Half-made soldiers and raw material alike would therefore be left to the instruction of amateur or hastily improvised officers--zealous and intelligent men without a doubt; but unqualified, owing to their own lack of experience, for training raw troops, so as to place them rapidly on an equality with the armies to which they would find themselves opposed. What the British system contemplated, was as if you were to send away the headmaster, and the assistant-masters, and the under-masters, leaving the school in charge of pupil-teachers.
In no profession is the direct personal influence of teaching and command more essential than in the soldier's. In none are good teachers and leaders more able to shorten and make smooth the road to confidence and efficiency. Seeing that we had chosen to depend so largely upon training our army after war began, it might have been supposed, that at least we should have taken care to provide ourselves with a sufficient number of officers and non-commissioned officers, under whose guidance the course of education would be made as thorough and as short as possible. This was not the case. Indeed the reverse was the case. Instead of possessing a large number of officers and non-commissioned officers, beyond those actually required at the outbreak of war for the purpose of { 324} starting with, and repairing the wastage in the Expeditionary Force, we were actually faced, as things then stood, with a serious initial shortage of the officers required for this one purpose alone.
Lord Haldane in framing the army system which is associated with his name chose to place his trust in a small, highly-trained expeditionary force for immediate purposes, to be supplemented at a later date--if war were obliging enough to continue for so long--by a new army of which the _Territorials_ formed the nucleus, and which would not begin its real training until after the outbreak of hostilities. Under the most favourable view this plan was a great gamble; for it assumed that in the war which was contemplated, the _onset_ and the _grip_ periods would be passed through without crushing disaster, and that England would, in due course, have an opportunity of making her great strength felt in the _drag_. It will be said that Lord Haldane's assumption has been justified by recent events, and in a sense this is true; but by what merest hair-breadth escape, by what sacrifices on the part of our Allies, at what cost in British lives, with what reproach to our national good name, we have not yet had time fully to realise.