The Making Of The British Army (45 page)

On 1 March Buller was at last able to lift the siege of Ladysmith, and after a few brisk skirmishes Roberts entered the Free State capital on
the thirteenth. Here he rested his forces to gather their strength (enteric fever was sweeping the army) and take in more reinforcements from Britain, before continuing the advance on the capital of the Transvaal, Pretoria, which he entered in procession in early June. On the way he had taken Johannesburg and drawn off men from the siege at Mafeking (which was finally relieved on 17 May after holding out for 217 days). On 28 May Britain formally annexed the Orange Free State; in August the last remaining Boer field force under Louis Botha was defeated, and on 25 October the Transvaal too was under the British flag.

The war had begun in a way that had become all too familiar: faulty strategy, faulty campaign planning, faulty tactics. It had then proceeded with the equally familiar combination of heroism (Queen Victoria ordered that a regiment of Irish Guards be formed to mark the bravery of the Irish regiments) and medals (seventy-eight VCs were awarded during the course of the war), with the self-healing regimental system averting total catastrophe before a capable pair of hands got a grip, took the fight back to the enemy and beat him. Roberts had done just that, and having done so he now handed over to his chief of staff, Kitchener, and returned to England where he was to replace Wolseley as commander-in-chief. But in the same way that the brilliant US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought down Saddam Hussein and his army in short order, only to be followed by a wholly unplanned-for insurgency, so now the war in South Africa – which everyone assumed was over – took an unexpected turn.

A few months after Roberts’s return to England, the most able of the Boer field commanders, Christian de Wet, began to wage guerrilla war. Over the following eighteen months he and others who had vowed to fight ‘to the bitter end’ would draw in the resources of a great part of the British Empire before their final defeat – nearly half a million men, indeed, and a great deal of treasure. Kitchener’s response was as ruthlessly efficient as his Nile campaign had been. First he isolated the commandos from their sources of intelligence and supply – their farms, scattered the length and breadth of the veldt. Then he began a scorched earth policy – farm-burning – and interned the families of those ‘on commando’ in what were called concentration camps. Kitchener’s true purpose in these camps remains ambiguous. They were meant as a means of isolation – and, indeed, some of the Boers were glad to be relieved of the responsibility of feeding and protecting
their families while on commando
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– but the conditions inside the camps rapidly deteriorated, and many of the inmates died from disease. There was outrage in the more liberal press in London, and indeed in Parliament, but Kitchener was undismayed, just as he was undaunted by the vastness of the veldt and the elusiveness of the
komandos.
Erecting thousands of miles of barbed wire and chains of blockhouses each garrisoned by a dozen or so men on the same principle as Hadrian’s Wall, he conducted massive sweeps of the country in between, driving the
komandos
on to these stop lines in a constant war of attrition – techniques of containment, denial and harassment that would become familiar to later generations of British soldiers in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya and southern Arabia.

When the war was at last truly over there was an inquiry into what had gone wrong. How had a rag-tag collection of settlers been able to humiliate the British army in a whole series of field battles? And how had it taken nearly half a million men to bring the war to a close (the ‘bitter enders’ fighting on until May 1902)? For there were gloating eyes in Europe and further afield: was this all it took to bring the British Empire practically to its knees? There were covetous as well as gloating French eyes on colonial Africa, too, and opportunistic Russian eyes on the North-West Frontier of India. Most menacing of all, there were calculating German eyes scrutinizing every detail of the fighting so that when it came to the contest in Europe – as the German general staff believed it must – they would be able to deal decisively with the British army if it should choose to set foot on the Continent.

When the contest finally came it would take more than Bismarck’s policeman to deal with the British Expeditionary Force; but, observing the débâcle of the war in South Africa, Berlin was convinced it would not take a very great deal.

NOT ALL THE FOREIGN EYES WATCHING THE ARMY IN THOSE LAST YEARS OF
the nineteenth century had been hostile. On 27 February 1890 the
New York Times
carried a piece about army reform:

Nothing had come of the recommendations, however, and so the army had stumbled into the Boer War in much the way that it had into the Crimea. The Crimea had been a loud wake-up call; but the country had merely pressed the snooze button. And it had ignored the mild repeating calls in the years that followed. The war in South Africa had finally woken everyone with a start – with alarm, indeed. But in ‘The Lesson’, Kipling was as consolatory as he was excoriating:

And empire was part of the problem, as well as being part of the answer. How was the Empire to be protected, the homeland secured and an army sent to the Continent all at the same time? The proponents of an ever stronger navy, the ‘blue-water school’, harked back to Admiral St Vincent in the invasion scares before Trafalgar, who, addressing the House of Lords, had declared with matchless irony: ‘I do not say that the French cannot come; I only say that they cannot come by sea!’ Except that after the various points of colonial dispute with France had been settled in 1904 (the ‘Entente Cordiale’), it was the Germans who would or would not come by sea, the French now allies instead. Meanwhile there was a new crop of invasion novels warning of the country’s unpreparedness for war with the Hun, of which Erskine Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands
(1903) was probably the most influential, and possibly the most readable.

Those who argued against the blue-water school that the Royal Navy alone would be insufficient safeguard in a war with Germany, and that the army must be strengthened, were derided as the ‘blue funk school’. Inevitably a compromise was reached, which was itself another hark back to the invasion scares of a century before: when the regular army was deployed to the Continent, home defence would become the responsibility of the auxiliary forces. Meanwhile, imperial defence would continue to be a primary function of the regular army, boosted by better coordination of colonial resources through a Committee for Imperial Defence and the build-up of the colonies’ own forces, many of which had shown exceptionally well in South Africa (the Australians and Canadians had fielded superb mounted troops). But Britain’s auxiliary forces would also have to be modernized. Although they, too, had performed well at times (indeed, many of those who gave evidence to the subsequent inquiries spoke of the superior physical and intellectual condition of the volunteers over that of the regular soldiers), their organization and training were haphazard.

But all this reorganization could scarcely come about without the sort of radical reform at the top, at the War Office and the Horse Guards (as the commander-in-chief ’s headquarters was still known),
that Lord Hartington’s 1890 report had recommended, and which a further inquiry chaired by Lord Esher now urged.
¹³⁸
In 1904 the post of commander-in-chief was duly abolished and replaced by a chief of the general staff (soon redesignated chief of the imperial general staff (CIGS) to reflect his primacy in planning with the staffs of the colonial and dominion forces); an Army Council was formed, modelled on the Board of Admiralty – a single collective body to determine policy, thus ending the confusion of responsibilities between the civil and military; and a professional army staff was established to support the military members of the Army Council.

The duties of the new general staff were to be shared among a director of military operations, a director of staff duties (responsible for all matters touching on the organization of the army, including the ‘order of battle’ – in particular where units were to be stationed and under what command arrangements) and a director of military training. The adjutant-general’s staff (as opposed to the general staff) was given overall responsibility for the soldier’s welfare and discipline, medical services, casualties, and what is now loosely called ‘conditions of service’. Under him was a director of recruiting, a director of personal services, a director-general of medical services and a director of auxiliary services. Apart from manufacture, or what today is called procurement, all supply, accommodation, transport and movement matters became the responsibility of the quartermaster-general, whose staff consisted of a director of transport and remounts, a director of movements and quartering, a director of supplies and clothing, and a director of equipment and ordnance stores. The Master General of the Ordnance’s staff was principally concerned with procurement of materiel – weapons, ammunition and warlike stores – with a director of artillery, a naval adviser and a director of fortifications and works.
¹³⁹

This division of responsibility was replicated at each subordinate level where appropriate, so that at the lowest level of headquarters, the brigade, the functions of the general staff were coordinated by a brigade major (today called a chief of staff), and those of the adjutant-general and the quartermaster-general were combined in an
appointment with the longest title in the army: the deputy assistant adjutant and quartermaster-general, or DAA&QMG (usually abbreviated to ‘DQ’ – and also a major) – today called the deputy chief of staff. Indeed, the system as a whole remains much as it was first devised.

The idea of drawing these lines of responsibility was to establish an administrative framework of military districts, each commanded by a lieutenant- or major-general, which would leave commanders of field units free to train for war. And it rapidly began to bear fruit, thanks to the intellect and energy of the war minister in the new Liberal government, Richard Burdon Haldane (1905–12), and to Major-General Douglas Haig, who as director of military training and then of staff duties was a prime mover in the changes.

But Haldane’s biggest challenge was how to ‘echelon’ the regulars and auxiliaries at home – that is, how to organize and employ them in relation to each other. He decided to reduce the three existing categories – regulars, militia and volunteers – to two, and organize them into the ‘Field Force’ (of three army corps and a cavalry division, with the implied intention of continental service), and a ‘Territorial Force’ for service at home and, if the situation warranted it, and after further training, abroad. He set out his plan in a memorandum of February 1907:

The Territorial Force (TF) – renamed Territorial Army after the First World War – came into being in 1908, though with two critical concessions to the widespread opposition of the ‘old and bold’ – the retired officers who ran the county militia ‘establishment’. First, the militia would not be entirely done away with: men in the county cadres would have the option of joining a ‘special reserve’ to supplement or support the Field Force. Second, the TF would be for home service only, administered by county associations, with its funding ‘ring-fenced’; Haldane thought that the question of foreign service was a bridge
better crossed when they came to it. The TF was, however, organized on a more complete all-arms basis than hitherto, with artillery, engineers and supporting services. On paper, it amounted to fourteen infantry divisions and fourteen mounted yeomanry brigades, with an overall strength of approximately 269,000. And to help overcome a shortfall in officer recruiting in both the regular and reserve armies, an officer training corps (OTC) was established with a senior division in eight universities and a junior division in the public schools.
¹⁴⁰
If the TF (and for that matter the Special Reserve) never quite met its target strength or training standards, there was at least a coherent system; and as the years passed, everyone grew accustomed to the idea of ‘home service only’, seeing no prospect of any bridge to cross.