Report on the reserve and auxiliary forces of England and the militia of Switzerland

Front matter

Class Lift & & / Book 1 3 D _

REPORT

The Reserve and Auxiliary Forces of England

Part I. Introductk3n

EisraLA.]srD.

THE ARMY.

THE MILITIA.

DTTBODTJCTIOK

Sangerfield, N. Y., November 10, 1900.

Hon. Elihu Root,

Secretary of War, War Department,

Washington, D. C.

Sir: In compliance with the wish of the President set forth in your letter, a copy of which is annexed hereto, I have the honor to ask you to submit to the President the following- report "in regard to the principles upon which other countries, and especially England, have organized their reserve and auxiliary forces, and in regard to the practical working of the English system," with certain other information relating to these subjects.

It was nearly two thousand years after the world had received the glad tidings of "Peace on earth, good will toward men," when the Czar of all the Russias, whose will is law throughout a vast empire more than twice as large as the United States, and who numbers his soldiers by the millions, asked the civilized world to unite in an effort to maintain general peace and to lessen the burdens borne by so many countries in their preparations for war.

Page after page of history tells of wars, waged sometimes with the noblest motives, but more often prompted by greed and ambition; and many of the pages are stained with the record of suffering and misery, and the indescribable horrors of sack and pillage. Even now when humanity has reached a higher level, bringing truer standards of action to people, rulers, and kings, Europe is like an armed camp, with heavy burdens on taxpayers to maintain the forces which are ever ready to destroy each other.

It was 'the 24th day of August, 1898, when the Czar sent his first rescript" to all the governments represented at St. Petersburg. When this appeal for universal peace was sent forth, the people of the United States, who have always believed that their geographical conditions protected them against the probability of war with any European nation, were ending a contest with Spain in which American ships and men had been lighting 7,000 miles from home, and England was on the verge of a struggle in which she would have a quarter of a million men under arms at even a greater distance from the British Isles.

Hidden in the future was the peril which was to threaten representatives of all the civilized nations of the world in the capital of China; a peril so great and attended with so many horrors that even the most earnest and devoted opponents of war united in bidding godspeed to the soldiers who were sent from America and Europe to rescue women and children from the dangers which threatened them.

"This rescript will be found in the Appendix.

It is undoubtedly true that Americans would hail with delight the realization of the Emperor's dream of universal peace. No'great and powerful nation in the entire history of the world has been more earnest and sincere than America in its love of peace, in its efforts to lessen human suffering and to save its citizens from the expenses of preparing for war; and in our country, as elsewhere, it was an intense disappointment that the peace conference was not more successful in hastening the time when, as was said in the imperial rescript, "the great conception of universal peace should triumph over the elements of trouble and discord."

Americans should and will, in cooperation with their fellow-men the world over, exert their influence to make the principles of equity and right so powerfully dominate the relations of nations that battle and bloodshed will not stain the records of international controversies.

But while Americans should spare no effort to aid those who, whether on the throne or in the pulpit, are laboring for the betterment of mankind, only the foolish and the wicked will shut their eyes to existing facts. Much as we may long for peace, we must see that in the strange medley of the world's affairs war may at any time become inevitable, and when it comes the awful truth is written in letters of blood that the unready nation pays for its neglect of wise forethought in the needless death and suffering of brave men, and far less important, although the taxpayer properly objects, in squandered and wasted treasure. Every war ever waged reiterates this truth and places an awful responsibilit} r on those who have prevented the precautions demanded by humanity and common sense.

When' the youth and strength of our nation are dying in feverstricken camps, when artillery and infantry are pouring out their life's blood in order to make obsolete guns and black powder effective against smokeless powder and modern rifles, when we are organizing a fighting force after the declaration of war, with divided counsels on all important questions, the people are properly and righteously indignant. But they ignore their own responsibility for the wretched conditions, and worse than that, when the victory is won, and the war ended, there are some who are not willing to profit by the awful lessons.

It is true that, as a people, we love peace, but there is not a country in the world more eager to begin fighting at once when we make up our minds that there ought to be a fight. One of the most striking evidences of this temper was found in the attitude of the people when a conservative President sent a message to England which made war with that country more than possible. The fact that we were not in any way ready for a struggle with that country, and that in consequence a war would have required the needless sacrifice of thousands of lives, had no effect upon the people, and when the cloud had passed no effort was made to be better prepared for the next emergency.

In the peaceful intervals between wars there is no nation on the globe which gives less thought or attention to those questions which must be wisely settled in advance in order to save the waste of life and treasure when war once begins. Other nations have at different times made the same terrible mistake. After the peace of 1819 England failed entirely to prepare for the next war, and the terrible experience of the Crimea was the result. At that time, as in every other crisis in the world's history, lack of preparation did not prevent war. When a nation has decided to fight it is as useless to tell a people that they are not ready for a struggle as to try to check a raging storm. The story of the Crimea is only one of many instances of the culpable neglect by the Anglo-Saxon people of the duty which a nation owes to the brave men who are going to fight its battles.

England sent out to the Crimea an army of some 29,000 men; during the first year the casualties averaged nearly 3,000 a month, and after two years, more than 21,000 men had been buried, being more than the original number sent out. The reason for this is plainly told in official papers, and will have a strangely familiar sound to American ears.

When the English army reached the Crimea it was without any adequate transports for moving the impedimenta, provisions or ammunition, and it is not an exaggeration to say that as an army it was practically immovable. The old wagon train, which had been organized by the Duke of Wellington, had been deemed too expensive, and had gone out of existence; to resuscitate it on the breaking out of hostilities in time to be of service was impossible.

Mr. Filder was placed at the head of the commissariat, and subsequently said:

None of the subordinate establishments absolutely necessary to the efficiency of a field commissariat existed at the outbreak of the war, and even the officers had to be collected from the most distant parts of the Empire; from Sierra Leone, Cape of Good Hope, and New South Wales, and of course by slow degrees.

In the meantime I had to carry on the duties with the temporary assistance of gentlemen furnished from other public departments and wholly without experience in commissariat service. This inefficient state of the department when I took charge of it necessarily diverted much of my attention from the more important general arrangements of the service to the regulation of the details.

With such a frank statement as this in regard to a war waged fifty years ago, there can be little excuse for our having both in 1861 and in 1898 put officers holding high and responsible positions in such a situation that their attention had to be diverted from the "important general arrangements of the service" to "the regulation of details" from which tney should in time of emergency have been absolutely free.

All this lack of adequate preparation by England was paid for in the suffering of the soldiers; the troops, overworked, exposed, and with short rations and indifferent clothing, sickened and died. In January, 1855, there were 4,000 sick before Sebastopol, and 8,000 at Scutari; 9,248 died in the severe winter months, not including those killed in action. This was mainly due to want of transport animals, who had died from want of forage.

No adequate medical staff corps existed at the outbreak of the war, and the report of the select committee states that "the suffering of the wounded was produced mainly by the want of an effective ambulance and partly from an insufficient supply of surgeons. The men in hospital suffered from insufficient medical attention, insufficient medicine, and an absence of medical comforts." One ray of brightness illumines this sad page of history; the work of Florence Nightingale, the "lady with the lamp," lightens the shadows of those dark days, and her noble and heroic work amid the sick and wounded has pointed the way to thousands of self-sacrificing women who since her time have alleviated human suffering.

A repetition of the story of the awful cost of inadequate preparation is found in the case of France. During the years 1866-1870 Colonel

Stoffel was the French military attache in Prussia, and during those years a series of reports were sent to his home GovernmeiTt, pointing* out in the clearest manner Prussia's readiness for war, her superiority in armament and organization, and supplying adequate information for the betterment of existing military conditions in France. It is needless to say that both warnings and recommendations were ignored. France, unprepared, without proper organization, entered upon a struggle with the inevitable result which follows undertaking a great task without proper preparation. After the war she lost to Germany a piece of territory larger than the State of Connecticut, with a population of one and a half millions, and she paid a war indemnity of five milliards of francs, or one thousand million dollars, besides the millions of dollars which were levied by the Germans from the departments and cities which they occupied during the war. And in addition to that she lost on the field of battle the very flower of the nation, which could ill be spared.

Our own history has its ugly record of useless death, of needless suffering, and of wasted treasure. The North was not prepared for the civil war, and to this fact was due, in a great measure, the long duration of the war, its long list of dead and wounded, and its enormous pension charges, which have amounted since 1861 to $2,423,592,188. This war taught in the clearest manner many lessons in regard to the organization of a fighting force and the need of proper training for line and staff officers; but despite the most earnest efforts of those men who, from patriotic motives, urged the necessity of profiting by these lessons, little or no interest was taken in an}^ of the proposals to improve the organization of the Arnry, to secure for it a reserve, to adopt an organization for the existing State forces which would make them effective for national purposes, to adequately prepare the staff departments for war, or to give officers the training necessary to fit them for high command.

The story of the Spanish-American war has much which Americans must read with pain. For years the taxpayers in all the States had been paying large sums of money to maintain the National Guard or State militia, and yet when war was declared no one could tell what was the legal status of that force, or what it could or should be asked to do. Some of the State forces coupled their offers to volunteer with conditions which seriously hampered the action of the Federal authorities. The National Guard of some States opposed with great energy the legislation for increasing the Army. There was eveiy where doubt and uncertainty as to how the Volunteer Army should be enrolled, officered, and organized for service in the field; some of the volunteers left their States without proper shoes, others did guard duty wearing civilian clothes, and derby hats, and carrying sticks and clubs, while waiting for their uniforms and arms. At Santiago the medical, commissary, and quartermaster departments were at the outset hampered in the performance of their work by the lack of adequate preparation on the part of the Government to meet the conditions which confronted the army there. Even in our own country there were times when the sanitation of some of the camps was disgracefully bad, when the hospital accommodations in some camps were inadequate, and when there were not enough doctors or nurses properly to care for the sick; but notwithstanding the fact that lives were useless^ sacrificed, because of inadequate preparation for war, there are certain people who oppose every effort to lessen in the future the needless loss of life through fear of what is called "militarism."

So far from there being any real danger in this country from " militarism," there is a deeply rooted and practically universal prejudice against any excessive influence of the military spirit; and this is one of our best and oldest race traditions, which for centuries has asserted itself with almost unnecessary aggressiveness in the history of the Anglo-Saxons. But our perfectly justifiable antagonism to militarism should not blind us to the fact that if we are to maintain any standing army at all, and if the States are to continue paying out money for their forces, it is the part of common sense and patriotism to secure for the Army and the National Guard that organization and training which will make them most effective to do the work for which they are maintained; if we are to maintain a standing army, whether it be 100,000, 50,000, or 5,000, it should be so organized and trained that it can render the utmost possible service in defending the honor, the lives, and the property of the people; and its officers should be in character, training, and capacity the best which the country can produce; if the State forces are maintained with a view to national defense in time of need, there can be no excuse for not devising in time of peace the best plan for utilizing their services; and if they are not to be so used when war is declared, it is an injustice to the members of the force and to the States not to have that fact known by all; and if it is admitted, as admitted it must be, that the Army and the State forces combined will not be numerically strong enough to cany on any great war, it is our plain duty to decide in advance what is the wisest and best plan for expanding our fighting force when such action is necessary.

These are only some of the many questions demanding answer, for a nation, like an individual, has many serious problems to solve during the course of its existence. Whether there is a limit to the length of a nation's life beyond which it can not endure, or whether a people might prolong indefinitely their national life by avoiding those mistakes which have caused the decay of so many great civilizations, we need not attempt to answer here. The centuries of the past are strewn with the ruins of nations which have risen to power and then have fallen into decay. Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, Chaldea, Persia, Greece, Rome, are, as we study the strange history of the human race, like so many death's heads at the feast to make nations pause and think, for in every instance the final blow which has destroyed the power of each of these great races has been struck by some more powerful, vigorous, and virile nation, and has been the triumph of brute force more or less intelligently directed; and a tainted public and private life has invariably prepared the way for the destroyer.

No one can foretell what destiny the future ma}^ have in store for us. We know that our greatest safeguard against disaster and our greatest help to a position of influence and power will be found in the virtue of our people, in their love of right and their hate of wrong, combined with vigor of mind and body. But all these alone are not enough to protect a country against the needless sacrifice of life and treasure which must result from being unprepared to resist the attacks of a powerful aggressor.

That everyone should labor to prevent war is as right and proper as that they should labor to prevent poverty, sin, or civil disorder.

But it does not protect a city from riot and disturbance to abolish the police or to maintain it in an inefficient condition, badly organized, or improperly trained. It does not prevent the spread of pestilence to have an inefficient or incompetent force of sanitary inspectors. It does not lessen sickness or protect from death to have doctors who are not properly educated or adequately qualified, and in exactly the same way it does not conduce to the peace of the world to maintain a military force which is badly organized or defectively trained.

It is right that every citizen should have his own convictions as to the size of the Army, how much it should cost, how many men should be maintained in the State forces, and how much money the State should expend for the maintenance of that force, and he is entitled to make every effort to have his ideas carried into effect. But there can be absolutely no excuse for the man who, when it has once been decided how large our Army is to be, contends that it should be badly organized, or that no system or plan should be adopted for the organization of the citizen soldiers, upon whom we must to a great extent rely. Hardly any subject which concerns the American people has been so obscured by irrelevant and illogical arguments as the organization and training of our fighting forces, and some wise and good men have failed to see that those who oppose the efforts which are made to settle in advance the questions which must be decided when war is declared are directly contributing to the unnecessary loss of life.

Let the people make the Army as small as, in their best judgment, they think wise; let them, if they think it necessary, reduce the numbers and the cost of the State forces, and while there is ample room for difference of opinion as to the wisdom of such reductions, at least that course does not in itself of necessity mean defective organization or inadequate training. But whatever may be the opinion of the people in regard to the questions of number and cost, there can be no excuse for not giving the forces which do exist the best possible organization, and the training which will make them competent to do the work for which they exist.

To have an army without a reserve is to-da} r to ignore principles which every civilized nation except our own has accepted as fundamental. To maintain at very considerable expense forty little independent armies, with differing degrees of efficiency and without knowing what their duties are to be when war is declared, is to insure confusion at the outbreak of hostilities and to make dissatisfaction inevitable. Our refusal to settle in advance these and other necessary questions has alwa} T s resulted in an unnecessary number of incompetent or untrained officers, in needless deaths and gross extravagances.

It was not evidence of either patriotism or intelligence that miles of railway cars accumulated on the tracks in Florida at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, and that car after car had to be broken open in order to find the articles which were needed. Nor is it entirely worthy of a great and generous people that, after they had insisted upon the maintenance of conditions which made confusion absolutely inevitable, they should attempt to place the entire blame for all that went amiss upon the shoulders of some few men who were only partially at fault for the unsatisfactory working of a bad and defective system. If we should decide to ignore the lessons which experience has taught us, and to enter upon our next war unprepared, let us at least have the fairness to put upon our own shoulders that portion of the blame which should properly rest there for our failures and mistakes and for the needless suffering of the sick and wounded.

In discussing how we should organize our Army and our State forces two important facts should be kept clearly in mind. The first is that the strongest arguments in favor of getting the best possible organization for the Army and of giving it an effective and homogeneous reserve are humanitarian and economic, and the second is that questions of organization and training are entirely independent of the question of the numerical strength of the forces. * The best system of organization should be adopted, because it will save the useless sacrifice of life, the needless infliction of suffering, and the wanton waste of the people's money. Every dictate of humanity demands that the question of organization should be honestly studied and wisely settled.

It is, of course, true, that our vast territory can never be occupied by an enemy and that our enormous population can never be conquered. It is equally true that we have never been beaten, and it is thoroughly characteristic of our race to believe that we never shall be; but all this is entirely wide of the mark. War brings in its train misery and suffering, and the longer any war lasts the greater will be the misery and suffering. The duration of every war in which we engage, the number of men killed and wounded, the number of stricken homes and fatherless children, and the financial burden which will fall upon the taxpayer, all will be affected by the way in which the question of the organization of the Army and of a reserve is treated by the people, for this question is the foundation of all preparation for war, and preparation means less suffering and less cost.

It can not be too strongly emphasized that questions of organization and training are entirely independent of the question of how strong numerically our armed forces should be. Men will differ as to the size of the Army and the strength of the State forces; but whether we keep a handful of men under arms or have a force adequate to our needs there can be no room for difference of opinion in regard to the proposition that such forces as we do maintain should have the best possible organization.

We always have been and always shall be largely dependent upon our citizen soldiery to fight our battles, and the splendid qualities shown in all our wars by our citizen soldiers only emphasize what we have always known — that an effective militia is a force of the greatest value. To adopt some plan by which the machinery for calling to the nation's defense those citizens who are always ready to render such service when needed, so that in time of national peril the fighting force will be, so far as possible, automatically called into being, is a duty which should be plainly recognized by all political parties, as well as by all of the people.

The mere imitation by us of systems which have worked well in other countries would be a mistake which it would be inexcusable to make, for it would be as foolish as it is unnecessary. We should know what other countries have done and how they have done' it, but we should adopt the system of organization and method of training and instruction which will best meet our needs and conditions; and in order to find the principles upon which this work should rest we need not go beyond the Constitution of the United States, that wonderful document in which can be found the basis for every duty which an American citizen should perform.

The following- pages tell something of the way in which England and Switzerland nave organized their armed forces.

The work of preparing this report has been undertaken and finished with the hope that it might, to some extent, help those who are trying to decide how, under our political, commercial, and social conditions, the best and wisest plan may be formulated for organizing our Army and militia, and with the still stronger hope that even those who wish to reduce the numerical strength of our Army will admit that it is our duty to decide in time of peace how we are to organize the forces which are to be our protection if war is forced upon us.

England's military problem.

In the present condition of the world's affairs every nation must decide how it will prepare to meet the awful responsibility of sending soldiers to the field of battle. The most earnest and conscientious advocate of peace must admit that in our day and generation no country can escape this responsibility, and how to prepare for this work may be called the military problem which confronts every nation.

England's problem is unlike thatof any other nation, and is the resultof conditions which have gradually arisen with the expansion of England's Empire. There is no country in the world, except America, in which national responsibilities are to-day less due to a settled policy than England. Her Empire has grown, not because the nation mapped out a clearty defined line of imperial policy, but because the people have followed a race instinct, which has made them expand, just as some strange law makes lower forms of animal life destroy and absorb the weaker organisms with which they come in contact.

The only deliberate and carefully thought-out plan for territorial aggrandizement which the English nation ever formed was a dismal failure. When the Edwards, with a defective claim to the throne of France, attempted to make that country a province of the English realm they wasted blood and money in vain. The great Empire of to-da} r was never planned in advance. There never was a time when any Englishman could have asserted with truth that his nation had determined upon the extension of the imperial domains which took place in the succeeding generation.

The inheritance from Norman William, and the great dowry of Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought to the English crown in the reign of Henry II the entire western coast of what is now called France; but in the years that followed, despite the efforts of the Edwards, the continental possessions passed from English rule. But when Magellan, Vasco de Gama, Columbus, and Cabot made their voyages of discovery, the spirit of trade and commerce introduced new conditions of national growth, and unexplored continents became potent factors in the development of the Old World.

England's condition, almost unconscious^ and without any definite and settled purpose, was gradually and wonderfully changed. From 1497," when she acquired Newfoundland, to the present day, when she has just extended her rule in South Africa, she has been acquiring, by treaty, by purchase, and by conquest, colonies and dependencies, until now there is embraced -within the British Empire beyond the British

«For the dates of the acquisition of territory, see Appendix.

Isles over 11,000,000 square miles of territory, more than one-fifth of all the land on the globe, and about 310,000,000 of people, more than a quarter of the total estimated population of the earth. She is charged with the duty of maintaining this vast territorial Empire, and to do this she should be able to resist aggression in any part of her Empire and at the same time successfully to defend her island home from attack.

England's home defense is absolutely dependent upon her control of the seas, and it is the clear recognition of this fact which has led the English people cheerfully to spend the enormous sums which have made her navy so formidable. Should the English fleet be destroyed England could be starved into submission, and yet without the destruction of the fleet the contingency of an attempt to invade the country can not be entirely ignored; so that in addition to the fleet, and in addition to the forces which must always be maintained in the colonies and dependencies, there should be a force sufficient in numbers and adequately trained to protect the country in the case of invasion.

How England has attempted to meet her great responsibilities must be of especial interest to us in America for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that in both countries all military and naval service is purely voluntary, and each country has a deep-rooted antagonism to a large standing army and an innate dread of the development of the military power of the Executive or of the Crown ; and last, but not least, the people of both countries have always been most reluctant to pay taxes in time of peace for military purposes.