" MR. CH:ELDERS' SCHEME."
IT is as nearly certain as anything political can be, that within the next five years the Householder Parliament
will have abolished Purchase in the Army, established a pure Seniority as the rule of promotion in the Army. It is abso- lutely certain that mere seniority will, in the end, render the Army incompetent for active service. Yet for fifty members in the House of Commons who take an active interest in Mr. Trevelyan's resolutions for the abolition of Purchase, not five will attend to its inevitable corollary, the plan known among Artillery officers, all of whom are promoted by seniority, as "Mr. Childers' Scheme." Yet the latter is not only an advisable complement of the former, but an indispensable complement, if the Army, under the new organization, is to continue efficient at all.
The case stands thus. Mr. Trevelyan proposes to abolish Purchase, and to make of the lower ranks of the Army a pure Seniority list. If the question is to be seriously discussed, what can be more rational than to inquire with regard to the three large seniority corps, which already exist in our Army, to what extent the system answers with them ? Let us consider the facts, and in order not to confuse the ques- tion, let us take, by way of an example, the Royal Artil- lery, the largest of the three corps concerned, and con- sider its present position and past history. At first sight nothing could appear more promising. It chances that we have what, is unquestionably the best guide in such a case, abundant testimony from foreign critics on the subject, and that testimony is singularly unanimous. The Times quoted the other day from the official report of Prussian officers sent in 1865 to inspect foreign military establishments a sentence which it translates thus : — " The English artillery officer, taken on an average, stands at the top of the far-reaching artillery science of the day." A piece of testimony quite as striking fell in the way of a friend of the present writer. He was travelling in France as an amateur artist, and being a man fond of hearing what he could of the opinions of all ranks, he was wont to join him- self freely to the little knots of French soldiers, " brigadiers " and corporals who frequented the different cafes of the towns through which he passed. He endeavoured often to draw them out on the subject of the English Army, and whenever he succeeded he declares that the result was invariably the same. French soldiers are apt to be severe critics of our unwarlike muddling, and our friend says that they amused themselves much at our expense with reference to many parts of our military administration, and whilst full of courteous compliments as to the pluck of our infantry and cavalry, took always a little the tone of the onlookers at the Balaklava charge, " Splendid, splendid! but not warlike." He declares, however, that the conclusion was invariably the same—"Mais, monsieur, vous avez une artillerie magnifique ;" and they always endeavoured to show that their former remarks were not dictated by prejudice, by the eager generosity with which they acknowledged how often, when their own artillery was disabled, the deadly accuracy of our own was unimpaired. Nor did the French soldier any more than the Prussian officer hesitate to assign the reason for the present perfection of our artillery service. " Ah, Sir, you see it is quite different in that corps from the rest of your Army. Your artillery officers are educated for their work and are- not passed over by purchase." What, then, can be more satis- factory than this seniority system ? How can we do better than adopt it for the rest of our Army ? Alas ! these criticisms on our Artillery are of very recent date, and if we go back only as far as the year 1848 we shall find " a report " by a distin- guished Artillery officer " On the Numerical Deficiency, Want of Instruction, and Inefficient Equipment of the Artillery." How, then, has a change so radical been brought about ? The answer is easy. It is not difficult to understand that in a service in which more changes, more daily improvements are made than in any other, efficiency will depend absolutely on the extent to which the junior, the direct executive officers are kept in full practical acquaintance with the latest improvements of the day. Now, it is exactly this which you can secure with young men, which it is impossible that you should secure with elderly gentlemen, At this moment courses' of artillery officers, captains and subalterns, are constantly passing through Wool- wich and Shoeburyness in successive batches to learn the latest details of modern improvement, in order that " the average artillery officer " may be kept abreast of " the far- reaching artillery science of the day." But supposing that these courses,' instead of consisting of men of from five- and-twenty to five-and-thirty years of age, as they do at present, consisted of men of from five-and-forty to five- and-fifty, as they would have done before the Crimean War, how useful the system would have been, how easy it woald have been for the elderly gentlemen to settle themselves down to unlearn the work of their lives, and to begin to learn every- thing anew 1 And yet it is an absolute certainty that we are returning to the old state of things with faithful exactness, and, what is the most curious part of the whole case as it at present stands, the round to which we are doomed is this. During peace time, just after a war, our artillery is likely to be in a high state of perfec- tion, and just when it is not wanted most ready for use ; just when a war comes our artillery is almost certain to be officered, more especially in its junior ranks, by a set of decrepit old gentlemen, utterly unfit to command it, and just when it is wanted is sure therefore to be hoplessly inefficient. The causes of all this have been so often explained that we hardly care to go over them again, except to show that unless we can provide a remedy, the inevitable result of Mr. Trevelyan's resolutions will be to inflict on the whole of our Army the evils which have hitherto been confined to the most important corps in it. The fact is that purchase, with all its mischiefs, does increase the rate of his promotion enor- mously, even to the man who does not purchase. As soon as an officer feels that, for his time of life, and this is the im- portant point to mark, the rank which he then holds does not offer him sufficient inducement to remain in the service, he accepts an offer from one of his juniors and goes. The man of junior rank succeeds not to his place, but to the bottom of the list of the rank in which the vacancy occurs. All the men junior in his own rank to the officer who leaves, whether they intend ultimately to purchase or not, thus obtain a step which they would not have obtained but for an expenditure of private money to which they do not contri- bute. Of the abuses to which such a system may and does lead it is not our present purpose to speak. If after all the
comments that have been made on them, more needs to be said, we can only infer that it is useless to say it.
But what this system does secure is that those men leave the service who in each rank are getting too old for their work. Now, it is obvious that a man may at fifty be highly useful as a general officer, who would be utterly useless as a subaltern. If our Army is to retain the one feature which has always been its best characteristic, the genuine and com- plete sympathy which subsists between officers and men, the junior ranks of officers must be able to join efficiently in every exertion which is required of the soldiers, and to be their leaders as much by physical energy as by military authority. But if, whilst the average age of the men is less than thirty, you allow the average age of the subalterns to be much greater than that, and the age of the youngest captain to be very much greater, you render such a leadership in physical energy impossible. And yet it is exactly to this result that our system in the Non-Purchase corps has hitherto tended. Large retiring allowances were granted to officers who should cling on to the service till the last, no induce- ment whatever was offered to officers to retire in the junior ranks. The result has been that at all times the difference in age between the senior and junior of each rank has been immensely greater than that which has existed between the average age of two successive ranks. During a long peace we have had old subalterns, old captains, and old senior officers. Then a war has cleared off the old gentlemen, who could not stand the rough work of a campaign, or, as in the exceptional case of the Crimea, an aug- mentation has produced the same effect, promotion has been rapid, and we have had young colonels, young captains, and young subalterns, each by the end of a year of war time promoted into ranks the work of which was quite new to them. No doubt, as the material out of which our Artillery officers are taken is, by the allowance of all Europe, the best in any existing army, these officers have in the course of another year learned efficiently and well in the presence of an enemy work which they ought to have learned, had our system of promo- tion been reasonable, in peace time at home ; and by, say, the third year of war, our artillery has become, as it was at the end of the Crimean War, and as it has continued with constant improvement ever since, the corps d'ilite of Europe. But as three years is a long period to allow nowadays for the dura- tion of any war, it certainly does seem the very perfection of penny-wisdom and of pound-folly to expend untold sums on the most costly implements of modern war, and to neglect the consideration of a simple scheme which is offered by business-like men like Mr. Childers, Mr. Trevelyan, and Lord Hartington, as a remedy for the defect which prevents that expenditure from being of any value to the country until the end of the period during which any modern war is, we may hope, likely to last. The scheme itself is an exceedingly simple one. It con- sists in the following points : — 1. It does away entirely with the high premiums given to those officers who merely remain on in the service with a view to retiring on a large salary at the end of their career. 2.. It offers to middle- aged men a moderate retiring pension irrespective of the rank they may hold, and of the number of others who may chance to have accepted it already, and one which is thus valuable to them or not precisely according to the rank they may hold at any given time ; the scheme, in this respect, adopting the one advantage which, as we have pointed out, is afforded by the Purchase system. 3. It allows the rate of this pension slowly to increase in order that men who have not jumped at the offer at once may not be deprived of all inducement to retire afterwards. 4. By allowing officers to obtain from the Government, in lieu of their pensions, a lump sum down, calculated upon their lives, it deprives them of much inducement to remain on after that age at which the value of life annuities decreases rapidly, and it fur- ther tempts most those men to retire whose tastes and inclinations point strongly to another career, but who have not the capital with which to enter it. 5. It obliges all officers at sixty to make their choice between taking their pension, or awaiting their chance of being employed in general Army commands. So that it thus, in fact, .obliges all officers to retire, who have not by that time so dis- tinguished themselves as to make it certain that they will be employed ; while it retains in the service all those who are so distinguished. We shall not enter into the details by which these results are obtained ; they have been repeated again and again with a rare unanimity of approval by every paper in the country. The Times, the Daily News, the Standard, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review have vied with one another in the excellence of their articles on the subject, and in the completeness with which they have approved Mr. Childers' scheme as it stands. We cannot but think, however, that our contemporaries have a little too much insisted on the moderation of the request which is made by men who after long service claim a small pension. That is to discuss the question on grounds of abstract justice, and abstract justice carried to its logical consequences means 2d. in the pound added to the income-tax, as Lord Palmerston used to say.
The point is not that, but that as the case at present stands we are paying enormous sums for a useless commodity. Mr. Childers offers us at an increase of expense which is relatively absolutely insignificant, a perfect commodity, instead of a useless one. Is it wisdom or folly to accept the offer ? A few of the senior officers who are threatened with a slight decrease in the amount of pension they had expected are not unnaturally disposed to doubt the success of the scheme. We cannot think it an unreasonable or costly demand to ask that ade- quate compensation should be made in cases of this kind of individual hardship. But our present object is to demand that if, as we hope will be the case ere long, our legislators insist that the Army shall be brought under their own hands as a department responsible to Parliament, they will conde- scend to show that they do not habitually shirk dull details concerning it, and that they will not allow a question to be decided without their understanding what the nature of the decision is by an incompetent Secretary of State for War, who confesses, as Sir John Pakington did the other night to Mr. Childers, that he is ignorant of the whole subject because, not being a man of the calibre necessary to oblige his subordinates to furnish him with correct information, he has also no time to read the newspapers.
Previous page
