But to what argument I did venture upon he was impervious. I noted that fact for him and quoted it as, perhaps, a characteristic of the mind which was not non-military. And altogether we had some charming quarrels, as amusing, almost, as those of old men in their clubs, who if they could not bicker could not digest their dinners, and then where would they be?
Now H—— takes it all back. He is at last convinced that the New Army is all right. Of course it is. Why should it not be? Is not the British Empire all right? And is not the New Army a sort of Representative Assembly of the British Empire?
G.H.Q. in 1918 saw clearly enough that never before in the history of any Empire was such splendid raw material for an Army gathered together as in Great Britain in 1914-1918. There were things to offend dainty tastes in the recruiting campaign of which the New Armies were the harvest. But nothing can spoil the value of the result, that many hundreds of thousands of the best men who ever served in an Army joined the colours.
Judge the New Army by the standard of the "Regulars."
The soldiers of the first Expeditionary Force (the "Regulars," the men who, despite the booming of certain special units, did the greater part of the heroic work of Lord French's command up to Loos) have proved themselves so nobly that it is possible to say now, without fear of offence, that if they had been judged as individuals before they joined the Army, they might not have been held to represent the best average of the British people. There is nothing ungracious in saying this now, when even the furious and blinded foe is compelled to admit their excellent virtue. The men of the old Regular Army themselves would admit almost unanimously that it was the Army that made them, and that they occasionally took the King's shilling for lack of prospect of another shilling. The people of England must confess, on their part, that they rather boasted of "not being a military nation" and were content with an army system which did not seek to levy fairly upon the average manhood of the nation but trusted chiefly to the patriotism and instinct for rule of an officer class.
The material of the ranks was not bad material, nor even poor material. The British blood is a good brew. For it has tapped the most adventurous and hardiest veins of the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian, and the Norman; and this British blood learned by some subtle alchemy to draw always fresh savour and wholesomeness from the girdling sea. Put out of consideration a few criminal degenerates, and the mentally emasculated politicians who used to preach the gospel of no nationalism, and no British stock is actually bad stock, as can be seen from the superb young nations that have sprung, partly from its lees, in the Dominions.
But the raw material of the New Armies represented a great improvement on the raw material from which was built up the old army. Other things being equal, therefore, the New Armies could be expected to beat the Expeditionary Force. Other things, unfortunately, were not equal, such as officers' education and time of training. But in all the circumstances the New Armies, after some blooding, might be expected to attain, and actually did attain, the high standard set in the field by the British Regular.
The material of the New Armies was such as no recruiting sergeant in 1913 could have hoped to secure. In a fairly typical batch of recruits which I had to take over one day were engine-fitters, brass finishers, coal miners, agricultural labourers, gamekeepers, two foremen, one compositor, one valet, one pugilist (a champion), one stud groom, one cycle mechanic, one clerk. The wages of these men before they joined was high, and only two out of thirty-eight had been of the "usually unemployed" class. Among these men, accustomed to the discipline of the workshop, many of them with experience as gangers or foremen, possible non-commissioned officers were sprinkled thickly. I have seen batches of recruits for the old army just when they joined, and they looked usually rather forlorn—men accustomed to be unemployed, men at a loose end, disappointed men, with just a sprinkling of eager men taking to the soldier's life for the love of it. Only after three months of the wholesome life, the wholesome food, the kindly discipline of the Army, would they fairly compare in physique, manhood, and intelligence with the recruits of the New Armies.
A well-marked stream coming to join the flood of New Army recruits was that of British men from overseas. The British blood is strangely responsive to the magic of the seas. Send a careless young Englishman abroad to Australia, South Africa, or to some foreign land such as China or the Argentine, and the salt air of the seas as he traverses them seems to set tingling in his blood a new keenness of Imperial pride. His outlook comes closer to that of the Elizabethan Englishman. Perhaps it is from the first actual consciousness of what it means to be one of a nation which is mistress of the seas. Perhaps one must seek deeper for a more transcendental explanation, finding it in something analogous to the Greek myth of the giant who renewed his strength whenever he touched Mother Earth.
Let the reason be what it may, the fact is clear enough. Of British men abroad—I speak now of British born, not of those born citizens of the Dominions—one can dare the guess that ninety-nine out of a hundred turned their thoughts at once to the joy of service on the outbreak of this war.