CHILDREN-IN-ARMS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 160, 17 July 1942, Page 4

CHILDREN-IN-ARMS?

A Devastating Critic Of Ihe Army With A Constructive Purpose So tar, the war has produced no songs that every soldier sings, and almost no books, big or little, that every soldier talks about. But such a book has now appeared: "Bless ’Em All," by an Australian who hides behind the pen-name "Boomerang." We referred to it briefly in last week’s leading article. Now we give ourselves space to quote more freely.

S we said last week, Bless ’Em All is an irreverent book written with a reverent purpose. The author begins with the bald statement that the British Army is a bad one, and plunges at once into the reasons why. He sweeps aside the usual excuse that the army has been badly equipped. "The R.A.F. was let down en the supply side much more badly than the Army; our airmen had every reason to sit down and moan that they had not been given the ’planes necessary for fighting the Germans: yet in September, 1940, they went up in their meagre squadrons and won the Battle of Britain. In June, 1940, the Navy suddenly found itself with far fewer ships than it needed; the French Fleet was no longer its ally, the

w Italian Flect had beccme its enemy, and Hitler had acquired the use of every ship-building yard cn the coast of Europe. In spite of this dramatic dangerous shift of the naval .balance,

the Navy won the LDattle of the Atlantic. These are tangible victories to set against the Army's definite defeats. They bear out the general impression that the R.A.F and the Navy are far more efficient than the Army." The reasons of this greater efficiency he discusses at some length, admitting that he exaggerates, but driving home his points in paragraphs like this: "An incompetent admiral will run his ship on the rocks. An incompetent squadron-leader will crash his ’plane. A sailor or an airman has to be capable of mastering practical aeronautics and navigation, of conquering the sea or the sky, if he is to survive. He has to fight a successful battle against the power of the elements ‘and the force of gravity before he can even get within fighting distance of the enemy. The soldier has no such inexorable intelligence tests to pass.

There are no simple natural catastrophes to kill off incompetent colonels." Why Is the Army Funny? A little later he is asking why the Army, and never the Navy or the Air Force, is always funny: " When Low created his great comic character, he christened him Colonel Blimp; it would have been unthinkable to call him Admiral Blimp or Wing Commander Blimp. Nobody would laugh at a stupid admiral who was hazy on the pringiples of modern navigation and regretted the passing of sailing ships. Or at the wing-com-mander who did not understand how a machine which wads heavier than air could fly, and thought chat balloons would be better. But everybody accepts as a stock figure of fun-and of fact-the colonel who knows nothing of modern war, who regrets that cavalry should give way to tanks. who thinks the bayonet a more -gentlemanly weapon than the submachine gun, and doesn’t want to give Tommy-guns to soldiers anyhow because they can’t be taught to do arms drill with them." ;

And then, in case we should thinks that he is either an irresponsible joker or a man with a grouse, he adds a few pages later: "Consider mothers-in-law. You will hear plenty of stock jokes about them in general. You will hear plenty of husbands grousing about their own in particular. But the joking and the grousing do not mean that mothers-in-law do not exist. Qn the contrary, they prove that they exist as a serious problem, that it is very difficult to be a good mother-in-law, and that many mothers-in-law are a source of. friction in the family. In the same way, I believe the jests and grumbles about the Army indicate that there are things seriously wrong with it. These things are not irremovable, like mothers-in-law; so there is no need, in their case, to make the best of them: to let off steam by the traditional English methods of turning a serious problem into a joke or @

grouse. We can realise the advantage of the English character, we can applaud joking and grumbling as excellent safety-valves, which save the boile. from bursting and the engine from going off the rails. But we can remember that safety-valves can be too good; if too much steam is let off through them, the engine will never get anywhere." Wrong End of the Stick On the question of military and civilian morale, he insists that the authorities are holding th> v-rong end of the stick-that it is not the public who require constant attention but the

bored and bewildered legions in camp. More than once we have this note: "Tt is always the custom in Britain to assume that the morale of the troops is excellent, and to act on the assumption that the morale of the civilians is not. Any hint, any suggestion, that the morale of the Army is not tip-top high, any argument that it needs careful concern, is regarded as the shocking seditious burbling of a slanderous scoundrel. On the other hand, civilian morale is the constant preoccupation of the authorities. It is the civilian, not the soldier, who receives stirring exhortations from the newspapers calling on him to be bloody, bold, and resolute, to square his shoulders, set his teeth, clench his fists, stiffen his sinews, summon up his blood, hold up his head, gird up his loins, pull up his socks. The Press provides uplift for his morale, the radio sustains it. The Ministry of Information watches over it with tender care, and takes tests at regular intervals of public opinion all over the country to make sure the patient is keeping up his strength."

"As Simple As A Baby's" But everything that we have quoted so far is tame. The burden of his story is that the army treats men as children and spends precious hours teaching them | things that they don’t greatly require to know. In the end they become children: "T have found little harsh or brutal about my life: it is simply childish. Joining the Army is the nearest possible approach to obeying the Biblical injunction to be born again. A soldier-in-arms is the nearest thing on earth to a child-in-arms. Your way of life has the simplicity of a baby’s. Everything is arranged for you. The time you get up, the clothes you wear, the hours you work, and the hours you play, the time you are sent to bed at night, tired out by simple bodily fatigue, to sink into the sweet, sodden slumber of childhood. You delight in bodily health: you pass again through your boyhood stage of

Narcissism as the muscles grow on your body in the P.T. class, You enjoy simple excitements like riding on lorries, or paddling round a muddy gun-site with great big gumboots on. You revel in schoolboy jokes about sex. You feel your mental age falling lower and lower. Your brain shrinks. The cares of the years, the worries of a grown-up man with a wife and family to support, slip from your shoulders, and you become immersed in a thousand petty problems and pleasures, trials and triumphs."

This, he thinks, is bad enough. But sven children can be taught intelligently. They can be encouraged by proficiency prizes: "The work we had to do was intensely interesting: A.A. gunnery is a fascinating science, with something in it to appeal to everyone: our gun-site was the first to use radio locators, one

of the _ greatest marvels of this war. The prize offered for doing our work well seemed self -evident; the protection from the enemy bombs of our own homes, our wives and our children. Yet our

Army instructors seemed blindly incapable of pointing out this proficiency prize. Most of us were London men; we were in our training depot when the big raids on London began;.every night we watched the distant glow of fires over London. and saw the sparkle of A.A. shells bursting in the in two months we were to be back there helping to put up that barrage. Yet it passed the wit of the Army to say to us ‘Learn this gun-drill properly, and then you will be equipped to fight in defence of your own homes.’ It was always ‘Learn this gun-drill properly, or I will make you double .ound the square holding a rifle above your head.’" The Old Etonian After arguing that one of the chief causes of our military failures is the fact that our soldiers are underpaid-a reckless argument when we remember the pay in Germany and in Japan-he turns to the selection of officers: "On this question, then, I am on the side of the Blimps....I agree with the much abused Colonel Bingham, who was honest enough to speak his mind and the mind of the War Office (Continued on next page)

OUR SOLDIERS: BLESS °EM ALL!

(Continued from previous page) on the matter, and bold enough to attempt to strike a blow for free speech against the silly censorship imposed by King’s Regulations, First preference, say I, for the old school tie. But when we come to consider second preferences, we must begin by + noticing the deficiencies of the Old Etonian." Old Etonians, he insists, know little about science, and less about business, They have ceased to be on feudal terms with working men, They are incorruptible and stupid: "An Old Etonian has been taught to live true to type and to conform to his code: to do the things which are done (like passing the port to the left); to leave undone those things which are left undone (like the bottom waistcoat button). Such a man, brought up in a ritualistic gentlemanly conception of life-and of war — has no chance of coping with a rough, untutored house-painter like Hitler and the other social upstarts whom Hitler has made his generals. " Remembet, Hitler did not repeat the Kaiser’s mistake, when he gave von Moltke command of his armies in 1914 because von Moltke’s father won the war of 1870. Hitler ignored the hereditary principle and chose his generals from clever go-getters. Our Old Etonian brasshats’ were as helpless before these German generals in the fields of battle as our Old Etonian diplomats were before a thoroughgoing crook like Ribbentrop in the fields of diplomacy. For these Germans didn’t play the game. They broke the rules taught on the playing fields of Eton. They used tommyguns, gangsters’ weapons, and the Old Etonians had none. They used their brains and the Old Etonians had none." "There'll Always Be An England .. ." Still he would give them their commissions.. They look the part and they

can die. But their numbers are limited. It is necessary to open the door wider: "The English aristocracy has always been open to outsiders. One source of such upstarts has been the rest of the British Islands and the British Empire. There will always be an England so long as it is governed by Jews like Disraeli, Scotsmen like Gladstone, Welshmen like Lloyd George, South Africans like Smuts, Canadians like Bonar Law and _ Beaverbrook, Australians like Brendan Bracken, and Anglo-Americans like Winston Churchill." And by this time he is almost ready to speak seriously: "The future historian, reading the disastrous tale of Britain’s retreat and defeat before Hitler, will scratch his head and ask feebly: ‘What can the British people have been thinking of, to allow all this to happen, when a single firm stand against Hitler would have stopped him years earlier without war?’ The answer is that they were thinking of doles, football pools, the cinema, and sex."

We are getting very near to his real Purpose in this. passage: "Well, you take all these young men as they were in September, 1939 --- young men whose youth had been rotted by unemployment, young men who had spent their time filling in football coupons while the Hitler jugend were filling in every spare minute with soldiering, young men. who had been dosed and doped with a perverted pacificism, young men whose faiths had grown weary and whose hopes had turned sour. You put them all into uniform, and what do you get? A crusading, all-conquer-ing army? Nonsense," And then suddenly you have this: "A vision, aiming high-that is the only thing which can lift the British Army from the ruck, the slavish round of routine, the tangles of red tape. It needs boldness. It needs courage, It needs iconoclasm. It needs recklessness." « Pretty blunt stuff, as Frank Owen points out in a foreword; very cheeky, but desperately serious. So let Owen end the list of quotations: "When Colonel Bingham got into trouble for saying that the news secondary school officers were not as good as the public school type he was ninety per cent. right. The Hoxtonians had, and have, many of the failings and few of the qualities of the Etonians. Where the Colonel stopped short of real service to us was in not urging that we should create a new esprit de corps, based on modern weapons and their strategy, and informed by a fresh concept of society, in which the fine sense of personal loyalty and obligation which adorned the old order should blend with the new idea of e@ broad national comradeship in the cause of our common humanity."