Then for the first time it became possible to carry out sieges like those of Rhodes (305), Syracuse (213), Carthage (146), and Alesia (52), in which also the increasing importance of rapidity, even for Classical strategy, became evident It was in line with this tendency that the Roman legion, the characteristic structure of which developed only in the Hellenistic age, worked like a machine as compared with the Athenian and Spartan militias of the fifth century. In China, correspondingly, iron was worked up for cutting and thrusting weapons from 474, light cavalry of the Mongolian model displaced the heavy war-chariot, and fortress warfare suddenly acquired outstanding importance.[1] The fundamental craving of Civilized mankind for speed, mobility, and mass-effects finally combined, in the world of Europe and America, with the Faustian will to domination over Nature and produced dynamic methods of war that even to Frederick the Great would have seemed like lunacy, but to us of to-day, in close proximity to our technics of transportation and industry, are perfectly natural. Napoleon horsed his artillery and thereby made it highly mobile (just as he broke up the mass army of the Revolution into a system of self-contained and easily moved corps), and already at Wagram and Borodino it had augmented its purely physical effectiveness to the point of what we should call rapid-fire and drum fire.[2] The second stage is — most significantly — marked by the American Civil War of 1861-5 — which even in the numbers of troops it involved far surpassed the order of magnitude of the Napoleonic Wars[3] and in which for the first time the railway was used for large troop-movements, the telegraph-network for messages, and a steam fleet, keeping the sea for months on end, for blockade, and in which armoured ships, the torpedo, rifled weapons, and monster artillery of extraordinary range were discovered.[4][5] The third stage is that of the World War, preluded by the Russo-Japanese conflict;[6] here submarine and aircraft were set to work, speed of invention became
- ↑ The book of the Socialist Moh-ti, of this period, treats of universal love of mankind in its first part, of fortress artillery in its second — a singular example of contraposition of truths and facts. Forke in Ostasiat. Ztschr., VIII (Hirth number).
- ↑ A whole literature exists for Napoleon's "case-shot attack," which was closely studied in the years before 1914 with the definite aim of finding a key to victories that the mechanical developments in the defensive rifle had made doubtful. — Tr.
- ↑ On the side of the North, more than 1½ million men out of barely 10 million inhabitants.[The total of men of military age in the North was 4,600,000, of whom 2,780,000 actually enlisted. The figure of 1,700,000 is a reduction to a three-year level — i.e., men who served throughout the war counting as ⅓ each and men who served for one year as f each. The Southern states put into the field, on the same three-years' basis, 900,000 out of 1,065,000 men of military age. (Dodge, Birds Eye View of our Civil War.) — Tr.]
- ↑ To which should be added, though on a small scale, the first serious attempts at submarines, machine-guns, and magazine rifles. — Tr.
- ↑ Amongst the wholly new problems was that of rapidly restoring railways and bridges; the bridge at Chattanooga, for the heaviest military trains, 240 metres long and 30 metres high, was built in 4½ days.
- ↑ Modern Japan belongs to the Western Civilization no less than "modern" Carthage of the third century to the Classical.
