TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE ARMY THAT WE NEED.
IT is difficult to keep patience while the conditions of future military service are being. discussed as they are being discussed now. Between nomination day and polling day Conscription " was turned into. a first-class electoral issue. It is a lamentable fact that the war with its countless lessons should have caused politicians to unlearn so little of the old fictitious principles which they really believed to be in dispute before the war. We have been listening once more to the old hollow talk about " Conscription " fastening upon an unwilling and oppressed nation the "yoke" and "slavery" of military service. We have been told that the Jingoes are rising up again to fashion a fresh enormous military organi- zation, with which deadly weapon of aggression they will keep the world in a state of suppressed war for countless generations, and will bleed is all white into the bargain. Labour and Radical candidates have addressed their audiences hour by hour upon this gloomy prospect. Mr. Lloyd George, they said, was trying to bring it about that the war should have been in vain ; militarism was not, after all, to be ended ; Great Britain was to commit the oldest military sins the newest kinds of ways, and was to take the lead in imposing upon the world an intolerable nuisance and curse. Much as we disagree with Mr. Lloyd George about many things, we cannot see that in respect of what is comprehensively and very loosely called Conscription " he said a word more than one in his highly responsible position ought to have said. He expressed the hope that the world would be relieved of the frightful incubus of the Continental type of Conscription, but he added that whatever we could do towards bringing about our release would depend upon the action of our tentative enemies. That surely is the barest truth. We all hope for release, and mean to do our level best to obtain it ; but so long as there is danger of our house once more being set on fire, we shall have to continue to pay our insurance premiums. Does any sensible man who has just succeeded in putting a fire out argue that he need never insure his house again ? On the contrary ; he has been greatly impressed by the fact that his house caught on fire from some mysterious or unfore- seen cause, and he is precisely in the mood to reflect that such a thing might very well happen again. Nevertheless, though we should be fools to shut our eyes to danger so long as danger exists, we do sincerely believe that the causes of danger will be enormously reduced in future. We do not believe for a moment that when the settlement has been accomplished any nation will be found clinging to the old Continental system of Conscription.
Let us assume that this happy condition will be achieved, and now let us consider what kind of Army we shall scant in those circumstances. To begin with, it is obvious that however many causes of danger may be taken out of our hands by a League of Nations, and however much our relations with other nations may be soothed by the same means, the British Empire will still require a highly expert professional Army for the physical regulation of its affairs. This will not be a large Army, but it will have to be an extremely skilled one—quite RS skilled, and that is saying a great deal, as the wonderful Contemptibles " who were shipped over to France in August, 1911. The terms of service of that old Regular Army could not be improved, and they ought to remain. We would suggest, however, that there should be in future two divisions of Guards ; that is to say, four battalions of Grenadiers, four battalions of the Coldstream, two battalions of Irish, two of Welsh, and two of Scots Guards. These two divisions would provide a small short-service Regular Army for those men who did not wish to go to India, but who wanted to have three years' soldiering as a preliminary to passing into the police force or some cognate occupation. The Regular Army, whose duties would of course be those of an Imperial Gen- darmerie, would be the only force in which service would take up a considerable part of a man's time and would be in any sense a profession. Now we come to the field of military service in which compulsion could with all propriety be applied, and ought without fail to be applied. There should be a Territorial Army exactly on the old lines, except that it would be compulsory for every youth who has reached the age of seventeen or eighteen to join it. The conditions we suggest are that the wholly untrained boy should receive three months' recruit training, one month of which should be under canvas and the rest while the boy was still living at home, just as Militia- men in the old days were able to be trained without going into barracks. It is quite true, of course, that in sparsely populated districts it would not be possible to train- boys while they were living at home, and in these cases, as the training could not come to the boys, the boys would have to go to the training. Even in these cases, however, it would be easy for recruits to be lodged in private houses. The usual objections to the evils of barrack life could not possibly be raised under these conditions. The period of training would be so light as not to interfere with any boy's prospects or with his training for any particular trade. It could be arranged that if boys could bring school certificates of four years' drill and proficiency, signed by an Army inspector, the recruit training would be reduced to a single month under canvas. In the case of less satisfactory certificates the training might be cut down in proportion. But in any event there ought to be a month's recruit training under canvas.
All promotions to commissions should be through the ranks, though it might be found convenient to give commissions to O.T.C. boys immediately after the recruit training. When the recruit training was ended men should be called out for a fortnight every year for a period of three years, and thereafter till they reached the age of thirty they would be required to put in only one week of training in each year. Between the ages of thirty and forty they would be in the Reserve. Surely no one could seriously pretend that a training of this kind would interfere with a man's livelihood. In Switzerland, where the training is considerably longer than that which we propose, there never has been and never could be any com- plaint. The training becomes progressively less as a man's age increases, and the annual meetings of the Landsturm on the one day on which its members are compelled to put in -an appearance is a reunion of old friends and has all the qualities of a holiday. If the alleged disadvantages of such a training as this are chimerical, the advantages are positive and great. It is excellent from every point of view, physical, mental, and moral, that the youth of the country should be trained in the elements of the use of arms, should be brought under a system of organized discipline, and should have, as is necessary for military purposes, their health carefully watched and tended. So long as military training is not too protracted, it is a blessing both to the nation and to the individual man himself. No doubt too long a training becomes a dull routine, and may tend to cause a man to conform too rigidly to a convention. But this certainly cannot be said of the extremely light training which we propose. In brief, we do not want, and do not propose, a conscript Army. There is no suggestion of com- pulsion for overseas service ; and finally there is no question of herding men in barracks or of spoiling their lives.
Provided that the possibility of an attack upon us cannot be entirely ruled out, it is the duty of every good citizen to be prepared to defend his country. The more democratic we profess ourselves to be, the stricter does this obligation become. It is amazing to us that men who call themselves democrats should have so bemused their minds, or should have so deliber- ately stultified their principles in the course of saying what they think will be acceptable to their hearers, that they can pretend that voluntaryism is in any sense democratic. Under the old system it was possible, indeed usual, for a very large number of the nation to regard the defence of the Empire as a job not fit for the aristocracy of Labour. There was an intense class feeling. Mothers used to talk of a son " going for a soldier " as though some disgrace had been brought upon the family. Really the son who went for a soldier, though he may have done so for wretched reasons and may have arrived at his decision by devious and shady courses, brought a great honour upon his family. He was fulfilling one of the element- ary functions of citizenship, and perhaps he was the only one in the family doing so. Nevertheless other men who flattered themselves on living under better conditions than the soldier were content to regard him with contempt. They were able to talk light-heartedly about war, and perhaps even to do their bit towards creating a warlike atmosphere, feeling all the time that they would never be drawn into the turmoil them- selves—that their own skins would be perfectly safe. Is it possible to imagine in a so-called democratic country a -posture more irresponsible, more ignoble I The assertion that compulsory military training would mean a readiness to dash into aggression is nothing more than an assertion, and a singularly ill-founded one. Every one thinks several times before helping to bring on a war if he has to say to himself " This means I'm in it."
It is ridiculous to pretend that there is no need for men to learn the use of arms. Even the League of Nations must call for sacrifice. Every householder is a potential policeman in that he has a legal obligation on him to rally to the assistance of the police, and inasmuch as every householder who is not a poltroon will always resist a housebreaker. The same principle exactly applies to the life of the nation. We ask for the only principle that it is possible for a self-respecting and logically minded people to accept. We have mentioned the great benefit of a compulsory training to the health of the nation. If any one is inclined to persist in the argument that it is useless to train large numbers of men as they will never be wanted again, we would answer that the results of military training on health are alone sufficient to justify that training. No writer, we believe, has emphasized the health side of this question more than Mr. T. C. Horsfall. Although the Conti- nental conscript system is quite unsuited to our own probable needs in future, the results of that system in bringing heath to millions of men remain perfectly clear. Mr. Horsfall has pointed out with great force that the mere fact that as many young men as possible in Germany were to be trained as soldiers inevitably brought it about that great attention was paid by the authorities to the national health. " They take care," he wrote in 1915 in a pamphlet entitled The Uplifting of the Nation by Compulsory Military Training (C. B. Barber, Manchester ; price 2d.), " that all children, girls as well as boys, shall as soon as possible and as long as possible be kept under the influence of good physical training and all other obtainable conditions favourable to the healthy growth and development of their bodies." The statistics prove that the benefits which one would expect did actually occur. Compul- sory training means, in fact, a sort of Automatic National Health Register. We should much like to hear the opinion of some of the mothers in the cottage homes of England about the physical condition of their sons as a result of Army training. If they were candid, and their old prejudices were stifled, they would admit that their sons came back bigger and stronger, held themselves better, had better manners and a more ordered sense of life than they had ever had before. Are these advan- tages to be withheld from the nation because politicians prefer to argue along lines of controversy which no longer have any sense or justification ?
As regards class feeling, which is admittedly a curse, nothing is more calculated to remove it than compulsory military training. All young men, rich and poor alike, would have to go through the training under equal conditions.- There would be no privilege, no purchasing of exemptions. The humble and the proud, the simple and the luxurious, would meet one another and shake down together under the same canvas roof or in the same billets. " man, " as Shakespeare says, " is too good to serve his Prince." In this case a man's Prince is his country. What have our Labour leaders really got to say against this proposal ? Do they, or do they not, want to support an out-of-date system of privilege for them- selves ? Are they, or are they not, as much concerned as they profess to be with the health of the workers ? Why not plump then for the Automatic National Health Register?
Let us put one final suggestion in a very few words. Women have now been invested with the fullest responsibilities of citizenship. It is not proposed that they should bear arms. No one wants Amazonian regiments. But do women want to be put in a position parallel to that of the men ? Why should not the girls have some compulsory training in domestic and sanitary work and in the management and bringing up of small children ? The figures of infant mortality, though there has been an improvement, have for many years been appalling. Are the leaders of the women prepared to say that it would be wrong to dispel the fatal ignorance—for the mortality arises chiefly from ignorance—by compulsion ?
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