MILITARY TINKERING, AND A PROPOSAL W E congratulate Mr. Brodrick most
heartily on the result of Tuesday's debate on the Militia and Yeomanry Bill. By his courageous surrender of Section 3 of that Bill he has not only made a valuable concession to the best opinion of the Yeomanry itself, but by allowing full time for the more mature consideration of our military problem as a whole he has created for himself a great oppor- tunity. It is with a view to strengthening his hands in his earnest endeavour to prove himself a real reforming Minister that we make bold to submit the proposal outlined at the close of this article. But first we may be permitted to express our doubts whether the true significance of the Bill as originally drafted was at all understood in the country at large. With the first two sections we do not propose to deal. They are administrative and confirmatory only, and though of great importance in themselves, are not opposed, and. will, we trust, become law. But Section 3 was of vital importance, and would, had it been incor- porated in the Act as Mr. Brodrick proposed, have marked the advent of a new, and in our view a fatal, military policy. It provided for a special section of the Yeomanry, who were to bind themselves beforehand, in return for £5 a year, to serve abroad in war time, not, like the Imperial Yeomanry, in their own local squadrons under their own officers, but as drafts to some Regular cavalry regiment. Its full significance can only be under- stood by recalling the military situation created by the South African War.
It will be remembered that on the outbreak of war it was necessary, in order to provide any field army at all, to call out practically all the sections of the Regular Reserve. None of the home battalions called upon for South Africa (if we except the Brigade of Guards) could produce more than four hundred effectives serving with the colours out of a war strength of over a thousand men, and some battalions could show no more than a hundred and fifty effectives. The men who had completed their colour service and had been passed into the Reserve were there- fore recalled to the colours, and even with the influx of these men many battalions left this country a hundred and fifty or two hundred men short of their full complement. The Regular Reserve was thus, with some minor excep- tions, exhausted, and the drafts to replace war casualties had to be found elsewhere. Recourse was had to the Volunteer companies and to the Militia Reserve, though in some cases the Militia Reserve also had proceeded to the front with the first Line troops. The Militia Reservists were men who, although on the strength of Militia battalions, had bound themselves to serve as drafts to their Regular battalions in time of war. The result was disastrous to the Militia. When they in their turn were called out to meet the ever-growing necessities of South Africa, the cream of their men were gone ; and they went out many of them terribly under strength, and all of them with a large proportion of untrained boys in their ranks. The general average strength of a Militia battalion was six hundred men, and of these not one-half had received one scason's training or so much as' ever fired a rifle. En other words, the Militia of the Home Army was completely sacrificed to the expeditionary force. As a consequence the War Office have now quite rightly determined to regard the Militia no longer merely as a feeder to the Army, but to cut it once more adrift from•the exacting connection, and to make it a real unit for home defence with a Reserve which shall be a real Militia Reserve.
' The amazing thing about Section 3 of the Militia and Yeomanry Bill was that by it the War Office proposed the very system for the Yeomanry which they adm it to have been fatal to the Militia. The Yeomanry Reserve was to feed the Regular cavalry. Thus from the special-service section of a Yeomanry regiment twenty men might suddenly have found themselves on their way to join a Dragoon regiment on the Indian frontier, fifteen more might have been ordered to a Lancer regiment in China, while another draft would have been required to bring the Hussars up to strength on embarkation for Canada. Nor was there any guarantee in the Bill that the war need be a big one. The special-service section was to be Section A of the Cavalry Reserve, liable for service with the Line immediately there was a shortage of colour-service men. In the present condition of Army recruiting there is always such a shortage, and a cavalry regiment ordered to proceed against the Mad Mullah would have required to be filled up with Yeomen before it could meet him. We confess we should have been surprised if any Yeoman had consented for ..t5 to put his head into such I noose ; but if he had done so, then, on the analogy of the Militia Reserve, the first result would have been to render the Yeomanry itself useless in the event of a big war, or, in other words, at the very time when it would have been urgently needed to form the cavalry of the Home Army.
The military authorities are undoubtedly face to face with a serious problem. The war has shown the utter inadequacy of the Army to deal with any but miniature wars. To maintain that Army at war strength in peace time, which is the only way to provide a real Reserve, would involve an addition of some sixty millions to the Estimates, and such an expense the country very rightly will not face. Yet without such an expenditure a second war requiring an army of three hundred thousand men, or a tenth part only of the force which a great Continental Power could put into the field, could not be engaged in without the aid of the civil population. Section 3 was a clever compromise providing the same article at a merely nominal cost.
We can well imagine that Mr. Brodrick was pleased with his handiwork. It was mere tinkering, it is true, but it was a fascinating compromise. It was a valuable sop to the military expert, and it did not offend the taxpayer. Mr. Brodrick forgets that an army, unlike a constitution, cannot be made by tinkers. And, moreover, he appears to us to suffer from a serious confusion of ideas. His Army is either too big or too small. The German manceuvres should surely have shown him what his six army corps would weigh in the balance against the record of the chief Continental Powers. For a Continental war the Army is ludicrously small. As an expeditionary force it is far too large. Who is the imaginary foe, and what the com- bination of circumstances, that require six army corps and no more ? Or if the number of men that each occasion will demand can only be known when the occasion comes, wherein lies the virtue of this cut-and-dried creation ? Mr. Brodrick and his successors cannot unfortunately limit the resources of the enemy, whoever he may be, to just that number with which six army corps could effectively deal.
And now we would make our proposal. We would submit that what Mr. Brodrick really requires is not one Army but two. The first is the Army for the Colonial and Indian roster, backed by a small expeditionary force at home, say of three divisions, or thirty thousand men. This Army should be kept permanently on a war footing, a. professional Army whose life's work is soldiering, labourers well paid, as ,worthy of their hire. We are prepared to say that had the expeditionary force existed in 1899 there would have been no war. It would have been despatched to South Africa in June of that year, and the Government would not have been obliged to await the actual outbreak of war, and' to run the risk of a serious reverse at the outset, before it felt itself ju'stifled in calling out the Reserve. The present system is a serious diplomatic weakness to us; we can never show that we intend to fight till the eleventh hour when all hope of compromise is gone, and we cannot involve the country in the serious dislocation entailed by calling out the Reserve except in extreme cases of national emergency, when the die is virtually cast for war. The second Army that Mr. Brodrick requires is the Army for home defence which would leave us secure, when our expeditionary force had sailed, against the descent of a hostile expeditionary force. This Army should be as large as possible, and though organised and staffed by pro- fessionals, would not require to be permanently under arms, and may consist of non-professionals, with a training con- ducted in such a way and at such times as would interfere least with the civil occupation of its officers and men. We believe that such an Army is no armchair creation, and that it would not only be a possible but an excellent fighting unit. Above all, it would be cheap. But the kernel of the whole dual system would be to insist upon the distinction between the two Armies, which would require to be kept quite apart, with a training as different for each as their functions and the quality and numbers and character of their men.
We are aware that our proposal is a revolutionary one ; it is very far indeed from the minds of our military authorities at present. The advisers at Pall Mall are all Army men, &xi as such view the Auxiliary Forces with distrust, if not with jealousy. But we are convinced that their effort to enlarge the borders of the Regular Army, and to increase its authority and its responsibilities, is not the measure best suited to the military needs of the country, and that it will fail to develop our fighting resources to the best advantage. By sacrificing Section 3 of his last Bill, Mr. Brodrick is now able to face the problem afresh. The conclusion of the war, and the determination of the country to profit by its lessons, have given him an opportunity such as has fallen to the lot of but few War Ministers. The Royal Commission on that war is still sitting, and in common fairness to the country which called for its appointment he should wait 411 it has been able to report. But even now the main fait nouveau of that war has been, not the vindication of the Regular Army as a fighting machine, but the serviceable qualities of the Irregular Forces. Any scheme therefore that would even possibly affect the efficiency of the Auxiliary Forces would be most distasteful to the country at large, who would, on the other hand, most readily support a measure which laid more responsibility upon them. Section 3 of the Militia and Yeomanry Bill was merely an attempt to bolster up the cavalry at the expense of the Yeomanry, and would have been satisfactory to neither arm of the Service. What is wanted is a scheme for an Army of home defence as a national force apart from the Regular Army,—a scheme which, by allotting to each a separate and definite task, would secure, as specialisation always does secure, that the task was efficiently and zealously performed. We are convinced that were Mr. Brodrick to produce a measure• based on these lines he would command the enthusiastic support of the nation. At present he suffers from an exaggerated reverence for the narrower, more prejudiced view of the professional Army, and from a lack of confidence in the nation at large. We should expect these things from the War Minister of the German Emperor; but they are surprising enough in the civilian Secretary of State fora Constitutional Monarchy. Fortunately enough, he ,does not, after Tuesday's debate, stand committed to the new policy, and he has still time to be an Englishman.
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