HOW TO SHORTEN THE WAR.—II. COMPULSORY VOLUNTEERING.
WE showed last week how the war might be shortened by stimulating the surrender of German soldiers, and the weakening of German man-power be thereby achieved. To-day we desire to point out how our man-power might be strengthened by a system of compulsory Volunteering for men over military age.
The whole of the manhood of Great Britain up to the age of forty-one are either fighting or preparing to fight, with the exception of those men who are physically unfit, or those of whom it has been decided that they are doing work at home so important that they cannot be spared for the field. It is notorious that a certain number of men have been improperly exempted, and that either women or male substitutes of over forty-one should be found for them ; but we are working towards a satisfactory solution of this loss of power, and in any case the principle of compulsory war service up to forty-one is with us. That is a great gain, but it is not enough. We arc convinced that we shall not get through the warwithout compulsorily bringing into otir war organization all males between the ages of forty-one and sixty-one who arc not medically unfit, training them to arms in their spare time, and placing them at the disposal of the military authorities for home defence in case of invasion or other great emergency. The Government may put off laying this duty upon the middle-aged, but we are quite certain that sooner or later they will have to face the problem, and will have to solve it in the way we have suggested. They must array the whole nation as the Germans are about to array the German nation. We shall not win the war without resort to this plan ; or rather if we neglect to train and organize the men over military age we shall not be able to win the war without running risks which no sane body of men would dare to run. The Government may of course postpone matters for three or even six.months, but the time will come for all that. The only difference will be that if it comes after an undue prolongation of the policy of the ostrich, the difficulties will be greater, not less, than if the matter be at once faced in earnest.
The essential thing is to train, organize, and equip the men over military age in such a way that the commerce of the country will not be dislocated, and that the men to whom home defence will be entrusted will be able to continue to earn their own living as they do now, and earn it without unnecessary friction and without having imposed upon them burdens too hard to bear. Happily, we have already been taught how this can be done, for a very large number of men have done and are doing this very thing. That selforganized Volunteer Force whose fortunes have been constantly followed in the Spectator, and whose Central Organization was at a moment of difficulty supported by the generosity of Spectator readers, the force which has now been recognized and taken over by the Government and has won such generous praise from Lord French, Sir Francis Lloyd, and other military authorities of the first order, may be said to be founded and maintained upon the following principle : Unless invasion takes place and the Volunteer passes automatically from a Volunteer into a Regular, he shall never be deprived of the opportunity of earning his own livelihood. He shall never be forced to train or work under conditions which render it impossible for him to discharge the duties in civil life, whether of factory, shop, office, or profession, which enable him to live and maintain his wife and family, and make his contribution to the industrial and commercial energy of the nation. The Volunteers have elaborated a system so elastic that it fits the breadwinner without galling him, and yet provides sufficient time for training and a considerable amount of time even for actual service before embodiment. The simple secret consists, as we have often said in these columns, in getting men to subscribe as it were their out-of-office and recreation hours, their off-duty time, to preparing themselves for defending their homes and liberties in arms. The Volunteer gives up to the Mother Country that leisure which in old days he thought quite honestly was meant for golf or cricket or football or a dozen other amusements. He has, so to speak, spontaneously sacrificed his Saturday afternoon golf, his Sunday walk, or his evening game of billiards to his country's call—an act of self-negation rendered all the more notable by the fact that at the beginning of the Volunteer movement his efforts were repelled by the War Office, not merely with chill contempt, but even with threats and menaces. Though every one now speaks well of the Volunteers, we recall the time two years ago when persons who, like the present writer, advocated the formation of Volunteer Corps with all the energy at their command, were treated almost as if they were criminal lunatics, and solemnly warned that somehow or other, though it was never explained how, they were taking action which would lead to the ruin of the country. And yet we never advocated Volunteering except for those over military age !
The time has now come when the Government must make all men between forty-one and sixty-one who are medically lit do what the original Volunteers did spontaneously and of their own free will. There must, in a word, be compulsory Volunteering. A good many people, including a correspondent in this week's Spectator, have protested against the use of the word " Volunteering " under such conditions as we propose. As a matter of fact, however, we see no objection. At any rate, there are plenty of precedents in the history of the English-speaking race. The legislation of Mr. Pitt and his successors in power during the Napoleonic Wars in effect established compulsory Volunteering, and equally compulsory in fact, though not in name, was the Volunteering on which Mr. Lincoln's military policy rested. In both cases men were told that they could only be exempted from service in the Regular Army or the Militia if they joined and remained in a Volunteer. Corps. This is probably the best way in which the compulsion of the men over forty could be established. It is the way in which the elastic, and therefore cheap as well as efficient, organization of the Volunteers can be maintained. We would enact that every man medically fit between forty-one and sixty-one should be deemed to be a member of the Home Defence, or Reserve, Army, to use the phrase of the Napoleonic period, unless he should have joined some recognized Volunteer Corps. Further, the Army Council should be empowered to make such regulations for the training and organization in suitable units of such men as refused or neglected to obtain exemption by becoming enrolled in a Volunteer Corps, and became automatically members of the Army of Reserve. The less onerous and the more honourable status of the Volunteers would obviously make the majority elect for service with the Volunteers under the present system, which would not be altered.
Many persons will no doubt ask us why we propose to plunge into all the difficulties connected with compulsion when the Volunteer Force is doing so well, and when it is clear that if the Government liked to come forward more openly with offers of assistance to poor corps, and would find arms and equipment, the Volunteers might, without any of the disturbances caused by force, be raised to some three hundred thousand men. Our answer is very simple and we are sure perfectly sound, though it is not one which may be accepted by our critics. We want compulsory Volunteering because we are anxious above all things that an obligation not too hard for them to bear shall be laid upon the men of non-military age. We deem it of the most vital importance to the welfare of the nation that none of the men who remain in this country and to whom its home defence will be entrusted shall be, either in the matter of training or service, deprived of the opportunity of earning their own livelihood or even have that ability impaired in the slightest degree. Further, we wish it in order that their health shall not suffer by their being asked or expected to undertake more military work than they can safely accomplish, unless of course some great national emergency makes it necessary for them to bear any strain required and to spend themselves, no matter what their age or strength, for the good of the nation. Now nothing is clearer to any one who has studied the problem of how to use the Volunteers without breaking down the best men in the force than the following proposition. The more Volunteers there are the easier it is to train them, to make useof them for those duties which half-time or quarter-time or even onetenth-time home soldiers can perform, and so set free wholetime soldiers for the front. If the personnel of a battalion of Volunteers could be doubled—raised to, say, fifteen hundred men—it would be far easier than it is now for the unit, even before embodiment, to do a certain amount of guard and similar work. At present, under the system by which we only skim the cream of men over military age for Volunteers, there is an enormous amount of waste in time and labour. For example, with a great deal of difficulty and labour we bring men by special trains and other modes of conveyance to dig trenches or to perform guard work at places distant from their homes because they are the only men available and because they are zealous and self-sacrificing. The ideal of course is to make use of the men of nonmilitary age who are already on the spot. But just now as often as not they are not Volunteers. If however every man not medically unfit were in the Volunteers, and after he had finished his drill and his musketry training still remained in the Volunteers, it would in almost every case be found that where a piece of work had to be done the Volunteers actually living within marching distance of that work could be utilized for its performance. Look at what happens now. We take a purely imaginary case. A piece of trench-digging has to be done in some portion of Essex. Now it may often happen that the men who dig this trench are brought from the South or West of London and its suburbs. But this strain is laid upon the Volunteers because there are not enough of them—because owing to there being no system of compulsion the men close to the place where the digging has to be done have not been organized to do it. In the same way, if there is a vulnerable point—a munition factory or some other place of the kind— to guard, the guard ought to be provided as far as possible locally, and not by people scraped together from distant places where it happens that the spirit of Volunteering is strong and the men keen and eager. In a word, the great enlargement of the Volunteer Force which would take place under a system of compulsory Volunteering would enormously lessen the labour of the Volunteers. But though we are convinced that compulsion would spread the work to be done over a force five or possibly ten times as large as it is now, it must not be supposed that a vast amount of actual work would be cast upon the Volunteers. What would be cast upon them would be training in arms and proper organization, which would cover England and Scotland with units that would even on the first day of embodiment make a fair show, and after a fortnight of embodiment provide troops of considerable utility for defence purposes. Embodiment would mean not a confused, restless, and irresponsible levee en masse, but a calling to arms of people who at any rate knew the alphabet of their business, and, what is more important, were in recognized units in which they understood what their place was and whom they had to obey. If you have done forty drills with a battalion you are not it perfect soldier, you are not even the beginnings of a fair soldier, but at any rate you are very much better than a man in a half-excited, half-suspicious, and altogether despairing mob. We want to make Volunteering in many ways much easier than it is now through large numbers and an efficient system of organization. But this we can do—and we may indeed say this we can only do—by the application of compulsion to men over military age. There remains the problem of the rural districts. It is quite easy to organize the Town Guards in towns or in urban areas, but when you come to the true country district the problem is much more difficult. Personally we believe the solution which will be found to work the best will be the solution which, unless we are mistaken, our fathers and grandfathers adopted in the "sixties "—the making of the company, or even the platoon, not the battalion, the rural unit. Then we should not see the absurdity of a rural labourer being asked to trudge five miles in the winter to do an hour's drill with his brother-recruits. A man must not be asked to go more than a mile beyond his village. But here again the numbers which compulsion would bring would greatly facilitate matters. If there are only five men in the village who will volunteer under present conditions, and if the next village is three or four miles away, their case is hopeless. If under compulsion there are fifty men available, the giving them an elementary training in arms becomes a far easier and more practical proposition.
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