MODERN WARFARE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3500, 25 September 1882, Page 4

MODERN WARFARE.

Mr Archibald Forbes, discussing the facility with which Adelaide could be surprised, says—And, believe me, future wars will not be of the old methodic pattern that gave ample time for getting ready. Some yeare ago I was talking with General Phil Sheridan, one of the most original soldiers I know, on this very subject. ' My idea of war making,' said Sheridan, 'is not by doing so in deliberate masses, and witli pitched battles ; not by killing your enemy's fighting men, but by pinching your enemy's citizens. At the beginning of the FrancoGerman war, if I had had my old cavalry corps with me, I would have crossed the frontier with it alone, the day after the declaration of war. I'd have ' stuck up' open town after open town right up to Paris. I'd have blown up railway bridges, run off canals, played the devil with the communications generally, and made France a misery to Frenchmen, so that instead of the citizens, secure in their own immunity, cheering the soldiers blatantly as they marched to the frontier, these same citizens would have squirmed under the horrors of war brought to their own doore and into their own strong rooms.' That Sheridan's line of reasoning was beginning to spread in general appreciation was apparent in that enterprise of Russia in American harbors when the war cloud hung between her and England. It indicated the realisation that the British Empire could be ' squeezed ' to use Sheridan's expression—without an actual invasion of the British Isles. The Afrika and her_ consorts would have preyed on British maritime commei'ce, no doubt as their leading role, but they would have kept [a shrewd glance on British colonies as well.