Half-savage men turn out in mass to fight
their quarrels between tribe and tribe. From the
days when the whole able-bodied male population
rose in a crowd to represent its fighting
power, we pass through the centuries to our own
time. The complex system of civilised society
compels nations to fight by trained armies, while
the mass of their population labours on in trades,
and arts, and sciences. It is now calculated
that one man in a hundred may be spared to
military service without hurt to other interests
by the removal. In some of the small states
of Greece twenty men in a hundred used to be
employed as soldiers.

These also were the best men. The
magistrates of Greece and Rome, in their ripe days,
recruited the army with picked citizens. In the
later and worse days of Rome, when, large
armies were earning little honour, slaves and
criminals were added to the ranks; desertion
was so frequent, that recruits were branded when
enrolled; and the service was so hateful that
men cut their thumbs off, to disqualify
themselves. Thus it is that from the Latin for an
amputated thumb we get the word poltroon.

Before the time of Philip of Macedon, father
of Alexander the Great, the forces used
throughout Greece were, in fact, militia. Philip,
perceiving the use of a standing army, did not
disband his troops if there occurred during his
reign an interval of peace. His army was in
this way made very competent to conquer the
militias of the Greek republics and of Persia.
The mass of a Greek army, in that day of its
perfection, was divided into four parts, each
forming what was called a phalanx. It
presented the long spears—sixteen feet long—of
the first six ranks of men against the shock of
battle, so that every man in the front rank had
six spear points to protect him from a charge.
There was a rampart, too, of brazen scales
formed by the shields of the phalanx, on which
darts fell harmless. As a defensive position
this was excellent; for attack, the phalanx was
strong by its weight in a plain field, but not
easily available for military tactics. The Greeks
had little knowledge of the use of cavalry,
although a small proportion of both heavy and
irregular troops upon horseback formed part of
their armies. Alexander, on landing in Asia,
increased the proportion of cavalry in his army.
Half-barbarous tribes, who know nothing of the
order and discipline on which the strength of
infantry depends, have preferred fighting on horse-
back. Scipio learnt from Hannibal the good
use to which cavalry might be put in ancient
war; and the invention of gunpowder, by
enlarging the space of battle-grounds, created a
new want of horses on the field.

It is said that Epaminondas at Leuctra was
the first to depart from the primitive form of
battle array, which struck one parallel line of
fighting men against another, and so left the
issue to be determined by a trial of strength
extending down the whole length of the line.
Epaminondas at Leuctra, being opposed to
double numbers, would not risk a general
attack in line, but multiplied the force of his
extreme left, so that it formed, as it were, the
head of a battering-ram, threw the rest into an
oblique line, and so charging, broke through the
Lacedemonian rank, which was defeated by
assault in flank and rear. Various forms of
such cunning belong to what is called the
oblique order of battle, the object of which is to
multiply the force of a blow against the most
assailable part of the enemy's position, to
effect a breach in his line, and overpower one
part of his army before the other part can be
brought to the rescue. How best to gain
advantage over the state of equality implied by
the parallel order of battle when numbers are
equal, or the inferiority when he is outnumbered,
is one problem to be solved by a good general.
Alexander, with inferior numbers, won the
battle of Issus by outflanking the left wing of
the Persians. A Persian general with any head
for strategy might easily have saved the kingdom
of Darius. Alexander in Asia knew so little of
the country that he marched into it as a bold
leader—as Cortes marched into Mexico—not as
a skilled master of the art of war. In India, he
sometimes had gunpowder to contend against.
Long before it was used in Europe, gunpowder
was known in Asia. Probably Roger Bacon
learnt the secret of it from the volumes of the
Arabs. Yet the Asiatics, where we have not
taught them better, are to this day using the
old matchlock, while we talk of the Minié balls
and Armstrong guns. Beside the Ganges,
Alexander found the Onydracea, who "come
not out to fight those who attack them, but
those holy men, beloved by the gods, overthrow
their enemies with tempests and thunderbolts
shot from their walls." They could repel attack
"with storms of thunderbolts and lightning
hurled from above."

The secret of this favour of the gods did not
then find its way to Europe. There was no
sixty-eight pound shot known to Vespasian, to
do suddenly and easily the work of his great
battering-ram, which could be drawn only by
the labour of six hundred horses and mules and
which required the utmost strength of fifteen
hundred men to force it into use.

During the first five hundred years of Roman
history, the constant wars were confined within
the limits of Italy; there was much fighting,
but no art in war.

The contest between Rome and Carthage
first began to call forth military skill. The
successes of the Carthaginians on the sea-coast
compelled Rome to create a navy. The
generalship of Hannibal, who was, as a strategist,
far greater than Alexander, instructed Roman
chiefs; and at last Hannibal was matched with
a Scipio, who carried war into the enemy's
quarters, fought and won scientific battles,
parted his adversaries that he might beat them
in detail, foiled their diplomacies, understood as
well as Hannibal the power that lies in rapidity
of movement, and got Roman soldiers to march,
each man carrying fifty or sixty pounds' weight,
eight leagues in five hours.