In this connection it must be remembered that every Great Power has secret agents in every country, including Great Britain, and that it will be easy for such a secret agent to telegraph in cypher or in some agreed code to an agent in a neutral State all war information published here, who will telegraph it on at once to the hostile general, who will thus get, within a very short time of its publication in London, perhaps just exactly the information he requires to clear up the strategical or tactical situation for him, and enable him to defeat the combinations of our generals. As a case in point, take Macmahon's march on Sedan to relieve Metz in 1870, where secrecy was absolutely necessary for success, but which became known to the Germans by the English newspapers.--Result, Sedan.
That this cannot be allowed is plain. It is believed that the patriotism of our Press will welcome any necessary measure to this end if it is made compulsory upon ALL.[61]
Some will probably feel inclined to ask what Clausewitz, who wrote more than eighty years ago, can possibly have to say about tactics which can be valuable in the twentieth century.
It was said by Napoleon that tactics change every ten years, according, of course, to the progress of technicalities, etc. Weapons indeed change, but there is one thing that never changes, and that is human nature. The most important thing in tactics, the man behind the gun, never alters; in his heart and feelings, his strength and weakness, he is always much the same.
Therefore, Clausewitz's tactical deductions, founded on the immense and varied data supplied by the desperate and long-continued fighting of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, permeated as they are by his all-pervading psychological or moral view, can never lose their value to us.
It is true, no doubt, that our rifles of to-day can be used with effect at a distance ten times as great as the old smooth bores of Clausewitz's day, our shrapnel five times as far as his cannon, and that cover and ground play a far more important part now than then, and so on. All these things, of course, considerably modify the tactics of Clausewitz. Not so much, however, as some text-books would lead us to suppose, which always seem to assume clear ground and clear weather. For, after all, how many combats are fought on ground where there is a very restricted field of fire (_vide_ Herbert's "Defence of Plevna," etc.), or at night? How many battles are fought during rain, or snow, or mist, or fog, which destroys all long range? Compare the tremendous fighting with "bullets, bayonets, swords, hand-grenades, and even fists," of Nogi's attempt to cut the Russian line of retreat at Mukden, with the hand-to-hand fighting of Eylau, Friedland, Borodino, or with the desperate efforts of the French in 1812 to open their line of retreat through Maro-Jaroslawitz, where all day the masses of troops fought hand-to-hand in the streets, "the town was taken and retaken seven times, and the rival nations fought with the bayonet in the midst of the burning houses" (Alison).