I do not print this passage here to reopen an old controversy, but because—though the details of Lord Roberts’ proposals will, in the light of recent events, require considerable modification—the main issues raised by him abide and must be reaffirmed. Here in England we have short memories. It is possible that in the bewildering happenings of the war and in the breathless interest with which, at its end, the shifting of frontiers and the striking of great balances will be watched, there is the danger, if only from reaction, that we slackly fall back into our previous national inertia and national apathy, and that the little puddles of party politics (dirty puddles for the most part) once again matter more to us than to hold sacred and inviolate the great Empire and these world-trusts which God has seen well to commit to Britain’s charge.
II
I have heard many noble tributes paid to Lord Roberts, but I remember none which touched him more than that of Sir William Robertson Nicoll at the Whitefriars’ Club. Lord Roberts was the club guest, that brilliant author and journalist Mr. John Foster Fraser being Chairman. I had the honour of being in the Vice-Chair.
The toast of Lord Roberts’ health was seconded by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who was meeting the Field-Marshal for the first time. The Whitefriars’ dinner to Lord Roberts was merely a compliment to a great soldier. Not all of those present would have shared the views he entertained upon the question of National Service, and controversial issues were carefully excluded. Speaking, therefore, of Lord Roberts as a soldier, as a writer, and as a man, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, in one of the most graceful and generous tributes to which I have ever listened, assured him that by no class was our guest held in greater honour and affection than by the Nonconformists of this country and of every denomination. Lord Roberts knew that many Nonconformists differed from him in politics and upon the question of National Service, of which he was the acknowledged champion, and Sir William’s tribute so gracefully phrased, so obviously sincere in its expression of personal reverence and affection, touched and gratified him deeply.
That he felt a little sore, in regard to the misunderstanding of his views by some Nonconformists, is clear, I think, from a letter to me which lies before me as I write.
I happen to be a Churchman myself, but for the last eight or nine years before the war I devoted no inconsiderable portion of my time in trying to put the case for National Defence, as advocated by the Field-Marshal, before my many friends in the Nonconformist Churches, and I am glad and grateful to remember that, while not sharing my views, the editors of the great Nonconformist and Free Church organs gave me for the most part—there were exceptions—full opportunity to “state a case.” In April, 1913, a prominent Free Churchman of Hastings asked me to speak at the Brotherhood meeting in that town. I told him frankly that I dislike public speaking, but would do so if I were permitted to speak upon the subject of National Defence. My friend demurred, but it was finally arranged that I should first give a reading from a tiny booklet of my own, and after that I should speak for twenty minutes on the subject that lay so near my heart.
As this was the first occasion upon which an address upon National Defence was to be given at a Brotherhood meeting, Lord Roberts took deep interest in the matter. He was, indeed, so anxious to remove any misunderstanding which existed that he sent me a special message to deliver in his name to my audience. The message was in the form of a letter to myself, and as it puts his views very plainly, I print it here in full.
Englemere, Ascot,
Berks, 12.4.13.Dear Mr. Kernahan,
I am very glad to learn that when asked to speak at the Brotherhood Meeting which is to take place in your own town on Sunday the 20th instant, you refused to do so unless you were allowed to deal with the question of National Service.
I know that there are many very well-meaning people who think that all military training is an abomination, and who are convinced that the life of youth in barracks is a continued round of vice and immorality of all kinds. I am prepared to admit that this certainly was true 200 years ago, and possibly it was true even at the beginning of the last century. During Marlborough’s wars we know from history that the ranks of the Regular Army were filled up by taking broken men of all kinds, and forcing them into the service.
Any man who was really on his last legs—broken debtors, tramps and vagabonds, condemned felons—these and such as these were forced into the ranks. Can it be wondered if the Army got a bad name? and, as we know, there is nothing so hard to live down as a really evil reputation. But all this is changed and has been changed for some years. Have we not heard that the Chief Constable of the county of Cambridge announced, after the Army manœuvres, that although 45,000 men had been turned loose in the area for which he was responsible, yet not a single accusation for wrongdoing had been brought against any of these soldiers? Have not the papers just recently told us that 10,000 men taken at random from the garrison at Aldershot have been billeted upon the inhabitants in the Hartley district, that these men were willingly received by the people of the district in their houses, and that again, in this instance, there has not been one complaint of misconduct? I must confess that I am pained, as well as surprised, when I find that those who profess, and profess very loudly, that they are followers of Christ, should still look upon the defenders of their country with such unchristian suspicion and dislike.
I should like you to read out to the meeting the following extract which occurs in an article on “Germany and the Germans,” by Mr. Price Collier. It can be found in the current issue of Scribner’s Magazine: “Military training makes youths better and stronger citizens and produces that self-respect, self-control and cosmopolitan sympathy which more than aught else lessen the chances of conflict. I can vouch for it that there are fewer personal jealousies, bickerings, quarrels, in the mess room or below decks of a warship, or in a soldiers’ camp, than in many Church and Sunday School assemblies, in many club smoking-rooms, in many ladies’ sewing and reading circles. Nothing does away more surely with quarrelsomeness than the training of men to get on together comfortably. Each giving way a little in the narrow lanes of life, so that each may pass without moral shoving. There are no such successful schools for the teaching of this fundamental diplomacy as the sister-services: the Army and the Navy.”
Here is another extract [Lord Roberts then goes on himself] from a New Zealand paper which was forwarded to me by a friend in that Dominion: “The Rev. W. Ready, the well-known Methodist Minister, took up a strong stand on the subject of military training at a meeting of the Society of Friends held in Auckland last week. Mr. Ready, who was present by invitation, was taken to task for some remarks he had made on the subject at the recent Methodist Conference. He thereupon explained to the meeting his attitude at the Conference. There was a time, he had told the Conference, when he held the opinion that camps were very immoral, and not places to which youths should be sent; but since he had had his sons attending camp as Territorials, he had been converted into believing that these camps were moral and were well-regulated. Every instinct of his moral nature went against compulsory training, but he had his sons in the Territorials. At this point there were cries of ‘Shame’ from the assembled members of the Society of Friends, but Mr. Ready stuck to his guns and declared that he was not going to advise his boys to break the law, merely because he objected on principle to military training. The Defence Act was now the law of the land, and he would no more advocate his sons breaking the law than he would support the English Suffragettes in their militant tactics. This is both sound ethics and common sense, and Mr. Ready has done the community a service in emphasising the duty of every man to obey the law. The change in his opinions on the subject of camps is interesting and gratifying, and should be noted by those who profess to be so concerned about their evil influences.”
I sincerely hope that your discourse at the Brotherhood Meeting will help to dissipate the suspicions against military life and all connected with it.
Yours very truly,
Roberts.
Lord Roberts made some appreciative remarks about my own work in the cause of National Defence. These I took the liberty of omitting when reading his letter at the Brotherhood Meeting, and I venture to follow a similar course in transcribing it here. Otherwise this very interesting letter is given exactly as he wrote it.
That the great soldier should, in his eighty-first year, have been at the pains to write so lengthy a letter for one of the rank and file, merely, of his supporters to read at a meeting held in a Nonconformist Church, bears witness not only to Lord Roberts’ unwearying energies, but also to his earnest desire, one might even say his anxiety, that the case for National Defence should be fully and fairly put before his fellow Britons of the Free Churches. Had he lived to see the magnificent response made by every denomination of the Free Churches—not even excepting some members of the Society of Friends—in sending the flower of its young manhood to the heroic task of subduing the monster of Prussian militarism, it would have added gladness and thankfulness to his “Nunc Dimittis,” when within sound of the guns the hero-soul of the great soldier, patriot and Christian, passed into the presence of his God.