THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE AUXILIARY FORCES.
THE Commission en the Auxiliary Forces which is about to begin its sittings may prove, nay, ought to prove, an event of great moment in our military history. . The reference to the Commission is wide, and if the Commissioners, as we trust they will, realise the vast importance of their task, the result of their inquiries should affect our whole ,system of national defence. We look to them to tell us in what way the Auxiliary Forces may be raised, organised, equipped, and aimed go as include all the best elements in the nation, and to be ready and able to undertake the military: defence'of these islands alone:. The word that we have italicised, the word °alone,' is the crucial point. The Commission will doubt- less be told, and told in all sincerity, by the Regular officers and by the representatives of the War Office that it is never proposed to entrust the defence of these islands to the ' Auxiliary Forces, and that therefore this question of alone need not be considered. There will always, they will declare, be a stiffening of Regular troops, at least an army corps, but generally more, left in these islands, and they will add that what is wanted from the Militia, Yeomanry, and Volunteers is a force auxiliary to such a Regular Army, and not troops capable of undertaking alone the military defence of these islands. Now, as we have said, these con- ditions will be laid down in all sincerity by the representa- tives of the Secretary of State and by the officers of the Regular Forces who will be called on to give evidence ; but for all -that, they must not be regarded as stating what would. or could really happen if we were engaged in a great war requiring the sending of a large force of soldiers to places outside these islands. If such a war comes, we may be absolutely certain that what will happen will be what happened in the South African War. The whole of the efficient portion of the Regular Army, as well as a great part of the best Auxiliaries, will be sent out of the country, and theSe islands will, whatever may be said in cool blood and in peace-time by the authorities, be entirely denuded of Regular troops of the kind that can be used for stiffening purposes. Those who will be left will not be capable of stiffening anything or any- body. The Regulars in these islands at the end of, or during 'the crisis of, a great oversea war will be, as always before, not a stiffening, but the dregs of the Regular Army.—We use the term " dregs " in no offensive sense, but rather in the sense of scraps and odds and ends,—i.e., what remains at the bottom of a glass after you have tossed off the liquor that it contained.—There will be a large number of men just enlisted and of men either too young or too feeble in health to be sent abroad,—the men who were rejected, that is, as unfit for foreign service when the active drafts were made up. Next there will be a certain mimber of odds and ends of Reservemen who, though recalled to the colours, have for one reason or other not been sent to the front with their regiments. Lastly, there will be a certain number of so-called garrison regi- ments men,—men who have passed out of the Reserve, but who have been induced to rejoin by patriotic feeling and by the offer of certain exceptional terms. These odds and ends —partly reliquiae medici, partly raw recruits, and partly "old stagers "—will, when heads are counted, present a very imposing total Many of, them also will be per se excellent fighting men, and all of them, we do not doubt, will he willing, and capable, in a sense, of -striking hard blows in defence of the Motherland. But they will not be ".a: stiffening of Regulars " in any sense. They will, as we have just said, be the dregs of the Regular Army, —the odds and ends of several army corps, and not in any way a field army capable of stiffening the Auxiliaries. For good or evil, the Auxiliaries will be the field. army, and the so-called stiffening of Regulars a force auxiliary thereto.
We shall be told, of course,' that this is pure specu- lation, and we shall be asked why we assume that in the event of a great oversew war the Government of the day will not select some thirty thousand. of its best troops of all arms, and keep them in these islands at full strength and in full efficiency as a field army. Our answer is that we know the nature of our countrymen, and that we are perfectly certain they will show the spirit of the race, and obey that most English of mottoes,—"Nothing venture, nothing have." Hoarding one's trumps is not, and quite rightly, a British trait. When we are once engaged in a great war oversee, and are determined to win it, we shall in order to win be willing to send. every available Regular out of the country, as we did in 1900 and 1901, and to chance the consequences. We are not saying a word, remember, against this national proclivity to take risks. On the contrary, we applaud it, and realise that on the whole it is the wisest and safest course. What we object to is pretending that this is not the habit of the British people, and acting as if at a time of crisis we should or could hoard our best Regular troops—i.e., the troops who could act as stiffening—and could. refuse to let them go abroad, where they might possibly be able to give the " knock-out blow." What we plead for, then, is that the Commission should turn a deaf ear to any assurances that there will always be a stiffening of Regulars in these islands, and should, sweeping away all pedantic hindrances, address themselves to the task of considering in what way the Auxiliaries could be organised into a great and self-sufficing field army capable of providing for the military defence of these islands alone. If they can get help, and help, of course, of the best kind, from any Regular force that may happen to be in the kingdom, that will be all to the good. The point is that such Regulars must be regarded for this purpose as an auxiliary force, and that the main home-defence force must be the Militia, Yeomanry, and Volunteers properly organised, and, above all, properly officered.
It is not our business to lay down in detail the lines on which the Commission should proceed. Any attempt on our part to do so would be very properly resented. We should, however, like to draw attention to one or two simple points, in the hope that the Commission may be able to consider them. The Commission will naturally be much occupied with the Militia, that splendid national force which, in spite of the neglect, and even insult, from which it has suffered, has never failed the nation in its day of trouble ; and in South Africa, as in the Belgian yeoman's cornfields and fellows, helped to save the nation from danger and disgrace. The Commission will want to suggest means for improving the Militia. Now, in our belief, they can find close at hand. a very simple and easy way, not only of increasing the numbers of the Militia, but of immensely improving the stamp of man at present obtained as a re- cruit. That plan is one which has been repeatedly pro- posed in -these columns during the last three years. It is, in a nutshell, to allow the Militia recruit wherever possible—and in the majority of cases it is possible —to live at home while he is doing .his recruit training. That is, instead of living in barracks, the recruit lives at home, and goes every day to the drill-ground, just as he might go to work in a factory or in private employment. This used to be the plan in many Militia regiments, but for various reasons it was discouraged by the War Office, till at last the " day-boy " system was entirely suppressed, and remained suppressed till January 1st of this year. On that date leave was given to the Colonel of the 7th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, an East End Militia regiment, for recruits to live out of barracks whilst drilling on enlistment. The result on the regiment was at once most marked. Whereas- on April 1st in 1901 and 1902—i.e., while on the barrack system—the regiment was respectively four hundred and' ninety and four hundred and seventy-one strong, it was on April 1st last—i.e., after being on the " day-boy " system for three months—seven hundred and seventy-five strong, or over 60 per cent. better. To put it in another way. whereas last year the regiment wanted five hundred and ninety men to attain full strength, it now only wants two hundred and eighty-six men. Surely these are figures which should. not be neglected. They point to the fact that the way to obtain Militia recruits is to let them live at home while they train. The Commission should, of course, inquire most carefully whether the " day-boys " make as efficient soldiers, and belong to as good a class, and if the discipline is as good as formerly. If the answers are in all cases entirely satisfactory, as we believe they will be found to be, it should. surely be worth while to consider whether the plan of Militia " day-boys " cannot be extended.
It is not necessary to dwell upon the fact that the Com- mission will have to consider the conditions under which more and better officers of Volunteers can be obtained; for such an inquiry is their very raison d'être. We trust, however, that they will not, while considering the problem of officers, forget the point raised in these columns in regard to the distinctions of D.L. and J.P. Other matters which should, in our opinion, occupy some slight attention are rifle clubs, County Guide Corps, and the organisation 'of the levee en masse. In our view, we ought to consider the possibility of raising, arming, and organising the population in each district in case of invasion. We ought, that is, to con- template a call to arms in the villages and country districts, and to have ready a skeleton scheme for issuing. "commission of array" to s- me person of trust and responsibility in each small local, • centre. But if that is to be done, the first thing necessary is to have some simple mechanism for getting the rifles and the cartridges into the hands of the men called to arms. Of course at the present moment we have not only no organisation for arming any portion of the rural popu- latiim, but also we have no store of extra arms for such 'a purpose. Literally, if England were in danger of being invaded to-morrow, and only the most respectable part of the adult population—i.e., the men with £100 a year and more—asked to be armed, there would be no possibility of arming them. We are enemies, not friends, of conscription or of compulsory universal military service, but it has at any rate one advantage. It makes Govern- ments face the problem of arms, and forces them to keep arms in the country in some way commensurable with the population. Yet in reality, although we have not got con- scription, it would. be possible to keep a million extra rifles in the country. Will not the Commission consider this ? At present, compared with France and Germany, we are literally an unarmed nation, and we could not, working day and night, arm ourselves under a year.
While we are debating the question of universal military service, could we not, by way of a beginning, keep enough rifles to arm, say, one adult male in ten in case of real emergency ? In our belief, if invasion came, we should not need the compulsion; but, at any rate, let us not act as if no Englishman would ask for a rifle in case of invasion. In any case, the Commission might ask the question as to how many rifles and how much spare and extra ammunition are i kept in the country on behalf of the Auxiliary Forces.
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