No greater evidence could be forthcoming of the absolute determination
of the British people to fight the War to a finish than the adoption, in
the teeth of our most cherished prejudices, of the principle of
compulsory service. Limited in its action though it may be, so watered
down, apparently of set purpose, that only a very tiny fraction of men
will or need be affected by it, the passing of the Act into law
definitely marks a new departure for Britain, and for the first time
ranges her alongside the rest of the nations of Europe in emphasising
the principle--as old as law itself--that in times of stress and danger
the State has the right to call upon all of its sons to come forward and
do personal service in defence of the common weal. That, at least, is a
very great step in advance. We can be sure it was noted with pleasure
and gratification in France and Russia, and with very much the reverse
feelings in Germany.
Of all the numerous problems which the War forced suddenly into
prominence, this was by far the most urgent and most important. No one
imagined, when the War broke out, that in less than eighteen months we
should see a measure dealing with compulsory service on the Statute Book
of England. That, however, is only to say that few, if any, people
realised what the War was going to be; I am firmly convinced that if the
problem had been boldly faced in August, 1914, and the people told
plainly what it was they were "up against," they would no more have
hesitated than they did when the time finally came for a decision. I do
not think there is the slightest doubt that, in spite of the occasional
clamour of the cranks who, like the poor, are always with us, the Act is
on the whole secure in the hearty approval of the great mass of the
people.
As those who have done me the honour of reading my books will remember,
I have been for many years a convinced advocate of the principle of
compulsory national service _for all_. The principle is now adopted in
part, and it would serve no good purpose to go again into the arguments
for and against it. But there are one or two points to which, even in
such a book as this, attention may we usefully drawn. We have to
remember that for the first time in our history we have undertaken the
responsibility of waging a land war on a national scale. That is to
say, we have taken the field with nations whose armies consist literally
of the nation in arms.
By hook or by crook we have to maintain our position. Magnificent as
has been the response to the call for volunteers, it could not be
expected that it would be sufficient under such conditions, partly, of
course, because our people were confronted by a set of conditions to
which they were absolutely strangers. It was not that there was any
real decline in their patriotism--that I do not believe for a moment.
Shirkers and slackers, of course, there were and are, as there have
always been and will always be in every nation under the sun. But upon
the whole the response of the manhood of England to the appeal for
recruits was so magnificent that we are justified in regarding it with
every feeling of pride. And, convinced as I am of the benefits which
national service confers upon the nations which adopt it, I should have
been glad from the bottom of my heart if we had been able to carry this
War to a successful conclusion on the principles of voluntarism which
has served us so long. It would have been a glorious vindication of
those very principles of liberty which this country went into the War to
uphold.
But, after all, there is no derogation from the liberty of the subject
in being called upon to serve the State which protects him and to which
he owes the very possibility of existence in peace and comfort. That
principle is as old as liberty itself; without it liberty, as we
understand it to-day, would never have been won; perhaps civilisation
itself would have been centuries farther back. It is an utter
misrepresentation to speak as though the conscript, which has been made
a word of evil omen by the very journals which a few short years ago
were holding up everything German for our admiration, were a
much-to-be-pitied individual with no rights and no liberties. Because
German drill-sergeants happen to be brutes--as the Germans _en masse_
have proved themselves to be--there is no reason for thinking that we
need share their brutality. The experience of France, of Switzerland,
of Italy--indeed, of every country except Germany that has adopted the
principle of compulsion--does not support the comfortable and lazy
theory that brutes are created by the "militarism" which some of our
facile writers fail entirely to understand. It is the innate brutality
of the Prussian which has produced the horrible results we see springing
from German militarism, not the principle of compulsion introduced as a
matter of national self-preservation.
We are an insular Power, and as such we have been able in the past to
rely almost entirely upon our Fleet for protection against our enemies;
our land campaigns of the past, glorious though they have often been,
bear little relation to the present struggle, in which the greatest
battles of bygone days--battles which have decided the fate of nations--
would be dwarfed to mere incidents hardly worth a paragraph in the
official report. The campaigns of to-day are being fought not by armies
but by nations in arms--a very important distinction. Only a few short
years ago, when armies were tiny compared with the vast hosts of to-day,
a single battle often decided a war. To-day battles which dwarf the
greatest struggles of the past into comparative insignificance are
nothing more than mere incidents in the far-flung lines of the
contending hosts. And the huge size of modern armies has been made
possible only by the system which takes the young and able-bodied and
compulsorily trains them with a view to military service when war comes.
We did not invent that system; indeed, we refused to adopt it long
after it had come into operation among all other European nations. But
we have to meet the system in operation in the field against us, and we
have hitherto been trying with hastily improvised armies to beat nations
which have spent half a century in training their manhood in the use of
arms. I rejoice that such marvellous efforts have been made, and that
such wonderful results have been achieved under the voluntary system.
But that system can never produce "the nation in arms," and it is
emphatically "the nation in arms" that is required if we are to beat the
Germans. Before this frightful struggle ends we shall certainly require
to make every effort of which we, as a nation and an Empire, are
capable.
It is a little difficult to understand the opposition to the principle
of compulsory service. By the common law of almost all nations the
State has the right to call upon the individual for assistance in
protecting the State against the common enemy. I do not see, indeed,
how this right can be disputed, for to dispute it would be to cut at the
very foundations of organised society. One can, of course, readily
understand wide differences of opinion as to the advisability or
necessity of adopting a compulsory system, especially in the middle of a
great war, but against the principle itself I fail to see any valid
argument. _Salus populi lex suprema_. If the interests of the nation
demand the introduction of compulsion, whether during a war or not, I
cannot understand how it can be opposed either in principle or as a
matter of expediency.
Now it must be quite clearly understood that, so far as Britain is
concerned, the adoption of the principle of compulsion was purely a
matter of expediency, and those lifelong opponents of compulsory service
who found themselves able to support the Act sacrificed none of their
convictions or principles in doing so. We had reached a stage in the
War when the problem of finding enough men to keep our armies in the
field up to full strength had become critical. Mr Asquith had pledged
himself--quite rightly, as I think--that the married men who enlisted
under the Derby group system should not be called up while any
considerable number of single slackers remained deaf to every call that
was made upon them. In this I believe he was absolutely right, and I
believe he had behind him the vast preponderance of intelligent opinion
in the country, including, though the fact has been disputed, the bulk
of the working-class population. We were unquestionably drafting into
the Army too large a proportion of married men, and widows and orphans
were being made at a rate that was positively appalling. It was quite
obvious that something must be done to put a stop to this condition of
things, and the famous pledge of Mr Asquith was the result. And when
it was found that the unmarried men still remained outside the Army, the
passage into law of a measure of compulsion could be nothing more than a
matter of time.
The Act was frankly a temporising measure, and my own personal belief is
that it does not go nearly far enough. Mr Asquith has declared that he
does not think the situation calls for a measure of general compulsion,
and he must be in possession of facts which are hidden from the public.
Present indications suggest that he is right; whether he was wise to
bolt and bar the door to general compulsion so emphatically as he did is
another matter. It was certainly a very remarkable statement of Lord
Kitchener, reported to the House of Commons by Mr Walter Long, that the
Act as it stood would provide all the men required to ensure victory, a
statement which seems hardly to have attracted the attention that it
deserved. Both Mr Asquith and Lord Kitchener may be right, and it is
certainly true that our prospects are brighter than they have been for
many months.
In view of what may conceivably happen in the future, there is one
misconception with regard to national service which it is perhaps worth
while to try to clear up. It is too hastily assumed that the men who
are swept into the net of a compulsory system are necessarily drafted to
the fighting ranks. This, of course, is a mistake pure and simple. One
of the greatest advantages of the compulsory system is that by its means
men can be employed just at the work where their services are most
needed. It is quite certain that had we had a compulsory service system
in operation when the War broke out we should have seen less of the
enlistment into the fighting services of men whose brains and muscles
were urgently needed in other directions. We should not, for instance,
have seen three hundred thousand miners sent to the trenches while we
were short of coal at home; we should not have seen our munition works
held up through shortage of skilled labour consequent upon high-class
mechanics joining the fighting line. Each man would have been sent to
serve where he was most needed, and this, it seems to me, is one of the
strongest arguments that can be adduced in favour of the principle of
compulsion.
Under all the circumstances the adoption of compulsion has been achieved
with wonderfully little disturbance. There have been none of those wild
outbreaks of popular passion which were so strenuously forecasted by the
thick-and-thin opponents of compulsion. As my readers are, of course,
aware, the adoption of compulsion by President Lincoln during the
American Civil War was followed by serious disturbances which had to be
suppressed by troops brought from the front, and which caused grievous
loss of life. We have seen nothing of the kind here, and I do not think
we are likely to do so. The country is united and determined to win the
War, and the anti-conscription efforts of certain misguided folk have
been received with the contempt they deserved. The quiet acceptance of
the Act is all the more remarkable when we remember that owing to the
operation of the censorship the people generally were very ill-informed
about the War, and it is certain that up to quite a recent date they did
not realise all that was involved or the magnitude of the task we had
undertaken. The wonder is not that a system of compulsion became
necessary, but that under the bad system of secrecy we succeeded in
raising armies totalling some three millions of men by the voluntary
plan. There could be no greater testimony to the genuine patriotism of
the workers of England. Happily, the country is now more fully awake to
the facts of the situation, and has achieved a better realisation of
what the struggle really means.
Nothing has been more remarkable than the attitude of Labour on this
subject. We have been told over and over again that the workers of
Britain would never accept the principle of compulsion; we have found,
in fact, that it has gained the support of all that is best in the
Labour ranks. There can be no doubt that one of the greatest
difficulties in the way was the hasty and ill-advised resolution passed
by the Trade Union Congress at Bristol in January, 1915. It is not
necessary to enter into the causes which led to the passing of that most
unhappy resolution. Suffice it to say that it put the Trade Unionists
in the position of declaring that they would prefer to see the Empire go
to ruin rather than see the principle of compulsion introduced. I felt
at the time--and subsequent events have justified my belief--that this
was a grave libel upon the patriotism of our workers. The Merthyr
by-election, when the official Liberal and Labour candidate was
decisively beaten by an Independent candidate, who won a tremendous
victory on a straight compulsion issue in a constituency which had
always been regarded as a stronghold of every idea that would be opposed
to compulsion, came as a dramatic surprise. In all probability that
election did more than any other single thing to make compulsion
possible, and it certainly showed that the working classes of this
country had changed their minds on a subject on which it was supposed
their minds were irrevocably made up. We were to learn later that their
opposition to compulsion was based not on compulsion itself, but on the
fear that conscripts would be used to settle industrial troubles as was
done in the case of the French railway strike. But the assurance on
this head given by Mr Asquith seems to have removed what latent
hostility there was to the proposals of the Government, and as a result
there is every prospect that the Act will work as smoothly as we could
desire or expect.
Under all the circumstances it is easy to sympathise with the attitude
of the Labour leaders when they met for the Trade Union Congress of
1916. They found themselves faced with the resolution passed twelve
months before under very different circumstances. They knew better--
they had been told frankly by Lord Kitchener--the extreme urgency of our
needs, and they certainly had no desire to embarrass the Government or
stand in the way of the Empire winning the victory. But we have to
recognise the facts of human nature. It is not easy for any of us to
eat our words, and yet it seemed as if the Congress must either do so or
take up a frankly disloyal attitude. They were deeply pledged against
compulsion, and it needs no very powerful effort of the imagination to
see that they were in a position of some difficulty.
Luckily, a way was found out of the seeming _impasse_. The Congress
decided to adhere to its resolution condemning compulsory service as a
matter of principle, but it decisively defeated a proposal to work for
the repeal of the Act which had already been passed. The national
spirit of compromise came strongly to the front. I wrote before the
Congress met: "However difficult it may be for them to swallow the very
definite declaration of the last Congress, I think the majority of them,
if the present recruiting movement fails, will loyally accept the
logical sequel." Those words were abundantly justified. In view of the
partial failure of Lord Derby's scheme, the Congress took the natural
and proper view. Abating none of their strongly held objections to
compulsion, they accepted the Bill as the lesser of two evils: better
put up with a modified measure of compulsion now than endure defeat,
with all the horrors that it would imply, in the future. And there can
be no reasonable doubt that that view is far more widely held among the
working classes than is shown by the voting of a caucus in which the
most extreme Socialist and Syndicalist element has secured a measure of
representation which it does not deserve.
As to whether the Act will give us all the men we need, we can only go
on and hope for the best. Lord Kitchener apparently thinks it will, and
he ought to be in a position to know. But we have to remember that in
modern warfare the drain upon an army and the wastage of men--not only
from actual casualties in fighting, but from sickness and other causes--
is appalling. It has been officially stated that our losses by wastage
from all causes amount to _fifteen per cent, per month_ of all the
forces in the field. That is to say, that if we have a million men
under arms they will have to be replaced every six months! And even
this appalling rate of loss might well be exceeded if fighting became
very severe; if, for instance, we had to fight battles such as the first
and second battles of Ypres. Fighting on an even larger scale, it must
be remembered, is only too probable if the Allies undertake the "big
push" which shall throw the Huns out of their entrenchments in the West,
to say nothing of a possible advance from Salonica and more fighting in
Mesopotamia. It will thus be seen that the requirements of the Army in
the matter of drafts during the next few months will be on a gigantic
scale, and we cannot afford to run the risk of being short of men.
The time is assuredly coming when the German reserves will begin to give
out in view of the enormous extent of front they had to defend. That
will be the opportunity of the Allies; and unless we are then in a
position swiftly to make good all possible losses and fling more and
ever more men into the fight to administer the _coup de grace_, the War
may well drag on--almost certainly it would drag on--to an inconclusive
ending which would be only one remove less disastrous than defeat. It
is against such a possibility as this that we have to guard, and we can
only do so by deciding that, cost what it may--whether by compulsion or
not, whether only the single men are taken or whether every able-bodied
man shall be swept into the ranks--the fighting lines of our armies
shall be maintained at fighting strength. So much we owe to ourselves,
to our Empire, and to the thousands of gallant souls who have given
their all in order that we may live out our lives in peace. To falter
now would be not only ingratitude to the fallen, but would be the
blackest treachery to everything which we know as civilisation.
Mr Asquith has declared that he will be no party to any further measure
of general compulsion. I can only assume that he means by this that he
is confident of victory under existing circumstances, and I hope and
believe he is right. But it would be foolish to disguise from ourselves
that war is a very "chancy" and uncertain business, and that there are
few subjects upon which it is more foolhardy to dogmatise. We have seen
something during this War of the wreck which has fallen on the
reputations of the military "experts." And, believe we never so
strongly in victory, there is no disguising the fact that our
expectations may be falsified by events. In such a case--supposing we
require more men than we can obtain by the measure of limited compulsion
that we have adopted--are we to lose the War for want of stronger
measures? That will hardly, I think, be contended, and if the men
wanted are not forthcoming they must be found by sterner measures.
"We must win or go under" is the great truth we have to keep for ever
before our eyes and before the eyes of our fellow-countrymen. And to
secure victory there must be no half-measures. If Mr Asquith finds
himself unable to undertake the task of raising the men urgently
needed--should more be required--other men and other measures must fill
the gaps. On that point, at least, there must be no faltering.
I do not believe the workers to-day are troubling themselves very
greatly about the nice ethical points for or against the principle of
compulsion. They are judging on broad lines, and I am confident they
view the question in a light very different from that in which they
regarded it when the War broke out. Since those days they have learnt
from the example of Belgium and France what is involved in German rule,
and their change of views has been helped by a realisation of the
magnitude of the task which lies before us. They know that the War is
for us a matter of self-preservation, and I believe such opposition to
compulsion as still survives comes solely from other and more
doctrinaire classes. What the country asks from the Government is a
clear and unmistakable lead. If the Government will but take the nation
fully and frankly into its confidence, if those who are entitled to
speak for the nation will call upon the nation for the greatest and
supremest effort of its history, I do not believe there will be any
hesitation in the response whether we decide to extend the principle of
compulsion or not. I believe the result will be to astonish and
confound those who have more or less openly suggested that the spirit of
England is not what it was, and that the Englishman has lost in a great
measure the stern invincibility and determination which in his
forefathers made England what she is and has always been.
So far we have adopted what Lord Lansdowne has described as "a
homeopathic dose" of compulsion. The description is apt; I hope the
dose will be sufficient to dispel the disease. But there is one point
on which we must be on our guard: the list of "reserved" trades whose
men are not to be taken for the Army is growing at an alarming rate. We
know that one of the results of this has been to cut down very seriously
the number of men who ought to have joined the colours under Lord
Derby's group scheme; we must be careful lest we lose more men than we
should from the same cause under the Compulsion Act. It is necessary,
of course, that our trade must be kept going as far as possible;
otherwise we shall not be able to pay for the War.
But we must remember at the same time that victory is and must be our
first consideration, for without this we shall have no trade to look
after. And if, in our eagerness to conserve our trade, we neglect or
starve the fighting forces, we shall pay a terrible and appalling
penalty. That is the worst of doing things by halves; one generally
finds in the long run that it would have been better and cheaper to have
made a good job at the first. It is more than likely that the
"reserved" occupations will turn out to be the crux of the whole
question, and the rapidly growing lists give rise to a feeling of
apprehension as to whether we shall not fail, if they are extended
indefinitely, to get the men we require. I earnestly hope that this
most important subject is receiving careful attention, and that we shall
have such periodical revisions of the lists as experience may show to be
necessary. All will be well so long as we do not risk, for the sake of
supposed trade advantages, any shortage of men in the actual fighting
lines.
The willing adoption by our people of the principle of compulsion has
been Britain's master-stroke in this war. Nothing else, I am convinced,
could have had such an effect upon our friends, our enemies, and the
neutral nations, whether friendly to us or the reverse. Nothing else
could have shown so clearly the unalterable determination of the British
people, or proved so unmistakably that at length--late, it is true, but
better late than never--the cold and deadly pertinacity of Britain, the
dour temper which never knows when it is beaten and never lets go, has
been fully roused. Britain, it is said, wins but one victory in every
war, but that victory is the last. That is one victory we mean to win
in this War, if it takes us ten or twenty years to do it. We fought
Napoleon for twenty years; we won the last victory at Waterloo. It will
not be twenty years before the Allies win the victory that shall put an
end to the pretensions of the upstart who aspires to be the Napoleon of
the twentieth century.