GIANT ARMIES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 1, 19 August 1914, Page 4

GIANT ARMIES.

Armies so vast in scale have • their special limitations. The task of feeding them, of moving them, of keeping control of all their lines of advance, is almost too great for any single brain and will, remarks a writer in “Life.” Not Alexander himself could direct the operations of such hosts. Soult—in the realm of tactics perhaps the ablest of Napoleon’s generals—in a conversation with Sir William Napier, told him that he classified French generals by a single test. “I calculated the value of the French generals,” he says, “by the number of men they were capable of commanding. I name nobody, but there were amongst them men who were worth ten thousand men, who were worth fifteen thousand men, twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty-five thousand, or even, in case of necessity, sixty thousand. The art of commanding armies becomes more difficult as the numbers increase. It is very different to command eighty thousand and to command a hundred thousand. Pass a hundred thousand, and the human mind is scarcely equal to the task.” Napoleon himself invaded Russia with 600,000 men, the greatest force in point of numbers lie ever commanded; and the secret of his failure was the fact that even his ua mrp'lssed genius for war was unequal to the task of effectively controlling that vast force. On a battlefield with an army composed, say, of a million armed men, there can lie no tactics, any more than there can be “tact'cs” with a garden-roller of giant dimensions. Each army, indeed, will try, like a garden roller, to crush its opponents by mere mass and weight.