GUARDS LIFE AT THE DEPOT.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—I have read letters in your issues of November 22nd and 29th which impugn the accuracy of Mr. Stephen Graham's account of his experiences while serving in the Guards. It is therefore up to those, who have reason to believe that his account is substantially accurate, to speak. Every one admires the Guards' record in the Great War as well as in previous wars and peace soldiering. Most soldiers know well enough the value of Guards discipline and traditions and of Guards officers. Moreover Mr. Graham testifies to the value of all these. Nevertheless in reading Mr. Graham's book I felt that much of his account was a repetition of what I knew.
One of my sons enlisted in the Guards in August, 1914, being then twenty-nine years old, went through a full recruit's course, and was passed out. He was persuaded, much against his will, to take a commission in another regiment, and was killed in France early in 1916, being then a Captain. His wish was to go out as a private in the Guards. His account of life at the Depot quite bore out Mr. Graham's. The men were frequently half drunk at night. Their language and subjects of conversation were unspeakably foul; he admitted that this was worse at first in the tents, when there was less discipline, than afterwards in barracks; when there is no order the worse elements have freer play. He said that men would be sent for by N.O.O.'s to their rooms and given a sound thrashing; also that N.C.O.'s would say to men : "If the officer asks you, you will say so-and-so" (so-and-eo being a direct lie); that the officers were practically inaccessible to the men, the N.C.O.'s ruling the mot so long as the military results were satisfactory, and the officers not wishing to penetrate the barrier, or at any rate not doing so. After serving in another regiment he was able to appreciate the value of Guards discipline on parade and in training, but he did deplore the whole effect of the Guards Depot life on boys and young men coming many of them from decent homes. He thought it bad.
I may say that he was no sentimentalist, having spent some very hard-worked years in South London in constant contact with its poor and its rough elements and with boys and youths. As the value of his opinions and his evidence depends altogether on his character and abilities, I send for your private inspection a few out of many papers I have, which may enable you to form an opinion as to the probable value of these.
To me it seems that there is no necessary connexion between the valuable elements of any discipline and the evils which may accompany it. We often hear of bullying foremen in civil life, and need not suppose that a similar tendency will be absent from the Army. It remains to aim at a better interpenetration of the whole organization by the influence of the best type of officer and N.C.O., and an unwillingness to acquiesce in impenetrable fences. I should add that it is important that the nation should not have reason to regard military training as likely to involve moral deterioration. There is no good reason why the contrary should not be the case.
I greatly dislike, for several reasons, writing this letter for publication, but feel it is due to Mr. Graham and to truth
that I should do so.—I am, Sir, &c., E. H. Barmax. 18 Hyde Park Square, W. 2.
(There can be no doubt that Colonel Bethell's gallant son is a very important witness. While, as a lawyer might say, making " a motion in arrest of judgment " in regard to Caterham, we do not in the least impugn his competence, or suggest that he lent himself to any exaggeration, or even listened too easily to rumours. His splendid record as a soldier, the proofs of which we have seen, give a clear denial to any such supposition. At the same time it would be most unfair to condemn the Caterham methods of training wholesale on evidence gathered under the stress of war—i.e., to infer from it, as some people do, that the Guards officers neglect their duty of protecting privates, and especially recruits, from oppressive or barbarous acts by the drill sergeants. After considering the matter from both sides and with some knowledge of the Guards and the Guards system, we desire to state what we believe is the truth.
During the war there is no doubt that Caterham was a pretty rough place, and things occasionally happened there which not only no Guards officer would want to defend, but which every Guards officer would have desired to prevent. The difficulties, however, were enormous. Recruits instead of coming in by twenty or a hundred at a time came in literally by the thousand. During the war there were sometimes as many as 4,000 recruits training at Caterham, and this trainisg had to be conducted, not by the best type of drill sergeants, but by those who must be described as of a distinctly inferior variety. The best sergeants had made good their claim to go to the front, where indeed they were even more needed than at Caterham. We must also never forget, as we have said before in these columns, that the work of drilling a great body of recruits very quickly and under conditions of rapid improvisation was enough to break the temper of any one not a mixture of the saint and hero. All teaching tends to make people " nervy," and drilling is notoriously one of the most nerveracking forms of teaching. Finally, the supervision of the huge numbers of recruits had to be done often by officers who were new to their job. The best and most experienced officers were either with the Colours, or had paid that tribute to their country which the Guards paid with such splendid generosity of spirit. In all these circumstances we feel bound to remind a public inclined, and most rightly inclined, to resent anything in the nature of unnecessary severity that there must be justice to Guards officers and N.C.O.'s as well as to Guards recruits. Under normal conditions Caterham is anything but a place of torture, though it isno doubt a Sparta. The Caterham system has in truth, a great deal to be said for it from the point of view of intensive military training. At the same time, and to prevent any disconsideration of what after all remain the best infantry regiments in the British Army, and therefore in the world, we not only hope but we are sure that the Guards officers responsible for Caterham will take even greater care than before to protect their men from ill-treatment on the part of neurasthenic or brutalized N.C.O.'s. This of course has always been the desire of the officers, and any properly attested case of a man being struck has at once been dealt with with the utmost severity. After all, even N.C.O.'s cannot be punished on rumour. It is most extraordinarily difficultfor an officer to catch out an N.C.O. without spying on him in a way which would be most undesirable, and which we believe the privates would in the end greatly resent. Guards officers are not very good dialecticians or controversialists, but we are absolutely certain that they feel very deeply the accusations of cruelty, and that they have always done their best to prevent tyranny, and especially the supreme outrage of blows.—ED. Spectator.]
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