LORD KITCHENER.
MR. BONAR LAW has a happy power of focussing public opinion in his speeches. He has never shown this power to better advantage than on Monday night. The country in general feels confidence in Lord Kitchener, and knows vaguely that it is under a debt of gratitude to him for what he has accomplished and is accomplish- ing. It has not, however, been able to define and put into words the special way in which the Secretary of State for War has served it. The Leader of the Opposition, in performing his function of interpreter of his country's feelings, has named the specific reason for our gratitude. We are grateful to Lord Kitchener because at the very beginning of the war he formed what Mr. Boner Law calls "a gigantic conception," not only of the military needs of the nation, but of our ability to meet those needs. Other men and lesser men, even though they might have bad enough imagination to see what might and ought to be done, would in the emergency have been daunted by the task 'before them. They would have argued that it was too late to try any now system, that we were committed to great naval but only to small military action, and that therefore all we could be expected to do, and all we could do, since we were unpre- pared from the military point of view, was to send abroad a comparatively small but efficient Expeditionary Force, and to keep that force thoroughly equipped and thoroughly well supplied with men. As Mr. Boner Law declared, it is probable that no statesman on either bench would have attempted to do more than keep up the Expeditionary Force anti develop the Territorials. Happily, it seemed otherwise to Lord Kitchener. The departure of the first instalments of the Expeditionary Force appeared to leave the military cupboard almost bare. The reserves of equipment and of rifles were, we will not say exhausted, but dangerously reduced by mobilization. The condition of our arsenal. showed that the Government had never contemplated or prepared for a great improvisation of troops, and had been content to shape our military policy wholly on the idea of a moderate-sized Expeditionary Force. Faced with such a situation, Lord Kitchener's was indeed a gigantic, nay, s glorious, conception, and one worthy of the best traditions of the nation.
To resolve, as Lord Kitchener did, that he would not hear the word "impossible," but that at one and the same time he would keep the Expeditionary Force going, double the Territorials, and raise a new army on a scale to which the history of war affords no parallel, was worthy of Chatham himself. We cannot say more. The daring and the prescience of the course adopted by Lord. Kitchener would have been less notable had we possessed that reserve store of a million rifles for which the Spectator's weak voice had clamoured so ineffectually in the past. Again, if we had adopted in the past some scheme of universal training, and had the men earmarked for improvisation, even if we had not got the equipment, Lord Kitchener's task would have been comparatively easy. The magnificence of his attitude is to be measured by the fact that lie had neither the men nor the equipment ready, nor even the plant for providing equipment. He had not only to create an army, but to create the instruments required to create it. You cannot make an omelette without eggs. Lord Kitchener could not make one without first raising the hens to lay the eggs!
The situation with which he was faced in the first week of August was as follows. He had either to be content with holding out no prospect to our French allies of our being able to increase our military aid to them, or else to face the appalling problem just described of improvising at one and the same time the men and the material. Happily Lord Kitchener's mind did not quail before the task. He had imagination enough to see what he bad got to do and will-power enough to resolve that he would do it. Finally, he bad practical ability enough to realize that this was a case in which there was a great danger of a sham improvisation. If he was to improvise something that was to be worth having, he must, he saw, begin by the slow dull work of laying deep foundations. Take an example which is always before our minds. It was no good merely to speed up the existing rifle factories to the utmost. If the problem was not to be trifled with, it was necessary to sit down and quietly and carefully create the plant which six months hence could be used to turn out the much-desired weapons. Men more flighty and with less strength of judgment might have argued : "It is no good to think of beginning to manufacture machines to manufacture rifles six months hence. The war may be over by then. What we must do is to concentrate upon the needs of the next six weeks." Lord Kitcheuer was fortunately a man capable of taking long views. He was not depressed. He made up his mind that the war would be a long war, and therefore that it was worth while to prepare machinery which would only begin to give prac- tical results six months hence. He was not content with wild efforts at jerrybuilding, but determined that his corner- stones should be well and truly laid. Accordingly he began the tremendous task of arraying the manhood of the nation for war, and of developing, organizing, and exploiting its great commercial resources for the provision of rifles, machine-guns, great guns, ammunition small and great, clothes and equipment, bayonets and swords, and all the thousand things needed by an army, from huts to tents, from waterproofs to field-glasses, from saddles to motor-cars. The Roman Senate thanked their General because he had not despaired of the Republic. Well may we thank ours because last August he not only did not despair of the Republic in the abstract, but also did not despair of the Republic's power to give us men, and. also of its power to improvise the equipment for those men. Once more,—" a gigantic conception," and one which the country is not likely to forget.
We have criticized some of Lord 'Kitchener's methods
in detail, and our appreciation of the wisdom and great- heartedness with which he approached his task does not seem to us at all incompatible with such criticisms. Splendidly equipped as Lord Kitchener has shown himself for his great task, he is liable, like other human beings, to errors of judgment. The offering of criticism while at the same time acknowledging, as we have always acknowledged, his energy and devotion has, however, not impeded his task in the slightest degree. Fair criticism has never hurt, and never will hurt, a great man who is worthily performing a great task. A weak man who for some reason has got into a great place, and does not possess that self-confidence which is the necessary precursor of great achievement, should perhaps be exempt from criticism. Such criticism may spoil the only chance lie has of getting through without a catastrophe. It cannot injure, and inay in the end help, a man of power and ability, for such men are never so foolish or so inflated as to believe that they cannot do wrong. Take a very simple example of what we mean. Lord Kitchener at the beginning of the war did not understand the proposals for the raising of Volunteer Corps amongst the men of non-military age which were made in the columns of the Spectator and elsewhere in August and September. He thought—and who can blame him considering the amount of detail with which he had to grapple that the raising of these corps would interfere with recruiting and with the pro- vision of equipment. At first, then, the military authorities, presumably by his orders, discouraged the organization of Town Guards or Village Guards and the drilling and organizing of the men who were too old to join the colours. Later, however, the true meaning and the true uses of the Volunteer Training Corps were brought home to him, and he thereupon did a thoroughly wise and sensible thing. He selected a man whom he knew he could trust, Lord Desborough, and agreed to his being placed at the head of a Central Organization for the encouragement and control of the Volunteer Movement.
He in effect told Lord Desborough, the President of the Central Organization, that if that body kept the movement within certain prescribed lines, lines which from the first we recognized as singularly well thought out, he (Lord Kitchener) would not merely not discourage but would welcome the formation of Volunteer Training Corps. The result has been a change of attitude on the part of the War Office ; or, to put it more fairly, a fuller and better understanding of the Volunteer Movement has altered Lord Kitchener's point of view. Before long we shall have a million men of good spirit and good physique, though over military age, drilled and organized through- out the kingdom. If not capable of the awful strain of campaigning such as falls upon our men abroad, they will be quite capable of lending a very useful band for the defence of these islands. They are a body of men which has been called into existence without causing any expense to the nation. We do not hesitate to any that in another four or five months' time the progress made in the Volunteer Force will be so great that it will be possible to send out of the country a far greater number of Regulars and Territorials than it would have been possible to send if the Volunteer Corps had not been established. We must never forget the possibility of the dying flurry of the monster with whom we are engaged doing severe injury to the nation. At the same time we do not want to sterilize a considerable part of our land forces in order to avoid the possibility of harm from that flurry. Hero our Volunteer Training Corps come in. While the possibility of invasion, never very great, becomes more and snore remote, the practical need of the Home Guards may in one sense become greater. No one feels that we could do without any armed force in this country, and yet we can understand our military authorities being fretted almost beyond endurance by the thought of Regular and Terri- torial formations being kept here when they might be able to do so much to hasten the end of the war if employed abroad.
But in dealing with the Volunteer Corps we must not forget that this is only a side-issue, and that our main point is to remember what we owe to Lord Kitchener and the military organization under his control. Let us once more say that with a whole heart we endorse every phrase and every word in the following passage of Mr. Bona! Law's speech
"If I am right in that, then if at any tints any of us feel inclined—and I think there is good reason—to consider that everything done by the War Office is not quite perfect, we ought at least to remember how much the country owes for this gigantic conception of what we can do, and for the way in which it is being made into a reality before our eyes."
Before leaving Mr. Boner Law's speech there is another passage with which we should like to express our agree- ment, even if it raises new issues. It is the passage in which he pointed out that even now a good many of the inhabitants of this country do not seem to realize that this is " our war "
"We have not realized that it is not a case of our helping France or Russia, but, on the contrary, it is just an much a case of France and Russia helping us, for if we know anything, we know that the bulk of the strength of the hatred of our enemies is directed against us and not against our allies."
These are facts of which it is well that we should ho reminded.
Previous page
