WAR BY BLOCKHOUSE.

Evening Star, Issue 11725, 7 April 1902, Page 8

WAR BY BLOCKHOUSE.

rkwne people seem to think that Lord Kitchener invented blockhouses; others that he was at least the first general to use them systematically, on a large scale, for the purpose of " building in" a mobile enemy aud contracting Ids range of mischief. As a matter of fact-, while the actual origin of blockhouses is lost in Hie mists of antiquity, tho use which Lord Kitchener is making "of thom in South Africa was anticipated by the Russian General Print* Vorontsoff, in the Caucasus. That Russian war, indeed, exact accounts of which are not very easy to come by, and cannot be got at all in English, is worth going bock to, partly because of its resemblances to the Boer war, and partly because it shows that, in analogous circumstances, a great Continental Power may fare even worse than we have fared. Our war is said to be " dragging on " because it has lasted a little over two years and cost some 20,000 lives. The conquest of the Caucasus —a smaller though no doubt a more difficult country—took more than fiftv years, and cost about half a million lives.

The war began in a small way in 1813, and the Caucasians had all the best of it, raiding and invading freely. Began to become acute after the cession, by the Treaty of Adrianople, of certain Turkish territories in Asia Minor. Then the Russians endeavored to take possession of the ceded provinces, and were met by a religious revolt and an organised resistance of which the famous Schamyl presently became the leader. A book rather than a newspaper article would be required to relate the. history of the campaigns. Here it is only possible to classify the phases of the war. Tho first phase, just as in South Africa., consisted of regular operations of large field armies, supplemented by an extensive system of farm burning; but this did not answer. The Caucasians rebuilt the farms as fast us they were destroyed, and ambushed the field armies.. One ambuscade in particular ia fajnous. An army of 85,000 men wero entrapped in the forest of Ytchkeri, and no fewer than 73,000 of them were slain there. Because of this and similar disasters the blockhouse system was invented by Vorontzoll, and extended by his successor in the command, Babidatinski. Our own blockhouses were, of course, in the first instance only built to protect railways and lines of eommimicatioiu Their use as walla of circumvallation, to hem in the enemy, was an afterthought. In the case of the Caucasus they were designed from the first to fulfil this latter purpose. What was built was, in faet, a continuous line of fortification more than 300 miles in length- There were forts along the line as well as blockhouses, and entrenched camps as well as forts. From each fort to tho next there ran what in military terminology is called a " curtain"—a long earth work like a railway embankment, with a ditch in front of it, serving as a screen, behind which troops could be moved safely and secretly from place to place. When one line of this fortification wa£ complete.!

the Russians advanced five miles or so, and made another, securing the ground woo, and narrowing the space within which the enemy was free to manoeuvre. Naturally, too, the fortifications served as a base from which the Russian mobile columns' could operate. The process seemed to promise the slow but sure extinction of the war without auy exciting incidents. But, jui-t as so often in South Africa, the unexpected happened, suddenly, gtartlingly, like a thunderclap. The Russian mobile cohnnns, which, like some of our own mobile columns, were not so mobile as they might have been, were out at their usual busmesg of sweeping and clearing the country. The Caucasians saw them, avoided them, circled roand them, got behind them, and massed themselves silent and unseen, in the dark forests close to the line of circumvallation. What happened next is described in official histories by the bald statement that " Schamyl broke through the line," but the statement does bnt sorry justice to a really tremendous feat of arms. The " curtain" was actually "rushed" in several places at once by cavalry j it is probably the only instance in history in which cavalry hav* stormed earthworks and taken them. Unlocked for, unsuspected, they issued Kke a whirlwind from their hiding places. Nimble as cats, the horses leapt down into tbe ditch, and scrambled up the sides of the embankment, and were among the Russian garrison, who died at their posts, not because they did not desire bo leave them, but because they had not time to do so. Then the inv.tders looted the camps, and blew up the forts and blockhouses, undoing in a day the work of montln>, rf not of years-; and then they turned back and ambuscaded the mobile columns so that only stragglers escaped. And this sort of thing happened not once, but several times in tie history of blockhouse operations hi th2 Caucasus.