THE ENGLISH ARMY SYSTEM.

Patea Mail, 2 October 1880, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE ENGLISH ARMY SYSTEM.

Mr. Trevelyan has once more renewed his attack upon our army system, a subject upon which ho has proved his consistency and patriotism by a refusal of ollice under the present government. It would seem as if Air. Trevelyan had much more accurately measured the reforming capacity of the Ministry than other Liberals who are supposed to feel as strongly, but who .are nevertheless now in ollice. Mr. Trevelyan on this occasion addressed his attention to the higher ranks of the array—to the generals and honorary colonels who do nothing except receive their pay and their pensions. Mr. Bright once incurred a good deal of odium by saying that he regarded the army .as “a gigantic system of out door relief for the aristocracy,” Mr. Trevelyan proved the truth of Mr. Bright’s words, and indeed nobody stood \ip to deny them. Wn have a peace establishment of 1 .’30,000 men at home, and 70,000 in India :

when to this establishment is put upon a war footing we have -10,000 men. To command this force we have 215 generals, 100 lieutenant-generals, and 2 12 major-generals, or 020 commanders of the highest ranks. Well, these 000 generals cost ns in one form or other just four tines as ranch as is paid for the command of the army of Prussia and Saxony, which numbers 000,000 men. The English stall’costs .£IO.OOO a-yoar; honorary colonelcies, .£203,500; salaries of oil leers employed in administration, .£28,000 ; full pay for general ollicors, 130,000; share of distinguished service money, .€15,000 ; retired generals of Artillery and Engineers, .£■17,000; half-pay oilicers with rank as generals, €50,000. The pay of general officers in the Indian army who are resident in England is to bo taken approximately at €210,000, and the sum paid to general officers in India, excluding brigadier-generals, is £70,000. These items make up a total of €781,540 a-year, just three and a-half times as much as the German army, in which the generals are limited to 150, all of them on the active list, which, with the retired list, makes up a sum of £220,000 per annum, for which sum the Germans get their soldiers led to victory—without Isandulas. If wo consider the difference of one-third in total of men, and deduct one-third of the cost from the German total, wo llnd that the cost of the higher ranks in the German array is about a fourth as much as it is with us. If wo impure who are the men taking the pay and pensions that go to make up the difference between €140,000 and €784,004, wo shall find Mr. Bright’s words completely justified. Mr. Trevelyan did not stop here. He asked the House of Commons to believe what at first appeared to be incredible when we come to ask what we are to get for our money. If we count that illustrious soldier, the Commander-iu-Chief, as a combatant, we have then just twenty general officers engaged in militaxy commands at home, fourteen on administrative duties, and seventeen actively employed in India, with twelve in the colonies. We have therefore sixty-three generals at work doing something for €784,000 a year. A

Prussian general out of the £220,000 a year costs £I4BO, bub a British, general costs £12,41--4 a year when be is employed ; others are idle. Are all these generals fit for duty ? Mr. Trevelyan, using the strongest language, said some of them were so incapable that they could not be entrusted with a brigade. We have 07 ‘generals’ on active service, but thirty-four of these are really colonels and lieutenantcolonels, who have been placed in command because the generals at home arc of no use. In point of fact, we pay for generals, and only get colonels—a proceeding about as sensible as if, instead of getting the services of a surveyor to superintend a great work, we pay for one, and then put up with a clerk of works. . To be a general now-a-days is not to be a man fib to command ; it is simply a certificate that the officer promoted is older than other people in a lower rank. It is merely a question of age and ra.uk : fitness has nothing at all to do with the matter. Mr. Trevelyan had an even worse feature to add to all this—the distribution of colonelcies, which were merely sinecures. The Comm-inder-in-(Jhicf has a salary of £llß2, and then lie gets £2OOO a year as honorary colonel of the Grenadier Guards; the military secretary has £ISOO a year, and £IOOO as honorary colonel; the adjutant has this sum too, in addition to a salary of £2OOO a year. It was impossible for Mr. Trevelyan to put a stronger case to the House of Commons; but liis seconder, Mr. Anderson, hit the blot. There was no chance of any reform so long as the Duke of Cambridge is Commandor-in-CJiief. Mr. Anderson cheerfully admitted the qualities of the duke ; but ho held that the duke belonged to the old school. Wc have got rid of the office of Lord High Admiral, once hold by a not A'ery brilliant prince ; and if all our lords and first lords have not been great sailors, they have at least avoided the blunders of the £ Lord High.’ Mr. Anderson [Jointed out that if there were honorary positions in the army, the best plan would bo to give them to the Duke of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales—without [jay, of course, for that is the true meaning of ‘ honorary.’ Of course, Mr. Anderson very much startled the military caste by his allusions to royal personages who were not there to reply. Lord Eustace Cecil thought the facts ought to be more carefully inquired into ‘ before inferences were made so publicly, and so invidiously to illustrious personages.’ Mr. Anderson might reply that he found the names of illustrious personages in blue-books ' containing the accounts in which the sums paid to the illustrious are carefully set down, and he only wished the illustrious persons to be content with the sums so set down. We have the assurance of General Burnaby that the Commauder-in-Cluef is absorbed in his duties, which we accept as true; and wo ask what time lias he left to devote to the Grenadier Guards, for the colonelcy of which lie receives ,22000 a year ? Whether the Commander-in-Clncf lias endeared himself to the army is a subject upon which the evidence is not likely to he acceptable from general officers. We are able ourselves to estimate how far the nation is disposed to trust the illustrious personage now at tho head of the army.

Mr. Childers actually condescended so far as to point out that there was a difference between Germany and .IDupland. Germany had no India. Well, nobody ever said that she had, but it has never been alleged that if we have an India that our officers pay their own expenses there and back out of the sum of .£7B 1,000. Mr. Childers might have added another difference—Germany has had no Isandula, and if she had undertaken to conquer Afghanistan, it is probable that she would have succeeded without any disaster at Cabul. Will Mr. Childers go so far as to say that we could have invaded a country as completely as Germany invaded France, with any number of our generals, and obtained results in a military point of view as some of the IdO generals of the Germans did?- Mr, Childers admitted anomalies, and promised to devote his attention to the subject—a safe Ministerial promise—and one which will, no doubt, be kept in a Ministerial sense. It is time that reform in the army commenced at the top. It is idle to talk of having GOO odd generals, of whom not more than half a dozen arc fit to 1 set a squadron in a field.’ When wc are in a real difficulty, wc want a man like Sir Garnet Wolsemy in two places at once. It is said that we have got some really good scientific officers, and wo hope that is so, but they are slow in appearing. Colonel Loyd Lindsay asked very pertinently whether men like Count Moltkc, General Blumentlul, and Sir Colin Campbo’l—-lie ought to have called old Colin, Lord Clyde—were to be dismissed because they were old. Well, if there is an officer who studios his profession as Count Moltke does at his age, we say no. The battles fought and won by our veterans are principally battles at whist, and their judgment is much better upon a bottle of port than upon a campaign. Mr. Trevelyan has only to persevere, and even Mr. Childers must give way upon two points—the number of men on the active list, and the sums paid in pensions to men who have never clone anything. Beyond this reduces the army to ‘ a system of out-door relief’ for the ‘upper ten.’

THE CTJPIOUS EPISODE DURING THE POUSCirKINE COMMEMORATION.

The statue erected to the Russian poet Pouschkine has been unveiled at Moscow with great ceremony, amid enthusiastic cheers from a large crowd present. At six in the evening of the 27th January, 1837, the ‘dvornik,’ or horso-portcr, of a mansion in St. Petersburg, assisted by a valet-dc-chambre, carried upstairs to his apartments, where his wife and children were awaiting his return, a dying man. Tliis was a noble Russian gentleman, an employee in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the editor of a periodical called ‘The Contemporary.’ He had been shot through the breast that self-same evening in a duel. When the mortally-wounded man had readied the door of his room he turned to his faithful servant, and murmured, ‘lt makes thee sad to bear mo thus.’ He had been brought homo from the scene of tho encounter by his second, and old school-fellow, Colonel Danzas. They laid the patient, on a sofa ; doctors were sent for, and ice was applied to his wounds. At ten o’clock arrived one of his fastest Iriends, the famous Joukovsky, who had just been apprise! of tho terrible tidings by the Princess Viazemsky. Prince Viazemsky himself, and Prince Mitchershy were in the cabinet adjoining the wounded man’s chamber. They shook their heads, and told Joukovsky that there was no hope. The chief anxiety expressed by the patient when his friends joined him was that his wife should not bo told what had happened. But it was necessary to toll her. Tho poor lady was led to his bedside, and his little children were brought to him, half asleep, from their cradles. Ho lingered yet some 30 hours in intense agony. On the second morning, after casting a look of affection upon the books on his sli ol ves, saying, ‘ Pave well, dear old friends,’ he turned to Count Vielgorski, who, with MM. Dahl and Tourgniuief, stood by him, and said, ‘ Lift me up —higher, higher.’

His friends raised him; and then, as Joukoysky writes, a ‘ kind of splendour came over his face. Ho seemed to wake, and in a clear voice said, ‘My life is over.’ ’

‘ You have been brought back to life,’ exclaimed Dahl.

‘My life is finished,’ repeated the patient, and in a moment he urns dead. £ Wo read in his countenance,’ continued Joukovsky, ‘the development of grave yet amazed thoughtfulness—of a vision of perception, profound, entire, radiant. Wo felt inclined to ask him, ‘ What secst thou, friend Y ’

‘ Tims died, in tho :38th year of his age, Alexander Pousehkine, tho greatest poetic genius that the frigid regions of the Korth have produced. It is strange to learn that at the dinner which took place in the city of tho Kremlin to celebrate the inauguration of IV-usch-kine’s statue, ah Katkoff, the weilknown editor of the ‘ Moscow Gazette,’ .should twice have proposed as a. sentiment ‘To unity and concord anmna all whoaio devoted to Russian literaturo. May old strifes ho forgotten an I forgiven !’ and that not a single gneu, should have raised his grass in response to the toast. Every Russian must or should ho proud of the glory of Pousehkine; hut the jealousies, the controversies, and the evil passions, both of a literary and political nature, hy which throughout his career he was environed and persecuted, have not perhaps been wholly interred with his bones. As a politician his record is an equivocal one. ("ionic half seditious satirical epigrams and •'chansons,’ and an ‘ Ole to Liberty’ had been the means of his condemnation to long and bitter years of exile, first at Kischenolf in Bessarabia, and next in his own paternal estate at ?»likhnilovskoi, in the Government of Pskof. Had it not been, indeed, for the kind intercession of Count Capo dTstrio, with General Miloradovich, the stern Governor of St. Petersburg, tho youthful and insubordinate poet would probably have been transported to Siberia. Tho abortive insurrection of 1825, in which many of Pouschlcine’.s closest friends were implicated, came upon him in his remote solitude at Mikhailovskoi like a thunderbolt. He took post, and travelled some versts towards the capital, but at the first relay prudence got the better oi valour, lie had no idea of being a martyr. Ho burnt his memoirs, or as much of his correspondence as might possib.y compromise him, and did not. subsequently exhibit any especial ardour in favour of revolutionary doctrine.;. Pousehkine was summoned to Moscow to bo presented to the new Emperor, who received him most graciously cancelled hi; decree of exile, and told the poet that, in future, tho only censor of his writings would be the Sovereign himself. Nicholas, conversing the same day with. Count PloudoT, observed that he had just been talking to ‘the cleverest man in Russia.’ So M. Pousehkine returned to St. Petersburg, re-appointed to Lis post at tho Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with a salary of 5000 roubles a year, to he lionised in society and petted by ladies of fashion, to b? married to be outwardly happy and prosperous, but to get shot in a duel arising out of the most wietched of squabbles.