In short you could just read the bits in bold.
"IT must continually be insisted upon in military
history, that general actions, however decisive, are but the functions of
campaigns; and that campaigns, in their turn, are but the functions of the
political energies of the governments whose armies are engaged.
The object of a campaign is invariably a political
object, and all its military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that
political object.
One human community desires to impose upon the
future a political condition which another human community rejects; or each is
attempting to impose upon the future, conditions irreconcilable one with the
other.
Until we know what those conditions are, or what is
the political objective of each opponent, we cannot decide upon the success of
a campaign, nor give it its true position in history.
Thus, to take the simplest and crudest case, a
nation or its government determines to annex the territory of a neighbour; that
is, to subject a neighbouring community to the laws of the conqueror. That
neighbouring community and its government, if they are so old-fashioned as to
prefer freedom, will resist by force of arms, and there will follow what is
called a "campaign" (a term derived from the French, and signifying a
countryside : for countrysides are the theatres of wars). In this campaign the political
object of the attempted conquest on the one hand, and of resistance to it on
the other, are the issue. The military aspect of the campaign is subsidiary to
its political objects, and we judge of its success or failure not in military
but in political terms.
The prime military object of a general is to
"annihilate" the armed force of his opponents. He may do this by
breaking up their organisation and dispersing them, or by compelling the
surrender of their arms. He may achieve success in this purely military object
in any degree. But if, as an end and consequence of his military success, the
political object be not achieved if, for instance, in the particular case we
are considering, the neighbouring community does not in the future obey laws
dictated to it by the conqueror, but remains autonomous then the campaign has
failed.
Such considerations are, I repeat, the very
foundation of military history; and throughout this Series they will be
insisted upon as the light in which alone military history can be understood.
It is further true that not only may a campaign be
successful in the military sense, and yet in the largest historical sense be a
failure, but, quite evidently, the actions in a campaign may each be successful
and yet the campaign a failure ; or each action may, on the whole, fail, and
yet that campaign be a success. As the old formula goes, "You can win
every battle and lose your campaign." And, again, "A great general
does not aim at winning battles, but at winning his campaign." An action
results from the contact of the opposing forces, and from the necessity in
which they find themselves, after such contact, of attempting the one to
disorganise or to capture the other. And in the greater part actions are only
"accepted," as the phrase goes, by either party, because each party
regards the action as presenting opportunities for his own success.
A campaign can perfectly well be conceived in which
an opponent, consciously inferior in the field, will avoid action throughout,
and by such a plan can actually win the campaign in the end. Historical
instances of this, though rare, exist. And there have even been campaigns
where, after a great action disastrous to one side, that side has yet been able
to keep up a broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and exhausting to baulk the
conqueror of his political object in the end.
In a word, it is the business of the serious
student in military history to reverse the popular and dramatic conception of
war, to neglect the brilliance and local interest of a battle for the larger
view of the whole operations; and, again, to remember that these operations are
not an end in themselves, but are only designed to serve the political plan of
the government which has commanded them. Judged in this true light, we may
establish the following conclusions with regard to the battle of Waterloo.
First, the battle of Waterloo was a decisive
action, the result of which was a complete military success for the Allies in
the campaign they had undertaken, and a complete military defeat for Napoleon,
who had opposed them.
This complete military success of the Allies'
campaign was, again, equivalent to a success in their immediate political
object, which was the overthrow of Napoleon's personal power, the
re-establishment of the Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of
those traditions and ideals of government which had been common to Europe
before the outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before.
Had the effect of this battle and that campaign
been permanent, one could speak of their success as complete; but when we
discuss that largest issue of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which
Waterloo so decisively concluded really effected its object, considering that
that object was the permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent
re- establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled to
arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary with the
varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because the drama is
not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of all, singularly
modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo.
It is obvious, at the first glance we take of
European history during, say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy
in Waterloo year, that the general political object of the revolutionary and
Napoleonic armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established.
The war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the
uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to impose
upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic to the
European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in spite of all
attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic institutions,
democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after their defeat at
Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and later elsewhere, within
a very few years of that action.
The same is true of certain secondary results of
the prolonged revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality pre-
dominated over the old idea of a monarch governing his various
"peoples," and the whole history of the nineteenth century was a
gradual vindication of the principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited
institutions bound up with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and
continually expressed suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their
independence, the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to
the details of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme,
etc.) these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which that
older society had fought to restore.
[And so 200 hundred years on I'm still fighting the Battle of Waterloo by drinking PINTS of non-alcoholic snakebite and by still being five FOOT ten INCHES tall. Walking 27 Miles each year on the GK Chesterton Pilgrimage helps as well, http://www.catholicgkchestertonsociety.co.uk/]
On the other hand, the advance of all this was much
slower, much more disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had
Napoleon not failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and
fallen for ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular
characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by the
will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.
We may sum up, then, and say that the political
effect of the battle of Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for
the Allies: that their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century
has reversed; but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps
distorted in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of
society and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had
set out to establish.
There is a side question attached to all this, with
which I shall conclude, because it forms the best introduction to what is to
follow: that question is, "Would Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even
if he had triumphed instead of fallen upon the 18th of June 1815?" In
other words, was Waterloo one of these battles the winning or losing of which
by either side, meant a corresponding decisive result to that side? Had Wellington's
command broken at Waterloo before the arrival of Blucher, would Napoleon's
consequent victory have meant as much to him as his defeat actually meant to
the allies? The answer of history to this question is, No. Even had Napoleon
won on that day he would have lost in the long run.
The date to which we must affix the reverse of
Napoleon's effort is not the 18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October 1812,
when the Grand Army began its retreat from Moscow; and the political decision,
his failure in which was the origin of his fall, was not the decision taken in
June 1815 to advance against the Allies in Belgium, but the decision taken in
May 1812 to advance into the vast spaces of Russia. The decisive action which
the largest view of history will record in centuries to come as the defeat
which ruined Napoleon took place, not south of Brussels, but near the town of
Leipzig, two years before. From the last moment of that three days' battle
(again the 19th of October, precisely a twelvemonth after the retreat from
Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the French armies are continually falling back.
Upon the 4th of April in the following year Napoleon abdicated; and exactly a
month later, on the 4th of May, he was imprisoned, under the show of local
sovereignty, in the island of Elba.
It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that, having
escaped from that island, he landed upon the southern coast of France. There
followed the doomed attempt to save somewhat of the Revolution and the
Napoleonic scheme, which is known to history as the "hundred days."
Even that attempt would have been impossible had not the greater part of the
commanders of units in the French army, that is, of the colonels of regiments,
abandoned the Bourbon government, which had been restored at Paris, and decided
to support Napoleon.
But even so, the experiment was hazardous in the
extreme. Had the surrounding governments which had witnessed and triumphed over
his fall permitted him, as he desired, to govern France in peace, and France
alone, this small part of the revolutionary plan might have been saved from the
general wreck of its fortunes and of his. But such an hypothesis is fantastic.
There could be and there was no chance that these great governments, now fully
armed, and with all their organised hosts prepared and filled with the memory
of recent victory, would permit the restoration of democratic government in
that France which had been the centre and outset of the vast movement they had
determined to destroy. Further, though Napoleon had behind him the majority, he
had not the united mass of the French people. An ordered peace following upon
victory would have given him such a support; after his recent crushing defeat
it was lacking. It was especially true that the great chiefs of the army were
doubtful. His own generals rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more with doubt,
while a few betrayed him early in the process of his attempted restoration.
It is impossible to believe that under such
circumstances Napoleon could have successfully met Europe in arms. The military
resources of the French people, though not exhausted, were reaching their term.
New levies of men yielded a material far inferior to the conscripts of earlier years;
and when the Emperor estimated 800,000 men as the force which he required for
his effort, it was but the calculation of despair. Eight hundred thousand men:
even had they been the harvest of a long peace, the whole armed nation,
vigorous in health and fresh for a prolonged contest, would not have been
sufficient. The combined Powers had actually under arms a number as great as
that, and inexhaustible reserves upon which to draw. A quarter of a million
stood ready in the Netherlands, another quarter of a million could march from
Austria to cross the Rhine. North Italy had actually present against him 70,000
men; and Russia, which had a similarly active and ready force of 170,000, could
increase that host almost indefinitely from her enormous body of population.
But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon found to his
command not one quarter of that number armed and ready for war. Though Napoleon
fell back upon that desperate resource of a starved army, the inclusion of
militia; though he swept into his net the whole youth of that year, and
accepted conscripts almost without regard to physical capacity; though he went
so far as to put the sailors upon shore to help him in his effort, and counted
in his effectives the police, the customs officials, and, as one may say, every
uniformed man, he was compelled, even after two and a half months of effort, to
consider his ready force as less than 300,000, indeed only just over 290,000.
There was behind this, it is true, a reserve of
irregulars such as I have described, but the spirit furnishing those irregulars
was uncertain, and the yield of them patchy and heterogeneous. Perhaps a
quarter of the country responded readily to the appeal which was to call up a
national militia. But even upon the eve of the Waterloo campaign there were
departments, such as the Orne, which had not compelled five per cent, of those
called to join the colours, such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers, which had not
furnished eight per cent., and at the very last moment, of every twenty-five
men called, not fifteen had come.
Add to this that Napoleon must strike at once or
not at all, and it will readily be seen how desperate his situation was. His
great chiefs of the higher command were not united in his service, the issue
was doubtful, and to join Napoleon was to be a rebel should he fail, was to be
a rebel, that is, in case of a very probable event. The marvel is that so many
of the leading men who had anything to lose undertook the chances at all.
Finally, even of the total force available to him at that early moment when he
was compelled to strike, Napoleon could strike with but a fraction. Less than
half of the men available could he gather to deliver this decisive blow; and
that blow, be it remembered, he could deliver at but one of the various hosts
which were preparing to advance against him.
He was thus handicapped by two things: first, the
necessity under which he believed himself to be of leaving considerable numbers
to watch the frontiers. Secondly, and most important, the limitations imposed
upon him by his lack of provision. With every effort, he could not fully arm
and equip and munition a larger force than that which he gathered in early June
for his last desperate throw; and the body upon the immediate and decisive
success of which everything depended numbered but 124,000 men.
With this force Napoleon proceeded to attack the
Allies in the Netherlands. There was a belt of French-speaking population.
There was that body of the Allies which lay nearest to his hand, and over
which, if he were but victorious, his victory would have its fullest effect.
There were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the
cutting off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. There
was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and with
the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium was the
least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal in the long
succession of struggle from which even a success at this moment would not spare
him.
From all these causes combined, and for the further
reason that Paris was most immediately threatened from this neighbouring
Belgian frontier, it was upon that frontier that Napoleon determined to cast
his spear. It was upon the 5th of June that the first order was sent out for
the concentration of this army for the invasion of Belgium.
In ten days the 124,000 men, with their 370 guns,
were massed upon the line between Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately upon
the frontier, and ready to cross it. The way in which the frontier was passed
and the river Sambre crossed before the first actions took place form between
them the preliminaries of the campaign, and must be the subject of my next
section."
