The British Army from Within

by Evelyn Charles Vivian

At the same time, there is plenty of relaxation and sport as well as work in the routine of military life. Set a battalion down in a new station, and the chances are ten to one that on the evening of their arrival the men will be kicking a football about. Each company and squadron, and each battery of artillery as well, has its own sports fund and sports club, which keeps going the national games in the unit concerned. Men work hard and play hard, and their play is made to help their work. Infantry units organise cross-country races which help enormously in maintaining the men in fit marching condition; cavalry units get up scouting competitions and other sporting fixtures based on work—to say nothing of tent pegging, lemon cutting, and other forms of military sport of which the Royal Military Tournament annually affords examples, while shooting ranges form fields for weekly competitions at such times as they are not in use for annual musketry courses.

The actual composition of the various units composing the British Army differs from that of continental armies, the only units of strength which are identical being those of the army corps, and the division, which is half an army corps. The next unit in the scale is the brigade, which is composed of three batteries of field or two of horse artillery, three regiments of cavalry, or four battalions of infantry. A division is made up of brigades, which vary in number and composition according to the work which that particular division will be expected to accomplish—there is a standard for the composition of the division, but changes now in process of taking place in the composition of the whole army render it unsafe to quote any standard as definite. A normal division, certainly, is composed of cavalry, artillery, and infantry in certain strengths, together with non-combatants and supply units making up its total strength to anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 men.

The unit of strength in which figures become definite is the brigade of artillery, the regiment of cavalry, and the battalion of infantry. The peace strength of each of these units may be regarded, as a rule, as from 10 to 20 per cent. over the war strength, and the war strength is as follows:

For cavalry, a regiment consists of about 620 officers and men of all ranks; this body is divided into three service squadrons, each of an approximate strength of 160 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, the remainder of the strength of the unit forming the “reserve squadron,” devoted to the headquarters staff—the commanding officer and administrative staff of the regiment, as well as the “pom-pom” or one-pounder quick-firer, of which one is included in the establishment of every cavalry regiment. In this connection it is probable that the experiences of the present European war will lead to the adoption of a greater number of these quick-firers, and in future each cavalry regiment will probably have at least two “pom-poms” as part of its regular equipment. The possession of these, of course, involves the training of a gun crew for each weapon—a full complement of gunners and drivers.

For artillery, a brigade is divided into three batteries, each of an approximate strength of 150 men and six guns (the artillery battery corresponds to the cavalry squadron and to the infantry company) and, in addition, one ammunition column, together with transport and auxiliary staff, making up a total of about 600 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men. This refers to the field artillery, which forms the bulk of the British artillery strength, and is armed with 18½-pounder quick-firing guns. The Royal Horse Artillery is armed with a lighter gun, and is used mainly as support to cavalry in single batteries. It is so constituted as to be more mobile and capable of rendering quicker service than the R.F.A. Horse artillery is hardly ever constituted into brigades, as is the field artillery. Horse artillery, again, has no counterpart in the armies of Continental nations, so far as mobility and quality of armament are in question.

Infantry reckons its numbers by battalions, of which the war strength is approximately 1010 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men per battalion. Each battalion is divided into four double companies, the “double-company system” having been adopted in order to compensate for a certain shortage of officers. The double company may be reckoned at 240 officers, non-commissioned officers, and men, roughly, and the remainder of the total is taken up by two maxim-gun sections and the headquarters staff of the unit. As in the case of the cavalry “pom-pom,” it is more than likely that the number of maxims or machine-guns per battalion will be increased, as a result of the experiences gained in the present Continental war.

Engineers and departmental units are divided into companies of varying strengths, according to the part they are called on to play when the division is constituted. Thus it is self-evident that an average division will require more Engineers, who do all the field work of construction and demolition, than it will Army Ordnance men, who attend to the equipment of the division—fitting out with clothing, provision of transport vehicles, etc. The number of men of departmental corps allotted to each division in the field varies with the strength of the division and with its distance from its base of supplies.

There is a permanent and outstanding difference between the British Army as a whole and any Continental army as a whole. In the case of the Continental army—no matter which one is chosen for purposes of comparison, the conscript system renders it a part of the nation concerned, identifies the army with the nation, and incidentally takes out the element of freedom. A man in a conscript army is serving because he must, and, no matter how patriotic he may be, there are times when this is brought home to him very forcibly by the discipline without which no army could exist. In the British Army, on the other hand, the men serving are there by their own choice; this fact gives them a sense that the discipline, no matter how distasteful it may be, is a necessity to their training—by their enlistment they chose to undergo it. But the British Army, until the present war linked it on to the man in the street, was not a part of the nation, but a thing distinct from the nation; it was a profession apart, and none too enviable a profession, in the opinion of many, but something to be avoided by men in equivalent walks of civilian life.

There are advantages as well as disadvantages in the voluntary system by which our Army is raised and maintained. As an advantage may be set first the spirit of the men; having enlisted voluntarily, and ascertained by experience that they must make the best of it or be considered utterly worthless, men in a voluntary army gain a spirit that conscripts can never attain. They are soldiers of their own free will, with regimental traditions to maintain, and practice has demonstrated that they form the finest fighting body, as a whole, among all the armies of the world. On the other hand, they have no political significance, and are but little understood, as regards their needs and the constitution of the force to which they belong. In France, for instance, the rule is “every citizen a soldier,” and it is a rule which is observed with but very few exceptions. The result is that every citizen who has been a soldier is also a voter, and in the matter of army requirements he votes in an understanding way, while the British voter, with the exception of the small percentage who have served in the Army, is as a rule unmoved by Army needs and questions. To this extent the Army suffers from the voluntary system, though the quality of the Army itself under present voluntary conditions may be held to compensate for this. It is doubtful whether it does compensate.

Further, the voluntary system makes of life in the ranks a totally different thing from civilian life. In conscript armies the discipline to which men are subjected makes their life different from that of their civilian days, but not to such an extent as in the voluntary British Army. The civilian can never quite understand the soldier; Kipling came nearer than any other civilian in his understanding, but even he failed altogether to appreciate the soldier of to-day—perhaps he had a better understanding of the soldier of the ’eighties and ’nineties, before the South African war had come to awaken the Army to the need for individual training and the development of initiative. However that may be, no man has yet written of the soldier as he really is, because the task has been usually attempted by civilians, to whom the soldier rarely shows his real self. Soldiers have themselves given us glimpses of their real life, but usually they have specialised on the dramatic and the picturesque. It is necessary, if one would understand the soldier and his inner life, that one should have a grasp of the monotony of soldiering, the drill and riding school, the barrack-room routine, and all that makes up the daily life, as well as the exceptional and picturesque.