INQUIRY INTO WAR QUESTIONS.
grin discussion which took place in the House of Lords on Monday on the need of an inquiry into the work done by the various Army Departments, and by the Army itself, during the present war, only confirms us in the fear which we expressed alortnight ago in dealing with the remounts question,—that is, the fear lest the main question to be resolved by such an inquiry as the Govern- ment has promised should be obscured by side-issues. Not only the opponents but the friends of the Govern- ment have occupied themselves with desperately earnest discussion of points which after all matter comparatively little. Our own view is, to put the matter as shortly as possible, that it is little use crying over spilt milk. What we have to do is to see that the milk shall not be spilt again. After punishing the guilty wherever possible, we must make sure that our preparations for future con- tingencies shall be such as to prevent us from having to pay in the same scandalously stupid and wasteful way on another occasion. We want to, and we believe we shall, come out of this war much stronger than when we went into it. But the first and best way of strengthening ourselves is not by doing what so many of the Government's friends and critics seem to think is the right thing to do. They want to spend time in proving that an incompetent Department broke down in its work, and because it had made no preparations, wasted the nation's money with criminal prodigality. We know that already ; let us get on to something which we do not know. The real, vital questions raised by the war are far wider and greater. If, in spite of Lord Tweedmouth's warning against the use of metaphor, we may go back to our homely proverb, we would sum up the business by urging that what we have to do is not to examine the precise size of the splash of milk on the pavement, but to try to see what it was that jogged the milkman's arm.
Let us before we go further, and lest our views on the broad question of the necessity and the scope of an inquiry be misunderstood, make our position perfectly clear. We desire inquiry up to a certain point. But we believe that the scope of such an inquiry as has been promised by the Government may easily be made, or become, too wide to be really useful. For these reasons. The iesults of an ideal inquiry, in our opinion, should be two. The first result—first because it is a matter of the immediate moment, and not a matter which should be, or could be, deferred for deliberate national consideration—should be the summary punishment of those who have failed in their duty to the nation. We want, that is, exemplary punish- ment for the guilty, and would not for a moment allow them to be sheltered by the colossal size of their own muddles and misdoings. The second result—it is, as we hope to show, a result even more important–. should be the thorough learning of particular and distinct lessons for the future. First, then, let us state our view as to the case of those who have been proved—if any are proved— to have failed in their duty towards the nation. They will divide themselves into two classes : (1) military ; (2) civilian As to the military, if an officer is proved not to have done his duty in certain circumstances, whether on the actual field of battle or in the non-combatant business of working a department, let him be punished by dis- missal. As to civilians, if a civilian has cheated us, let us make sure that he shall never be. in a position to cheat us again, and if it is in our power so to punish him, let him be punished by fine or by imprisonment. But, in the case both of officers and civilians, do not let us allow our energies to carry us beyond the punish- ment of guilt or culpable negligence. Let us, above all things, avoid Lord Rosebery's "siege of Troy,"—an in- quiry lasting ten years, with all sorts of belated disclosures, six-year-old affidavits by German waiters, and all the rest of what is likely if an inquiry such as the Opposition appears to want is actually once set on foot. Long-winded inquiries are far too apt to end, not in the punishment of those who deserve punishment, but in their protection. Let the inquiry be concerned, not with what might have been of use to us, but with what will be of use to us. Important as the question of punishment of wrongdoers is —important, that is to say, as it is to let it be clearly realised. by officer and civilian alike that it does not pay to work lazily or on crooked lines—there are other questions infinitely more important with which such an ideal inquiry as we have in our mind should deal. They are not ques- tions involving the price -of tinned beef; they are not questions involving the price of live horses. They are questions involving the whole of our national military policy, and they are questions upon which a large and valuable light will be thrown by a review of what we have been able to do, and what we have not been able to do, in *present war,—questions which, as a matter of course, involve the possibilities of what we shall do in wars of the future.
There is, then, one point which the present war has raised which we should like to see made the main question to be discussed by the promised Cemmittee of Inquiry. Hitherto it has not been even mentioned by the Govern- Ment's friends or critics, who have confined themselves to the attractive problems of the actions of individual officers and men. Yet in our view there is no deeper or more serious question to be discussed. It involves the whole of our military policy; it is the pivot upon which the worth of all future Army Estimates must turn. It is, briefly stated, the difference in fighting value between the " trained " and the " untrained " man,"—i.e., between the Regular and. the Volunteer or other improvised soldier. Is there a difference, and if so, what is it ? Has it been established that it is worth while to spend the time we spend now in insisting on exact, machine-like, barrack- square drill?. Is training typified by the "trussed fowl" attitude of the infantry soldier right and. valuable ? Do these things make a soldier? Do they help? Do they matter? We do not want to assume arbitrarily that they do not, but we know that there are thousands of men in South Africa who can do all the minutite of drill to perfection, and also thousands who are per- fectly ignorint of them, and we want to know the comparative results of knowledge and ignorance in this respect. What has the war taught us on the question ? Take a man who (1) is gifted with the amount of courage which falls to the lot of the average English- man, who (2) is a reasonably intelligent man, who (3) knows how to shoot straight and well, but who (4) has never been trained in barrack-square drill, or, indeed, in drill of any kind. Has he, or has he not; been proved by the war to be as useful a soldier for fighting purposes as the Regular who has gone through his three or five years' training, and is perfect in all matters of drill and profes- sional soldiering ?
Our question seems at first sight a very simple one, and we accept beforehand the answer of a large number of pro- fessional soldiers that all this barrack-square drill matters very much indeed. We shall be told that you cannot get combined, disciplined, corporate, co-ordinate action under fire unless you have this preliminary barrack-square drudgery and rigidity. It may be so ; we do not say that it is not. All we assert is that it is a matter of vital importance to the nation to find out whether it is so, and to answer this question as to the comparative merits of Regulars and untrained men by reference to the facts disclosed in South Africa, and ascertained by a strict and impartial inquiry. At present the position is this. One distinguished officer comes back from the front and declares that neither Volunteers, nor Yeomanry, nor Colonials have been of anything approaching the use generally supposed. The men upon whom you must depend, he asserts, are " trained " regiments of the Line, " trained " Artillery, and " trained " Cavalry. Another distinguished officer comes back with the verdict that " untrained " Colonials have done splendidly ; that " untrained " Yeo- manry have shown themselves every whit as good as " trained " Cavalry, and that Volunteers only partially trained have picked up the business of fighting as well as " troined " Linesmen. No verdicts could be more contra- dietory. What we want to arrive at is, what is the balance of valuable, expert opinion? With that question answered, and not till then, we shall be able to get to work on our Army in a sensible, practical way.
To put the matter in a nutshell : If the Auxiliary Forces are found to have done worse in the war than the Regulars, then, concluding that they have not done so well because they have not received the same amount of barrack-square training, we must either give them more barrack-square training, or cease to reckon with them as a really valuable fighting force. If, on the other hand, the evidence goes to show that the untrained men have for fighting purposes done quite as well as Regulars, we may safely assume that the training of the barrack- square has had no perceptible effect upon the fighting value of the Regular soldier, and may work out the inevit- able conclusions. We are convinced that the question we have raised is far more important than those with which the Government's critics and. apologists have mainly concerned themselves. We can only express our sincere hope that its importance may be realised by those who are now, and will be in the future, charged with the work of organising the military resources of the country. There- fore we ask for a real and impartial inquiry into the comparative combative merits of the Regulars and un- trained men. No one, of course, would wish to pit one against the other in rivalry, for it may be admitted at once that, taken as a whole, no one could have done better than the British private of the Regulars. What we want to know is whether the untrained man did as well or per- ceptibly worse ? We want, again, this inquiry to cover the whole field and all the forces, and, to be enforced by the statistics as to surrenders. It has always been said that untrained men might do very well while winning, but that if they got into a tight place they would show the want of that cohesion and. co-operation that years of train- ing alone can give the soldier, and that they would show it by panic and panic's chief phenomenon, surrender That sounds superficially reasonable. We want to know whether it can be proved by. the facts, and whether, in truth, the untrained men were more ready than the Regulars to throw up the sponge. If they were not, and if in other respects, such as willingness to attack and to "stick it out" while holding difficult positions, their equality of military sacrifice can be sustained, then we have a great and most important fact ascertained and recorded, and one on which we can base our future military policy.
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