Conclusions

结论

With the important exception of the American Civil War, the period 1815–1885 had not witnessed any lengthy, mutually exhausting military struggles. The lesser campaigns of this age, like the Franco-Austrian clash in 1859 or the Russian attack upon Turkey in 1877, did little to affect the Great Power system. Even the more important wars were limited in some significant ways: the Crimean War was chiefly a regional one, and concluded before Britain had fully harnessed its resources; and the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars were over in one season’s campaigning—a remarkable contrast to the far lengthier conflicts of the eighteenth century. No wonder, then, that the vision which military leaders and strategic pundits entertained of Great Power struggles in the future was one of swift knockout victories à la Prussienne in 1870—of railways and mobilization schedules, of general staff plans for a speedy offensive, of quick-firing guns and mass, short-service armies, all of which would be brought together to overwhelm the foe within a matter of weeks. That the newer, quick-firing weapons might, if used properly, benefit defensive rather than offensive warfare was not appreciated at the time; nor, alas, were the portents of the American Civil War, where a combination of irreconcilable popular principles and extensive terrain had made for a far lengthier and deadlier conflict than any short, sharp European conflict of this period.

除了美国内战这一重要例外，1815～1885年这段时期没有出现任何长期的、互耗精力的军事斗争。这个时期的小战役，像1859年的法奥冲突或1877年俄国对土耳其的进攻，对大国体制没有什么影响。甚至几次更重要的战争也在几个重要方面有其局限性：克里米亚战争均主要是地区性战争，在英国充分利用其资源前就结束了；普奥战争和普法战争均在一个季度内结束——这与18世纪极为漫长的冲突形成了鲜明的对比。于是，军事领袖和战争权威所持的关于未来大国斗争，是1870年普鲁士式的迅速打倒敌人取得胜利的观点，就不足为奇了：铁路和动员日程、总参谋部制订的迅速进攻计划、速射枪炮和大量短期服役的陆军，这一切将被结合使用，以便在几个星期内打垮敌人。速射武器如果使用得当，将对防御战而不是进攻战有利，这个观点当时尚无人赏识；也无人意识到美国内战中的不祥之兆，在那次战争中，民众不可调和的原则和开阔的地形这两者的结合，使冲突比当时的任何短期而尖锐的欧洲冲突更加漫长和残酷。

Yet all of these wars—whether fought in the Tennessee Valley or the Bohemian plain, in the Crimean Peninsula or the fields of Lorraine—pointed to one general conclusion: the powers which were defeated were those that had failed to adopt to the “military revolution” of the mid-nineteenth century, the acquisition of new weapons, the mobilizing and equipping of large armies, the use of improved communications offered by the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph, and a productive industrial base to sustain the armed forces. In all of these conflicts, grievous blunders were to be committed on the battlefield by the generals and armies of the winning side from time to time—but they were never enough to cancel out the advantages which that belligerent possessed in terms of trained manpower, supply, organization, and economic base.

可是所有这些战争——不论在田纳西河谷发生，还是在波希米亚平原、克里米亚半岛或洛林的原野展开——都说明了一个总的结论：战败国是那些没有进行19世纪中期的“军事革命”，没有取得新武器，没有动员和装备庞大的军队，没有使用铁路、轮船和电报提供的先进的交通和通信，没有供养武装部队的生产性工业基础的国家。在这些冲突中，胜方的将领和军队不时在战场上犯下严重的错误，但这些错误不足以抵消那个交战国在受训的人力、供应、组织和经济基础等方面的优势。

This leads to a final and more general set of remarks about the period after about 1860. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the half-century which followed the battle of Waterloo had been characterized by the steady growth of an international economy, by large-scale productive increases caused by industrial development and technical change, by the relative stability of the Great Power system and the occurrence of only localized and short-term wars. In addition, while there had been some modernization of military and naval weaponry, new developments within the armed forces were far less than those occurring in civilian spheres exposed both to the Industrial Revolution and to constitutional-political transformation. The prime beneficiary of this half-century of change had been Britain; in terms both of productive power and of world influence, it probably reached its peak in the late 1860s (even if the policies of the first Gladstone ministry tended to conceal that fact). The prime losers had been the nonindustrialized peasant societies of the extra- European world, which were able to withstand neither the industrial manufactures nor the military incursions of the West. For the same fundamental reason, the less industrialized of the European Great Powers—Russia, the Habsburg Empire—began to lose their earlier place, and a newly united nation, Italy, never really made it into the first rank.

这导致了关于1860年以后时期的一整套较为普遍的定论。本章开头已经指出，滑铁卢之战以后半个世纪的特点是：国际经济的稳步发展，工业发展和技术变革引起的生产力的大规模增长，大国体制的相对稳定和只限于局部的短期战争的形势。此外，虽然陆军和海军武器已经进行了一定程度的现代化，武装部队内部的新发展却远不如受产业革命和宪法——政治改革影响的民用事业的发展。这场半个世纪的变革的主要受益者是英国，不论在生产力方面，还是在世界影响方面，它在19世纪60年代后期很可能达到了顶峰（虽然第一个格莱斯顿内阁的政策有掩盖这个事实的倾向）。主要的失败者是欧洲以外的非工业化农业社会，它们抵挡不住工业品和西方军事的侵袭。出于这一根本原因，工业化较差的欧洲大国——俄国和奥地利哈布斯堡——开始丧失它们以前的地位，而新统一的意大利则从来没有进入一流国家的行列。

From the 1860s, moreover, these trends were to intensify. The volume of world trade and, even more important, the growth of manufacturing output increased swiftly. Industrialization, formerly confined to Britain and certain parts of continental Europe and North America, was beginning to transform other regions. In particular, it was boosting the positions of Germany, which in 1870 already possessed 13 percent of world industrial production, and of the United States, which even then had 23 percent of the total. 107 Thus the chief features of the international system which was emerging by the end of the nineteenth century were already detectable, even if few observers could fully recognize them. On the other hand, the relatively stable Pentarchy of the post-1815 Concert system was dissolving, not merely because its members were more willing to fight against each other by the 1860s than a few decades earlier, but also because some of those states were two or three times more powerful than others. On the other hand, Europe’s own monopoly of modern industrial production was being broken across the Atlantic. Steam power, railways, electricity, and other instruments of modernization could benefit any society which had both the will and the freedom to adopt them.

此外，从19世纪60年代起，这些趋势还在加剧。世界贸易的数量，更重要的还有工业品产量，都在迅速增长。以前局限于英国、欧洲大陆某些地区和北美的工业化，正在开始改变其他区域。工业化特别提高了德意志和美国的地位，前者在1870年已经拥有世界工业产量的13%，后者那时甚至达到总产量的23%。因此，19世纪末正在出现的国际体系的主要特征已经可以察觉，虽然只有很少数观察家能充分认识这些特征。另一方面，1815年以后协作体制相对稳定的五头政治正在解体，这不仅是因为到19世纪60年代它的成员比前几十年更愿意交战，而且因为其中有的国家比另几个国家强两三倍。此外，欧洲本身对现代工业生产的垄断正被打破而扩大到大西洋彼岸。蒸汽动力、铁路、电力和其他现代化工具，对具有意志和自由去采用它们的任何社会都有利。

The absence of major conflicts during that post-1871 period in which Bismarck dominated European diplomacy may have suggested that a new equilibrium had been established, following the fissures of the 1850s and 1860s. Yet away from the world of armies and navies and foreign offices, far-reaching industrial and technological developments were under way, changing the global economic balances more swiftly than ever before. And it would not be too long before those alterations in the productive/industrial base would have their impacts upon the military capacities and external policies of the Great Powers.

1871年以后俾斯麦支配欧洲外交时期没有大冲突的事实可能说明，随着19世纪50年代和60年代的分裂，新的平衡已经建立。可是，除了陆军、海军和外交领域，广泛的工业和技术发展正在进行，从而比以往更迅速地改变着全球的经济力量对比。生产性工业基础的变化将对大国的军事能力和对外政策产生影响，这个日子的来临将不会太久。

* That is to say, some of the historical statistics refer to Great Britain (minus Ireland), some to the United Kingdom (with Ireland), and some include only northern but not southern Ireland.

[1]?也就是说，有的历史统计数字不包括爱尔兰；有的包括爱尔兰；有的只包括北爱尔兰，但不包括南爱尔兰。

* Following, at least, the definition of “manufactures” that Bairoch employs (see note 11).

[2]?至少是根据贝罗克采用的关于“制造业”的定义。

* Argentina, for example, would be able to find a ready market in the U. K. for its exports of beef and grain, thereby allowing it not only to pay for imported British manufactures and for the various service fees but also to repay the long-term loans floated in London, and thus to keep its own credit high for further borrowing. The contrast with U. S. loans to Latin America in the twentieth century—lending at short term, and not allowing the importation of agricultural produce—is striking.

[3]?科蒂兹（Hernando Cortes，1485～1547年），西班牙军人兼探险家，曾征服墨西哥。——译者注

* It being argued that any man who had competed two or three years in the army could no longer be a serf; and that it was safer to recruit a small proportion of each year’s males as long-service troops.

[4]?基切纳（1850～1916年），英国殖民者，陆军元帅。1898年率军镇压埃及的马赫迪起义。——审校者注

* Except the black slaves, and the still relatively populous Indians.

[5]?苏族人，北美印第安人中的一个民族。——审校者注

* About one-third in battle, the rest chiefly through diseases. The grand total of around 620,000 was more than the American losses in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War put together, and was suffered by a much smaller population.

[6]?华伦斯坦（1583～1634年），神圣罗马帝国统帅，屡建战功。——审校者注

* And, exceptionally, the first Landwehr annual intake as well.

[7]?例如，阿根廷能在英国为它出口牛肉和谷物找到现成的市场，从而不但使它能够偿付进口的英国制成品和各种劳务费用，而且能够偿还在伦敦筹措的长期贷款，这样使它自己有高度可靠的信用，以便再借款。20世纪美国贷款给拉丁美洲——短期贷款，但不容许进口农产品，这种对比是很鲜明的。

[8]?麦考莱（1800～1859年），英国政治家，主张国会改革，历任陆军大臣、军需总监等职。——审校者注

[9]?加富尔（1810～1861年），意大利自由主义贵族和资产阶级政治家，为意大利的统—做出了贡献。——审校者注

[10]?有人正在争辩，任何人在军队中卖命两年或三年，就可以不再是农奴了；又争辩说，每年征募少量男丁为长期服役的士兵比较保险。

[11]?黑奴和相对说依然众多的印第安人除外。

[12]?约1/3在战斗中损失，其余主要因疾病而损失。约62万人的巨大数字超过了美国人在第一、第二次世界大战和朝鲜战争中损失的总数，而且内战遭受这个损失时，美国人口少得多。

[13]?迪斯雷利（1804～1881年），英国首相，任内（1867～1868年，1874～1880年）大力推行殖民扩张政策。——审校者注

[14]?在非常的情况下还有第一年的后备军征召。

[15]?赫尔姆斯·卡尔·毛奇（1800～1891年），一称老毛奇，德国军事家、元帅。1858～1888年先后任普鲁士和德意志帝国总参谋长。