THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES LACIES AND FACTS AN ANSWER TO COMPULSORY SERVICE BY )-MARSHAL EARL ROBERTS, V.C., K.G. IESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL SERVICE LEAGUE LONDON [N MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1911 PRINTED BY HAZEIJ., WATSON AND V1NEY, LD., LONDON AND AYTESBURY. ' CONTENTS PART I PAGE : THE NATION'S PERIL . 1 mm t: O PART II ?THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 52 > PART III THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY . 193 .188.^55 LORD ESHER'S COMMITTEE TEN years ago this country found itself in a serious difficulty. We were engaged in a war 6,000 miles away, against an enemy numbering from first to last less than 90,000 fighting men. Our forces had encountered a severe check and the people of the British Empire were thoroughly roused and determined to do all that could be done to turn defeat into victory. In this they were success- ful. To accomplish the task, however, required twenty-eight months, and a total 1 2 FALLACIES AND FACTS sacrifice of over twenty thousand lives and more than two hundred and fifty million pounds. Now as a people we pride ourselves on our business aptitudes. We recognized that the cost of this our latest venture in war was higher than it should have been, and we determined, if possible, to make more satis- factory arrangements to meet any similar complications which might arise in the future. Accordingly we appointed first one Royal Commission, then another, to con- sider and deal with the question, and finally a Committee, all in the space of a few months ; one led to the other. The purpose in each case was one and the same or so the country believed namely, that the men best qualified, by ability and experi- ence, to throw light upon the subject and to come to a practical conclusion, should take and sift all available evidence and then make their recommendations for the im- provement of our land forces as regards their preparation for war. Let us see what these recommendations were. The two Royal Commissions had THE NATION'S PERIL 3 met under the presidency of the Earl of Elgin and the Duke of Norfolk respectively, and their conclusions may be shortly sum- marized. Lord Elgin's Commission reported that " No military system will be satis- factory which does not contain powers of expansion outside the limits of the Regular Forces of the Crown, whatever that limit may be." The Duke of Norfolk's Com- mission said of the Militia that it was " unfit to take the field for the defence of the country," and of the Volunteers that " neither the musketry nor the tactical training of the rank and file would enable it to face, with prospect of success, the troops of a Continental Army," and fol- lowed up this assertion by unanimously declaring that " a Home Defence Army capable, in the absence of the whole, or the greater part of the Regular Forces, of protecting this country from invasion can be raised and maintained only on the principle that it is the duty of every citizen of military age and sound physique to be trained for the national defence, and to take part in it should emergency arise." 4 FALLACIES AND FACTS The Committee, which succeeded the two Royal Commissions, met under the presi- dency of Lord Esher to consider an organ- ization for Army Headquarters better suited to our needs than that which then existed. After a short deliberation it recommended the formation of an Army Council of seven members, four military and three civil. This Council was forthwith created. It was hoped that, by thus placing the administra- tion of the Army in the hands of a Council in which professional opinion preponderated, the people of this country might feel assured that the experts in the art of war were satisfied with our preparations. The Esher Committee laid stress on the responsibility attaching to each member of this Council in any decisions taken, and in executive orders issued in the name of the Council. Its Report as concerns this matter is couched in the following terms : " It thus becomes the duty of any military member or members of the Council who may dissent from a decision taken, either to resign office or to accept a share of re- sponsibility for the action involved. While, THE NATION'S PERIL 5 therefore, loyalty to the service should prevent any member from retaining office if what he considers a vital principle of policy is contravened, loyalty to colleagues will prevent the opinions of individual members from becoming known outside the Council-room." Since the appointment of the Army Council there has been no resignation of a military member, and, prior to the publica- tion of Sir Ian Hamilton's " Compulsory Service," the individual opinion of military members on all questions of first-rate im- portance has been withheld from the public a fact due no doubt to that " loyalty to colleagues " dwelt upon in the sentence quoted above. Members of Parliament and writers to the newspapers have, from time to time, expressed a desire to know the views of these leading soldiers upon such matters ; but, officially, it has always been ruled that such freedom in expressing their opinions would be incom- patible with the spirit of ministerial control and responsibility. How, then, are we to interpret the action 6 FALLACIES AND FACTS of a War Minister who publishes what he styles " an unofficial document, originally prepared for my private information " ? For, be it observed, this memorandum on the highly controversial question " how far, if at all, compulsory service could be made applicable to our Imperial system," has been written by no less a person than the late Ad jut ant- General to the Forces, who is the Second Military Member of the Army Council. The question at once arises why is it the Second Military Member, and not the First, who has been thus invited to set forth his private and " unofficial " opinion ? The answer is given by Mr. Haldane (p. 10). It is, he says, because " To the Department of the Adjutant-General falls, among other duties, that of finding and organizing in peace the men to fill the cadres." But how does this sentence finish ? . . . " which the General Staff de- mands for war " ! Now it is clear that it is of little value to learn how cadres can, or cannot, be filled until we know on authority the number of these cadres, their nature, and THE NATION'S PERIL 7 the purposes for which they are intended. And if Mr. Haldane feels that his own authority is inadequate, and requires the backing of one of his Military Members as regards the filling of the cadres, why should he feel any less doubt of the adequacy of his personal authority as regards their number and purpose ? In short, why should not the public have the advantage of "an unofficial document, originally prepared for my private information " over the signa- ture "W. G. Nicholson," Chief of the Imperial General Staff ? Granted, again, that the attention of the Secretary of State for War, and, through him, that of the public, is to be confined for the moment to the filling of cadres, why does Mr. Haldane who lays great stress upon the experience gained by the work of the Adjutant-General as affording the only reliable ground on which to form a correct opinion why does Mr. Haldane select Sir Ian Hamilton as his adviser in preference to Sir Charles Douglas ? Sir Ian Hamilton occupied the post of Adjutant-General only during a single recruiting season, whereas 8 FALLACIES AND FACTS Sir Charles Douglas not only held that office for five years, nearly three of which were under Mr. Haldane, but is well known throughout the Army for the thoroughness of his personal knowledge of this particular subject. This choice might be intelligible if Sir Charles Douglas were out of reach, but it becomes curious and scarcely com- mendable when it is remembered that he is quartered at Salisbury with the necessary books of reference at his elbow, while Sir Ian Hamilton, for the composition of this memorandum, has had to snatch an hour when he could during a series of Imperial banquets at various European capitals.* * Besides Sir Charles Douglas no fewer than three ex-Adjutants-General are still alive, viz. Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood, and General Sir Thomas Kelly- Kenny. Sir Thomas was also Inspector-General of the Auxiliary Forces, as was Field- Marshal Lord Grenfell. All these officers have had far more experience of the recruiting problem than Sir Ian Hamilton could possibly have obtained in the fourteen months he held the office of Adjutant-General. But, considering the well-known views of all these officers, it was evidently thought undesirable to obtain their opinion on the con- troversial question dealt with in " Compulsory Service.'* THE NATION'S PERIL To return to the reports of the two Royal Commissions as distinct from that of the Esher Committee : the points mainly in- sisted upon were, as we have seen (a) the necessity of a large body of trained reserves behind the Regular Army, on which that Army could draw for reinforcements in emergency, and (b) the inadequacy of the training of the Auxiliary Forces of those days. What has been done in the inter- vening six years to carry out the recom- mendations of these two Royal Commissions ? Are our reserves behind the Regular Forces more numerous in 1911 than in 1904 ? On the contrary, they are less by some 32,000, while the numbers of the Regulars them- selves have been reduced by more than 30,000 indeed by well over 40,000 if the effect on the Army Reserve is taken into account. So much for numbers. Has the training been substantially improved ? Cer- tainly the organization of the Territorial Force is an improvement on that of the 1* 10 FALLACIES AND FACTS Volunteers ; but organization alone will not ensure adequacy of training, and when it is officially admitted that out of 257,000 rank and file enrolled, more than 30,000 failed to fire a round during the last musketry year,* it is difficult to suppose that the training has been greatly improved. In any case, such improvement as has been made falls assuredly far short of the recommendations of the two Royal Commissions. To what, then, are we to attribute our present unsatisfactory position ? Certainly not to the officers and men of the Terri- torials : to them no blame attaches. A more praiseworthy or more patriotic body of men does not exist in this or in any other coun- try. Who, then, is to blame ? The people of this country and their representatives, for not giving sufficient attention to this subject of National Defence, and, in parti- cular, for paying no heed to the concluding words of the report of the Duke of Nor- folk's Commission words which I have already quoted. The Commission saw clearly that to fight for his country is, * 1909. The figures for 1910 are not yet available. THE NATION'S PERIL 11 in a democratic nation and empire, the paramount duty of every citizen of military age and sound physique, and that a timely and adequate training of the manhood of the country must be equally universal. Mr. Haldane, when in 1906 he became Secretary of State for War, was also of this opinion. His earliest speeches fore- shadowed the creation of a " Nation in Arms." He visualized it as amounting to seven, or eight, or even to nine hundred thousand men; but, in spite of the ex- periences of his predecessors, he insisted on believing that no compulsion was ne- cessary to fill its ranks. And, notwith- standing his own experience of the last three years, he still refuses to believe at any rate officially in the hard logic of facts. The " Nation in Arms," 900,000 strong, was rapidly reduced to a Territorial Force of 315,000, and, after nearly three years of strenuous recruiting, and the loyal co-opera- tion of civilians and soldiers alike, the actual numbers enrolled now amount to less than 267,000, officers and men, and these numbers tend to decrease rather than to advance. 12 FALLACIES AND FACTS III "QUANTUM MUTATUS AB ILLO " As regards the training, Mr. Haldane realized from the outset that no " Nation in Arms " recruited on a voluntary basis could be trained for war during peace, and he was frank enough to make it clear to all that this training was to be given after, not before, the outbreak of hostilities ! Speak- ing in the House of Commons on March 4th, 1907, Mr. Haldane made the assertion " that under the voluntary system the required amount of training could never be given in time of peace." He never spoke a truer word. The training of the rank and file for war consists in teaching them three things drill, musketry (or gunnery), and discipline. But, of these essentials, dis- cipline is by far the most essential, for dis- cipline, even more than drill or musketry, leads to victory, and discipline cannot be imparted in small doses. Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton both lay stress on the fact that the Territorial Force is still in its infancy, and that great THE NATION'S PERIL 13 improvements are to be anticipated as one annual training succeeds another. I hope the civil portion of the population will accept this plausible anticipation with much caution. It is possible that a Territorial will handle his rifle with more precision, and present a more soldier-like appearance on parade in his fourth than in his second camp, and in his sixth he may be still smarter ; but even though he were to attend a fortnight's training in camp every year till he was fifty it would inspire me with no confidence in the stability of his discipline, when put to the test of modern war. It is for this reason that the National Service League insists on four to six months' continuous training as the irreducible minimum, and that, be it remembered, as the climax to years of cadet training both at school and during the subsequent period of youth.* * This mention of four months has, I know, caused profound discontent amongst a considerable number of people, who, while believing with the National Service League that the safety of the nation can only be secured by Universal Service, cavil at the idea that reasonable efficiency can be obtained in so short a period of training. In some 14 FALLACIES AND FACTS I, too, was present at Windsor when the late King gave Colours to representatives from the Territorial regiments at the parade so graphically depicted by Sir Ian Hamilton, and well I remember feeling anxious lest those onlookers, who were unacquainted with the realities of war, might be misled by the fine appearance of these patriotic individuals in military uniform into be- lieving that they were watching the evolu- tions of a reliable fighting machine. Little did I suspect that my countrymen were to be asked to carry away this false and dan- gerous lesson by a soldier whose varied fighting career is so well known to me as that of Sir Ian Hamilton ! This is the same soldier who, after being an eye-witness of the awful fighting in cases this belief is so strongly held as to alienate its supporters from taking any active part in upholding and popularizing the cause of National Service. I am glad to have this opportunity to explain that the N.S.L. has no special predilection for this particular period. The League's desire is to see the principle of Universal Service for Home Defence accepted, as it seems to its members that if this great principle once gains the consent of the majority of our countrymen, there will then be no difficulty in adjusting the details of the scheme which will be necessary to reduce theory into practice. THE NATION'S PERIL 15 Manchuria only six short years ago, wrote to the late Mr. Arnold-Forster, then Secre- tary of State for War, from Japan : " This war has burnt into my mind in a way nothing else could have done that the condition of our Army constitutes a terrible danger to the existence of our Empire. I have learned here that nothing but the best will do, and we have too often the very worst." This is the same soldier who wrote in his book, " A Staff Officer's Scrap- book," describing an incident in the Russo- Japanese War : " It would be difficult find a stronger argument in favour of some kind of universal training, or to realize more acutely what a falling off the British show in this respect since the days of their famous ancestors who fought at Agincourt and Cre9y." This is the same soldier who, when giving evidence in 1903 before Lord Elgin's Commission on the subject of the desperate fighting on Wagon Hill, in which his own personal bravery and leader- ship were so conspicuous, and being asked whether the holding back of the Boers was due to a want of discipline, replied : "I 16 FALLACIES AND FACTS think it was, because if you have discip- lined troops, men may not be very keen, they may perhaps even try to make excuses, but if they are told they must go, they must go." This is the same soldier who answered another question concerning the offensive tactics developed by the Boers in the late period of the war by saying, " I think they came on more gallantly to- wards the end of the campaign, first because they were becoming veterans and acquiring a regular sort of discipline in fact, I am sure of it ; and secondly, because our mounted troops which they were then en- countering, the Second Yeomanry and so on, shot so badly that they could gallop in and would probably not be hit." This same soldier, throughout his evi- dence before that Royal Commission, laid the greatest stress upon the demands made by modern war on individual training and discipline. When asked whether he thought it possible to get the ordinary soldier to the requisite pitch of training, he answered : " That is just it. Of course, the better educated the man the more easily you get THE NATION'S PERIL 17 him to that pitch of training, and the less well educated the more difficult and the longer it will be. Given men like the City Imperial Volunteers, you could reckon on making them good infantry in six months, working hard * ; but given the ordinary corner-boy or clod-hopper, then you certainly will not do it in much under two years." And this same soldier now attempts to y persuade his countrymen that the mere fact of men joining the Territorial Force of their own free will counts for more on the battlefield than the continuous period of six months' training which he acknow- ledges to be necessary for even the best class of man, and which he knows full well as does Mr. Haldane can never be obtained in peace from a National Army raised on anything but a compulsory basis ! Since I first noticed him fighting gallantly as a subaltern in Afghanistan nearly thirty- three years ago, Sir Ian Hamilton has been closely associated with me, and my affection for him and admiration for his soldierly qualities are such that I heartily wish we * The italics are mine. 18 FALLACIES AND FACTS were in agreement in this controversy ; but the question is one of such supreme impor- tance, and my convictions on this subject are so firm, and, in my opinion, so well- founded, that I should deem myself a traitor to my country if I allowed my private feelings to lessen my efforts to expose the fallacies in the arguments addressed to Mr. Haldane by Sir Ian Hamilton in this memorandum. The people of this country will do what is right in this matter, as in others, if the truth is put before them. They look to their leaders to tell them what the truth is. More particularly do they pay atten- tion and rightly to the opinions of ex- perts. In an article in The National Review of last September Lord Esher gave his reasons for believing that even 315,000 Territorials would never be raised by volun- tary enlistment. In this article he used the following words : " The training and efficiency of such a force are matters for experts, and with the training and efficiency of this force military experts appear, from their public statements, to be well satisfied.* * The italics are mine. THE NATION'S PERIL 19 The ordinary citizen knows very little of the subject." What a terrible warning to our soldiers of high rank these words convey ! It is only the most senior officers and very few of these who ever have a chance of making " public statements " on the training and efficiency of our forces. How careful then should they be, when addressing citizen soldiers, not to let them imagine that they can be trusted in war simply because they are able to " march past " on Salisbury Plain, or take part in peace manoeuvres. How important, too, it is for those officers to avoid giving their countrymen a false impression of security through a desire, however laudable, to do all in their power to help a War Minister, or to do honour to the patriotism of the few men in this large population of ours who voluntarily devote their holidays to an endeavour to acquire the rudiments of a military training ! 20 FALLACIES AND FACTS IV POWER OF EXPANSION WHERE, meanwhile, is that " power of expansion " which both the Royal Com- missions declared to be necessary ? The Army Reserve and the Special Reserve would, at best, suffice to keep our exiguous Expeditionary Force up to its original strength during a short campaign. In order to enlarge it, and even in order to prevent it from dwindling away after the first few months of war, we should still, as in 1900-2, have to fall back upon improvised troops raised at enormous cost, yet of doubtful efficiency. How different would be the position if, behind our Regular Army, there stood a nation of which every able-bodied man had received a substantial degree of military training ! Put at its lowest, such a Home Army as the scheme of the National Service League would give us would at least ensure two things. In the first place, it would enable us, without exposing ourselves to the danger of success- ful invasion, to send the last available man THE NATION'S PERIL 21 of the Regular Army and its Reserves out of this country. Under present conditions, on the other hand, a substantial portion of that Army, however urgently needed for the defence of some distant part of the Empire, or for the support of a European ally, would have to be retained in this country until the Territorial Army had received that serious training which is only to be given to it after the outbreak of war. In the second place, if the Regular Army had to be supplemented by other forces and in every great national struggle of the past it has had to be so supplemented if that " power of expansion " which all expert opinion has so emphatically demanded had to be called into play, we should have an enormous reservoir of men, all of whom had undergone a really serious, if not a perfect, military training. True it is that, unless they volunteered, they would not be available for service abroad ; but it is not willingness to volun- teer which, if we may judge from past experience, is likely to be lacking, least of 22 FALLACIES AND FACTS all amongst men already possessed of some military skill, for the possession of an art, or of skill of any kind, stimulates the wish to practise that art or to exercise that skill. It is a law of human nature. During the South African War, for instance, one man of every five of the Militia volunteered ; of the Yeomanry and Volunteers, one man in fifteen ; but of the untrained civil popu- lation only one man in every thousand. Yet it would be unfair to assume that such citizens were deficient in patriotism. They were deficient in military capacity, and they knew it. Men, however patriotic, might well be deterred from coming forward to take their place in the field, even at a moment of crisis, by a sense of their in- competence, and by the feeling that even if they went to the front they could be of no effective use there. Indeed, in a sudden emergency, the "power of expansion" is only possible on the basis of pre-existent widespread military training. It is a complete fallacy to regard the creation of a large army for home defence as militating against our power to take the THE NATION'S PERIL 23 offensive, or as calculated, in Sir Ian Hamilton's words, to " paralyse our own attack, sacrifice our initiative, and imperil all that we stand for in the world." On the contrary, the existence of such a force would not only give greater freedom to our attack in the first instance, but could alone supply that in which we are at present most conspicuously lacking, the power of keeping up the attack by continuous re- inforcements of trained men. V SIR ARTHUR WILSON'S MEMORANDUM IN the second edition of " Compulsory Service " there is included a paper written by Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson. It is to be remarked that this paper was drawn up by the First Sea Lord at the request of the First Lord of the Admiralty, as spokesman for the Government, in view of a debate which was to have taken place in the House of Lords in November last. That the official views of the First Sea Lord on this all-important question should be 24 FALLACIES AND FACTS withheld from the public is nothing new, but that those views should be offered, in the first instance, to any one who cares to purchase the book for half a crown, is a startling novelty in ministerial pro- cedure. The paper in question is dealt with in Part II. of the present volume, and I wish to confine myself to one or two observations. The whole tone of the memorandum is one of extreme confidence. Indeed it is no whit less optimistic than that of Lord Fisher's speech at the Mansion House on November 9th, 1907, when he assured us all that the Navy alone was fully equal to the task of protecting these shores from the foot of the invader, and that we could all sleep comfortably in our beds " and need not be disturbed by those bogeys of invasion which have been periodically resuscitated by all sorts of leagues." * So long as our Navy is concentrated in home waters, and unde- feated, I am in full agreement with Lord * The bogeys of invasion, though chimerical, have appar- ently to be guarded against, as they keep a considerable portion of our fleets in home waters. THE NATION'S PERIL 25 Fisher and Sir Arthur Wilson in their con- tention that even an attempt on the part of the enemy to invade this country is most improbable. But few people will suggest that our Navy is stronger now in proportion to those of our possible enemies than it was three years ago, and it is well to remind my countrymen of the statesmanlike words used in the House of Commons by our Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, on February 7th, 1908 : " As far as we are concerned in this country, our means of bringing a war to a conclusion rest entirely on our sea power. ... As long as our Navy could contain the Navy of the other Power, no doubt we should not suffer ourselves ; . . . but, supposing other complications arose while the war was going on, supposing some great stroke of hard luck, some piece of ineptitude, any of those things to which human nature is liable occurred, and sup- posing our Navy did lose command of the sea, what would be before us ? Not only defeat, but conquest." Any one who, at the present time, reads 26 FALLACIES AND FACTS the daily newspapers with intelligence must foresee the possibility of trouble arising in the Mediterranean Sea or in the Persian Gulf and the adjoining regions, in which we should be vitally interested. If our Navy and our Expeditionary Force are capable of dealing with the disturbance without delay we should have less reason to be anxious regarding such contingencies. But what if both these weapons of offence are tied to our home shores by the acknow- ledged inefficiency of our Home Defence forces ? It is here that the strategy em- bodied in Mr. Haldane's volume, both in its first and in its second edition, is so hopelessly at fault. Or, again, let us consider the statement with which Sir Arthur Wilson concludes his notes, that the Admiralty has decided " that an invasion on even the moderate scale of 70,000 men is practically im- possible." Readers of this new edition of " Compulsory Service " may well ask : " Why, then, is Mr. Haldane, at great ex- pense to the taxpayer, attempting to raise an army of 315,000 men for home defence?" 27 Mr. Haldane would doubtless refer such questioners to pages 21 and 22 of his Intro- duction, where he explains that the Home Defence land force is required for a double purpose : either (a) to deal with minor raids which have successfully eluded the wireless and the submarine, or (b) " to compel the enemy to send 4 forces ' in such magnitude that they cannot escape the Fleet." But the practical manner in which this figure of 70,000 is treated in Part II. of this book will, I trust, open the eyes of the public to the fact that neither Mr. Haldane nor Sir Arthur Wilson has any trustworthy grounds for assuming that an invading force would not consist of more than 70,000 men. Moreover, a first-class European army, 70,000 strong, will never be deterred by untrained troops, however superior to themselves in numbers.* * Towards the end of the Franco-German war, 35,000 German soldiers in the south-east of France were opposed by French levies numbering over 140,000 men. These latter had been under a certain military training for the past four months. Within a month nearly 60,000 of them were killed, wounded, prisoners, or missing, while the 28 FALLACIES AND FACTS Accordingly, either the knowledge of the naval welcome that awaits the enemy will alone be sufficient to prevent his attempting invasion of these islands, in which case we have a larger land force for home defence that can possibly be required, or he must have sufficient respect for the efficiency of the land forces which may oppose his disembarkation, and would challenge his advance inland. The fact is that, however the question is argued, it comes back to this, that money spent on inefficient land forces is money wasted ; and to increase, as is now pro- posed, our expenditure on the Territorials, a force which can never be efficient because its members are unable to give the time remaining 80,000 were driven across the Swiss frontier and there interned. Commenting on this and other similar incidents during this war, General von Heinleth writes : " In these days the utmost was accomplished that can be expected from a popular rising of men who have re- ceived no military training. The road by which the result was arrived at was strewn with a hideous number of victims, who paid with their lives for the lack of political foresight on the part of the rulers of France, and for their own opposition to universal military training in time of peace." German official account of the Franco-German War. THE NATION'S PERIL 29 for the indispensable period of continuous training, is merely to throw good money after bad. VI THE MAIN THESIS BUT Sir Ian Hamilton's main thesis is that the introduction of universal and com- pulsory military training would make it more difficult to recruit the numbers of volunteers we should still require for our Regular Army for service abroad, and he bases this contention on our experiences between 1902 and 1904 when men were enlisted for three years' colour service with the option of extending their service to twelve years. Sir Ian Hamilton refers to this as the " one narrow beam from the search-light of experience which illumines the dense mist of conjecture wherein we find ourselves groping." Let me recall to his memory and to that of the public a few experiences which seem to me equally illuminating if, not more so. Two years ago, at Mr. Haldane's request, 30 FALLACIES AND FACTS Mr. Fortescue made an exhaustive study of the manner in which the British Army was raised and replenished during the Napoleonic Wars. The results of his labours were published in that valuable book, " The County Lieutenancies and the Army, 1803-1814," which should be closely studied by all British statesmen. During those eleven critical years no less than fifty-three separate Acts were passed by Parlia- ment for raising the troops found neces- sary Acts based on compulsion, on the ballot, on voluntary enlistment, and on every conceivable combination and per- mutation of these means of recruitment. The deductions made by Mr. Fortescue have so important a bearing on the point now under discussion that I quote them in full : " England cannot, any more than any other nation, fill the ranks of her Army in a great war without compulsion." " Compulsion cannot in peace be applied for service outside the British Isles." " The admission of the principle of sub- stitution in any scheme of compulsory THE NATION'S PERIL 31 service leads to ruinous expense, demoraliza- tion, and inefficiency." " Compulsory personal service for home de- fence has been tried and not found wanting." " The ultimate end for which all our military organization must exist is the maintenance of the Regular Army, our only offensive land force (Windham)." " The true basis of such an organiza- tion is national training (Windham)." " Learning the use of arms should be imposed as a positive duty upon all in- dividuals within certain ages, to be enforced by fine (Castlereagh)." " A Volunteer who asks more from the State than his arms, except on active service, is no Volunteer (Windham)." " False Volunteers are alike troublesome, expensive, and useless." * In an Appendix to Mr. Fortescue's volume the numbers of recruits taken each year between 1805 and 1813 are given. Out of a total of 227,510 no less than 99,755 joined * The cost to the country of our Territorial Force dur- ing, the current financial year was 2,632,000, and it is rumoured that this sum will be largely increased in the coming Army Estimates. 32 FALLACIES AND FACTS the Regular Army voluntarily from the / ranks of the Militia which was raised by ballot on a basis of compulsion. These illuminating figures scarcely bear out Sir Ian Hamilton's contention that compulsory military training would increase his suc- cessor's difficulties as regards recruiting for the Regular Army. And the same thing occurred, as I have already pointed out, in the war of ten years ago. Men came forward in larger numbers in propor- tion to the greater amount of training they had received. Mr. Fortescue's figures are very signifi- cant, and the following extract from a letter I lately received from him is no less interesting : " The irony of the whole thing is that Lord Chatham, by his Militia Act of 1757, had provided for passing the entire able- bodied male population of England (not of Scotland or Ireland) through the Militia in terms of three years, i.e. national training. The Act, however, was not enforced until the war against our American colonies, and, when it was enforced, substitutes were permitted. In those days Militia discipline THE NATION'S PERIL 33 included flogging, which may have been a reason for not enforcing the Act strictly ; but that objection does not apply in the slightest degree to national training at the present time. Sir Ian Hamilton totally ignores the history of Napoleon's conscript army. I doubt if any troops ever hated service more than the French hated the war in the Pen- insula. They had a very hard time, much privation, some loot, it is true, but no glory. Officers and men, from Marshal to private, loathed it. Yet they marched for ever, and fought most gallantly, though their pay was always in arrears. Moreover, there was less desertion of born French (as apart from foreign contingents in the French service) than of born British to the enemy not very creditable to the voluntary British soldier.' Again, out of the 102 men enlisted in The Spectator Company in 1906 by Lieut.-Col. H. Pollock, no fewer than 38 out of the 76 whose whereabouts are now known joined the Regular Army and 1 the Royal Navy, while 7 others are serving in the home or over-sea Auxiliary Forces. But the best example before us, and the one which furnishes the most recent evi- dence that men who have undergone mill- "- 2 34 FALLACIES AND FACTS tary training are not likely to be less willing to enlist in the Regular Army is the case of the Special Reserve. The period of training for recruits who join the Special Reserve is practically the same as that recommended by the National Service League. If, therefore, Sir Ian Hamilton's contention that a period of six months' training will prevent recruits en- tering the Regular Army is correct, we should expect very few Special Reservists to join that service. The contrary, however, is the case ; nearly forty-five per cent have joined, as the following figures prove : TEAR. Enlistments in to Special Reserve. Numbers volunteered from the Special Re- serve to the Line. Percentage. 1908 (Feb. to Sept.) 1909 1910 17,781 26,157 18,658 3,955 11,060 10,291 22 42-28 55-15 Total 62,596 25,306 44-27 / It was the same with the old Militia, which was for many years the best re- cruiting ground the Regular Army had, and I think there can be no doubt that com- pulsory military training, as advocated by the National Service League, far from in- THE NATION'S PERIL 35 terfering with, would materially assist the solution of the recruiting problem. In comparing the over-sea forces of the Continental Powers with our Regular Army it must be remembered that both in France and in Germany the machinery for obtaining those forces was introduced as an appendage to the system of compulsory service for the Home Armies which had been in force for many years. With us the case is reversed. We already possess a voluntary over-sea Army, adequate for the policing of the Empire in normal times, and " enormously larger," no doubt, in peace, "than the over- sea forces of Germany and France put to- gether," which they require only for their relatively unimportant foreign possessions. The size of a National over-sea Army in time of peace is regulated by the requirements of the nation's over-sea possessions. But does Mr. Haldane mean to imply, by his frequently repeated state- ment, that our over-sea Army is " enor- mously larger " than the army which any other nation could send over-sea if the occasion required ? Once given command 36 FALLACIES AND FACTS of the sea, even local and temporary command, the only limit to the numbers available for over-sea service is imposed by the strength of the nation's army from which that force would have to be supplied, and by the amount of tonnage obtainable for their transport. The truth is that our over- sea Force is ridiculously small in comparison with the demands that may be made upon it, and one of the objects of the National Service League is to form a potential reservoir of trained men by means of which it can be strengthened in time of war. Did the fact of the Japanese Army being raised by compulsion prevent the Government of that country sending its soldiers over-sea by hundreds of thousands to fight in Manchuria ? or does Mr. Haldane suppose that the army, 70,000 strong, which he admits may attempt the invasion of these islands, will be com- posed of men who may volunteer for that special service ? It must, I think, be conceded that Sir Ian Hamilton is in error when he asserts THE NATION'S PERIL 37 that we have only " one narrow beam " to guide us ; and the present Adjutant-General, before accepting his predecessor's conclu- sions, will be well advised to examine them by the further light which the historical facts enumerated above throw on the subject. VII "CLEAR THINKING" The obvious purpose of both parts of " Compulsory Service " is to confute those who are endeavouring to persuade our countrymen that these islands and the British Empire can never find either actual safety, or security from panic, until all able-bodied citizens are compelled to undergo an ade- quate military training. Yet, when we study the volume atten- tively, what do we find ? Mr. Haldane, on page 20 of the Intro- duction, after extolling the superiority of the strategic offensive, adds : "To this end a highly trained army for over-sea work is 888555 38 FALLACIES AND FACTS essential, an army such as can be raised only on a professional and therefore voluntary footing." On page 39 he doubts the pos- sibility of establishing " adequate military systems of compulsory and voluntary service side by side in the same country." And on the following page, going far beyond any- thing that the National Service League has ever advocated, he submits to the public the " definite conclusion " to which he has been led by his four years' study of the question of National Defence. In that he says : " On the assumption, not to be lightly made, that we can get over all preliminary difficulties, industrial, social, and financial, it would be possible to sub- stitute a larger force for the Expeditionary Army of six divisions and a cavalry division which we have kept at home ready for service over-sea.* This force would be * It is somewhat difficult to credit Mr. Haldane's state- ment that such a large " Expeditionary Army," p. 15, " is now organized " and kept " at home ready for service over-sea," when we know that for mobilization purposes, after making use of every Reserve Officer, 2,500 Regular Officers would still be required, without making any de- duction for sick, absent, etc., and without having any officers available to replace casualties in the field. Fifty thousand THE NATION'S PERIL 39 prepared after the continental model and compulsorily recruited with the minimum of two years' training that would be requisite." * Can anything be more contradictory ? We are warned on one page that an army for offensive work over-sea can only be raised on a voluntary basis. A few pages later we have the final conclusion of four years' thought, that compulsion would, after horses also would be required, and though, no doubt, thia number could be found in the country, no satisfactory organization or arrangement exists for their distribution on mobilization by the Expeditionary Force. It is extremely doubtful how long the process would take, or whether the horses required would be of the right stamp, in good con- dition, or adequately trained. The truth is that four divi- sions and one cavalry division, with the usual complement of artillery, numbering less than 90,000 men, are all that could be mobilized within a fairly reasonable time. But in order to do this the whole Reserve of Officers would be practically used up, and the remaining divisions would be left seriously under-officered. The intention is to mobilize the Territorial Force simultaneously with the Expeditionary Force. The establishment of officers in the Territorial Force is 11,210, but there is a deficiency of 1,519 which leaves 9,691, and of this number 10 per cent, must be deducted as absent, sick, etc., leaving 8,722, or nearly 2,500 below establishment. No one, who gives the matter a moment's thought, can, I think, doubt the truth of what I have often said, that we have neither a Home Army such as is needed for the defence of this country, nor an effective Regular Army to protect Imperial interests abroad. * The italics are mine. 40 FALLACIES AND FACTS all, so far as military considerations go, give us a better force for over-sea purposes at any rate on the Continent of Europe than the voluntary system gives us at present. Mr. Haldane, it is true, qualifies this signifi- cant admission by adding that such a force could not be used in India or elsewhere for a prolonged campaign. If the reference is to minor and guerilla wars, which may drag on for a great length of time, the quali- fication can be accepted ; even if we had such a compulsory over-sea force as Mr. Haldane describes we should still require a second, though probably much smaller, Expeditionary Force on a voluntary basis for these contingencies. But I doubt very much if Mr. Haldane's qualification applies to any great lif e-and-death struggle, wherever fought; in such a vital situation the Force which Mr. Haldane says could be com- pulsorily recruited, would so history en- courages us to believe fight as well in any other continent as in Europe. In making his most striking admission in favour of compulsory service, Mr. Hal- dane, however, seems to have been mainly THE NATION'S PERIL 41 concerned with throwing cold water on the proposals of the National Service League. " Here is a scheme of compulsion worth something," he says in effect ; " the National Service League's scheme is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl." To this I entirely demur. Mr. Haldane's compulsory scheme, as it stands, makes no provision, as I have already pointed out, for minor campaigns over-sea, and further makes no provision for home defence against raids. The scheme of the National Service League, it is true, only proposes compulsory service for Home Defence. But it does so, not only for the sake of Home Defence of great importance though that must always be but to liberate the voluntarily raised over-sea force and the Navy at the very outset of war for their proper offensive work; to facilitate some such reorganization of our Voluntary Regular Army as is outlined in Part II., which would enable it to mobilize a larger Expeditionary Force than we have at present ; to provide that reservoir of trained manhood upon which we shall be bound to draw in the course of any great struggle for existence; 2* 42 FALLACIES AND FACTS and also to improve the moral and physical qualities of the people.* The scheme of the National Service League is, I submit, based on much sounder strategical conceptions, and is moreover much more suitable to the conditions of our national life, than the form of compulsory service suggested by Mr. Haldane. So much for Mr. Haldane's "clear thinking." Now let us see what Sir Ian Hamilton's plan is. Sir Ian Hamilton winds up his letter by telling us that behind our present forces, Regular, Special, Reserve, and Territorials, is to come the " Third Line a great or- ganization," adding, " This Third Line or- ganization would be based on compulsion." f Was ever a stronger or more unex- * It is frequently urged by the opponents of the National Service League that the withdrawal from civil life of a limited number of youths, for the purpose of undergoing a course of military training, would have the effect of dis- locating trade. But, in the opinion of many people who have studied the question carefully, the habits of regularity, obedience, order, and punctuality which would be instilled into those youths would be an immense gain to themselves and their employers, whereby trade would be greatly benefited. t The italics are mine. THE NATION'S PERIL 43 pected backing given to the advocates of compulsory service ? Sir Ian Hamilton, it is true, makes the compulsion part of his scheme " latent " the great organization is merely to exist on paper during peace, and is to become flesh and blood only after the outbreak of war, " the avowed purpose of the organization " being "the mainten- ance in the field during hostilities of both first and second lines." Now it must be remembered that Sir Ian Hamilton's " First Line " is " the Regular Army and Special Reserve as we know them." It comes, then, to this, that Sir Ian Hamilton deliberately recommends that this country's small fight- ing forces should be maintained in the field, abroad as well as at home, by men compelled to fight, but not permitted any training prior to the outbreak of hostilities. And this Third Line is to be utilized when the nation and the Empire are " fighting for bare life"!* * The italics are mine. 44 FALLACIES AND FACTS I have touched on some of the salient points of Mr. Haldane's and Sir Ian Hamilton's book. These points and many others are dealt with more exhaustively in Parts II. and III. of the present volume, and it has only been necessary for me to allude to them in my introductory chapter. But, before I close my remarks, there is one point to which I am compelled to refer, a point of paramount importance, but which is totally ignored by Sir Ian Hamilton, scarcely hinted at by Mr. Haldane, and never alluded to by Sir Arthur Wilson. I refer to the Balance of Power in Europe. For can it be seriously questioned that, for the last three hundred years, it has not been the command of the sea in itself that has made us so powerful in the Councils of Europe, but that through and by the com- mand of the sea in itself, we have been able to maintain the Balance of Power in Europe, whilst we ourselves moved on our steady path to Empire in other parts of the world ? THE NATION'S PERIL 45 But to maintain our position in Europe we were compelled again and again to secure the co-operation of Allies possessing great land forces. How did we secure this ? By subsidies often, as in the wars of the Austrian Succession and later in the wars against Napoleon, by enormous subsidies which our pre-eminence in wealth at that time made possible. To-day, however, we no longer enjoy that pre-eminence. Nor are wars any longer decided by subsidized troops, but by armed nations. How, then, are we to adhere to our immemorial policy if we can neither render efficient aid to a first-rate Power in alliance with ourselves, nor give such support to a lesser State as will enable it to offer a firm resistance to projects of domination ? And is it not rash for a British Foreign Minister to assert, as Sir Edward Grey did in the House of Com- mons on March 29th, 1909, our determina- tion to maintain the Balance of Power in Europe, so long as we are incapable of making those words good ? The possession of an armed force such as would enable us to maintain the Balance 46 FALLACIES AXD FACTS of Power in Europe does not in the least imply that we are anxious to carry on actual operations on the Continent, or cherish the aggressive designs which Sir Ian Hamilton suggests would be attributed to us if we put our defences in order. There are two ways of utilizing armies and navies. They may gain their country's purposes as completely in peace as in war, but only if they are known to be efficient and war-proof. In 1898 the strength of our fleet assured to us the fruits of Lord Kitchener's victories, averted a disastrous war with France and Russia, and paved the way to the establishment of the present good relations with those Powers. Again, in 1900, the British Navy alone enabled our Empire forces to carry the war in South Africa to a successful con- clusion by preventing interference by a European coalition. Similarly with the German Army. For the past fifty years Germany has been steadily increasing her commerce, her well-being, her position amongst the Great Powers. Out of these fifty years she has enjoyed forty of un- THE NATION'S PERIL 47 interrupted peace, but every student of European politics knows that these last forty years have not been barren of German victories bloodless, it is true, but none the less directly gained by her armed forces. For during this period the world has been well aware that the German Empire was at any moment as capable of winning her way by the sword as she proved herself to be in 1866 and again in 1870-71. Again, Sir Ian Hamilton seems to think that our present and prospective state, in which, for purposes of war, we are, and shall be, able to place some 120,000 to 140,000 men in the decisive field, is the best, most efficient, and most economical scheme that the wit of man can devise ; Mr. Haldane endorses Sir lan's contentions ; Sir Arthur Wilson concerns himself entirely with a successful defence of these islands considered as an isolated problem ; but no one of the three seems to recognize the fact that com- mand of the sea, be it ever so pronounced, be it ever so complete, cannot, under modern conditions, in Admiral Mahan's words, be 48 FALLACIES AND FACTS other than "temporary and local," or that, for an island Power, the command of the sea is not the end itself, but only a means to the end, namely defeat of the enemy. * One hundred years ago this country was brought to the brink of ruin. We had gained a mastery of the sea as complete as any recorded in history. In addition to this unchallenged position, we had the power, which we freely exercised, of buying the assistance of many of the other Great Powers. But we had no military power or none that we were prepared to use with which to follow up the success of the Navy at Trafalgar, and the result was we were nearly crushed by the enormous burden of debt piled up in ten more years of war. We had no effective power of expansion then. The extracts from the Reports of the Royal Commissions, which I made in the earlier pages of this Introduction, show that we have no effective power of expansion to-day. It is in order that such expansion of our forces may be possible, and in order that we may keep the high position which THE NATION'S PERIL 49> we have so long held, and which for the first time for one hundred years is now being threatened, that for the last six years I have advocated the tenets of the National Service League. It is because Mr. Haldane^ Sir Ian Hamilton, and Sir Arthur Wilson have ignored this fact in toto, that the present volume is put before the public. The necessities of one hundred years ago were great, the danger pressing, and the straits to which this country was reduced desperate ; but, with all history to support me, I venture to think that the neces- sities and the dangers of the future will be even greater, and the straits to which this country will be reduced will be more desperate, unless we, as a nation, realize the gravity of these dangers, and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices to meet them. Otherwise we shall most certainly lose the great heritage which has been entrusted to us, and forfeit our position amongst the great nations of the world, for we have not now the same re-*- cuperative power in proportion to other great countries that we had in former times. 60 FALLACIES AND FACTS NOTE WITH regard to Parts II. and III. of the present volume, a word of explanation is necessary. Part II., entitled " The Military and Naval Situation," is from the pen of a well-known writer on problems of Imperial Defence. It not only examines in detail the various arguments brought forward in " Compul- sory Service," but it deals in a compre- hensive form with the whole strategical problem which Mr. Haldane and his com- panions have practically ignored. Part III., entitled the " Argument from History," is from the pen of a writer who has given much time and thought to that subject. It did not seem to me that the verdict of history was so strongly in support of Mr. Haldane's and Sir Ian Hamilton's position as they assume in their book ; but thought it better to have the opinion of a man who has devoted special attention to the study of history. Accordingly, in writing to my friend, THE NATION'S PERIL 51 shortly after the publication of " Com- pulsory Service " I asked him his opinion of the book, and in the course of the next few days I received from him two letters which supported my own opinion so con- vincingly that, with his permission, I made use of these letters in their entirety, retain- ing both the form and the order in which they were written to me. In answer to a question by Mr. Arthur Lee in the House of Commons on February 14th last, Mr. Haldane stated that it was in the public interest that " Compulsory Service " had been published, adding that *' The amount of fiction which was spread about in various works was enormous, and it was desirable to place the facts before the people." Mr. Haldane, therefore, will, I am sure, not object to my following his example and placing before the people of this country another presentment of the subject under discussion. It will now rest with the readers of both volumes to dis- criminate between what are facts and what is fiction. v^y^ /w^ ( i AW PART II THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION " Readiness for defence is the strongest of the safeguards of Peace." King Edward VII. at Liverpool, July 1th t 1909. THE case for National Service may be stated in very few words. It is simply this : that our present military arrangements are wholly inadequate to deal with the grave dangers which threaten the existence of the British Empire. The forces available for service over-sea are insufficient in num- bers for the task they would have to under- take in a great war. The forces available for home defence are utterly incapable of dealing with a serious invasion, and their incapacity is bound, when the crisis comes, to have the most paralysing effect on the operations both of the over-sea forces and of the Navy. Nothing short of some form of universal service can provide the trained men required for home defence or for the 52 THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 53 necessary expansion in war of our forces over-sea, and so avert a national disaster. There are other general arguments, of a political and social character, in favour of National Service. But the case does not rest on these. It rests on a perfectly de- finite and concrete consideration of our military needs and of our military resources. And it cannot be disposed of except by proof, equally definite and concrete, that the existing voluntary system does in fact meet those needs, or can be made to meet them. Have Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton furnished that proof in their book ? The answer must be that they have not even attempted the task. They have put for- ward a variety of general propositions, more or less supported by argument, to the effect that compulsory service would inter- fere with recruiting for the Regular Army, that it could not furnish troops for service over-sea, and that the forces it could supply for home defence would be superfluous. In still more general terms Sir^ Ian Hamilton has extolled the voluntary system as " the 54 FALLACIES AND PACTS creator of our national glory " and the secret of Imperial expansion, and has identi- fied National Service with a spirit of passive defence which would make us " retrace the steps of Empire " and " imperil all we stand for in the world." There are appen- dixes which set out to prove that National Service would cost more than the original estimate of the National Service League. Last, but not least, there is the appendix containing Sir Arthur Wilson's famous Memorandum, which proves conclusively that serious invasion of these islands is impossible provided always that the enemy carries out his attempt at invasion at a time convenient to the Admiralty and under the conditions most unfavourable to himself. But nowhere, from first page to last of the work, is there the slightest indication of any attempt whatever to estimate the forces which we should actually require in any serious war, or the slightest effort to work out to any reasoned conclusion that intimate interdependence of sea-power and military strength, of home defence and striking power abroad which is the key to the whole THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 55 problem of Imperial strategy. Sir Ian Hamilton, indeed, with the most engaging simplicity, leaves these matters to Mr. Haldane : " Have they (our military needs) ever been clearly stated ? If not, it is for you to make the statement." And Mr. Haldane, in his turn, discreetly evades the appeal by bland generalities intended to diffuse the comfortable, but wholly mis- leading, impression that the General Staff and the Committee of Imperial Defence have seen to all this, and that our forces are, in fact, at present organized on the basis of our strategic requirements. But the question of our actual require*- ments in war cannot be set aside in this fashion. It goes to the root of the whole controversy, and till it is settled, the dis- cussion of the relative merits of the Volun- tary and National systems is entirely in the air. If Sir Ian Hamilton and Mr. Haldane had begun by proving that our present system does provide us, or ever could pro- vide us, with an army capable of defeating the forces which it may have to encounter in a great war, then the rest of their argu- 56 FALLACIES AND FACTS ments would have come in appropriately as bearing on the further question whether the same end might or might not be secured more efficiently by National Service. In the absence of any such proof, or even any attempt at proof, the greater part of their disquisition on the defects and difficulties of this or that form of compulsory service is entirely irrelevant. What those diffi- culties amount to, how far they are real, and how far the mere products of Sir Ian Hamilton's ingenious fancy, is a matter well worth careful examination at a sub- sequent stage in the argument. But our first task is to clear the ground of the main issue : is National Service necessary for our security or is it not ? The problem before us is a perfectly definite one. We have to ascertain the strength of the hostile forces, or combina- tions of forces, against which, on any reasonable calculation of probabilities, we may have to take the field. With these we have to compare our own actual or potential fighting strength as provided by voluntary service. If that comparison THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 57 gives us a fair prospect of success, well and good. If not, then our main contention is proved, and what we have to do next is to show in what specific way the principle of National Service can be most effectively applied to suit our peculiar needs in war and peace. Before dealing with the strategical pro- blem of Imperial security in its detailed aspects, we must first get clear in our minds some of the general considerations which govern that problem. Not the least im- portant of these is the relation of strategy to foreign policy. There is a dangerous half-truth which asserts that armaments depend on policy dangerous, because it encourages the delusion that pacific inten- tions alone are enough to secure peace, and that armaments are an ambitious luxury which can always be cut down by a Govern- ment resolved on a meek and unaggressive foreign policy. The full truth is that armaments and policy are essentially inter- dependent and complementary. A mala- 58 FALLACIES AND FACTS droit or aggressive policy may, indeed, provoke unnecessary friction and create hostile combinations, which in turn will necessitate an increase of expenditure on armaments ; a prudent and skilful policy may smooth over difficulties and pave the way to useful alliances which will form an effective contribution to the armed strength of the nation. But the converse is no less true, and, for practical purposes, even more important. Whatever the object and char- - acter of a nation's foreign policy, the success of that policy is directly dependent on the actual fighting strength behind it. The money and effort spent on armaments are frequently spoken of as a sort of insurance, an expenditure whose benefits are only reaped when some fortuitous circumstance has precipitated war. But they correspond far more closely to the cash reserve of some great bank, which, though stored away in its vaults, and produced only in emergencies, is yet in daily employment through the medium of its note circulation. Just so in times of peace the army and navy of a Great Power are used continuously and to THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 59 their fullest value through the channels of diplomacy. At no time since Trafalgar has the British Navy been employed so fully and so successfully as in the last twenty years. The peaceful partition of tropical Africa, the undisturbed settlement of the South African struggle, the isolation of the Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese con- flicts, the establishment of friendly relations with France and Russia all these are but the most striking examples of its successful work during a critical period in our history. Nor has the mighty German Army been idle since it fired its last shells into Paris. The acquisition of a great Colonial Empire, and the vigorous defence of German trade in- terests in many fields, most notably of recent years in Morocco and the Near East, are the direct fruits of a military system which, according to Sir Ian Hamilton, in- volves the constant sacrifice of Imperial ambitions on the altar of home defence ! No less misleading than the idea that skilful diplomacy can provide a substitute for armed strength is the idea that such a substitute can be found in alliances. 60 FALLACIES AND FACTS The basis of every alliance is mutual advan- tage, and it is only the Power that can contribute effective strength to an alliance that can hope to get anything out of it. It was not Prussia's need for assistance, but Prussia's strength, that enabled Bis- marck to secure the support of Italy against Austria in 1866. It is those who can best help themselves who will always find allies to help them. Foreign policy and military policy are, in fact, only different aspects of the same thing the external policy of a nation. And that external policy is, in the main, not an arbitrary plan of action devised either by diplomats or by strategists, but the logical and inevitable outcome of certain broad geographical and economic conditions. The geographical distribution of the territories of the British Empire, the diffusion of our economic interests outside those territories, the territorial, economic, and military ex- pansion of other States these are the primary and permanent factors which govern the external policy of the Empire. It is these factors which bring the Empire THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 61 into contact with other Powers and involve the dangers of war. The more numerous the points of contact, the greater the likeli- hood of friction ; the more important the objects of economic rivalry between us and other Powers, the more serious the danger of war ; the stronger those Powers, the stronger must be the forces with which we propose to meet them. These are the elementary considerations which must govern the framework of our scheme of Imperial defence. The diplomatic situa- tion at any particular period will naturally affect our strategic dispositions for the time being. But it is much too unstable a thing to furnish a secure foundation on which to lay the main lines of a naval or military organization which it may take a generation to build up. Those main lines consequently must take no account of present inter- national relations, but must be laid with a view to dealing with any Power with which the Empire can possibly come in contact on sea or on land. There can be no such thing in sound strategy as the exclusion from our calculations of any foreign Power, 62 FALLACIES AND FACTS however friendly at the moment, or however much we may dislike the idea of coming into conflict with it. Those are excellent reasons for continuing to cultivate friend- ship, but not for neglecting to make pro- vision against the breaking up of friendship under the stress of a serious conflict of interests. The British Empire is scattered all over the world. How it came to be where it is is a matter of history. The essential point to remember is that during the period in which it attained its present dimensions and political constitution it was entirely outside the great world of international conflict. For eighty years after Trafalgar we practically had the outer world to our- selves. The United States were absorbed in their internal affairs ; elsewhere we were confronted only by weak Oriental mon- archies or by savage tribes. The growth of the Empire was attended by plenty of mis- cellaneous, though not really serious, fight- ing. But no broad conceptions either of strategy or of internal organization domin- ated the acquisition and development of THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 63 our territories. In a haphazard and sporadic fashion, without much thought of the morrow, the British Empire grew up over the face of the earth. The question of the internal political and economic organization of the Empire does not directly concern the present controversy. It is enough to insist v in passing that it is the absence of such internal organization which at present throws almost the whole burden and responsibility of Imperial defence on the Mother Country, and that in the long run, failing some com- plete reconstruction, both of our Imperial constitution and of the economic basis of our policy, no efforts or sacrifices on the part of the Mother Country can avert the dissolution of the Empire from within, or its forcible disruption at the hands of stronger, wealthier, and better organized Powers. What is more immediately to the point of our inquiry, however, is that it was during this period of undisturbed and unmenaced expansion of petty and dis- connected military operations, involving no general strategical conceptions, and calling for no serious national effort that our 64 FALLACIES AND FACTS military system reached its present shape, a shape which in all essential respects has remained unchanged for the last forty years. In the interval the whole world-situation has been transformed. The expansion of England has been followed by the expansion of Europe. The expansion of America and the expansion of Asia have already begun. The British Empire, which was once out of the world, far removed from the din of great battles, is rapidly finding itself in the very midst of the arena of the world- struggle for power and economic develop- ment. At every point its scattered terri- tories and vested interests are in contact with the expanding activities and ambitions of other nations. With the exception of Austria-Hungary, there is not a single Great Power with which our frontiers do not march, or with which our interests may not clash seriously at any moment. So far from being a protection, as it formerly was, the geographical distribution of the Empire has become in the last twenty years a steadily increasing source of danger. It THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 66 multiplies enormously not only the occa- sions which give rise to wars, but also the probability of those wars being waged against us not by single Powers, but by coalitions. We cannot stand in everybody's way without expecting to be jostled. We cannot in an age of fierce land-hunger hold up for our own use territory enough for half a dozen mighty empires, and think we can always avert hostility by amiable in- tentions, or isolate our opponents by skilful diplomacy. Least of all have we any reason to expect that a military system framed, in the days of our unchallenged naval supre- macy, to cope from time to time with native risings in India, with Afghans, Zulus, or Sudanese, is really calculated to enable us to confront the menace of armed coali- tion between Powers that count their trained soldiers by the million and will soon be counting their Dreadnoughts by the squadron. The danger of finding ourselves at war with more than one Great Power at a time must be reckoned as a permanent factor in the situation, and all our naval and military 3 66 FALLACIES AND FACTS preparations must take account of it. From this it at once becomes clear that the " Two-Power Standard " is not a mere arbitrary and fanciful convention, a kind of over-insurance in the matter of naval protection, but a natural consequence of the extent and distribution of our terri- tories and interests in the midst of expanding and ambitious Powers, and an essential measure of our requirements. From this de- finition, too, of its real meaning it is clear that the " Two-Enemy Standard " applies to the military as well as to the naval problem. The only difference is that while at sea we are bound to maintain at all times, if we wish to be safe, a superiority to the total naval forces of any two Powers whatever, our con- cern on land is only with those Powers which are in a position to invade our territories, or, in certain eventualities, the territory of our allies. Nor are we concerned with their total land forces, but only with those that can be brought against us in the field. What enters into our consideration is not the whole Russian army, but the Russian force which can be put in the field in THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 67 Afghanistan ; not the whole German army, but the force which can be landed in Eng- land, or which, in the case of continental operations, can be spared from dealing with the French. Again, over and above the danger of having to deal with a coalition of hostile foreign Powers, we cannot afford to overlook the possibility of internal trouble. Vast regions of the Empire are inhabited by alien races, often half-civilized, in many cases still wholly savage. Our rule in India, to begin with, was established by military conquest, and cannot for generations to come dispense with the support of military power against possible outbreaks, local or general. There has been an enormous extension of our terri- tories in Africa during the last twenty years. The acquisition of this Empire in Africa, like that of our Empire in India, has been the work of the merest handful of Englishmen, aided by small bodies of native troops. But, as the Indian Mutiny showed, the forces sufficient to win an Empire may well prove inadequate to hold it. Nor can we treat this internal military problem as disconnected 68 FALLACIES AND FACTS with the external problem. It is precisely the occasion of serious internal trouble in India or Egypt that a hostile Power or hos- tile coalition would select as suitable for striking the long - prepared blow, while nothing would give such direct encourage- ment to the ever - simmering elements of discontented ambition in various portions of our Empire as the outbreak of a great war, marked, perhaps, by a series of grave reverses. And this connection between internal and external danger is one which the immense development of telegraphy and other means of communication the whole modern shrinkage of the world, in fact has only accentuated. It is, in truth, a gigantic responsibility which rests upon the shoulders of the British nation. Is it awake to the meaning of that responsibility ? If not, then are its political leaders doing their duty to the nation by shaking it from its slumber ? And are the professional advisers of those leaders doing their duty by a fearless exposition of the effort required to avert disaster ? But to return to our theme. First and THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 69 foremost, then, we must keep in mind that ours is an oceanic Empire. It was won by sea-power, and without sea-power it cannot be maintained. The great oceans of the world are its internal communications, and their control by hostile fleets would mean for the whole Empire instant paralysis and eventual disruption. Again, the economic fabric of every part of the Empire depends in a greater or less degree upon sea-borne commerce. In the case of the United King- dom the immense majority of the population exists by the working up of imported raw materials and the consumption of imported food-stuffs. The suspension or serious dislo- cation of British commercial shipping would inflict heavy losses upon every portion of the Empire. But it would be an appalling disaster to the industrial population of the United Kingdom. The safety of British shipping on the high seas, and the free pas- sage of troops, munitions of war, and food- supplies between the different parts of the Empire, are objects which must be secured in war at all hazards. They can be secured directly by naval power alone, and the 70 FALLACIES AND FACTS maintenance of a navy capable of securing them against any two hostile Powers must always remain a fundamental principle of Imperial strategy. But if the British Empire is oceanic it is also continental. Of its eleven and a half million square miles of territory, eight mil- lions are on the continents of Asia, Africa, and America. Its land frontier extends for some 28,000 miles four times the extent of the frontiers of any other Power. Fortun- ately, only a comparatively small portion of that frontier is menaced by formidable neighbours. In practice we have only to consider two military problems of the first magnitude arising out of our position as a continental Empire the defence of our position in India and the defence of Canada. What these two problems involve in the way of military effort will be considered later. For the moment, the only essential point to keep in view is that, in the main, they can be solved only by military strength. Another fundamental condition of Imperial strategy, therefore, is a military system capable of dealing with either Russia or the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 71 United States in the defence of India or Canada. That this condition, at any rate as regards the problem of Canadian defence, is habitually ignored, does not alter its funda- mental necessity. It is no use trying to blink unpleasant realities by calling the Americans "cousins," and proclaiming war with them to be " unthinkable." Unthink- able ! There is no such word in international politics. With every desire to maintain and strengthen the most friendly and intimate relations with the United States, the fact still remains that they are a foreign Power. If a serious conflict of economic interests or the expansion of their ambitions should commend war with us to American states- men, no considerations of sentiment on their side, no conceivable degree of meekness or forbearance on ours, nothing but a practical comparison of our fighting power with theirs will affect their decision. After all, we have been at war with the United States in the past. It is not fifteen years since President Cleveland practically threatened war over Venezuela. Only the other day the Speaker- Elect of the American House of Representa- 72 FALLACIES AND FACTS lives openly proclaimed the annexation of Canada as the goal of American policy. There is no reason to take such an utterance too seriously if we did, we should have to consider war inevitable but it may serve as a useful corrective to the sort of gush which takes in none but those who wish to be taken in, among whom, indeed, it is to be feared, must be reckoned the great majority of British politicians. So far we have considered those portions of the task of Imperial defence which pri- marily devolve upon one particular arm of our forces, and cannot be directly carried out by the other. But there are other por- tions of the task where the work could in theory be done by either arm acting separ- ately, but in practice can only be done effectively and economically by both arms acting in conjunction. Let us take the de- fence of an insular naval base and coaling station like Malta. In theorv Malta could p be defended entirely by the Navy, or entirely by the Army. In practice it would be absurd to garrison Malta with a military force capa- ble of holding it indefinitely against all THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 73 comers, without taking account of the pres- ence of a British fleet in the Mediterranean, and of its power of interfering with any operations conducted against the island. On the other hand, it would be no less absurd to remove altogether the military garrison of Malta, and assign to the Mediterranean squadron the whole task of protecting its base. That task would be at once refused by the Admiralty as calculated to hamper its strategic freedom of action. Even the suggestion that bases like Malta, though still garrisoned by soldiers or marines, should at any rate be under the control of the Admiral commanding the station has in the past been rejected by the Admiralty, on the ground that not only the ships, but also the mind of the Admiral, must be kept absolutely concen- trated on the main objective the enemy's fighting fleet. Theoretically, no doubt, it might be possible to spend the money devoted to the garrison of Malta on extra destroyers and submarines specially ear- marked for local defence. But such a scheme would not work in practice, and it would, moreover, fail to provide what the 3* 74 FALLACIES AND FACTS present arrangement does provide a reser- voir of military force available on occasion at other points e.g. Egypt or Crete where destroyers or submarines could be of no use. But what is true of a minor base like Malta in its relation to the Mediterranean squadron, and to military problems in the Mediterranean area, is equally true of the United Kingdom, the main base and arsenal of our fleets, in relation to the whole of our naval and military strategy. To make our military arrangements for the defence of these Islands as if the Navy did not exist on the supposition, let us say, that our opponents will be able to transport their troops to our shores undisturbed for weeks and months on end is an absurdity which no one has ever suggested. But the even more preposterous assumption that our Navy can never be distracted from the problem of covering England for more than a few hours, and that in considering our arrange- ments for home defence we can ignore our general strategical needs for a large reservoir of military force that assumption is con- tinually being made. It underlies the whole THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 75 of Mr. Haldane's and Sir Ian Hamilton's disquisitions, and is nowhere more patent than in Sir Arthur Wilson's unfortunate Memorandum. To get rid of this dangerous delusion, to realize clearly the need for a strong military force in this country, both in order to free the Navy for its fighting work, and to enable us to face Imperial tasks which have got to be faced, but which the Navy alone cannot deal with, is an indis- pensable preliminary to any sound grasp of the whole complex problem of Imperial security. This conjunction and interaction of naval and military strength is as essential in offence as in defence. A military force strong enough to seize the enemy's naval bases may be a vital factor in determining success at sea. It was the Japanese Army which paved the way for the crowning naval victory at Tsushima, by destroying the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. It was not Japanese sailors alone, but Japanese sailors and soldiers working in conjunction, that won the command of the Pacific. Con- versely, many an example in our own mill- 76 FALLACIES AND FACTS tary history most signally the Peninsular War has proved the advantage of " the shifting base and incalculable line of com- munications," to use Sir Ian Hamilton's phrase, which belongs to the Army which enjoys the command of the sea. Emerson has described in graphic terms the immensely enhanced striking power of an amphibious army. " The men who have built a ship . . . have acquired much more than a ship. Now arm them, and every shore is at their mercy ; for if they have not numerical superiority where they anchor they have only to sail a mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of war namely of concentrating force on the point of attack must always be theirs who have the choice of the battle-ground." There is only one qualification which it is necessary to add : it is little use enjoying this immense strategical advantage unless we have an army strong enough to turn it to account. There is no more dangerous delusion than that the command of the sea is an end in itself. The end is security in peace by the possession of strength adequate to ensure THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 77 victory in war. Victory means crushing an opponent, not merely denying him the use of a certain area of operations. And the latter is all that, in most cases, the command of the sea can effect. As Lord Roberts has pointed out in the first part of this work, it took ten years of struggle to make good our naval triumph at Trafalgar. Our com- mand of the sea was not ratified till Vittoria, Leipzig, and Waterloo put an end to Napo- leon's dream of a confederated Europe out- building and crushing Britain by the irre- sistible weight of its economic power. And in the meantime the burden of maintaining the struggle, of paying heavy subsidies to allies, and of incurring fresh complications, such as the war with the United States, brought England almost to the verge of ruin. It is an interesting speculation to consider what would have been the saving in blood and money to England and Europe if we could have followed up, or even pre- ceded Trafalgar with an army sufficient to have made it impossible for Napoleon to concentrate his forces for Austerlitz. The need for military strength over-sea, 78 FALLACIES AND FACTS whether our own or that of our allies, has always been recognized by British states- manship in the past. And we have needed it, not only to complete and make good our naval success, but in order to prevent a condition of things which would have made naval success impossible for us. From Queen Elizabeth down to the younger Pitt, our statesmen have at intervals been con- fronted with one transcending menace the possibility of a great European military Power concentrating in its hands, by con- quest or by alliances, an economic strength and ship-building resources which would nullify all our efforts to maintain command of the sea, and expose England to invasion in overwhelming force. It was to avert this menace that we helped the Dutch against Spain, depriving the Great Armada of ships and harbours, whose use might well have made it irresistible. It was for the same end that William of Orange, Chatham, and Pitt formed their coalitions against France. The maintenance of the European balance of power against the domination of a single Power has been of vital consequence to us THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 7 in the past, and may be no less vital to us in the near future. The only way to main- tain that balance is to give effective military support to those European Powers who are prepared to resist the attempt at domination; In the days of our commercial preponder- ance and of mercenary armies, that effective support could be given in the shape of money subsidies. In these days, when we enjoy no such marked pre-eminence in wealth and in- dustry, and when wars are fought by nations trained and organized as armies, neither our subsidies nor the additional forces they might provide would go very far. The only thing that will count are the men we can put in the field. And these will count for nothing if they are not sufficient to redress the balance of military strength in favour of our allies. Unless we can hold out a reason- able prospect of victory as the result of alliance, our potential allies will of necessity make the best terms they can with the dominant Power, even if those terms include co-operation in the task of crushing England. From the foregoing general analysis of the problem of Imperial defence one thing stands BO FALLACIES AND FACTS out clearly the intimate interdependence of Army and Navy. Not only does the Empire require a supreme Navy to maintain its internal unity and protect its commerce, and an Army strong enough to defend its continental territories, but each arm for its own purposes requires the effective and close co-operation of the other. Any deficiency in the one arm throws a heavy and unneces- sary burden on the other, or renders it in- capable of fulfilling its proper work. With- out a Navy strong enough to command the sea, our Army can neither reinforce a threatened frontier nor strike home in an enemy's territory. Without adequate mili- tary provision for the defence of our naval bases, and above all of the central base and heart of our whole Imperial system, the United Kingdom, our Navy will be paralysed and weakened in action. Without an Army strong enough to redress the balance of power in Europe against the premeditated continental domination of a single Power, the Navy may have to face the prospect of being hopelessly outbuilt in peace, and of being crushed by overwhelming numbers THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 81 whenever our rivals think the time is ripe for the settling of old scores, and for opening a new chapter in the world's history. We can now pass on to the actual concrete task which confronts our Army and Navy to-day, and consider the adequacy of those two arms of the service to cope with it in war in other words, their adequacy to give us the security which is essential to the prosperous and peaceful development of British civilization. The Two-Power Standard of naval strength is the very lowest measure of security we can allow ourselves at sea. Are we as a nation to-day honestly facing all that is involved in our undertaking to maintain that standard ? Sea-power under modern con- ditions is based on money-power, on indus- trial and economic strength. A Two-Power Standard in ships presupposes, in the long run, something like a Two-Power Standard in taxable wealth and industrial output. That condition we were able to fulfil through- out the prolonged naval competition with 82 FALLACIES AND FACTS France and Russia which marked the close of the last century. For every pound the allies put down we put down our guinea. For every ship they launched, we launched a bigger and better one. Do we enjoy the same advantages of greater wealth and greater industrial strength over Germany and the United States, the Powers which are now taking up the competition ? Mr. Haldane airily assures us that it is " com- paratively easy for us to keep well ahead of any possible adversary for many years to come." The wish, it is to be feared, is in his case father to the thought. The V formidable nature of the German menace to our command of the sea has seriously startled the British nation in the last few years. An expenditure on new construction and armament during the last three finan- cial years of 29,365,000 as against our 34,531,000 ought certainly to have opened even Mr. Haldane's eyes. Whether in 1914 our " capital ships " will be to the Germans as 30 to 21, or whatever the precise figure may be then or a year or two later, we have already reached the point at which the two- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 83 to-one standard has clearly ceased to exist. But what is more serious, and what is still apparently unrealized, is that this is but the beginning. With her sixty-five millions of people, her enormous industrial growth, her much lighter incidence of taxation, there is nothing, except certain temporary financial difficulties due to the complex arrange- ments of her federal system, to prevent Germany raising her naval expenditure from 20,000,000 to 30,000,000, or even 40,000,000 in the near future. She can well afford it. Moreover, Germany enjoys a great advantage over us in the absence of other naval commitments. She has no important interests in the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic, or in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to absorb part of her naval strength. Her naval general staff has not to waste a thought on home defence in a war with England it would waste very few thoughts even on the defence of German commerce. The whole German fleet can be concentrated for the one single purpose of offence, and will be spent unreservedly on that object. By victory at sea Germany 84 FALLACIES AND FACTS stands to gain the first position in the world, . by defeat she stands to lose nothing beyond the ships themselves and a few colonies of comparatively little value. Conditions such as these, coupled with the almost certain prospect of having the initiative and striking the first blow, add fifty per cent to the fighting value of a fleet. Nor can we reckon with the German fleet alone. Aus- tria-Hungary is beginning to lay down Dreadnoughts, which will, to all intents and purposes, form the nucleus of a German Mediterranean fleet, the rest of which will be furnished by Italy, reluctant but unable in the absence of effective military help from us to resist the pressure on her north-eastern frontier. Less immediately threatening, but even more formidable in the long run, is the naval competition of the United States coupled as it is with the power of bringing direct military pressure to bear on us and of Japan. The Americans spend 27,000,000 a year on their navy to-day. They could spend 50,000,000 a year without really feeling it ; they probably will be spending it before THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 85 twenty years are passed. Japan, if less wealthy, is nevertheless advancing by extra- ordinary strides. In neither case is existing friendship or alliance sufficient warrant for wholly disregarding the change in the naval situation and treating it as irrelevant to our safety. The pressure on our resources is getting greater year by year. With an annual naval expenditure of over 44,000,000 in imme- diate prospect we have already practically abandoned the Two-Power Standard. Even to maintain our present relative position to our chief competitors is likely to involve naval estimates of 60,000,000 or 80,000,000 in a future by no means remote. Double our pre- sent naval estimates ! Still, there are plenty of persons who can remember when the naval estimates were about one-third of what they are to-day, and when they would have gasped at the mere suggestion of our present naval budget. It is no use gasping. We have got to face the facts, however unpleasant they may be, and find ways and means of meeting them. We cannot abandon the command of the sea, cost what it may. But 86 FALLACIES AND FACTS there is one thing we can do, and that is to see that the Navy shall not be burdened by any duty which might detract from its full fighting efficiency, if that duty can be performed mroe economically in other ways. Immense as is the task it has to fulfil, the actual organization of the Navy is com- paratively simple. It is framed with a view to one object, and one object only the most serious war that is likely to break out. Subsidiary tasks, such as those of suppressing slavery and gun-running, or of " showing the flag " in out-of-the-way re- gions of the world, have of late years been reduced to very small dimensions. The organization of our land forces, on the other hand, is necessarily much more complex. Apart from the contingency of serious wars of the first magnitude, provision has to be made for those smaller wars which are in- cidental to the growth and consolidation of Imperial rule among Eastern or savage races, for the maintenance of a sufficient force of white troops in India and Egypt, and for the garrisoning of naval bases and coaling stations. This complexity differ- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 87 entiates, and must always differentiate, our military system from that of continental Powers like Germany or Russia. No one disputes this fact, though Sir Ian Hamilton and Mr. Haldane, by constant reiteration, would have us believe that it is ignored by the advocates of National Service. The question at issue is a very different one, namely, the adequacy of our present military system, however organized, to provide for all of these requirements, and in particular for the first and most vital of all serious war. In considering this question it is essential to bear in mind that when the existing organization was framed by Lord Cardwell forty years ago the contingency of serious war on a large scale hardly entered into our calculations at all. There was no system of strategic railways from the centre of Russia to the Afghan border in those days, and the danger of any effective force ever being brought to bear upon India seemed excessively remote. The feeling of Imperial Unity was at its lowest, and the idea of resisting to the death an American attempt upon Canada was nowhere seriously enter- 88 FALLACIES AND FACTS tained. Still less was there any idea of operations on a large scale on the continent of Europe, though the existence of a treaty obligation to assist in preserving Belgian neutrality was recognized in theory. The main object of the Cardwell reorganization was the provision of a field force primarily for home defence and, in the second place, available, at any rate in part, for suppres- sing an outbreak in India or for coping with any other military task on a similar scale. Considering the circumstances in which the present organization was framed, there is, at any rate on the face of it, no particular reason for assuming that it provides a force capable of dealing with the great strategical problems of our generation. This view is only confirmed by a study of the organization itself. The principle of the Cardwellian system is that the recruits for each unit quartered in peace in India, or in the various Colonies or naval stations, are organized at home in a corresponding " linked " training unit, which can be mobi- lized for war by the inclusion of reservists. That is to say the force that can be mobilized THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 89 in war is exactly equal, in number of units, to the total force stationed abroad. But the strength of this latter force depends on a whole variety of different local conditions which have no bearing whatever on the question of the size of the force required for a serious campaign against a great Power. A reduction of the British troops in South Africa, or the substitution of Indian for British troops in Egypt, can in no possible sense simplify the strategical pro- blem of operations against the Russians in Afghanistan or against the Germans in Belgium. Nevertheless it would automati- cally reduce the field force available for those operations. To quote the words once used by Mr. Churchill in support of Mr. Haldane : "If the numbers necessary to maintain the troops abroad can be re- duced, then a reduction will be made in the size of the Expeditionary Force, and the scheme of the Secretary of State for War will not lose in its harmony and effici- ency." As if there can be any other har- mony in our military arrangements which matters except harmony with our require- 90 FALLACIES AND FACTS ments in war, or any other efficiency we need look to except that which will secure victory for our forces ! Can we conceive the French General Staff determining the strength of the forces which they mean to put in the field against Germany by some fixed multiple of the garrisons required for Algeria, Tonkin, and Madagascar ? Or a German statesman suggesting that the re- duction of the forces required to chase Hottentots in South-West Africa would enable the army corps at Metz to be dis- banded without loss of harmony or effici- ency ? A more absurdly unstrategical system it would be difficult to imagine, and its only explanation is that it belongs to a period before any serious problems of strategy had forced themselves on the atten- tion of our military authorities. Let us now consider the actual numbers which the existing system provides. There are, first of all, permanently abroad some 76,000 officers and men of the Regular Army in India, and 37,000 in Egypt and minor garrisons. At home there are some 128,000 Regulars with the colours, and about the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 91 same strength of the Regular Reserve.* the latter an abnormally high figure, due to the three years' service introduced by Lord Midleton, and reflecting the higher peace es- tablishment since cut down by Mr. Haldane. Behind these there is the Special Reserve, some 63,000 strong, available for drafts and certain other special purposes. Lastly, there is the Territorial Force, some 267,000 strong; the Territorial Force Reserve and the Veteran Reserve recently inaugurated by Mr. Haldane exist, as yet, chiefly in the imaginative eloquence of their author. On paper this does not seem an altogether inconsiderable force, when all its items are added together irrespective of their actual fighting value, or their availability for any specific purpose. To do so has always been our official habit, and Mr. Haldane has de- veloped it to the point at which he can speak without a smile of " twenty, organized divi- sions," or of a " long range army of nearly 300,000 " in the one case treating the Territorial Force as a serious army to be reckoned at its face value, in the other * Not including some 7,000 Reservists living abroad. 92 FALLACIES AND FACTS reckoning the troops locked up in India, Egypt, and our naval garrisons as if they were available for general purposes. But the apotheosis of sheer buncombe on this sub- ject is achieved by Sir Ian Hamilton when he speaks of our miscellaneous forces at home composing " a fighting organization of something like half a million men," and gives us to understand that these are " mili- tary effectives available for over-seas offen- sive purposes." The real situation is as follows : Of the Regulars with the colours not more than about 80,000 are men actually fit for ser- vice over-seas ; the rest are recruits of less than one year's training, or under twenty years of age. On mobilization, the Expe- ditionary Force of six divisions would have to draw to the extent of over 80,000 on the Reserve, and to the extent of some 15,000 on certain special contingents from the Special Reserve and from the Territorial Force. The total force available on mobili- zation for service over-sea is not more than 170,000, even on paper, and for these there would be enough drafts from the sur- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 93 plus Reserve and Special Reserve, and from young soldiers maturing, to enable them to keep the field for six months providing casualties were not excessive, and that no drafts were required meanwhile for any of the troops in India, Egypt, or the naval garrisons. As a matter of fact, the War Office is not in a position to mobilize 170,000 men, or anything like that figure, immedi- ately on the outbreak of war. Unless units left at home, depots, and Special Reserve were absolutely stripped of every single officer, there would be a shortage of over 2,000 officers. There is practically no pro- vision whatever for the wastage of officers in war or for the need of officers for special services or for the organization of impro- vised forces. Fifty thousand horses are required to complete on mobilization, and to secure these and arrange for their col- lection, distribution to units, and fitting with harness and saddlery, would take considerable time. If four divisions with cavalry division, artillery, etc., say 100,000 men in all, could be mobilized in a week or ten days, the War Office authorities would 94 FALLACIES AND FACTS have every reason to congratulate them- selves. The force available for over-sea service may thus be reckoned as amounting at the most to 100,000 men at the outbreak of war. Another 70,000 might be put in the field in the next two months. The whole force might be maintained at full strength for six months or so, after which it would have to rely on newly enlisted recruits or volunteers from the Territorial Force to keep it from dwindling away to nothing. There is no provision whatever for expansion be- yond the original six divisions, except in so far as units or individuals of the Territorial Force may volunteer for foreign service. Mere numerical strength is not everything, and in the warfare of the future individual tactical skill, intelligence, self-reliance, en- durance, and, above all, discipline in the highest sense of the word, the active, con- scientious, unwavering resolve to carry out instructions, will count for more than ever before. There is no idea more attractive to the student of war than that of an army moderate in numbers, highly mobile, and immensely efficient, defeating vastly su- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 95 perior forces of partly trained conscripts. Unfortunately, it is no use deluding our- selves with the idea that our present Ex- peditionary Force corresponds to this de- scription, or can be made to correspond to it under the existing system. Sir Ian Hamilton, it is true, in one passage describes it as composed of the " finest troops in Europe," in virtue of the long service of the Reservists in its ranks. But Sir Ian has also drawn us a very different picture. He describes the material which enlists in our Army as composed, to the extent of four- fifths, of " weedy, over-grown youths," * "hungry hobbledehoys," who "come to us because they cannot get a job at fifteen shillings a week" in other words, of the least promising material of which to make the intel- ligent, alert, strong-willed, enduring type of individual postulated for our imaginary army * The nominal ago of enlistment is eighteen, but little effort is made to ensure it. On February 1 8, 1 9 1 1 , a deserter from the Royal Fusiliers was charged before the West London Police Magistrate, who, after ascertaining his age to be fifteen years and nine months, remanded him to the Children's Court as " a mere child dressed up as a soldier ... a fine sample of the soldiers by whom this country is defended." 96 of experts. In another passage designed to extol the Territorial Force, he contrasts the " fourteen shillings to fifteen shillings a week hobbledehoy " from the point of view of receptivity to training with the " twenty- five to thirty shillings a week man," for- getting, apparently, that it is precisely this latter type that composes the great bulk of the national armies of other countries, as it will of our own national army when we secure one. In "A Staff-Officer's Scrap- book," indeed, we have the comparison made directly in favour of the national army. There, speaking of conscription in Japan, Sir Ian says, " The Army is the cream of the nation. How different from us ! " Taking a perfectly dispassionate view of our Regular Army, it can hardly be gainsaid that the material from which it is recruited is physically and intellectually below the average standard of armies based on the principle of National Service. The training of the material, moreover, under the volun- tary system, which has to allow recruits to dribble in as it suits their fancy, can never compare with the systematic training of a THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 97 national army where all the recruits are set to work on the same day, and where the one idea is to teach the utmost possible amount in a given period. Taking one con- sideration with another, it is probably not till the end of four years' service that our soldier is the equal in proficiency, as he is in age, of the continental soldier at the end of his two years. On that basis our over- sea battalions, mostly men with between three and eight years' service and perman- ently mobilized, may not unfairly be reck- oned as superior to continental troops in training, homogeneity, arid cohesion. The same advantage can hardly be claimed for the battalions of the Expeditionary Force, composed only in part of highly seasoned mature men, and for the rest made up of material less well trained than that of con- tinental armies. Nor can the drafts for the Expeditionary Force, drawn either from Section D men who have been more than four years away from the Army or from the Special Reserve, which has only six months' training, compare with the homogeneous drafts supplied under a national system. 4 98 FALLACIES AND FACTS We have no reason to fear that our Expe- ditionary Force could not hold its own, man for man, with any foreign troops. But it would be a pure delusion to imagine that there is anything in our conditions of service which would justify us in reckoning it at more than its actual numerical strength. There remains the Territorial Force, with a nominal strength of 315,000 and an actual strength of 267,000 officers and men. This is the old Volunteer Force with an improved organization and with an obliga- tion to do six months' continuous service after the outbreak of war. The members of this force do a certain number of drills and are supposed to be trained in camp from a week to a fortnight every year. Here, again, it must not be supposed for a moment that either the numbers or the training of the force have been based on any strategical considerations. The num- bers are roughly those of the existing Volunteers and Yeomanry when Mr. Hal- dane introduced his scheme of reorganiza- tion.* At one time, indeed, Mr. Haldane * "We have existing material to the extent of about THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 99 talked airily of a " nation in arms " of 900,000 men, but, like a good practical politician, he has long since trimmed his sense of the Empire's requirements in war to what can be conveniently obtained in peace. As for the training of the force, it just represents what volunteers can do without serious inconvenience or prejudice to their business. Low as the standard of training is, by no means the whole of the force conforms to it. In April 1910 there were 100,000 who had not qualified in musketry, and in the following summer 1,321 officers and 24,000 men failed to put in any attendance in camp, while only 168,000 put in fifteen days' training or over. Add the fact that 83,000 non-commissioned officers and men, or nearly a third of the whole, are under twenty years of age ; that none of the units are provided with the entrenching tools, wagons, harness, and other equipment, without which they could not take the field ; that 86,000 horses will be required to mobilize the three hundred thousand officers and men." Memorandum of Feb. 25, 1907, outlining Mr. Haldane's proposals. 100 FALLACIES AND FACTS Force, and will have to be scrambled for at a time when the Expeditionary Force will be ransacking the country for the 50,000 horses it needs itself, and will cer- tainly impound in their livery stables those invaluable steeds whose complacent backs manage in peace time to accommodate three or four yeomen apiece ; add the weak- ness of the artillery and the lack of training and experience on the part of the officers and then listen to Mr. Haldane talking away serenely about his " fourteen organized divisions," or his " swiftly moving central field force," ready at any moment to crush an invader by sheer weight of numbers ! Sir Ian Hamilton claims that there are brigades of Territorials ready to fight to- morrow, and capable of giving " the best of enemies a bellyful," if in a superiority of three to one, though liable to go abso- lutely to pieces for a time if defeated. This may be so, but the isolated fighting value of a picked Territorial brigade, and the fighting value of, say 100,000 average Territorials attempting to work and move as a field army are totally different things. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 101 Naturally, the Territorial Force would im- prove rapidly on embodiment. But the rapidity with which untrained troops can be licked into shape depends mainly on the officers ; and in this case the great bulk of the officers will be far more in need of training than even the men. Sir Ian Hamil- ton, in quoting the case of the City Imperial Volunteers in South Africa, who had eight regular officers, and of the Volunteer Com- panies, which were simply incorporated in their regular battalions, overlooks this vital distinction between his examples and the Territorial Force. The latter, on the de- parture of the Expeditionary Army, will be almost wholly thrown on its own devices, and will probably have to surrender many of its best officers to make good the shortage due to casualties and illness with the forces in the field. To form even an approximate estimate of the fighting value of the Terri- torial Force in the various stages of its progress from mobilization and embodiment onward is very difficult. But it is doubtful whether even at the end of six months it could be reckoned the equal, mass for 102 FALLACIES AND FACTS mass not unit for unit, which is a very different thing of anything like 100,000 continental troops. This does not on the face of it look a very powerful force to serve the double task of defending the United Kingdom from invasion and of providing a great reservoir of armed strength for our forces over-sea. During the forty years of its existence the present system has only once had to cope with anything approaching serious war. The war in South Africa was of immense significance in the inner history of the British Empire. But from the purely military point of view it was of the first importance only because it so nearly proved too much for our military resources. Our military system in 1899 differed very little from what it is to-day. The total strength of the Regular Army was approximately the same, namely, just over 240,000 of all ranks, including India. The Militia was a separate force larger in numbers by some 44,000 than the Special Reserve that has replaced it, somewhat inferior to it in training, but enjoying the advantage of THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 103 being composed of units capable of being used as such for garrison or field purposes, and possessing a tradition and corporate spirit of its own. The Volunteers and Yeo- manry were considerably below the strength they rose to during the war, and numbered some 240,000, individually a little less trained than the Territorial Force to-day, and collectively without anything resem- bling an organization. At the very outset of the war we were handicapped by the practical absence of any reserve of troops at home available for the reinforcement of our threatened frontiers, without a general mobilization which would have precipitated war. This is an inherent defect of the Cardwell system. As it was, a few thousand men were taken from colonial garrisons here and there and 7,000 borrowed from India. These were insufficient to prevent the situation being hopelessly compromised before the main Expeditionary Force of 47,000 men arrived. With that situation the Expeditionary Force was wholly unable to cope, and in a few months practically the whole of the Regular 104 Army at home and in the Mediterranean had to be sent out. The place of the battalions in the Mediterranean was taken by the Militia, while 30 Militia battalions were dispatched to South Africa early in 1900 and relieved by another 30 battalions in 1901. Altogether, 256,370 Regulars and 45,566 Militia, including drafts, were sent to South Africa in the course of the war. But it required another 146,819 volunteers, in improvised forces of all sorts and kinds, from the Mother Country, from the other Dominions and from South Africa, to carry the struggle to a successful issue. Throughout the war we enjoyed the undisputed command of the sea. Our ad- versaries never even had a single torpedo boat with which to harass our transports. Our fleet, then at more than Three-Power strength, retained its absolute strategic freedom, and we were able to deplete England and weaken the Mediterranean garrisons and India, without running any risk of hostile intervention. Our adver- saries, from first to last, only numbered 90,000 men, and of that number not more THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 105 than half were ever in the field at any one time. Remarkable as were the fighting qualities displayed by the Boers, they never made the slightest effort to follow up their successes, and we were given unlimited leisure to retrieve our failures and train our raw levies. Why should we ever get off so lightly again ? The war has been followed by nearly a decade of patching and tinkering. A num- ber of additional infantry battalions and batteries of artillery were added to the Regular Army during the war. A recruiting crisis followed. To meet this, and also in order to increase the strength of the Reserve, Lord Midleton introduced the system of optional three years' service, at the same time substantially raising the soldier's pay. The reform was sound in principle, and the high figure at which the Reserve stands to-day is the result. But it was introduced without any precautions being taken to make sure that the numbers extending would be sufficient for the supply of drafts to the over-sea battalions, and a considerable shortage in this respect caused Mr. Arnold- 4* 106 FALLACIES AND FACTS Forster to reverse the arrangement a few years later. Mr. Arnold-Forster himself, deeply impressed by the strategical weakness of the Cardwellian system, endeavoured to substitute a new system based on a clear division between a permanently mobilized long service army on the one hand intended to provide not only the over- sea garrisons but also a central reserve available for minor expeditions and for the quiet reinforcement of any point over- sea without general mobilization and, on the other hand, a real short-service army with fifteen months' service, which was to furnish an adequate expeditionary force on mobilization. The principles un- derlying Mr. Arnold Forster 's scheme were absolutely sound, and whenever the task of organizing our army for war is seriously taken in hand they will have to be admitted. But there were defects in the actual working-out of the scheme. It was too far-reaching not to encounter opposition among soldiers grown up in the tradition of the existing system and appreciative of its administrative convenience in peace. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 107 There was a general feeling of relief in the higher ranks of the Army when Mr. Haldane dropped the whole troublesome business of reforming the Cardwell system, and confined himself to minor changes calcu- lated to make the best of things as they were. A divisional organization, which is largely in actual existence, and is more convenient in the field, was substituted for an army corps organization which chiefly existed on paper. Cardwell's original in- tention of making the Militia an integral and subordinate part of the Regular Army was carried out by converting it into the Special Reserve. The strength of the Regular Army was, for reasons of economy, reduced by over 30,000 men by the dis- banding of units raised during or since the war. To all intents and purposes, the force available for war over-sea is to-day what it was in 1899, only more scien- tifically organized. But the most pressing need shown by the war was not the internal reform of the Regular Army but the provision of some power of expansion outside it. " No mili- 108 FALLACIES AND FACTS tary system will be satisfactory which does not contain powers of expansion out- side the limit of the Regular Forces of the Crown, whatever that limit may be " that was the one practical conclusion ar- rived at by Lord Elgin's Commission. The only existing source from which such power of expansion could be drawn were the Auxiliary Forces. The Duke of Nor- folk's Commission of Enquiry into the condition of these forces found them unfit to face trained troops with any prospect of success. It recommended a variety of minor reforms, but found that it was impossible, from volunteers, to exact any standard of training incompatible with the conditions of open competition in their civil life in other words, any standard adequate to secure real fighting efficiency. The Commission consequently declared that " a home defence army capable ... of protecting this country from invasion can only be raised on the principle that it is the duty of every citizen . . . to be trained for the national defence." Mr. Haldane, accepting the minor recommendations of THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 109 the Commission, decided to ignore its main conclusion and to rely on a better organiza- tion of local patriotism to provide that " nation in arms " the necessity of which he recognized, and the strength of which he was at one time prepared to fix as high as 900,000 men. The actual result of his anticipations has already been dealt with. At the end of nearly ten years' tinkering we stand very much where we did. Our military material is somewhat better organ- ized and better trained. But in total quantity available either for home defence or for foreign service, and in initial quality, it is simply the same material that proved so lamentably insufficient to deal with two small farmer republics in 1899. We can now go on to consider how far this same material is sufficient for the task involved in a war with one or more of the world's great naval and military powers. The wars that will be briefly reviewed in the next few pages are none of them necessarily imminent. But not one of them is more improbable than the South African war might have seemed within four or five 110 FALLACIES AND FACTS years of its outbreak. Can we be certain beyond all shadow of doubt that not one of them will come about within the next ten years, and, if not, can we afford to lose even a moment in putting our house in order ? Our position as a continental empire can involve us in only two wars of the first mag- nitude a war with Russia affecting our position in India and the Near East, and a war with the United States in defence of Canada. A war with Turkey, in defence of our position in Egypt, a war with Afghan- istan, or an internal rising in India, would not in themselves be beyond the power of our present organization, though any of them might prove a severe handicap in a wider struggle. The problem involved in a conflict with Russia is not so much the actual defence of India against a direct Russian invasion, carried out from the present Russian fron- tier, as the prevention of an aggressive ad- vance by Russia which would render our THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 111 position in India impossible in the future. Afghanistan, and possibly Persia, would be the battle-ground. There would be no ques- tion of immediate encounter on a large scale, but the necessity of strengthening our posi- tion on the frontier, and possibly of taking up advanced positions in the debatable area, even before the outbreak of war, in order to decide or forestall the action of Afghans or Persians, indicates the same need, so keenly felt in the case of South Africa, for some means of reinforcement at the threatened point, independent of general mobilization. Judging by the Manchurian campaign, in which Russia eventually had 1,000,000 men in the field at the end of 5,000 miles of a single line of railway, there would be nothing to prevent her transporting an equally large force to the Afghan border, less than half as far away, and with two lines of railway to facilitate the movement. The real difficulty in the way of anything like a rapid movement in force beyond that point lies in the almost complete absence of local supplies, and the scarcity of forage and water for transport animals. Still, 112 FALLACIES AND FACTS Lord Roberts and other competent critics have estimated that the Russian forces in the area of operation would be brought up to 500,000 men, or more, within the first year, and could be maintained at that figure, es- pecially if strategic railways were pushed on in the rear of the invading forces. What have we to put in the field against such a force ? Thanks to Lord Kitchener, the Indian Army can now put 150,000 men on the frontier on mobilization, though that figure might easily be reduced by 50,000 if the Afridi tribesmen were inclined to give trouble on our line of communication, and by another 50,000 in case of internal dis- turbance in India itself. The addition of our present Expeditionary Force would bring the total forces in the field up to 250,000 or 300,000. For the first six months this might possibly prove sufficient. After that the supply of drafts would be exhausted, and the force would begin to dwindle, while the Russian strength grew to its maximum. Can we rely on volunteering from the Terri- torials, and from the defence forces of the Dominions, or on the improvisation of new THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 113 native units in India, to find the other 200,000 to 300,000 men necessary to put us on an equality with our opponents, and then to supply drafts at the rate of some 200,000 men a year for the whole of our forces in the field ? And if we could find the men, could we find the officers to lead them ? The answers to these questions can only be in the negative. We may therefore reckon that, with our existing system, we could not expect to hold our own against the Russians for very much more than six months, and would then be compelled to fall back on India itself. Whether the Russians then contented themselves with making good their position in Afghanistan, or whether they considered the circum- stances sufficiently favourable to warrant an immediate advance into India, in either event the whole fabric of our Indian Empire would be fatally undermined. Equally serious, from the purely military point of view, is the problem involved in the defence of Canada against the United States. Here we have a frontier of nearly four thousand miles which, except for the chain 114 FALLACIES AND FACTS of the Great Lakes, presents not a single natural obstacle to invasion, while there is hardly a single important town in Canada, outside the Maritime Provinces, which is secure from a raid. What are the forces available on both sides ? The Canadian Militia consists of some 50,000 men, on much the same level of efficiency as our Terri- torials, and of an untrained Reserve of 50,000. The total available Regular Army of the United States and the organized State Militias do not amount to much more than 150,000 men. If the Canadians could hold their own for three or four weeks, and we had a sufficiently effective command of the sea to make possible the immediate dispatch of the Expeditionary Force, we might for a time enjoy a decided superiority. But that superiority would not be sufficient to enable us to deliver a really crushing blow at any vital point, and compel the Americans to make peace. Failing that, the contest would inevitably become one of endurance. The Americans would call their whole manhood under arms, as they did in the Civil War, and in a few months could bring from one THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 116 million to two million imperfectly trained, but by no means despicable, troops into the field. Even if we adopted the same policy, and, following Sir Ian Hamilton's suggestion, improvised a similar force by compulsion, we should never be in a position to match them in mere numbers. We should be crushed as surely in the end as the Southern Confederacy was, Canada would be forcibly annexed, and the keystone taken out of the arch of Empire. Our only chance of holding our own, and saving Canada, would be if we could start off with an expeditionary force capable of securing a really decisive initial advantage, and could follow it up with a steady stream of reinforcements, not equal, perhaps, in mere numbers to the American levies, but sufficiently superior in training and direction to prevent our opponents ever reversing the situation. But those two con- ditions are not satisfied by the existing system, which is even less adequate to the task of defending Canada than it is to safe- guarding that of our position in India. We come next to a class of military pro- blems, no less vital, and undoubtedly more 116 FALLACIES AND FACTS urgent, namely, those incidental to a great struggle for the maintenance of British sea- power. These include, on the one hand, opera- tions conducted on the continent of Europe, whether to preserve the Balance of Power, or to strike home after a naval success, and on the other hand, the defence of the United Kingdom against invasion. In this connec- tion there is, for our generation at least, only one potential opponent in view. That opponent is Germany. The immense strides made by the German Navy in recent years, and the seriousness of the German challenge to our command of the sea, have already been referred to. But Germany is not only our greatest rival at sea. She is the most for- midable military power in the world. She can put 1,700,000 men into the field, keeping over 2,000,000 more for local defence, for lines of communication, and for drafts. She has at her back Austria-Hungary and Italy, with field armies of 750,000 and 600,000, and correspondingly vast reserves for local defence and for replacing losses. This tremendous engine of destruction is used by Germany for the furtherance of her THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 117 interests and her ambitions, either through the normal medium of diplomacy or, if occasion should demand, by war. More than once in recent years she has gained her way by a mere movement of her hand to the sword-hilt. The danger which con- fronts us is the possibility that Germany, if she feels convinced that we stand in the way of her expansion, may decide to use her military power in order to compel her neigh- bours to conform to her policy, and provide her with the help necessary to enable her to crush us at sea. The reduction of France to the position of a dependent ally, the practical incorporation of Holland and Belgium in the German Empire these are the steps by which such a policy would be carried out. There is no other means of checking such a policy, if such a policy should be intended, than the capacity to support France with a military force which would enable her to resist the German pressure in peace, or re- pulse the German attack in war. With Austria to cover her rear against any possible interference from Russia, Ger- many could, for the purposes of such a war, 118 FALLACIES AND FACTS develop almost her whole strength against France. She would bring fully 1,600,000 men into the field at the very outset, against whom the French could at the most muster some 1,300,000, with a corre- spondingly smaller reserve in rear. The actual frontier between Germany and France has, it is true, been so strongly fortified by the French that they might hope to defend it successfully against largely superior numbers. But nothing can be more certain than that, in the event of war, Germany is not going to throw away her advantages by crowding her army into the 240 miles of actual Franco- German frontier, but will move directly through Belgium, possibly also through Switzerland, in order to give full play to her numbers and to her en- veloping strategy. Given these general conditions, the question is, Can we supply France with a force strong enough to redress her numerical weakness and sustain the left flank of her defence ? In other words, can we supply at least 300,000 men ? And what in a continental war is no less material, can we put them in the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 119 field in Belgium within a fortnight of the declaration of war ? We obviously can do nothing of the kind. The most our system ever professes to do is to find 170,000 men for over-sea work. The largest force we actually could send in time to be of any service is less than 100,000. And for the purpose which we are considering neither 100,000 men, nor even 170,000 men, are enough to decide the issue. The conclusion remains that we are not in a position to help France to stand up against Germany with any prospect of success. And that means that we cannot reckon upon the support of France when the critical time arrives, and may even find France and the French Navy brought into line against us. There will be no sudden change of policy, perhaps, but one day France, at present still inclined to be- lieve that we really mean to set our military house in order, may definitely make up her mind that we can be of no real use to her. From that moment her policy will begin to shape a new course, and the logical end of that course will be an understanding with 120 FALLACIES AND FACTS Germany, followed by mutual diplomatic support, and maturing in armed co-operation. We now come to the remaining problem, that of an invasion of these islands. This is the only strategical problem which Mr. Haldane and his coadjutors have discussed at all, and an examination of their con- clusions, and of the arguments and assump- tions on which they have been founded, affords some extraordinarily interesting ex- amples of the process which Mr. Haldane has described as " clear thinking." Mr. Haldane's conclusions are, firstly, that the Territorial Army, by itself, is capable of dealing with an invading force not exceeding 70,000 men, and, secondly, that no force of that size or, indeed, any- thing like that size, could possibly elude our Navy and reach these shores in safety. This latter conclusion is based by Mr. Haldane and Sir Arthur Wilson on a series of most remarkable assumptions. It is assumed, to begin with, that we are at war with Germany alone, and that our Navy has no other problem to deal with. It is further assumed that our naval superiority over THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 121 Germany in home waters must always be so great that, even if half our fleet is decoyed away by a stratagem, the remaining half could make a certainty of crushing the whole German Navy. It is further assumed that at the time when the projected invasion is undertaken, the whole German Navy, including apparently even commerce de- stroyers, is shut up in its ports, and that it will only come out in order to act as a passive escort to the transports carrying the invading army. It is assumed that an immense fleet of transports will be necessary ; according to a magazine article by " Master Mariner," an anonymous expert whom Mr. Haldane has pressed into his service along with Sir Ian Hamilton and Sir Arthur Wilson, the Germans will require at least 200,000 tons of shipping, or three tons a man, to carry 70,000 men across the North Sea, and will be obliged to use at least 150 vessels, that is to say, vessels of an average tonnage of little more than 1,300 tons, for the purpose ; many of these vessels, according to Sir Arthur Wilson, will not steam more than ten to twelve 122 FALLACIES AND FACTS knots. It is assumed by " Master Mariner " that the whole operation of getting the men on board, crossing the North Sea, disembarking, and getting ready for an advance inland, would, given fair weather and no opposition afloat or ashore, take three weeks about the time it took us to land troops at Cape Town ! Lastly, Sir Arthur Wilson assumes that the Germans will have neither destroyers, nor submarines, nor wireless telegraphy, while we shall have an unlimited supply of all these adjuncts of modern naval warfare. Now let us make a few assumptions on our side. Let us begin by assuming a few of those contingencies which must be taken into account in any sane policy of Imperial defence. Let us assume, for instance, the contingency of an acute disagreement with Japan on the question of Japanese immigra- tion into the Dominions, resulting in the denunciation of the alliance, and followed by a period of friction and rivalry. Could we afford in that case to neglect the situation in the Pacific and expose Australia to the possibility of invasion? But if not, what THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 123 becomes of the more than two-to-one superiority over the German Navy ? Again, let us assume that Turkey, egged on by the Triple Alliance, should reassert by force her claims upon Egypt, or that serious trouble broke out in India at a time when our relations with Germany and her allies were seriously strained. The immediate dispatch of the Expeditionary Force would be imperative. Could we afford to disregard the possible action of the Austro-Hungarian and Italian navies, and not reinforce the Mediterranean squadron in order to safe- guard the passage of our transports ? And would not that seriously impair the more than two-to-one standard in the North Sea especially if we consider, not what the naval position is to-day, but what it will be a few years hence ? Are these contingencies im- possible, or even improbable ? And if not, and if the Germans do mean business, why should they not be allowed by Mr. Haldane to make or choose their opportunity ? Why should they deliberately select the con- ditions least favourable to themselves ? Let us further assume that a few vears 124 FALLACIES AND FACTS hence we shall not, in any case, and apart from other complications, have that more than two-to-one superiority over the Ger- man Navy in home waters, which Sir A. Wilson postulates and all the indications, unfortunately, favour that assumption. Then take the case, admitted in his Memo- randum, of a successful stratagem ; for in- stance, a report that the whole German Navy has successfully got out and is heading northerly towards the Faroes. Could we afford to send north a bare half of our fleet to encounter it ? If not, then, for a time at least, till the mistake had been discovered, we should be left with a fleet considerably smaller than the German, and the conditions would be not unfavourable for invasion. Again, let us assume that the Germans do not accept for their Navy the passive role assigned to them by our Admiralty. Suppose they take the initiative and achieve, in greater or less degree, the success achieved by Japan in February 1904 ? Suppose that in the first serious encounter they should prove to be possessed of some formidable new tactical device not yet THIS MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 125 fully appreciated by our sailors ? Suppose our fleet so seriously crippled as to make it inadvisable to try conclusions again till our injured ships were repaired, or out- lying squadrons concentrated to restore our superiority ? Suppose, in other words, that we have got only a very incomplete command of the sea, or are, even temporarily, in a position of decided naval inferiority. Would invasion in force be impossible then ? Napoleon needed no assured superiority at sea to invade Egypt. The Japanese did not wait for Tsushima before sending their army to Manchuria.* Not only would in- vasion in such a case be possible, but it would be certain. For with our present defencelessnessonlandtheinvaderwouldhave everything to gain by it. The capture of one or more of our naval bases might enable * This was in spite of assurances from the Russian Admiralty to the Russian military authorities as categori- cal as Sir A. Wilson's Memorandum itself. In answer to questions as to the possibility of the Japanese landing troops in Manchuria, the chief of the Naval Staff replied on October 10, 1903 : " So long as our fleet is not destroyed the operations named are absolutely impossible . . . our fleet cannot be beaten by the Japanese fleet, either in the Gulf of Korea or in the Yellow Sea." 126 FALLACIES AND FACTS him to convert a mere temporary success at sea into permanent superiority. By the occupation of London and other centres of our national life he might hope to bring about the complete collapse of our Govern- ment and secure peace on his own terms. In other words, under our present system a comparatively slight check at sea may, and a serious defeat, even if only temporary, must, spell irretrievable disaster. Now let us deal with that immense, unwieldy fleet of transports, the contem- plation of which affords Mr. Haldane and his friends such consolation. The estimate of three tons a man would be unnecessarily high even for a force, complete in all arms, and dispatched on a long voyage across the ocean.* Half that allowance would be ample for the short passage across the North Sea ; and when we consider that the Army intended for the invasion of England would * In the South African war 329,251 officers and men, together with the guns of artillery units, large quantities of stores, but only a few horses and wagons, were taken out in 117 transports totalling 718,837 tons, an average of a little over two tons a man. The Japanese used about one and a half tons a man for their Manchurian campaign. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 127 be as lightly equipped as possible, and would contain a much higher proportion than usual of infantry, and a much lower proportion of cavalry and artillery, in view of the en- closed nature of the country, we shall not be far out in assuming that even one ton a man will be quite sufficient for the purpose. Again, why should the Germans be sup- posed to use ships of 1,300 tons doing ten knots when they have plenty of ships of 13,000 tons and over, capable of doing eighteen and twenty knots ? To carry 70,000 men would require, not 150, nor yet fifteen, but five German liners. The new 50,000 ton Hamburg- Amerika liner, now on the slips at Stettin, will be able to take more than half the force herself. There are a dozen German ships that could between them carry an invading army of much nearer 200,000 than 70,000 men. A dozen, or even two dozen ships, starting from several different ports and escorted by destroyers, are something very different from the fleet of small transports covering twenty miles of sea, with a whole battle-fleet in attendance, with which our 128 FALLACIES AND FACTS vendors of soporifics would comfort us. With the magnificent detraining and berthing facilities of the great German ports, and the high speed of the vessels themselves, the period required for the whole operation of invasion, from the time that the soldiers step on board to the time that they begin their advance on the other side, is much more likely to be three days than three weeks. Meanwhile, what of our wireless tele- graphy ? What of our destroyers and sub- marines ? As to the first, if our wireless telegraphy will enable our scouting vessels to report at once any ships in sight, their wireless telegraphy will enable them to know better the whereabouts both of our scouts and of our cruisers, and take care to avoid them. As for destroyers, Germany is almost as well off as ourselves, possibly even better off, if we take into account the much heavier task, namely that of patrol- ling the whole German coast line, which we propose to assign to our destroyers. If we have submarines, so have they. If our submarines can torpedo their transports, THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 129 might not their submarines succeed against our battleships, and alter the whole naval situation in an hour ? In any case the first thing the Germans would do to cover an invasion would be to attack our three submarine bases on the east coast. Failing that, they might try to decoy our sub- marines in the wrong direction. Again, if the transports were already in port or close in shore in shallow water, their being torpedoed by submarines, even if it were possible, would not necessarily make any very serious difference to the landing. There are other factors, too, introduced by modern science as well as submarines. The use of floating mines, of which the Germans showed themselves such stout advocates at The Hague, is apparently never contemplated by " Master Mariner " or Sir Arthur Wilson. Yet the laying of mines round the transports, as a defence against submarines, or using them to block our submarine stations, or even Dover Straits, do not seem such impossible precau- tions. Last of all, there are the airship and the aeroplane, even now developed to a 5 130 FALLACIES AND FACTS point at which they might be of consider- able scouting service, and certain to be enormously improved in the next few years. Apart from any possibility of the dropping of projectiles from above, an airship at a height of several thousand feet, and equipped with wireless apparatus, can gather and convey more information than a score of destroyers and cruisers. The submarine, invisible as it is from the deck of a ship, is as visible to an aeroplane scout flying overhead as the unwary herring playing near the surface is to the watchful cor- morant. The aeroplane could follow and signal its every movement, and might, perchance, even essay to damage the delicate periscope on which the submarine depends for finding its way when submerged. Are we likely to be so much ahead of Germany in the use of aerial craft as to prevent her using them successfully in furtherance of an invasion ? Whatever the soporific school may say, the danger of invasion will, in certain by no means improbable contingencies, be a, very real one. No one suggests that the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 131 invasion of England is likely to prove an easy task. It will, even under the most favourable circumstances, be a difficult and hazardous undertaking. But it is an under- taking in which the prize would justify almost any risk. Once in England, the invader would have the heart of the Empire at his mercy, with no obstacle between him and complete, overwhelming triumph except the Territorial Army. What could that army do to stop him ? In an earlier passage we came to the conclusion that even at the end of six months' embodiment it would not collec- tively be the equal of 100,000 continental troops. It would certainly not be the equal of 70,000, or anything approaching 70,000, at the outset. But that is on the sup- position that the whole force could be assembled to meet an invader. Now, the defence of two islands with an enor- mous coast line inevitably necessitates not only garrisons for all naval bases and other important points, but a mobile local defence. Can Ireland, or Scotland, or the north of England, can any part, in fact, be 132 FALLACIES AND FACTS left wholly unprotected ? With even the most inadequate provision for these needs and local political pressure would not let it be too inadequate it would be impossible at any time to bring more than 100,000 Territorials, " stiffened " by a few thousand odds and ends of Regulars, into the field against the invading army. It is no dis- paragement either of the patriotism or of the courage of our citizen force to say that 30,000 to 50,000 trained troops, according as invasion took place at the outset of war or after some months, would be able to defeat them. And defeat in their case would, according to Sir Ian Hamilton, mean com- plete disorganization for the time being. The invader, too, might no doubt have to shed some troops at his base and along his line of advance. But an invading force of 70,000 to 100,000 men, playing for a great stake, ought to be able to bring fully three- quarters of its strength into action. And invasion on the scale even of 200,000 men presents, as we have seen, no insuperable difficulties. What we maintain, then, is that the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 133 Territorial Force is wholly unequal to meet- ing an invasion of even only 70,000 men in the early stages of a war, and that invasion on that scale, and, indeed, on a far larger scale, is, under certain circumstances, per- fectly possible. To provide adequately for local mobile troops and for garrisons, as well as to furnish a central field-force capable of crushing the invading army we require a force of, at the very least, twice the numerical strength of the Territorials, at least as well trained, before war breaks out, as the Territorials would be after several months' embodiment, and officered in the main by professional soldiers. We are now in a position to consider the sum total of our needs as illustrated by a consideration of the main strategical pro- blems which confront us. We want, first of all, a Two-Power Standard of naval strength to keep the sea road of the Empire clear for the passage of our military rein- forcements and of our commercial shipping. An immense effort will be required to 134 FALLACIES AND FACTS maintain that standard, and even that standard will not secure the maintenance, under all circumstances, of a two-to-one standard in home waters for defensive purposes. We want, for over-sea purposes, first of all, a small permanently mobilized reserve, over and above the forces already quartered over-seas in peace ; secondly, we want an Expeditionary Force capable of mobilizing something not far off 300,000 men and maintaining them in the field ; thirdly, we want a power of expansion over and above the 300,000, which, in the case of India, might perhaps be estimated at 100,000, in the case of a continental war, or a war for the defence of Canada, at 500,000, or even more. Lastly, we want another 500,000 for home defence. The provision for home defence and that for expansion would to some extent overlap : the need for expansion would not reach its height till some time after the outbreak of even the most serious war, and during that time additional measures for home defence could be taken. Our total military requirement, then, may be summed up as the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 135 power to mobilize or embody a million men, of whom 300,000 should be immediately available over-sea, and to keep this million up to strength in the course of a war. These are no fanciful or extravagant figures. They represent what we should need in any one great world-war. They would not, indeed, by themselves cover the requirements of such a contingency as war with Germany and the United States, or war with a European coalition which included either France or Russia in the German system, or in which Japan and Turkey espoused the German cause. There is nothing in the present trend of inter- national affairs at all incompatible with such possibilities; but if we once really make ourselves an effective military Power we shall have no difficulty in finding allies of our own, and forestalling all such coalitions by diplomatic means. It is our present weakness that invites the possi- bility of dangers against which no effort we could make would be sufficient, and against which no help would be forthcoming from any ally. A moderate, a reasonable 136 FALLACIES AND FACTS effort to put our defences in order would diminish the dangers to be encountered, find us friends on whose support we could rely, and last, but by no means least, afford time for the development of new centres of defensive streagth within our own Empire. So much for our requirements. Now for the means at our disposal for meeting them. Our maintenance of the Two-Power Stan- dard at sea is being slowly, but surely, whittled away. There is not a single one of the over-sea campaigns discussed in the preceding pages with which our Expe- ditionary Force could cope, not even if we threw the whole Territorial Force in with it, and compelled it to go abroad. But even if the whole Territorial Force remained at home it would be utterly inadequate to defend the citadel of the Empire and the base of our fleets against an invasion on even a moderate scale. The result, when war comes upon us, can only be general paralysis. The plainest dictates of strategy and Imperial policy may demand the instant dispatch of our Regular soldiers and our THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 137 fleets, inadequate though they may be, to avert disaster in some threatened portion of our Empire. But we shall not dare to use our Navy as it should be used, we shall not dare to send out of these islands that Ex- peditionary Force whose "length of range" Mr. Haldane is so fond of dwelling upon. Our fatal weakness at home will not allow it. The British Empire will collapse like a house of cards, and the inevitable ruin of England will follow. It is the policy we pursue at present, the policy of shutting our eyes to the facts of the world around us, the policy of make-believe, the policy of deceiving ourselves to avoid discomfort, and not the policy of strengthening our defences, whether at home or abroad, which, in Sir Ian Hamilton's words, will " paralyse our attack, sacrifice our initiative, and imperil all that we stand for in the world." How then can our needs be met ? That the Two-Power Standard at sea must be effectively restored and maintained hardly needs argument. But that standard, though it will enable the Navy to fulfil its proper strategic task in the Empire, will not be 5* 138 FALLACIES AND FACTS enough to enable it in all contingencies to provide also a margin of surplus strength in home waters sufficient to make invasion impossible. That margin might, no doubt, be found, but at what cost ? We have to remember that sea-power is not only actually becoming more costly every year, but that it is becoming relatively far more costly for us. Let us suppose that the extra margin, over and above the Two- Power Standard, should be reckoned as half the standard of the Power from which we contemplate the possibility of invasion. Thirty years ago that margin could have been provided against Germany at a cost of less than 1,000,000 a year, i.e. for far less than the cost of a large home-defence army, even if raised by the cheap method of National Service. To-day the same basis of half the German expenditure would mean an extra cost of 10,000,000, considerably more than even the War Office estimate of the extra cost of the National Service League's scheme. In a few years it would mean an extra cost of 15,000,000 and more. And having incurred that heavy additional THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 139 burden we should be no nearer meeting the requirements of Imperial security over-sea. It is the Imperial position as a whole, and not merely local defence, that we have to keep in view, even when it is our local defence arrangements that we are discussing. Military forces raised for the local defence of England may, in an emergency, serve equally well for the defence of Canada or India. Extra battleships cannot sail through the Khaibar or take the field in Belgium. The question is one of the best economy of our resources, and from that point of view, whether it is home defence or Imperial defence that we are considering, we are forced to the conclusion that, what- ever may have been the case in the past, the power to put a really large force of trained men into the field is indispensable to us to-day. Can that force, or anything like it, be found under the existing system of volun- tary service ? Let us take first the Regular Army. Sir Ian Hamilton admits that to increase it beyond an extra division is, for recruiting reasons, practically impossible, 140 FALLACIES AND FACTS except at the wholly disproportionate cost of a large increase of pay all round. Nor would even doubling or trebling the pay produce an army which, at the present strength, would be equal to twice its number of continental troops. The material out of which such a force might be created exists in the country without a doubt now, as it did in the days of Cressy and Agin- court. But in the absence of a military spirit in the nation, and a preliminary groundwork of national training, no mere money inducement will secure it. The little bands of English archers that scattered the feudal armies of France were paid, and well paid. But it was the national training in archery imposed by Edward I., and not the pay offered by Edward III. or Henry V. that made them what they were. Again, w r hile the abandonment of the Cardwell system, and the clear separa- tion of the permanently mobilized long- service force, from a short-service Expedi- tionary Force with a large reserve, would give us a system of greater strategical flexibility, and a somewhat greater total THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION HI on mobilization, the same recruiting diffi- culty would, under present conditions, in- evitably recur the moment the attempt was made to mobilize more than say 200,000 men. There remains the Territorial Force. After four years of unwearied effort on the part, not only of Mr. Haldane and the soldiers, but of hundreds of patriotic workers on the County Associations, the Force, which, after all, was not a new creation, but a mere reorganization of what already existed, is 45,000 below its establishment of 315,000. It is not growing, but contracting, at present only slowly, though most Territorial officers foresee a very rapid and serious depletion after next September, when some 100,000 men will be eligible to take their discharge. It may be possible to get a few more cyclist battalions or to encourage the zeal of Associations and commanding officers by a little judicious expenditure here and there on drill-halls, ranges, or equipment. But there is no serious pro- spect of an increase even up to the present establishment of the Force. As for any 142 FALLACIES AND FACTS substantial improvement in the training, the conditions of the voluntary system put it out of the question. It is not, as Mr. Haldane would have us believe, a question whether there are or are not in this country 315,000, or three times 315,000, young men who have in them the spirit of patriotism. The question is whether, under existing conditions, it is possible for the patriotic young men to give scope to their desire to become efficient citizen soldiers without suffering in their careers from the com- petition of those who are unpatriotic, or at least have never been wakened to a sufficiently active sense of public duty.* The whole issue of voluntary patriotism versus forced patriotism, which Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton make, is a false one. w * As it is, the great majority of Territorials and of their employers have never clearly realized what will happen on the outbreak of any serious war, when the Territorial Force will be embodied for six months. At a time when war contracts are in full swing, the firms who have en- couraged volunteering will find themselves shorthanded, while less patriotic rivals will be coining money as fast as they can. It only wants one real war to finish the Terri- torial Force ; the danger is that it will finish the British Empire as well. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 143 The real alternatives are compulsory un- patriotism for the patriotic, or compulsory patriotism for the unpatriotic. Which do we prefer ? Whatever our preference, it does not affect the conclusion to which our whole examination of the military and naval situation has led us, namely, that there is no possible way of meeting the require- ments of our defence, either at home or abroad, under the voluntary system. No- thing short of universal service will give us the strength we need, and the only question to consider is in what form the principle of universal service can be best adapted to our complex requirements. The total number of men available under National Service is easily calculated. Taking the young men who reach a certain age, say eighteen or twenty, in any year, roughly half are available for military purposes. The balance includes those who are below the required physical standard, certain recognized exemptions, recruits for the Navy, 144 FALLACIES AND FACTS and in our case possibly also merchant seamen and emigrants to other parts of the Empire. The total national strength is a multiple of that number, depending on the number of years for which the trained men are liable to serve, and, of course, subject to natural wastage. In Germany the liability to service is, theoreti- cally, from eighteen to forty-five, in practice from twenty to thirty-nine. The annual contingent is some 275,000. The first seven annual classes form the first-line army ; the next twelve classes form the Landwehr or Militia, the last class, and the men under twenty and over thirty-nine, together with the men rejected for physical defects, form the Landsturm, or militia reserve. In the United Kingdom the annual contingent, out of some 440,000 who reach the military age, would be about 200,000. On the German basis of twenty years' liability that would give us, allowing for wastage, considerably over three million trained men, of whom some 1,100.000 would be in the first line. In our own case we should, however, have to deduct the men enlisted THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 145 in or transferred to the paid voluntary army, a proportion which would vary with the particular scheme of National Service adopted. The schemes of National Service which have been advocated, or at least discussed in this country, fall into two classes. On the one side are the schemes for a national army, on the German model, available for service anywhere, and taking the place not only of the Territorial Army but also to a great extent of the existing Expeditionary Force. On the other side are the schemes for a national militia, with a term of service ranging from a few weeks to six months, primarily available for home defence only, but calculated to provide, by volunteering of units or of individuals, a considerable reservoir of expansion for over-sea pur- poses. The former type would undoubtedly give the greatest total of effective military power. It would enable us to mobilize an army comparable in size to that of France, and to use that army for any great national struggle in any field of operations. It would, on the other hand, be less well 146 FALLACIES AND FACTS adapted for distant over-sea wars of what might be called the second magnitude, such, for instance, as a serious Afghan trouble or a war with Turkey, or even for V ' the initial stages of a slowly developing war, such as a war with Russia on the Indian frontier. These operations would want a considerable force to deal with them ; but to call out a section of the National Army for such a purpose would be in- convenient from many points of view, and very hard on the individuals selected. Again, any scheme of this character is open to the objection that it gives us more than we need, and that the demands it makes upon our people, even if the service is only for one year, are so heavy that it has no chance of being accepted. A Na- tional Militia scheme, on the other hand, is primarily only designed to liberate the Regular Army and Navy for their proper strategic work. But it would provide an unlimited reservoir of trained men who would in all human probability volunteer for over-sea work in a great national struggle, and it could be made to fit in with and THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 147 assist such a reorganization of the Regular Forces as would enable a greater Expedi- tionary Force to be mobilized. It would involve a far less drastic alteration of our ways of living, and be in every respect easier to carry out. In their book Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton have given a very peculiar variant of the first type. They have assumed a compulsorily enlisted army serving for two years, but limited to a peace establishment of 123,000. The scheme is, of course, an absurd one. It would mean taking about one man in seven of those who reach the military age and keeping him for two years, as well as making him liable for service for the rest of his military age, a pro- ceeding so obviously unfair that its adoption is wholly out of the question. But leaving aside that aspect, and regarding simply the military result, we may conclude, on the German analogy, that such a force would mobilize to about 315,000 in the first line, and would have behind it subsequent annual classes, corresponding to the German Land- wehr, amounting to another 400,000 to 148 FALLACIES AND FACTS 500,000, available for drafts and for home defence. This would give us an Expedi- tionary Force twice as large as we have at present, and a reserve force as large, after deducting drafts for the Expeditionary Force, as our present Territorials, and, of course, very much more efficient. It is scarcely credible, but Sir Ian Hamil- ton in criticizing this scheme omits the whole of the later age-classes altogether, assumes that the whole result is to replace 315,000 Territorials by 315,000 " conscripts," and deplores the " wiping out " of our present Expeditionary Force of six divi- sions for the sake of a miserable saving of 6,000,000 ! In order to be practically in the same position as we are now, Sir Ian Hamilton declares that another 100,000 must be added to the peace establishment of the Compulsory Service Army, bringing the total cost to 1,500,000 above our present estimates. Now, on the German basis a peace establishment of 100,000 means a first line on mobilization of about 230,000 and a second line of 300,000 to 350,000 behind it. It would appear from THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 149 the calculations given in an appendix that the War Office arithmetician, duly followed by Sir Ian Hamilton, got his figure of 100,000 by comparing the German first line, not to the mobilized strength of our Ex- peditionary Force, but to our Expeditionary Force, plus the remaining Regular and Special Reserves a most extraordinary blunder. After this it is not surprising that Sir Ian Hamilton should consider a mobilization strength of 545,000 in first line and 800,000 in second line which is what a peace estab- lishment of 223,000 on the German system would give us barely equal to our present arrangements, and should contrast the " very considerable margin of enlisted men," i.e. the miscellaneous assortment of recruits, youths under twenty, and special reservists, left behind on mobilization at present, with the absence of margin under conscription 1 For sheer muddle-headedness it would be hard to beat this joint effort of Mr. Haldane's, Sir Ian Hamilton's, and the anonymous War Office calculator's, at working out the re- sults of their own scheme of compulsory service. 160 FALLACIES AND FACTS For a reasonable scheme of National Service on the continental model we cannot do better than consider the one outlined by Professor Spenser Wilkinson in his work " Britain at Bay." Starting on a basis of one year's service, beginning at the age of twenty, for the infantry and field artillery, and two years for cavalry and horse artillery, he calculates that a peace establishment of some 220,000 would give, on the mobiliza- tion of the first six age-classes, a first line force of nearly a million men, leaving a further half million in the next four classes, and a corresponding further reserve if the liability were prolonged to the age of thirty-nine as in Germany. The existing Regular Army in the United Kingdom is eliminated in this scheme, drafts for the over-sea units being enlisted at the end of their service with the National Army, while a certain portion of the latter are to be paid a retainer for accepting the liability to serve in minor expeditions. The total cost of this force he works out at just over 27,000,000, or over a million less than our present estimates. This estimate coin- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 161 cides almost exactly with the one framed in the War Office for a conscript force on the same peace footing, when we deduct 3,000,000 put down in the latter for wholly superfluous depots for training recruits for the over-sea forces. The shortness of the training given under Professor Spenser Wilkinson's scheme is no doubt a disadvantage, if his National Army is to be pitted against continental troops with two years' training. But good training and leading can do much, and at any rate the numbers provided by the scheme would be ample. The really weak spot of the scheme is its very inadequate provision for wars of the second and third magnitude, wars which, owing either to their relative unimportance, or to their long duration, or to unfavourable climatic conditions, would hardly justify the use of the National Army, and yet would want something larger as well as much better organized than the arrangement he contemplates for minor wars. In other words, his scheme, as it stands,* might do * There is nothing, however, to prevent such a scheme 152 FALLACIES AND FACTS well for a campaign in Belgium or in Canada, but would hardly meet the case of Indian trouble, whether external or internal, or of war with Turkey or even Abyssinia. Of the schemes on a Militia basis the best known and most carefully worked out is that of the National Service League. This scheme is primarily concerned only with creating a better Territorial Force than the one at present existing. The annual contin- gent, estimated at about 150,000,* after subtracting recruits for the Regular Army, Navy, and Marines, for emigrants and for merchant seamen, is to be trained for four months in the infantry (rather more in the other arms), and to be called up for a short annual repetition training during the next three years. The military age is to be from eighteen to thirty. This would give, after allowing for wastage, a total force of nearly 1,400,000. Of these the National Service League being coupled, at an increased cost, with some such reorganization of our whole military system as is dis- cussed in the following pages. * On 1901 census ; the figures and the consequent financial estimate would now be somewhat higher. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 153 scheme would apparently only directly or- ganize the 400,000 comprised in the three classes doing repetition training. But there would be no insuperable difficulty, though a certain amount of extra expense, in pro- viding for the mobilization of three more classes, giving a total force of 750,000. The cost of the scheme, including a bounty of 305. a year to 80,000 of the force to take the liability of the present Special Reserve, is estimated by the League at 8,600,000, or a net increase to the esti- mates of under 4,000,000, after deducting the cost of the existing Territorial Force and Special Reserve which would be abolished.* Sir Ian Hamilton's criticism of the Na- tional Service League scheme is, firstly, that * The War Office financial expert, whose impartiality Sir Ian Hamilton extols, insists that the gross cost will be nearly 13,000,000, instead of 8,600,000. But the calcu- lations of this same expert, in Appendix VII. to " Compul- sory Service," indicate that, on the German system, a peace strength of 150,000 could be kept up all the year round for 13,000,000. The German system includes the cost of barracks, which the National Service League scheme does not ; it also includes the calling up of Reservists for repeti- tion courses. The pay at sixpence a day for four months would be practically the same as the 2|d. of the German soldier for the year. Admitting that armaments and stores, 154 FALLACIES AND FACTS it is wholly defensive in its spirit, and, secondly, that the " monstrous agglomeration of half-baked conscript Militiamen " which this sort of scheme provides would be quite useless against 70,000 continental regulars. Apparently a force of 400,000, all nineteen years and over, with a large proportion of regular officers, with four to six months' training in peace time, together with repe- tition courses, and with an unlimited reserve, is useless, even for home defence. But 267,000 Territorials, of whom not two-thirds manage even a fortnight's training, of whom a large proportion is under nineteen, with hardly any professional officers, and with no reserve outside Mr. Haldane's imagination, are not only sufficient to beat an invader, administration, pay of officers and non-commissioned offi- cers, would be the same for a four months' Militia as for a standing army, allowing for the Is. a, day proposed for the men doing repetition courses, and for the Special Reserve retaining fee, which items would total altogether to just over 3,000,000, and halving the balance of 10,000,000, we would, on the War Office expert's own basis, get a cost for the whole force of 8,000,000, or rather less than the estimate of the National Service League. It is a pity the War Office expert did not take the trouble to compare his calculations in Appendix IV. with those of Appendix VII. ! THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 155 but are reckoned by Sir Ian Hamilton as also available en bloc for offensive purposes over-seas ! The real difficulty throughout the present controversy is to take either Mr. Haldane or Sir Ian Hamilton seriously. What the National Service League's// scheme would do is, first of all, to provide a force adequate for home defence, and so liberate the Regular Army and the Navy for their proper work. In the second place, it would provide a source of expansion. Judging from the experience of the South African War, and assuming that the em- bodied Territorial units would volunteer in the same proportion as the old Militia, while the proportion of volunteers from the unorganized reserve would be much the same as among Volunteers and ex- Volunteers in 1899, we might reckon this expansion as likely to amount to some 80,000 men in units, and another 60,000 70,000 in drafts or specially formed corps. In a great struggle for existence, especially if fought nearer home, say in Canada or Europe, possibly twice that number might be available. This would be an immense 156 FALLACIES AND FACTS improvement on the present state of affairs ; but it would still fall short, by a good deal, of the full measure of our requirements for any one of the three great over-sea campaigns which we have already discussed. Imperial security requires not only an adequate home defence, in order to liberate our over-sea force, but it wants this latter force to be, from the outset of a campaign, something like twice the strength of our present Expeditionary Force. The difficulty is not insurmountable, pro- vided the reorganization of the Regular Army is taken in hand at the same time as the creation of the National Militia force. It has already been suggested, on a previous page, that the reorganization of our Regular Army on strategically sound lines would involve, as Mr. Arnold-Forster realized, a division between two clearly separated forces. On the one side we require a per- manently mobilized true long-service army, in the main distributed among the over- sea garrisons in peace, but in part also retained as a central reserve available for immediate despatch, without mobilization, THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 157 either to conduct a minor expedition or to reinforce a threatened frontier ; on the other we need a true voluntary short- service army, with a large reserve capable of providing, on mobilization, an Expe- ditionary Force sufficient for our require- ments in a great war. The difficulty, under voluntary service, is that the number of recruits required for this short-service force would not be forthcoming. This diffi- culty is diminished enormously by the in- troduction of the principle of National Service, even if only for home defence. When the question for the individual is no longer merely one between serving and not serving, but between having to serve for four or six months without pay, or at the very outside for a gratuity of sixpence a day, and serving a year for a shilling a day with reserve pay to follow, the whole situation is altered. While service would only be compulsory for unpaid home defence, yet the existence of that com- pulsion would be a most effective induce- ment to enlistment in the paid regular service. 158 FALLACIES AND FACTS A scheme for a complete reorganization of our forces, based on a foundation of obli- gatory Militia service for home defence, might work out somewhat as follows * : Keep- ing approximately the same total on the regular peace establishment, viz. slightly over 240,000, but dividing differently, we might maintain somewhat over 150,000 per- manently mobilized and on a long-service basis namely the present Indian and Colonial garrisons, and a reserve striking force of about 40,000 and another 90,000 on a short-service basis. The long service should be a true long service; that is to say, it should afford a complete career. Facilities for transfer to a reserve, or to positions as non-commissioned officers and * While agreeing entirely with the writer that the introduction of National Service will involve, and also facilitate, a radical reorganization of our Regular Army calculated to adapt it more closely to our strategical needs, I could not, of course, commit myself, still less the National Service League, to all the details of a proposal such as that here outlined without much closer examination. The general principle of a division into two clearly separated categories of Regular troops, one short service and the other long service, was advocated in an article which I contributed to The Nineteenth Century thirty years ago. ROBEBTS. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 159 instructors in the short-service force and the National Militia, or to civil appointments, should be freely given, but failing these the soldier should be allowed to serve on for twenty-one years and earn his pension. There would be a small reserve available to furnish a portion of the drafts required by the long-service units in war; the rest would be furnished by the reserve of the short-service force and by Special Reservists from the Territorial Force. There would be no depots for the long- service units, but their annual requirement for drafts, amounting to from 12,000 to 15,000, would be met by enlistment from those who had completed their term either in the short-service force or in the Terri- torial Force mainly, no doubt, from the former. The short-service army should be on a real short-service basis, a year for the in- fantry and eighteen months to two years for the other arms. This, on a peace estab- lishment of 90,000, would mean an intake of some 70,000 recruits a year a figure which only the indirect pressure of compulsion for 160 FALLACIES AND FACTS home defence would make possible. Allow- ing for some 10,000 transferred to the long- service force, there would be about 60,000 passed into the Reserve every year. On a twelve-years' basis that would give, allowing for wastage, a total reserve of about 500,000 and make possible the mobilization of a field force of some 270,000, with an adequate surplus for drafting purposes. The service would be short, but the co-existence of a compulsory system would make it possible to take in all the recruits at the same time a very considerable advantage from the point of view of efficient training while repetition courses of, say a month a year for two years and a fortnight a year in two subsequent years, would add greatly to the value of the Reserve. Behind the short-service Regular Army would come the Territorial Force, or National Militia, organized on the lines laid down by the National Service League, but on a somewhat smaller establishment, owing to the transfer of another 35,000 from the annual contingent to the short-service force. It would have to call on four THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 161 classes instead of three in order to mobi- lize a strength of 400,000, and its total output would be 1,000,000 men instead of 1,400,000. Such a scheme would provide a military organization closely adapted to our complex requirements. It would give us a first line in the shape of a long-service army of the very highest efficiency, permanently mobi- lized, and ready to take road, rail, or steamer for anywhere at a moment's notice. That long-service force would be distributed as between India, England, and the Colonial stations, on no rigid system of linking, but simply in accordance with the strategical situation for the time being. With this force we could reinforce a threatened frontier, temporarily or permanently, or carry on an expeditionary war of moderate dimensions for a long time without interfering either with our social and industrial system or with the training of the short-service force maintained for wars of the first magnitude. This latter force would, together with the available portion of the long-service army, give us a mobilization strength equal to our G 162 FALLACIES AND FACTS estimated requirement of 300,000 men im- mediately available for over-sea purposes in any great war. Behind this force the National Militia would provide 1,000,000 trained men both for home defence and for voluntary expansion in a great struggle over-sea. From the recruiting point of view, too, such a scheme would be thoroughly sound. The existence of obligatory National Service, though confined to home defence, would both furnish the recruits for the short-service force and provide an inducement to enlistment in the long-service force in the shape of subse- quent employment on the permanent staff of the two other forces. The main defect of the Cardwell system is that, while it offers no career and no pension, it keeps the soldier long enough to make it difficult for him to find another career. Under the scheme here outlined he could either choose a complete military career or else return to civil life only eight months later than his contem- poraries who have preferred the Territorial Force, and with the advantage of enjoying reserve-pay. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 163 As for the cost of such a scheme, there would be no increase in the ordinary peace estab- lishment of the Regular Army. But there would be a considerable increase in the pay- ment to the Reserve, in the provision for repetition courses, and for extra officers to complete on mobilization.* The reserve-pay for the short-service force, which would not carry any practical liability for service in minor campaigns, but only for a great na- tional war, might well be considerably less than the present pay of the first-class Re- serve, and the total cost under this heading, including repetition courses, should not ex- ceed 4,500,000, or about 3,000,000 more than the existing cost of the Army Reserve. Against this would have to be set a saving of some 2,000,000 on the Territorial Force due to the reduction in numbers, leaving a total increase, on balance, of 1,000,000 above the scheme of the National Service League in its original form, and 5,000,000 * It might be possible to provide the large necessary reserve of officers required, both for the National Militia and for the Regular Army, by attaching a certain number as supernumeraries every year to the short-service force and calling them out for repetition courses. 164 FALLACIES AND FACTS or 6,000,000 * above our present Army Estimates. That is a substantial addition, no doubt ; but it is a small matter when compared with the risk of national disaster. Having established the necessity of some form of National Service, and having con- sidered the ways in which it can be most effectively adapted to our complex require- ments, we can now proceed to consider briefly some of the objections which compose the greater part of the case made out by Sir Ian Hamilton and Mr. Haldane. The first objection is that an army based on obligatory service cannot conduct war far from home or for any length of time, that " its tendency is in the direction of the merely defensive," that it leads to a continual sacrifice of Imperial ambitions on the altar of home defence. In support of this theory Sir Ian Hamilton asserts that " the moment Rome began to expand imperially " she was * 9,000,000, according to the War Office expert's cal- culations in Appendix IV. to " Compulsory Service " ; about 4,400,000, according to the same expert's calculations in Appendix VII. THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 165 forced to abandon her national system for a professional one ; that in the Manchurian War the Russian reservists did not fight as well as the Siberian reservists, because they had lost the sustaining power of the national idea in a land where there were no churches ; that the Japanese, on the other hand, were secretly getting tired of the war after Muk- den ; that the Spaniards failed in Cuba and the Italians in Abyssinia ; that the Germans sent volunteers, and not a conscript detach- ment, to Pekin in 1900 ; and, lastly, that our Regulars plodded on patiently in South Africa, while the irregular volunteer corps showed their anxiety to get home much sooner. " No instance can be drawn from history of the successful employment, for such purposes (i.e. distant war), of men compelled to serve against their will." Let us see. The Romans conquered Sicily, Spain, Northern Africa, Macedonia, and Greece with conscript legions. The mercenary system was not begun till the days of Marius, and it contained In itself the seeds of Rome's eventual downfall. The Swedes fought campaign after campaign in 166 FALLACIES AND FACTS Germany, in the Thirty Years' War, with conscripts. Napoleon's conscripts fought at Jena and Austerlitz, at Borodino and the Pyramids, at distances far greater then than any part of our Empire is to-day. But to come down to our own times. Sir Ian Hamilton may be right in saying that the Elder Statesmen of Japan were far too wise to listen to the hot-heads who spoke of marching to Harbin. But was it really mere war-weariness and dislike of advancing far- ther from home in the ranks of their own army that moved them ? Was it not rather the fact that the steadily increasing strength and efficiency of the Russian forces con- scripts also, and fighting 5,000 miles from their homes ruled out the hope of any fur- ther striking successes ? Sir Ian Hamilton entirely ignores the fact that for the only purposes for which we should send a citi- zen army over-sea, it would be encountering a similar force subject to the same influences. Why should our men get war- weary in Bel- gium sooner than the Germans, in Afghanis- tan sooner than the Russians, in Canada sooner than the Americans ? Even if THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 167 professional soldiers can go on longer than citizen soldiers, what is the use if they are beaten at the outset ? Suppose that the Japanese had relied on a professional army. Their narrow budget, even allowing for lower pay and cost of maintenance, would not have provided for a larger expeditionary force than ours. Would that force have been enough to win Liao-Yang, let alone Muk- den ? Could it at the outset have spared the force required to take Port Arthur and so make good the command of the sea ? Or suppose that the Russians had only had voluntary service to rely on. Could they have put up the fight they did ? Could they have held on to Harbin and Vladivostok and secured such compara- tively favourable terms of peace ? If the Spaniards failed in Cuba, it was not till after they had put some 180,000 men in the field. Would thev have been more / likely to succeed with 30,000 men under a professional system ? Italy's trouble in Abyssinia was not the impossibility of using conscripts for Imperial defence, but the unpopularity resulting from the massacre 168 FALLACIES AND FACTS of a citizen force, not in a great national struggle, but in an aggressive expedition, promoted by an ambitious attempt at colonial expansion on the part of the Government, with no real backing of national sentiment behind it. It is to avoid the unfairness and unpopularity of using the " armed nation " for other than great national objects, that the Germans quite wisely decided to call for volunteers rather than to order off a small section of their citizen soldiers to China in 1900. That is why we shall always have to maintain a considerable force of professional soldiers, whatever form of citizen service we may introduce. But that is no argument against the use of citizen soldiers at a dis- tance if the occasion is serious enough to warrant it. Now let us come to the South African War. Sir Ian Hamilton contrasts the endurance of the Regulars with the impatience of the volunteer corps to get home at the end of a year. But what on earth does that prove against compulsion ? The argument, if any- thing, is all the other way. The Regular is, to begin with, enlisted compulsorily, accord- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 169 ing to Sir Ian, by the pressure of hunger and unemployment. And whatever the original cause of the first enlistment, the Reservists in South Africa, who composed half the force, were exactly in the same position as continental Reservists, citizens called away from their work by order of the State. They knew they were under a legal obliga- tion, and did their duty without worrying further about their return. The irregular corps only took on a temporary obligation, and when the time for its termination arrived, began to fidget if they were not speedily released. Does anybody dream that if we had had in 1899 a citizen army capable of being sent abroad, the nation would not have insisted on its being sent to South Africa the moment the serious- ness of the struggle was realized ? Sir Ian, v in an amazing passage, says : " Who is to guarantee that the parents of the men would let them go, or that, if they did so, they would fight ? ' Is there any one who, look- ing back to the dark days of December 1899, and to the immense wave of helpless, in- coherent patriotism striving for the outlet 6* 170 FALLACIES AND FACTS so inadequately provided by the improvisa- tion of extempore forces, can have a doubt what the citizen soldiers of England and their parents would have done then had a system of National Service existed ? Not the least astonishing thing in an as- tonishing book is, in fact, Sir Ian Hamilton's complete ignoring of the real strength and real meaning of Imperial sentiment. Because Russian peasants fought without much en- thusiasm in a part of the world they had never heard of, for a policy they did not understand, and for an autocracy many of them detested, are we to be told that Eng- lishmen would refuse to fight for Canada, the mainstay of the whole Imperial fabric in the future, for India, imperishably asso- ciated with our glory as soldiers and as rulers, or even for Egypt, bound up with the names of Nelson and Abercromby in the past, and with those of Gordon, Cromer, and Kitchener in our own generation ? What was it but that self-same sentiment the agony of fear at the possibility of Imperial disaster, the burning indignation at the thought of a victorious invader on British THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 171 soil, even though that soil was six thousand miles away over the sea which sent men in thousands flocking to the recruiting offices, and made thousands more hang their heads in shame and " hold their manhood cheap " because they had never been fitted by training to be of use to their country in the hour of danger ? So much for Sir Ian Hamilton's arguments against the use of a citizen force over-sea. Having shown what they amount to, we may incidentally note that if they were as valid as they are illogical they would still have no bearing whatever on the proposals of the National Service League, whether in their original form or with the modifications suggested in this work, as those proposals do not contemplate compulsory service over-sea, but only look to securing a greater effective- ness and expansion of our offensive power, naval and military, by citizen service for home defence. We can now proceed to deal with the ob- jection brought from the Adjutant-General's point of view, namely that compulsory ser- vice will kill recruiting for our voluntary 172 FALLACIES AND FACTS over-sea Army, and make its maintenance impossible in peace. This is Sir Ian Hamil- ton's inference from the following facts. The small German force in South-west Africa is better paid than our Regular Army. The Russians have had considerable diffi- culty in getting a class of professional non- commissioned officers. The French Colonial Army and Foreign Legion have posts in the Government service reserved to them when they leave the colours, in spite of which Sir Ian thinks he has discovered traces of a ten- dency towards unpopularity in the colonial service. Lastly, there is the " one narrow beam from the searchlight of experience," which he finds in the inadequate response to Lord Midleton's scheme of a three- years' service with optional extension to eight years. Let us see. The Germans apparently pay 50 a year to a private volunteering from their home army for a peculiarly arduous and uncomfortable service. We pay very little over half that sum ; but then we give that for an all-round service, two or three years of which are spent in England, and THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 173 the rest at stations the great majority of which are equipped with every sort of pro- vision for the soldier's amusement and com- fort. We give it to " hungry hobblede- hoys," " weedy youths of seventeen and eighteen," unfit for any other job, and costing in pay and keep the best part of 100 a head before they are matured and trained soldiers. What the Germans get is trained men over twenty, and they pay them, not for ordinary regimental work, but for work corresponding more nearly to the work done just across the border by the Cape Mounted Rifles or British South African Police at rates of five shillings a day and upward. It would pay us handsomely to give the German rate of pay if we could recruit the same material as the Germans get. Our Home Establishment would then be a real Army, and not, as it largely is to-day, a creche for the feeding up and maturing of " hungry hobbledehoys," and we could knock fully 30,000 or 40,000 men off the establishment without taking one iota from its mobilizing and fighting strength. As a result of National Service, indeed, we 174 FALLACIES AND FACTS may not unreasonably aspire to some such result even without doubling the pay. We shall never get it under the present system. When we further consider that the Germans have no established recruiting system, in- cluding such feeders as the Special Reserve, and that German industrial conditions do not, whatever may be the cause, create the " hungry hobbledehoy," fourteen-shillings-a- week class to anything like the same extent as ours, it would not appear that the German instance carries us very far ! What of the movement " towards unpopu- larity " of the French voluntary system ? The evidence on which Sir Ian Hamilton founds his assumption is based on " a certain condescension " with which French officers and men of other units speak of them. A French officer attending British manoeuvres might find the same condescension on the part of every arm of our service, and every unit in that arm towards other arms and other units. He might even notice it on the part of Regulars towards Territorials ! But would it not be a little hasty if he in- ferred from this that either the British Army as a whole, or even the Territorial Force, were " moving towards unpopularity," and then proceeded, from this hypothesis, to draw sweeping deductions as to what might or might not be done in France ? That the French voluntary soldier enjoys, over and above a rate of pay substantially the same as ours, certain openings for em- ployment which Sir Ian Hamilton assumes as worth fourpence a day added to his pay, is true enough. If that provision really does secure the mature men France gets for her Colonial Army, and saves the expense of nursing up " hobbledehoys," we might do well to imitate her example. As to the Russian difficulty about non- commissioned officers, whatever its cause, it seems, on Sir Ian Hamilton's own showing, to be on the fair road towards solution, and we can leave it at that. But there is another foreign instance, which Sir Ian Hamilton has forgotten, of which it might be well to remind him, as it really does bear on the point at issue. The United States have a profes- sional Regular Army of 86,000 men, con- siderably smaller in proportion to population 176 FALLACIES AND FACTS than the professional Colonial Army of France. The pay is double the British or French standard. The soldiers' comforts are well looked after in every way. Disci- pline is not too rigorous. Only a fifth of the army is stationed abroad. There is no conscript army in existence to kill recruiting. Yet, strange to say, the Americans find no little difficulty in keeping their ranks filled, and the men they do get are to a very large extent not native-born Americans, but foreigners, in many cases men who have been through the mill of European conscrip- tion, and are consequently in spite of all Sir Ian Hamilton's ingenious disquisitions more inclined towards a professional military career than the unmilitary citizens of the Republic. Nor is there any evidence, after more than a century of voluntary service, interrupted only by the Civil War, of any " movement towards popularity " on the part of the American Army. Sir Ian Hamilton's argument from foreign countries, for all its parade of special in- formation, is really too flimsy to stand examination. But let us consider our own THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 177 experience, and, first of all, let us take the case of Lord Midleton's three-years' system. Experience showed that, after two or three years' service, our infantrymen were not pre- pared to sign on for longer service in the necessary proportion of 71 per cent, of the total. Therefore, says Sir Ian Hamilton, if you have a conscript army you will not get enough men to sign on from that for your professional army. But he himself admits that our men did sign on to the extent of 40 per cent. On that basis, a National Army on the lines advocated by Professor Spenser Wilkinson would furnish our over-sea units with drafts to the tune of 80,000 a year ! But, as the drafting requirements are only a little over 20,000, and would be reduced by the introduction of true long service to from 12,000 to 15,000, the percentage required would be only from 7 to 10 per cent. As far as it goes, the " searchlight of experi- ence " afforded by Lord Midleton's experi- ment would indicate that, even with service on the continental model, we should have no difficulty about drafts for the over- sea force. In any case, the arguments developed by 178 FALLACIES AND FACTS Sir Ian Hamilton, which have been dealt with so far, have no bearing whatever on National Service on a Militia basis, as pro- posed by the National Service League. But here he has another argument. With a recol- lection, perhaps, of Mr. Haldane's capitu- lation to the Labour Party on the subject of cadet training, he declares that public opinion will insist that the National Militia shall be trained in winter. Consequently, just at the age and time when the " hungry hobbledehoy," "inspired by the spirit of self-confidence, expansion, and Imperialism," usually takes refuge out of the cold with the recruiting-sergeant, he will be offered the equally pleasant alternative of a few months' board and lodging in the National Militia, and the Regular Army will " shrivel up from the roots." To this pretty theory we need only reply that the National Militia will not be trained in the winter. Even the compliant Mr. Haldane has left the training of his Territorial Force to the season best suited for military training and not for re- lief works, and any Government that has the courage to introduce National Service will THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 179 not fall short of his standard of resistance to pressure. In so far as there is anything at all in the argument about winter, it is a point in favour of recruiting. The youth who has just done his summer's training, and has winter before him with no immediate prospect of work, will listen to the recruiter even more readily than the youth who has never handled a rifle, and will be worth a good deal more to the Army. The whole edifice of theorizing on this supposed killing of the Regular Army, built up by Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton, is contrary to the ordinary law of human nature that men enjoy practising any skill which they have once acquired, however they may have acquired it, and to the un- doubted fact that Governments can, by legis- lation, affect the aptitudes and tastes of a nation. Has compulsory education in Eng- land or Germany diminished the supply of clerks and professional men ? Are not all thoughtful educationists in favour of intro- ducing a more practical mechanical or agri- cultural training into our compulsory edu- cational system in order to stimulate the 180 FALLACIES AND FACTS desire of the growing generation to become skilled artisans and agriculturists instead of unskilled workers or clerks ? Has compul- sory football in our public schools discouraged athletics among our young men ? Military education is no exception to the rule. What are the best sources of recruiting for the Army to-day ? The Special Reserve, which contributes over 40 per cent, of its numbers, as did the Militia before it, the Territorial Force, which contributes some 7,000 recruits a year, and military schools, like the Duke of York's School and the Gordon Bovs* V Home. The case of the Spectator Company, quoted by Lord Roberts, is equally in point, as is also that of the compulsorily enrolled Militia who enlisted for the Peninsular War, which he quotes from Mr. Fortescue. An instance from our history which is even more suggestive is that of the compulsory training in archery introduced by Edward I. Will any sane person argue that the paid volun- teer archers who fought at Cressy and Agin- court were fewer in numbers or inferior in skill because of that compulsory training ? Yet that is precisely the line Mr. Haldane THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 181 and Sir Ian Hamilton are taking when they tell us that universal military training will discourage professional soldiering. The fact is, that the one thing which can improve recruiting for our Regular Army, which can substitute trained adult men for " hungry hobbledehoys," and so give us an establishment composed entirely of fighting units, and with a real strength corresponding to its paper strength, the one thing which can bring into its ranks a wholly new class of intelligence and technical aptitude, is a groundwork of national service. On that groundwork, and on that groundwork alone, might be built up some day an " Army of a Dream," such as Mr. Kipling once wrote of, a flower of mobile military force which im- agination can foresee crumpling up the vast conscript armies of Europe, as the Black Prince's archers in their day crumpled up the multitudinous levies of feudal France. Sir Ian Hamilton declares that our volun- tary service is based on the principle of specialization ; but the efficiency of that principle depends largely on continuity and steadiness of demand. A farmer does not 182 FALLACIES AND PACTS set aside a special labourer for hay-making, and keep him practising for that special business for the rest of the year. A captain does not set aside a gang of men to specialize on working the pumps in case of a serious leak. All hands are called out for the emer- gency in either case, and all hands are sup- posed to know how to do that particular work. And to a large extent this is true of war also. Modern war, that is to say serious war, occurs at intervals of a generation or more, but then it calls for an immense effort, for the relegating of everything else in a nation's life to the supreme business of fighting. The most effective way of coping with such a crisis is not specialization of the few, but the best available training of the largest number, coupled with a high degree of specialization on the part of the leaders. But where partial specialization is rendered necessary, as for instance by the need for oversea garrisons and the frequency of small wars, then the efficiency of the specialized force will depend no little on the general diffusion of military aptitude in the nation at large. A highly specialized professional THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 183 army will only flourish if rooted in the soil of a military nation. Mr. Haldane has an objection of his own to any form of National Service, and that is that it will be impossible to get officers enough, seeing that the Regular Army already suffers from a serious shortage. He does not attempt to explain why that which is possible in every other country should be impossible here. If he made the attempt he might, perhaps, realize that a national system creates its own class of officers. A nation trained to arms will naturally include a much larger proportion of its professional and leisured classes who will take up the military career. And, again, just as the existence of compulsory unpaid service will stimulate enlistment into the paid profes- sional force, so the thought of compulsory service in the ranks will stimulate the youth of brains and ambition to qualify, at any rate for the reserve of officers, a decision which will often lead on to the further step of becoming an officer for good. The shortage of officers in our Army, and the absence of any adequate 184 FALLACIES AND FACTS reserve, are bound to prove a terrible handi- cap to our Expeditionary Force in a great war, and to make effective expansion from sources outside the Regular Army almost impossible. Here, again, the key to the problem of the professional army is the trained and organized nation behind it. This practically exhausts the argumenta- tive case against National Service presented by Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton ; but there remains a good deal of general vague insinuation and denunciation which deserves to be dealt with briefly. There is, through- out the work, a studied depreciation of the " conscript " as an inferior being reluctantly dragged to war, and, at the best, only ready to fight where his own immediate hearth and home seem to him in danger. In so far as the criticism applies to the physical and intellectual qualities of nations in arms, it is freely and effectively confuted by Sir Ian Hamilton himself when he contrasts the " fifteen-shilling-a-week hobbledehoy " with the skilled man who composes the rank and file of the Territorial Force, and no less so of any national army. Does it, then, apply THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 185 to their moral value ? The heroes of Mara- thon and Thermopylae were " conscripts " ; so were those Roman legionaries at Heraclea, of whom their conqueror, Pyrrhus, said : " If these were my soldiers, or if I were their general, we should conquer the world " ; " conscripts," too, were the victors of Jena and Sedan, as well as the men who fought at Plevna, or those who filled the trenches before Port Arthur with their dead. Yet, throughout, Sir Ian Hamilton assumes that compulsory or universal service means un- willing service, and professional, optional service a joyous eagerness for battle. Can there be any insinuation more unwarranted and more unjust than that the citizens of a community that governs itself, or is con- tent with its national form of government, will not obey cheerfully the laws to which they themselves have assented, and fight bravely on behalf of a cause which is dear to them ? The only really compulsory system in Europe is ours, where 80 per cent, of the men who serve do so, according to Sir Ian Hamilton, under the pressure of unemploy- 186 FALLACIES AND FACTS ment and sheer hunger, and where the great mass of patriotic citizens cannot train them- selves properly for the defence of their country in the absence of legislation to safeguard them against being the losers in their private affairs as a result of their patriotism. The whole contrast between voluntary and compulsory patriotism, con- tinually emphasized or implied by Sir Ian Hamilton, is a false one. The true contrast is between organized patriotism and unor- ganized patriotism. In the former case a small minority of the unpatriotic or cowardly are compelled to serve along with the great body of brave and patriotic citizen soldiers. In the latter case the vast majority of the patriotic are prevented from fulfilling what is their duty and their desire, while a minor- ity, impelled not so much by patriotism or even " sheer love " of fighting, as by desti- tution, are sacrificed on their behalf and, it is more than likely, sacrificed in vain. Of the effect of National Service upon the individual Sir Ian Hamilton is prepared to admit something that is favourable : chests are broadened, backs straightened, cleanli- THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 187 ness, obedience, punctuality are fostered ; but individual initiative, he asserts, is weak- ened, the interplay of varying ideals is sacrificed, and the land is filled with sealed- pattern citizens turned out by the hundred thousand. He is here speaking of Germany, and would have us believe that military service robs the German of his native initia- tive and originality, and that National Ser- vice in England would have the same result. That the German lacks initiative, as com- pared with the Englishman, is true ; but he lacked it before the days of Scharnhorst, and the blame for it cannot be thrown on a system of training which has always laid great stress on the initiative of the individual far more, indeed, than the training of our own Army. There is no reason in the world why National Ser- vice in this country, if intelligently applied, should not develop initiative, self-reliance, and originality, as well as improve the national physique and foster much-needed habits of discipline. It cannot be said that any of these various qualities physical, moral, and intellectual are fostered by our 188 FALLACIES AND FACTS modern industrial conditions. It is as a corrective to those conditions that National Service would be worth having, even if there were no prospect of the citizen army ever firing a shot. Sir Ian Hamilton him- self admits the value of military training in making the old soldier, whatever his ante- cedents or his subsequent career, " a pre- servative, not a disintegrating, element in the population." Surely we have room in our national life for an institution which shall be the citizen's university an insti- tution in which our young men shall, to use Milton's description of the ideal school, " be stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God ; where they shall have an abundance of exercises which shall keep them healthy, nimble, strong, and well in breath ; which, being tempered with precepts of true forti- tude and patience, will turn into a national valour, and make them hate the cowardice of doing wrong." As to the general effect of citizen service upon national policy, Sir Ian Hamilton lays down a theory which will hardly commend THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 189 itself to those lovers of peace who are also advocates of the existing system. He con- tends that the voluntary system encourages Imperial expansion and a light-hearted atti- tude towards war, based on the " valour of ignorance," while National Service is defen- sive, unaggressive, and " anti-Imperialist." There is an element of truth in this which is worth disentangling. National Service does certainly imply a much more respon- sible attitude towards war. The voter who is also a soldier, or father of soldiers, will not, as a rule, favour war on frivolous or inadequate grounds. The soldier or ex- soldier who is a voter will expect an intelli- gent attitude towards military affairs from the politicians who solicit his support, and does not encourage, or approve of, the " valour of ignorance " in his rulers, when that ignorance may involve the loss of his own life. He expects that if he is to risk his life, it will be for a good cause and with every reasonable preparation to ensure success. " Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice " that is the ideal of the nation in arms. But this has nothing 190 FALLACIES AND FACTS to do with the question of a defensive atti- tude in strategy or with Imperialism. Given a national objective that is worth it the establishment of a great political ideal like German unity, the securing of an economic opening essential to the national develop- ment, such as the Korean and Manchurian market was to Japan and the armed nation will attack as unhesitatingly as the nation which relies on a professional army. As for Imperialism, it has nothing to do with aggression. It is a conception of all the British Dominions as one great united com- munity, a State with a real life of its own, and not a mere fortuitous and temporary conglomeration of scattered territories. If the citizens of the United Kingdom, or of any other part of the Empire, are imbued with this conception, then National Service will be used for Imperial purposes, and the citizen force will be employed as readily to defend the unity and integrity of the Empire as to preserve the inviolability of the home territory. If not, then neither a citizen army nor a professional army will be used for other than local objects. That many of the THE MILITARY AND NAVAL SITUATION 191 most ardent Imperialists are zealous advo- cates of National Service for home defence is not a mere inconsistency, as Sir Ian Hamilton suggests, but the reasoned con- clusion of a study of the problem of war from the Imperial as well as from the local point of view. But universal service has another value, no less great, in the internal life of a nation. The prosperity of a nation, the existence of true liberty and justice within it, depend upon the strength of the national idea in the minds and hearts of its citizens. The reawakening of that idea in our people is what England needs more than any other reform. After two generations and more devoted to the assertion of the right of the individual to do as he pleased, subject to the police regulations, our own generation abounds in saviours of society who assert a new variant of the old idea the right of the individual to get what he wants out of others through the machinery of the vote, and the right of one class to use its political power against other classes. These things do not make for the greatness or the happiness of 192 England. What is wanted is the assertion, not of rights, but of duties. What our people most need to learn is the lesson that their duty as Englishmen comes first, and their individual or class interests second. There is no better school for teaching that lesson than a military system, where men of all classes work side by side at a common task, where every detail of that task reminds them that they have a duty in common, a duty which may some day demand of each and all of them the one supreme sacrifice, which is the same for rich and poor, workman and employer, landlord and tenant the sacrifice of their lives for England. PART III THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY Sine ira et studio quorum causas procul habeo. TACITTTS. [FIRST LETTER] I MR. HALDANE'S "FREE-BORN BRITON" AND CONSCRIPTION To the student of History few things are more difficult than to discover in the past an analogy that can justly be applied to the present. Superficial resemblances again and again conceal fundamental and enduring divergences. Sixty years ago, for instance, it was a topic of the schools to compare the conspiracies which threatened the free cities of Hellas with those which harassed similar communities in mediaeval Italy. Modern research and a more philo- 7 193 194 FALLACIES AND FACTS sophic method of study have taken the edge from this agreeable pastime. A politician in search of an analogy has, therefore, if he makes truth his aim, to exercise the extremest care not to be misled by apparent similarities. The mo- tives and capacities of the actors in the two periods must be weighed, their purposes and opportunities collated, and, above all, the most rigid scrutiny must be directed to the study of the contrasting environ- ments stages of moral development and civilization, climate, social and political ideals, the hereditary past of States and the hereditary past of individuals all that mass of ever-changing circumstance which makes historical comparison seem an irrele- vancy or a sport, impelling us to the con- clusion that history never does and never can repeat itself, and that the old en- couraging notion of " politics taught by experience " is, or may become, as mis- chievous as a nostrum of the sixteenth century swallowed by a healthy man in the twentieth. The hypothesis of Evolution supports this paradox ; nor can it be THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 195 styled " pessimistic " except by those who prefer any illusion to the truth, and in- variably test reality by the comfort or discomfort that its recognition brings to their indolence. No one who reads " Compulsory Service " will accuse Sir Ian Hamilton and Mr. Haldane of taking those precautions too seriously. " The first duty of a rhetor," says Aristotle, " is to persuade." Of this both writers are firmly convinced. Sometimes they draw inferences from one period of a nation's life on the theory, dexterously or clumsily disguised, that in decades or in centuries the nation has not changed. At other times positions are assumed to be axiomatic which are not by any means axiomatic, or deductions are made from premises which need only be stated syllogistically for the fallacy to appear. Throughout the book it is assumed, for example, that to the " free-born Briton " constraint of any kind, especially compulsory military training, is intolerable or an insult. And on this subject, as on others, where 196 FALLACIES AND FACTS Mr. Haldane cautiously insinuates, Sir Ian who is nothing if not a Kelt is open and effusive. On page 89, for example, the " free-born Briton " appears as the recruit who, when ordered to " fall in," retorts, " Fall in yourself, and be d d to you ! " And the advocates of compulsory service and a national army are recommended by Sir Ian to beware how they interfere with the liberties of so splendid a fellow ! For what is the underlying purpose of all our charters and all our wars, and for what did Hampden fight and Algernon Sidney die, except just to produce that demi-savage " Fall in yourself, and be d d to you ! " ? It is, of course, impossible to discuss in this place abstract definitions of " free- dom." A propos of Sir lan's illustration, however, it may be allowable, even in a letter, to cite once more the maxim, ancient as the Teutonic race itself, that the warrior alone is the freeman, that the slave has no country, that he alone possesses freedom who can guard or maintain in arms his personal rights and, by implication, can guard and maintain in arms the rights of THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 197 the State. This principle, variously modi- fied, governs the heroic period of English history. Obscured or obliterated, pace Mr. Haldane, it governs English history now. It is inherent in the moral life itself ; for it is but the political expression of the principle that man as man has duties as well as rights, and that the higher he ascends in the scale of nature the more complex and varied those duties become. But it is useless to labour the point. The demi-savage of Sir Ian has rights, but no duties, and therefore forfeits those very rights. Yet despite platform eloquence and triumphant democracy, he is still a carica- ture, not a portrait, of the ideal English- man if Munro, Nicholson, Clive, Gordon, Sidney, or the Black Prince represent that ideal. The puzzle is to understand how Mr. Haldane, who, before he took to projectiles and torpedoes, was a reader of Kant, can reconcile the " Critique of the Practical Reason " one of the most sublime books ever written with his present acquiescence in the antics of this monstrous travesty of all 198 FALLACIES AND FACTS that constitutes human dignity or freedom. Can infatuation with a pet scheme go further ? ii Another characteristic of the volume is the adroit use of the words " compulsion " and " compulsory," " conscript " and " con- scription." The term " conscript " has in itself nothing odious ; but the Napoleonic wars and military novels, from those of Erckmann- Chatrian to the anti-militarist writings of the present day, have gathered a thick cloud of suspicion around the name. The authors of " Compulsory Service " make the utmost use I had almost said an unscrupulous use of this odium. The climax is reached on page 88, where, after enumerating the evils of compulsory service, the writer adds the portentous and em- phatic sentence, " He would be a con- script." It is as if he said, '* He would be a galley-slave, or a criminal." Yet what is a conscript ? The word and THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 199 fact alike are Roman. The former is de- rived from the Roman practice of registering or enrolling (conscribere milites) the men chosen for the legion from the whole body of free-born citizens capable of bearing arms. The practice governs Roman history from the time of Servius to that of Caius Marius. The legions, in a word, whose victories founded the Roman Empire were conscript legions. But though the word is Roman the custom had been long established in Hellas, Rome's great predecessor in the race for glory. The imperishable light which rests upon, her battle-fields, from Marathon to Leuctra, rests upon battle-fields where conscript Greeks fought and died. Greek freedom vanished when, in State after State, in Athens above all, the mercenary soldier replaced the citizen-soldier. It is not within the scope of this letter to examine the causes of so disastrous a revolution indifference to politics, the in- fluence of rich metics such as Meidias, sketched with studied force by Demos- thenes or that vague process named 200 FALLACIES AND FACTS " degeneracy," or again the superiority of the phalanx. The fact and the catastrophe are indisputable. And who that has read the first Philippic can forget the paragraph in which, like the prenunciatory sketch of a motif in a symphony, we discover under the boldest language of exhortation the real impression which the appalling truth has made upon the imagination of Demosthenes ? Mr. Haldane knows the passage, and must have felt the magic of that effect. Why, then, in the search for historical analogues did so " sincere a mind " pass by the fate of Athens ? For if there is a period in history more likely than another to reward the closest study by an English statesman at the present crisis it is the history of Athens between Aigospotami and Chaeroneia. The material is copious ; the story itself has all the unity of a most thrilling drama ; and in its earlier phases, at least, it is astonishingly relevant to this Empire of ours. The trite comparison of England and Carthage, on the other hand, loses its relevancy the moment we pierce the surface resemblance. THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 201 Carthage never swerved from the type of the mother-city, Tyre, which again followed that of the earlier Semitic monarchies. But in Athens we have an Empire-State, which if we keep steadily in sight the maxim indicated in my first paragraph- alike in arts and in arms, in her political and her social aims, may not unfitly be compared with England. Like England, again, her imperial ideal was an ideal wide as humanity. Already in the era of Pheidias she anticipated the policy of later times " The question put to a stranger in Athens is not whether he is of Greek birth, but whether he has a Greek mind." Nevertheless, in the fourth century, disaster rushes down upon Athens inexorable and irretrievable disaster. Why ? In speech after speech during the years which im- mediately precede and follow Chaeroneia Demosthenes has written the answer. And in the De Corona, his supreme effort, the speech that, like a last bugle-call ringing up from the ruins of a sinking army and a sinking empire, still takes captive the heart, he attests that in Athens, amid 7* 202 FALLACIES AND FACTS universal indifference or defeat, one man at least was unconquerable. And what is his thesis, iterated and reiterated with restrained yet still increasing vehemence and an Isaiah-like grief and wrath and scorn ? It is almost an affront to recall that thesis to Mr. Haldane for it is this : " There is one source, O Athenians, of all your defeats. It is that your citizens have ceased to be soldiers. Yet you have time. Even now you may avert the catastrophe. Disband your mercenary armies. Stand in the ranks yourselves. Recruit your armies, man your fleets not with the off- scourings of Hellas and Asia, but with the best of your free-born citizens, and you yet may conquer or, falling, you shall not have disgraced your past; you shall not have disgraced those Athenians who at Salamis and Marathon were the fore- most of all men in the race for freedom and deathless renown." And Athens listened, rapt and attentive ; Athens listened, but did nothing. She passed noble resolutions ; but, when the THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 203 hour for action came, she entrusted their execution to men bribed to betray her, and, even when the enemy had crept to her very walls, she still remained supine, trusting to old watchwords and past glories, to the memories of Marathon and Salamis, as though these could repel the phalanx of Macedon, or invocations of dead heroes overawe the craft and might of a living foe ! Mr. Haldane should read again the Olyn- thiacs and the Philippics. If he could then be induced to put to himself the question, meditatively or even casually, whether in the present crisis the part of the Athenian orator or that of a Pobyedonostseff-Jackson of the twentieth century is the more fitting part for a man to play II CONSTITUTIONAL FALLACIES AND FALLA- CIES BASED ON FOREIGN EXPERIENCE SEVERAL of the most startling fallacies by which the present military system is defended occur in Mr. Haldane's Intro- 204 FALLACIES AND FACTS duction to " Compulsory Service." Thus in one passage the Secretary of State for War justifies his hopes for the success of Territorialism by the success of the Church. " The Churches," he asserts, " constitute a voluntary organization, and they maintain a far larger establishment with little effort, simply because the sense of religious duty is a real one. . . . Are we, then, to despair of modern capacity for patriotic duty ? " In these, and in the sentences which follow, the fallacy is so wrought into the texture of the argument that it has un- deniably a certain impressiveness derived from the association of the ideas of pa- triotism and religion, the priest and the soldier. Yet the instant an effort is made to state the argument logically it resolves itself into an amazing sort of enthymeme, or quasi syllogism, which pans itself out into the series of logical judgments that duty to one's country is the equivalent of belief in religion, and that belief in some sect or church, say, the Church of England, is the equivalent of belief in the Territorials ! But, it can be retorted, the Nonconformists THE ARGUMENT PROM HISTORY 205 do not accept the Church of England. Are they, therefore, without religion ? Similarly, the National Service League derides the Territorials ; but even Mr. Haldane will hesitate to brand its members as destitute of patriotism. Or has the Secretary of State for War so befogged his brain in ruminating a favourite scheme that he can really think of Territorialism and the tenets of the Christian faith as in some fashion identical ? Mr. Haldane's argument is open to criti- cism of another kind. If he wishes to com- pare the impulse towards active service of the State in war to the religious impulse itself, the second term of his comparison is much too wide. If, on the other hand, he merely wishes to compare his Terri- torials to priests or to ministers his second term is much too narrow. It is almost unnecessary to contradict another postulate which underlies not only the confused and cumbrous paragraphs of pages 30-32, but the whole Introduction. This is the postulate that the young man who does not join the Territorials is some- how deficient in patriotism. The young 206 FALLACIES AND FACTS men of this country, as is demonstrated by evidence increasing in volume and precision week by week, refuse to join the Territorials, not because they are deficient in patriotism, but some because they regard the whole system as a make-shift, a mere pandering to the spirit of inefficiency, and others because they see in it a system which, in the rivalries of trade and profession, handicaps honesty and integrity and puts a premium on virtues of another sort. If that blood-tax is just and equitable, they ask, why is it not, like every other tax, levied on all men equally ? Why is it levied only on those willing or high-minded enough to pay it of themselves ? When we consider the diminishing num- bers of the Territorials, there is something pathetic in Mr. Haldane's attestation of the willingness of young men to serve their country observed by him in every shire of England to which, in his peregrinations as War Minister, he has penetrated. The fervour of Sir Ian Hamilton's concluding paragraph (p. 147) has scarcely less pathos, especially in the sentence, " Speaking of THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 207 the fountain of goodness, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus says, ' Ever dig, and it will ever well forth.' " Why then, one asks, do not Mr. Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton put this willingness to the supreme test ? Why not express in a national edict the nation's will ? From ideas and fragments of ideas dis- persed throughout the book it is possible to discover the answer to reconstruct the method in which both men have theorized. Conscription, they seem to say, would somehow be unconstitutional and un-Eng- lish. It would be fraught with all the evils which attend it in Germany, France, and Russia. It would be an act of violence, an unjust impost in blood enforced by our seniors on the young men of this country, and it would give us inefficient soldiers, as is proved by the fighting qualities of conscript armies when opposed to armies enlisted on a voluntary system. Let me attempt to expose some of the fallacies woven into this tissue of theory or fancy. And first let me examine the con- stitutional question. 208 FALLACIES AND FACTS Here the fallacy consists in the assump- tion that if conscription were imposed to- morrow it would be an arbitrary or despotic act of power which every English- man would have the right to resist. The authors are not alone in this assumption. It is widely spread, and it is therefore worth our while to consider its origins and growth. In a democratic country like England an Act of Parliament resembles less an act of arbitrary restraint imposed by a despot upon the community than an inward resolu- tion, or vow made by the free choice of the individual will. The refusal to recognize this distinction vitiates many of the argu- ments urged against compulsory service in England, whether by Mr. Haldane or others. Mr. Haldane's reference in his present volume to Chatham and Nelson may of course be mere clap-trap, and it is perhaps unfair to take it seriously. Nevertheless, it is a kind of clap-trap that may be ex- tremely mischievous. Accustomed as we are to the easy-going dilettante generaliza- tions of the Secretary of State for War, it is still something of a staggerer to find THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 209 Nelson and Chatham thus bracketed to- gether as " strategists " ! During the war against the French Revolution and Napoleon the problem of the Army did unquestionably engage the atten- tion of English statesmen in a very pressing way. The record of the Bills brought for- ward to meet the difficulty recalls in number and variety nothing more strongly than the Bills brought forward in the latter half of the sixteenth century to meet the problem of pauperism originating in the dissolution of the monasteries and the long war. Never- theless, between 1793 and 1815, the one solution never seriously attempted was con- scription. The press-gang was in free operation ; the liberty of the individual was violated in several oppressive ways, but even when every Prussian was known to be drilling in secret there was no conscription in England. Why is this ? One main reason is to be found in that mistrust of great standing armies which the eighteenth- century had inherited from the seventeenth. By the Englishman of the eighteenth century an army was regarded less as the possession of 210 FALLACIES AND FACTS the people than as a possession of the Crown, and further, as an instrument which might at any moment be employed against the liberties of that people. The trust which the nation now rests in the power of Parlia- ment had not as yet arisen. A minister was still the minister of the Crown, and as such he was accepted by both parties whether or not he had a majority in the House ; nor was it until the crisis of 1834 that it became apparent, almost by a coup de theatre, whither the constitutional history of the preceding seventy years had been tending, namely, towards the establishment of a minis- ter and a cabinet depending not upon the will of the king, but upon the will of the House, and wielding absolute pow r er so long as that minister and that cabinet possess the con- fidence of the nation through its representa- tives at Westminster. From that moment the fear of a standing army became obsolete, for the action of a Government had visibly become the action of the nation. The constitutional situation has been still further modified by the various Reform Acts, 1832, 1867, 1885, and by the Ballot THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 211 Act of 1872 ; until at the present hour an Act of Parliament passed upon such a question as compulsory service a question involving the interest of the whole man- hood of the nation would be in very deed, as I have suggested, analogous not to an impost levied by an exterior despot but rather to a vow or inward resolu- tion made by the individual. Ethically and politically it would be of a totally different character from an act passed by a Government such as that of Russia or even that of Germany. It would be the volun- tary act of a nation, a free experiment, or, if you prefer it, a self-denying ordinance, binding only so long as it is visibly in accord with the nation's temper. The power which makes it to-day could unmake it to-morrow. For this is the character of a free country, that, whilst it is, or ought to be, the mark of a base mind surreptitiously to evade the expressed will of a sovereign Parliament, it is, or ought to be, the duty of a true citizen openly to resist by every constitu- tional means in his power any measure that he considers dangerous to liberty. 212 FALLACIES AND FACTS Making every allowance, then, for a life " passed in camps," how are we to understand the assertion by Sir Ian Hamilton (p. 122) that if the British Parliament voted com- pulsion it would be the act of " old men," immune themselves from the dangers of war, commanding " young men " to go to the front ? Is Sir Ian Hamilton under the illusion that only men above the age of fifty can sit in a British House of Commons, or that only Englishmen above sixty have the franchise ? Is a general election determined by sexagenarians ? And, if an Act were passed to-morrow, resented by the " young men " of the nation, would these young men sit still and make no attempt to get it repealed ? It would be a point for casuists to discuss whether such reasoning is more unfortu- nate in the English soldier who formulates it or in the English cabinet minister who in a volume bearing his signature allows it to pass unchallenged. n In a passage which extends over several pages (pp. 64-81) Sir Ian Hamilton has THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 213 brought together a number of facts and personal observations bearing on the effects of compulsory service in Germany, France, and Russia. All, needless to say, tell more or less against the system. I do not contest at this point Sir lan's facts. His application of them to England, however, is surprising. Russian reservists arriving in Manchuria, he informs us, at once inquired for a church, and, finding none, demanded to be led back to Russia. This is interesting ; but what end can it serve to imply, that an English general would find the same or similar embarrassments, if he com- manded a division of conscripts, say, in New Zealand, South Africa, or even in Afghanistan or Egypt ? Does Sir Ian contend that a Yorkshireman drafted in time of war to Egypt, attacked by Germany or Russia, or to Auckland, attacked, say, by the Japanese, would fight worse than at the mouth of the Humber ? The growing sentiment of Empire is dead against such a theory though it is postu- lated throughout the book by both writers. In other passages, the inference is tacitly 214 FALLACIES AND FACTS made that whatever social or political evils have attended conscription, e.g. in Germany and France, must attend it in England. But to point to Rennes as is the practice of some opponents of national service and Vaffaire Dreyfus, or to quote Sudermann and descant upon the petty tyrannies exercised by military upstarts over civilians in Berlin and cry, " See what awaits you from conscription ! " has precisely the same value as the arguments long ago urged against Parliamentary Re- form, based on the terror of Jacobinism. You might as well condemn all free institu- tions because of Tammany Hall as condemn compulsory service because of its abuses in other countries. in Exactly as in the nineteenth century the action of the Parliament stood revealed as the action of the nation, so in the twen- tieth century the action of the nation is gradually becoming the action of the Empire. Insensibly but more and more strongly year by year the Britisher is becoming con- THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 215 scious that, though a native of Devon or Yorkshire, an attack upon Melbourne is an attack at once upon his own honour and his own security ; and, though a native of Sydney, that an attack upon Hull is equally an attack upon his honour and his security. And who shall estimate the effect of that silent but mighty change which is ever diminishing the time-distance between the various parts of the Empire, until, at the present hour, by the immediacy of com- munication in various ways, India appears as near England as Carlisle was to the capital under the first Georges, and Sydney as near to Southampton as Inverness was to Dover less than a century ago ? Nevertheless, upon this subject Sir lan's facts are in places as perverted or unsound as his arguments. History, he asserts on page 54, has no record of a conscript army being success- fully used to defend a distant frontier. And he goes on to imply that no conscript army is of any use beyond a certain distance from the native State. But the French conscript fought as magnificently at Borodino as in 216 FALLACIES AND FACTS Italy, though Moscow was, by the measure of time-distance, farther from Paris than India or South Africa now is from London. Again, the armies of Gustavus Adolphus were conscript armies. Thus in 1629, whilst preparing for the campaign of 1630, he had all males between fifteen and sixty assembled, and every man without a settled home was at once placed in the army destined for Germany, and of the remainder every tenth man between the ages of eighteen and thirty was similarly enrolled. Yet whether under the command of the king himself, or, after his death at Liitzen, under that of Bernard of Saxe-Weimar or Horn or Baner, the Swedes passed from victory to victory, though campaigning far enough from Sweden. Other instances invalidating Sir lan's assertion could easily be cited. Sir Ian further implies that compulsion damps the ardour of recruits, that it tends to lower the " moral " strength which should be kept at the Napoleonic 3 to 1 ratio to the " physical " strength. Yet it was from conscript armies that Napoleon drew that very ratio ! And does Sir Ian THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 217 imagine that Bonaparte would have pre- ferred to his own " conscripts " our " vol- unteer regulars," recruited from the des- titute or desperate classes of society Sir Ian himself gives his ideal example of that class drawn, that is to say, from men who have not a penny in the world, and are driven to the army to escape the work- house or the prison ? If Napoleon can be imagined preferring such men, it would be be- cause they were Englishmen, not because they have, in Sir lan's unconscious bull, " volun- tarily " enlisted by " force of hunger ! " III A DEFINITION OF WAR WAR has been variously defined by specu- lative writers in different epochs of history. By some it has been classed with plague and famine, and it is perhaps another aspect rather than another definition which de- scribes it as " the noblest witness to the self-devotion of a State to the supreme end of its being, to its power of consecration 218 FALLACIES AND FACTS to the Highest Good." Indeed, no great war was ever waged for material ends only, every such war known to history ultimately resolving itself into the conflict of two ideals. The Cavalier fights in triumph or defeat in a cause not less exalted than that of the Puritan, and Salami s acquires a profounder significance when considered, not from the standpoint of Athens only, but from the camp of Xerxes and the ruins of the mighty designs of Cyrus and Hystaspes. But whether we regard war as a scourge or as a heroism, as a madness or as a terrible instrument for the realization of the world-soul's serenest ends, one thing is certain that whatever system of waging it is right, the continuance of the English system is hopelessly and for ever wrong. For war, under modern conditions, is an action which either ought never to be com- mitted, or an action in which every able- bodied citizen, without exemption of any kind, should participate to the utmost degree, sharing alike its dangers and its allurements, its glory and its shame. THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 219 Upon this subject, as upon others, the reasoning of both the writers of " Compul- sory Service " is full of sophistries and of contradictions. In one place Mr. Haldane, author of " The Dedicated Life," regards, or seems to regard, war as something of an evil ; in another he extols the " attack " attitude, and softly deprecates conscription as tending towards too pacific a policy or too serious a view of war unless for purposes of defence. Sir Ian Hamilton, again, varying, not to its advantage, a passage in Tolstoi, defines war as " beyond logic and beyond law." But the nation, as Cujas in an age of despots had the courage to affirm, and Grotius to repeat, is the fountain of law. How then can an action ratified by the nation be " beyond " law ? And to go on to assert, as Sir Ian asserts, that war is beyond law because it enters " the domain of force," is just as reasonable as to main- tain that when a nation hangs or imprisons a man for murder it passes beyond law into the domain of violence. Nevertheless, a nation may, and at times does, act wrongly. It may violate the moral law, e.g. 220 FALLACIES AND FACTS in shooting Admiral Byng though casu- ists dispute even this concession. Let us, however, accept Sir lan's defini- tion. Let us see in war an action at once illogical and immoral. But what, we ask, is more certain to reduce to a minimum that immoral and illogical element than just the universal service which he combats ? No serious critic of history would define the ris- ing of France in 1793 as immoral, or the rising of Germany in 1813 as illogical. And why ? Because in each case it was the will of the entire nation consecrated to a great ideal. Similarly, the German war of 1870 would have lost something of its splendour as an act of high and great retributive justice, had not every German taken his place on the stricken field. ii But upon this very war of 1870 Sir Ian Hamilton has some singular observations to make. " Not the German soldier," he assures us THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 221 on page 56, " but Bismarck, fought for Alsace-Lorraine." In the first place, the question of Alsace was on a wholly different footing from that of Lorraine. Alsace, historically and ethno- logically, is German ; Lorraine is French. Moltke and Bismarck recognized this. The demand for Belfort and then its concession in return for the right to enter Paris is the proof. Every German every German man or woman of average intelligence and edu- cation wished to recover Alsace. " The Rhine is a German river, but not a German boundary," had for long been a common- place. The literature of the preceding twenty years is full of it. Nor was it national sentiment only : the possession of Alsace by France was a constant menace of war, and of war upon German soil. Metz, on the other hand, is a German fortress on French soil. As a matter of fact, it was Moltke's, not Bismarck's demand. Its insertion in the treaty was the triumph of arms over diplomacy, of Moltke over Bismarck. But it gave tranquillity to the German mind and, after all, it was only 222 FALLACIES AND FACTS the Vce Victis once more, in the strict meaning of that phrase. It was a deadly insult retorted upon a deadly insult, and must have made Blucher and Scharnhorst, or Arndt and Gneisenau in their places in Hades, look into each other's eyes the silent comment, " After sixty years this is well, Scharnhorst." " Yes, Blucher, this is well." With regard to the assertion (page 58) that the German troops suffered more severely from " war-weariness " than is suspected by historians a knowledge which Sir Ian has derived from such " extremely private " sources of information eh bien, moi au$si, I have known some Germans in my time, men who had taken part in that campaign. I have also read now and then the actual letters of young men at the front the student circle of Friedrich Nietzsche amongst others. Yet I have no where either read or heard a syllable to justify any theory of the conduct of the German armies unless that of the most extraordinary fortitude, high hopes, daring, and patience. War-weariness doubtless was there the THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 223 combatants were men. But, in the present controversy, what is its significance when weighed against the desertions en masse which from time to time have disfigured the records of voluntary armies during the last three hundred years ? Again (page 64) in his desire to rub in the evil effects of conscription, he points derisively to the German " microscopic over- seas army." A more prudent or a more sensitive writer would have paused and probably erased that sentence. Ten years ago we jested, some of us, at the micro- scopic German navy. To-day the German fleet . . . Absit omen ! For who will measure the resources of that great and singular people ? the noblest, and, on the whole, the worthiest enemy that in her fateful career England has ever had a noble and high enemy, a thing to thank God for, fasting ! The fall of a nation greatly, or of a city or empire, is indeed a spectacle before which the eyelids of the gods lower ; but a rotten thing enduring and continuing and pretending to be a great and sound thing that is a spectacle which makes the 224 FALLACIES AND FACTS very gods spit with vexation. They hasten themselves to destroy it if the nations around will not touch it ! Finally, upon this subject of war, when Sir Ian expands and still further extols Mr. Haldane's famous " attack " policy, to which I have referred above, and insists that com- pulsory service means the transformation of the mood of " attack " into the mood of " defence," it is impossible not to ask in perplexity, " Whom, under the present sys- tem, can we attack ? Is it Belgium ? Or is it Switzerland ? ' I remember the speech made at a public banquet by the French Minister for Foreign Affairs exactly ten years ago, when the excitement against England was at its highest, and I remember speeches of a similar temper made, one at a dinner of Austrian staff -officers, another in Berlin. And the meaning of these speeches, ironical or brutally contemptuous well, it recalled to me only one incident, the retort of the Scythian conqueror to one of the later Byzantine Caesars, " I marvel that you will still be talking of Empire you, who cannot make war upon a village ! " THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 225 But England is not yet Carthage ; still less is she Byzantium. It was in the study of English history that the creator of modern Germany found the inspiration of some of his boldest con- ceptions. And are there not symptoms that England herself is turning with increas- ing earnestness and questioning to the mighty past, and that, reinvigorated by such converse, she is preparing to front the conflicts of the future, not with re- monstrances about the sizes of fleets or armies, but with her energies undiminished by the centuries, and her confidence in her fate unimpaired ? In politics, indeed, this may be the era of the Pelhams ; but, it must be remembered, the era of the Pelhams passed immediately into that of Rodney and Wolfe, Chatham and Clive. 226 [SECOND LETTER] IV MR. HALDANE, SIR IAN, AND- HANNIBAL ! SIR IAN'S contributions to the many de- scriptions of the great Carthaginian have the merit of originality. It is a week since I read his page on Hannibal, but it still pre- sents itself to my imagination as the chief ornament and high-water mark of attain- ment in the volume. I am not unversed in the encounter of eccentricities of the sort, but this seems to unite in itself so many and varied fatuities of trope, of inference, and fact, that, like some rare crystal, you can turn it round and round in your hand, and still it presents some new facet to your admiration. " A snail in a honey-comb." Hannibal ? Montesquieu, after reading Livy, expressed a regret that the Roman historian had " scat- tered nosegays on that dread colossus." Sir Ian is not afraid of Montesquieu's nor of THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 227 any man's censure. What is Hannibal to him, or he to Hannibal, that he should stand abashed before his shade ? Therefore the ci-devant Adjutant-General, as he sits in Vienna (p. 139) and tosses off this careless trifle, the latest product of his " facile pen " (see reviews), proceeds to seek out a new metaphor for the Carthaginian, and, turning for counsel to his friend, the Secretary of of State for War " Well, Mr. Haldane, what are we to call him ? " " Call whom ? Hannibal ? Why not a bull in a china shop ? }: suggests the Minister. " I do not recollect that any one has yet made that comparison." " Not bad," demurs Sir Ian, *' but what of a snail a snail in a honey- comb ? " " Capital, Sir Ian ! An excellent metaphor; the very image of Hannibal himself ! Cannot you see him rise before us? and those battles of his very like a snail, Sir Ian ; very like a snail ! " ii Hannibal against Rome? Those sixteen years, four of victory upon victory Ticino, 228 FALLACIES AND FACTS Trebia, Trasimene, Cannae the bloodiest stricken-fields up to that date in authentic history, as from Cannae (216 B.C.), where fifty thousand Romans lay dead, the mind has to sweep across twenty centuries to Aspern-Essling and to Wagram to find in civilized warfare its equal in stubbornness and in death. And in Hannibal's battles what variousness of conception ! here the subtlety of a Numidian chief, there the rapidity of a Bonaparte. Then the eight years which ensued upon Cannse years during which he displays already in politics and in diplomacy everything that afterwards astonishes the world in a Caius Julius or in a Napoleon that strangely impressive com- bination of forces, for instance, embracing every State round the shores of the Medi- terranean, all to be leagued in one over- whelming mass against Rome ! Such is the alliance that Hannibal uprears gradually and securely, not even Syphax ignored, such is his Napoleonic love of finished detail; fighting battle after battle meanwhile, under- taking sieges, defending fortresses, villages, towns, plotting the revolt of the Taren tines THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 229 and Rome's murder of the hostages a crime, for " reasons of state," of an ap- palling enough order. " Very like a snail, Sir Ian ? " Then the era of disaster sets in, irresistible as the night Mutines, his Murat, betraying him in Sicily ; and, beyond the Adriatic, the ^Etolian and the Macedonian disaffection follow ; and, countermined by Roman states- manship, all that huge edifice of alliances within alliances crashes to the ground jealousy and grudging envy in Carthage itself not without their share in thwarting the hero's designs. And, on the other side, the greatness, the stupendous constancy of Rome ! Threatened by a world-league, she prepares herself greatly to confront a world. So that in this fate-burdened drama the imagination, hurried from one impression of vastness to another continuously, strains at its own suspense, and, wonder being ex- hausted, the foreboding mind rushes of itself to the catastrophe to the crisis in which, quite literally, the fate of the entire world is on the hazard for it is the fate of Greece and of Macedon, it is the fate of Judaea and 230 FALLACIES AND FACTS of Galilee, it is the fate of Egypt, and ulti- mately of the entire East, it is the fate of Gaul, of Spain, of Britain, and of Germany. Indeed, strike from world-history the page named " Rome," and what is left ? And to what an actor and actors does Fate entrust the part ! To Hasdrubal and his horsemen let the wind from their feet but reach the listening ears of Hannibal as he waits there in Apulia pondering the hazards of things, and the page named " Rome " is in very deed wrenched from the book of world-history. And between Hasdrubal's horsemen and that Punic watcher Rome can interpose only her emaciated and half-starved legion- aries, led by two most ordinary men, two of the most commonplace soldiers, so far as recorded evidence goes, that ever acted a part so momentous Marcus Livius and Gaius Nero. To us, as we watch the drama, Rome's defeat appears dead certain ; for famine is within her gates, and in the north the Gauls are flocking to Hasdrubal's standards, and in the south the Etruscans are in arms around THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 231 Hannibal ; and, having risen higher than herself in grandeur, Rome, we imagine, is destined now to a long repose the quiet of annihilation. Thus we reason. But suddenly a vicious glint as of unexpected lightning and a courier has been intercepted. " The rendez- vous is Narnia," runs the despatch, and on the instant the night-march of the seven thousand, the commonplace Gaius Nero having " genius " thrust upon him, appar- ently thrust upon him for a critic will hesi- tate in these fate-burdened hours and Has- drubal's horsemen, ambushed, are with the winters beyond the Flood ! Hannibal at Canusium still waits for them ; but now the wind of their feet shall never reach his ears. " We were wrong, then ? ' : we now think we, the breathless observers of the event. " Rome is not to fall ? And an intercepted despatch has changed the fortunes of a world ? " Nevertheless, in this reverse Hannibal abates in nothing his height of temper. At bay, he transforms himself into an un- 232 FALLACIES AND FACTS rivalled general of defence, as hitherto of attack, making Bruttium into a sort of Torres Vedras, until Rome, having now struck at Carthage herself, the Libyan lion has to turn his back upon Italy, and at Zama finds his Waterloo. A banished outlaw, a wanderer, a price on his head, still he nurses the unconquerable will, the inextinguishable hate ; then, when Prusias, Bithynia's petty tyrant, is about to deliver him up to the Roman Senate even for this Hannibal is prepared. A touch of his poisoned ring, and the cohort which comes to seize him finds him dead. in Out of this portentous and various drama, with its numberless characters, events, possibilities, and issues, its vistas of ancient civilizations, of moribund races and half fabulous cities, out of this intricate welter of tragic circumstance how is it possible, how is it endurable to make even the most beggarly inference in support of le sieur Hamilton's theme that the recruiting-ser- THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 233 geant gets a better man than the national edict ? Sir Ian, however, without giving us the slightest hint of these difficulties, informs us, on his authority as Adjutant-General, backed by the authority of the War Minister, that Hannibal achieved his stupendous suc- cesses solely because of his 20,000 regulars, and he invites England to imitate Carthage, and virtually promises us that an English army, voluntarily enlisted, though only 20,000 strong, will be quite at its ease though surrounded, say, by 700,000 Germans or Frenchmen raised by conscription ! His words, taken with their context, mean this, or they mean nothing. For the Roman army that bit the dust at Cannae was a conscript army, enrolled in accordance with the Ser- vian constitution, little altered with the cen- turies. And those burgess legions, we are to believe, were vanquished because they were pitted against regulars, " an over-seas Expeditionary Force " from Carthage ! Sir Ian, wittingly or unwittingly, ignores the facts that at Cannae, as at Trebia and Trasimene, the Roman conscripts led at 8* 234 FALLACIES AND FACTS Cannae at least not by a soldier but by the temporary idol of the mob, the demagogue Varro were pitted against the second in time of the four greatest military intellects that recorded history is acquainted with Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, and Bonaparte. Hannibal's genius, it seems, does not count. It was his " regulars " who did it ? Or does Mr. Haldane intend to guarantee us a sort of permanent Hannibal to lead our Expe- ditionary Force against the conscripts of other nations in that famous " attack " system of his ? But let us examine Sir lan's facts. He gives Hannibal 20,000 men ; and he cer- tainly seems to imply that this was some- thing like the figure of the Carthaginian " Expeditionary Force " else his argument has no point. But Hannibal started from the other side of the Alps with 50,000 foot and 9,000 horse ; and at the lowest estimate he had still 6,000 horse and still some 20,000 foot, more probably from 20,000 to 25,000, when he came down into the plains of the Ticino. Why does Sir Ian Hamilton, a responsible writer, omit Hannibal's 6,000 cavalry ? THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 235 More than this : Hannibal recruits every- where, enlists everywhere ; and when he goes into winter quarters after the Trebia he has raised 60,000 additional foot and 4,000 horse. Why does Sir Ian Hamilton say not a word of these 64,000 ? Why does the ci-devant Adjutant-General of the British Army, backed by the War Minister, who is also addicted to " dragging in " Hannibal, treat the plain facts of history with so much levity ? IV Again, Sir Ian assures us that Hannibal was supremely comfortable " just as if he were in Birmingham " is his phrase though surrounded by clouds of Roman legions. This certainly is a new light upon the Roman legion that formation which to one of the greatest of ancient writers on the art of war seemed " the invention of a Nevertheless, out of Hannibal's sixteen campaigns there is not one that gives a shadow of justification to Sir lan's theories. There is, of course, the one affair at Capua 236 FALLACIES AND FACTS during the winter quarters of 216-15 B.C. ; but, until this book, no one has had originality enough to suggest that Hannibal himself looked on, complacent, whilst his troops ran riot, or " sat still " despising the conscript legions of Rome ! Giving Sir Ian the whole rope of his own absurdities, we still ask whether if a " snail " had come to Italy with 20,000 " regulars " for the sole purpose of laying siege to Rome and had found that it could not even get near Rome whether that " snail ' would have been happy as in a honey-comb ? The farther we press our scrutiny the more conspicuous the fallacy becomes. For in the campaigns which immediately follow 216 B.C. the Romans having meanwhile dismissed the demagogue Hannibal meets first a severe check from Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, and then a second and worse defeat from Claudius Marcellus, under the very walls of Nola and, as a result, is compelled to evacuate the whole of Cam- pania. But indeed, one has to read and reread the Adjutant-General's extraordinary para- THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 237 graph to convince oneself that it can actually have been written by so earnest a soldier. Further, in the face of his professed impartiality, Sir Ian, before printing that novel condemnation of the Roman legion as a fighting machine, ought surely to have considered the world-acknowledged achievements of those legions which at Zama, when led by a Scipio, defeated Hannibal himself, and fifty years earlier, 256-55 B.C., under Marcus Atilius Regulus, though numbering only 15,000 foot and 500 horse, besieged Carthage and made the city sue for peace. Yet this was an army, compulsorily recruited, used over-seas, and at a greater time-distance from Rome than Egypt now is from England ! It would be easy to pursue the inquiry into other periods of history and fill columns with instances of the work done by con- script legions from Zama to Austerlitz and Sedan. But any inquiry of the sort simply drives home the maxim that the means by which an army is summoned to the standards matters only secondarily that the main thing is the character of the man once 238 FALLACIES AND FACTS he is got there, and though Sir Ian makes little of generalship the character of the man who is to lead them. MR. HALDANE, SIR IAN, ANDTHE ROMAN EMPIRE SIR IAN'S other excursions into history, ancient or modern, are scarcely more fortu- nate, though none is so brilliant as this on Hannibal. Thus on page 52 he gaily brackets Rome and Britain without making the slightest attempt to indicate which of the well- defined periods of Roman policy he means, or with which phase of the history of the British Empire he is instituting a compari- son. He does it, so to speak, in the rough ; but his inferences are never in the rough always the definite inference, " Compulsory service is a bad thing." But even if we allow him to speak " in the rough," he might in candour have pointed out that the severance of the Roman legions from Roman civic life (begun, not under Augustus, but by Caius Marius some seventy years earlier, in 107 B.C. to be exact), the disappearance of the burgess armies, did within two generations from the death of Tiberius create the worst kind of militarism not Mr. Haldane's imaginary militarism, but real militarism the tyrant made and un- made by the cohorts ; and that this rapidly evolved itself into the execrable despotism of the Pretorian Guards. ii It is not easy to make a list of battles that shall be comical ; the affair itself is so grimly earnest but Sir Ian, on page 124, succeeds in this difficult task, and writes a list which, when we consider its purpose, is certainly comical. He is here insisting upon the power of enthusiasm over discipline which, within its limits, I submit, no serious soldier dreams of denying. But, with the whole field of ancient and modern history to range 240 FALLACIES AND FACTS over, why does the Adjutant- General select Maiwand, where the enthusiasts outnum- bered their adversaries by ten to one ? What does the Adjutant-General of the British Army mean ? And amongst the Mahdi's followers was there not enthusiasm enough at Omdurman ? His insertion of Majuba in the same list is even more curious. Sir Ian was on the spot, and is therefore a first-hand authority for that fight. Yet to gauge an historical event it is not enough that a man should be on the spot and have eyes : there must be willingness to see and a certain quality in the brain that ticks behind the eyes. And even if Sir Ian were a subaltern on Majuba Mountain, and is therefore a first-hand authority for what with his eyes he saw, yet the historians of the future will certainly question his value as an authority for what with his eyes he could not see the causes and the meanings of things if he seriously insists, as on this page he seems to insist, that the British defeat at Majuba was due solely to the superiority of enthusiasm over discipline ! THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 241 Again, of the ten battles in his list, five are certainly English defeats Lexington, Bunker's Hill, Prestonpans, Majuba, and Maiwand ; a sixth, Falkirk, may be an English defeat or an English victory when once Sir Ian has made up his mind which battle of Falkirk he means the great vic- tory of Edward I. in 1298, or the check of General Hawley in 1746. Unfortunately for Sir lan's earlier and main argument the supreme necessity of an Expeditionary Force recruited by voluntary enlistment all these six battles, assuming that he means the second battle of Falkirk, are arguments against the value of such a force for in every instance it is just this Expeditionary Force, or its equivalent, that is defeated ! What is a plain man, the man in the street, to make of the " deep wisdom based on a varied experience " (see reviews) of the War Minister, and the " graceful pen " of the Adjutant-General ? Will he not be tempted to long for the " sealed-pattern " machine-made German automaton whom Sir Ian derides so whole-heartedly ? 242 FALLACIES AND FACTS VI A NATION AND ITS ARMY Thus, paragraph by paragraph, the histori- cal evidence collected by the two writers in support of their main contention dissolves before the least serious scrutiny. Everything indeed in the history of the ancient world, whether we take into view the Roman Republic and the later Empire, or the civic states of Hellas, everything in the history of modern Europe, from the conquering hordes of Charles the Great to the brigades and corps of Moltke, drives us irresistibly to seek the explanation of the conduct of armies in the field, their weakness or fortitude, their impetuosity or reluctance, their pliancy or daring, in something much deeper than in the question " Have they enrolled themselves in obedience to hunger and the recruiting-sergeant, or in obedience to a national edict ? ): Not the manner in which the recruit is brought into the fighting-line, but the kind of man he is when once you get him there, THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 243 is the main matter. Conscripts behave well in one set of circumstances ; volunteers in another. In France, for instance, after the levee en masse of 1792-3, organized some months later into a conscript army by Dubois-Crance, what battles are fought, and what leaders arise ! Hoche, Marceau, Jour- dan, Bernadotte, Moreau, Bonaparte ! The army which most strongly wills the victory, whether that will is a self-inspired resolve, as in the Puritans at the battle of the Dunes, or whether that will is communicated by a Marlborough or a Skobeleff, is, other things being equal, foredoomed to victory. It is very well for Sir Ian Hamilton to declaim upon the benefits which accrue to those destitute and hunger-driven men who, in England here, turn in their misery or their despair to the recruiting-sergeant. Sir lan's sympathy does him credit. It shows that his heart is in the right place. But does the Army of this Empire exist primarily or even secondarily as an appendix to Row- ton House ? Are British officers imperfect reproductions of the prison-warder and the lady-visitor to alms-houses ? 244 FALLACIES AND FACTS True, the English nation in its present temper is not disinclined to take some such view of the Army. That nation's be- haviour during certain crises of the last two decades is consonant with such a theory. For its behaviour towards officers and men alike fatally suggests that of a master towards a slave, alternately arrogant and kind grudging or contemptuous in time of peace, not wisely generous even in war, and, though strutting in the pride of others' deeds, ignobly lavish only in its outbursts of hysterical devotion. Such a state of things cannot make for the well-being of any empire or of any nation. The Army may indeed, as Sir Ian con- tends, be good for the morals of the loafer or the derelict who enlists ; it may transform him, as the ex- Adjutant-General asserts, per- manently into a " King's man " ; but even if such a system were good for the morals of tens of thousands of destitute or despairing derelicts it must, in the long run, be disas- trous to the nation which hires them. The Secretary for War knows this if Sir Ian THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 245 does not. The author of " The Dedicated Life " must be very well aware that every moral argument once urged against negro slavery can be urged against such an army and such a system. The advocates of negro slavery proclaimed from pulpit and platform the benefits which accrued to the blacks from their Christian and white masters. But there was scarcely a homestead in the Southern States which did not prove how frightful a price the masters themselves had to pay for those dubious benefits conferred upon their slaves. Humanity's fairest im- age was hour by hour blasted, not in the soul of the slave, but in the soul of the master. Under the conditions of modern war conditions which in every battle test the character and strain the fortitude of men to the breaking point the modern soldier, isolated, thrown back upon himself, deprived of all that communicated enthusiasm of the charging squadrons and columns of earlier fights, has an ordeal to face which demands from him something at once of the hero and the martyr. Has he not therefore the right 246 FALLACIES AND FACTS to convince himself is not it his duty as a citizen to convince himself ? not merely that he is fighting for his country and his honour, but that his country is fighting with him that the nation is in arms, not he alone and his unhappy comrades, hunger-driven into this hideous melee, confronting death in shapes the most calculated to daunt the heart of the bravest ? Conscription indeed, as Mr. Haldane path- etically complains, may beget in the nation an attitude of " defence " rather than that of " attack," and hamper a spirited cabinet ; it may also lead more frequently to arbitra- tion, and diminish the risks of war unless upon the weightiest issues. But one asks in astonishment, Is such a consummation surveyed with anxiety by the author of " The Dedicated Life " ? I am not here postulating any definition of war. I am not here assuming an answer to the question whether war is a permanent evil inseparable from the life of States, or whether, in the words of a German strategist, universal peace is a dream and a bad dream ; I am merely insisting that, however ambigu- THE ARGUMENT FROM HISTORY 247 ous may be the verdict of history upon the virtues of the recruiting-sergeant, or a nation's edict in sending a certain type of man into the field, its verdict upon a matter of far profounder interest is clear and un- mistakable in the judgment, namely, that the moral and political life of a nation or empire, qua nation or empire, its tone and temper, its hopes of continuance and of realizing to the utmost its innate powers, indisputably depend upon the extent to which in war its fighting front is constantly and normally in organic unity with the whole body politic. Progress and the advance of the centuries have increased, not diminished, the force of this maxim, which might be styled, in Kant's phraseology, " the categorical imperative " of the ethics of war. PRINTED BT HAZELL, WATSON AND VINBY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBUBY.