POLITICS AND THE SOLDIER

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6545, 18 November 1924, Page 6

POLITICS AND THE SOLDIER

The introduction of politics into military affairs, an example of which /we are seeing just now in the struggle betweeri. the partisans of General Gouraud, the favourite of the French Conservative politicians, and, those of General Sarrail, the darling of' the Liberals, in respect of the Military Governorship of Paris, writes a correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian.” Perhaps the nearest case in recent history in Britain would be the matter of the succession to the office of Commander-in-Chief after the sold Duke of Cambridge had been disposed of. When the fell in 1895 there on what was thought thej haste with which the seals ; vwere demanded from the retiring Wai'FSecretary; Lut it has been whispered that thdyap-. pointment of a now Commarider-firt-Chief was at stake, that each party had a candidate, and that the incoming Ministers were, afraid that an appointment might be made before they could get possession of the seals. Buller was the Liberal nominee; Wolseley got the post from Lord Salisbury. Going farther back we have plenty of instances of the incursion of politics jn Service matters. One writer, describing the state of the Navy in the middle of the eighteenth. ,century, has declared thatr “a Whig, captain was capable of remembering his politics even in the,flaming stress of battle, and by refusing ' effective/ help to another British: captain, be-, cause he was guilty of beipga Tory.” In the navy of William 111. there Was a strong Jacobite party, and there was grave anxiety in London before the Battle of La Hogue as to ;thp part which officers and men of Jacobite tendencies would take. The whole career of Marlborough was intermingled with polities/ and it was perhaps the working of fate which destroyed him by the swamping of the House of Lords with Whig peers. And politics entered strongly into the attempt of one party to belittle Wellington before he had made himself unassailable as a general in the field.