Domestic life is no longer incompatible with his military service. But in 1837 married quarters did not exist. Those who had wives and children herded with their unmarried comrades in scandalous confusion. Whatever, with a view of completely brutalizing if possible the men who fought their country’s battles, could in addition to these things be devised, was not wanting. Punishments were meted out with indiscriminating severity. The Queen had been on her throne some years before the lash was limited to time of war. Among the officers brought up in the school of Wellington a prejudice in favour of flogging as a simple, efficacious sort of British punishment lingered perhaps till 1880, when on a memorable occasion after an exciting debate that had signalized the opening of a new era of parliamentary obstruction, the House of Commons decreed its entire abolition. As has been already said, the policy to which the Duke of Wellington had from political exigencies been as he thought compelled, was to sacrifice to the maintenance of a small and often invisible body of regulars every other branch of the Service.

Thus sixty years ago the Militia force of the country was declared by the Adjutant-General of the day practically to be non-existent. Before 1815 this force had been a considerable body. After the Peace it dwindled down to less than 70,000; when the Queen mounted her throne, it was seldom or never regularly drilled. There had been no ballot for it since 1831. Twenty-eight years later, December 1895, the strength of an annually trained Militia was 107,742. The Militia, too, in 1837 was administered not as it now is by the War Office, but by the Home Secretary in conjunction with the Lords Lieutenant of Counties; its payment was provided for in the civil not the military estimates; in 1837 its expense was £192,115. The Yeomanry, then called Volunteers, comprised 18,000 men of all ranks, at a cost in round numbers of £105,400. In 1897 the Yeomanry, instructed not less systematically than the Militia, were a force of 11,678 men.

Important additions to the permanent strength of the country against an emergency were made, largely on the Prince Consort’s initiative, during the first decade of the reign. In 1842 the military pensioners already enrolled and liable to service were regularly organized, less however as a military power than as an aid to the civil Government, to the number of 7,000 men. This, too, was the period in which (1846) Sir John Burgoyne submitted to Lord John Russell a State paper on that subject of coast defences which had already engaged the Duke of Wellington and had been taken up warmly as mentioned above by the Queen’s husband. The Channel Tunnel scheme was then unborn in the brains of future projectors. Our military experts held England sufficiently to be weakened as it was by the isthmus of steam which bridged the Straits of Dover. Sir John Burgoyne’s estimate in 1846 was that after providing for Ireland and for home fortifications, only a maximum of 10,000 men could be placed in the field; that the entire United Kingdom did not possess field guns enough for 20,000 men; that there were no reserves of muskets or military stores; that the dockyards were defenceless against any sudden attack. In 1847 the apprehensions caused by these expert disclosures moved Lord Palmerston, when Foreign Secretary in the Russell Cabinet, to suggest a loan for military works along the Hampshire and Dorsetshire coast. Nothing, however, was actually done until the Prince Consort in May 1859 secured the issue of instructions to Lords Lieutenant of Counties by the War Secretary. These resulted in the raising of the Volunteers. Lord Palmerston was himself Prime Minister then. The attitude of Napoleon III. towards England and the Austrian war scare of 1859 supplied the Government with the leverage for the vote needed to strengthen the coast protection of England in accordance with the Prince Consort’s proposal of twelve years earlier. On June 23, 1860, the earliest Volunteer Review was held in Hyde Park. A week or so later, on July 2, the Volunteers first met on Wimbledon Common; the competition was opened by Her Majesty discharging her rifle and scoring the inaugural bull’s eye.

A quarter of a century later the Volunteers had risen from 119,000 in 1860 to 226,752 in 1886, of whom 220,000 were efficients. At the number then reached subject to fluctuations of some thousands periodically they seem disposed to remain. In Great Britain 800,000 men of military age have passed through the Volunteers. Thus, not counting our natural rampart of sea, and a navy which public opinion, if not official patriotism, insists on maintaining at a high point, the coast fortresses bristling in nearly continuous array from Dover to the Land’s End mask behind them little less than 1,000,000 citizen soldiers, who with some help from their brethren of the Royal Artillery could effectively man our coast batteries.

Military education under teachers of the new school and the class of officers thus produced are the immediate outcome of the interest taken in the army by the Court at, and subsequently to, the time of the Prince Consort. The whole scheme of education under which the commanders of the future are trained and a general anxiety for the most beneficent use of the Queen’s prerogative, were much in the thoughts of the Queen’s husband. The council of military education was largely the work of the Prince, as also was the formation of the Aldershot camp. When a ‘governor’ was to be chosen for the Prince of Wales, the selection made was the first Commander at Aldershot and one of the chief members of the education council, Sir William Knollys, who, on the Prince reaching his majority became chief of his household. When that veteran was appointed Usher of the Black Rod he was succeeded as Private Secretary to the Heir Apparent by one so thoroughly trained to his administrative methods as his son, Sir Francis Knollys;—a man in whom common sense attains as nearly as is conceivable to the calibre of absolute genius. It was at the period now mentioned and under these influences that officers in the scientific corps began to get their proper share of army staff appointments and commands. So entirely have the old disabilities of that corps disappeared that to-day, in striking contrast to the earlier experience, an officer of Royal Artillery or Royal Engineers who in general respects shows the necessary aptitude enjoys the same chance as anyone else of staff employment in peace. When he has reached the grade of General officer, he will not be at any disadvantage in the process of selection for a command. Here merit alone tells now. Whatever arm of the Service to which he belongs the best candidate practically never fails to be chosen. Generally, in the opinion of the best professional judges, the young officer finds the army a self-supporting profession. The exact experience seems to be that a young man obtaining a commission in the infantry of the Line or in the Artillery can look forward at no distant date to marrying in fair comfort, and that as a bachelor he requires no larger allowance or private means than he would need in any other branch of the public employ, that, for example, of the Colonial Service.

In cavalry regiments, or in the Household Brigade, life is more costly. In these cases, the young officer could scarcely subsist in comfort without private resources equal to those on which young men entering the diplomatic service must at the outset of their career be able to count. Obviously if the army is to be made a career sufficiently attractive for young Englishmen of first-rate abilities as well as of gentle birth, the prizes of the profession must not, for the sake of an unwise national economy, be too severely diminished in value. The complaint is general and just that the emoluments of those who win their way to the top are already unattractively small and few. It cannot be a satisfactory state of things under which no General officer can afford, without private fortune of his own, to take a command. Impolitic retrenchment has touched other positions than these. Thus, quite recently the salary of the Military Secretary to the Commander-in-Chief has been cut down from £2,100 to £1,500; that of Adjutant-General to the Forces from £2,700 to £2,100; that of Governor of the Royal Military Academy from £2,000 to £1,500. The unwisdom of these reductions and the comparative smallness of the highest army stipends, become the more apparent when it is remembered that all military appointments, unlike civil appointments from the Primacy of Canterbury down to a junior Treasury lordship, are for five years only, that the installation in these posts, and the establishment they require are necessarily costly; thus the choice is practically limited to men of means. Nor does a timocratic[69] scheme of military preferment accord well with the democratic ideal of careers unrestrictedly open to all talents.

The reform in the system of officers’ education which the Prince Consort launched his eldest son has already lived to see practically accomplished. At the beginning of the reign the average military officer at his best was a keen sportsman or a well-bred London club-man; at his worst, and as not very unfrequently witnessed, the original of him may be recognised to-day in Thackeray’s Sketches of Ensigns Rag and Famish; before some Becky Sharpe of the period had taken them in charge, and had developed them into Captains Rawdon Crawley, to become in due course candidates for the Governorship of Coventry Island. The officer of to-day, naval as well as military, is not less keen a sportsman, is as good a shot, can take and hold a line of his own across country equally well. But he is a soldier first, eager to add to his knowledge from the facts of history, or from contemporary examples of professional achievement. There are to-day no better read men than those who serve their Sovereign ashore or afloat. The training of our sailors of whatever rank leaves perhaps something to be wished for. Scientific seamanship, however, is not merely an ideal, but a familiar experience. Jack Tars or flag officers,—the school wherein respectively they are trained is, as Nelson himself was, and wished to see his sailors, above all things scientific too.

The man-of-war’s-man of to-day has educated himself so well from books, with occasional hints from his commanding officer, as to be often a better informed person than the average undergraduate or Admiralty clerk. To speak now only of the soldier. It is not only that like the sailor he has felt the intellectually quickening influences which are part of the atmosphere of his epoch. The military officer of to-day has passed through the curriculum which the Prince Consort was among the earliest to mark out; he has already acquired nearly all that learning which thirty years ago it was predicted would prove the ruin of the Service. Between what he is and what he was, the contrast is not less great than between a future Moltke and Corinthian Tom; yet has he not developed into the spectacled professor with head too big for any busby to fit, to which some looked forward should the British subaltern fail to model himself after Albert Smith’s medical student.

Almost till the beginning of the present decade there might be seen any afternoon issuing from the Athenæum Club in Pall Mall, a well-set-up gentleman, scarcely middle-aged, soldierly indeed of figure, but chiefly noticeable for his commandingly intellectual brow. This was Edward Hamley. Should the time now spoken of happen to have been that of the opening of the Franco-Prussian War, Hamley was perhaps demonstrating to a civilian friend the justification of his prediction of a French triumph afforded by the slight advantage gained by French troops at the early affair of Saarbruck; then came the French reverses. Hamley was not cast down. These were tactical moves, only the preludes of decisive triumph; so things went on till the day of Sedan arrived, when even General Hamley was constrained to acknowledge a French failure. If, however, like most of his cloth, this able and upright soldier was sometimes opinionated, he had earned almost a right to be so by having done more than any other man of his generation for the intellectual formation of the new order of English officer who stands in such marked contrast to his predecessor. That young Aldershot, Woolwich, or Sandhurst does not find time hang heavily on his hands when there is no cricket match on, no race-meeting whither to drive his dogcart, no afternoon train to town to catch, is chiefly due to the intellectual habits which Hamley did more by example and writing than anyone else to generate. The most competent critics, by no mean personal partizans of the author, have testified the impossibility of over-estimating the good done by his book on the Operations of War. This was the first readable work in the English language on strategy and tactics; in the opinion of experts it is far ahead of any book on those subjects previously written in any language. Hamley took the art of war out of the dull and dreary region of technical diagram, of skeleton charts of battle; he dealt with it as a living theme. Thus Hamley’s great treatise, even to those who have been students of Jomini, Clausewitz, and M’Dougall, is a revelation. Its author, not by innate genius alone, but by years of careful practice, had acquired an excellent literary style; the clear and forcible language of this book first taught professional readers how to study all military history, and how to apply the lessons of the past to the campaigns of the future. Such a volume then may, if any, claim to belong to what De Quincey called the literature of power as distinct from that of mere information.

Intellectual quality is not the only respect in which there has been lately witnessed a change among the officers of the army. The Crimean War was followed by many promotions to the grade of officers from the ranks. Since then the average number of commissions given in this way seems to have been about twenty-five a year. Of this number 16 have gone to infantry, 4 to cavalry, and the remainder to other branches of the Service. These promotions, suitable as they are to the day of democracy, cannot of course affect sensibly the tone or the personnel of the officers of the Queen’s army, who will continue to be, as they have been, men born to the social advantages of gentle station. The social fusion and personal intimacy of men whose antecedents and interests differ, though their official rank be identical, is not likely ever to be more complete than between English and native officers in the Indian Staff Corps regiments; though the difficulty in the way of amalgamation proceeds probably less from the exclusiveness of the older officer than from the indisposition of the new to avail himself of the social opportunities placed technically at his disposal.[70]