NATIONAL SERVICE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 217, 1 February 1913, Page 2 (Supplement)

NATIONAL SERVICE

> ■•— ' (LORD ROBERTS REPLIES TO LORD HALDANE. The following letter by Lord Roberts appears in the London .Morning Post:— Sir,—You have recently given so generous a space to the subject of National' Service that I am reluctant to trespass on your columns by a single other line, but the speech of the Lord Chancellor, as reported in your issue of Saturday last, contains assumptions so misleading and assertions so wide of the fact that I am unable to permit them to pass unchallenged. Incidentally, Viscount Haldane's rebuking reference to the ignorance of strategy on the part of the pro- : moters of National Service must provoke 1 a smile from every experienced soldier, and force him to recollect that this is the same man who, a few years ago, spoke of a whole nation springing to arms on war being declared, and nobly preparing to submit itself to six months' training in order to meet the invading foe! Within half—even within a third of that period, that foe might have done his destructive work, broken an Empire to pieces, imposed a huge indemnity, and returned :n triumph to his own shores. And amongst the many mare's nests which Lord Haldane in his career as War .Minister has discovered, surely this "discovery" of the intimate connection between finance and naval and military strategy, which he gravely announced on Friday evening, is the quaintest and most orginal! At what period in human history has that connection not been only too obvious? Again, Lord Haldane talks loosely of the command of the sea as a profound strategical principle, but it is obvious, ; from the context of his speech and from the interpretations put upon it in the press, that he is thinking only of the North Sea and English Channel. But "the command of the seas" would be a much less misleading term, both to the amateur strategist and to the general ! Deader, and it is just this principle of our strategy, namely, the command of I the seas, that the National Service i League has firmly grasped and repeatedly inculcated. Tor the ocean is not only the highway to our scattered Empire, but, as a distinguished German admiral frankly pointed out a couple of months ago, the seizure of Egypt -or the command of the Mediterranean by tin alien Power could at any moment force England to her knees by starvation. To Great Britain's maintenance of this command a supreme navy is certainly the first essential. This we have never denied. Our contention is that such supremacy cannot be secured by a slight superiority in the number of our Dreadnoughts merely, but by the complete mobility of that navy itself. To permit that mobility an efficient army for Home defence is, we contend, indispensable. There is the crux of the whole matter. It is an error to lay excessive stress on the fact that England is an "island Power," As a factor in military defence > the phrase "island Power" varies with times and circumstances. Nearly every day that passes brings some new invention, which decreases the force of the words and narrows the already narrow seas environing us. What are we to think of the "profundity" of the strategy which ignores both these principles, and at the same time ignores the mutual inter-dependency of the Navy, the Expeditionary Army, and the Home Defence Army for their present efficiency whether in diplomacy or war? Again, I am at a loss to understand : by what, right Lord Haldane accuses the National Service League of insincerity and of not meaning what it says. The League has repeatedly demonstrated that at an additional expense of less than four millions an army adequate to undertake the home defence of these islands could easily be provided. It would be an army which at the same time would give perfect freedom of action to the Navy and to the Overseas Expeditionary Force. And the four millions they spent upon that army would be money well spent, whereas the three and a-half millions annually spent upon the Territorial Force, which, as T pointed out the other day, in spite of the utmost backing up by a partial Government, is a complete failure in discipline, numbers, equipment and energy, these three and a-half millions completely thrown away. By what right does Lord Haldane go behind the repeated statements of the League and to assert, or insinuate, that the adoption of our scheme of national service would really involve an outlay of from ten to fifteen millions per annum? Even allowing for the exigencies of political oratory, such distortions of fact seem excessive.

Xor can I too strongly deprecate Lord Haldane's identification of compulsory training with the Unionist party. The National Service League has throughout the ten years of its history striven to keep this question outside the heat and confusion of party politics, believine as we do that every man born within these islands—the inheritor of their freedom and the justice of their laws—has but to realise the graavity of the present situation to be willing to face his responsibilities and to be, prepared to defend that freedom and that justice in arms against any enemy. And we further believe that if the inhabitants of these islands once fully realised the tremendous task which invasion would impose upon the Territorial Force, and the sacrifices which, by the insufficiency of their training, these gallant fellows would be compelled to make—we are convinced that our countrymen—thus instructed in the truth at last—would be the mere exercise of English common sense, end this unhappy playing at war within twenty-four hours. In this new strategy of his, Lord Haldane appears to regard our second line as negligible or irrelevant, and I further observe that in all the mass of discussion which has followed my Manchester speech—whether on public platform or in the daily press—not a single attempt has been made to meet the several points of my indictment or the statistics set forth in the speech I made'at the Mansion House i n July last, upon ■which that indictment was based. In this letter I cannot even recapitulate those statistics; but in a matter of so much urgency and national importance I may be permitted to refer your readers to a small book which Mr. John Murray is publishing this week, wherethey will find a full'statement of those statistics as well as of my whole position in this crisis of our history.—-Yours etc ROBERTS, F.M. ''