THE STATE OF THE ARMY.
MR. HALDANE'S speech on going into Committee of Supply on the Army Estimates on Monday night was, as usual, full of character and interest, and enables us to take stock of the nation's military forces. If we consider the condition of those forces in the abstract, and judge it by what in our opinion ought to be our ideal in the matter of defence, we are bound to confess that it is anything but satisfactory. We are not sufficiently insured. To use Mr. Haldane 's own phrase, if a great war suddenly burst upon us out of the blue, we should not be in a position to carry it through without very grave risks, so inadequate is the total military force at our disposal. Until we have adopted a military system like that of Switzerland, under which every male inhabitant is given a training in the use of arms in order to enable him to fulfil the obligation which every State, including our own, theoretically imposes on its subjects—namely, the obligation to repel the invasion of its territories— we cannot be safe. The expansion of the Empire, and its increasing exposure to foreign attack caused by modern conditions, make our Regular Army only just sufficient for our oversee. needs, while our Territorial Force is not strong enough either in quantity or training to enable it single-handed to undertake the amount of responsibility which must fall upon it in a great war. If we were engaged in a great war, we should be impaled upon the horns of a dilemma. Either the nation's interests must suffer—and they may suffer to the point of ruin—from our not daring to despatch the whole of the efficient portion of our Regular Forces over- sea, or else we must run the risk of not having a sufficient force in these islands to forbid any attempt at invasion. If our whole male population had been trained to arms as are the people of Switzerland, and we had an organisation like theirs, we should. be able to put a million or a million and a half citizen soldiers in the field, and we may be sure that in such circumstances no foreign Power would. think it worth while to try to invade us. While wo have only throe hundred thousand the temptation to attempt in- vasion would be too great to be resisted. But surely it is madness to present that temptation when we can eliminate it by adopting a system which will incidentally immensely improve the physique and moral of our own people, and also incidentally give us a reservoir of trained men from which we can count upon obtaining volunteers should the need for supplying our oversee army with extra men become pressing. Judged, then, by what we ought to do, and could do without putting any undue burden on our people, but rather with advantage to them, our military preparations must be condemned as dangerously inadequate.
We must next ask what has been done by Mr. Haldane in the four years during which lie has held office to improve the state of our military forces, for to say that they are inadequate is not to say that they are not better than they were. Are we in a better condition as regards war—that is the sole test, for armies exist not for parade but for war—than we were when be took office ? Let us consider first the case against Mr. Haldane as it was put by Mr. Lee in Tuesday's debate. Mr. Lee pointed out that in the last nine years the numbers of the Regular Army had declined by nearly forty thousand men, while the Militia, which had a strength of over ninety thousand, had now in its altered form of the Special Reserve dropped to sixty- seven thousand. Even if these figures can be proved to convey a not altogether correct view of the situation, we are bound to say that they show a very serious loss of strength. As our readers know, we should like to have seen the Regular Army, not reduced, but maintained at the highest strength ; while we still hold that it would have been far better to have maintained a reformed and rejuvenated Militia than to have established the Special Reserve. If, however, this shrinkage in numbers can be explained or condoned on the ground that it was absolutely necessary to reduce the cost of the Army—a contention which we ourselves cannot admit—we are bound to say that in every other respect Mr. Haldane has improved the condition of the military forces of the nation. In this context it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of sound organisation, and unquestionably Mr. Haldane has made vast improvements here. There never was a time in our military annals when we could so easily and rapidly prepare an expeditionary force as we. can now. Before Mr. Haldane's time mobilisation involved an enormous amount of waste. After mobilisation had taken place there were a great number of derelict military items scattered about the country which did not fit into or increase the strength of the military machine, but which when added together made up a very large force. To use a metaphor,—in the work of mobilisation a quantity of water was spilt out of the buckets and practically lost. Mr. Haldane by an improved organisation has utilised these spillings, and they will in the future play their proper part in our military system. On mobilisation we now get full value for our money, which we never did before. That is a fact for which the nation owes a debt of unqualified gratitude to Mr. Haldane.
Mr. Haldane's organisation of the Territorial Army has also unquestionably been a success. We use the word " organisation " advisedly, for we admit that it has not yet been proved whether the conditions of service for the Territorial Force will in the end be found com- patible with the recruiting of a sufficient number of men. Putting that point aside, however, we have now got what we did not have with the old Volunteers,—a properly organised and equipped field army of citizen soldiers. The Volunteers were an incoherent body of men —often very good men—in which the units stood in no efficient relation to each other or to the rest of our forces. The Territorial Army is a real army with its appropriate proportions of horse, foot, and artillery grouped in brigades and divisions, and with organised Staffs. Further, it possesses in a reasonably complete form Army Service Corps and medical contingents. If the Volunteers in the old days had been called upon to take the field, it would have been necessary to improvise somehow and anyhow what we may call the " side-shows " of war. Now those " side-shows " have been worked out and prepared in peace- time. Therefore, should the Territorial Army be embodied, it would be embodied with the supports and buttresses which are absolutely essential to an armed force in the field ready and in their places. This is a great achievement and a very great addition to our military strength, but it is not all that Mr. Haldane has accomplished. One of his most striking successes has been the establishment of the County Associations. He has managed to interest what in the aggregate is a very large number of civilians in the work of supplying us with an efficient citizen army. All over the country some of the best and most self- sacrificing of those who are accustomed to conduct our local administration are working hard at organising and equipping the Territorial Army. But the County Associa- tions have not only interested in military matters an important body of people who were never so interests) before. Those Associations form a machine which if war broke out could be utilised for that work of improvising troops which would certainly have to be undertaken, though it is part of our strange habits in regard to military affairs to pretend that no such improvisation would now be required or could take place. Needless to say, that is a pure delusion. If a great war were to come upon us to-morrow, the first thing we should have to do would be to set to work to raise, drill, and equip very large bodies of new troops. While the Boer War compelled us to do this by the ten thousand, a, really big war would compel us to do it by the hundred thousand.
Before we leave the subject of Mr. Haldane's steward- ship we should like to call attention to a matter on which he dwelt very lightly in his speech, but which we are inclined to think may prove of vast importance, —may even prove Mr. Haldane's greatest achievement. We allude to the new Reserve Forces. The first of these, the Territorial Reserve, is already in process of formation, and when it is formed it will obviously greatly increase the power and efficiency of the Terri- torial Army. Next, and of almost equal importance, is the formation among civilians of a Technical Reserve,— a Reserve of civilian experts of various kinds whose help would be of enormous use in time of war. In this Reserve skilled men of all kinds will be registered and ear- marked throughout the country. Last, but we believe by no means least, comes the Veteran Reserve. Under Mr. Haldane's scheme, each County Association will register all the trained men who live in its area, but who for one reason or another are at present not connected with any fighting unit. We believe that when this Reserve comes into being we shall find that there are in this country some hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand trained men, the great majority of them in the prime of life, and fitted by health and age to do good service in the field. At present, however, and though the majority of them have seen more service than any troops that could be found on the Continent, this magnificent national asset is allowed to run to waste. Yet it would be quite capable of turning the scale in the event of invasion.
We admit that all this sounds rather wild, but we can quote in support of our statement the experiment which has been made by the Surrey Territorial Association. That Association has established, with official sanction but without official help of any kind, a register of trained men under fifty years of age living within the county area. The names and addresses of such trained men were not entered in any official record, or at any rate could not be obtained from any official sources. The Surrey Association found that they could only reach the trained men resident in the county by an appeal through the Surrey newspapers. Yet in spite of this fact they have already got on their register, which has not been in existence a year, over seven hundred men. The men who have thus come forward are all men in the prime of life, and the majority of them have actually seen service. Further, they are not members of the " unemployed," or in any sense the wastage of our military forces, but all men holding good positions. In other words, though there must be hundreds of men in Surrey eligible for a Veteran Reserve who have not yet heard of the Register of Trained Men, the equivalent of a battalion has already been obtained. We do not doubt, when full publicity is given to the scheme, and when official agencies are compelled to help in the work of discovering the names and addresses of men eligible, that a register of fifteen hundred men could easily be obtained in a comparatively small county like Surrey. But this would probably mean that a Veteran Reserve of a hundred and fifty thousand. men could be formed throughout the country. The proper employment of that force in the embodiment of the Territorial Army has not yet been decided ; but, in our opinion, the Veterans should be used as a Reserve with which to fill the ranks of the Territorial battalions. To take the specific case of Surrey. At the present moment two companies of seventy-five men each might be added out of the register of trained men to each of the Terri- torial battalions of the county, and a couple of troops of old cavalrymen sent to reinforce the Yeomanry. That the commanders of the various units would be proud to receive such recruits goes without saying. Many of them are highly trained men who have seen much service, and could be usefully employed as non-commissioned officers. We are convinced that, whether Mr. Haldane remains in office or not, it is of vital importance that the scheme for the Veteran Reserve should be proceeded with.
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