648
ARMIES
information, with recommending for commissions and 'proposing officers for promotion, honours, appointments, and rewards. Adjutant-General.—Discipline, military education and training, patterns of clothing and necessaries, returns and statistics of personnel, enlistment and discharge, and establishments. In the absence of commander-in-chief, acts for him. Quartermaster - General. — Food, forage, fuel, light, quarters, land and water transport, remounts, movement, distribution of stores and equipment, the administration of the Army Service Corps and Pay Department, sanitation. Inspector - General of Fortifications. — Fortifications, barracks, and store - buildings, inspection of ordnance factory buildings, military railways and telegraphs, War Office lands and unoccupied buildings, submarine mining stores. Estimates for Engineer services, appointment and removal of officers Royal Engineers, technical instruction of Royal Engineers. Director-General of Ordnance.—Warlike stores, equipment, clothing, the direction of the ordnance committee and manufacturing departments. Armament patterns, inventions and designs, inspection of all stores. The administration of the Army Ordnance Department and Army Ordnance Corps; annual estimates for these services. The most important part of the War Office is, however, not mentioned in the Order in Council. The “ sinews of war ” have at all times been money, without which neither could the army exist nor any military operation in peace or war be undertaken. It is true that, as a kind of appendix to the Order in Council, the statement is made that “the financial secretary is charged with the whole finance of the army in gross and detail ”; but it is not mentioned that the “War Office” is a great permanent civil service, which has both independent offices, with its own heads, and also permeates the whole of the five departments. The Secretary of State has under him, in addition to the officers charged with the five departments and the financial secretary, a parliamentary undersecretary, who represents him in the House to which he himself does not belong, and a permanent under-secretary, who is the head of the permanent civil service of the War Office. The enormous relative power of the civil service within the War Office, as compared with the military heads of departments, depends on the fact that these latter are appointed for five years at a time, and pass and repass through the War Office, while the War Office civil service is a permanent body which preserves all the traditions of decades, and can cite at will the records of opinion given at different epochs by soldiers who have temporarily occupied chairs in the office. Soldiers, like doctors, lawyers, and parsons, when called in to diagnose a case, do not always exhibit an absolute and instant agreement in the statement of their views. A Secretary of State holding all authority is necessarily much more likely to be impressed with the consistency and weight, and the method of a carefully collected catena of opinions, than with the comparatively casual dicta of men, very much overworked as compared with the officers of any other department of the kind in Europe, and relatively unfamiliar with the office aspect of a question. The practical result is, that the ordinary conviction of nearly every soldier employed within the office has been that he was helplessly in the hands of the permanent officials. This is altogether apart from the question of the supreme authority of the Secretary of State as the representative of the Cabinet. The committee which in 1901 reported on the reorganization of the War Office appears to have taken this
[BRITISH
view of the question, and to have considered that a better state of things would be produced if the authority of the War Office were largely devolved upon the army corps commanders to be created under Mr Brodrick’s scheme. The practical possibility of this would appear ultimately to depend upon the extent to which Parliament will be content to accept reference to the army corps commanders as a final one as long as they are sustained in office. It is obvious that if the Secretary of State is to answer in Parliament for every incident that takes place in every army corps no practical independence can be left to any of them. Everything must be reported to the War Office in order to satisfy the demands of the House. It is a large question which can only be judged in its practical outcome. In accordance with the recommendations of the committee on War Office Reorganization presided over by Mr Clinton Dawkins in 1901, the Secretary of State directed that in future the “ War Office Council ” should be constituted as follows :—President—the Secretary of State for War. Members—the Commander-in-Chief ; the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State ; the Permanent Under-Secretary of State; the Financial Secretary; the Quartermaster-General; the Inspector-General of Fortifications; the Director-General of Ordnance; the AdjutantGeneral; the Director-General of Mobilization and Military Intelligence; the Director-General, Army Medical Department (for medical and sanitary questions); the Secretary of the Council; and such other members of the staff of the War Office as may be specially summoned from time to time. In the absence of the Secretary of State, the Commander-in-Chief acts as president. A Permanent Executive Committee of the War Office was also appointed, with the object of co-ordinating the business of the office and of ensuring that combined action might be taken in matters affecting more than one department. It consists of the following:—the Permanent Under-Secretary of State, or, in his absence, the Assistant Under-Secretary of State, chairman ; the Deputy Adjutant-General, or, in his absence, an officer selected by the Adjutant-General; the Assistant QuartermasterGeneral, or officer selected by the Quartermaster-General; a Deputy Inspector-General of Fortifications, or an officerselected by the Inspector-General of Fortifications; the Deputy Director-General of Ordnance, or an officer selected by the Director-General of Ordnance; an officer of the Mobilization section of the department of the DirectorGerjeral of Military Intelligence; an officer of the Intelligence section of the department of the DirectorGeneral of Military Intelligence; the Deputy AccountantGeneral, or an Assistant Accountant-General; the Deputy Director-General, Army Medical Department, or an officer selected by the Director-General; the Assistant Director of Contracts; the Secretary of the War Office Council, who will act as secretary of the executive committee. In addition to the above, the “Army Board,” which consists of the Commander-in-Chief, the Adjutant-General, the Quartermaster - General, the Inspector - General of Fortifications, the Director-General of Artillery, with usually the military secretary, as assessor, and the Director-General of the Army Medical Department now added, meets at such times as may be fixed by the Commander-in-Chief. Table C.—Terms of Service. With the In the Corps. Colours. Reserve. 12 — Boys 12 — Household Cavalry . 7 5 Cavalry of the Line 7 5 Royal Artillery
