A RESERVE OF RIFLES—AN ESSENTIAL ITEM IN NATIONAL DEFENCE.
As a good deal of interest has been aroused over our reference last week to an article published eight years ago on the need of a reserve of a million rifles, we reprint the article in question. It appeared on May 18th, 1907, under the title given above. We should not, of course, have republished this article had we not felt assured that the peril of a shortage of rifles had now, thanks to Lord Kitchener's vigilance and driving-power, entirely passed away. This happy fact unmuzzles us :— Have we enough store of extra rifles to make our position absolutely secure, and to enable ns to take full advantage of the patriotism and Imperial spirit of our people should the Empire bo called on to endure a very sudden and very great strain P We have argued en former occasions that it is not safe to rely upon what we may term the naked patriotism of a people who have net received an elementary training in arms. On the present occasion, however, we desire to leave that matter entirely out of considera- tion, and to assume that it may be safe to go on in the future as we have gone on in the past, without attempting to giro our people generally any knowledge of arms during peace time. We wish to accept for the moment and for purposes of argument the view of those who consider that national training beforehand is not necessary, and that the people, even though untrained, will be able to give us all that we shall need to ask from them at a crisis. In other words, let us temporarily accept the hypothesis of the Labour Member who stated in the House of Commons that at a moment of peril hundreds of thousands of British men of all classes would bo ready to flash their bayonets in the sun.
What we want to ask now is,—Have Co got the aforesaid bayonets, or, to be a little less picturesque but more specific, the rifles into which the bayonota fit, in sufficient numbers to enable us to benefit as a nation by the patriotic response that would undoubtedly be made to an appeal in a moment of peril P Those who consider the training of our population against en emergency an unnecessary precaution must at any rate admit that it is essential to have a store of rifles ready to pot into their hands. Even if we assume that we shall always have three or four months' time in which to train and improvise troops, few people, we fancy, will be found to say that there will also always bo enough time in which to manufacture the necessary arms. We feel sure that the man who relies upon the patriotic appeal to an untrained nation always instinctively assumes that the Government will have enough rifles to deal out to the volunteers who would flock in thousands on the raising of the national stendard. The Labour Member of whom we have spoken certainly made that assumption, for incidentally he declared that should the rifles not be forth- coming the nation would bane the Secretary for War. 'That was, of course, a rhetorical 'flourish, and we feel sure that he and all other sensible persona will agree that it would be a very poor consolation to make our last act as an independent nation the hanging of a Cabinet Minister. To he conquered with our hands red even with the guiltiest possible blood would make very little amends for an act of national folly. In other words, to talk about hanging the Secretary for War if there should not be enough rifles ready is only a somewhat exaggerated way of declaring that we ought always to have sufficient rifles in store to cable as to take advantage of the patriotism of our people. Either we must have sufficient rifles for that purpose, or else see meet abandon the notion of the appeal, and rely solely upon such organized forces ea we now possess. To reckon upon a sudden and great expansion of our forces by patriotic volunteering must mean, in a nation governed by reason and not by rhetoric, the provision of such a prime and physical essential of expansion as a large reserve of rifles. We say nothing of reserves of clothes. greatcoats, cartridge-belts, and the hundred-and-one other things necessary for military equipment, for fighting is conceivable without them, though it may be rendered very much more difficult through want of them. For example, it may be tench better and handier to have a bandolier or a cartridge-belt ; but still. if it cornea to a pinch, a man may stuff the pockets of an ordinary coat full of cartridges, and so be able to do the State some service. The thing that itis quite certain he cannot do is to make any use of cartridges if he has no rifle into which to put them. The rifle and the cartridges are no doubt in a sense both essentials; but the rifle is the thing which it is most important to dwell upon, for the plain reason that cartridges can be made far more rapidly than rifles. We may take it, then, that there is a general agreement that we ought to have in store sufficient
rifles for the equipment of those of our people who will volunteer at a great national emergency. Further, since we should find no satisfaction in hanging a Secretary of State for War who had neglected to remind us of this elementary duty, we ought as a nation, instead of indulging in vague threats, to see to it ourselves that the proper stores are provided and kept ready in these islands
Perhaps it will be said that all we have written is beside the mark, for the very simple reason that we have sufficient rifles already in store, and that we are making a fuss about doing some- thing which has already been done. The optimist of our thought would probably allege that the introduction of the new short rifle, coupled with the retention of our old rifles—which, since they fire the same ammunition, are quite as useful as before—will give us all the extra rifles that could possibly be required. We do not profess to know exactly how many extra rifles we shall have when the rearming, first of the Regulars and then of the Auxiliaries, with the short rifle has been completed; but we must venture to express a very strong doubt whether even then—the process, we presume, will take two or three years more—we shall have sufficient rifles in stook. What is the standard to which we ought to attain P That, of course, is a question which no civilian could presume to answer in detaiL But though we cannot do this, we hold that any man of common-sense is competent to discuss the manner in which the momentous problem should be approached. In the first place, it is clear that we most have not only enough rifles for our Regular troops, including the Reserves, but a large number of reserve rifles with which to make good in their case the tremendous wear and tear of war. Next, we ought to possess rifles and reserve rifles for the whole of the Auxiliary Forces, and for the augmentation of those Auxiliary Forces which would take place automatically at a moment of peril. Next, we ought, in our opinion, to have ready to band a stock of rifles sufficient to equip five hundred thousand men should it be necessary for us to appeal to tho country to give us—we do not say at one moment, but spread over two or three years—sufficient men to prevent our Indian Empire from being destroyed, or, to put it in a safer way, for there is always danger in specific hypotheses, to enable us to carry on a life-and-death struggle abroad. But remember that the carrying on of a life-and-death struggle abroad involves, not peace and safety at home, but the very reverse. The moment when we are face to face with a great crisis oversee will also be the moment when we shall be face to face with great peril in Britain itself from foreign attack. If we have to provide half-a-million rifles to arm troops improvised here to save us from peril abroad, that will be the very moment when we shall also need to improvise troops here for ensuring our safety. We may depend upon it that if we have to send half-a-million extra rifles out of the country, we shall want at least half-a-million more here in order to make us feel and be absolutely secure. Again, we must remember that in a moment of great national peril we shall be sure to receive very large offers of help from the Colonies. But the Colonies have no stores of rifles of their own, and they would therefore have to tell us, when making those offers, that they were subject to our providing the necessary rifles. At least a hundred thousand extra rifles ought to be ready for such an emergency. /I seems to us, therefore, that, speaking in the most general terms, we ought, after the fullest provision had been made for all our Regulars and Auxiliaries—that is, for all our men at present uniformed and for their reserves—to have at least a million extra rifles in store in England to sleet any great emergency. Unless we make such a provision we are living in a fool's paradise—the fool's paradise of those who either think that the spirit of patriotism will avail although there are no arms to put into the hands of the popula- tion, or who imagine that it would be any consolation to a con- quered nation to hang a Minister at the moment of its entering on its death-agony.
We are prepared to find one set of critics telling us that we are absurdly alarmist, and another, of a more cynical description, shrugging their shoulders and declaring that, although all we say may be perfectly true, nothing will he done, and that we shalt just muddle on as before with the barest possible provision for immediate needs, and shall rely upon improvising rifles as much as upon improvising men in a case of great peril. After all, did we not in the Boer War come down to the very bottom of the reserves, not only of cartridges, but of rifles ? [We believe we are right in saying that if the European situation had at the crisis of the Boer War become very dangerous, and we had wanted to raise half a million extra volunteers in this country, wo could not have done so bemuse we had only just enough rifles to arm the men already raised. In those days it was impossible even to get two or three hundred rifles from the Government for rifle-club pur- poses. Those who wanted them had to order them from private makers.] In opposition to those who say that nothing can or will be done in regard to this vital question of a proper provision of rifles, we at any rate will make a suggestion which is practical and C,onstitutionaL It is that there should be a Committee—a secret Committee, if necessary—of Members of the House of Commons, upon which there would be no Minister or ex-Minister—that is, a Com- mittee composed entirely of outsiders as regards military matters— and that this independent body should call witnesses, first to ascertain how many extra rifle. there now are in the country which could be used if we were driven to improvise large bodies of troops, and next to answer the question r "How many such extra rifle, ought we to possess in order to make ourselves perfectly safe and to be quite free front the danger and humiliation of seeing men volunteering by the hundred thousand at a moment of national peril and being told that their services could not be accepted because the whole of the rifles in the possession of the Government were already employed and in hand, and that the factories could not produce the requisite number under three months ?” After all, the cost of extra rifles is not a very serious affair. We suppose that they could be provided for some three million pounds. Even presuming that they would be obsolete at the end of twenty years, or worth very little thou, this would only moan, say, £200,000 a year to provide interest and sinking fund. Remember, we are not asking for anything abnormal or impossible. France and Germany keep, not a million, but something much more like three or four million rifles ready in case of emergency.
Is the Secretary of State for War prepared to say that we have all the rifles we could possibly require should a great emergency arise? If he is not prepared to make such a statement, then the sooner we ascertain how many extra rifles we ought to have to supply the deficiency the better right we shall have to say that as a people we are not neglectful of the national safety.
In the year following the appearance of this article the editor of the Spectator made another quite unsuccessful attempt to gain the ear of the War Office and the Cabinet by opening a debate at one of the Discussion Dinners of the National Defence Association, at which the Master of the Ordnance—the member of the Army Council chiefly concerned with the supply of rifles—and other official soldiers were guests. The official view, freely and warmly expressed, was that Mr. Strachey's proposal was the idiocy of a well-meaning but weak-minded civilian, and the politicians present seemed impressed by this view. If the expert soldiers thought there was nothing in the scheme, it was obviously not worth even considering. Only from the younger soldiers was any support forthcoming. The Master of the Ordnance went so far as to say that this country would never again improvise troops in large numbers. So ended a pleasant evening. Very likely some of our readers were at the dinner and will remember the incident. The discussion was well reported, and published in the official magazine of the Association. Lord Glenconner was in the chair.
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