Читать книгу History of the British Army (Vol.1&2) - J. W. Fortescue - Страница 24

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It is strange that our historians have for the most part taken leave of the New Model without a tinge of regret, without estimation of its merits or enumeration of its services. Mountains of eulogy have been heaped on the Long Parliament, but little has been spared for this famous Army; nay, even military historians by a strange perversity begin the history of the Army not from its foundation but from its dissolution. Much doubtless besides the creation of a standing Army dates from the great rebellion, though few things more important in our history, unless indeed it be the cant that denies its importance. The bare thought of militarism or the military spirit is supposed to be unendurable to Englishmen. As if a nation had ever risen to great empire that did not possess the military spirit, and as if England herself had not won her vast dominions by the sword. We are accustomed to speak of our rule as an earnest for the eternal furtherance of civilisation; but we try to conceal the fact that the first step to empire is conquest. It is because we are a fighting people that we have risen to greatness, and it is as a fighting people that we stand or fall. Arms rule the world; and war, the supreme test of moral and physical greatness, remains eternally the touchstone of nations.

Surely therefore the revival of the military spirit, and on the whole the grandest manifestation of the same in English history, are not matters to be lightly overlooked. The campaigns of the Plantagenets had shown how deep was the instinct of pugnacity that underlay the stolid English calm, but since the accession of the Tudors no sovereign had given it an outlet ashore in any great national enterprise. Elizabeth never truly threw in her lot with the revolted Netherlands; James hated a soldier, and shrank back in terror from the idea of throwing the English sword into the scale of the Thirty Years' War; Charles's miserable trifling with warfare contributed not a little to the unpopularity which caused his downfall. The English were compelled to sate their military appetite in the service of foreign countries, and as fractions of foreign armies.

Then at last the door of the rebellion was opened and the nation crowded in. It is hardly too much to say that for at any rate the four years from 1642 to 1646 the English went mad about military matters. Military figures and metaphors abounded in the language and literature of the day, and were used by none more effectively than by John Milton.[197] Divines took words of command and the phrases of the parade ground as titles for their discourses, and were not ashamed to publish sermons under such a head as "As you were." If anything like a review or a sham fight were going forward, the people thronged in crowds to witness it; and one astute colonel took advantage of this feeling to reconcile the people to the prohibition of the sports of May-day. He drew out two regiments on Blackheath, and held a sham fight of Cavaliers and Roundheads, wherein both sides played their parts with great spirit and the Cavaliers were duly defeated; and the spectacle, we are assured, satisfied the people as well as if they had gone maying any other way. It is true that the sentiment did not endure, that the eulogy of the general and his brave soldiers was turned in time to abuse of the tyrant and his red-coats; but when a nation after beheading a king, abolishing a House of Lords, and welcoming freedom by the blessing of God restored, still finds that the golden age is not yet returned, it must needs visit its disappointment upon some one. The later unpopularity of the strong military hand does not affect the undoubted fact of a great preliminary outburst of military enthusiasm. Nor indeed even at the end was there any feeling but of pride in the prowess of Morgan's regiments in Flanders.

The rapid advance of military reform in its deepest significance is not less remarkable. For two years it may be said that opposing factions of the Civil War fought at haphazard, after the obsolete fashion of the days of the Tudors. The most brilliant soldier on either side was a military adventurer of the type that Shakespeare had depicted, a man who

dreams of cutting Spanish throats,

Of trenches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades

And healths five fathoms deep.

Against the wild, impetuous Rupert the primitive armies of the Parliament were powerless. From the first engagement Cromwell perceived that such high-mettled dare-devils could be beaten only by men who took their profession seriously, who made some conscience of what they did, who drew no distinction between moral and military virtues, who believed that a bad man could not be a good soldier, nor a bad soldier a good man, who saw in cowardice a moral failing and in vice a military crime. Cromwell's system is generally summed up in the word fanaticism; but this is less than half of the truth. The employment of the phrase, moral force, in relation to the operations of war, is familiar enough in our language; but the French term morale is now pressed into the service to signify that indefinable consciousness of superiority which is the chief element of strength in an army. Such narrowing of old broad terms is in a high degree misleading. It should never be forgotten that military discipline rests at bottom on the broadest and deepest of moral foundations; its ideal is the organised abnegation of self. Simple fanaticism is in its nature undisciplined; it is strong because it assumes its superiority, it is weak because it is content with the assumption; only when bound under a yoke such as that of a Zizka or of a Cromwell is it irresistible. Cromwell's great work was the same as Zizka's, to subject the fanaticism that he saw around him to discipline. He did not go out of his way to find fanatics. "Sir," he once wrote, "the State in choosing men for its service takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that satisfies." In forming his original regiment of horse he undoubtedly selected men of good character, just as any colonel would endeavour to do to-day. But Fairfax's was by no means an army of saints. One regiment of the New Model mutinied when its colonel opened his command with a sermon, and the Parliament with great good sense prohibited by Ordinance the preaching of laymen in the Army. It is time to have done with all misconceptions as to the work that Cromwell did for the military service of England, for it is summed up in the one word discipline. It was the work not of a preacher but of a soldier.

That the discipline was immensely strict and the punishments correspondingly severe followed necessarily from the nature of his system. The military code took cognisance not only of purely military offences, but of many moral delinquencies, even in time of peace, which if now visited with the like severity would make the list of defaulters as long as the muster-roll. Swearing was checked principally by fine, drunkenness by the wooden horse. This barbarous engine, imitated from abroad, consisted simply of a triangular block of wood, like a saddle-stand, raised on four legs and finished with a rude representation of a horse's head. On this the culprit was set astride for one hour a day for so many days, with from one to six muskets tied to his heels; and that degradation might be added to the penalty, drunkards rode the horse in some public place, such as Charing Cross, with cans about their necks. A soldier who brought discredit on his cloth by public misconduct paid the penalty with public disgrace. Fornication was commonly punished with the lash, the culprit being flogged so many times up and down the ranks of his company or regiment according to the flagrancy of the offence. It is small wonder that men forced by such discipline to perpetual self-control should have scorned civilians who allowed themselves greater latitude, and despised a Parliament which, in spite of many purgings, was never wholly purged of loose livers.

Towards the unfortunate Royalists the feelings of the Parliamentary Army after 1645 were of unutterable contempt. It was not only that it felt its moral superiority over the unhappy cavaliers; it mingled with this the keenest professional pride. No sergeant-major of the smartest modern cavalry regiment could speak with more withering disdain of the rudest troop of rustic yeomanry than did the Parliamentary newspapers of the prisoners captured at Bristol.[198] It is instructive, too, to note the patronising tone adopted by Reynolds towards the army of Turenne, his criticism of the discipline that was "good, for France," and his observations as to the proverbial inefficiency of a French regiment at the end of a campaign. Beyond all doubt the English standing Army from 1646 to 1658 was the finest force in Europe. It is the more amazing that Cromwell should have suffered its fair fame to be tarnished by the rabble that he sent to the West Indies.

Such an army will never again be seen in England; but though its peculiar distinctions are for ever lost, the legacies bequeathed by it must not be overlooked. Enough has been said of the institution of the new discipline, and of the virtual extinction of the old stamp of military adventurer; it remains now briefly to summarise the minor changes wrought by the creation of a standing Army. First comes the incipient organisation of a War-Department as seen in the Committee of the Army working with the Treasurers at War on one side and the ancient Office of Ordnance on the other, and in the appointment of a single commander-in-chief for all the forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland. And here it must be noted in passing that the division of the Army into an English, Scotch, and Irish establishment, which lasted until the three kingdoms were one by one united, becomes fully defined in the years of the Protectorate. Next must be mentioned the organisation of regiments with frames of a fixed strength, regiments of horse with six troops, and of foot and dragoons with ten companies, and the maintenance of a fixed establishment for services of artillery and transport.[199] Further, to combine the unity of the Army with the distinction of the various corps that composed it, there was the adoption of the historic scarlet uniform differenced by the facings of the several regiments.

Clothing however, leads us to the more complicated question of the pay of the Army. The regular payment of wages was, as has been seen, the first essential step towards the establishment of a standing force; and with it came concurrently the system of clothing, mounting and equipping soldiers at the expense of the State. It should seem, however, that the rules for regulating the system were sufficiently elastic, for we find quite late in the second Civil War that troopers generally still provided their own horses, and received a higher rate of pay, and that colonels were permitted to make independent contracts for the clothing and equipment of their regiments. The stoppages from the soldiers' pay at this period are also instructive. The deduction of a fixed sum for clothing dates, as has been already told, from the days of Elizabeth if not from still earlier times. But to this was now added the principle of withholding a proportion of the wages, under the name of arrears, as security against misconduct and desertion; while it was a recognised rule that both men and officers should forfeit an additional proportion so long as they lived at free quarter. An allowance for billet-money, and a fixed tariff of prices to be paid by soldiers while on the march within the kingdom, contributed somewhat to lighten the burden of all these stoppages, and made a precedent for the Mutiny Act of a later day. It is worthy of remark that the garrison of Dunkirk found in the town special buildings, constructed by the Spaniards for their troops and called barracks,[200] and that it was duly installed therein in the autumn of 1659. The reader, if he have patience to follow me further, will be able to note for himself how long was the time before English soldiers exchanged life in alehouses for the Spanish system of life in barracks.

But there is another and more interesting aspect of the question of pay, when we pass from that of the men to that of the officers. The extinction of the old military adventurer brought with it the total abolition, for the time, of the system of purchase. In the Royalist regiments that gathered around Charles Stuart in Flanders, we find that companies and regiments still changed hands for money, but in the English standing Army the practice seems utterly to have disappeared. Promotion was regulated not necessarily by seniority but by the recommendation of superior officers, and, as external evidence seems to indicate, ran not in individual regiments but in the Army at large. The arrears of officers, especially of those who possessed means of their own, often remained, through their patriotic forbearance, not only many months but many years overdue; and it is interesting to mark that their inability to watch over their own interests while they were engaged on active service led to the appointment of regimental agents, who drew their pay and transacted their financial business with the country on their behalf. The Army Agent may, therefore, justly boast himself to be a survival of the Civil War.

Nor can I leave this subject without reference to yet another remarkable feature in the New Model Army, which unfortunately has not passed into a tradition. I allude to the great and sudden check on the ancient evil of military corruption. To say that corruption came absolutely to an end would be an excessive statement, for the minutes of courts-martial on fraudulent auditors are still extant, but it is probable that during the Civil War it was reduced to the lowest level that it has touched in the whole of our Army's history. The abolition of purchase and the higher moral tone that pervaded the whole force doubtless contributed greatly to so desirable an end. It is, however, melancholy to record that the evil was evidently but scotched, not killed. Before the Protector had been dead a year, there was seen, at the withdrawal of part of the garrison of Dunkirk, a deliberate and disgraceful falsification of the muster-rolls, aggravated by every circumstance that could encourage fraud and injure good discipline. Contact with foreign troops was probably the immediate cause of this lamentable backsliding, but it furnishes a sad commentary on the fickleness of Puritan morality.

Finally, let us close with the greatest and noblest work of the New Model Army; the establishment of England's supremacy in the British Isles as a first step to their constitutional union. No achievement could have stood in more direct antagonism to the policy of Charles Stuart, who strove with might and main to set nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and paid for his folly with his life. It may be that the greatness of this service will in these days be denied. There were not wanting in the Long Parliament men who intrigued with Scotland against England rather than suffer power to slip from their hands, and it is not perhaps strange that the type of such men should be imperishable. Those, however, who call England the predominant partner in the British Isles should not forget who were the men that made her predominant.[201] The Civil War was no mere rebellion against despotic authority. It accomplished more than the destruction of the old monarchy; it was the battle for the union of the British Isles, and it was fought and won by the New Model Army.

Authorities.—In so slight a sketch of the Civil War and the Protectorate as is given in these pages any lengthy enumeration of the authorities would be absurd. Readers will find them for themselves in the exhaustive history of Mr. Gardiner, to whose labours, as well as to those of Mr. C. H. Firth, I am very greatly indebted. Such collections of documents as the Calendars of State Papers, Rushworth, Thurloe, and Carlyle's Cromwell's Letters and Speeches are almost too obvious to call for mention. The Clarke Papers are of exceptional value for purposes of military history, and Sprigge's Anglia Rediviva is of course an indispensable authority as to the New Model. But even in such fields as the newspapers and the King's Pamphlets Mr. Gardiner and Mr. Firth have left little harvest ungleaned. Of the military writers of the time Barriffe is the most instructive, particularly in respect of certain comments added in the later editions. A French folio volume, Le Mareschal le Bataille (1647), gives excellent plates of the drill of pikemen and musketeers, and beautiful diagrams of the evolutions.