LESSONS. T HE country read with complete satisfaction Lord Lansdowne's speech
at the Guildhall. That speech is an assurance that the peace of the world will not be broken through the North Sea incident. That the peaceful solution of the difficulty was due in no small measure to Lord Lansdowne's moderation and good sense, we most gladly acknowledge. The nation, indeed, owes him a debt of gratitude for not having lost his head during a period of popular excitement, for showing an ability to put himself in his opponent's place, for realising that there are two sides to every controversy, and for seeing that, however good one's own case may be, it is never right to assume that there is nothing to be said in the way of explanation by the other side. Specially welcome was Lord Lansdowne's implied assurance that the Russian Government have acted in good faith through- out, and we trust that this assurance will be given its proper weight by those writers in the Press who have been somewhat too much inclined to assume that Russia was not going to deal fairly. The fact that Russia has acknowledged the fullest responsibility for the selection of the officers into whose actions the Commission is to inquire, and that she has promised that, if the Commission should find that not they but other officers were guilty, she will punish them, should, we think, be held to meet completely the allegation that Russia is playing with us, and offering us, not the real culprits, but men of straw.
The promise of a peaceful and satisfactory solution of the crisis that has menaced the nation for the past three weeks happily calls for no further comment. There is, however, an aspect of that crisis which demands the most serious attention. Had we become involved in war with Russia, it is evident that the Russians would have at once attempted to carry out an invasion of India, and that we should have been obliged to strain every nerve, not merely to resist that invasion, but to make its failure absolutely certain and complete. But in order to do this—in order to make quite sure of success—we must have reinforced the British army in India by as large a body of men as we were capable of raising. We had to collect in South Africa an army of nearly four hundred thousand men in order to repel the Boer invasion of our Colonies and re-establish British control in South Africa. Yet the Boer forces in the field never numbered one hundred thousand men. If we had to deal with a Russian invasion of India, we should have to meet a foe numbering at least three times the Boer force. Russia in such a war as we are contem- plating must put out her whole strength. We are consider- ing the matter for the moment on the assumption that she would be without allies. If she had allies, we should want, in addition to meeting invasion in India, to guard Egypt, and possibly our possessions in South and West Africa. Let us assume, however, that we should only need to reinforce the Indian garrison. How many men should we require ? Clearly, if we needed four hundred thousand men in South Africa, we should want an extra two hundred thousand white troops to make India safe. In the event of war with Russia it is evident, then, that we should at once have to make use of the machinery which we used during the South African War for improvising a large body of extra troops. We should have to begin by calling up the Resetves and sending them oversea, together with the greater part of the Regular troops now stationed at Aldershot and on Salisbury Plain. We could presumably send in this way one hundred thousand Regulars from England. But in addition to these we should require at least another hundred thousand men for oversea service, and yet another hundred thousand to replace the Regulars and Reservists sent out of the country. Now there is one way, and only one way, in which we could meet such a sudden call, and that is the way we adopted in the case of the South African War.
In other words, if war had broken out a fortnight ago, we should have begun by embodying the Militia, and placing a part of these embodied regiments in the garri- sons and camps from which the Regulars had been sent to India. Next, we should have appealed to the best of the Militia battalions, and of the Militia Garrison Artillery, to volunteer for service in India and Egypt and.the Mediterranean as they did in 1900. Just as the Militia Garrison Artillery then took up their stations at the "Rock" and in Malta, just as the Citadel at Cairo was garrisoned by a Militia battalion, and just as the lines of communication were held by Militia infantry battalions in South Africa, so should we now have been arranging for the Militia to do garrison duty at home and abroad and to supply troops for the front. The Militia in this way gave us in the last war some hundred thousand men, and we must have endeavoured to get at least as many from them for a war with Russia. This would. have been our first and our most easily utilised means for im- provising an army. Next, we should have appealed to the Volunteers. Following the precedent of the South African War, we should probably have asked for Service Com- panies from the Volunteer regiments ; and we do not doubt that in this way we should have got, as we did then, some twenty thousand men and officers educated for war by the Volunteer Forces. A body of men of the nature of the C.I.V. would also have been raised. Lastly, we should at this moment have been making an appeal for a force analogous to that supplied by the Imperial Yeomanry. And the best of this force, as in the case of the South African War, would have been drawn from men who were trained in the Volunteers. No doubt the new Imperial Yeomanry—the only real addition to our fighting force, be it noted, made by the War Office after three years of confused and angry talk—would give us for oversea service a considerable number of men. In any case, we should at this moment be relying upon the Auxiliary Forces to provide us in one way or another, as they did in the Boer War, with a hundred and forty thousand men, partly to free Regular troops now at home, and partly to fight at the front.
We do not say that all the troops thus raised would be of the very best quality, or that the machinery for impro- vising them would not be wasteful and imperfect, but at any rate the machinery is at present in existence, and we could have used it to produce extra troops which, if not perfect, would at least be very much better than nothing. We possess at the present moment, that is, the means of improvising an army for oversea service in an emergency. We trust that the people of England will note this fact, and will then remember that the Secretary of State for War, with the sanction of the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet, is now busy destroying the machinery upon which we should a fortnight ago have relied had war broken out. Mr. Arnold-Forster's avowed inten- tion is to do away with the Militia Force. If, then, his scheme had already been carried out in the way he desires, we should have had no Militia infantry battalions to em- body, and no Militia Garrison Artillery to place on a war footing. Those " redundant " batteries of which he spoke, and which proved so useful three years ago, would have ceased to exist. The machinery which enabled the Militia to give us a hundred thousand men during the Boer War would have been pulled to pieces and destroyed, and there would have been nothing to take its place, except Mr. Arnold- Forster's short-service Home Army. But this short-service Home Army would not in reality be a substitute for the Militia, but only for certain Regular battalions which are to cease to exist. The abolition of the Militia if it comes will constitute a dead loss to our military forces. But Mr. Arnold-Forster proposes not merely to destroy a part of the machinery which enabled us to improvise an army three years ago, but practically the whole. Up till now the 'Volunteers have constituted a school of arms for the nation, and have formed a reservoir from which we could draw men who could shoot and who knew the elements of military training. Mr. Arnold-Forster's scheme proposes, we do not say to destroy entirely that reservoir, but to reduce it so greatly in size that we should only be able in the future to draw on it to a very small degree in case of war. Practically under his scheme the Volunteers are to be reduced by one-half. It is our belief that if his ill-omened, though no doubt well-intentioned, scheme is carried out, the reduction will be much more serious,—that he will, in fact, not leave us one hundred thousand Volunteers all told. We will assume, however, that his scheme will do what he thinks it will, and will leave us one-half of our present force. But if the reservoir from which we are to draw in war is reduced by one-half, it' stands to reason that we shall only be able to draw off one-half the numbers which we drew off in the Boer War. Now in the case of the Boer War it is calculated that in one way or another the Volunteers supplied us with some thirty-five thousand men. There- fore under Mr. Arnold-Forster's plan we could not count on improvising more than seventeen or eighteen thousand fight- ing men out of the Volunteers. To sum up, if the crisis of the past fortnight had occurred after the carrying out of Mr. Arnold-Forster's scheme instead of before, we should have been left without any means of improvising quickly a large force for the defence of India.
We would most earnestly urge upon the British people the imperative need for considering these facts, for determining that they will not allow the Militia which has served them so well in the past to be abolished, nor allow the Volunteer Force to be so diminished that it will no longer be able to play the part which it played in the South African War,—i.e., to provide a reservoir of partly trained men from whom good soldiers could be rapidly improvised. We may note that when last spring Mr. Arnold-Forster's scheme was under discussion, the strong objections made to it by our- selves and others were very often met with the declara- tion :—" You talk as if the South African War ought to be our guide in these matters. But in reality we shall never have to fight such a war as that again. Therefore it is extravagant to keep up the machinery for improvising troops which will never be used. That machinery is re- dundant, and therefore unnecessary ; and the only wise and efficient plan is to get rid of it, and spend the money so saved on a smaller but more efficient force of Regular troops." Well, we have not waited six months, and yet we have been threatened with a war such as we were told last May could never come again,—a war which, like the South African War, would have needed, had it occurred, the improvisation of some two hundred thousand troops. If the British people allow the Militia to be destroyed, and the Volunteers to be reduced, in face of these facts, they will deserve any fate that may over- take them. Instead of destroying the Militia, let us enlarge and improve it. Instead of applying sham tests of efficiency to the Volunteers, the real object of which is not so much to produce efficiency as to reduce numbers, let us frankly accept a low standard in training, though not in physique. Let us, that is, increase their number, and so enlarge the reservoir from which we shall be able to draw off a force for oversea service. Let us, in a word, not destroy, but improve the machinery which we now possess for improvising an extra army in a great 'national emergency,—an emergency such as that which so nearly overtook us two weeks ago.
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