April 1^, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
13 
When the Men come Home 
By Professor J. H. Morgan 
S; 
MITH, the sergeant has reported you to nic for 
insubordination. What have you to say ? " 
j"Beg pardon, sir, but him and 1 had a dispute 
'about the number of carbon copies. He said 
he wanted three and I said two'd be enough. And he 
said ' Them's my orders.' And I said again ' Two will 
be enough.' And he said ' Them's my orders ' ■ and I 
said ' Two — ' " ' 
" That'll do. Why didn't you obey the sergeant's 
orders ? " 
" Well, sir, I told him he was wrong and I offered to 
■proj'e he was wrong. You see, sir,—" 
The Colonel scribbled a note or two on one of those 
fawn-coloured strips of paper which a thrifty War Office 
prescribes for H.O. Memoranda, and gazed soarchingly 
at tin's forensic offender. He was young, pert, and ratlicr 
pleased with himself, having been specially enlisted as a 
typist, with special rates of pay, and detailed to that 
marvellous corps which, as regards its intellectual attain- 
ments, is notlnngless than a profession, in respect of its 
mechanical gifts is certainly a craft, and in point of the 
\aricty and burden of its tasks could give points to 
" casual labour." On his shoulder straps were the 
letters " R.E." 
" Look here, my lad " said the Colonel. " The 
Army's not a debating society. No ! and it's not a 
trade union. Or if it is we've only got one trade union 
rule, which is ' Do as you are told, and do it quickly.' 
I've got to do as I am told. That surprises you, does it ? 
Well if I didn't, home would be the word, perhaps some- 
thing worse. H you don't, then field punishment's the 
word. Nasty thing field punishment " he said pensively. 
" It takes many forms— all of them more or less unpleas- 
ant, some of them very distressing to the sense of smell. 
Now we'll say no more about this. Don't do it again. 
You can go." 
Casuistries of Obedience 
As the delinquent saluted and withdrew, the Colonel 
turned to me. I knew him well for a wisp man and 
discriminating. What he doesn't know about the labour 
movement is hardly worth knowing, for whenever there's 
been " labour unrest " in the last ten years at home, and 
the harassed authorities have had to call in the military 
in aid of the civil power, that unlovely duty has fallen 
to him and a certain illustrious chief of "his. He has gone 
in and out, in mufti, among Labour conventicles, atten- 
tive, persuasive, expostulatory, drinking bad beer in a 
good cause and almost persuading your Socialist to be a 
citizen. If any officer has ever got to the bottom of 
that conundrum of the King's Regulations and the 
common law which presents an officer in times of civil 
"disturbance" with the pleasing alternative of being 
hanged if he obeys an order and shot if he doesn't, that 
officer is Colonel X. He knew, if any man did, that the 
only solution in dealing with the " disturbed" civilian 
is the exercise of a stupendous tact. Consequently 
liis opinions on the casuistries of obedience were worthy 
of respect. 
They often begin like that," he explained to me. 
" You see they come over here fresh from a city office 
where they've probablv wrangled incessantly with the 
senior clerk as to who should do the least work in the longest 
time, and they've hardly discarded their paper cuffs 
and put on khaki before they begin to try it on out here 
at G.H.Q. And they can talk— talk a dog's hind leg off. 
' One of the first things that surprises 'em — and there are 
many— is the silence in this office. The second is Work. 
The third is Overtime. The fourth is— What you've just 
heard. I don't think I shall have any more trouble with 
him." ^ 
This allocution has often recurred to me since. For 
.. with several millions of men taken from civil life and 
passed — many of them at their most impressionable 
age— through the mint of the British Army, ther*? is 
likely to be an abiding impression left upon them wlien 
they have passed out of military circulation and are 
returned to civil life. What kind of i'lnrM-es^ion ? In those 
memoirs of military life which are a classic of their kind— 
Souvenirs de servitude et grandeur militaires — ^De Vigny, 
who came of a dynasty of soldiers and was a soldier 
himself, speculates with extraordinary insight as to the 
effects of military life upon those who have been sub- 
mitted to it. His early years were passed under the spell 
of Napoleon, and throwing his books at the head of his 
tutor he quited the Lycee for the Army, only to find him- 
self, with the fall of the Emperor, waiting for a war 
which never came — kicking his heels in a barracks and 
reilecting on the futility of his career, and the " isola- 
tion " of the military life. The Army, he declared, was 
a nation within a nation, and though he loved with a 
passionate devotion the camaraderie of regimental life, 
he deplored its long divorce from civilian influences. 
Universal Service 
Few have celebrated more enthusiastically than he 
the bracing virtues of Army life—" c'est un hon livre 
pour connaitre I'humanite " ; none have dwelt more 
mournfully on its drawbacks. Superb in war, it was 
banal in peace, and the soldier, he complained, was in- 
ordinately flattered and no less inordinately depreciated 
according as the civilian found him necessary or the 
reverse. De Vigny's one hope was in universal military 
service — he wrote in the days of standing armies — where- 
by the Army and the Nation should become identified. 
Such a change, he prophesied, would be equally beneficial 
to the soldier and to the civilian. The soldier would cease 
to be obsequious, the civilian would become docile ; the 
one would acquire flexibility, the other discipline. As it 
was, the soldier had too little confidence in himself, the 
civilian had too much. 
This catastrophic war — a war which has come to be 
what von der Goltz prophesied it would be — a war not of 
armies but of peoples— has wrought the very change that 
de Vigny looked for. We have a nation in arms. Two 
things will result ; the Army will leaven the nation, the 
nation will leaven the Army. Neither will ever be quite 
tire same again. One may predict with some confidence 
that each will have a better opinion of the other. But 
of the two there can be little doubt that the nation had 
most to learn. 
Both industrially and politically it was going from 
bad to worse ; Liberal and Conservative, employer and 
workman, abused each other as though he were an alien 
enemy instead of a fellow-countryman, and never did 
anarchy run so high. Oc the other hand, though the 
nation had never been in a worse condition, the Army had 
never been in a better. In the early days of the present 
. conflict a certain ex-Secretary of State for War, with 
whom I was discussing the retreat from Mons and the 
superb rearguard actions fought by our men, said to me : 
" Yes, for its size no better Army than the British E.x- 
peditionary Force ever took the field." 
The Army of Mons 
Anyone who knows anything of the inner life of the 
Army during the ten years from 1904 — 1914 will endorse 
that verdict. Every officer from the divisional commands 
down to the youngest subalterns had set themselves to 
study the men ; the new recruits no longer, as in the pre- 
historic studies of Kipling, gave every reason for joining 
the Army but the true one, and to say that " there was 
a woman at the bottom of it " ceased to be either pleasant 
or true ; drunkenness had become merely foolish and 
disease disgraceful ; the musketry of the British infantry- 
man, always good, was now excellent ; barracks were no 
longer the dreary inhospitable places they once had been ; 
officers who took their profession seriously were no longer 
regarded as " mugs," and to be indifferent to the recrea- 
tions of your men was regarded as neither amiable nor 
wise. In a certain little yellow manual recently issued 
confidentially to ofticers on active service, are words 
to this effect : " It is important for officers to remember 
that their first care should be not for themselves but for 
their men." Those words might stand as the motto 
of the original British Expeditionary Force. How 
