THE RIGHT WAY AND THE WRONG- WAY TO RECRUIT. T HERE
are plenty of excuses for the War Office for having hitherto managed the recruiting business rather badly, and we are not going to be so unfair to them as to "rub in" their mistakes. All the officers concerned have been doing their best with splendid devotion, but on a bad system. That is the long and short of the matter. Again, we are not going to talk as if the mismanagement were a fatal error which if it were not set right—as it can be—would deal a severe blow to the nation's dearest interests. We shall get the men in spite of the muddle. Our first impulse was to say nothing in criticism of the War Office methods. We think, however, that, since the business of recruiting must go on for many weeks to come, we should be doing harm, not good, if we refrained from pointing out why the machine was running badly, and being impeded by the friction, the smoke, and the heat which are engendered by bad running.
How would a firm of business people have proceeded if they had wanted suddenly to get four hundred and fifty thousand men from the nation as a whole, and to get them in double-quick time ? The first thing they would have said was that, as the population was about forty-five millions, what they were asking for was that every com- munity should give them a number of recruits equivalent to one per cent. of the population of that community. In other words, that towns of a million inhabitants should give ten thousand recruits ; towns of one hundred thousand inhabitants, one thousand recruits ; counties of half a million, five thousand ; big villages of one thousand, ten men ; and villages of three hundred, three men each. They would then have seen how to attack the problem in detail, and what number of men would be required in each town or district to make up the total desired. Next, they would. have recognized that their existing staff would be inadequate, and that they must call in a great many voluntary workers of all sorts, including the clergy, the local Magistrates, local employers, insurance agents, and, perhaps best of all, the local doctors.
The next thing that the business firm we have imagined would have done would have been to attack the attestation form. They would have said to themselves : " When we take men in a hurry like this the rush will choke our system if we try to work through a narrow passage full of obstacles. This, being translated, means that after decentralizing the work of recruiting we must have a very simple form of attestation. If we can reduce the time it takes to attest a man from the present twenty minutes, or even more, to three minutes, we shall have quadrupled our recruiting capacity." The manager running the business firm would then have looked at the existing attestation form to see how it could be improved. What would he find ? He would find, to begin with, a huge document, to fill up which no less than three hundred and seventy-nine words have to be written in in ink, and twelve of them signatures by the recruiting officer—an officer of commissioned rank. Executing a long and com- plicated will is nothing to it. But the attestation form is not all. Behind. it is an even more complicated paper entitled " Medical History of —." We cannot, how- ever, trust ourselves to deal with this document. Let us stick to Form B. 111, which is the essential attestation paper. It begins with a series of seventeen questions, which start, after the manner of the Catechism, with : " What is your name ? "—questions which are cheerfully broken in the middle by a minatory clause declaring that "if a false answer is given to any of the following seven questions "—it is really followed by ten questions—the recruit will be liable to imprisonment with hard labour.
Nextcomes a solemn declaration with the signature of the recruit and the totally unnecessary signature of a witness. Then follows the nice, picturesque, and old-fashioned oath of allegiance. Next to that is the certificate of the Magistrate or attesting officer which declares that the seventeen questions have all been read. to the recruit, and that the officer has taken care that the recruit understands each question, that his answer to each has been duly entered as replied to, and that the said recruit has made and signed the declaration and taken the oath, &c., &o. Then comes a wonderful statement of the services of the recruit if he has ever served before, and next what is entitled "The Military History Sheet." Then come the particulars of marriage— which in the spiritof Mr.Weller, senior, make anxious inquiry whether the lady was a spinster or a widow—and the names of the two witnesses of the marriage. Then follow questions as to the Christian names of the man's children, when they were baptized, where they were baptized, and who baptized them. The attestation form, having exhausted the subject of the recruit's wife and family and their places of baptism, flies back to the recruit himself, and gives us a wonderful section which deals with his " apparent " age, girth of his chest when fully expanded, and his complexion. Next his particular religious denomination is anxiously inquired into under seven headings. Then follows a specially large space for distinctive marks. After this comes the certificate of medical examination. One might suppose that this would be the statement that " I have examined Thomas Atkins and consider him fit for military service." Not a bit of it. It goes into all sorts of details about his eyes, his heart and lungs, the free use of his joints and limbs, and so forth, and includes the cautious, almost sly, statement : " He declares that be is not subject to fits of any de- scription." Then follows the certificate of " Primary Military Examination" signed by the recruiting officer, who certifies that due care has been exercised in the enlistment of Thomas Atkins.
The whole splendid monument of red-tape is crowned by what is termed the " Certificate of Approving Officer," who pats everybody on the back, as it were, says that all the obstacles have been negotiated, that the attestation is correct and properly filled up, and that the required forms "appear to have been complied with." This kindly bureaucrat ends with a statement worthy of the heavy father in the melodrama : " I accordingly approve and appoint him to the —." [One expects to see as an aside : " Take her, you dog !"] Then follow more signa- tures and more dates, till finally the four sheets of fools- cap and small print are exhausted.
Far be it from us to say that this document is not generally necessary to the military salvation of the recruit. The War Office authorities are, of course, not fools, and we have no doubt that an explanation and a defence can be made in peace time for most, if not for the whole, of this rigmarole. At any rate, we will for the purposes of this argu- ment, and still more for the purposes of getting recruits, admit that the filling in of all the three hundred and seventy-nine words and the twelve signatures and the details about the children is absolutely necessary and cannot possibly be dispensed with. We are not going to tilt against Army Form B. 111 and the gallant men who invented it, or even against the " Medical History of —." All we ask is that these particulars should be ascertained later, and should not be allowed, as now, to create a narrow bottle-necked passage through which the recruits have to struggle, as the present writer has seen them struggle every day this week, with much loss of energy to the good men and true who are enlisting them. For we must never forget that they are spending themselves most loyally in the endeavour. Recruiting officers, with all this mountain of forms heaped upon their heads, are literally and knowingly giving life and strength as much as if they were marching in the field. Many of them will no doubt be utterly broken down. That they do not mind, nor must we mind, but let us at any rate try to relieve the jam at the enlist- ment gates. " But how do you propose to do it ? " we shall be asked. What we propose is to substitute for the present attestation form the following, which every lawyer must, we think, admit makes a perfectly good contract, and preserves in all their sanctity the existing forms, while not insisting that they shall be filled in at the wrong time instead of the right time :—
FORM OF ATTESTATION FOR RECRUITS TAKING SERVICE TILL THE END OF THE PRESENT WAR.
I hereby promise to serve my King and Country as a soldier during the continuing of the present war on the lame terms and conditions as do other Regular soldiers, except only as regards the period of service.
I undertake whenever called upon to give the information required in the ordinary attestation form and to take the ordinary oath.
I recognize that I am as much bound in law and con- science by the terms of that oath as if I had already taken it and also recognize that by my signature attached hereto I
become in every way a regular soldier of H.M. the King during my period of service.
Signature Address
Date By a simple attestation form of this kind the military authorities could really have it both ways. They would get a man into the ranks very quickly, and at the same time they could, during his three months' training for the front, ask him at their leisure all the seventeen questions about himself and the dozen other questions, following Mr. Weller's example, as to whether he has married a spinster or a widow, and as to who was the curate who baptized his children, and also obtain all the particulars as to his health. Thus every one would be pleased : we who -want to get the men in quickly and those who want plenty of statistics—and very likely these are more necessary than the impatient civilian may think—in regard to the men's previous history. For ourselves, we are such revolution- aries that we would defer even the medical examination till the man was sent to his unit—that is, we would take him subject to medical examination, and reject him if after he had been a week in barracks his health was found to be too bad. This, however, is probably too drastic a proposal, and therefore we suppose that the present system of medical examination. ust continue.
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