‘there appeared to be a movement on foot throughout the country to induce large companies to close down their works and simply compel men to enlist in the Territorial Force, or be idle and have no wages at all.’
Another councillor considered that ‘this was an attempt to establish municipal conscription.’ Another gravely pointed out that ‘to encourage’ did not necessarily mean ‘to force,’ but might be stretched as much as to mean ‘persuade.’
Merville Church
49th DIVISION, APRIL, 1915.
We shall not attach names to these dead controversies. They have buried their dead to-day, and the graves of Flanders and Gallipoli bear mute but eloquent witness to the sudden glory of patriotism which dissolved ‘encouragement,’ ‘force,’ ‘persuasion,’ ‘compulsion,’ and ‘conscription’ in the single light of national defence. But this perception was not yet, and the passive and active resistance which sections of opinion in the country, not excluding the West Riding, presented to Lord Haldane’s Act was recognized by its author himself. Speaking at Leicester in the same week as the elders of York met in council, the Secretary for War declared—
‘We are not militarists.... All we want is to feel secure in our hearths and homes, and to have the feeling that labour and commerce are alike adequately protected.... He was against conscription and compulsion.... He wanted to make the Army a people’s Army’;
and when a man at the back of the hall shouted that the scheme would lead to compulsory service, ‘he was caught hold of by half a dozen police, and flung out’—to join the suffragettes. We cannot neglect these facts, old echoes though they be to-day. Nor shall we pause to ask if a bolder policy might not have been more successful, and if the appeal should have been directed to the real menace of German aggression. The whole tendency of the times was against emphasizing that aspect, and the pacific instinct of the nation was fostered rather than rebuked by the voices of responsible authority. It was not a healthy atmosphere for the New Act, and the Roman author of the maxim, si vis pacem, para bellum, never explained how to do it if a Government cried peace, and the Government was the people.
Still, the Act was launched, and the counties had to make the preparations.
There were two difficulties inherent from the start, and it is probably correct to associate them with the public apathy towards the scheme. For one thing, the burden of preparation fell a little obviously on a class, which, in the years before the war, lay under a cloud of misrepresentation. That it was a simulated and a temporary cloud, at least in its chief manifestations, the war itself was to prove; but it was spread fast enough and thick enough at the time to darken initiative and counsel. Not the best Government imaginable could contrive to have things both ways. If they chose to load certain classes in the community with the reproach of obstructing the ‘people’s will,’ it was unseemly to rely on individuals from those classes to popularize a branch of their legislation. Thus, the recommendation of a ‘people’s budget’ by abusive ridicule of landowners, and the promotion of a reform of the Second Chamber as the cause of ‘people versus peers,’ however expedient as a means of affixing a stigma for abuses, would prove impolitic, to say the least of it, when members of those orders were invited to take a leading part in recruiting for a ‘people’s army.’ The same ‘people’ might not see the point of leading and following at the same time. Yet the Territorial and Reserve Forces Act constituted ‘the Lieutenant of the County.. . president of the Association,’ and the Lieutenant, thus placed in power, was, almost without exception, either a peer or a landowner or both. Next, it assigned to the Association the duty of ‘recruiting for the Territorial Force both in peace and in war,’ and we have seen that this duty was liable to be misconstrued as legalized conscription. The risk of such misconstruction was certainly not diminished by the obloquy which was poured, for other purposes of the legislature, on the order to which the presidents and some other of the more leisured members of the recruiting Associations belonged. Secondly, these political conditions reacted on the Government to some extent. For good or ill, the success of their plans for social betterment and domestic reform was a little obscurely involved with the maintenance of the open door to foreign imports, the rejection of commercial preference within the Empire, and, as a necessary corollary, with the doctrine that ‘free trade’ would keep the peace. This avoidance, on the highest principles, of any action likely to seem provocative abroad, so firmly upheld at the Foreign Office till the sixtieth minute of the eleventh hour, made us rig Dreadnoughts with apologies and raise recruits with muffled drums. It followed from all these causes-the preoccupation of Ministers, the social status of county leaders, the talking peace to ensure peace—that, once the Territorial Act was launched, no member of the Government except Lord Haldane appeared openly anxious to make it go. The early annals of Territorial Force Associations, as they came into being under the Act, are plaintively and miserably punctuated by what Sir William Clegg, in the West Riding, used to call the ‘pin-pricks of the Army Council,’ and a large part of their work of initiation, which is always the most difficult part, was achieved by personal effort against alternate or simultaneous doses of public indifference and official neglect.