OUR HIGHER COMMANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 May 1916, Page 3

OUR HIGHER COMMANDS.

BRAINS, NOT BRAVERY, WANTING. "I have never heard anyone in France suggest that the British officer is lacking in bravery," writes Mr. 13. A. Powell, ''but I have often lieard it intimated that he is lacking in brains." According to Mr. Powell, "the patronising youngsters who officered the new army" combined a deficiency of technique with a certain air of condescension which was extremely galling to the skilled Trench officers whom they honored with their observations. Mr. Powell is an American, but his opinion of some of the new army officers is not more caustic, than that of Capt. Cecil Battinc, who writes in the Nineteenth Century for March: "No one who has studied the events of the present war, and who appreciate the relative value of German soldiers and theii opponents, can doubt that the German victories are entirely due to their method of selecting leaders, to the prestige of their officer corps, and to the excellence of their machinery for command. Conversely, the failures at Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Siivla Bay were due to our inferiority in this all-important respect." Fortunately, time exercises a curative influence. Since Loos and Suvla, and since Mr. Powell wrote, the new armies have seen much service, and according to Captain Battine, "by now it should he possible to choose from among the senior regimental officers the promising leaders who have demonstrated their superiority in the war, and 'without doubt this has been done to an important extent." By means of the new armies, many newly-made officers soared above regular officers who had seen fifteen or twenty years' service all over the world. Here is an astounding anomaly: "Innumerable instances have occurred of officers reaching the highest regimental ranks while serving in training camps at Home. On the other hand, many officers who have endured the strain of two winter campaigns in the trenches are still lieutenants. , , . The result has necessarily damaged the array as a fighting machine. Even the occasional peeps behind the curtain afforded by the official despatches of Neuve Chapelle, Loos and Suvla Bay prove the point. The private testimony of hundreds of officers who return from the front leaves no doubt upon the' subject.'' This pushing of the new officers above the old might not be so damaging to the Army if the new officers had been carefully selected. But Captain Battine states: "The crowd of young men of unknown antecedents who were suddenly given the authority of officers over ■their companions by hazard, or because they asked for it, or because they had not enlisted, or because they knew some commanding officer, have not proved an unqualified success. Although the majority have zealously tried to learn their duties, a. dangerously large proportion have been found wanting, and the Criminal Courts continue to show up cases where commissions were given without the slightest enquiry as to the fitness of the recipient." The difficult of finding officers for the now army "would have been very great even if the old army had been the best of all possible schools fer the purpose of instructing officers. Unfortunately (adds Captain Battine I that was not the case. Promotion to the highest ranks certainly had not depended on any single one consideration, but so far as professional merit had influenced •the choice, the qualities sought for were entirely those of an administrative order. Tactical skill was entirely ignored. Strategy, the statesmanship' of war, knowledge of the world, of the resources ,of our own country and of other countries, and th,. Understanding of foreign aimies were never sought for in the aspirant to high office. The elect were administrative officials who could, with a minimum of trouble to Headquarters, carry on the time-honored but obsolete routine of the British War Office. Out oi the second best of the. men promoted on this system of elimination, the «enerals and General Staff of the Army winch set out to chastise iPrussianisin had to be built up. Not onlv had there been no incentive in the British service to cultivate the knowledge, the character, the habit of thought, and the technical skill required bv the leader of a modern army, but there had been a systematic discouragement to anythiii" of the kind. The heads of departments did not wish any of their junior officers to know more of such matters than themselves, and it was literally impossible to know less,"