The Way to Win

by William Le Queux

No greater evidence could be forthcoming of the absolute determination of the British people to fight the War to a finish than the adoption, in the teeth of our most cherished prejudices, of the principle of compulsory service. Limited in its action though it may be, so watered down, apparently of set purpose, that only a very tiny fraction of men will or need be affected by it, the passing of the Act into law definitely marks a new departure for Britain, and for the first time ranges her alongside the rest of the nations of Europe in emphasising the principle—as old as law itself—that in times of stress and danger the State has the right to call upon all of its sons to come forward and do personal service in defence of the common weal. That, at least, is a very great step in advance. We can be sure it was noted with pleasure and gratification in France and Russia, and with very much the reverse feelings in Germany.

Of all the numerous problems which the War forced suddenly into prominence, this was by far the most urgent and most important. No one imagined, when the War broke out, that in less than eighteen months we should see a measure dealing with compulsory service on the Statute Book of England. That, however, is only to say that few, if any, people realised what the War was going to be; I am firmly convinced that if the problem had been boldly faced in August, 1914, and the people told plainly what it was they were “up against,” they would no more have hesitated than they did when the time finally came for a decision. I do not think there is the slightest doubt that, in spite of the occasional clamour of the cranks who, like the poor, are always with us, the Act is on the whole secure in the hearty approval of the great mass of the people.

As those who have done me the honour of reading my books will remember, I have been for many years a convinced advocate of the principle of compulsory national service for all. The principle is now adopted in part, and it would serve no good purpose to go again into the arguments for and against it. But there are one or two points to which, even in such a book as this, attention may we usefully drawn. We have to remember that for the first time in our history we have undertaken the responsibility of waging a land war on a national scale. That is to say, we have taken the field with nations whose armies consist literally of the nation in arms.

By hook or by crook we have to maintain our position. Magnificent as has been the response to the call for volunteers, it could not be expected that it would be sufficient under such conditions, partly, of course, because our people were confronted by a set of conditions to which they were absolutely strangers. It was not that there was any real decline in their patriotism—that I do not believe for a moment. Shirkers and slackers, of course, there were and are, as there have always been and will always be in every nation under the sun. But upon the whole the response of the manhood of England to the appeal for recruits was so magnificent that we are justified in regarding it with every feeling of pride. And, convinced as I am of the benefits which national service confers upon the nations which adopt it, I should have been glad from the bottom of my heart if we had been able to carry this War to a successful conclusion on the principles of voluntarism which has served us so long. It would have been a glorious vindication of those very principles of liberty which this country went into the War to uphold.

But, after all, there is no derogation from the liberty of the subject in being called upon to serve the State which protects him and to which he owes the very possibility of existence in peace and comfort. That principle is as old as liberty itself; without it liberty, as we understand it to-day, would never have been won; perhaps civilisation itself would have been centuries farther back. It is an utter misrepresentation to speak as though the conscript, which has been made a word of evil omen by the very journals which a few short years ago were holding up everything German for our admiration, were a much-to-be-pitied individual with no rights and no liberties. Because German drill-sergeants happen to be brutes—as the Germans en masse have proved themselves to be—there is no reason for thinking that we need share their brutality. The experience of France, of Switzerland, of Italy—indeed, of every country except Germany that has adopted the principle of compulsion—does not support the comfortable and lazy theory that brutes are created by the “militarism” which some of our facile writers fail entirely to understand. It is the innate brutality of the Prussian which has produced the horrible results we see springing from German militarism, not the principle of compulsion introduced as a matter of national self-preservation.

We are an insular Power, and as such we have been able in the past to rely almost entirely upon our Fleet for protection against our enemies; our land campaigns of the past, glorious though they have often been, bear little relation to the present struggle, in which the greatest battles of bygone days—battles which have decided the fate of nations—would be dwarfed to mere incidents hardly worth a paragraph in the official report. The campaigns of to-day are being fought not by armies but by nations in arms—a very important distinction. Only a few short years ago, when armies were tiny compared with the vast hosts of to-day, a single battle often decided a war. To-day battles which dwarf the greatest struggles of the past into comparative insignificance are nothing more than mere incidents in the far-flung lines of the contending hosts. And the huge size of modern armies has been made possible only by the system which takes the young and able-bodied and compulsorily trains them with a view to military service when war comes. We did not invent that system; indeed, we refused to adopt it long after it had come into operation among all other European nations. But we have to meet the system in operation in the field against us, and we have hitherto been trying with hastily improvised armies to beat nations which have spent half a century in training their manhood in the use of arms. I rejoice that such marvellous efforts have been made, and that such wonderful results have been achieved under the voluntary system. But that system can never produce “the nation in arms,” and it is emphatically “the nation in arms” that is required if we are to beat the Germans. Before this frightful struggle ends we shall certainly require to make every effort of which we, as a nation and an Empire, are capable.

It is a little difficult to understand the opposition to the principle of compulsory service. By the common law of almost all nations the State has the right to call upon the individual for assistance in protecting the State against the common enemy. I do not see, indeed, how this right can be disputed, for to dispute it would be to cut at the very foundations of organised society. One can, of course, readily understand wide differences of opinion as to the advisability or necessity of adopting a compulsory system, especially in the middle of a great war, but against the principle itself I fail to see any valid argument. Salus populi lex suprema. If the interests of the nation demand the introduction of compulsion, whether during a war or not, I cannot understand how it can be opposed either in principle or as a matter of expediency.

Now it must be quite clearly understood that, so far as Britain is concerned, the adoption of the principle of compulsion was purely a matter of expediency, and those lifelong opponents of compulsory service who found themselves able to support the Act sacrificed none of their convictions or principles in doing so. We had reached a stage in the War when the problem of finding enough men to keep our armies in the field up to full strength had become critical. Mr Asquith had pledged himself—quite rightly, as I think—that the married men who enlisted under the Derby group system should not be called up while any considerable number of single slackers remained deaf to every call that was made upon them. In this I believe he was absolutely right, and I believe he had behind him the vast preponderance of intelligent opinion in the country, including, though the fact has been disputed, the bulk of the working-class population. We were unquestionably drafting into the Army too large a proportion of married men, and widows and orphans were being made at a rate that was positively appalling. It was quite obvious that something must be done to put a stop to this condition of things, and the famous pledge of Mr Asquith was the result. And when it was found that the unmarried men still remained outside the Army, the passage into law of a measure of compulsion could be nothing more than a matter of time.

The Act was frankly a temporising measure, and my own personal belief is that it does not go nearly far enough. Mr Asquith has declared that he does not think the situation calls for a measure of general compulsion, and he must be in possession of facts which are hidden from the public. Present indications suggest that he is right; whether he was wise to bolt and bar the door to general compulsion so emphatically as he did is another matter. It was certainly a very remarkable statement of Lord Kitchener, reported to the House of Commons by Mr Walter Long, that the Act as it stood would provide all the men required to ensure victory, a statement which seems hardly to have attracted the attention that it deserved. Both Mr Asquith and Lord Kitchener may be right, and it is certainly true that our prospects are brighter than they have been for many months.

In view of what may conceivably happen in the future, there is one misconception with regard to national service which it is perhaps worth while to try to clear up. It is too hastily assumed that the men who are swept into the net of a compulsory system are necessarily drafted to the fighting ranks. This, of course, is a mistake pure and simple. One of the greatest advantages of the compulsory system is that by its means men can be employed just at the work where their services are most needed. It is quite certain that had we had a compulsory service system in operation when the War broke out we should have seen less of the enlistment into the fighting services of men whose brains and muscles were urgently needed in other directions. We should not, for instance, have seen three hundred thousand miners sent to the trenches while we were short of coal at home; we should not have seen our munition works held up through shortage of skilled labour consequent upon high-class mechanics joining the fighting line. Each man would have been sent to serve where he was most needed, and this, it seems to me, is one of the strongest arguments that can be adduced in favour of the principle of compulsion.