Hard words
JOHN TERRAINE
Britain and her Army Correlli Barnett (Allen Lane The Penguin Press 100s) 'Wars,' says Correlli Barnett, 'would keep breaking in.' They do indeed. He is speaking of the eighteenth century, a time when the British exercised themselves alternately with frantic attempts to raise armies and frantic attempts to get rid of them once specific jobs were apparently 'done'. It was a time, he reminds us, when Dr Johnson 'bracketed lifeguardsmen with felons and horrible stinks as equally unwelcome presences in private lodgings.' A hundred and fifty years later things had not changed much: I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer, The publican 'e up an' sez, 'We serve no red-coats here.'
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I: '0 it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an'
Tommy go away'; But it's 'Thank you, Mister Atkins,' when
the band begins to play— And the wars still kept breaking in. The British public of all shades of opinion— socialistic, pacifistic, economical—might speak of 'peace-time', but the facts have often been awkward brutes. It is, for example, a fact that between August 1945 and July 1965 the British Armed Forces were engaged in no less than sixty-four operations,
twenty-four of them defined as 'major opera- tions' by the Ministry of Defence.
The running theme through this excellent book is the almost permanent divorce be- tween Britain and her army. Only at very rare intervals—the New Model before it became an instrument of oppression; the later stages of the Napoleonic wars, when normal recruiting dried up, and the army was filled from the ranks of the citizen militia; the two world wars of the twentieth century—has there been a happy marriage. One reason for this is clear: the role of the Royal Navy in the history of an island power. The American Admiral Mahan gave the British a splendid phrase with which to excite Themselves whenever they thought
about the Navy: . . those far distant, storm-beaten ships upon which [Napoleon's) Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.' And the Navy itself gave Britain a dominion in the world unequalled by any other European country. But for Correlli Barnett, the British Empire was really a great distractor of military strength from the true arenas of power, and so he gives us another phrase: 'The growing riches and the comfort of Georgian England depended indeed on dis- tant war-torn red-coats that the Georgian squires rarely saw.'
Ultimately, Barnett maintains, it was Britain's capacity to play a part in continental wars which decided how much power she would possess. He points with unrestrained admiration to Marlborough's achievements, and Wellington's a hundred years later. In 1815 'British prestige and influence in Europe had become paramount ... Britain had been raised to this pinnacle by the feats of Well- ington and a British army that it had taken twenty-two years of war to create and mature; an army which was promptly broken up.'
So the sad story ran on, until the twentieth century forced home its own remorseless logic. In 1906, when General Haig was help- ing Mr Haldane with his vast work of army reform, he wrote to Haldane's Military Private Secretary: 'The Swiss system seems to me to be exactly what is wanted "to root the army in the people" ...' A laudable aim; but first the people must desire to have an army 'rooted in it', and this, as Correlli Barnett very clearly shows, it never had de- sired. Ten years later, however, the thing had to be done irrespective of desires, and so at last conscription by law replaced what some had called 'conscription by hunger', and universal service replaced the voluntary principle, which others called `the principle of unequal sacrifice.'
As may be expected, it is the period lead- ing up to the world wars and those wars themselves that bring out the best in Barnett; this, after all, is where his earlier work has been done. On World War I he is very good indeed; he seizes the main facts and brushes aside the claptrap. Thus, by 1916, he tells us, 'the British army in France was the largest, most complicated and most compre- hensive single organisation ever evolved by the British nation. No peacetime operation of either government or private enterprise could begin to compare with it.' This is true; the evolution of the British Expeditionary Force, which in 1918 numbered just over 21 million men, was a superb piece of impro- visation resulting in a high degree of pro- fessionalism. The result was what might be supposed. It was a terrible war, but, says Barnett, 'It had not been in vain: an enemy more powerful and more dangerous than the France of Louis XIV or Napoleon had been
beaten down . . . It was the British army's hardest fought and greatest victory.'
Once again, after a war, the British divested themselves of power as rapidly as possible; once again the result was what might be supposed. 'The British contribution to the Second World War reflected the decline of Britain's relative power. The British helped the Russians and Americans to beat Germany, and helped the Americans to beat the Japanese; they took the major part only in defeating Italy.' It is a hard say- ing, but once again, true. But this is a book full of hard sayings, and one can only hope that some of them may at last sink in.
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