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Updated: June 24, 2025
To march a company to exactly the right spot, with every man keeping his proper distance from his file-leader "twenty-eight inches from back to breast," clear down the column, so that when the order "front" was given, every one turns, as if on pivot, and touches elbows with those on each side of him, in a straight, firm wall of men, without any shambling "closing up," or "side-stepping" to the right or left, to do all this at word of command, looks very simple and easy to the non-military spectator, as many other very difficult things look simple and easy to the inexperienced.
They follow the phases of the war in Great Britain, the strain, the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset of conscription in an essentially non-military community, with the complete understanding of a people similarly circumstanced, differing only by scale and distance. They have been through something of the sort already; they may have something of the sort happen again.
George has undertaken a very useful task that of making military affairs intelligible and instructive to non-military readers and has executed it with laudable intelligence and industry, and with a large measure of success. Times.
The difference between the two methods was that one was a process of conquest, and the other of colonizing, or non-military administration for commercial purposes. The one embodied the sordid Cobdenite idea, which so excites the scorn of the militarists, and the other the lofty military ideal. The one was parasitism; the other co-operation....
To an unskilled observer, to a non-military man like myself, who could not tell the difference between 120,000 and 120 guns, it did look as if it were going to make an attack upon the Eternal City.
The immensity of the task of transforming a non-military people into a great fighting force grew on one in all its humdrum and vital details as he watched the new army forming. "Are you learning to think in big numbers?" was Lord Kitchener's question to his generals. Half of the regular officers were killed or wounded. Where the leaders? Where the drillmasters for the new army?
It will, I think, be of use to the non-military reader if I append to the sketch I have just given of the last phase of the British effort, the following paragraphs written last January by an officer of the General Staff, in response to the question indicated in the opening sentence.
It is true that no other nation has actually conquered her of late; but this has been largely by reason of her remoteness from the active world, and because other nations imposed their will upon her, without meeting any resistance that required the use of war to overcome. And even China has not lived a wholly peaceful life, despite the non-military character of her people.
Different as the two men were, they were two real Englishmen, and their instincts were almost the same. And Godfrey Marshall had the world to reckon with. There was German military aggression, and the English non-military idea of liberty and the 'conquests of peace' meaning industrialism.
Opposite to that large stone edifice, is an old cannon standing on end at the corner of the street, to keep carriages from trespassing on the pavement, and the non-military assemble round it; they are civic great guns.
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