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LAND & \\ A T 1-: R 
May 25, 1916 
The Empire in Arms 
By Professor J. H. Morgan 
ONE evening at the end of April last year two 
or three statf officers and myself were "sitting at 
dinner in one of the dingy hotels at d.H.O. 
Our talk was scnnbre. News was filtering in that 
tlie position on the Ypres salient was desperate, and from 
day to day pt^rplexing rumours were ni circulation — 
the first tliat the French troops on our left had been on 
the run. runnint; " from Dan even to Beersheba," as I 
heard some one put it. This circumstance, novel and 
perplexing in itself -for we knew the indomitaole temper 
df our Ailies— \\'as not rendered the more reassuring by 
the second rumour which came on top of the first : That 
they had succumbed to some strange lethal \'apour whicii 
had risen from tiie ground in the twilight like a river mist 
and floated stealthily over the fields until e\'ery trench 
and sap-head became a pocket of poisonous chlorine. Also 
tiiat men, horses, cattle were lying all over the place, 
stricken by a kind of blight, and' that the happiest were 
those who did not survive. 
One heard strange stories of a Brigade with its left 
wing in the air, of flanking movements which had brotight 
the enemy into our rear, of signal wires cut and whole 
battalions isolated, until the position was a kind of jig- 
saw puzzle. Also that there was a gap of four miles on 
our left through which the enemy was pouring like a 
flood. And other such things. As we talked, a young 
artillery officer, a Canadian, with his arm in splints, came 
into the room and shyly slipped into a place at the long 
table — the only table in the room. (i.H.Q is like a 
\\\»lsh \-illage — one knows everyone by sight, but the 
newcomer was unfamiliar to us. A stray remark about 
the position at St. JtUien brought him into the radius of 
our conversation, and the next moment we were eagerly 
hearing from his lips the story of the colossal struggle still 
in progress and of how his battery of four eighteen- 
pounders had suddenly foimd the enemy right in their 
rear and had. had to swing round their guns to face a 
force not 400 yards away. 
It is not my purpose to re-tell the immortal 
story of those thirteen days — ^others have done it better 
- — but the impression that stands out most clearly from 
my recolle( tion of that young gunner's vivid narrative 
• — illustrated by a rapid requisitioning of all the knives 
and forks within reach to reconstruct the positions — is 
that it was the beginning of a new epoch in the military 
history of the Overseas Dominions. For his talk was 
not so much of battalions as of brigades, of brigades not 
only of infantry but of artillery, and he spoke too of 
administratiA'e field units, of ambulance, supply, and 
ammunition columns. And all this suddenly brought 
home to us the fact that for the first time in the history 
the Empire an Overseas Dominion had put a whole 
Division into the field. No man who knows anything of 
the problems of Imperial Defence requires to be told 
what that means. 
An Imperial Army 
For years it had been the dream of our Imperial 
General Staff to secure that there should be a homogeneous 
Imi)erial Army in which the composition of units 
should be that of our own War Establishments — the 
Division of three infantry brigades with its full comple- 
ment of " divisional troops. " F'or the secret of sound 
military organisation is a standardisation of parts and a 
uniform composition of units. The Imperial army which 
took the field in the. Boer \\'ar wis such as to make an 
R.T.O.'s hair stand on end ; its spirit was willing but 
its " make-up " was weak ; the Colonial contingents 
differed in weapons, kit; organisation, and their 
composition was as unorthodox as their ^military 
vocabulary. The result was delay, confusion, and 
vexation of spirit. 
In 1907 our newly-created General Staff took these 
questions in hand. The problem which exercised their 
minds was primarily a political One — the jjroblem of 
^^jcurinj; a homogeneous army from a heterogeneous 
Empire and of persuading self-governing Dominions, 
which are independent in almost everything but 
name, not only to take the Army Annual Act as a kind 
of Model Clatises Act for their own Defence Acts, but to 
conform to our own War I*:stablishments. The (ieneral 
Staff had to work out its own plans within the rigid limits 
of two constitutional principles ; the legislative inde- 
pendence of the Overseas Dominions and the liberty of 
the Dominion citizen to volunteer for extra-Colonial 
service or not as he thought fit. 
No Compulsion for Foreign Service 
The Dominions were prepared to impose com- 
pulsion on their own citizens for home defence ; they 
were not prepared to impose it on them for foreign service 
—in the former they w-ere ahead of us, in the latter we 
are now ahead of them. Whatever troops the Dominions 
choose to raise — whether compulsorily for home service, 
or voluntarily for foreign service — they claimed to control. 
Legally, a Colonial soldier is, of course, " the King's 
soldier," the Crown is one and indivisible throughout 
the Empire, and the King is supposed by an engaging 
legal fiction to be personally present throughout his 
Dominions— a legal fiction which sadly perplexed a 
certain Colonial trooper when he had his pay-book 
made up in the Boer Wav* The King is indeed, Com- 
mander-in-Chief of all the Dominion forces — Dominion 
Defence Acts recogni.se it. But, as leveryone knows, the 
prerogatives, of the Crown in the Dominions are vested 
in the Governor-Cicncral, or Governor, acting on the 
advice of his Ministers, who in turn are responsible to the 
local legislatures. 
As regards the local defence of the Dominions a great 
advance had already been made in the early years of 
this centurv. Manv causes contributed to it : the ex- 
perience of "the Boer \\'ar started it, the federation of 
Australia facilitated it, the emergence of a great Asiatic 
power in the Pacific accelerated it, but I fancy that it 
was the concentration of our navy in home waters, in 
response to the challenge of the German Naval Bill, 
that did most to consolidate it. Be that as it may, there 
was a remarkable sequence of Dominion Defence Acts 
in Australia (iQO^, 1904. 1909, 1910), Canada (1906), 
New Zealand (1909, 1910), and the new South African 
Union (1912). All of them, with some variation, adopted 
the principle of compulsory service for home defence 
though the application of the principle was more nominal 
than real. Training in peace and service in war are alike 
compulsory, though in the case of Canada the former is 
limited to a kind of militia ballot, to be taken when the 
Government think fit ; whereas in Australia and New 
Zealand the compulsory training is tmiversal for youths 
from the ages of 16 to 25, and the exercise of the com- 
pulsion is made mandatory upon the Government instead 
of discretionary. In all these Dominions the liability to 
service applies to e\-ery citizen under 55 or 60 years of 
age. Apart from this adoption of the Icvec en masse all 
the Acts provide for the raising of a Defence Force which 
— the nomenclature varies slightly — is divided into a 
Permanent F'orce and a Citizen Force. 
Much might be written abotit the organisation of these 
forces as a series of experiments in compulsory training, 
but their immediate interest for tis is the provision made 
for their use in such great Imperial crises as the present. 
The problem which presented itself to the General Staff 
was how far could they rely on the assistance of organised, 
highly trained, and uniformly composite forces in the 
case of a great emergency. As was ])ointed out in the 
Imperial Defence Conference of i90(), in none of the 
Dominions was it " legally possible for a military^ unit to 
volunteer, as such, for service oversea as part of an 
I mperial Army ." All the Defence Acts expressly provided 
that the members of the various Dominion Forces were 
• Sec the case of Williams r. Howarth lic;ird oil appeal by tUo 
Jiidiciui Committee o( the Privy Council in 1905. 
