THE NATION'S EMERGENCY MEN. T HE announcement that the Volunteer Bill,
which proposes to give a regular status to the members of the Volunteer Training Corps, is postponed till next Session is very disappointing news. The Irish parties felt them- selves unable to support the Bill, for reasons which we need not discuss, and the Government took the view that the Bill must pass with general consent or not at all. Surely this principle that a Bill dealing with a military, or, if you please, quasi-military, service must depend i upon general consent is wholly misapplied in time of war. If the Government believe that the Bill is desirable in order to add to the military strength of the country, they ought boldly to lead the country, as they have done with complete success in the introduction of compulsion. No demand of a military nature made in plain, terms by'the Government is ever likely to be resisted. In our opinion, the Government are missing a rare opportunity of en- couraging a kind of service which might be laid under contribution for numerous purposes as yet unimagined. Even as it is the Volunteer Training Corps have shown, in spite of much official discouragement, that they do extremely well whatever they are asked to do, and that their appetite for work grows by what it feeds on. It is senseless to say that the Volunteers are not "serious," when few chances are given to them of proving their seriousness. At Didcot, Volunteers have speeded up the work of an Ordnance Supply Depot out of all knowledge, and the result has been that applications for enrolment in corps which have been allowed to perform this work have been much more numerous than ever before. So far as the objections to the Volunteer Bill are not a matter of political tactics, they are based on what seems to us a mere official punctilio. It is said that if the Volunteers are recognized as part of the Forces of the Crown, they must bo given the same rates of compensation and pension in the event of injuries that are given to ordinary soldiers. We cannot think why this should be considered a grave objection. Surely if a Volunteer guarding a munitions factory had a leg blown off by an explosion, public opinion would not indignantly accuse the Government of thrift- lessness because they were pledged to compensate the victim on the usual military scale. The man would have suffered for his country as much as, say, a Territorial soldier engaged exclusively in home service. But even if the Government should continue to stand by this punc- tilio, we hope that the Volunteer Training Corps will not imitate a bad example and turn their own resentment into a punctilio. Their motto ought to be " Carry on." If they suffer through carrying on, they will put the Govern- ment to shame, and they will prove that not only men at the front are willing to make real sacrifices. That is an ideal which will seem worth while to any, man who thinks it worth while voluntarily to train himself and learn to shoot. On the other hand, there are thousands of Volunteers much too poor to bear heavy material loss through injury, and it is very intelligible that they do not care to expose themselves to the risks which attend in a small degree any sort of patrol work, when they know that the Govern- ment can say to them : " Compensation ? We know nothing whatever about it. You are not a soldier."
The more we think of it the more incredible it seems to us that the Government should not make it their business to encourage the Volunteer movement in every possible way. The Volunteers are the emergency men of the nation. They are ready for any useful job ; they offer themselves as the hewers of wood and the drawers of water in their spare time. If it be objected that spare- time men are no good from a military point of view, the answer is that the very organization of the Volunteer Training Corps enables the officers to fit in relays so that a party of men required for any purpose can be continually maintained at a stated strength. Suppose that a corps is nominally six hundred strong, and is asked to supply a guard at a munitions factory. If fifteen men are required for the guard daily and nightly, it falls to the officers of the corps to arrange the attendance ; the Minister of Munitions, or the officer of the district, or whoever it may be, need not trouble himself about that. Naturally it is difficult for busy men to find time for military duties on the working days of the week, but in a fairly large corps such a guard as we have described could perfectly well be supplied without dislocating the normal training of the corps, or even preventing the men from taking on other duties as well. One of the crying needs of the moment is labour— labour for every conceivable purpose, direct and indirect, in making the conduct of the war more efficient. Well, the Volunteers offer their labour in a form in which it can be applied with the minimum of delay and the smallest waste of effort. They are drilled ; they respond to the words of command ; they can be mobilized, transported, and set to work in a manner that is not possible with a mob of well-intentioned but uudrilled citizens, who, though anxious to help, would succeed only in throwing themselves into a state of perspiring confusion and getting in one another's way. Imagine—if one can imagine such an impossible thing—that Germany had instead of her Landsturm many thousands of Volunteers over the military age, but still capable of pretty hard work. Is it not certain that she would lay siege to their services, and press and cajole them in every conceivable way till she had extracted from them the last pennyweight of their usefulness ?
A correspondent whose letter we publish elsewhere suggests that now that compulsion has been introduced the time has come to disband the V.T.C. It would be impossible to mis• apprehend the situation more thoroughly. The larger the Army becomes, the greater is the call for drafts to fill up the gaps abroad. This means that soldiers at home who could once be spared to guard railways, watch the coast, and so forth can no longer be spared—or at least before long will not be able to be spared. Nor is that by any means all. The right balance between manning the Army and manning the national industries must be maintained, and this means that voluntary labour must be called in to eke out the in-. sufficient supply in the civil transport services, in agriculture, and so on in a hundred different directions. The V.T.C. are the most mobile force of voluntary labour at present in existence. Do the War Office want trenches dug in Britain ? The Volunteers are ready to do it, and of course are actually doing it. Do the depots which supply ordnance and equipment want more man-power to handle their material ? The Volunteers are ready again. Volunteers saved the situation once in despatching ordnance supplies from Hammersmith to the front when the shortage of labour had caused a delay at a critical moment. They worked as patrols so well for General Smith-Dorrien that he said he did not know what he would have done without them. They have become a regular reinforcement of the London Fire Brigade. They act as guides and general helpers to soldiers who do not know London at some of the great London railway stations. And now Mr. Lloyd George has announced that he desires the V.T.C. to supply guards regularly for the munition workshops.
Mr. Lloyd George has taken a long step in advance of previous practice. He has undertaken that the voluntary guards shall receive rations when they are on duty, and shall be compensated at the rates under the Workmen's Compensation Acts in case of injury. What Mr. Lloyd George has done could of course be done on a larger scale by the Government by statute for all Volunteers. He has pointed the way. But, after all, we think it very likely that the Government will be compelled by circumstances to do what imagination does not yet suggest to them. The need for the Volunteers, so far from becoming less, is greater than ever it was, and will become much greater still. Before we win this war every sort of wastage in labour will have utterly to disappear. The Volunteers will be courted as much as they are now snubbed. The Government learn slowly, but they do learn. Besides, think what an impressive moral example the Volunteers would be able to set if they were recognized as an integral portion of the Forces of the Crown. The Volunteers of proved efficiency would have their special badge, and the circle of those who were not doing all that they could would be reduced automatically to very small proportions. One of the difficulties in regard to recognition is no doubt the fact that the Cabinet do not realize what the Volunteers are not only willing to do but are actually doing, We suggest that some Sunday the Prime Minister and the War Council should get into their motors and go to " some- where on the Chalk Downs" and see the V.T.C. with its coat and waistcoat off digging trenches " better than Regulars." That should settle the business.
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