MR. HALDANE AND THE ARMY THAT WE NEED.
TO grasp the essential conditions of a problem may not necessarily enable a statesman to produce a practical administrative scheme. A hundred. things may militate against success of this kind. What, however, is certain is that a statesman who does grasp the essentials of his problem is half way to success. Mr. Haldane's speech in- troducing the Army Estimates showed. that he, at any rate, fully realises the principles upon which our Army must be based. To begin with, he understands that in the futuffe, as in the past, we shall have to rely upon a voluntary system. Not only does the peculiar genius of the British people make this a necessity, but, still more, it is a necessity owing to the fact that we need. our Army primarily to police, garrison, and. defend our vast overseas Empire. Conscrip- tion can never solve the military problem of the British Empire, because you can never send. conscript troops oversea, against their will. Besides understanding that the rock-bed. foundation of our system must be a voluntary one, Mr. Haldane obviously sees that we shall always be forced in the case of great military enterprises to rely upon an appeal to the people, and upon some system of improvising troops for the emergency at hand. In other words, after we have made provision for our professional Army, we must make provision for the im- provisation of armies out of the civilian population, taking care that such improvisation shall be as perfect and as practical as possible, and shall not be left to the hurry- scurry of the actual crisis. We have always declared that our Auxiliary Forces should be used to form. a great reservoir of partially trained men from which in times of emergency a supply may be drawn off. Mr. Haldane in his speech virtually adopted this policy, and actually made use of the phrase "reservoir," showing that here, at all events, he agrees with the policy so often advocated in these columns. Clearly Mr. Haldane is also in general agreement with us in regard to the Militia and its future. We have always felt that the Militia is, or rather ought to be, the cardinal point in our military system,—the point on which it should hinge. The Militia and Yeomanry should hold a middle place between the professional Army and the Volunteers, but the Militiaman and. Yeoman, though partly soldiers and partly civilians, should belong rather to the professional side of our military force than to the civilian. We bold that the War Office should be in a position to feel that when it has exhausted the professional Army and its Reserves, it has the Militia and the Yeomanry to fall back upon, and. to employ while it is busy putting what we have called the skeleton system of improvisation in force,—that is, while it is drawing off and. organising into proper military units a draft out of the reservoir of trained men formed by the Volunteers.
So important do we consider this question of the im- provement and. better organisation of the Militia, that we believe that if Mr. Haldane were to resolve for the first two years of his tenure of office to concentrate his attention upon the Militia, and to make the Militia into a large well-ordered and. well-equipped force, he would confer an immense benefit upon the nation. If we were in his shoes, we should aim at constituting a Militia or Second Line Army of 200,000 men, 175,000 of these being infantry and. artillery and 25,000 Yeomanry cavalry. In regard to the 175,000 infantry and artillery, the question will of course be at once asked, "How are you going to get them P" Our answer is, "By improving the conditions of service." We would begin by frankly recognising the fact that the Militia can never be anything but the resort of the casual labourer if the Militiaman is asked to do as much as a month's service every year. That obligation destroys his value in the labour market. It was for this reason that we appealed to our readers to help us to test Colonel Pollock's declaration that men of the Militia class can in six months, by a system of intensive and individual training, be turned into com- petent infantry soldiers, and. that afterwards all they will require to keep them fit will be a certain amount of training under Volunteer conditions,—that is, drill and shooting in their spare time, and possibly a week each year under canvas. The Army Council's intended Militia experi- ment, we may mention incidentally, is quite different from ours. What they propose to do is to embody certain Militia regiments for six months in the winter, and. after this preliminary six months to give the men six weeks' training each year. We have no doubt that under this plan very good soldiers and. very good regiments may be produced, but nothing will have been done to help to solve the problem of Militia recruiting. On the contrary, it will have been made more difficult than ever, as the increased obliga- tion of annual service will create further obstacles in the labour market. Our plan, on the other hand, if it succeeds, as we believe it will, will immensely facilitate recruiting. A young man will get his six months' training over before he seeks a permanent place, for be will realise that, once over, the very small obligations imposed upon him will not interfere with civil employment. It is interesting to note in this respect how little difficulty there has been in filling the Specta,tor Company. The young men who assembled at Hounslow on Wednesday and Thursday clearly look forward with pleasure and interest to six months' soldiering, and. no doubt many of them believe, and rightly believe, that it will improve their physique and intelligence, and so help them to better employment. We are sure, however, that if we had made a month's obligatory training each year in the future part- of our conditions of service, we should. have had infinitely greater trouble in obtaining the men. In addition to raising the Militia infantry and artillery to 175,000 men, • we should. like to create a Militia and Yeomanry Reserve, formed from the men who had finished their first term of service. We would make the conditions under which men should join such a Reserve as little onerous as possible. It would, in our opinion, be quite worth while to pay £150,000 a year if, as we believe possible, the Militiamen could be kept in the Reserve by a payment of .21 a year per man.
We have left ourselves little space to speak about the Volunteers, but, unless we are greatly mistaken, Mr. Haldane intends to take up a very sound and wise attitude in regard to them. 'In the first place, it is clear that he does not mean to copy any former attempts to turn them into imitation Regulars. On the other hand, we see no indi- cation on his part of any desire to go to the other extreme and treat them as merely uniformed rifle clubs. We gather from indications in his speech that his policy is one of elasticity. He will endeavour to increase the number of Volunteers as -much as possible, and be will accept the principle of taking from each man as much as he can give. On the whole, 'what he will aim at will be numbers rather than the production of a highly finished copy of the Regular soldier. He will, in other words, realise that the main function of the Volunteers is to act as a national school of arms and to provide a reservoir of trained men, and that it is therefore wise to keep the reservoir always at as high a level as possible. Remember that even as it is the Volunteers provide such a reservoir. Had we cared to use them, they would have given us 75,000 men for service in South Africa. We are well aware, of course, that only some 20,000 actually served ; but this does not alter the fact that when the appeal to the nation was made after Celenso 75,000 Volunteers expressed their willingness to undertake oversea service. We should like to see the reservoir so much enlarged and strengthened that it might, in the case of a European war, be relied upon to yield 150,000 men. As to the rifle clubs, we hope that Mr. Haldane will devise some practical means of extending them, and that they may become a valuable source for adding to the reservoir of partially trained men. Again, in connection with the skeleton scheme of improvisation, we trust that Mr. Haldane will find some way of keeping in touch with all the trained men in the eountry,—those trained men who have passed out of the various Reserves, Regular and Militia, but who nevertheless are perfectly competent to undertake military duties. By means either of a promise of a pension or else employment in Government service, we would keep in touch with every old soldier in the country up to the age of sixty-five, and thus provide the nation automatically with a most useful extra Reserve. Finally, we hope that before he has finished with the Army, Mr. Haldane, in conjunction with the Education Office, will have arranged that in elementary and continua- tion schools all our boys shall receive a physical education of a military character, including the use of the rifle. We have one more word to say in regard to Mr. Haldane's speech, and it is a word of warning. We trust that he will not press the "blue-water "-school principles too hard. In theory we are entirely in accord with the " blue-water " school, and believe that it is the Navy which always has kept, and always must keep, our islands free from invasion. At the same time, we see no good in pushing this theory too far, and absolutely precluding any form of what we may call "second insurance in the military office. Our way of viewing the matter would be this. We would refuse to enter into any large expenditure on preparations to repel invasion ; or, rather, anything that we were able to put aside for such a contingency we would spend. on naval rather than on military defence, on the ground that such expenditure would get us the best value for our money. Notwithstanding this, any reasonable military precautions against invasion which could be taken without great expen- diture of money or energy we would take. We have got our Militia and our Volunteers, which we need in order to give us a reservoir of trained and partially trained men. But these forces being in existence, we see no reason why they should not be organised in such a way that if the " blue- water "-school theory failed, or partly failed, in practice, they would be readily available for purposes of defence. We would not, as we have said, lavish money on military pre- parations to repel invasion ; but when such preparations °mid be carried out without cost, and would only be part of the ordinary training of the Militia 'and the Volunteers, we should certainly' make use of them. For example, we have always thought that we should like to regard Britain as a gigantic city, with its cliffs and shores as town walls. Every permanent military unit in the country should, in our opinion, know its exact place on the town \inn, and be exercised in reaching it, or in being despatched to some other spot which at the moment was weaker. Again, though we -hold that the creation of the inland forts on the North Downs was a mistake and involved a great waste of money, and that the same must be said in regard to many of our coast fortifications, we do not think that it would be wise to destroy these forts and 'batteries now that they have been built. We would spend no more on them, but those which can be left in statu quo without any great annual expense we would allow to remain. The nation ought to have large supplies of all sorts of material, such, for example, as entrenching tools, and, unless we are greatly mistaken, it is quite as cheap to store entrenching tools in a so-called fort at Dorking as in any other military arsenal. In other words, though we fully adopt Campbell's view that "Britannia needs no bulwarks, No 'guns along the steep," but must rely on her Fleet, we would not, out of an extravagant regard for the opinions of the " blue-water " school, throw away the results even of injudicious expendi- ture in the past. As we have got the North Downs forts, do not let us dismantle them, but rather use them in any way we can. We might, for example, instead of leaving them utterly derelict, place them under the care of the local rifle clubs. That seems to us the common-sense view of the matter, and since Mr. Haldane is eminently a man of common-sense as well as of fine sense, we do not doubt that when he has looked a little closer into the question he will adopt it in substance.
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