TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A PLAN FOR ARMY REFORM. THE interest excited by the proposals for Army reform remains as great as ever. Almost every recent public speech touches on the problem in some form or other, and wherever soldiers or military-minded civilians con- gregate, plans for putting the Army straight are discussed with the utmost eagerness. Standing as we do outside the whirlpool of discussion, and professing no knowledge of technical details, we are perhaps able to grasp some of the general conditions that govern the problem better than some of those actively engaged in the controversy. Not only do onlookers proverbially see the best of the game, but in the present case the soldiers engaged in planning bow best to get us a sound Army are to some extent bewildered and perplexed by what we may call the civilian bogey. They are apt to think too much about what the civilian can be got to stand, and so to construct, not the beat possible plan, but the plan which they think is most likely to be accepted,—i.e., the best plan under the circumstances. The result is often to vitiate their pro- posals. They are paralysed, as it were, by the dread of the civilian. That being so, we believe that help may conceiv- ably come from the civilian who bases his proposals on reason and common-sense, leaving it to the professional soldier to correct the faults of detail, and to put the general and abstract suggestions into a practical and concrete form. This is our excuse for endeavouring to put forward a rough and skeleton plan of Army reform. It is very likely extremely crude in many points, but we venture to think that it does meet the main human and political needs of the situation, and that it could easily be licked into shape by any Committee of practical soldiers. We make, we need hardly say, no claim to originality for our plan or to any new discovery. It is merely a résumé of the common-sense of the situation. When men with great technical knowledge are discussing a tech- nical problem, it sometimes happens that the non-technical listener is able to make a helpful common-sense suggestion which clears the air. He could not carry out his suggestion in detail himself, but for all that it clears the ideas of the men who could. carry it out, and who, for the moment immersed too much in details, have, it may be, missed a possible solution of their problem. All we claim for our plan is that it is the possible suggestion of the bystander offered for what it is worth to the practical men.
Before we state our proposal it will be as well to note one or two of the conditions upon which all reasonable men seem now agreed,—conditions which, therefore, must be a sine quci non in every scheme. The first of these is that the soldier must be offered a career in the Army, and allowed to feel that if he likes to make the Army his life- work he can do so. Next, the conditions of service must be so elastic that they will also tempt men who want to try the Army in their hot youth, but who do not wish to commit themselves for any very long term of service. Next, there must be a Reserve, but it must not be main- tained at the expense of an efficient Army. Again, every regiment in the service must always, at home and abroad, in England or on foreign service, be a real regiment, that is, a real military family in full vigour, and not sometimes a true regiment (i.e., when abroad) and sometimes a mere walking depOt,—an ambulatory school for recruits, whose business is not to be an efficient fighting machine, but instead a supplier of drafts to the foreign battalion. Lastly, it is universally and most properly agreed that there must be no creation of a purely Indian Army—a sort of Prietorian Guard permanently stationed in India—like the old Company's white troops ; for against such a body can be urged an infinite number of sound arguments, military, civil, and political. So much for the chief essential conditions. Now for a plan which, we suggest, fulfils most of them. To begin with, we would have two army corps of some thirty- three thousand men each, or sixty-six thousand men in all, raised on a three years' enlistment with the colours and three in the Reserve, the regiments of which army corps would be exactly in the position which the Guards were in up till last June, and which several cavalry regiments were in till five or six years ago. It is idle to say that these Home Army Corps, or Guards Corps if you will, would be a sort of glorified Militia. The Guards have never been that, and there is no reason why these army corps should be. This part of our proposal is, in fact, no experiment, for we know exactly the sort of conditions produced by Guards service, and those conditions would be just the conditions governing these Home Army Corps. The regiments forming these two army corps, though they would be permanently stationed at home, would of course go on active service whenever re.. quired, and they would naturally have the first claim to serve on all expeditions fitted out direct from England: They would, as we have said in effect, constitute not a new military monster, but be merely the old Guards Division under a magnifying glass. What would be the good of them? They would (1) keep always in England a visible body of men in a complete state of efficiency, and a body of men always ready for emergency work ; (2) afford a place for recruits who wished to join the Army, but did not wish to commit themselves for more than three years certain. After these two Home or Guards Corps would come the rest of the regiments of the Army,—regiments not forming in any way a separate army, but merely regiments which did not happen to be those that remained perpetually at home in peace-time, but instead served a tour in India, in the Colonies, and at home. The recruit who joined one of these regiments would join for twelve years' service with the colours and, say, ten years' in the active Reserve, and ten years' more in a home Reserve. While in the active Reserve he would be liable, in case of war, for foreign ser- vice. In the home Reserve he would be only called on for Militia service. While in both Reserves he would receive a reasonable pension, or else employment in Government service, or in service found for him by Government, say on the railways. (The Government might remit the Passenger-tax on condition that in every company 10 per cent. of the employes were Reserve men.) These long.. service regiments and batteries would serve, say, for six years in India, for three years in the Colonies or the Mediterranean, and for three years in the United Kingdom. Thus there would always be some forty or fifty thousand of them in the United Kingdom serving alongside the short-service regiments. They would, of course, all belong to the same Army and feel themselves so. The short- service regiments would feel as, say, the Dragoon Guards used to feel when they were home regiments. The long- service regiments would simply be like what the whole Army is now, except the Guards and Household Cavalry. The moral change, in fact, would be none whatever. The plan is simply one for adding to the troops in the position. the Guards were in, with great satisfaction to every one, up to last June. At home, then, we should have always, say, sixty-six thousand short-service men and, say, forty thousand long-service men. Abroad in peace-time we should have always, say, one hundred and twenty thousand long-service men. We use these figures quite roughly and merely by way of example. Now for a recruiting point.. We would allow any man who had completed his three years in a short-service regiment, and who found he like& soldiering, to re-enlist in a long-service regiment, and we would give such transfers special terms of pay. They would enter as finished soldiers, and should be given at once an advance of pay both in respect of their foreign service and their longer period of enlistment. Next, it should be noted that under our plan the linked-battalion system would cease to exist. Each battalion, whether getting back its old number or not, would become an autonomous military family. It would no more be a walking depOt at home than abroad. It would feed no one, but only be fed. But how would it be fed when abroad and at home ? Our suggestion is—not an original one, of course—that the present depots should remain what they are, namely, regimental receiving-houses for recruits. When, however, the recruit was received he should not be sent to his battalion to learn his work, but rather to what would, in fact, be two or three great training-schools or military mills ; one might be at Aldershot, one in Durham or Northumberland, and one in North Wales, and so near Liverpool and Lancashire. Here the recruits taken each year would be trained and taught their work for, say, eight months, and hence they would be sent to their regi- ments as soldiers fit for the ranks. The advantages of these training-schools are obvious. The result of their establishment would be that each long, and also each short, service battalion at home would be a fighting machine, and not half a depot for feeding a regiment abroad and half a training-school for young soldiers.
Every man with the colours would have learnt his busi- ness, and every regiment would be a real regiment. It will be said, perhaps, that we should fail to get the men under this system. We do not believe it. We hold that directly it is realised that the soldier is to get his full shilling and "all found," and also that he can at first, if he likes, only commit himself for three years, and then afterwards, if he chooses, make a real career of the Army—or again, can at once take up a military career and be sure of being kept either at work or as a pensioner until he dies—recruiting will very greatly improve. The advertisement given to the conditions of service by any new scheme will be enormous. At any rate it is worth trying. If we got the men now, it would of course be mad- ness to change. But as we do not get them, the danger of an unsuccessful experiment is small. Thiers was once asked why he did not in 1848 take a particular precaution and try a certain plan. His reply was, "If I had done that the Monarchy would have fallen." He forgot that it fell all the same, and that therefore his argument was not a very strong one. When we are told that our plan would not get the men, we can only reply that the present arrangements do not get them. But in order to supplement the supply we would most certainly adopt Lord Lansdowne's excellent plan for taking boys and training them on boy's pay—i.e., food and lodging and a little pocket-money—to be soldiers. If you could say to his parents when a boy leaves school, Let your boy come to us and we will feed and clothe him, teach him a simple trade, and then make a soldier of him and provide him a career through life if he likes to stick to it,' you would get an almost indefinite supply of boys. In thousands of poor households it is not at all an easy thing to find even a bare living for a boy. If one were offered at once by the State, plus a, real career at the end of it, the Army would be as popular with boys as is the Navy.
We have sketched our plan in the rough, and we will leave it for the criticism of the soldiers. Of one thing we are sure. It may be a bad or an unworkable plan, but at any rate it is not a revolutionary plan. It does not make a PrEetorian Guard, and it does not really tear the present system up by the roots. If it were adopted, and a War Office clerk who died five years ago came back to life, almost the only thing he would notice would be that the brigade of Guards had, in effect, been multiplied by seven, and that men were freely allowed to extend their service with the colours up to twelve years. Before we leave the subject we must say one more word. A good deal of talk is to be heard as to the Commander-in-Chief being too much committed to the old system for him to allow it to be touched. Of such mischievous nonsense we do not believe a single word. Lord Wolseley is a man of large mind, a great soldier, and, what is more, a man of real patriotism. Such petty influences will not, we are sure, weigh with him in the least. And why should they, even if he were inclined to think of his own amour propre rather than of the service ? He has worked and defended the present system most loyally, but he is not really responsible for it. The system in regard to which he might be expected to feel • responsible has never come into operation, and so never had a trial. To abandon the present system, then, would not be to abandon his own scheme, but merely a travesty of it. He could say, most truly : Circumstances and the perversity and slackness of succeeding Govern- ments have prevented the Cardwell scheme getting a fair trial, and almost certainly would prevent it being properly carried out in the future. That being so, it is necessary to abandon it.' But this being so, it is childish, as well as grossly unfair, to suppose that Lord Wolseley must necessarily stand in the way of reform merely out of personal feeling. He has no doubt many great difficulties to contend with, and many perplexities and anxieties, but at least we may be sure that the silly desire to shelter himself from the accusation of having " made " a scheme which has broken down is not one of them. He could abandon the Cardwell scheme to-morrow without suffering in the very least in the opinion of any one competent to judge of the matter.
Previous page
