32 
LAND & WATER 
December 7, 1916 
The Sinews of War 
By J. H. Morgan 
THE army deals with two things : men and 
suppHes ; the Adjutant-General being concerned 
with the one, and the O.M.G. preoccupied with 
the other. There are, oT course, other branches: 
lliere is the R.E., which beheves m justification by works, 
there is Ordnance, there is Operations, there is IntelUgence, 
But men and what they shall eat and wherewithal they 
>hall be clothed are, after all, the largest concern, and in 
the consideration of these problems the army has evolved 
ttn organisation which is the nearest approach to the ideal 
of the collectivist state that the political world has yet 
ieen. It has, it is true, not yet appropriated the sphere 
of production in the same way as it has pegged out that of 
distribution ; it is still dependent on the contractor, 
ilthough, with the assistance of the Board of Trade and 
the Ministry of Munitions, it is getting hold of him, not 
\>y Wellington's method of hanging him pour cncourager 
ies autres, but by putting him in a strait waistcoat called 
\he Defence of the Realm Act and the Excess Profits 
Tax, whereby his factories, land, stocks, and profits, are 
all laid under contribution. That, however, is not the 
immediate business of the army, although it is the out- 
come of its imperious necessities. The army in the field 
does indeed " produce " ; the Director of Water Transport 
enters the sphere of production when he builds his reser- 
voir and lays his miles of pipe- line on the Somme, as does 
theO.C. of a Rest Camp when he passes the empty tins of 
ration jam into his incinerator in order to transform them 
into a top dressing for his drainage scheme. And likewise 
when the sappers take ten thousand empty oil drums and, 
by packing them with the sand from the sand dunes, 
build an amphitheatre at a Base training camp for lectures 
to the drafts. And so, too when a section of a Pioneer 
battalion gets to work, as I have seen it getting to work 
in what was once the village of Longueval, to pick the 
bricks of the levelled houses out of the slime and pass them 
from hand to hand, hke a game of rounders, in order to 
fill the lorries of the road repairers — then also the army 
turns producer. If, indeed, the conversion of waste 
products into new and surprising uses is '' production," 
then the army has nothing to learn from '' the business 
man," and a great deal to teach him. In its practice of 
economy it could give points to the French housewife 
who, as everyone knows, is the greatest of all economists. 
Men 
But to handle goods, to produce them, to distribute 
them, to put them to their best and most serviceable 
uses is, after all, a far less subtle thing than to make the 
most of men. And it is in its handling of men that the 
British Army has done its greatest. It has compiled the 
greatest biographical dictionary in the world. A dis- 
tinguished officer has claimed for the War Office that if 
a Parliamentary question is asked about a soldier in the 
ranks, he can tell the questioner all about him in twelve 
hours. The claim was not unfounded ; in this particular 
case the answer was forthcoming in four hours. From 
the moment a man has signed his attestation form, he is 
the subject of a continuous record of his physical pecu- 
liarities, his health, his conduct, his pay, his movements, 
and his whereabouts. His attestation form describes him, 
his military history sheet chronicles him, his medical 
history sheet diagnoses him, his conduct sheet testifies 
for or against him. If he is wounded, his case sheet will 
tell you the nature of his wounds and the state of his 
temperature ; if he is " crimed," CM. " proceedings " 
will inform you of the character of the offence and the 
circumstances which aggravate or mitigate it ; if he is 
dead, then, with God's grace, the Graves Registry will 
tell you where he is buried. Every " corps " — using 
that word in its technical sense —has its records, at 
W^oolwich or Lichfield or elsewhere as the case may be, 
and though the man be anywhere from France to Mesopo- 
tamia, " Records " can tell you in a few minutes where 
the man is. And once the scent is started, in a few hours 
or days that man's army biography is open to you like a 
book. And this, be it remembered, is true, not of one 
man, but of many millions of men. 
If the army does not waste goods, neither does it wasta 
men. The whole object of the army organisation is to 
keep men " fit " — their kit, their training, their health, 
and their moral character are all equally the object of 
its sohcitude. If a draft goes out to France, the first 
thing that happens to it is : it is put through its paces 
at a Base Training Camp. The O.C. and his instructors 
go round and study its " form. " — in musketry, in bombing, 
in Lewis-gunning, in bayonet exercise — and award it 
marks. If the percentage of marks is high, it goes up to 
the front without delay ; if they are low it stays till 
they are higher. Incidentally, the men learn a thing or two 
about gas. When it is ready to go, a kit inspection of 
every man's kit is made and the O.C. Details enters up 
the possession of some thirty-seven articles in every man's 
pay-book. The Medical Officer pays him the compliment 
of an intimate personal examination. Thereafter the 
Division takes him to its bosom as a hen gathers its chickens 
under its wings. The Divisional Commander, it is true, 
only thinks of him in terms of Operation or Divisional 
Routine Orders — he is merely a number. But to his 
company commander and sergeant-major he is not merely 
a number but a character from the day at home when the 
company orderly sergeant received the nominal roll of 
men to be warned for overseas draft — to the day 
when company orders were posted up on the Co. 
notice-board in billets, warning him and his fellows to 
be ready with packs and water-bottles for his first visit 
to the trenches. 
And so from these days onwards the man is always 
under observation — but in no invidious sense. The 
word has gone forth that O.C.'s are to keep their eyes 
open for likely men for commissions, and if every soldier 
in the ranks does not carry a field-marshal's baton in his 
knapsack, he certainly may cherish hopes of a second- 
lieutenant's star. If it is all the other way, and he is 
more conspicuous by his faults than his virtues, that also 
does not pass unremarked. Anyone who is acquainted 
with the proceedings of a F.G.C.M., is familiar with the 
personal reports of a Company Commander or Battahon 
O.C, which often accompany the more formal conduct- 
sheet, when it comes to a question of considering the 
sentence to be awarded. And whether the sentence is 
suspended or put into execution, the man is from that 
moment the subject of a system of reformative treatment 
which despairs of no one. Every three months his 
sentence comes under review ; if it has been put into 
execution in a field-prison it may be suspended, if it has 
been suspended it - may be remitted. Few people are 
aware that within the screen of the armies there is a 
Borstal system at work which has already produced sur- 
prising results. 
This, however, is looking at the problem of flie in- 
dividual man, and it was worth while dwelling on if only 
to show that in this gigantic aggregation of men he is 
never lost sight of. But in the higher orders of the 
military hierarchy men are, of course, treated in terms of 
"strength returns." It is the business of the Adjutant- 
(leneral and his A.A.G.'s to see that units are kept up to 
strength with the necessary drafts. It is a business 
which every day grows more complicated as infantry 
battalions become more composite ; they have so many 
" specialists." Instead of the old normal complement 
of men with rifles and bayonets, there are now bombers 
and Lewis gunners in a certain ratio in each company, to 
say nothing of the machine gunners, the signallers, the 
tunnelling company, and the trench- mortar batteries 
attached to each battalion. These ratios (it is neither 
necessary nor advisable to say what they are), are more 
or less fixed and have to be maintained. The chief 
unit in the field is, of course, the Division, and not only 
are the infantry and artillery grouped accordingly, but 
also the field ambulances, the ammunition columns, and 
