Chapter 39

SOME CRITICISMS, SUGGESTIONS, AND GENERALITIES

Post-war extravagance -- The Office of Works lavish all through -- The Treasury -- Its unpopularity in the spending departments -- The Finance Branch of the War Office -- Suggestions -- The change made with regard to saluting -- Red tabs and red cap-bands -- A Staff dandy in the West -- The age of general-officers -- Position of the General Staff in the War Office -- The project of a Defence Ministry -- No excuse for it except with regard to the air services, and that not a sufficient excuse -- Confusion between the question of a Defence Ministry and that of the Imperial General Staff -- The time which must elapse before newly constituted units can be fully depended upon, one of the most important lessons of the war for the public to realize -- This proved to be the case in almost every theatre and in the military forces of almost every belligerent -- Misapprehensions about South Africa -- Improvised units could not have done what the "Old Contemptibles" did -- Conclusion.

My period of service on the active list closed a very few days before the Armistice of the 11th of November, so that no claim can be put forward to have formed one of that band of dug-outs who became dug-ins, and who continued to serve their country for extended periods with self-sacrificing devotion although the enemy was no longer in the gate. But even in the disguises of private life a craftsman, fully initiated into the mysteries by long practice, could appraise the proceedings of the central administration of the Army from the standpoint of inner knowledge, could watch its post-war proceedings with detachment, and could note that amongst the numberless Government institutions which took "it's never too late to spend" for their motto after the conclusion of hostilities, the War Office was not absolutely the most backward. Only by such formidable competitors as the Munitions Ministry, the Air Ministry, and, last but not least, the Office of Works did it apparently allow itself to be outpaced.

For relative prodigality during the course of the great emergency and after it was over, the Office of Works perhaps, upon the whole, took precedence over all rivals. Its prodigality was, to do it justice, tempered by extortion. Did the system of commandeering hotels and mammoth blocks of offices create new Departments of State? Or did the creation of new Departments of State precede the commandeering of the hotels and blocks of offices? Were the owners and occupiers of the blocks of offices paid for them, or were they bilked like the hotel proprietors? We know that householders were not only paid, but that they were in many cases preposterously overpaid. And the worst of it was that the Office of Works was not one of those _parvenu_ institutions, set on foot by Men of Business, which welled up so irrepressibly on all sides. It was not one of those _macédoines_ of friends of Men of Business, and of fish-out-of-water swashbucklers in khaki, and of comatose messengers, and of incompletely dressed representatives of the fair sex perpetually engaged in absorbing sweets. It was an old-established portion of the structure of State. A nomad offshoot of the War Office, such as that I was in charge of for the last two years of the war, which after quitting the parent building shifted its home three times within the space of twelve months, enjoyed somewhat unusual opportunities for sizing up the Office of Works.

In the matter of numerical establishment of its personnel, one Department of State with which I was brought a good deal into contact during the war, the Treasury, almost seemed to go into the opposite extreme from that which found favour in most limbs of the public service. If the guardians of the nation's purse-strings practically let the strings go during the early months of the contest, this may have been due to the effervescent personality of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer. But they took an uncommonly long time to recover possession of the strings. Was this in any way attributable to insufficiency of staff in times of great pressure? There was none of that cheery bustle within the portals of Treasury Buildings such as prevailed in the caravanseries of Northumberland Avenue after the Munitions Ministry had seized them; typewriters were not to be heard clicking frantically, no bewitching flappers flitted about, the place always seemed as uninhabited as a railway terminus when the N.U.R. takes a holiday.

The Treasury has ever, rightly or wrongly, been anathema to the professional side of the War Office. The same sentiments would appear to prevail amongst the sea-dogs who lurk in the Admiralty; for after my having a slight difference of opinion with the Treasury representative at a meeting of the War Cabinet one day, an Admiral who happened to be present came up to me full of congratulations as we withdrew from the battlefield. "I don't know from Adam what it was all about," he declared, "but I longed to torpedo the blighter under the table." But when one had direct dealings with the Treasury its officials always were quite ready to see both sides of any question, to take a common-sense view, and to give way if a good case could be put to them; moreover, when they stuck their toes in and got their ears back, they generally had some right on their side. Such feeling of hostility as exists in the case of the War Office towards the controllers of national expenditure housed on the farther side of Whitehall is perhaps to some extent a result of unsatisfactory internal administration on its own side of the street.

It is the manifest duty of the Finance Branch of the War Office to keep down expenditure where possible, to examine any new proposal involving outlay with meticulous care and critically, and to intimate what the effect will be in terms of pounds, shillings and pence supposing that some new policy which is under consideration should come to be adopted. But, once a point has been decided by the Army Council (the Finance Branch having had its say), that branch should fight the War Office corner "all out," and should regard itself as the champion, not of the Treasury but of the Department of State of which it itself forms a part. The Treasury, it should be mentioned, is treated entirely differently as a matter of routine from other outside institutions. Letters to it have to emanate from the Finance Branch, while letters to other Departments of State--the Colonial Office, say, or the Board of Trade--can be drafted and, after signature by the Secretary, despatched by any branch of the War Office concerned. This rule might perhaps be modified. A regulation should also exist that the Finance Branch must not despatch a letter to the Treasury concerning some matter in which another branch is interested, without that branch having been given an opportunity of concurring in the terms of the draft.

But no officials in any State Department probably were set a harder and a more thankless task during the war than were the staff of the Finance Branch of the War Office, and in spite of this its members were always approachable and ready to meet one half-way in an amicable discussion. They are also entitled to sympathy, in that the close of hostilities in their case has probably brought them little or no relief in respect to length of office hours and to weight of work. To revert to normal conditions in their case will probably take years. The grievance of the military side is that under existing conditions the financial experts are too much in the position of autocrats, when they happen to be recalcitrant on any point.

Who can that caitiff have been who abolished the plan of the soldier saluting with the hand away from the individual saluted? Travelling on the Continent before the war one was struck with one point in which our methods were superior to those abroad--in many foreign countries private soldiers had to salute non-commissioned officers in the streets, which must have been an intolerable nuisance to all concerned, and in all of them the soldier always saluted with the right hand instead of adopting the obvious and convenient procedure of saluting with the outer hand. There at least we showed common sense. The Army Council were, no doubt, responsible in their corporate capacity for abolishing the left-hand salute, but there must have been some busybody who put them up to it. Whoever he was, I wish that he had had to walk daily along the Strand for months (as I had) constantly expecting to be hit in the face or to have his cap knocked off by some well-intentioned N.C.O. or private trying to salute with the hand next to him in a crowd. Their contortions were painful to see. Had the War Office been guilty of such _bêtises_ when dealing with the things that really mattered during the struggle, they would have lost us the war. The reform was so inconvenient to all concerned that it may have helped to produce those untoward post-war conditions under which the men, if not belonging to the Guards, virtually abandoned the practice of saluting officers altogether in the streets of London.

Then, how about those red tabs? The expression "red tabs" is, however, employed rather as a shibboleth; staff-officers must be distinguished somehow when they are not wearing armlets, and were the tabs less conspicuous there would be no special harm in them. It is the red band round the cap that is so utterly inappropriate when imposed upon service dress. It ought to have been abolished within six months of the beginning of the war. General-officers and staff-officers who came under fire had to adopt a khaki valance to conceal their cap-band; they were to be seen going about in this get-up in the Metropolis when over on duty or on leave, and yet no steps were taken officially to assimilate their headgear to that of the ordinary officer. But for the red band and its distinctive effect, it is open to question whether officers performing every kind of special duty would have been so perpetually clamouring to be allowed to wear the red tabs. The practice of glorifying the staff-officer in his dress as compared with regimental officers is to be deprecated, although his turn-out should of course be, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion--to which I remember an exception when making first acquaintance with a staff I had come to join.

On reporting myself at headquarters at Devonport in the morning after arriving to take up an appointment a good many years ago, I learnt that there was to be no end of a pageant that afternoon. The British Association, or some such body, had descended upon Plymouth for a palaver. There was to be a review in Saltram Park on the farther side of the Three Towns so as to make sport for the visitors. The general was very keen on mustering as many cocked hats around him for the performance as could be got together, and he pressed me to borrow a horse somehow and to put in an appearance, proposing that I should ride out with him and the A.D.C. as, being a stranger, I would not know the way. So a crock was procured, saddlery was fished out of its case and polished up in frantic haste, and in due course we jogged out to the venue. On arriving in the park we found the garrison, reinforced by a substantial Naval Brigade which had been extracted from H.M. ships in harbour, drawn up and looking very imposing, while people from round about had gathered in swarms and their best clothes to witness the spectacle. As we rode on to the ground the Assistant-Adjutant-General came cantering up. "The parade's all ready for you, sir," he reported, "and everything's all correct--except the Assistant-Quartermaster-General. He, sir, is _in rags_." He was.

There was one broad principle, the truth of which was brought out very clearly during the course of our British campaigns between 1914 and 1919--the principle that commanders of brigades and divisions require to be young and active men. There were exceptions, no doubt; but the exceptions only proved what came to be a generally accepted rule. The old methods of promotion in the Army, methods which hinged partly on the purchase system and partly on the prizes of the service going by interest and by favour, were highly objectionable; but those methods did have the advantage that commanders in the field, whether they turned out to be efficient or to be inefficient, were at least fairly young in years as a rule. Wellington himself, and all his principal subordinates other than Graham and Picton, were well under fifty years of age at the end of the Peninsular War; Wellington was forty-five, Beresford was forty-six, Hill was forty-two, Lowry Cole was forty-two. Wolfe, again, and Clive, Amherst and Granby, the most distinguished British commanders of the eighteenth century except Marlborough, were all comparatively young men at the time when they made their mark. It was only in the course of the long peace that followed Waterloo that our general-officers as a body came to be well on in life--Lord Raglan at the beginning of the Crimean War was sixty-six, Brown was sixty-four, Cathcart was sixty--even if at a somewhat later date a prolonged course of small wars did produce a sufficiency of young commanders to go round for minor campaigns. It would seem advisable to reduce the limit of age for promotion to the grade of major-general from fifty-seven to fifty, and that for the grade of lieutenant-general from sixty-two to fifty-seven. The great obstacle in the way of a reform of this kind, as a rule, arises from the fact that the decision rests to a large extent in the hands of comparatively old officers, who do not always quite realize that they are past the age for work in the field. That is not so much the case now, so that it seems to be the right time to act.

The position of the General Staff within the War Office appears to be pretty well assured now. But it also appeared to be pretty well assured before the war; and yet there were those incidents of the non-existence of the high-explosive shell for our field artillery which nearly all foreign field artilleries possessed, and of Colonel Swinton's Tank projects being dealt with by a technical branch and the General Staff never hearing of it, which have been mentioned in this volume. The military technicalist, be he an expert in ballistics or in explosives or in metallurgy or in electrical communications or in any other form of scientific knowledge, is a very valuable member of the martial community. But he is a little inclined to get into a groove. He stood in some need of being stirred up from outside during the Great War, and he must learn that he is subordinate to the General Staff.

The old project of instituting a Ministry of Defence has cropped up again, very largely owing to the importance that aeronautics have assumed in war and to the anomalous position of affairs which the creation of an Air Ministry has brought about. Could aviation in its various forms be left entirely out of consideration in connection with defence problems, no case whatever could be put forward for setting up such a central Department of State. The relations between the sea service and the land service are on a totally different basis now from what they were when Lord Randolph Churchill, thirty years ago, proposed the establishment of a Ministry which would link together the Admiralty and the War Office, each of which was under his plan to be controlled by a professional head. It was in many respects an attractive scheme in those days. The departments that were respectively administering the Royal Navy and the Army were not then in close touch, as they are now; they badly required association in some form or other. But it has been found possible to secure the needed collaboration and concert between them without resorting to heroic measures such as Lord Randolph contemplated. The sea service and the land service generally worked in perfect harmony during the Great War--except in the one matter of their respective air departments. There was a certain amount of unwholesome competition between them over aeronautical material up to the time when one single air department was established late in 1917.

Aeronautics do unquestionably constitute a difficulty, and a difficulty which did not make itself apparent during the late conflict in quite the same form as it might in future wars. The Navy and the Army must both have air services absolutely under their control in peace and in war; but there is also, no doubt, immense scope for independent aeronautical establishments, kept separate from the righting forces on the sea and on land. Three more or less distinct air services, in fact, seem to be needed, and the question of equitable distribution of material between them at once crops up. Supposing all three to be administered, from the supply point of view, by an Air Ministry, this institution may show itself disposed to look better after its own child, the independent air service, than after its stepchildren, the naval and military air services. Were a Minister of Defence to be set up as overlord, he could act as impartial referee. But this one phase of our defence problems as a whole can surely be dealt with effectively without creating an entirely new Ministry, for the establishment of which no other good excuse can be put forward. The problem of preventing competition and rivalry in respect to material between the three branches of combatant aeronautics ought not to be an insuperable one, if firmly handled.

In this connection it may be observed that a certain confusion of ideas appears to exist in some quarters between a Defence Ministry co-ordinating naval, military and aeronautical questions, and an Imperial General Staff concerning itself with the sea, the land and the air. The two things are, and must always be, totally distinct. A Defence Ministry would in the nature of things be an executive institution. In the Empire as it is now constituted, an Imperial General Staff can only be a consultative institution. A General Staff in the ordinary meaning of the term is executive as well as consultative; it issues orders with regard to certain matters, and it administers certain military departments and branches. But so long as the Empire comprises a number of self-governing Dominions and has no common budget for defence purposes, the Imperial General Staff can only make recommendations and tender advice; it can order nothing.

Amongst the innumerable professional lessons taught by the experiences of the Great War, there is one which professional soldiers had learnt before it began, but which the public require to learn. This is that newly organized troops or troops of the militia type such as our Territorials of pre-war days, who necessarily have undergone little training previous to the outbreak of hostilities, do not make really effective instruments in the hands of a commander for a considerable period after embodiment. The course of events proved, it is true, that the individual soldier and officer can be adequately prepared for the ordeal in a shorter space of time than had generally been believed necessary by military men, and that they can be incorporated in drafts for the front within a very few months of their joining the colours. But that does not hold good with individual units. Still less does it hold good with collections of individual units such as brigades and divisions.

The records of the New Army, of the Territorials, of the improvised formations sent to fight by the great Dominions oversea, all go to show that such troops need to be broken in gradually after they take the field before they can safely be regarded as fully equal to serious operations. Our Allies' and our enemies' experiences were similar. We know from enemy works that, although the German "Reserve Corps" fought gallantly during the early months, they achieved less and suffered more heavily in casualties than would have been the case had Regular Corps been given corresponding tasks to carry out. It was the same with the French Territorial Divisions. The American troops proved fine fighters from the outset, but owing to lack of experience and of cohesion they took a considerable time before they pulled their weight; moreover, the larger the bodies in which they fought independently of French and British command, the more noticeable this was.

Certain regiments hastily got together on the spot from men who could shoot and ride and who knew the Boers and their ways, performed most distinguished service during the South African War, so much so, indeed, that an idea got abroad amongst civilians at that time that the need for the elaborate and prolonged training, which professional soldiers always insisted upon, was merely a question of prejudice. Happily those who were responsible for our Army organization and for its preparation for war knew better, and August 1914 proved that they were right. It was not merely due to the stubborn grit of their personnel that the "Old Contemptibles" carried out their retreat from Mons in face of greatly superior hostile forces with what was in reality comparatively small loss, and that they were ready to advance and fight again as soon as they got the word. It was also due to rank and file and regimental officers and staff knowing their business thoroughly. Had those five divisions been, say, New Army divisions just arrived at the front, or divisions such as landed under General Birdwood's orders at Anzac on the 25th of April, they would have been swept back in hopeless confusion. They would not have known enough about the niceties of the game to play it successfully under such adverse conditions. The framework would not have stood the strain.

The sedentary type of operations which for three years played so big a part in most theatres was, it must be remembered, particularly favourable to newly created formations. Mobile warfare imposes a much more violent test. When really active work is being carried on in the field by partially trained troops, the platoon may do capitally, the company fairly well, the battalion not altogether badly; but the brigade will be all over the place, and the division will be in a state of chaos. Whatever conditions future campaigns may bring forth, trench warfare is unlikely to supervene immediately, nor to be brought about until something fairly important has happened; and it will not continue to the end unless the result of the conflict is to be indecisive. In 1918 there was nothing to choose between British divisions which had had no existence in August 1914 and those which had fought as the point of England's lance at Le Cateau, on the Marne and on the Aisne. But wars will not always last four years. Nor will the belligerent who has to create entirely new armies to carry on the struggle always prove victorious in the end.

THE END

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