THE WAR OFFICE AND ITS SHAM ARMY

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume XXIV, Issue 3684, 13 April 1898, Page 3

THE WAR OFFICE AND ITS SHAM ARMY

K Major Bascb, Major-General £ 6 ' H and Lor d Alwyne CompBußße Thewhofe four of them do *>»• K much light We l Ot^eoS complaints of the K r c Ofice; some more stones W the circumlocution departab . but the reader will rise from T*L^L not much wiser than Major-General E^eUreSsustbittherank Tfile of the British Army in total strength being 220 742 <Of this force 76,937 of all * an kß are quartered m England, £X a ? n d the Channel Islands, Sin Scotland, and 25,841 in ?'?«?bS?a total of 106,408 S e Se While ia Egypt and fhe Colonies 38,884 are quartered SS to Into 75,450, or a total of 114,334 abroad.' Major.General Russell contrasts the complacent assertions of the, optimißt who assumes that every--2L « as it ought to be in the Hf with such facts as the follo^ g Qae T such <besK best' management up to October last not a man had been recruited for the two new battalions of Guards, while of the 3,000 men voted for the garrison artillery last session the Department bad only got hold of 245 ; that of our recruits, 30 cent are specials (i.e., under five foot and a half inches, and less than thirty-two round the chest, under age, and under size ; that in the home battalions one has only 290 effectives, and 40 per ceDt of specials among the recruits _I a m, of course, speaking of war strength-and requires 700 men to complete ; another wants 600 ; another 650 ; and after filling them up where is the reserve of which Sir Arthur Haliburton and Lord Wantage are so proud — that reserve which has been the one ewe lamb of successive representatives of the War Office in Parliament, and which, according to the answer given before the late Commission by Lord Wolseley, is « somewhat of a sham !' As to the artillery, the public are aware of the ' fiwco ' in the spring, when tweDty batteries were torn to pieces in order to send three out to the Cape, but what they are ignorant of is that the condition of the artillery ia worse than that of the line at home. To start with, the proportion of guns to infantry is lower in the British Army than ia foreign forces, and they cannot be improvised. The army of the South -East, under Bourbaki in 1871 , failed because Gambetta and De Freycinet ignored this salient fact ; and in our army we have some 200,000 auxiliaries with only one effective battery amongst them. Besides this a considerable number of the home batteries have been reduced to four guns, as they TjaHKled at the Jubilee-review forty-two men and forty-eight horses— by the way, what has become of the sixty-eight horse artillery and 282 field battery guns promised to Lord Lansdowne, at Salisbury, two years ago ? As for the cavalry, we have 13,000 dragoons at home, and only 3,000 horses, while the regiments are cut up and separated in a way fatal to efficiency.' All the writers appear to believe that the War Office needs reorganisation. They are all dissatisned with the reserve, and then make a few suggestions as to ■what should be done. Lord Alvrjme Comptoa proposes to doable the Militia at a cost of £120,000 a yeer ; to found a voluntary reserve, to which 30,000 additional men would be secured at a cost of £210,000.