Читать книгу The British Army from Within - Evelyn Charles Vivian - Страница 3

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On the badges of the corps of Engineers, and also on those of the Royal Artillery, will be found the word “Ubique,” but it is a word that might just as well be used with regard to the whole of the British Army, which serves everywhere, does everything, undergoes every kind of climate, and gains contact with every class of people. In this respect, the British soldier enjoys a distinct advantage over the soldiers of continental armies; he has a chance of seeing the world. India, Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, Mauritius, and the Mediterranean stations are open to him, and by the time he leaves the service he has at least had the opportunity of becoming cosmopolitan in his tastes and ways—of becoming a man of larger ideas and better grasp on the problems of life than were his at the time when he took the oath and passed the doctor. Of that phase, more anon.

It is of little use, in the present state of the British Army, to attempt to define its extent or composition, for it is in such a state of flux that the numbers of battalions, regiments, and batteries of a year ago are as obsolete as the Snider rifle. There used to be 157 battalions of infantry, 31 regiments of cavalry, and about 180 batteries of horse and field artillery, together with about 100 companies and 9 mountain batteries of Royal Garrison Artillery, forming the principal strength of the British Army. To these must be added the Royal Engineers, the Army Service Corps, the Royal Ordnance Department, the R.A.M.C., the Army Pay Corps, and other non-combatant units necessary to the domestic and general internal working of an army. To-day these various forces are increased to such an extent that no man outside the War Office can tell the strength of infantry, cavalry, and artillery; no man, either, can tell what will be the permanent strength of the Army on a peace footing, when the present urgent need for men no longer exists, and there is only to be considered the maintenance of a force sufficient for the garrisoning of colonial and foreign stations and for ordinary defensive needs at home.

Generally speaking, the soldier at home, no matter to what arm or branch of the service he belongs, undergoes a continuous training. It takes three years to make an infantryman fully efficient, five years to make a cavalryman thoroughly conversant with his many duties, and five years or more to teach a gunner his business. The raw material from which the Army is recruited is mixed and sometimes uneducated stuff, and, in addition to this, recruits are enlisted at an age when they must be taught everything—they are past the age of the schoolboy who absorbs tuition readily and with little trouble to his instructors, and they have not attained to such an age as will permit them to take their work really seriously. This, of course, does not apply to a time of great national emergency, when the men coming to the colours are actuated by the highest possible motives, eager to fit themselves for the work in hand, and bent on getting fit for active service in the shortest possible time. In times of peace, recruits join the colours from many motives—pure patriotism is not a common one—and, in consequence, the hard realities of soldiering in peace time disillusion them to such an extent that they are difficult to teach, and thus need the full term of training for full efficiency. Half the work of their instructors consists in getting them into the proper frame of mind and giving them that esprit de corps which is essential to the war fitness of a voluntary army.

At the best, there is much in the work that a soldier is called on to do which is beyond his understanding, in the first years of his service. One consequence of this is that he learns to do things without questioning their meaning, and thus acquires a habit of obeying; this, up to a few years ago, was the object of military training—to instil into the soldier unquestioning obedience to orders, and the sentence—“obedience is the first duty of the soldier,” gained currency and labelled the soldier as a mere cog in a great machine, one whose duty lay in obeying as did that Roman sentinel at Pompeii. One of the chief lessons of the South African war, however, was that such obedience was no longer the first duty of the soldier; he must obey, no less than before, but scientific warfare demands an understanding obedience, and not the unquestioning, die-at-his-post fidelity of old time. The recruit of to-day must be taught not only to obey, but to understand, and by that fact the work of his instructors, and his own work as well, are largely increased. “Obedience” was the watchword of yesterday. “Obedience and initiative” is the phrase of to-day.

To come down to concrete facts as regards the actual composition and general duties of the Army. The main station in England is Aldershot, headquarters of the first Army Corps. Theoretically, in all cases of national emergency, the Aldershot Command is first to move, and the units composing it are expected to be able to mobilise for active service at twenty-four hours’ notice. Next in importance are Colchester, Shorncliffe, York, and Bulford—the centre of the Salisbury Plain area under military control. In Ireland the principal stations are Dublin and the Curragh. In these stations, under normal circumstances, the furlough season begins at Christmas time and lasts up to the following March; for this period men are granted leave in batches, and drill and training for those who remain in barracks while the others take their holidays is somewhat relaxed. Serious training begins in March, when the corporals, sergeants, and troop and section officers begin to lick their squads, sections, and troops into shape. Following on this comes company training for the infantry, squadron training for the cavalry, and battery training for the artillery, and this in turn is followed by battalion training for infantry, regimental training for cavalry, and brigade training for artillery. Somewhere during the period taken up before the beginning of regimental and battalion training, musketry has to be fitted in, and, as the ranges cannot accommodate all the men at once, this has to be done by squadrons and companies, while those not engaged in perfecting their shooting continue with their other training. At the conclusion of the training of units—regiments, battalions, and brigades of artillery—brigade and divisional training is begun, and then manœuvres follow, in which the troops are given opportunities of learning the working of an army corps, as well as getting practical experience of camp life under conditions as near those obtaining on active service as circumstances will admit. By the time all this has been completed, the furlough season starts again, and the round begins once more with a few more recruits to train, a few old soldiers missing from the ranks.

In addition to the regular course of training that lasts through the year and goes on from year to year, there are various “courses” to be undergone in order to keep the departmental staff of each unit up to strength. Thus, in the infantry, signallers must be specially trained, and pioneers, who do all the sanitary work of their units, must be taught their duties, while musketry instructors and drill instructors have to be selected and taught their duties. Each unit, except as regards medical service and a few things totally out of its range of activity, is self-contained and self-supporting, and thus it is necessary that it should train its own instructors and its own special men for special work, together with understudies to take their places in case of casualties. The cavalry trains its own signallers, scouts, shoeing smiths, cooks, pioneers, and to a certain extent medical orderlies. The artillery does likewise, and in addition keeps up a staff of artificers to attend to minor needs of the guns—men capable of repairing breakages in the field, as far as this is possible. Wherever horses are concerned, too, saddlers must be trained to keep leather work in repair.

The Engineers, a body of men who seldom get the recognition their work deserves, have to train in telegraphy, bridge-building, construction and demolition of all things, from a regular defensive fortification to a field kitchen, and many other things incidental to the smooth working of an army in the field. Departmental corps, such as the Army Service, Army Ordnance, and R.A.M.C., not only train but exercise their functions in a practical way, for in peace time an army must be fed, equipped, and doctored, just the same as in war—except that in the latter case its requirements are more strenuous. The ancient belief entertained by civilians to the effect that the Army is a profession of laziness is thoroughly exploded as soon as one passes through the barrack gates, for the Army as a whole works as hard as, if not harder than the average man in equivalent stations of civilian life.

In foreign and colonial stations, the work goes on just the same, as far as limitations of climate will permit. In “plains” stations in India, the heat of the summer months renders training during the day impossible, and men get their work over, for the most part, in the very early morning, or in the cool of the evening. Malta and Gibraltar are subject to the same limitations in a lesser degree, as is South Africa, while Mauritius and minor colonial stations have their own ways. But, no matter where the unit concerned may be, it works—fitness is dependent on work, and no unit is allowed to get rusty, while the variety of work involved prevents men from getting stale.

At the same time, there is plenty of relaxation and sport as well as work in the routine of military life. Set a battalion down in a new station, and the chances are ten to one that on the evening of their arrival the men will be kicking a football about. Each company and squadron, and each battery of artillery as well, has its own sports fund and sports club, which keeps going the national games in the unit concerned. Men work hard and play hard, and their play is made to help their work. Infantry units organise cross-country races which help enormously in maintaining the men in fit marching condition; cavalry units get up scouting competitions and other sporting fixtures based on work—to say nothing of tent pegging, lemon cutting, and other forms of military sport of which the Royal Military Tournament annually affords examples, while shooting ranges form fields for weekly competitions at such times as they are not in use for annual musketry courses.

The actual composition of the various units composing the British Army differs from that of continental armies, the only units of strength which are identical being those of the army corps, and the division, which is half an army corps. The next unit in the scale is the brigade, which is composed of three batteries of field or two of horse artillery, three regiments of cavalry, or four battalions of infantry. A division is made up of brigades, which vary in number and composition according to the work which that particular division will be expected to accomplish—there is a standard for the composition of the division, but changes now in process of taking place in the composition of the whole army render it unsafe to quote any standard as definite. A normal division, certainly, is composed of cavalry, artillery, and infantry in certain strengths, together with non-combatants and supply units making up its total strength to anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men.

The unit of strength in which figures become definite is the brigade of artillery, the regiment of cavalry, and the battalion of infantry. The peace strength of each of these units may be regarded, as a rule, as from 10 to 20 per cent. over the war strength, and the war strength is as follows:

For cavalry, a regiment consists of about 620 officers and men of all ranks; this body is divided into three service squadrons, each of an approximate strength of 160 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, the remainder of the strength of the unit forming the “reserve squadron,” devoted to the headquarters staff—the commanding officer and administrative staff of the regiment, as well as the “pom-pom” or one-pounder quick-firer, of which one is included in the establishment of every cavalry regiment. In this connection it is probable that the experiences of the present European war will lead to the adoption of a greater number of these quick-firers, and in future each cavalry regiment will probably have at least two “pom-poms” as part of its regular equipment. The possession of these, of course, involves the training of a gun crew for each weapon—a full complement of gunners and drivers.

For artillery, a brigade is divided into three batteries, each of an approximate strength of 150 men and six guns (the artillery battery corresponds to the cavalry squadron and to the infantry company) and, in addition, one ammunition column, together with transport and auxiliary staff, making up a total of about 600 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men. This refers to the field artillery, which forms the bulk of the British artillery strength, and is armed with 18½-pounder quick-firing guns. The Royal Horse Artillery is armed with a lighter gun, and is used mainly as support to cavalry in single batteries. It is so constituted as to be more mobile and capable of rendering quicker service than the R.F.A. Horse artillery is hardly ever constituted into brigades, as is the field artillery. Horse artillery, again, has no counterpart in the armies of Continental nations, so far as mobility and quality of armament are in question.

Infantry reckons its numbers by battalions, of which the war strength is approximately 1010 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men per battalion. Each battalion is divided into four double companies, the “double-company system” having been adopted in order to compensate for a certain shortage of officers. The double company may be reckoned at 240 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, roughly, and the remainder of the total is taken up by two maxim-gun sections and the headquarters staff of the unit. As in the case of the cavalry “pom-pom,” it is more than likely that the number of maxims or machine-guns per battalion will be increased, as a result of the experiences gained in the present Continental war.

Engineers and departmental units are divided into companies of varying strengths, according to the part they are called on to play when the division is constituted. Thus it is self-evident that an average division will require more Engineers, who do all the field work of construction and demolition, than it will Army Ordnance men, who attend to the equipment of the division—fitting out with clothing, provision of transport vehicles, etc. The number of men of departmental corps allotted to each division in the field varies with the strength of the division and with its distance from its base of supplies.

There is a permanent and outstanding difference between the British Army as a whole and any Continental army as a whole. In the case of the Continental army—no matter which one is chosen for purposes of comparison, the conscript system renders it a part of the nation concerned, identifies the army with the nation, and incidentally takes out the element of freedom. A man in a conscript army is serving because he must, and, no matter how patriotic he may be, there are times when this is brought home to him very forcibly by the discipline without which no army could exist. In the British Army, on the other hand, the men serving are there by their own choice; this fact gives them a sense that the discipline, no matter how distasteful it may be, is a necessity to their training—by their enlistment they chose to undergo it. But the British Army, until the present war linked it on to the man in the street, was not a part of the nation, but a thing distinct from the nation; it was a profession apart, and none too enviable a profession, in the opinion of many, but something to be avoided by men in equivalent walks of civilian life.

There are advantages as well as disadvantages in the voluntary system by which our Army is raised and maintained. As an advantage may be set first the spirit of the men; having enlisted voluntarily, and ascertained by experience that they must make the best of it or be considered utterly worthless, men in a voluntary army gain a spirit that conscripts can never attain. They are soldiers of their own free will, with regimental traditions to maintain, and practice has demonstrated that they form the finest fighting body, as a whole, among all the armies of the world. On the other hand, they have no political significance, and are but little understood, as regards their needs and the constitution of the force to which they belong. In France, for instance, the rule is “every citizen a soldier,” and it is a rule which is observed with but very few exceptions. The result is that every citizen who has been a soldier is also a voter, and in the matter of army requirements he votes in an understanding way, while the British voter, with the exception of the small percentage who have served in the Army, is as a rule unmoved by Army needs and questions. To this extent the Army suffers from the voluntary system, though the quality of the Army itself under present voluntary conditions may be held to compensate for this. It is doubtful whether it does compensate.

Further, the voluntary system makes of life in the ranks a totally different thing from civilian life. In conscript armies the discipline to which men are subjected makes their life different from that of their civilian days, but not to such an extent as in the voluntary British Army. The civilian can never quite understand the soldier; Kipling came nearer than any other civilian in his understanding, but even he failed altogether to appreciate the soldier of to-day—perhaps he had a better understanding of the soldier of the ’eighties and ’nineties, before the South African war had come to awaken the Army to the need for individual training and the development of initiative. However that may be, no man has yet written of the soldier as he really is, because the task has been usually attempted by civilians, to whom the soldier rarely shows his real self. Soldiers have themselves given us glimpses of their real life, but usually they have specialised on the dramatic and the picturesque. It is necessary, if one would understand the soldier and his inner life, that one should have a grasp of the monotony of soldiering, the drill and riding school, the barrack-room routine, and all that makes up the daily life, as well as the exceptional and picturesque.

In the following chapters, showing as far as possible the inner life of the Army from the point of view of the soldier, an attempt has been made to show the average of life in each branch of the service. Exceptions occur: the quality of the commanding officer makes all the difference in the life of the unit which he commands; again, apart from the influence exercised by the personality of the commanding officer, that of the company or squadron officer is a very potent factor in the lives of the men under his command. The British Army, fine fighting machine though it is, is not perfect, and there are instances of bad commanding officers, bad squadron and company officers, just as there are instances of superlatively good ones. Between these is the influence exerted by the mass on the mass, from which an average picture may be drawn.

That picture is the portrait of the British soldier, second to none.