THE REAL " REMOUNTS " QUESTION.
NATE trust that the real lesson to be learned from the facts revealed by the discussion in the House of Commons on the working of the Remount Department will not be obscured by side-issues. That there is a danger of it being so obscured is plain from the course which the debate on the report of the supplementary vote of .25,000,000 for war charges took on Monday night. On the previous Friday Mr. Brodrick rose to "defend "—as Mr. Balfour put it—the vote on the broad grounds of the necessities of the campaign. On Monday the House occupied itself almost exclusively with the consideration of what was done or left undone by certain officers of the Imperial Yeomanry Committee in providing remounts for the limited number of troops they had to supply,—a proportion only of the numbers of mounted men engaged in the campaign. The question of remounts, taken as a whole, was left practically untouched. Yet that question, and the duties and responsibilities of the War Office connected with it, constituted the main point at issue. Instead of having to reply to criticisms of 'War Office methods in obtaining remounts from the Argentine, from Canada, from the United States, from Australia, and from whatever other source remounts have been obtained during the last two years, Mr. Brodrick found himself occupied in explaining the business done by two )ir three British officers during a few weeks in Hungary done. The red herring of an alleged scandal was drawn icross the proper trail, and the House agreed to follow the drag instead of the fox. It is not, of course, the first occasion in the annals of the House when the conduct of individual officers has proved of more interest to speakers taking part in a debate than the wider and more im- portant considerations which make the actions of those officers possible. The "argument to the man" is of all arguments naturally the most absorbing. But it is not v. ys the most valuable of all possible arguments.
We would not be understood to mean that we underrate the importance of bringing home responsibility for their actions to individuals engaged in the public service. On the contrary, as our readers know, we have always urged that if you want a thing done well you must pay your man well for doing it, and that if you pay him well you have a right to see and to know that he does his work as you wish him to do it. Therefore, if it can be proved that an officer engaged in the supply of remounts to the Army not only did not see that good remounts were supplied, but also pocketed considerable sums of public money while engaged in supplying bad remounts, by all means let the Army be purged of the presence and the services of that officer. In the same way with other officers engaged in the same transaction —although in their case there is not the suspicion that they have benefited in purse by one penny by reason of scamped or dishonest work—let it be clearly shown who is to blame, if anybody is to blame, and let blame and—if necessary and possible--punishraent be -appor- tioned accordingly. We are not referring to individualei we merely state general principles which we have stated before. The cases of the individual officers mentioned by various speakers in the two nights of debate on this question are to be considered by a military Court of Inquiry, and as to those officers there is for the present nothing more to be said. But we repeat that the question of real importance is not, Did certain officers blunder? but, How did it come about that the blunders they made, if they did make blunders, were rendered possible by the conditions prevailing at the War Office ? The officers of the Yeomanry Committee whose action in purchasing horses in Hungary has been called in question were entrusted by the War Office with the task of supply, ing so many thousands of men with horses. The 'War Office delegated to them the power of buying those horses on their own responsibility. Most of them were dis- tinguished officers ; most of them knew a great deal about horses. But as a body of men they had not had practical experience in buying horses by the thousand in foreign countries, and -the s 'it which is important is the extent to which the War 0 z ce helped them in their obvious inexperi- ence, and the nature of the information which the Govern- ment officials could put at the disposal of a. volunteer body to whom the Remount Department delegated a particular authority. Events have shown that as a fact the War °fate helped the Yeomanry Committee very little, and that it possessed on certain points very little information to give ; also, which is significant, that it did not, as we now, know, avail itself of all the advice and information which lay to its bands. The British Military Attache at Vienna, hearing that horses were to be bought in a country of which he had experience, telegraphed the offer of his services to the authorities in Pall Mall. He received no answer. Captain Lee, our Military Attache at Washington, happened to read in an American news- paper that horses were to be bought in the United States. He telegraphed to the War Office offering his services and those of a well-known horse expert in the United States Army as adviser. He also received no reply. The War Office at the time at which no notice was taken of these offers was, it would seem, absolutely bewildered by the task with which it had to contend. It gladly received one offer of help ; it did not find time to notice another offer worth in some respects a great deal more than that which it accepted. There had been scanty preparation for an unexpected emergency, and the result was a certain amount of muddle, hurry, and confusion, with the conse- quences now made public.
These being the facts, did Mr. Brodrick on Monday take exactly the right line ? Was it necessary for the present War Minister to set himself to find all the excuses possible for the War Department as it existed under his predecessor, and in so doing to attempt to fix responsibili- ties, which in the first place belonged to the War Office, upon the shoulders of an inexperienced and incompletely equipped body of officers volunteering for what should have been, or might have been, the War Office's work ? We cannot think so. Surely the right course for the War Office of to-day—when sensible men of all parties have sized up the situation as it was and as it is—was some- thing different. There was no necessity for excuses. Everybody knows that mistakes have been made, and all just and sensible M611 are willing to make allowance for those mistakes. None of us thought that we were going to tackle quite so big a job as we have had to tackle. Therefore, would not the better course for the War Office authorities to take in dealing with this question of remounts have been to come down to the House of Commons and to admit from their places on the Govern- ment Benches what the strongest supporters of tha Government admit in the smoking-room ? 'We have made mistakes. We did not think that what has hap- pened would happen. We did not believe that so many horses as your. .Army has wanted would be wanted. When we found out that we were wrong, we were "rushed.:" We had to get horses somehow, somewhere, at some price. and practical men know that whenever, you must get a partict4r.comnodity in a desperate hurry you will prob... ably have to pay for it through the nose. We have paid for it through the nose, but we intend by our actions and our precautions, of the value of which you shall be the judges, to see that such a course of events in the future shall he absolutely impossible.' Is not that a statement— as it is surely in some sense a defence—which would appeal to practical men far more strongly than a reiteration of excuses of which enough has been heard already ? Our point is definite. We should like to be sure that the War Office is concentrating its energies on the problems of the future rather than on raking up excuses for the past. Of one department of the War Office it should be the duty to be perpetually making plans and taking precautions against all sorts of most unlikely contingencies. The statement was elicited from the present Inspector-General of Remounts by Sir Charles -Welby's Committee, appointed to inquire into questions raised by certain allegations made by Sir Blundell Maple, that there was no informa- tion in 1899 available in the Remount Department as to the horse-breeding capacities of Austria-Hungary later than that which was obtained in 1886. If, as a con- trast to the conception implied in that admission of what a War Office's duty should be, we might suggest our own ideal, it would be that consideration should be given by the Remount I)epartment as to what would be the supply of war-horses likely to be obtainable from Norway and Sweden in 1910. All War Offices have, of course, a large amount of practical, humdrum, routine work to do day by day. But theirs is not, or should not be, wholly a hand-to-mouth existence. They exist, and are kept in existence by the men whose lives they hazard, as well as by the taxpayers whose pockets are affected by their mis- calculations, in part to consider and to provide for unlikely emergencies. An emergency which was con- sidered by the War Office, though not by every one outside the War Office, in the highest degree unlikely, actually occurred two years ago. Such an emergency may occur again. It is the duty of the War Office to take it for granted that it will occur again. We hope, nay, feel sure, that Mr. Brodrick is alive to a sense of that duty, even though he seemed on Monday to be chiefly concerned with a much smaller matter. We, at all events, deeply as we are con- vinced of the necessity of making examples of particular officers who have failed in their duty, would rather that half-a-dozen officers escaped the attention of the House of Commons than that the War Office should lose sight of the main lesson which the negligence of his duty by this or that officer inculcates. But the two things are in reality one. The head of a properly constituted and ordered Department does not punish subordinate officials unless he is clearly convinced that subordinate duties have been neglected ; and he cannot be properly conscious of what are subord-nate duties unless he also clearly recog- nises the dut'es of guidance, control, prevision, and organisation which are his own.
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