(^254) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
but the soldier had to pay out of pocket for grease; so, little or no
grease. Bullets were costiy—they were not the sort of thing that
Russia could produce in large quantities—so clay bullets were used
for target practice and damaged the barrels. Even officers took little
care of their sidearms, to the point where the Ministry of War
advised issuing pistols rather than revolvers. Regimental gunsmiths
lacked training and proper equipment and had to shoe horses, fix
wheels, and repair guns with the same chisels, hammers, and saws.
Rules follow practice. Confronted with these shortcomings,
Russian military strategists systematically underestimated the value of
firepower. Bodies were seen as more important than arms—bodies
and "moral force"—and the bayonet was preferred to guns. "The
bullet is a fool," opined Marshal Suvarov, "but the bayonet is a fine
lad."* The bayonet was surer, and reliance on guns could only
weaken resolve and fighting spirit. It would be a mistake, therefore,
to change from muzzleloaders to breechloaders. The soldier would
only waste a lot of ammunition and forget how to charge. As
firepower in other armies shot up, the Russian soldier was being
schooled in thrift. The regimental economy mirrored the larger
society: dragged down by inefficiency; wasting time and labor in
accessory activities (agriculture, gathering wood and hay,
construction, haulage); afraid of change.t
The Crimean War (1854-56) was a disaster. The Russians lost
what they could afford to lose most—people, six hundred thousand
of them. The trivial losses in territory hurt the generals and the tsar
more. Some Russians were still using muzzle-loading flintlocks,
while the British and French picked them off with percussion rifles
that had three and five times the range. Even the Russian generals
- Remember the Portuguese instructions to their second Indies fleet (see chapter VI):
stand off and blow them out of the water. A preference for steel over guns signals tech
nological inferiority.
f Cf. Bradley, Guns for the Tsar. The similarity to Japanese attitudes is striking. One
normally thinks of Japanese industry as exceptionally effective, but as late as World War
II, Japanese armaments manufacture was extremely spotty, and the army-issue rifles,
sidearms, and ammunition left much to be desired. Soldiers sought compensation in
the bayonet, which was often left permanently fixed, and cultivated the mystique of
personal bravery in close combat: "The fixing of bayonet is more than a fixing of steel
to the rifle since it puts iron into the soul of the soldier doing the fixing." Similarly,
officers relied more on sword than revolver, abandoning whenever possible standard
issue for samurai blades. A favorite test of prowess: decapitation or cleavage, often of
prisoners, at one stroke. Cf. M. and S. Harries, Soldiers of the Sun, ch. 35, " 'My Sword
Is My Soul.' "