THE WAR COMMISSION EVIDENCE.
THE members of the Royal Commission on the War did not write a summary of their Report because no doubt they felt that it was incapable of being summarised. After reading the Minutes of Evidence on which the Report was based, we are inclined to think that as the Report was to a summary, so are the Minutes of Evidence to the Report. The true Report of the Commission is the Minutes themselves ; they are clear, of superlative value, and of engrossing interest. There are a few passages which are almost perfect pieces of military criticism,—we might give as an instance Sir Ian Hamilton's sketch of the gradations by which the balance of power is being trans- ferred from the big battalions, mechanically trained, to the more slender forces of high intelligence. There are thrilling bits of narrative which give a wonderfully fresh picture of war, fresh because unpremeditated, having been simply drawn out by the accidents of cross-examination,—we might mention Sir A. Hunter's description of the memor- able series of attacks on Ladysmith on January 6th : the wild weather, the sound of firing imperfectly heard, so that each part of the garrison on the great perimeter sup- posed itself to be alone the object of attack ; the impossi- bility of reinforcing all points, and, the failure of each point to understand why it was not reinforced ; meanwhile the knowledge at headquarters that the fate of Ladysmith was at touch-and-go, and two hundred men kept in waiting to try to smuggle Sir George White, who was sick, safely away in the dark down the river-bed in the event of the town falling. And there are opinions on the right uses of the different arms of the Service, so numerous and so varied that even if the reader cannot always form a final opinion for himself, he at least cannot fail to be the wiser for his reading. All these things are ultimately incapable of compression. That is why these Minutes are different from the Minutes of almost any other Commission. In the case of other Commissions the Minutes are generally a means of merely verifying or checking the Report. But these Minutes are never otiose ; they deserve to be read in full ; and every Army reformer should use them as his Bible. He will not often fail to prove his point from such significant Scriptures. We wish that we could persuade every taxpayer to read them ; he need not fear the tedium of an ordinary Blue-book, and he might help, as his interest grew—we promise him as confidently as though we were recommending a good novel that it will grow—to dissipate -the indifference with which even the most disquieting dis- closures of the War Commission are received by his fellow- countrymen. "Indifference," we say without hesitation, because we cannot mistake a nine days' " sensation " for a. deep desire and determination that such things shall not be again. In any other country in the world, and in this country too in former times, the chief offenders in the alarming series of , official negligences and culpabilities described in these pages would not have been credited, as they are now, with no worse a fault than stupidity. We do not wish to imitate what we know most Continental countries would say and do to their public offenders in a case like this ; and we take a crumb of comfort from the reflection that the present indulgence is indirectly a testi- mony to the honesty of our public men,—we think they may have been stupid or thoughtless, but at all events we know they were not venal or treacherous. But remember that these offenders when they took up their offices were pledged implicitly before their country not to allow a life to be lost that need not be lost, and not to spend money that might be saved. If we have long since ceased to make our official delinquents bear their punishment in acute and drastic ways, the responsibility is all the greater in our- selves. We have simply transferred to ourselves a large part of the grave undertaking that every great official in Departments of State shall keepato a high standard of performance. And there can be no Departments, surely, where a higher standard is required than in those where the security and honour of the country are supposed to be safeguarded, and the lives of those who work for that security and honour are supposed to be taken into careful account.
Such considerations as these, we think, are essential if one is to read these Minutes profitably ; but as we have already dealt with the more delicate questions raised by the Commissioners when writing last week on the Report, our purpose now, when writing on the evidence, is rather to speak of the practice of war and of military administration in the field. And first of all, it seems clear from the evidence that there really is, as we felt sure there would be, a strong set in favour of quality as against quantity in troops. Sir Ian Hamilton made some deeply interesting remarks on this subject. He was speaking of the alleged enormous advantage which the defence has over the attack under modern conditions, and the belief (encouraged chiefly by M. Bloch) that a great Continental war could not come to any actual military conclusion because no attack could be pressed successfully home. This, he says, may be true enough of Continental Armies, in which the motion will be the motion of great machines, but it will not be true of a body of men who start out with the express intention of turning original thought to account :— "To my idea," he says, "under skilful leading the attack has rather gained than lost by the new conditions. There is so much more scope for manceuvre, and so much more frontage of ground comes into the sphere of operations, that it is almost always possible to take up flank and supporting positions, from which a deadly fire can be kept up on the enemy's line of defence, whilst small bodies work their way close up and effect a lodgment as previously described. The difficulties of estimating the strength of an enemy or the direction of his fire will give great advantages to a bold and vigorous general, who keeps on the move, and who is well served by his scouts and his patrols. The defence has then to extend its line, and the opportunities for a clever concen tration to envelop one flank or to break through in the centre are largely increased. This is hardly the place for an essay on tactic*. but I should like to say that I, personally, have never seen a determined and skilfully led attack fail when directed against a passive defence."
And in another place he says :— "At some part of the line, however, it is almost certain that a brook, or ditch, or imperceptible fold of the ground will give some trifling shelter to a further advance. Half a dozen private soldiers may find themselves at this spot. If they possess suffi- cient training to recognise the possibilities of their position, together with sufficient new discipline, initiative, and enthusiasm to take advantage of it, they will creep on. They will be followed by others, and if, as a result, the enemy's line is penetrated, even by a few men, the power of their modern armament will make their flanking fire so demoralising and effective that the position will either be abandoned forthwith, or so much attention will be concentrated on the intruders that an assault may become practicable all along the line. It will be evident that to do this the mind of each man must be imbued with a firm conviction that the other men of his own rank, whom he does not see, and who may be anywhere within the next few miles, are also doing the same and trying to seize hold of every opportunity ; in other words, active discipline on the higher plane really consists in an unalterable confidence that it also exists in others, and that the individual is not risking his life for nothing. All this means added importance to a thorough disciplinary training, and to esprit de corps. That is, I believe, where the conscript soldier will fail."
All this is of the. utmost moment because it shows that our rising school of military thought believes that a modern Alexander with a • comparatively small army of intellectual stalwarts could march through any country defended by the common type of conscript army. We are fortunate in having an officer who can express his view so intelligibly yet picturesquely. We have chosen these passages for their obvious qualities, but like opinions were expressed by Sir Evelyn Wood, Sir A. Hunter, Lord Methuen, General Kelly-Kenny, and others. Lord Roberts said :—" If I had 1,000 well-educated men of the stamp of the City Imperial Volunteers, I think in one year I should be quite satisfied that they would be thoroughly well trained; if I had the ordinary recruit who comes into Westminster, I should say he wants two or three. Education and intelligence make all the difference in the world, to my mind. And we need not remind any reader of military histories that the late Colonel Henderson, perhaps the strongest and most original historian, in a strictly military sense, of our time, was as keenly in favour of quality as against quantity as any one examined by the Commission. This is not to argue that we necessarily ought to have a small army. All we say is that quality must be aimed at first, and that it would be better to have a very small army (if that were all we could get) of clever thinkers and good marksmen than a very large army of dull and clumsy louts. "Brains," said Lord Roberts to the Commission, "are even more important than numbers."
Now a high-thinking army which does not depend upon brute force must have two conditions absolutely secured to it. The first is that at the head of this army there must be a central brain of quite exceptional quality which shall put all the subordinate brains to the best possible use; and the second is that no brain on which the country has spent money and instruction shall be allowed to drift away from purely military purposes, while nominally fulfilling them. There must be no wastage. There is a vast amount of evidence in the Minutes bearing on both these points, which we put now in a quite general way, although to the first at least we have often given a very precise shape. The central brain of course will be a really efficient Staff for general purposes, combined with a really efficient Intelligence Department. We have heard a great deal about the failure of our Intelligence Department in South Africa, and we do not -wish to make it appear that there is any cause for satisfaction now. But it is only just to say that the Minutes of Evidence make it appear that Sir John Ardagh under impossible conditions did much better than any one dreamed. He did not do what was neces- sary; he could not in the circumstances ; but he warned the War Office, and when his warning was disregarded he did almost marvellously under the conditions against which he had protested. When Director of Military Intelligence, to put the matter briefly, he asked for £18,000 a year for ten years for the special work of surveying in South Africa. "The end of my proposal," he says, "was an offer of £100." Sir John Ardagh proposes a hundred members for our future Intelligence Department. Now it has not more than twenty-five. And meanwhile we spend money upon adding clod of clay to clod of clay, —for that is what increasing a body which has as yet no proper brain amounts to. As for the drawing away of soldiers from a soldier's duty—a very old trouble and a very gross one in the British Army—the evidence of Sir Evelyn Wood will suffice. "Our system is so bad that in the last year, since I have been in the Second Army Corps, within two months of my going to Salisbury Plain, and during the war, I found fifty-two men all under a year's service who have since gone to the seat of war—the war happily came to an end—who for four and a half months had done nothing but clean windows, prevent patients straying outside a given line (this is in a great hospital), and carry coals. All these men were under a year's service ; there was not one of them who had been twelve months in the Army, and they had not done a day's duty for four and a half months." All these ancillary duties, of course, ought to be done by special camp-followers, old soldiers for preference, who, being soldiers, will know exactly how to go about their work. The Swiss Army has never thought of managing the matter in any other way. It is preposterous that a man who is reckoned as a fighting unit in all calculations about our national safety should be carrying coals and cleaning windows instead of practising at the rifle-butts.
We cannot pass over the evidence of Sir Redvers Buller as to Ladysmith and Coleus°, because though we have no wish to dwell upon this perfect example (as we honestly must call it) of confused thinking, and certainly no wish to press a transparent argumentative advantage against a brave officer who had the affection of his followers in an unexampled degree, yet we must claim the justification which is given us here for the strong protest we made when Sir Redvers Buller was appointed to command the First Army Corps. Any one who still doubts the soundness of what we unwillingly said then should read this evidence. One of the first cares in the construction of an intelligent army would be to avoid giving a high command to an officer capable of saying, in effect, that the battle of Colenso was an accidental result of rash precipitation on our side, although, as we know, definite orders had been given the night before for "forcing the passage of the Tugela " ; or capable of thinking that the fall of Ladysmith would not necessarily be a blow to our military stability, or that the words "Let Ladysmith go ! " would not be under- stood as the equivalent of "Let Ladysmith fall ! " or capable of seriously believing that Sir G. White had a better army inside Ladysmith than he himself had outside.
Of thousands of other points we have no space to write. We notice merely in passing the great value of the discussion whether a mounted infantryman is to be con- ceived as simply a foot soldier provided with seven-league boots for moving about quickly, or whether he is to develop into a new and peculiar type of mounted soldier, different from a cavalryman, but yet as distinct from an infantry- man as a cavalryman now is. We welcome the growing theory that the rules of common-sense which control the disposition of riflemen should also control the disposition of guns,—that the guns, that is, should be hidden and separated whenever necessary. We welcome,,too, the view of Lord Kitchener that. the strictness of fire. discipline must be relaxed. No man ever yet fired at his best who was told exactly when to fire. A man must fire when his aim is right. Volley firing is the , most pernicious of. all forma of fire discipline.
One more observation we must make. We wonder how many soldiers will read these Minutes. Lord Kitchener, as, of course, many others did, told the Commission that he should like to see the young officer professionally more serious. Let us imagine a document comparable in im- portance to these Minutes—we think them one of the most important sets of papers issued in England for many years —published on medical science or on law. Not a single doctor, or not a single barrister, could, afford not to read that document. Are not these Minutes, then, a convenient test of professional seriousness in the Army ? How many young officers will read these entertaining pages, giving them the most cherished views of their senior officers on their common profession? We have been told that very few will read them. We should very much like to know if this is so, and hope that some one will be able to tell us.
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