GEORGE, DUKE OF CAMBRIDGE.* THE Duke of Cambridge was long
regarded by the Army as its acknowledged, and, as it were, hereditary, champion against the dissolvent forms of Parliamentary government; and this view was in a large measure justified by the notorious improvi- dence which signalised all our dealings with the Army during the nineteenth century. Neither the nation nor the politicians ever seemed to realise that an effective Army, however small, is the last thing in the world that can be extemporised at the eleventh hour, nor to understand, though they had frequent practical demonstration of the fact, both at home and abroad, how ruinous, if not altogether fatal, are the consequences of unpreparedness for war. Untaught by the experience of the Crimea, England entered upon the suppression of the Indian Mutiny, and upon nearly every subsequent campaign, with a totally insufficient force, and viewed the conclusion of each war as it came, not as the opportunity for setting her military house in order, but as the final closing of the gates of Janus, and therefore as the fitting occasion for wholesale reduction. The one consistent opponent of all such hasty reductions was the Commander-in-Chief. Hence the not altogether un- founded belief in the Service that if H.R.H. had not com- manded the Army during this critical period there would have been no British Army left to command. It is not, in the circumstances, surprising that Colonel Willoughby Verner should find many occasions upon which the Duke, who objected to every new proposal almost as a matter of course, was very often justified by results. But one cannot help feeling that, but for the unfortunate ineptitude of the attempts at Army reform during the past five years, Colonel Verner would have been less successful in arguing that the halo with which he has invested the champion of the old order in representing him as a progressive soldier was all his by right.
For our own part, we should base our gratitude to the Duke of Cambridge on quite other grounds. His greatness lay in the wise instinct with which his whole house, and in particular his cousin the Queen, were so signally gifted. His opinions and wishes were overruled again and again, and this he very greatly deplored. But once his protest was made known, and the Cabinet decision given, he accepted the decision with a loyalty and a good sense which it would have been impossible to expect from any ordinary Commander-in-Chief. A Wolseley or a Kitchener would probably have held that the abandonment of principles which be believed to be vital, or the inauguration of reforms which he held to be injurious, must either compel him to resign office in favour of some other soldier who was more in harmony with the party in power, or else to bring the conflict of opinions down into the arena of party politics, as there has been of late a certain regrettable tendency to do. The continued tenure of office by the Duke of Cambridge, on the other hand, during times of change, or, 8,..9 he must often have viewed them, even of revolution, was a guarantee, first, of continuity of policy in the Army itself, and, secondly, of loyal obedience to the will of the nation. No doubt the Duke was inclined to put the interests of the Army as a caste above those of the nation, and the interests of the Crown, whose particular servants he held the Army to be, first of all; and he shared the suspicions with which many of his Royal ancestors regarded a Parlia- mentary Army. He knew, however, exactly how far he could carry his own personal convictions, and he never once considered * Military Life of 11.R.1I. George, Puke of Cambridge. By Colonel Willoughby Verner, Assisted by Captain Parker. 2 cols. London : John Murray. 1368. net.]
the adoption of contrary views as a personal insult to himself; while even when his views prevailed his personal position and character were such that he never could be a military adventurer. Not only was he emphatically not a progressive, but it was, at the particular period during which he held the command, an almost unmixed blessing that he was even ultra- conservative.
But great as is the interest which attaches to the personal aspect of the life of one who, as his biographer reminds us, formed the link between the Duke of Wellington's Army and the Army of to-day, perhaps the main value of Colonel Verner's book lies in the view with which it furnishes us of our complicated Army problem as seen from the old room at the Horse Guards. Of course this view is a somewhat partial one, and it certainly appears that Colonel Verner might have made a better book if he had regarded himself less as the biographer of an individual and more as the historian of fifty years of War Office and Army problems. A more rigorous selection of the letters and papers printed might have made room for a more elaborate account of the opinions and policy of the various important persons who were in charge of the War Office during the period, and Colonel Verner's own interpolations are also more often unfortunate than not. Nevertheless, to those who are familiar with the main outlines of Army problems, or with the highly technical and complicated questions of War Office organisation, this presentation of the more conservative view will repay careful study.
It is impossible for us to deal at length with all the topics which arise on what is practically a review of fifty years of the history of the Army. We therefore select for more detailed notice the account which Colonel Verner gives us of the old Duke's opinions upon what is certainly the burning question of the day in Pall Mall ; we mean the problem of the Second Line Army. The real puzzle which has confronted the War Office for many years, and is still unsolved, is how to make a tail-coat out of material sufficient only for an Eton jacket. Before the Cardwell reforms we had a small Army, but no Reserve ; after the Cardwell reforms a small Reserve, but, as far as the Home islands are concerned, no Army. The disasters of Isandhlwana and Majuba are indeed largely attributable to these facts, the battalions which were there represented being preparatory schools, and no longer fighting corps. For a large war, again, or for the defence of the Indian frontier, the Regular Army, even with Lord Cardwell's Reserve, does not, as Lord Roberts has warned us, provide us with anything like the numbers we require, and yet leaves England seriously denuded of troops.
The Duke was, unfortunately, not sufficiently impressed with the need for great numbers; his prejudices were undoubtedly in favour of the long-service Regular, and as much of him as possible. But he was forced to acknowledge that anything like large numbers of Regular troops were out of the question, and this forced him into what is virtually an untenable position. He was quite alive, like the Duke of Wellington before him, to the value of the Militia as providing a second line to the Army. But he would have been unable to agree, even had it ever been proposed to him, that the only remedy for the serious and constantly increasing decline in its numbers—short of the enforcement of the Militia Ballot in times of peace, to which no Government of his day would have consented—lay in so arranging the conditions of service in the Militia as to make it possible for the employed population generally to take service in its ranks. Yet one can hardly be surprised that so intensely conservative a soldier should have held the views that he did upon the paramount importance of long continuous periods of training. "Of course, I could not for a moment subscribe to the idea that six months' drill could possibly make a soldier; indeed, I should be very sorry to see three years' service made the rule, because I think that six years' is hardly enough."—(Speech in the House of Lords on Mr. Cardwell's Bill.) Consequently, although he seems to have realised that the Militia, and not the Regular Army, should be the true territorial troops, and wisely protested against their divorce from the Lord-Lieutenant and their mariage de convenance with those very territorial Regular regiments of which he disapproved, he contributed in no small degree to hasten the decline of the old Con- stitutional force. His views on training encouraged him to force the Militia more and more to try to be sham Regulars,
whilst in the interests of the Army he entirely approved of the present system under which thirty thousand Militiamen every year are passed into the Army, to the ruin of the Militia as an independent force.
A similar line of reasoning, and, as we think, a similar error,
underlay his attitude towards the early stages of the Volunteer movement. "I hope you will on no account give way to Volunteer Corps, of which I see so much said in the newspapers.
These will never answer ; they are unmanageable bodies, and would ruin our Army."—(Letter to Lord Panmure, Septem- ber 25th, 1857.) There are many eminent soldiers to-day who would certainly not consider themselves old-fashioned who subscribe to such doctrines. Colonel Verner appears to be one of them, while the following passage taken from a letter to Sir George Cornewall Lewis in 1862 advances the very arguments which were urged by a correspondent in the Spectator last autumn :— "I am confident that great mischief will arise if a money pay-
ment per head be granted to the Volunteers The money would be far better spent on the Regular Army or on the Militia. You may depend upon it, for every pound you thus spend on the Volunteers, Parliament will call upon you to make corre- sponding reductions in the Estimates for the Army, the very worst thing that could happen, for nothing would be so dangerous to the Empire as a system of allowing the Volunteers gradually to take the place of the Army."
The rival claims of continuous and intermittent military training are, however, even yet not finally determined. When they are, as we hope they soon will be, we shall have solved the problem which, largely for want of sufficiently reliable data, and partly owing to preconceived notions, the Duke of Cambridge and his contemporaries were only able to enunciate. At least it may be said of the Duke that he stated the two main propositions of the syllogism fairly and sensibly enough :— "The great thing we want in this country is a Reserve Force for the Army, whence the latter can be easily recruited in time of war."—Letter to Lord Panmure, 1856.
"The service [e.g., in the Volunteers] should be made as little irksome to the man as possible, and the object to be attained is therefore clearly to give the force to be enrolled such an organisa- tion as to combine, as far as possible, efficiency with the least amount of trouble or vexation to the parties forming it."— Memorandum on Volunteer Corps, 1859.
It has taken us half-a-century and the South African War to see that, granted the truth of these two propositions, they supply all the materials for a logical conclusion in the matter of the Second Line Army.
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