consolation from the Memorandum in explanation of the Army Estimates
published this week by the Secretary of State for War. It shows us the Army as it is, not as it ought to be,—the Army that we have got, not the Army that we need ; and unfortunately the difference between the two is very strongly marked. In drawing attention to this fact, as we mean to do in the present article, we desire to guard ourselves from seeming to impute special blame to Mr. Arnold-Forster. We disapprove of his administra- tion at the War Office, and especially of his disastrous proposals for destroying the Militia and reducing the Volunteers, and we realise that he has wasted nearly two precious years in the propagation of his abortive schemes. But our complaint in regard to the condition of the Army goes deeper and wider than Mr. Arnold-Forster's tenure of office, and involves the whole Administration. Briefly put, our charge—and it is, we believe, a charge which can be fully substantiated—comes to this. The Government at the close of the South African War, or say in 1902, were fully cognisant of the lessons of that war, and of what was needed to give us a sound and practical Army,—an Army fit to do the Imperial work for which it exists. Yet, with the lessons of the war fully before them, and with our Imperial requirements patent to all, the Government have failed to give us the Army that we need, or anything like it. They had a great opportunity, and they have misused it. Instead of placing the military forces of the nation on a sound and practical basis, they have left us in a condition of military chaos, with nothing settled, but everything unsettled ; with a host of tentative schemes and proposals before the nation, and yet with none of them brought to fruition. The things which were good. in our old system they have either left undeveloped, or else have inoculated with the virus of sterility. The new things which they have introduced have, with one exception—the Yeomanry—proved unproductive. They have left undone the things which they ought to have done, and what they have done was in most cases not worth doing.
Let us consider shortly what the war taught us. In the first place, it taught us that our field and horse artillery were not equal to the tasks of modern warfare, and that if we were to prepare, not for peace parades or for fighting unarmed savages, but for the awful ordeal of war with a Great Power, we must provide ourselves with a new and greatly improved artillery. It also showed that if small armies have to meet great ones, it is essential that the proportion of artillery with the numerically weaker force shall be specially large. In other words, the lesson of the war for us as regards artillery was that we must have not only the best guns which modern science and modern experience can devise, but also an over- whelming supply of such guns in hand. and in reserve. Though you may to a certain extent improvise troops during the continuance of a war, you cannot improvise artillery. How have we profited by this lesson ? What have we done during our three years of reprieve to strengthen our artillery? Practically nothing. The Army Estimates Memorandum talks about a few batteries to be delivered in July, or even earlier ; but as a matter of fact we shall not have the artillery we need, and which the Government knew we needed four years ago, till 1907. That is, though we knew four years ago what we wanted, and though it only takes two years to supply our wants, we shall not have secured the safety which a proper supply of artillery will give us until six years after we received our lesson. Who can say, in face of facts like Another equally patent lesson of the war was the practical value of our Militia system. In spite of the neglect from which the Militia suffered, and in spite also of the constant tendency of the War Office and of our military authorities to regard the Militia as the worthless toy of foolish civilians who preferred a cheap and nasty article to " the real thing," the Militia sent more than a hundred. thousand men oversea. The Militia, by sending infantry and artillery to Cairo and the Mediterranean, also set free Regular Forces for service in South Africa. Finally, by doing garrison duty at home, they enabled us to send a far larger proportion of our Regular troops out of these islands than would have been possible if the Militia had not existed. Emphatically the lesson of the war was that the Militia proved itself then, as it had always proved itself in the past, a vital portion of our military system ; and that, in spite of the neglect with which it had been treated, it could still do us immense service in an. oversea campaign. In these circumstances, is it too much to say that the Government ought to have determined to improve and develop the Militia, as a force which could be relied on in times of military stress ? Yet in the three years at their disposal the Government have done abso- lutely nothing to improve or develop the Militia. There was a little talk for a time of creating a Militia Reserve, but this soon came to nothing, and instead. the Govern- ment allowed. Mr. Arnold-Forster to go forward with his proposals for getting rid of the Militia altogether, as a. redundant and useless body. In fact, they read the lesson. thus :—' The Militia has made it possible for us to finish the war ; therefore we will get rid of the Militia as redundant.' The conclusion of this inane and ridiculous syllogism appears in substance in the Memorandum published on Tuesday. There we are informed. with a kind of futile satisfaction that the condition of the Militia remains unsatisfactory, and—" blessed word "—that a considerable proportion of the Militia Artillery is " redundant " for defence purposes. After an expression of regret that it is not possible to effect " immediate and rapid reductions " in the Militia, the following observation occurs : " It is obvious that if the Militia is to be used for service abroad, it must undergo a longer period. of training than at present, and must be provided with a larger number of trained officers than at present it possesses." Now we are fully aware that the supply of officers for the Militia is a very grave and difficult matter, but it is also one for which the Govern- ment have made no serious attempt to find a remedy. In any case, we must protest most strongly against this way of speaking of the Militia. Any one reading the Memorandum would suppose that the Militia had never been used for service abroad in recent years, and that under present con- ditions it would be quite useless to think of employing them abroad. Yet, as a matter of fact, only three years ago there was something like a hundred thousand Militiamen.
actually doing service abroad, and doing it, on the whole, extremely well. In many districts in South Africa, and districts infested with Boers, the only British force was composed of Militia, and Militia officers were responsible for large areas within the fighting zone. Militia posts were again and again subject to Boer attacks, and on.
the whole came well out of the ordeal. Furthermore, when Militia regiments were used, as they were on ono or two occasions, not merely to guard lines of com- munication or to hold posts, but actually to attack the Boers, they did. their duty admirably. The Boers were always ready to swoop down upon our weak places and to capture our soldiers, but, unless we are mistaken, their successes in this direction in the case of the Militia, were by no means conspicuous. On one occasion, no doubt, a Militia regiment was severely handled by the Boers ; but plenty of incidents to match this could be found in the annals of the Regular Army. In fact, the Militia did all it was asked to do, and did it well. Yet now Mr. Arnold-Forster tells us, in effect, that it is " obvious " that the Militia as at present constituted could not go on service abroad. Mr. Arnold-Forster might have said, with reason, that the Militia would do better service abroad if it were better organised, but to use the language he does is grossly unfair to the Militia, and absolutely inconsistent with known facts. It is true that Mr. Arnold-Forster concludes his animadversions on the Militia with a vague The third lesson of the war, one of vast importance, concerns the Volunteers. If the war showed anything, it showed us that in the Volunteers we had a force capable of doing work which few men in this country had pre- viously realised could be done by our civilian soldiers. Up till the year 1900 the Volunteers were looked upon as essentially a force for home defence,—a body of men whose use would be in case of invasion to line our hedge- rows and ditches. The war showed that, without knowing it, we had in our Volunteers a force capable of doing far more than this,—a force truly Imperial in its uses. The Volunteers, we suddenly realised, were a great reservoir of men trained in the essentials of soldiership, from which, if we understood how to open the sluices, could be drawn fighting men of the very best kind for oversea service. Even though the military authorities managed the sluices with almost incredible stupidity, the reservoir in one way or another gave us some thirty thousand men for oversee, service. This was an immense achievement, and even if the Volunteers did, and could do, nothing else for us, it would have abundantly justified their existence. But this actual employment of thirty thousand men trained by the Volunteers by no means exhausts the lessons of the war in regard to the Volunteers. We believe that when the investigations which our correspondent, " Volunteer Field Officer," is making are completed, it will be found that had the Government known how to tap the reservoir, or had they cared to learn from those who did know, we might have obtained not thirty, but sixty thousand Volunteers for service in the field abroad. When the first call for the service companies was made the response in almost all regiments was three or four times in excess of the number asked for, and a very little knowledge and sympathy on the part of the War Office would have made the whole of the men who thus volunteered available for use at the front. In other words, the lesson of the war as regards the Volunteers is that we have in them a great reservoir of men which can be drawn upon at a national crisis for oversea service.
Here, again, might it not be supposed that the Govern- ment would have argued in this way ?—' A force which can do this is not a force which is to be treated as only useful for home defence. On the contrary, it has been shown that we have in the Volunteers a great Imperial asset, and this asset we must preserve and enlarge to the best of our power. It may be true that the greatest number of men we could use for home defence would be two hundred thousand; but since the Volunteers have shown us that they act as an Imperial Reserve, we will do everything in our power to increase the size and depth of the reservoir of fighting men that has been revealed to us by the South African Campaign. Instead of cutting down the Volunteers, we will encourage every man we can to become a Volunteer and to remain a Volunteer, confident that if we handle the force properly we can count upon drawing some twenty-five per cent. from its numbers at a great national crisis.' That is how one would have expected a Government of men who cared for the Empire to read the lesson of the South African War. Instead, ever since the war we have seen the Government neglecting the lesson, or rather during the last year and a half busy in reading it as follows :—' The Volunteers showed us during the war that they form a reservoir of fighting men for oversee, fighting. Let us then take care to keep our reservoir as small as possible, lest at another national crisis we might be embarrassed, not by the offer of thirty thousand, but of sixty thousand men who have learnt the essentials of soldiership among the Volunteers.'
Such are the chief lessons of the war. Unhappily, they are lessons which the Government, as we have shown, have almost entirely neglected. Though they strike the man of ordinary intelligence as obvious, the Government do not appear to have realised any one of them. They have neglected to give us the guns we need, and they have determined not to improve the Militia and Volunteers, but instead to regard one force as redundant, and to cripple the other as an Imperial body able to come to our aid at a moment of peril and crisis. These are the conclusions which are written between the lines in the Army Estimates Memorandum for 1905. Is the nation THE ART OF WASTING PUBLIC TIME.
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