“You think so? One hundred thousand men, without a single case of venereal, and an average sick list of two per cent, permanently on a war footing? Well, perhaps you’re right, but it’s a useful little force to begin with while the others are getting ready. There’s the native Indian Army also, which isn’t a broken reed, and, since ‘no Volunteer no Vote’ is the rule throughout the Empire, you will find a few men in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, that are fairly hefty in their class.”
“But a hundred thousand isn’t enough for garrison duty,” I persisted.
“A hundred thousand sound men, not sick boys, go quite a way,” said Pigeon.
“We expect the Line to garrison the Mediterranean Ports and thereabouts,” said Bayley. “Don’t sneer at the mechanic. He’s deuced good stuff. He isn’t rudely ordered out, because this ain’t a military despotism, and we have to consider people’s feelings. The Armity usually brackets three Line regiments together, and calls for men for six months or a year for Malta, Gib, or elsewhere, at a bob a day. Three battalions will give you nearly a whole battalion of bachelors between ’em. You fill up deficiencies with a call on the territorial Volunteer battalion, and away you go with what we call a Ports battalion. What’s astonishing in that? Remember that in this country, where fifty per cent of the able-bodied males have got a pretty fair notion of soldiering, and, which is more, have all camped out in the open, you wake up the spirit of adventure in the young.”
“Not much adventure at Malta, Gib, or Cyprus,” I retorted. “Don’t they get sick of it?”
“But you don’t realise that we treat ’em rather differently from the soldier of the past. You ought to go and see a Ports battalion drawn from a manufacturing centre growin’ vines in Cyprus in its shirt sleeves; and at Gib, and Malta, of course, the battalions are working with the Fleet half the time.”
“It seems to me,” I said angrily, “you are knocking esprit de corps on the head with all this Army-Navy jumble. It’s as bad as——”
“I know what you’re going to say. As bad as what Kitchener used to do when he believed that a thousand details picked up on the veldt were as good as a column of two regiments. In the old days, when drill was a sort of holy sacred art learned in old age, you’d be quite right. But remember our chaps are broke to drill from childhood, and the theory we work on is that a thousand trained Englishmen ought to be about as good as another thousand trained Englishmen. We’ve enlarged our horizon, that’s all. Some day the Army and the Navy will be interchangeable.”
“You’ve enlarged it enough to fall out of, I think. Now where in all this mess of compulsory Volunteers——?”
“My dear boy, there’s no compulsion. You’ve got to be drilled when you’re a child, same as you’ve got to learn to read, and if you don’t pretend to serve in some corps or other till you’re thirty-five or medically chucked you rank with lunatics, women, and minors. That’s fair enough.”