SOME MILITARY RECOLLECTIONS OF A CIVILIAN.
LORD HALDANE ON THE FUTURE OF MILITARY SERVICE IN BRITAIN.
T N criticizing the proposals of the National Service League Lord Haldane says that their scheme "did not even profess to provide the Expeditionary Army for the Continent which they [the General Stall regarded as the only adequate instrument for the int- mediately possible strategical requirement." Of course the scheme of the National Service League did not provide for an Expeditionary Force, and for the very good reason that they intended, like all other sane per- sons, that such an Expeditionary Army for the Continent should primarily be provided out of the Regular Army. plus certain reinforcements from the Special Reserve and the Yeomanry, as was actually arranged by Lord Haldane. To assume that because we were asking for the safety that can only conic from a Nation trained to arms we were therefore condemning the provision of an efficient Expedi- tionary Force, is quite unworthy of Lord Haldane. It shows, indeed, to what shifts he is driven when he tries to defend himself and his scientific soldiers for their pre-war obsessions.
Next, Lord Haldane mentions the utterly preposterous argument with which his scientific soldiers provided hills when he desired to check the growing popularity of the proposals of the National Service League. Unable to meet our arguments, they had the audacity to tell him to try to frighten the British People by assuring them that if they had National Service, their Regular Army, their Imperial Gendarmerie, as the Spectator has always called it. must be destroyed, and that then we should stand naked before our enemies. Nothing in reality could have beer* farther from the truth. As was asserted again and again in the Spectator, all the experience we possessed showed that the effect of military training on our youths was to break down the ignorance, and the shyness due to ignorance. which prevented the enlistment of many lads. Instead of killing recruiting for the Regular Army, universal training in the Territorial Force would have immensely stimulated it. The advertisement that our militaiy system would have obtained thereby would have been sufficient to bring in additional recruits by the ten thousand. Milker! training has always proved a school of patriotism and of public duty. • Thesit assertions of the Spectator and of others in opposi- tion to the academic ineptitudes of the l' Great General Staff " can easily be proved. Take the tiny, but none the less significant; experiment of the Spectator Experimental Company. Of the hundred lads who joined that force, only one intended when he enlisted to adopt the military career—and he only if he liked it. Yet when the Company broke up after six months of intensely hard training half the recruits who had had no intention of becoming soldiers joined some branch of His Majesty's Naval or Military Forces. They had caught the fever, as our
Pacificists would say. The " No Recruits " argument of the General Staff is also answered by the fact that the old Militia always proved a fwitful recruiting-ground for the Army. Many men went into the Militia to try what soldier- ing was like, and, finding they got on well;determined to transfer into the Regular Army. Later, the Territorial units proved seed-grounds of a similar kind. Another example of this infection by experiment was found even during the war: Something like. a million men went into the Volunteer Force first, and having learned a little of what soldiering was like, and having had their eyes opened to the injustice of the accusations as to tyranny and oppression, voluntarily undertook to arm and train, not merely against the'vague risks of invasion, but in order to face the supreme ordeal of defending their country in the trenches of Belgium and France. This pontifical statement of the bigwigs of the General Staff as to National Service killing recruiting is alone enough to put them out of court in regard to the other questions of military policy on which Lord Haldane quotes thole.
Almost as bad was the blunder of the General Staff in regard to the National Reserve. (Remember, here I am not speaking of the younger men on the General Staff, but only of a little group of military pundits at the top, who before the war constituted the Oracle to whom Lord Haldane was wont to appeal.) On this point I can speak with precision, for I had the honour to originate the idea of the National Reserve and to help to work out the details in the first area in which it was raised —namely, in the county of Surrey. The General Staff, it was always whispered, I believe accurately, were against the National Reserve from the beginning ; they did not, they declared, know how to fit it into their system, and therefore they considered it would be useless. Happily, however, Lord Haldane did not back the Oracle here. He stated originally that the Army Council had decided not to take up the proposal officially--i.e., had decided against the scheme for a National . Reserve. They would not forbid the experiment, and would even watch it with interest, provided that no public money were spent upon it ; in other words, if the necessary expenses were paid by an enthusiastic civilian. When, however, the scheme proved a success, Lord-Haldane, to his very great credit, did not hesitate to admit six weeks later that the decision not to establish a National Reserve was a mistake. He accord- ingly threw over the pundits, gave most generous help to the scheme, and made it obligatory on all Territorial County Associations. And here let me say in parenthesis that though the General Staff, as a soldier once expressed it to ins, " always had a down on the National Reserve," the vast majority of aoldiers met the civilian originator with a zeal and enthusiasm equal to his own. General after General expressed his sympathy and goodwill, and proved once more that, taken as a whole, the upper ranks of our Army are far less prejudiced than the chiefs of any profession in the land. I could never have accomplished the difficult task of inaugurating a Register of all the trained men in the country if it had not been for the kind- ness and sympathy shown me by leading General Officers, headed by that gallant veteran, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, and including, to name only two, General Elles and General Codrington.
Incidentally the success of the National Reserve, which the then ruling spirits of the General Staff could find no use for, illustrates the proposition laid. down above, that the Arniy is our greatest-school of patriotism. - The men who joined the National Reserve' and put their necks back into the military collar had no'prospect of getting anything out of it. Is it possible that they would have consented to do what
they did if service in the Army was so repellent as the General Staff argued that it wan, when they said that if you had universal training the youth of the country would be so fed up with soldiering that very few of them would join the Regular Army ? And here I may mention incidentally that without the National Reserve, so much despised and so nearly rejected owing to the influence of the General Staff, Lord Haldane's Expeditionary Force, of which he was so justly proud, could not have bent fully mobilized. It must have started very short in many of its Cadres but for the existence of Class I. of the National Reserve. In the summer of 1914 the Special Reserve, which, as it will be remembered, played a great part in Lord Haldane's scheme, was something like forty thousand men short. These forty thousand men were supplied actually, and not merely figuratively, at a moment's notice, by Class I. of the National Reserve. And yet only three months before I bad been told by a distinguished member of the General Staff that he would far rather have one extra regiment of Regulars than the whole of the National Reaerve, then numbering over two hundred thousand men ! The way in which the bulk of the National Reserve were mobilized to their full extent, and employed either in the National Defence Force or in the Territorial or Regular Armies, I need not describe here, though it is a very- fine story of duty done quietly and in silence, and some day ought to be told in full. I have given two reasons for refusing to treat the opinion of the General Staff as conclusive against the policy of the National Service League, as Lord Haldane holds it should be treated. Next week I will give a still stronger example of the folly, nay, danger, of trusting to the opinion of that body in a matter of National Policy.
Previous page
