ARMIES OF BRITAIN.

Taranaki Daily News, 19 January 1917, Page 6

ARMIES OF BRITAIN.

HISTORY OF RECRUITING. (London Daily Telegraph). Many an immortal page in the history of the world v. ill bo consecrated to tiie ellort of England in this greatest of wars against the barbarian There cm be none more ama.'ing than that which tills of the levying and enlistment of our millions of fiuhtiug men from (he leas' military of European nations. The student of »var, enemy or friend, would have made onths two years ago that I ) think of the United Kingdom creating in the/shock and strain of war such armijs as those which now threaten the reeling po'-vei of Germain was mere mad delusion. Even yet the enemy ,\an hardly himself to believe that tiie overwhelming miracle has been wrought. But the armies are there in his trenches, and the hour of bis conviction draw* nearer. How great. is the achievement

liich, within two years, has magnified the military power of Britain tenfold, which has given lis armies of millions instead of armies to he counted by the hundred thousand, v.e who have watcher! the work done dav bj nay. who see only that little fraction affecting ourselves, can hardly vet realise. There i; 110 donbt that in the future it will be recognised bv the military historian as an example of national vigor and determination ir. war without precedent or- parallel.

We have now come to a sta«e in the struggle and in the progress of recruiting whence it is possible to take a survey of tiie growth of our armies, showing the various pharos in something 1 ik■_> their true-proportion. .Such a survey, guided by the authoritative information which has been placed at.pt:!' disposal, will be fomd of the deepest interest, and, what i< more to the purpose, rich 'n material for national confidence ar.d pride.

THE HALF-MILLION. Before we Itnew what a modern conflict of nations must be. it was supposed that if Armageddon ever were fought England's main task in support of her Allies of the Entente would be io enforce and maintain the command of the seven seas, and to supply the material of war from her deep purse and her highly organised industry. That rfie had,an army second to none Englishmen profoundly believed, out r,o one m Fn,aland or abroad expected her to produce an anv.y upon the Continental scale. In August, ]OIJ, the whole military forces in England, with the colors and in the restive. fully trained and partially trained, liable for foreign service, and only available for heme defence, amounted to no more than "00,000 men. Tin: Regular Army, counting ; n every class, reserves and special reserves, produced on mobilisation about 150,000 men. The Territorial Force, "■lnch couW not, except by men or bat. lalions volunteering, be employed overseas. could muster some 250,000. These men. however, eager to do their part, could not'be reckoned as fully trained. It was in the scheme of tilings that the

Territorials would require six months under arms before they ranked as firstline troops. Thus the paper total of ,"00.000 does not represent the number available to meet the shock of the German advance. Moreover, of this nominal 700,000, 100,000 and more were serving in India, or on other foreign stations. When Lord Kitchener took up the seals of the War Office he found that for the defence of the United Kingdom an.l for giving aid to our hard-pressed Allies 1,3 had at his disposal les3 than 000,000 men. more tVin half of whom were not fully trained. . We may or may not .be proud of ( it. but if ever a country gav<> pledges of ,if.j desire for peace that country was twentieth century England. From the first Kitchener believed that the war mu=l be a war of years, and not of months and with grim vigor lie acted on his belief. When wo rcmembei .the evcited optimism which in those clays svaved not only the masses, but many who had been trained to war and high politics, we may be inclined to reckon it a sigiial example of the historic good fortune of England that she had in her service the rare foresight, lie coiirr.geoiß judgment and the invincible energy of kitchener. His fiwi

fiction, cn goinjr to the War Office, was io Announce tlint the addition of IOO.OOn ' men to the Army was "immediatelv ! necessary." TJiey were to bp between ! the ages of nineteen and thirty, and they ' must enlist for "three years or the : duration of the war." The length an} i lasticity of the term caused a good ' many smiles. The theory that the struggle would be short and sharp was in favor with the export a? well as the layman. But those smiles are a queer memory in IIIIG. Kitchener decided that his recruits should not. bo brought into any of the old orcMiiUaUnin of the Tlogular Army, the Spesial I!e=orve or the Territorial Force, but enrolled in now formations called "Service Battalions." A second '•xpeditionary force was, to'corie into being behind (he old. But the -value of what the eld could teach was not forgotten. By attaching these Service Battalions to t lie Territorial regiments, t.) which the "Regular and Territorial Force battalions al>o belong, and numbering ihom consecutively after the old formation. the fcelins of unity, the traditions and spirit of the old Army were from the bejinmng implanted in tin Service ?attalior.s. That they can fight a..d di : not unworthily of that ."contemptible little army" which brol.e the first onset (f the barbarian at Mons and Le Cateau they have shown all the world in the lueii at Loos ai>d the steady advance on the Somme. THE FIRST lIUNDSED THOUSAND. Kitchener wanted 100,000 men to start with. Within a fortnight be found them. It was swiftly clear that the trouble would be not to obtain recruits, but to deal with them as they came. The rush to tV colors bad begun, indeed, before Kitchener issued bis appeal, before, he entered tin War ' Office. The officer in charge pf Great Scotland Yard, the principal recruiting office in London, has an odd story to tell of those early days. During the whole of Saturday, August 1, he recalls, he had attested only eight men. On August 2 and 3, Sunday and liank Holioay, his otiice was closed. When he came back early on the 4th be found it besieged by a seething mass of men eager to stem their way into the Army It'took him twenty mintucs and the desperate efforts , of twenty policemen to force his way into his own office, and he was attesting men as hard as he could all that day and for very many other Oays. But the experience of Scotland Yard was the experience of every requiting office in the kingdom. "Duke's son conk's son," men of all classes, married and single, childless and. with faiail-

ind loaders, crowded to the doors where tnce sergeants with persuasive tongues had cajoled to little purpose.

This wave of meii overwhelmed all organisation and machinery. Nobody ,n the War Oliice or out of it had dreamed of such a flood. Before the w|.r ouv Irtny expected to enlist 110 more than 30,tflf! men in a whole year, and it is to be confessed that the stalf and es•ablishnient of the recruiting department were hardly adequate to manage the &;• fairs cf even this unpretentious best. It is an cdrt example of tiie irony of circumstances that less than a month

;efore war broke, oui (here were auxins assemblies in Whitehall ('.(hating whether they could not find some le.-' 1 rdnous way of mustering and handling hose 30.000 per annum Four weeks ia;sod and the men and the system vliich had struggled inadequately with :heir .">O.OOO a year had to cope with nore than "0,000 a day. There \va" 'or a while "linos. But the enthusiasm tf the recruits refused .to be bafi'led >y a broken-down organisation, and be:ore long the organisation was re-es-.ablished upon an adequate scale.

The civilian cam? to the aid of the soldier. Zealous members of i'Krliavent'commissioned themselves with a scrap of paper in Lord Kitchener's hand, fled forth to their constituencies r.ivl began to break all the most red tape regulations. In one Midland city, il is related, the local member of his own autocratic notion removed the recruiting office from a room in a poky back street to the Town Hall, engaged eight civilian doctors to help the one struggling medical officer in his work of examination, printed locally the sacred army forms for recruits, with all the apparatus of seventeen elaborate questions, and, climax of daring, ordained that the bath, which in the old days of leisure every recruit had to enter, should be cut clean out of the rit|pl. But this heroic, reformer wns only one of ninny. From John o' Groats to Land's End provosts and mayors commandeered tlw largest halls which their towns contained, and mustered volunteers to help tho lccvuiting clerks,, who were struggling for breath in the sudden avalanche of forms, pay sheets, and other complicated documents. And volunteers were sore*/ needed. Wlion war broke out, some 50-) were employed on ltccniiting. At the j/rcscnt moment- the jepartment commands a staff of nearly 7000. But the local authorities die' not limit their help to filling up forms'. They improvised nuarters for the attested recruits, and organised the supply of food necessary during the hours or days which passed before the Army could find a depot for each new recruit.

250,000 IN ONE WEEPManv an ardent recruit had his ci.me to grumble ill thn.-c strenuous weeks, some may have lest for a while tlitir eagerness to serve, and it is probable that a few men who tried hard to be among the first ill the New Armies were allowed to slip through the too crowded hands of the recruiters. But there is lif. doubt that they were but a few. The general enthusiasm was more than enough to triumph over many rebuffs and a host of difficulties. The recruiting officers with their staffs, old and new, paid and voluntary, kept at their work day in day out, and night in and night out, too, so long as there were men at their doors. The time for mystery about their numbers has passed. In one week, the fifth of the war, the week which saw the first German onset hurled back, 175,000 men were enlisted fcr the regular Army alone. Many more went into the Territorial Force. If we include those rejected by the doctors, tho total number of men offering themselves to the Armv must have been in that one week little short of 250,000.

Within a month an Army of some half million had become an Army of a million and many more. That statement, precisely true in itself, quite fails to express the truth about the situation. For the ]ialf-iiiillios peaw wore not all in England, and of 'thoss who were in England not nil were wit.li the colors. So the War Office, called on at. a month's notice to feed, equip, and train these new Armies of far more than double the demands of peace time, was enmeshed in'difficulties. We should be cautious of exaggerating our unreadiness. Due preparations had been made in peace for the military '■establishments in prospect. Adequate reserves of material had been accumulated But the wave of recruits swept these reserves away as the tide blots out a child's sand castle. Shelter, food, clothing. equipment, arms, training ground':, instructors, officers —\ iiat there was of all these necessities was as nothing for the gathered battalions. Food, indeed, existed, but none of the other things were in Ife world at all. Even food could not be had in the right place and at the right time, in the lack- of any organisation""or collection and distribution. If the provision of clothing am 1 , equimncnt was difficult, the provision of arms seemed to he a task demanding miracles. Yet the supply of arms was a simple matter compared with the supply of drill-sergeants and instructor* Machinery can make rifles. But we have no machinery for making sioned officers. The raw recruit, however intelligent, however zealous, needed months of the training. Most of the officers and non-commissioned officers to whom the task of instruction should have fallen were at the front. If every one of them had been available they ■would have been ill too few for the newArmies. So before the work of making the recruit into a soldier could he begun the War Office had to discover instructors and drill-sergeants and put them lo the test.

END 0I« FIRST PHASE. A month after Kitchener's first cn.ll for men lie had more men than he kuc.v what to do with. Swarms of recruits for whom no proper provision could bo made wore obviously more waste of the national substance. And still more men crane in. Everybody now can see what ought to have been done. If some organiser with the gift of prophecy had, in the September of 1014, conceived and brought into use Lord Derby's group system, attested every man who came, and sent him back home to wait lis turn, the ardent enthusiasm of those first days of war might have given us cvorv man who can usefully bo taken for ilie Army.