The value of experience.
A friend Makes us to task for underrating the value of experience, in an article headed.
‘ "What Constitutes a General,"’ published by us a week or more since.
We certainly never intended any such thing.
We endeavored to show that a military school could not make a great General, and that nobody but God himself could do it. Horace tells us that a
poet must be born such, and cannot be made so by any process known to man. He might have said the same of a painter, a sculptor, and a General.
They must be born painters, sculptors, and
Generals, for the simple reason that superiority in their several arts implies the possession of genius, and genius can be bestowed by the Almighty alone.
Still cultivation of the particular talent each possesses improves the natural powers, and such cultivation is experience by another name.
The first attempts of all great poets are comparatively feeble.
The progress even of
Shakespeare, in his art, can be easily detected.
No man who had never heard of him, could expect
Macbeth and
Lear from the author of the two gentlemen of
Verona.
Who could guess, from reading the "Hours of Idleness," that the author would ever write "
Childe Harold?"--The first attempts of Raphael are said to have been very crude performances, and
Michael Angelo's memory would not have survived his own times, had he done nothing more than us attempted for the Medici, when his genius was first discovered.
We hold that experience is everything to a general; but we hold; likewise, that the experience which a youth obtains at a military school is not sufficient of itself to make a man a general.
Prince Eugene, himself, who preferred for a General a man who had not risen by the regular steps, could have had no objection to experience.
But it must be obtained on the field, and cannot be gathered from books.
There are two cases of great
Generals having failed at the outset of their career, and having been taught by experience.
Frederick the
Great ran away early in the action from Molwitz, and left
Marshal Schwerin to gain the victory for him. The
Duke of
Wellington, in his first battle in
India, being then a Colonel, was ordered to storm a certain outwork of a strong town, (the time being night,) failed, was beaten, and fled from the field to his tent.
Afterwards, in
Spain, he made the movement which brought on the
battle of Talavera, always spoken of by military writers as a very rash manœuvre.
Yet, these men, as their subsequent exploits manifested, both possessed great talents for war. Frederic acknowledged that he had been taught by misfortune, and
Wellington was, doubtless, instructed by the risk which he ran at
Talavera.
The first
Italian campaign of
Bonaparte was certainly the most extraordinary
first campaign of which we have any account, but a great military critic,
Colonel Napier, expressed the opinion that he would not have been able in 1796 (the date of the first
Italian campaign) to have executed the manœuvres which he performed just before the battle of
Eckmuhl, in 1809.
These manœuvres, he himself said, were superior to any he ever executed; and
Napier says of them, that ‘"never since troops first trod the earth"’ was anything seen which could be compared with them.
We cannot but think that an accurate description of these manœuvres, accompanied with maps and plans, would go far to, supply the place of all the "systems of war" that ever were written in instructing the military student.
The great objection which we have to the system of putting whole armies — and large armies, too — behind earthworks, is that it renders them stationary, like the guns of the Turks at the battle of Abukir, upon which
Bonaparte took care to make no attack, because he found that they could not be moved.
He beat the rest of the army, and then the men around the guns abandoned them.
So the enemy go around our earthworks, and operate in our rear, compelling their evacuation, without attacking them.
In the meantime, our armies not having been heretofore mobilized, they allow the enemy to go where he pleases, and do as he things proper.
We know not whence this system is derived, but we suspect from Jomim.
He tells us that, in the campaign of 1805, after the capture of the first
Austrian army at Vem,
Napoleon ought to have set himself down in
Bavaria, and cast up entrenchments.
In commenting on this passage at
St. Helena Napoleon says ‘"yes; that the Austrians and Russians might unite; that
Prussia might declare war; that all
Germany might rise, and come down upon him in a body."’ That was the very thing we did after
Manassas.
We sat down entrenched, and waited for the
Yankees to raise an army of 700,000 men, and now they are coming down upon us with a vengeance.
