suffice to have directed your attention to this most authoritative exposition of the subject. I will only add a single remark. The occupation of positions in any given war is no matter of arbitrary choice. Dispositions in relation to the positions occupied may be well or ill made according to the strategic skill and insight of the commander employed; but the positions themselves are determined by the fact that they must at the outset be on the sea-frontier of the enemy. If, notwithstanding, the enemy succeeds in crossing the frontier, new positions will have to be occupied, but they will still be determined by considerations, geographical in the main, which leave to neither belligerent very much room for choice. These propositions, at once elementary and fundamental, are too often ignored by heedless and inconsequent thinkers. How often do we hear that we cannot trust to naval defence for a country which can only be reached across the sea, because, forsooth, the Navy, however strong, may chance to be in the wrong place at the critical moment? Why should it be in the wrong place when its one business and duty is to be in the right place? Do you ever plan military campaigns on this preposterous assumption? Was Napoleon III. likely to mass his armies in the Pyrenees when the German armies were advancing towards his eastern frontier? When an enemy is seeking to invade this country are our fleets at all likely to be found anywhere but where they can best impeach the enterprise? "I will conquer India on the banks of the Vistula," said Napoleon. It was a vain boast. It is no vain boast, but a plain statement of inexorable strategic fact, that England can best defend all parts of her Empire on the sea-frontier of the enemy who seeks to attack them.

You will perhaps ask me at this point-perhaps, indeed, you have been asking all along-where in all this does the Army come in? I can only answer that in this, the preliminary defensive stage-defensive in purpose, but offensive in method of a great war to

FUNCTION OF THE ARMY

373 be waged across the seas, the Army does not, and cannot, come in at all. It cannot come in for the defence of these islands, because so long as the seafrontier is inviolate, and, indeed, until the naval forces entrusted with its occupation and defence are not only driven back but finally ousted from the intervening water-territory, no invading force can reach them. Nor can it cross the seas to attack the territory of the enemy, or any of his outlying possessions, until the command thereof by the British naval forces is so firmly established that its transit and communications are secure from all serious attack. These are the only conditions in which the Army can come in for the defence of an Empire which can only be defended by crossing the sea, and they are also the conditions in which it always has come in throughout the whole course of its history. This is why no British regiment bears on its colours the record of any military achievement on its native soil, while all are justly proud to associate their glories with nearly every land but their own. If this is not a record and a function with which the Army can be content I can assign it no other, nor as regards function can I think of a higher one to assign it. I cannot even think of the Army as defending these islands, because before I can do so I must think of the Empire as destroyed. I can only think of the Army as doing what it always has done, training itself at home for faithful service abroad, garrisoning the Empire's outposts in all parts of the world, occupying in far-flung échelons the long lines of communication which lead to the confines of the Empire-and lead also in time of war to weak points in an enemy's armour-ready at all times to move in any direction at the call of duty and the nation's needs. But when I think of the Army as doing all this I must also think of the Navy as alone enabling it to do all this. The functions of the two arms, the naval and the military, are not to be enclosed in separate watertight compartments with no communica

tion between them. They are correlative and inseparable. The Army must not attempt to do what the Navy alone can do-namely, keep the invader at bay; the Navy must not attempt to do what the Army alone can do-namely, attack the enemy wherever he is assailable on land. If the Navy relieves the Army of the duty of defending these islands, it also imposes on the Army the duty, and provides it with the opportunity, of fighting across the seas wherever its services are required. Fifty years ago, when the higher policy of defence was little understood and less appreciated, a special military force was organized for the defence of this country against the invader. Fifty years ago I was a member of that force myself, and I shared the ideas which inspired its formation. Those ideas were largely false, and if fortune had so willed it, they might have been fatal to the Empire. But patriotism is justified of all her children. I have the utmost respect for the Volunteers, and their successors of the Territorial Force, as a valuable auxiliary and reserve-never more valuable than in these days-for a mobile Army, for an Army which so long as the Empire endures will always be, not a forlorn hope for the defence of these shores, but the offensive and ubiquitous weapon of a sea-supremacy co-extensive with the Empire; and I congratulate the sons and the grandsons of my comrades-in-arms of 1859 that the facts of war have revealed to them what was hidden from us by the fallacies of peace, and that the only foe they have ever met in the field was encountered at a distance of 6,000 miles from the shores they were enrolled to defend.

INDEX