RIFLE CLUBS AND VOLUNTEERS.
WE stated last week that we reserved the subject of the voluntary forces available for military pur- poses for future treatment. We propose on the present occasion to make a few suggestions as to the best means of utilising voluntary effort. We shall deal first with the question of rifle clubs,—needless to say, not because rifle clubs can claim to afford anything approaching the exist- ing Volunteer Force in importance or usefulness, but because a large amount of misunderstanding and uncon- scious misstatement has arisen over the matter. The advo- cates of rifle clubs in general, and Dr. Conan Doyle in particular, are spoken of as if they were a set of criminal lunatics who ought to be at once put into strait-waistcoats. One would imagine, indeed, from much of the criticism directed against rifle clubs that the supporters of the rifle club movement had demanded that the Navy should be at once ordered into dry dock, the whole of the Army, Militia, and Volunteers should be disbanded, and the defence of the country handed over without further delay to the sole charge of rural riflemen, arrayed in slouch bats and com- manded by the first civilian who came handy. Now, with all due deference to the military critic of the Westminster Gazette, Colonel Lonsdale Hale, and other war-experts, this is not in the least what is proposed or desired by those who hope to see every village possessed of its rifle club and the bulk of the population taught to shoot. If our opponents—we say " ours "as the Spectator is proud to have been among the first of those who advocated the forming of rifle clubs—would only take the trouble to find out what they are opposing, they would discover that it is something quite different from what they imagine.
We advocate rifle clubs primarily and chiefly because we think that they will enable the majority of the adult male population to learn to shoot with a rifle. But, say our critics, what is the use of teaching them how to shoot? Even if you teach your whole population how to shoot you will have accomplished little or nothing from the military point of view. With all possible submission to our military critics, we think they are somewhat mis- taken here. We noticed that when last year the Government appealed for ten thousand civilians to join the Imperial Yeomanry thousands of the men who applied to enlist, though men of good physique, did not know how to shoot, and that even among those who were taken there were many who were absolute novices with the rifle. What was the result? The first thing that these recruits had to do was to learn to shoot. Besides being taught their drill and how to ride, they had to learn the handling of the rifle and the elements of marksmanship. But if every village in the country had during the past ten years possessed a rifle club, as we trust every village will in the next ten years, it would not have been necessary to show these recruits which was the right and which the wrong end of a rifle. They would have come to the country's call knowing at least half their business. Possibly some people will say only the unimportant half, and one which can be easily learnt, whereas they would still have been ignorant of how to " form fours " and keep step with proper precision. Still, taking the very lowest view of rifle-shooting, when compared with drill, we cannot help believing that a man who knows how to shoot already is a little way on the road to making a soldier. We think, in fact, that the rifle clubs will make a national reservoir of riflemen, and that the next time the country wants to improvise a large force of men it will be a great advantage to it to be able to dip into that reservoir. In other words, learning how to shoot cannot, we hold, make the civilian part of the population worse fitted to become soldiers than they are now, and mac even to some extent expedite the process of turning them into soldiers,—even granting that they have more important things to learn in addition. The country may some day call for a hundred thousand Volun- teers to form into regiments, as the United States has often done. When it does no expert will persuade us that the fact that the majority of those men know how to bold and clean a rifle, and can shoot, even though indif- ferently, will not be of some advantage to the nation.
But remember that whatever advantage is secured will have been gained without doing any harm to any other military body in the country. It is an entire mistake to imagine that rifle clubs will compete with the Volunteers,—no one can even pretend that they will injure the Militia or Regulars. Rifle clubs formed in large towns might conceivably do so, but such urban rifle clubs will not, we venture to think, play any important or permanent part in the movement. The townsmen will naturally, and rightly, prefer the Volun- teers with their drill-balls and close and pleasant social organisations. It is in country districts, in the villages and small market-towns, that the rifle clubs will flourish. There it is comparatively easy and inexpensive to secure ranges, and there the difficulties of distance and occupation make the joining of Volunteer regiments almost impossible. Between the village rifle club and the Volunteer regiment there can be no real competition, or if there is, the Volun- teer regiment will certainly win. The present writer has experience of a village rifle club which is, we believe, destined to be typical. In that club there is one ex- Volunteer ; but practically none, or very few at any rate, of its members, owing to distances and employment, could become Volunteers without a sacrifice of time and money that they could not be expected to make. Yet we venture to say that not one of them is less, but more, sympathetic to Volunteers than previously. They have learned to takean active interest in rifle-shooting, and with it in military questions ; and we do not doubt that many of them, if they removed from the village into a town, would be far more likely to become Volunteers than if they had never joined a rifle club. Rifle clubs are destined, in fact, to act to a considerable extent as recruiting agents for the Volunteers, and this tendency might easily be increased if in suitable oases Volunteer battalions were enabled to affiliate rifle clubs in their districts. There is one other small way in which rifle clubs will certainly be of use. They will stimulate interest in rifle-shooting, and will tend to create a public opinion in regard to marksman- ship. Look at the way in which village cricket clubs stimulate public interest in cricket. So village rifle clubs will make people watch, criticise, and so improve rifle- shooting. If in every village bar-room men knew how to criticise shooting returns, there would be no fear of the shooting in the Militia and Regulars falling back into the condition it was in some years ago. Every county would watch its regiment shooting as it now watches the batting and bowling of its eleven. But who can deny that this would be an advantage? We have dwelt chiefly upon the way in which rifle clubs are certain to be of use. We will add a word as to how they may be ultimately developed, provided our military authorities have the wisdom to utilise them. We would at first ask the military authorities to leave the civilian rifle clubs severely alone,—except in the matter of allowing them to have Service rifles fur practice on reasonably liberal terms, and letting them have ammu- nition, both Service and Morris tube, at cost price. We would, that is, not have any public money spent on the clubs, but we do not see why Government should force them to buy their ammunition unnecessarily dear. When the country districts are pretty freely studded with village clubs—the ideal is, of course, that a village should as certainly have its range, long or miniature, as its church—we think that an attempt might be made in a selected district to see whether men living on the ground and knowing every i inch of it could not be made of some use in the work of protecting it from a hostile incursion. A very capable officer who is an opponent of rifle clubs lately asked the present writer what possible good Mr. Smith of the Stock Exchange with a villa in Sussex could do by creep- ing about the edges of the South Downs accompanied by his butler and footman and gardener, acting under the designation of the " Little Peddlington Rifle Club." It is a humorous and effective picture no doubt, but it rests upon a misapprehension. Mr. Smith and his butler might be there perhaps, but they would not be so utterly useless after all, for they would have with them men with a minute knowledge of the district. Of course, one cannot argue about clubs that are not in existence, but the only country club—and a very small one—of which we have any knowledge would certainly know its own little piece of country pretty well. There are in it two or three farmers and farmers' sons, there are four gamekeepers, and there are one or two local tradesmen whose business makes them know all the lanes and cross-roads of the country as well as the position of the farms and cottages. If these men did not know the lie of the ground better than the best Regular, and would not be able to give him very useful in- formation on the spot and rifle in hand, our rural popula- tion must be stupider than even the British officer is falsely represented to he in the most unfriendly foreign caricature. But, of course, they would be of use. Take a concrete ex- ample on the classic ground of the battle of Dorking. Sup- pose all the villages on both sides of the North Downs—i.e., all the villages strung out on the Leatherhead to Guildford road on the one side, and on the Guildford to Dorking road on the other—had rifle clubs, and that their members were able to the number of some two thousand to help a Regular force to occupy the thickets and old chalk and gravel pits and deep lanes on the south slope and on the ridge, in order to delay a hostile advance, is it likely that such members, actually on the spot, would be rejected as worthless ? Of course they would not. No general opera- ting in any district would refuse such ready-localised and ready-mobilised aid. But, it is said, all these riflemen would be liable to be shot if taken prisoners. Possibly— though we read the arrangements come to at the Hague differently—but even so we are not sure that the effect would be so bad. Their anxiety not to surrender would be extremely keen.
Depend upon it, rifle clubs will at the very lowest do no harm from the military point of view, and may do a great deal of good. Our military teachers need not, then, be in so great a fuss about rifle clubs—we notice, by the way, that the fuss is largely confined to our home and academic critics, and is not apparently shared by men, like Lord Dundonald, who know the conditions of modern war at first hand—for no one is going to close the Staff College and substitute for it the Camberley Rifle Club, or to abolish any other part of the Army. We want, not a slacker Army, but a much more efficient one. But while we get this, and also a better Militia and a less snubbed and patronised Volunteer Force, we do not see why the nation should not also teach itself the use of the rifle because a certain number of over-anxious people think that some hypo- thetical civilian riflemen may some day imagine that they are as capable fighters as regular soldiers, and so will abolish or neglect the Army. Really rifle-shooting cannot be dis- couraged for fear of such ridiculous contingencies. The more men know about the difficulties of military work by personal experience, the more they will insist on having a body of real experts to do the main part of the work.
We have one more word to say on the subject of rifle- men and rifle-shooting. We would ask the Government most seriously to consider the subject of the gun-license, and the hindrance it presents to rifle practice. If they will only deal with that question appropriately they may not only give a great stimulus to the rifle club movement, for which Lord Salisbury has asked the nation's help, but they may also increase the military resources of the nation. Let them enact that any person who can produce a certificate of marksmanship can each year go to any post-office in the Kingdom and procure the ten- shilling gun-license free of charge, the only requirement being the registration of name and address. Let the certifi- cate of marksmanship be granted under rules drawn up by the Government, and let the test shooting be made at any Government range, or the range of any rifle club affiliated to the National Rifle Association, in the presence of (1) any person holding her Majesty's commission, or (2) any Justice of the Peace. Such officer or Justice, that is, would testify on a printed form, certify that A B has in my presence passed the test of marksmanship,' and A B would then be free of the gun-license for his life. In this way good shooting would be encouraged, and what is even more important, we should have a register, annually renewed, of all the marksmen in the Kingdom. On the advantages of such a register it is unnecessary to dilate.
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