EFFICIENCY.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16152, 28 November 1924, Page 9

EFFICIENCY.

getting things done. colonel op connaught rangers (By Stephen Gwynn, In the Spectator.)' If ever there was a question-beg-ging word, it is the one which Lord Rosebery made so popular in a disgruntled England during the Boer War. People recommended it like a quack medicine, and omitted to notice that Lord Rosebery had not told us what it was, or how to /jet it. You can at least buy the patent pill, but where was and where is the market of efficiency? Experience ought to help; but if I try my own trade, what is an efficient writer? Was Shelley, let us say, efficient? Was Marie Corelli? Besides, efficiency means getting things done, and that involves almost always not only the power of working capably, but of working in concert with others; it ought to mean also the power to get others to work for you, and most difficult of all, the power to get them to work together for your object. All these varieties of efficiency can be displayed in politics, which was also my trade; but here again experience is of no use, for I am at a loss to know who were and who are the efficient. To apprise efficiency you should he able to measure the results; and who can do that in politics? In short. If you test them with reference to the work upon which they have spent their lives, no two men will easily agree what efficiency is. But there is a territory in the experience of many thousands now living where things stand out with extraordinary distinctness. Those untrained for war. who were forced suddenly into sobering, naturally formed judgments which had the crispness and sharp outline of a tourist's impressions of a new country. Every one of them had to

Test His Own Efficiency by new and very definite standards: the test involved always the individual power to combine his effort with that of others, and almost always the effort to induce effort, and to induce combination. The ideas of efficiency which we formed in war, and in preparation for war. had a precision unlike anything else; and if I were asked for my type of the quality, I should name a certain commanding officer. We were a scratch lot indeed when he took us over—the last service battalion of our regiment .to be formed with the scrapings of the old N.C.O.'s for our mentors; but his impress was on it already when I joined, three or four months after he got command. Yet, having given my example, if I ask myself where his efficiency lay, the answer is not so easy. There was, indeed, that trait which .Towett declared to be efficiency's hallmark. He carried a notebook, and used it. Out it came, from the breastpocket of his tunic at all times, and something was neatly pencilled—without a word said. He noticed everything, and we noticed that he noticed. One of the subalterns in my particular lot came to me jubilant during a halt in a hot march, when men were in their shirtsleeves. He had devised a way of folding the tunic so that when it was strapped on the pack the buttons showed in a neat row. The' Colonel had stopped before his platoon and made a note. Sure enough, next day it was in battalion orders that tunics were to be so folded.

He never, I am sure, said anything to that subaltern. I cannot recall any individual word of commendation to any of us. If he approved you, you were given more to do, and that was all you heard about it explicitly. Censure there was, and I never met a more formidable power of rebuke: icy and quiet, the manner saying more than the words. But he praised us collectively whenever we gave him half a chance, and he never disparaged or discouraged us as a body. All ranks were made to feel that the regiment was a fine thing, so that each might bo made to fear that he was letting it down. The buttons were an outward visible sign of our inward efficiency—and it did not stop at buttons. In France, at one billet in the early days, a fierce order went out about leaving rubbish about, and we were ordered to clear up all strewn papers. Somebody pointed out that the papers in adja'cent hedgrows showed plainly by their dates and condition that they were a

Heritage From Many Forerunners.

"If other people are pigs," he said, "we have ourselves to consider." And the hedges, to the uttermost limits of Febvin Palfart (I think it was) were swept and garnished, for the four days' credit of the Connaught Rangers. In short, there was the utmost insistence on detail—and on rules. But no man ever recognised more clearly the limits of the possible. He had more than thirty years' service, but common sense—the base of efficiency —told him that this hasty levy were not, and could not be, regulars. "In the old army," he said to me one clay, "when an order was issued, everybody thought the sky would full if it were not acted on. This lot of new officers say: 'Was that in orders? I'd forgotten it.' " He never raged such shortcomings, but kept pushing us towards his standard. For him. orders were orders, and we knew it. Yet he never parted with the dispensing power, or feared to use it. Only the highest efficiency enables a man to maintain rules sternly and yet remain free to relax them without sacrificing the name for fair play: but discipline, as he administered it, was an instrument having suppleness as well as rigidity. Men knew that the Colonel was strictly just, but they knew that thev always had a human being to deal with and not a book of rules. It was so at home in little matters, such as the granting of leave; little matters, yet in which every decision would be sharply canvassed if it set aside a rule; and the efficient handling of men who form part of a mass involves thought for the effect on the mass as well as on the individual at every turn. In France, when weighty matters, even life and death, were at stake, he had the greater freedom, because

He Had Won Confidence. Ho relaxed' none of his strictness over the unessential —such as cleaning up. He rated me austerely because in a trench through which I conducted him with just pride we came upon tealeaves strewn on the duckhoards by some ruffian. If they had been -on a man-o'-war's deck in harbour, the offence could not have been made more heinous. But he let me save a man from execution by prescribing false teeth. The soldier in question had as hi tie right to 1)0 called a soldier as any that ever disgraced a parade: a lumpish oaf, in my judgment three, parts witted. Those who disagreed believed he was stumming stupid. Wo went into the line for our trial trip attached lo a veteran battalion, and the company with which this man's platoon was'blended caught a desperate shellin- in its first twenty-four hours. The company-commander told mc, when I

got onto the scene, that some of our lot had behaved very well, and this man 'was one ho singled out. His own comrades said that the firing had seemed to excite him, that he was jumping and pretending to catch the bullets. But in any case, at a moment when old soldiers were considerably shaken, he had shown

Contempt of Danger. For this he was duly and perhaps tmduly commended. The praise went to his head, and as soon as we got out he was grossly insubordinate to his sergeant-major, and got heavy punishment. We. went back into the line, this time attached as a spare company to another battalion (not a plan which made for efficiency). It was horrible weather, heavy snow in the muddiest trenches, and we were involved in one of the most bloody and purposeless attacks that marked that inefficient period. He got away from the front trench on a plea of frozen feet, and somehow evaded being sent back. We came into reserve line, were daily and nightly carrying up bombs—a heavy, hateful job—and I was without a sergeant-major. Twice this man, hidden away in ■ old ruins., dodged the assembling of the company. He was brought, up and sentenced to the heaviest penalty the Colonel could Inflict. Next clay he malingered again. There was nothing for it but to send him to a court-martial, and that was the Colonel's sentence. I hated the sight of the fellow. We were slave-driving good men; young boys* wont staggering up with sixty pound weight of bombs on them through mud that almost tore off their boots, and came in cheerful at the end: and here was this hulking creature, deliberately shirking both the danger and the hardship. Yet my mind was not easy. I did not honestly believe him to be quite normally a man. He was a mule, and ho had a mule's sulkiness, and I knew he had an old grievance rankling. I went to the Colonel with a proposal, and he told me to go ahead. So I had the man fetched out from whore ho was under guard and stood him up before me. I said: "Wo all know you aren't afraid of a fight: you don't mind bullets, shell fire doesn't frighten you. but how would you like now to be taken out to be shot in cold blood? to have your badges ripped ofr, before your own platoon, and your eyes bandaged and your hands tied behind you by your own platoon, and to be

Shot Like a Dog by your own platoon?" It was a fairy story, of course, but I was treating him as a child, and, barring the picturesque details, shooting was what he might look for. "How would you like.that?" I said to him: and as I watched, he was beginning to blubber —a trick he had—and big dirty tears rolled down his big dirty cheeks. "Indeed then, sir, I would not like that at all," said he. sobbing. "Well, look here, now," said I. "I know you have a grouse about your teeth." He revived at the recollection. "Sure, they pulled seven out of me one day there in Blackdown and said I would get new ones, but sorra one I got, and I can't chew a bit since, and what food I get does me no good, so it doesn't.". I stopped a string of details. "If I send you down to the hospital now, and get you a decent set of teeth, will you soldier properly?" He burst into a flood of weeping—"Och now, sir, Mr Gwynn sir, if you'll only do that, I'll fight for you like a hero, the same as I done at Loos."

I reported to the Colonel. It was a steep thing to do, but he quashed his own regimental decision, and sent the gentleman back to the base, from which he returned later—to another company, thank God. He never got the V.C.; lie never got anything; he was never much good at all. But there was never any trouble with him later. As for the company, they, I think, understood, approved, and worked the better. They certainly did not, any of them, seek indulgence on a similar account. And as for the battalion, the results of the Colonel's work were put to the test'in the quarries at Guillemont —known to me only by hearsay. The quarries were -carried, and six times before an attack had failed there. But there was a

Limit to the Colonel's Efficiency. He did not abide by his own plan, which was that he should remain in the rear when the charge was launched. Yet it was part of the quality which humanised his cool competence that he could not resist, the temptation to go with them. Perhaps without the gaiety, . the tpuch of wild blood, and the instinct for companionship that showed in him at times, he would have been less perfectly adapted for the task of making a rabble into a fine regiment: and I suppose that means he would have been less efficient. But would everyone agree to that? If he had been efficient in the more usual sense, he would have become a brigadier, possibly even a. major-general: and he would certainly not have ended his career there at Guillemont witli a bullet in the brain.