's province, and, I fear I must add, one for which the raider was more imperfectly equipped. For however distinguished he may be as a scientist, the writer does not seem to be acquainted, as I shall show presently, even with those fundamental principles of the Catholic Faith which are familiar to all educated Catholics. Other impugners of current dogmas have at least received a theological training, and some of them have been theologians of renown. Dr. Mivart rushes into the fray with a curious confession of his own incapacity for the fight, and yet he thrusts and cuts with a boldness and self-confidence which he ought to have known could only lead to disaster, failure, and defeat.

Another general characteristic that runs through the whole of Dr. Mivart's article is that nearly all his statements contain a