made of the means at their disposal. There was throughout a want of understanding between the Department and the troops, and discipline was very imperfectly maintained among the hired transport. The straggling allowed was excessive, and in consequence the whole day was often needlessly consumed in making a perfectly insignificant march. Had the army corps been marching on in one line, instead of moving to and fro over a contracted space, its advance would have been retarded in a most pernicious way by the necessity of waiting for supplies. One small reform, therefore, that may be expected to follow the revelations of the campaign will be the establishment of a small reserve stock of waggons, sufficient, it may be presumed, for at least one army corps, although there is no need to keep up a supply of horses in peace time. A still more important reform is shadowed forth in the discovery now beginning to dawn on the mind of the British public, that the title "Control Department" is altogether inappropriate to the functions performed by the body now styled by that name. With the perception of this truth it is to be hoped we may arrive at sounder views of the proper organization of the Department, and consequently of the whole system of supply for the army. The business of the army naturally divides into two main branches-first, the supply of food, clothing, and arms; and secondly, the government of the troops but why the duties involved in the one should be regarded as more in the nature of "control" than those of the other we fail to perceive, as must any one else who takes the trouble to think over the matter. The real "controller" of the army is he who controls it both in men and things; and if there is no one individual who unites both these functions, then there is no proper controller.

But if the title is to be

given to some one, it is more properly bestowed on the General commanding than on any civil subordinate in his division; it would be thought absurd to give the title, for example, to the

quartermaster or paymaster of a regiment, leaving the colonel out of sight. The fact is, the employment of this misleading title arose out of a hazy misconception that this Department was to be entrusted with some important financial functions which would conduce to economy in army expenditure; but a very slight acquaintance with the matter should make it evident that this idea was based on complete delusion. The civil branch of the army may be divided in a general way into two main branches, the first of these comprising the manufacturing departments, which fabricate the military stores of all kinds. Now, in the management of these great establishments there is room for an indefinite amount of financial manipulation, because it is here that the civil expenditure in the main takes place, and that economical management can produce sensible results; but with this great branch of expenditure the officers of the Control Department (if we except one or two of the head officials seated in the War Office) have nothing whatever to do. The Control Department is engaged for the most part in the mechanical business of issuing stores made elsewhere, and of paying the troops. Even in such matters as contracts for food and forage, the local officers have in reality no controlling authority; they are the mere agents of the army of officials sitting in Pall Mall, and their business is mainly to refer matters for the orders of the latter, and to act without question upon their instructions. As to the pay branch of the Control Department, it needs hardly be said that it is bound hard and fast by detailed rules, that its duties are purely mechanical, and that no cases ever arise in the discharge of those duties to call for the exercise of individual judgment.

While, however, the effect of creating this Department has not been in any sense to decentralize authority or to invest local officials with responsibility, the inappropriate title given to it has tended to create a false impression that its members possess an authority which really does not belong to them.

People are naturally misled by names, and those who do not go below the surface of things find it difficult to understand that an official with this highsounding title has really no controlling authority whatever, but is a mere postoffice for conveying references to the War Office, or at most is powerful only for obstruction. This fact has, however, now been forced on the attention of the public, and it is to be hoped that, the imposture once detected, there is still a sufficiency of volition remaining in our administrative system to admit of the needful change being carried out. If there follow only this one result from the manœuvres, that the Control Department comes to be recognized as what it really is, a cumbrous and over-centralized store and pay agency, and its title adjusted to coincide with its functions, the Autumn Camp will not have been established in vain.

As regards the course of the manœuvres also, a good deal of the criticism so freely offered appears to us to have been wide of the mark, the small errors of subordinates having been dwelt upon for the most part, instead of the large ones of superiors. This is like blaming the crew instead of the pilot for running on the rock. No doubt all that has been said about these blunders is quite true. Infantry advanced over open ground swept by artillery, when they might have moved up under cover on the right or left; cavalry rode about in all sorts of positions where they ought not to have been, masking the fire of their own side, or exposing themselves to utter annihilation; artillery plied their guns at ranges where not a gunner could have lived, all this and more happened; but to recount these things is merely to say that the troops were not properly handled, and about this there can be little doubt. In the first place, when the second and third divisions were operating against the first, they had no head, and the two divisions worked in consequence without any unity, and might have been crushed any number of times over in detail, if the defending

force, instead of passively retreating, had turned vigorously upon either; while the defending force often made no real defence at all, strong positions being repeatedly given up before they were seriously pressed, without attempting at any rate to offer that best of defences, an offensive one. In this respect the operations truly deserved the name of a sham fight. In the affair of the last great day, the perfect helplessness exhibited on one side was sufficiently evident without commentary. And there is nothing to prevent the same sort of thing recurring on future occasions. However carefully the programme may be drawn up, and whatever may be the degree of excellence eventually arrived at in feeding troops in the neighbourhood of London, such manoeuvres can never be successful unless ably directed, and it is not necessary to have manoeuvres at all in order to make the discovery that everybody does not possess the gift of handling troops well; for it is a natural quality, just as much as the power of speaking well. Some men, by dint of perseverance and practice, overcome the difficulty, and manage to become tolerable speakers although not possessing any natural aptitude for the art; but, as a rule, good speakers are good from the first, while those who are bad at the beginning continue to be incurable stammerers in public until the end of the chapter. It is just the same with tactical power, that is, the power of handling troops effectively in the field; it is an art for which many officers show a perfect inaptitude; and, moreover, there is not in this case anything like the same opportunity for overcoming natural defect by practice which occurs with regard to public speaking. We must remember that our generals, equally with all the junior ranks of the service, are almost wholly without experience in this branch of their business. The sort of conventional parade work which has hitherto done duty for tactical practice at every spot in the empire where British troops are stationed-when two or three battalions, with an occasional battery, are put

through a set of stock manœuvres on a piece of ground where every hillock has been shaved off, and every hole filled up-bears hardly the faintest resemblance to the problem which has to be performed in actual war, of bringing a body of troops through a variety of obstacles and under varying conditions of distance and ground up to a certain spot by a certain time. Nor is this branch of the art often to be learnt by actual practice in war, because the opportunities for practice on a campaign may occur but seldom. The public would be quite misled if they supposed that because a man has seen a great deal of service, as the phrase goes, he has therefore had much practice in the actual handling of troops in the presence of the enemy. Whole campaigns may pass away with scarcely an opportunity for such an operation; it occurred only once or twice, for example, in the whole Crimean war; and a man may have reached in appearance to the top of his profession, and have every possible decoration after his name, and yet be a perfect child in respect of tactical knowledge and skill.

Two important points, then, are to be borne in mind: the art is a difficult one, and not to be mastered by everyone; and the opportunities for acquiring it are only to be gained in peace. A person might as well expect to become a proficient in violin-playing by performing only in pubiic at concerts, as to become an expert tactician by the amount of practice that will usually be offered on the battle-field. Yet the art is not the less important because so rarely acquired. The critical moment arrives once only perhaps in a man's lifetime, but yet come it may, when the fate of a campaign depends on the relative skill with which the opposing Generals shall bring their forces into action; but then will be reaped the reward of patient study or of natural genius, and then too we may be sure that men who have always blundered will blunder again. Looking therefore at the insufficiency of practical training usually afforded, either by war or peace under ordinary conditions, we may appre

ciate the value for tactical purposes of a camp of exercise, and the importance of turning it to the best account. How far this was done on the late occasion, those present can judge. Certainly, a sure, way towards nullifying its value is to appoint to leading posts men of whom it is perfectly well known beforehand that this sort of thing is not in their line.

In another and extremely important respect the want of resemblance to the conditions of a real campaign was very strikingly apparent. In real warfare all authority is centred in the General commanding, and the whole business of the army is conducted by his staff. This peace campaign was conducted entirely by the War Office. Our army is perhaps the most department-ridden army in the world, and the extent to which centralization is carried was never more conspicuous than on the present occasion. The arrangements for feeding the troops, for hiring transport, for employing artillery to aid the controllers, for settling what lands should be occupied and what respected-all these details were arranged entirely in Pall Mall, and the Generals had nothing to do but to receive charge of the troops they found placed under their orders. We doubt

if from first to last the military authorities, most of whom, as well as their staff, only took up their appointments when the manœuvres commenced, had more than the vaguest notion of the cost of the performance. Their functions were limited to simply knocking the troops about after they and their appliances were collected on the ground. Is it surprising if our Generals, accustomed to be kept thus in leading-strings, and invested with only the merest shadow of responsibility, should so often exhibit perfect helplessness when called into the field? To the ordinary looker-on a General may perhaps appear a very imposing functionary, but in most respects he is merely the channel of communication between the representatives of the different departments nominally under his orders and the office in Pall Mall; and it would be difficult to specify a single point in which he possesses any

real power, except that perhaps of fixing the hour at which his brigade or division shall parade. But does a force proceed on active service, the General becomes at once transformed from an imposing nobody in a red coat into a great personage charged with the most responsible functions which it can fall to man to perform. Suddenly invested with real instead of nominal command, the dispenser of patronage and promotion, he now holds the power of life and death over his troops. And this is perhaps the smallest part of the change. When the army lands on a foreign shore, the whole system of supply also undergoes a complete transformation; the Treasury and War Office clerks, who up to this moment have centralized all authority and power in everything down to the minutest trifles in their own hands, retire at once into their proper insignificance, and the whole burden of moving, feeding, and housing, possibly of clothing the army, as well as of leading it against the enemy, falls on the shoulders of the commanding General. Every reader of the Wellington or Napoleon despatches must have observed that this business of transport and supply occupies the commander's time and attention in a much greater degree than any other part of his duties, and what happened in their case occurs in every campaign; but for efficiently dealing with it our Generals are in most cases utterly unfitted by previous training and occupation, while the subordinate departmental officials who have to carry out their orders, brought up as they have been in War Office leading-strings, and accustomed to act in a narrow circle hedged in by routine, are seldom fit to run alone. Here and there a General may have learned business habits, in Parliament or in the management of private property; but in the case of commanders who have shown a capacity for organizing as well as fighting, we shall generally find that they have been something besides mere soldiers. Not to mention Wellington and Napoleon as examples of men whose training was quite as much in politics and administration as in war,

we may cite the march to Magdala as an instance where success was probably in great measure due to the fact that the commander of the expedition had passed a large part of his life in other than military pursuits, and had been accustomed to public affairs on a large scale. So it will always be found to be the case. The efficiency of the British Navy, and the readiness and resource which naval commanders are accustomed to exhibit, are probably due in great measure to the fact that the captain commands the ship as well as her crew, and has constantly to exercise a varied responsibility both in peace and war. And this is what we have to aim at in our military administration, if it is ever to become effective. Our Generals must be practised in something more than moving their men about a given piece of ground two or three days in the year, if they are not to prove helpless in the business of organization when placed in the field.

This, then, is the further direction which should be given to our camps of exercise, if they are to become really useful schools for the business of war. Nor should there be any real difficulty in effecting such a development of the scheme. There is no reason, to name one point for example, why the grant of public money for the camp of exercise should not be placed at the disposal of the General commanding, to be laid out by the local staff under his direction for the needful carriage and supplies, without the intervention of any War Office officials. The operations would then, as regards the commissariat at any rate, resemble the course of an actual campaign; and we may be pretty sure that under such a plan the troops would at least get their meals with regularity.

Of course it will be objected that this suggestion for placing money credits at the disposal of military officials, and thus investing them with a certain amount of financial responsibility, is opposed to the cardinal rule that the finance of the army should be controlled by civil authority; and should such a measure be proposed, we must be pre

pared to hear an outburst of solemn platitudes about the violation of constitutional principles involved. We may, therefore, raise a protest beforehand against the attribution of any weight to what, if looked into, will be found sheer nonsense. No one, we presune, is silly enough to suppose that if the General commanding at Aldershot or Dover were authorized to spend fifty thousand pounds, any danger would arise of a coup d'état, of an Aldershot Monk marching upon London with the money in his pocket, to trample down the British Constitution. The danger to England is no longer that armies or governments should be too powerful for its liberties; we now seem to be falling into quite another form of danger, that of breaking down from sheer inaptitude on the part of anybody to do anything more than talk. The utmost danger that the greatest stickler for tradition and principle could foresee, would be, we may suppose, that more money might be spent than was sanctioned. But the assumption implied in this tall talk about constitutional principles, that soldierofficials always want to be spending money, and that civil officials ought to be employed to prevent them, we take leave to say is a perfect delusion. In India, where army finance is on a much more simple and effective system than here, the controllers of the military expenditure, the rigidity of whose audit has become proverbial, have always been military men. And here too they would be found quite as careful guardians of the public purse, if placed in charge of it. After all, it must be remembered that the object of maintaining an army in peace time is to prepare it for undertaking war with efficiency; and even if the sort of plan we have hinted at were to be attended with some direct loss of economy, the indirect saving would be great, if it released our Generals from the childish state of department-ridden tutelage in which they are now retained. But, in fact, the presumption is all the other way. The present system, under which the War Office controls itself, is unquestionably quite opposed to sound

economical principles. There is, indeed, the vague and imperfect check exercised by the Comptroller-General of the Exchequer, and ultimately the review of all expenditure by parliamentary committees; but these checks on financial irregularity would remain in force in any case; and it is not in the final audit, but in the check on the first application of the different sums voted for the army, that the present system is really weak. The War Office consists of a huge congeries of departments, the heads of which transact all business in the name of the Secretary of State; so that if any irregularity be committed the offence is already condoned, since the fiction is always maintained that it has been done by order of the very authority who should properly control such proceedings. But if the spending took place outside the office, and that overgrown establishment were reduced to manageable dimensions, of a size sufficient merely for supervision of those entrusted with executive functions, then executive responsibility and administrative control would occupy their proper relative positions; and so far from any loss of financial control accruing, it would be much more efficiently exercised than at present. is well understood, for example, that the expenditure incurred for the late manœuvres has largely exceeded the sum voted by Parliament for the purpose. This excess may have been incurred beneficially, but that is beside the present question; what we are now concerned to observe is, that there has been no financial control exercised in the matter; whereas if the grant had been made over to any specific general officer to spend, with a superintending, and not, as now, an executive War Office to watch him, we may be sure it would not have been exceeded without at any rate the matter coming formally under review of the controlling authority. As matters now stand, the Secretary of State will probably find that he has sanctioned a great deal of expenditure in one way and another without any specific or formal sanction by proper authority.

It