PREFACE.
The excuse for this book is that no recent biography of Scipio exists; the first and last in English appeared in 1817, and is the work of a country clergyman, who omits any study of Scipio as a soldier! The reason for this book is that, apart from the romance of Scipio’s personality and his political importance as the founder of Rome’s world-dominion, his military work has a greater value to modern students of war than that of any other great captain of the past. A bold claim, and yet its truth will, I hope, be substantiated in the following pages.
For the study of tactical methods the campaigns of Napoleon or of 1870, even of 1914-1918 perhaps, are as dead as those of the third century B.C. But the art of generalship does not age, and it is because Scipio’s battles are richer in stratagems and ruses—many still feasible to-day—than those of any other commander in history that they are an unfailing object-lesson to soldiers.
Strategically Scipio is still more “modern.” The present is a time of disillusionment, when we are realising that slaughter is not synonymous with victory, that the “destruction of the enemy’s main armed forces on the battlefield” is at best but a means to the end, and not an end in itself, as the purblind apostles of Clausewitz had deceived themselves—and the world, unhappily. In the future, even more than in the past, the need is to study and understand the interplay of the military, economic, and political forces, which are inseparable in strategy. Because Scipio more than any other great captain understood and combined these forces in his strategy, despite the very “modern” handicap of being the servant of a republic—not, like Alexander, Frederick, Napoleon, a despot,—the study of his life is peculiarly apposite to-day. Above all, because the moral objective was the aim of all his plans, whether political, strategical, or tactical.
My grateful thanks are due to Sir Geoffrey Butler, K.B.E., M.P., Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; to Mr W. E. Heitland, M.A., Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; and to Mr E. G. Hawke, M.A., Lecturer at Queen’s College, London, for their kindness in reading the proofs and for helpful comments.
B. H. L. H.