THE SOLDIER OF TO-DAY

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 118, 14 November 1929, Page 22

THE SOLDIER OF TO-DAY

FREEDOMS WON BY TEUST MODEL MEN IN UNIFORM A little while ago it pleased the War Office to issue eertaiu orders regarding privileges to private soldiers, concerning wearing of plain c-iothes at specified - times and when on l(^ave, tho hour of' return to barracks, and the" like, writes a correspondent in an overseas journal. The ways of the Army are largely the ways of the classes from which it is drawn, and the fact that so many of the older regulations can thus bo relaxed is but the recognition of the result of the last fifty years of education and uplift in the nation at large. ; The people of to-day of all classes are intensely civilised, .and their sense of responsibility and behaviour is great. Thereftire the Army can trust its soldiers among its citizens, and the more that sense of responsibility increases among the lads from whom soldiers are recruited, the more will it be possible to give tho rank and file the Bame liberty off duty as is permitted to officers. Improved as the young soldier is today in his manners and ways, yet for many a generation the British soldier has been loved and admired by the officers who had had to lead him, and especially so in the bad days, then frequent enough, of difficulty, diseases, and starvation. Atkins rough or Atkins smooth has ever been staunch to those who can lead and command him. HANDLING HARD CASES. Thero has always been much misapprehension as to the true facts of flogging in the Army. Flogging and all severe punishments were originally prescribed by the old "free" companies themselves • for their own selfprotection. It became intense in some corps in the Peninsula War because of tho difficulty in maintaining our armies with respectable men, when gaolbirds came to serve His Majesty. But even then the good regiments rarely sent a man to the triangle; they had other and better ways of handling their hard cases and keeping their young men content. The bad regiments—that is to say, those who had a succession of bad commanding officers and had never had a good cult—flogged their men through bad management.

When the Peninsula "War was over and - enlistment got back to the- good agricultural classes, life in the Army grew normal again, though the bad regiments still had to rule through the lash. It is to be remembered that those were days when men were hung "for sheep-stealing, and punishments ran harsh throughout all society, doubtless because of the generations it took to restore the sense of order which the war,s of the Boses had upset and the Civil War interrupted. . From the days of the Great Peace after Waterloo, the British- Army has ever been a school of "uplift" in advance of such movement in civil life. In the good regiments education and the humanities and the need to turn a man out of the Army better fitted to be a citizen than when he joined was always the aim. In the "iong service" days the ranks were by no means full of old soldiers. A great many men left young, and there wag only a small portion of long service rank and file. In modern years, too, •the Army has"usually been ahead of the times. VERSATILE ATKINS. We have seen and heard a' great deal during and .since the Groat War of Atkina throughout the world, and his gift for " mixing "—Atkins drilling Arab levies and police, Atkins bringing food into starving Vienna via the Danube, Atkins in Italy, Atkins nursing) the refugee Assyrian nations, Atkins looking after "Jerry," and the like. While we have seen the British solflier in France exceedingly popular, making himself .preposterously welcome, and generally spreading himself, .it is good to think how often ho has been there before. Cressy, Poitiers, Agincourt, Calais—it has gone on for centuries, and we may read something of it in the Froissart Chronicles. Unfortunately no one tells us anything like enough of what it really was like, and how our good Saxon soldiers then comported themselves. We need not bother much over the Norman strain, for the notion that there was anything French about them" even when they first came is a mistake. The Norseman was only a fraction removed from & Dane and a Saxon, and the reblending did not take a century. Thero" ar« sufficient records of the Crusades to show how little things differed in their human side in the days of Allenby and his Scottish and Saxon soldiers from those of the Middle Ages. Those times were not all savagery and callousness, as the records might appear to show. We may be sure that the country gentry of England would not have flocked to the Crusades and the Holy Land with their retainers long after the first fervour had died away over i period of several generations unless conditions were reasonably favourable. They and their country men-at-arms would not have served for long unless travel conditions were fair and the forces well found. There is one considerable change in the Army to-day which fills many with regret. Sixty or seventy years ago and even earlier, when Ireland carried a far greater population than now, the Irish flocked not only to all the Irish regiments, but to every English regiment that was at all short and could take them. How much this was so is evident from the names in the graveyards of deserted Indian cantonments and on the big memorials on many of the battlefields of the world. The corps of the Honourable East India Company's European force were largely filled by the Irish, and it was ±or this reason that most of these corps, when taken over by the Crown were made Irish regiments. They have almost all disappeared from the roll of honour of the Empire now, by some illogical fate, and the numerous Irish lads who wish to soldier must come as happily they still do, to enlist in Great Britain.