Evelyn Charles Vivian

“ When actually at the firing point, a soldier is taught that he must “keep his rifle pointing up the range,” for accidents happen easily, and, in spite of the extreme caution of officers and instructors, hardly a year goes by without some accidental shooting to record. The wonder is not that this sort of thing happens, but that it does not happen more often, for, until a soldier has undergone active service and seen how easily fatal results are produced with a rifle, it seems impossible to make him understand the danger attaching to careless use of the weapon. ”

“ A brigade of infantry, consisting of four battalions, looks a perfectly uniform mass of men on, say, a service, dress parade, but intimate knowledge of the characteristics of the men in each battalion reveals a world of difference; each regiment has its own traditions, and each battalion differs widely from the rest in its methods of working, its way of issuing commands, and its internal arrangements. There is a standard of bugle calls for the whole Army, but practically every infantry battalion infuses a certain amount of individuality into the method of sounding the call. ”

“ Often, when it begins to be apparent that the enemy is nearly beaten, there comes the order to retire; one does not understand the order, but, with a sullen sense of resentment at it, retires, ducking at the whizzing of a shell, though not all the ducking in the world would avail if the shell were truly aimed at the one who ducks, or starting back to avoid a bullet that whizzed by—as if by starting back one could get out of the way of a bullet! ”

“ In the artillery there is more to learn than in the cavalry, for a driver has to learn to drive the horse he rides, and lead another one as well, while the gunner has plenty to keep him busy in the mechanism of his gun, its cleaning, and the various duties connected with it.
To the recruit the perpetual cleaning, polishing, burnishing, and scouring are naturally somewhat irksome; and it is not until a man has undergone the whole of his recruits’ training that he begins dimly to understand the extreme delicacy and fineness of the instruments of his trade—or profession. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a training school which, taken in the right way, brings out all that is best in a man, stiffens him to face the battle of life as well as the battles of military service, and strengthens self-confidence and self-respect. The men who are seen to have suffered in character during their military training are by no means examples from which one can cite the result of discipline and army work, for it is not the training that is at fault, but the inherent weakness of the men themselves. ”

“ One may count the Army in peace time as a great training school out of which men come moulded to a definite pattern, and yet retaining their individuality. But active service is a fire through which men pass, emerging on the far side purified of little aims to a greater or less extent, according to the material on which the fire has to work. ”

“ One hears of the magnificent defence maintained by the infantry; one hears of the brilliant exploits of the cavalry on the flank of the enemy; one hears also of the skill of the commander who moved the troops with such suddenness and disconcerted his enemy; but the work of the Engineers, who made these things possible, generally goes unrecognised outside military circles, and the Engineers themselves have to reap their satisfaction out of the knowledge of work well done. ”

“ In no one thing does this fact become so clear as the way in which the duty of orderly officer of the day is performed in the majority of units. It happens as a rule that a lieutenant performs his turn of orderly conscientiously and well; at times, however, it happens that a subaltern, impatient at the fiddling duties involved in the turn of orderly, regards complaints on the part of the men as trivial and annoying, neglects to see that real causes of grievance are properly remedied, and lays the foundations of deep dislike for himself on the part of the men of the unit. ”

“ The social standing of the majority of recruits joining the new army renders it ten times more true of the Army of to-day than of the Army of yesterday, that military training gives more than it demands, inculcates habits which, followed in after life, are invaluable, and makes a man—in the best sense of the word—of each one who joins its ranks.
One thing that officers and men alike in the new army should be made to realise is that the possession of a good kit carries one half of the way on active service—the things that carry the other half of the way are not to be purchased. ”

“ THE INTERNAL ECONOMY OF THE ARMY Given such a conscript army as can be seen in working in any Continental nation, there is a very good reason for keeping the rate of pay for the rank and file down to as low a standard as possible, for the State concerned in the upkeep of a conscript army puts all, or in any case the greater part, of its male citizens through the mill of military service, and not only puts them through, but compels them to go through. It thus stands to reason that, as the men serve by compulsion, there is no need to offer good rates of pay as an inducement to serve ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the Army, the man who dislikes his work has to pocket the dislike and go on with the work, while if his employers, the regimental authorities, have any fault to find with him, they do not express it by dismissal until various forms and quantities of punishment for slackness have been resorted to. The recruit gets far more punishments than the old soldier, for the latter has learned what to do and what to avoid, in order to make life simple for himself ”

“ Here the war correspondent makes the most egregious mistakes, for, untrained in military service himself, he takes the word of the man in the ranks—the man on the staff of army headquarters is far too busy and far too discreet to talk to war correspondents—and out of what the man in the ranks has to say the war correspondent makes up his story. Though the man in the ranks may believe his own story to be true, though he may tell of the operations as he conceives them, he may be giving an utterly false impression of what is actually happening. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The infantryman, on the other hand, has to prepare for barrack-room and kit inspections at all times; he has to wet-scrub and dry-scrub the floors, blacklead the table trestles and legs of forms, whitewash himself tired on articles which, to the civilian eye, appear already sufficiently coated with whitewash, pick grass off the drill ground, and carry out a host of orders which seem designed for his especial irritation, though in reality they are designed to keep him at work and prevent him from being utterly idle. ”

“ On the other hand, however, nations will maintain sufficient forces to enable them to insist on international justice; the threat of the sword will always form the final court of appeal from the decisions of any arbitration body, and, while this is so, a British army must always be maintained. The existence of primal human instinct is fatal to the idea of total disarmament; war may not come again, for that is a contingency with regard to which none can prophesy, but the fact remains that the best provision for peace is ample preparation against the chances of war. ”

“ In addition to this there is the pleasant sense of freedom engendered by life under canvas, and the access of health induced thereby. The soldier, in common with most healthy men, enjoys roughing it up to a point, and life in a musketry camp seldom takes him beyond the point at which enjoyment ceases. ”

“ If in time of peace the soldier considers a rifle carelessly, and even resents having to carry it about with him, he looks on it differently on service, knowing as he does that his life may depend on the quality of the weapon and his ability to use it at almost any minute of the day or night. The confirmed “grouser” of peace time, who will make a fuss over having to put twenty rounds of blank ammunition in his bandolier to go out on a field-day, will swing his three bandoliers of ball cartridges on to his person without a word of complaint, for he knows that he may need every round. ”

“ Not that there is any system of espionage in the Army, but the man who reaches the rank of colonel is, under the present conditions governing promotion, keen-witted, and in the dissemination of all kinds of news, from matter for legitimate comment to rank scandal, a military unit is about equivalent to a ladies’ sewing meeting. ”

“ The spirit of the British infantryman, with very few exceptions, consists mainly in his belief that he is a member of the best company in the very best battalion of infantry in the service. As for his particular arm of the service, he points with pride to the fact that he comes in from a march and gets to his food while the poor cavalryman is still fretting about in the horse lines, and he has no two sets of harness to bother about after a field day. ”

“ A recruit joins the army somewhere about the age of twenty—the official limit is from eighteen to twenty-five; it is evident that in his first year of service a man is at such a stage of muscular and mental growth as to render him capable of being moulded much more readily than in the later military years. It is best that he should be shaped, as far as possible, while he is yet not quite formed and set, and, though the process of shaping may involve what looks like an undue amount of physical exertion, it is, in reality, not beyond the capabilities of such men as doctors pass into the service. ”

“ Every man carries in his bandoliers 150 rounds of ammunition for his rifle—not a bit too much, when the rate of fire possible with the modern rifle is taken into account. But 150 rounds of ball cartridge is a serious matter when one has to carry it throughout the day, and, when active service opens, it is easy to understand why only really fit men are passed by doctors into the Army. So far as the rank and file are concerned, it is power to endure that makes the soldier on active service; bravery is needed, initiative is needed, but staying power is needed most of all. ”

“ Certainly the man who can shoot well is of greater value in the firing line than the one who shoots badly, but, apart from this, all men are called on to do the same duty, and the third-class shot, if normally treated, has as much to do, does it just as well, and is entitled to as much pay for it as the marksman. There can be no objection to a system which rewards good shooting, but that is an entirely different matter from penalising bad shooting, as is done at present. ”