THE GREAT IMPROVISATION.
IT is as a general rule a very unsafe thing to praise Englishmen. In their hearty matter-of-fact way they are very much inclined to consider that praise crowns the work, and that no responsible person would think of giving praise unless the effort were over and the time come for slackening. The tendency of the Englishman when he
receives praise is therefore to knock off whatever he is doing, to stop pulling on the rope, and generally to straighten himself and say : "Thank goodness, that's over !" Other races will take praise as an encouragement and an incen- tive to greater efforts. Indeed, unless indulged with a little praise their spirits will droop and wither away to nothing. The Englishman recognizes the incentive side of praise hardly at all. In fact, he likes and expects a little " crabbing." Though he does not, of course, like angry blame or sarcasm, a little hopelessness is necessary in order to get the best efforts out of him. In the middle of his greatest difficulties what seems to encourage him most is when his immediate chiefs and leaders express themselves in some such way as this : "They have given us an impossible task ; they have given us nothing to do it with, and they have left us without any help; but it has got to be done somehow or other, even if it is impossible, and so we had better get down to it as quick as we can and be d—d to them ! " Whether it is that by talk of this sort you rouse the natural contradictoriness of the Englishman, or whether there is some hidden reason which escapes analysis, the fact remains that out of this kind of fierce pessimism and sense of being put upon and asked to eater on an unreasonable struggle the best British effort often arises.
But though we fully recognize that praise is dangerous, we must at Christmastide indulge ourselves with a little praise of the British people, or rather of the British Army, for that part of the British nation which really deserves praise is in the Army. Once again, what we are doing, and doing exceedingly well, though in a sense it is a disgrace for any nation to have to do it, either well or ill, is improvisation. We are improvising an Army in a way that probably no other nation in the world, except the American, which, after all, is only the other side of the same medal, could accomplish. We are proving that, though we are bad organizers, we have an extraordinary gift for rapidly making something out of nothing, and con- verting chaos into order. The way in which the regiments, battalions, batteries, and other units of the New Army and of the Territorials have been developing into efficient military unite during the past four months can only be described as amazing. To watch these units first pushing through the soil, as it were, then growing a stalk, then a bud, and then breaking into full flower, as quite a number of them have already done, is interesting and stimulating beyond description. It has been truly said that there is always something soul-shaking in seeing a house being built—the lintels raised, the roof put on, and even more, the hearthstone laid for the family fire. The fact that the building which one sees rising before one's eyes will be the home of a family makes its erection a holy and awe-inspiring event. A similar feeling is awakened when watching the growth of a military unit. A Colonel is appointed with an officer or two under him and a little Staff of non-commissioned officers, and he is told to raise a regi- ment. At first nothing seems more hopeless or more forlorn. There are no men, and when men are obtained they have neither uniforms nor rifles nor any other form of equipment, and the weight of their ignorance of all things military seems overwhelming. Yet gradually they are taught and licked into shape as they splash through wet fields or across muddy parade-grounds. Very soon what looked like a kind of destitute orphan child is turned into a smart young man, full of swagger and self-reliance, and the men begin to talk about "the old battalion" being ready to go anywhere and do anything.
The present writer is thinking how, only a couple of months ago, he found a Reserve Yeomanry regiment in the throes of birth. It seemed utterly impossible that the unit could ever come to maturity. To the ordinary diffi- culties of getting men and training them were added the apparently insuperable difficulties of getting horses and bits and saddlery, and of training the horses when procured. Men who can ride can break in a horse, but how is one to teach the men to ride before the horses are broken ? Yet the next time the present writer saw the regiment —only six weeks had elapsed—the miracle had taken place, and a quite presentable mounted unit had been created out of nothing. Raw young men, for the most part from the counting-house, the factory, and the shop—only a very few came from the land—had come together with some three hundred sturdy but unbroken Canadian horses,
and out of this weird union bad been engendered a cavalry soldier who in another six weeks will be, we will not say the equal of a highly trained British Dragoon, but at any rate a man quite ready to receive the lessons of war on the spot. What made the miracle all the greater was that the Colonel and his officers had not merely to improvise the men, horses, and equipment, but actually to improvise barracks and stables. A large country house which happened to be vacant near a county town became the headquarters of the new Reserve Yeomanry regiment. Prom neighbouring farm stables, stables in the town, cowsheds and other places, was im- provised excellent stabling for some three hundred horses. The Town Hall, including the ballroom used for county assemblies, made an admirable central barrack, and what more was needed was provided in smaller halls or by billets. All was improvisation, but all the improvisation was sound and thorough, and did not in the least interfere with training, discipline, or duty. Perhaps the greatest triumph of all was the riding-school in a disused chalk-pit. So steep were the sides of the semi-circle in which a set of jumps was put up that even if a horse threw its rider it could not get away. Again, the sides of the chalk-pit gave admirable opportunities for teaching the Italian system of riding violently down places so steep as to appear absolutely perpendicular. Hero the recruits soon learnt that a horse will go down a place like the side of a house with perfect safety if you will only keep his head straight and restrain his dangerous instinct to go sideways.
No doubt there are plenty of things to criticize in the regiment. We are far from saying it is perfect. For example, though the men have learned to ride with extra- ordinary rapidity, and are now quite prepared to take on new Canadian horses straight out of the train and " back " them at once, careless whether they are buck-jumpers or not, it must be admitted that they are not good horse- masters. To learn to be that, of course, requires much more time and a more special instinct than learning to ride. A strong man with a good heart can soon learn to keep the saddle. You must have the instinct of a horseman to become a good horse-master. Of the horse, indeed, you may Nay ae Wordsworth said of the poet :- e And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your lose' The man to whom a horse is a horse and nothing more- s square animal with a leg at each corner, useful for purposes of locomotion—will never get the best work out of his mount. However, there is the regiment, bursting from bud into flower—a sight indeed for sore eyes. To see the row of straight young backs erect on their sturdy horses is to realize that English pluck and English physique were never better developed than theyare now. Any oneat all accustomed to riding will know that you can soon find out whether a man is really at ease in his saddle by looking at his back. If he is sitting down comfortably, he is all right. If his back is drawn and contracted or a little askew, you may know at once that he is not happy on a horse. In the regi- ment of which we are writing there did not appear to be a single unhappy back. Even those who were not par- ticularly handy at mounting or dismounting seemed when once in the saddle to have come into their kingdom. One thought it was difficult to suppress as one saw the regiment canter over a breezy common: How are these men going back to the dulness of the ledger or the counter? No doubt they will perform this miracle also, but there will certainly be some of them like an infantry private of our acquaintance, who, eager, like a true British soldier, to find a grievance, found it in the fact that he was not a soldier long ago, and that nobody had properly put before him the pleasures of Army life. After a good grouse on this subject his final remark was : " If any one thinks that after this I'm going back to shifting sacks they're jolly well mistaken !"
If the spectacle of the wild stock suddenly producing the Marechal Niel rose can only be described as a miracle, what are we to say of the still greater miracle of raw Englishmen being turned into gunners in a couple of months ? Yet this piece of military impertinence has actually been attempted—we will not say accomplished, for these lines might possibly meet the eye of some artillery sergeant in the New Army and make him explode. No doubt in theory, and in practice if you will, it is impossible to make a gunner, or anything resembling a gunner, in two months. Yet the present writer lately guided a battery of the New Army across a Surrey common, saw the observation post placed, heard the word given to the guns in the hollow, and had the feeling that if the shells had been there they would have gone home, not with the deadly accuracy of the men who are winging the shells at the front, but still with a very fair imita- tion of it. He felt, further, that in another two months—but we must not repeat what we have said about the Yeomen. All we want to insist on now is that for those who have eyes to see there are artillery levies bursting into bud and flower at a pace which the old-fashioned military horticulturist will regardas positively unholy. The fact is, the men learn in a crisis like the present twice, or even three times, as quickly as they learn in peace time. In peace they feel that they have got months before them, and why should they bother ? Now they feel that there is just time, but only just, and so they work with a tenacity and zeal which are past belief. It is worth while trying when, if you succeed, you score off everybody, including the Sergeant, the Captain, the Adjutant, and the Colonel, who are all understood to have said at the beginning that the thing could not be done in the time.
We have spoken of individual and isolated unite, but any one who can spare the time to go to Aldershot or Salisbury Plain or any other of the great camps may see, not only the military roses and lilies of cavalry and artillery coming into flower, but also what is quite as imposing a sight—the crocuses, violets, and primroses of the infantry bursting through the soil and blooming almost before they have budded. Though it is only just January, the crocuses of the first hundred thousand men in Aldershot and the camps adjacent are already through the turf, and have triumphantly proved, as the Spectator Company proved, though on no tiny a scale, that quite a decent infantryman can be made in three months. The men who joined the colours in August and began serious training in September have by now finished their company, their battalion, their brigade, and even their divisional training, and have besides become well accustomed to the use of the rifle. They cannot, of course, shoot like Boers, but for the kind of work which seems to be prescribed by this war—namely, rapid firing at three hundred yards—they know all that is required to be known. They can, that is, turn themselves into human Maxims, and that is what is chiefly wanted at the moment. But as we have said, to the crocuses will succeed the violets and the primroses, and then will come the cowslips and all the pageantry of the meadows and woods of May, June, and July. In the supply of trained men the turn of the tide has come, and by the first day of spring—in the first week of March—the country will be filled with units trained and equipped which only a month or two before were mere paper abstractions. The Northern States of America did great things in improvising an army, but we have done an even greater thing, not only in the numbers of recruits, but in training and equipment. Truly we have a right to call it the Great Improvisation of the Great War, and Lord Kitchener the Great Improviser, for most gratefully do we acknowledge that he is " the speeder-up " in the nation's military garden.
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