THE REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON THE WAR.
THE three hundred and sixteen pages of closely printed matter which constitute the Report of the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa, published on Tuesday, form too large a document, and suggest too many important problems, to be dealt with fully within the limits of a single article. We do not propose, therefore, to do more for the present than to examine one or two of the salient questions which the Report raises, and must postpone consideration of others which, no doubt, are extremely important, but which require separate treatment. Indeed, there is sentence following sentence in this most valuable contribution to the dis- cussion of our military needs and policy that would. form the text of innumerable essays and speeches, sentences which we sincerely trust will be as carefully read and thought about by every private British citizen as by those who, by their own executive action, can make it possible for reform to come about in the methods of the War Office and. the provision of the Army we need.. Two such sentences stand out for immediate comment ; they are, indeed, perhaps those on which more attention should be concentrated than on any others in the Report. The first is the statement made by Sir George Taubman- Goldie, in a Note appended to the Report, that the hope expressed by the Commission "that the state of affairs in 1899 cannot recur" is, on his part, "a wish and not an expectation." The second is a general observation made by. the Commission as a whole. After stating that "the true lesson of the war in our opinion is,'that no military system will be satisfactory which does not contain powers of expansion outside the limit of the Regular forces of the Crown, whatever that limit may be," the Commission remark that "we regret to say that we are not satisfied that enough is being done to place matters on a better footing in the event of another emergency." It is difficult not to read into the second observation something of the same spirit of dissatisfaction with our present system which so clearly emphasises the remark made by Sir George Taubman-Goldie. That, to our mind, is the most important point in the Report. Should we, that is, if we suddenly engaged in a great war, do better to-day, or next year, or ten years hence, than we did in 1899?
If not, to what conclusion can we come ? Let us see what actually did happen in 1899, in the way of break- downs and mistakes on the part of various Departments connected with the Army which we eventually sent to South Africa. We can take as typical instances the failures of the Departments whose business it was to supply material. On December 15th, 1899, the day of the battle of Colenso, Sir Henry Brackenbury, Director- General of Ordnance, wrote a Minute to the Co mmander- in-Chief which, as showing a deficiency in warlike stores and material on the outbreak of a great war, is surely one of the most amazing documents to which a General can ever have had to sign his name. Not only had there been no preparation for the Boer War, but there had been no preparation for any war of any kind whatever. Every arrangement that was made seems to have been made on the suppogtion that the British nation, even three weeks before the Boer commandos marched into Natal, was about to enjoy the blessings of eternal peace. We are informed, for instance, that our authorised stock of small-arm ammunition on March 31st, 1899, was a hundred and. fifty-one millions. Sixty-six millions of these were use- less. It was the ammunition known as Mark IV., and. the bullets were expanding bullets, which could only have been used. in defiance of the Hague Convention. But the Hague Convention does not seem to have been the chief objection to their use. The cartridges are reported to have been liable to " strip " and, to explode in the face of the rifleman using them, especially if the weather happened to be hot and the rifle dirty,—not impossible conditions in the event of war. As to artillery, we began to manu- facture guns for many batteries only when war was in full "At the beginning of the war we had only three batteries of 5 in. howitzers, and in reserve, only one 5 in. howitzer, one carriage, and two ammunition wagons." Of harness, we had. in reserve less than sufficient for five batteries. The " authorised. " number of machine guns was 1,224. We had only 898. To meet the wear and. I This is a point upon which, as our readers may remember, tear of 16,000 seta of cavalry saddlery, we had 500 sets in reserve. To meet the wear and tear of 364,000 sets of infantry accoutrements, we had 10,000 sets in reserve. Of cavalry swords we were supposed to have 6,000 in reserve. We had. precisely 80; not that this was quite so disastrous A failure as it appears, since this particular pattern of sword was described by Sir John French as "the very worst that could possibly be used." As to rifles, we had 200,000 in reserve, but 25,000 of these., owing to bad sighting, threw eighteen inches to the left at 500 yards. As to the kits for the 82,000 Reservists, none could be used. They were red and blue, and useless for fighting abroad. The idea seems to have been that if the Reserves were called out, they would not be wanted to fight. True, we had 40,000 khaki suits made in the spring of 1899, but the doctors condemned them as being too thin. In regard to boots and helmets, we just managed to pull through by borrowing from India. For the two army corps supposed to be available for service abroad there was practically no transport. We had only 52,000 sets of horse-shoes to meet a monthly demand of 35,000; and we had no mule-shoes at all, although we had to send 40,000 every month to South Africa. As to remounts, the story is an old one ; it can be summed up in the statement that no provision had been made, or even so much as contem- plated, for the supply of animals in case of war.
That is a very brief summary of the failure of the various Departments concerned to supply material. We come next to the supply of men. The military situation in 1900 is described in the Report as follows :—" The strength of the Regular Army with the Colours in the United Kingdom consisted on 1st October, 1899, of 103,052 non-commissioned officers and men. Of these, we are informed, before 31st March, 1900, 61,593 had gone to South Africa and. 4,126 to India and the Mediterranean, thus leaving $7,333 at home. The Regular forces at home on the 1st April, 1900, consisted of 103,023 effectives ' of all ranks (not including the embodied Militia). This total included the 37,333 still immature soldiers above mentioned, the recruits who had subsequently joined, Reservists who had been found unfit for foreign service, and men who had been sent home sick and wounded from South Africa." There were also to be taken into account, of course, for purposes of home defence, the embodied. Militia, the Volunteers, and the Yeomanry ; but "a considerable part of these forces had gone to South Africa, and there was at home, as also in South Africa., much weakness in trained officers." These are two extracts from the Report, and if one thing is perfectly clear, it is this, that the system by which we were to be provided with an Army in 1899 did. not work. We did not get the material when it was wanted, and, we did. not get the men when they were wanted. But it will be retorted, perhaps : You did eventually get the material, and as for not getting the men, you employed from first to last no fewer that four hundred. and. fifty thousand soldiers in South Africa.' Yes ; but at what cost? and what would have been the extra cost had we been involved in war with a first-class European Power instead of a nation of farmers ? Those are the real questions to be considered to-day, and we should not have wearied our readers by drawing up the exasperating list of the War Office's failures in 1899 once more if it were not that it is only by a thorough realisation of the magnitude of those failures that it is possible to emphasise the necessity of deep and anxious thought and hard work in order to put matters on a better and safer footing ; and here we come, of course, to the deliberate statement of the Com- missioners that they "regret to say that" they "are not satisfied that enough is °being done." They give reasons for this conclusion. Having expressed their belief that "no military system will be satisfactory which does not contain powers of expansion outside the limit of the ular forces," they ask what has become of the organisa- tion which enabled us during the war to send Yeomanry and Volunteers, from home and. from the Colonies, to take their places by the side of the Regulars. "So far as we can learn, nothing has been done to collect systematically the valuable experience of the officers who worked that organisation, certainly nothing to formulate that experi- ence, to embody it in handbooks, or to create a framework which would be ready for prompt and. effective action." we have again and again insisted. We ought to keep fthe scaffolding always ready for use. Instead, we have deliberately flung away and lost all the poles and planks.
There, as it seems to us, is the keynote of this Report. We can settle the question of the supply of material easily enough: it is merely a question of voting money to buy .Funs and ammunition and transport and clothes, and seeing that they are bought. The real difficulty—the point on which every effort ought to be concentrated—is the supply of capable officers and trained men. Is it • really an insuperable difficulty ? Must it always remain the case that it is the "wish," not the "expectation," of long-sighted men like Sir George Taubman-Goldie that "the state of affairs in 1899 cannot recur " ? We do not believe it for a moment. If so huge a subject as the reform of our Army can be summed up into two words of counsel, we should sum it up in the words " educate " and "register." Educate your officers ; but it is not enough to educate the supply that is forthcoming to-day. That supply must be increased ; and how ? There is only one answer. More has been written about " stupid " officers, perhaps, than has been written about any subject con- nected with the war. But when do you ever hear it complaint—so far as the higher positions in each profession are concerned—about " stupid " barristers, or " stupid " solicitors, or " stupid " doctors? No such complaint is heard, and for what reason ? Simply because the profession of a barrister, or a solicitor, or a doctor is open to young men with brains but without money, and the profession of the soldier is not. How many boys, of the hundreds who gain scholarships at our public schools every year, take up the Army as a pro- fession? Probably about one per cent. ; yet those boys, year by year, represent very fairly the brains of the coming generation. They do not enter the Army because they cannot afford to do so. As to the question of officers, then, the first thing to do is to make the Army a possible career for poor men,—i.e., to increase the officer's pay, Which has stood now at the same figure since a hundred years ago, when a sovereign bought more and. fewer officers were wanted. If you increase the officer's pay, you can make the conditions of receiving that pay corre- spondingly harder, because you will get more competition for it ; and in that competition yod will certainly get rid of the man who only enters a "crack "regiment for amuse- ment or for show. As to the supply of men, we have little to add to what has already appeared in these columns. We want a small, thoroughly trained Army ready for ser- vice in any quarter of the Empire, and that our Regular Army ought to give us. But we want also the machinery for raising a very large force of men in the case of a national emergency, and that we could get by a proper elystem of training and registration. Lord Esher, Sir George Taubman-Goldie, Sir Frederick Darley, and Sir John Edge express the opinion in this Report that we ought to have a national system of compulsory military education. That is a point which we have always advo- cated; we need only quote from an earlier issue (March 14th, 1903) :—" We would make the reservoir" (of men able to shoot) "usable by enacting that no boy should be free from the requirements of the Education Act till he had received a physical education of a military nature In addition, we would encourage every man who had received a military training, and every man who held a marks- man's certificate, to enter his name on a register of trained men, so that the Government would be able to appeal at once and directly to the trained men in the country not enrolled in any other force." That is, almost in the same words, the recommendation of the more out- spoken of the members of the Royal Commission ; and if that recommendation were adopted, and the career of the Army officer left open to every boy with brains, whatever might be his income, we should certainly hold the "expec- tation," and not merely the "wish," that "the state of affairs in 1899 cannot recur."
One more point remains to be noted. We do not wish to seem to pursue Lord Lansdowne vindictively, for though we have often had to speak strongly against him, we know him to be a self-sacrificing, high-minded; patriotic man in intention. We would, however, ask any impartial reader to examine the Report, and then ask himself whether the Spectator's criticism of Lord Lansdowne, though it may have seemed harsh and unfair at the time, is not entirely justified by what is set forth in the Blue-book. We only spoke the bare truth when we said that Lord Lans- downe was not fit to conduct a great war, and based our strictures not so much on what he did after tho war broke out as on the fact that he bad been four years in office, and during that time had done practically nothing to give the nation an efficient Army.
Previous page
