MILITARY TRAINING.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 192, 16 August 1927, Page 6

MILITARY TRAINING.

Panegyrics on the alleged benefits «* compulsory military training are now Vfa frequent and fulsome. Previous to 1914, Ibb. ever, English-speaking people tvnywhen ' regarded compulsory military fraining wjft aversion; to them it was a form „<£ Mar slavery peculiar to Continental Europe. Menover, it was part and pared of that snte military machine which, we were assured, met be smashed if democracy was not to "pxuk from the earth." All of which prompts mt to ask: Why has the boast that one rolratw is worth three pressed men been "■■qiiiH and relegated to the lumber room of ohlirioa! There is an increasing tendency on the put of some advocates of compulsory training t« introduce into their arguments the prqwstem* suggestion that in present-day youth there are ill traits with which only military difdjiune can cope successfully. Such insinuation is unwarranted libel. Personal experience eoarinces me that military discipline is a enriow mixture of molly-coddling and trjuay, eminently calculated to destroy all uutiatfre in the individual. How else describe a system that treats grown men like children, era to the point of ordering them to bed at an absurdly early hour, after which neither lights nor conversation are tolerated? Army discipline supplies the example par esceflenre <i man as a mere cog in the machine. ■ Th» cert ' of discipline, far from benefiting those subject*! to it, will really render them unfit for tie useful occupations of civil life. Tkt Gnat War effectively demonstrated that it did M* ■ take years to train a man for active sarin. Actual warfare in 1914 turned out to be something radically different to anytHn* wtwpa ted. So much so. that at one fell «trc&e strategy, tactics, text books and traunmjafrr m> far as the Western front was eoncemed— . were rendered obsolete. Who in 1814 foresaw years of trench warfare ahead, mudt less prepared for it? And who can say wkat the next war will develop* We hare gruesome prophecies picturing whole populations clfiterated by poison gases or plague germs dropped .. from the air. In face of such sckntifie dewihy what price the barrack square drill a»4 discipline of which "choleric martinets of lie roaring bull variety are so enamoured? US.