Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/367

W A N W A 11 343 gate " Conquest Island" forms a picturesque object. The island is, however, more beautiful than healthy. The port, which was opened to foreign trade in 1876, has not justi fied the great expectations which were formed of its prob able success as a commercial centre. In 1886 the imports (excluding treasure) were valued at 118,710, and the exports at 25,751; 44 vessels entered, of which one only was British, and 45 cleared. A noticeable feature in the year s return is the falling off in the quantity of opium imported, only 25 piculs, 62 per cent, less than the average of the previous three years. The principal item of import is cotton goods, which showed an increase of 12 per cent, over the same average. Kerosene oil, matches, window-glass, sugar, dates, and old iron are among the chief goods imported ; while among the exports kittysols or umbrellas, timber, oranges, and tea figure prominently. WANDERING JEW. See JEW, WANDERING. WANSTEAD, a village of Essex, England, now really a London suburb, is situated on a branch of the Great Eastern Railway (Snaresbrook station), 8 miles by rail north-east of Liverpool Street station. It possesses the usual characteristics of the better-class eastern suburbs of London. Wanstead Park, 184 acres in extent, was opened in 1882. A feature of Wanstead is Eagle Pond or Lake, 10 acres in extent. At Lake House Hood wrote Tylney Hall. The population of the urban sanitary district (area about 1072 acres) is estimated to have been 4311 in 1871; in 1881 it was 5362. Wanstead is supposed to have been a Roman station. It belonged to the monks of St Peter s, Westminster, and afterwards to the bishop of London, of whom it was held at Domesday by Ralph Fitz Brien. In the reign of Henry VIII. it came into the posses sion of the crown, and in 1549 it was bestowed by Edward VI. on. Lord Rich, whose son sold it iu 1577 to Robert, earl of Leicester. The original manor house was rebuilt by Lord Chancellor Rich, who was here visited by Queen Elizabeth in 1561, and for her enter tainment Sir Philip Sidney wrote a dramatic interlude which was played before the queen at Wanstead garden, and is printed at the end of the Arcadia. Sir Richard Child, afterwards earl of Tylney, built the splendid mansion of Wanstead House in 1715 (demolished in 1822), in which the prince of Conde and others of the Bourbon family resided during the reign of the first Napoleon. WAR WHATEVER definition of the word "army" (see ARMY) be adopted, the fact that it is a body of men organized for the effective employment of arms is the essence of it. Hence the nature of the most effective organization and employment of armies in active warfare at any given period has always turned upon the nature of Ddern the arms in use at the time. The laboratory and work- anges in shops of science in recent years have in fact produced and 3 art of f orce( } on a change in the nature of fighting, of a kind which it is safe to say never entered the mind of any one of the inventors whose skill made it necessary. And yet the change is of such a kind that, though due to the development of very material things, as, for instance, the greater rapidity of fire, the greater range of weapons, and the like, it is much more remarkable in its effect on the spirit of armies and the nature of fighting discipline than in almost any other aspect. i army an In all periods of war, under all conditions of arms, the janism, moral forces which affect armies have been the great determining factors of victory and defeat. From a date much earlier than the day when Ciesar, defeated at Dyr- rachium, gained the empire of the world by so acting as to restore the morale of his army before the great contest at Pharsalia, it has been on this nice feeling of the moral pulse of armies that the skill of great commanders has chiefly depended. In that respect there is nothing new in the modern conditions of war. But the sequence by which the development of arms has changed the moral pivot of military power in our own times is so remarkable that it deserves to receive a somewhat careful historical statement at the outset of this article. Unless it is under stood the lessons of modern fighting cannot be learnt ; for there has not yet occurred a modern war in which the principles of modern fighting, as they are now universally understood among the most thoughtful soldiers of all nations, have been deliberately applied to action, after those principles have been realized and worked out in practice during peace time. And yet it is among the first of these principles that for success in our days careful peace practice, adapted to the actual conditions of fighting, must precede the entry on a campaign. When letters from the seat of war in 1866 brought home to Europe the effect which the breech-loader was producing in deter mining the contest, the first impression was that of simple consternation. It was supposed that Prussia, by the possession of that weapon alone, had made herself mistress of Europe. Gradually it came to be known that the secret of Prussian power lay, not in her breech-loader alone, but at least as much in her perfect organization. In 1870 her scarcely less startling successes tended for a time to produce an effect almost as blinding upon the eyes of those who watched them. There was a dis position to assume that whatever had been done in the war by the Prussians was, by the deliberate choice and determination of the best and most successful soldiers in Europe, shown to be the best thing that could be done under the circumstances. The exhaustive statement of facts contained in the Prussian official narrative and in the regi mental histories, and the evidence of eye-witnesses innumer able, have, however, gradually made it evident that, valuable as the experiences of the 1870 campaign unquestionably are for soldiers of all nations, the Prussian successes were certainly not due to the carrying out of what are now regarded by the best Prussian officers themselves as the principles of action which ought to determine practice in future wars. But during the course of the war itself the Prussian army, prepared by the soundest peace training to adapt itself to whatever conditions it met with, was continually and progressively modifying its practice under the experience of conditions which it had been impossible fully to anticipate. It is upon the surface of the facts that the extreme loss of life suddenly occasioned at particular points by the effectiveness of the fire of the new weapons, both of artillery and infantry, compelled the gradual abandonment of close formations of men, massed together in dense columns or even in closed lines, and the gradual adoption of what are known as "skirmishing" or open order formations. In other words, when the French fire fell upon the solid columns of the advancing Prussians, the column in stinctively scattered. The officers and non-commissioned officers were often lost in very large proportion, and during the actual course of the fighting, without any preconceived idea on the subject, a method of attack was adopted which proceeded by successive swarms of dispersed men taking advantage of such shelter as the ground permitted. The noise of the rapid breech-loader, and the crash of an artil lery able to fire much more frequently than in former campaigns, and, moreover, accumulated in much greater masses than had ever been the case before, made words of command inaudible at a distance. Hence it came to pass that small parties of men, once launched into an infantry fight, were virtually beyond all control on the part

of superior officers. All that these could do to influence