Sinews Of War

The champions of democracy are quite clear and confident about the system’s many virtues and advantages. They are inclined, however, to be somewhat hazy, not to say willfully astigmatic, about its ineludible defects. For defects it possesses, as must any system of governance in a world wherein perfectionism is no more than the dream of the utopian with his feet firmly anchored in the clouds.

In the main the exercise of power, through an executive responsible to a legislature elected by popular vote, does approximate fairly closely to that government of the people, by the people, for the people, which it is democracy’s aim to achieve. But where constitutional procedure insists upon the civilian control of a highly technicalised national service such as the Army, Navy or Air Force, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that—where the two great English- speaking peoples are concerned, at all events—greater consideration is given to the strict adherence to democratic dogma than to the best means of ensuring national security.

This aspect of the case is brought most sharply into focus when we come to the question of those monetary sinews of war— “estimates,” “appropriations,” what you will—upon whose punctual supply depends the fighting services’ ability to fulfil their primary obligation to wage successful war.

In most countries governed (at least in theory) by a body of elected representatives, budgeting for the requirements of the services now takes place annually, the estimates of future expenditure being presented for examination and approval either by the head of the department concerned or by some other civilian mouthpiece of the service involved. Since, under the normal democratic constitution, the service chief possesses no parliamentary entity whatsoever, he must be represented—or misrepresented!—by someone belonging to the civil administration with a recognised political identity. In itself, as a piece of procedural mumbo-jumbo, that might be sufficiently tolerable. But the matter becomes serious when full consideration is given to the fact that, prior to presenting them, the civil head of department has also subjected the estimates to the severest scrutiny, questioned much of their validity, and, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, at the menacing behest of the Treasury, pruned them down with an abandon which can only be attributed to sheer ignorance of what the consequences of retrenchment may entail. This, if it amounts to more than an example of the lambent lunacy characterising the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice in Wonderland, is an almost perfect instance of calling in the plumber to instruct the baker exactly how much flour it takes to turn out a proper loaf.

To account for this curious and highly dangerous anomaly it is necessary to turn back a goodly number of history’s pages, there to discover that, in days gone by, the ultimate responsibility for things both civil and military resided with the King’s Majesty in person, and thereafter to trace that individual responsibility’s gradual dichotomy.

Taking as a convenient datum line the period of the Norman Conquest, it will be found that what was termed the Exchequer— the repository of all public funds, and now a department of the civil administration— was at that time under the Sovereign’s direct control. He alone could sanction disbursements from it; as he alone, to all intents and purposes, was responsible for the means of its replenishment. For the limited funds then required to cover a country’s outgoings, even in time of war, control of the Exchequer was well within the compass of any resourceful man of affairs, aided by a Lord High Treasurer and a scrivener or so for the routine work of clerking. And if a mediaeval monarch was not a resourceful man of affairs he very soon ceased to be a mediaeval monarch!

But national expenditure soon develops a tendency to take the bit between its teeth, particularly under conditions of war; and in those early days normal sources of revenue were definitely limited. In countries like France and Germany, where the obligations of knight-service were strictly observed, this was no great matter. The King’s Treasury was sufficient to cover such “overheads” as were additional to those met out of the resources of his followers. But in England knight-service¹ was less distinctly military in character and far less perfect as an organisation for war. Thus there grew up the dubious practice of accepting a money contribution in lieu of self-supporting personal service; while the sheriffs were called upon to collect a subscription from their respective shires for the upkeep of those mercenaries the Sovereign had been driven to hire for want of native-born troops.

With Parliament given the breath of reality by Simon de Montfort (circa 1265), it was only natural for the Sovereign to turn to this body of national representatives for the funds wherewith to prosecute a war in the national interest; and at the outset the necessary finance was furnished without stipulation or comment. This halcyon state of affairs, however, was not destined for long endurance. With the King’s Exchequer undergoing reinforcement from public funds—for however technical a service— there arose a disposition on the part of the commonalty, through their representatives, to enquire into and interfere in the conduct of purely military concerns.

The first instance of civilian insistence on being fully apprised as to the manner in which it was proposed to expend the money furnished by Parliamentary vote, occurred in 1341. For on this occasion Parliament attached as a condition to the grant of “supplies” a proviso that commissioners should be appointed “to make a true examination of the accompts.” With a brisk and challenging confidence in his ability to “get away with it” which has ever since been the envy of every Treasury-harassed military leader, Henry IV took the strong line that “Kings do not render accounts!” Feeling singularly deflated by this magnificent exhibition of regal hardihood, Parliament elected to suspend the question of an audit; but, like the sailor’s parrot, they evidently thought the more. For presently we find Henry V, tiring of the protracted evasions and equivocations of a singularly coy body of legislators, raising the sinews of war for his campaign to Harfleur and Agincourt through the agency of a private loan from Sir Richard Whittington. For this hero of the nursery rhyme of Whittington and His Cat had become an enormously wealthy mercer, who had thrice achieved the dignity, and survived the expense, of the Lord Mayoralty of London. He was, moreover, sufficiently astute a business man to secure his “accommodation” against certain Customs dues normally reserved to the King.

If, under England’s Yorkist and Tudor monarchs, Parliament refrained from asserting its claim to audit the Exchequer accounts, the insistence on “popular” control was presently to find a vociferous advocate in John Hampden (1594-1643), the epitome of all parish-pump politicians. For among the primary causes of the strife between King and Parliament which led to the Cavalier-Roundhead civil wars, was the tenet held by Hampden and his associates that there could be “no taxation without consent.” This was reasonable enough, always provided that consent was not withheld unreasonably, as it was, for example, over the question of “ship money.”

This was an impost for the building of those specific warships—to take the place of the hired, temporarily adapted merchant vessels with which the earlier monarchs had been forced to make do—the cost of whose construction had hitherto been borne exclusively by the coastal shires. With exemplary logic, Charles sought to extend the levy to the inland shires also; since an inland community, such as Hampden’s in Buckinghamshire, would obviously benefit as much from the Navy’s preservation of the island inviolability as would any district adjacent to the coast. But Hampden would have none of this; and even the ensuing civil war in no way served to resolve the point at issue.

With the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, a certain lingering distrust of the Sovereign’s sole control of the Exchequer expressed itself in the conditions governing the vote for supplies for the war against the Dutch. This took the form of what was termed an “appropriation” clause, introduced to ensure that the funds supplied by Parliament should be used for the purpose which had been specified and for no other; which sounds a fair enough proviso, but which in practice proved far too rigid. Thus, under the most specious of pretences, the civilian right to grant, withhold, cut down, or interfere in the expenditure of, military funds, was established, and with it the precedent of a hectoring parliamentary particularism.

But an even greater encroachment on the services’ right to keep their own house in order accompanied the ascension of the throne by “Dutch Billy” (William of Orange, 1650-1702) in 1688. For with this event it was explicitly laid down, under the terms of the Act of Settlement, that the maintenance of a standing army in times of peace should be utterly and entirely dependent on the annual consent of Parliament. Funds for such an army’s upkeep would also be subject to a yearly vote; and to all practical intents and purposes, this was also the case with the Navy. With this Act, the Exchequer—the central institution for the receipt and issue of funds—became a government department directly responsible to Parliament; while the Treasury—which received and expended money granted by the Exchequer to the Crown, as the nominal head of the fighting forces—’became a Government Department controlled by a civilian minister. With that, all real say in the financing of the two fighting services passed from the hands of the naval or military expert into those of a civilian fonctionnaire.

In endeavouring to assimilate the grounds for this almost incredible deflection of responsibility, it is highly necessary to bear in mind the country’s long established and deeply rooted detestation of anything even faintly resembling a standing army or even a fulltime professional soldier; a captious and seemingly inalienable prejudice, which underwent transportation to North America with, as it would appear, an accretion rather than any loss of vigour.

For, flagitiously blind to the fact that improvisation after a conflict has started, besides being a most fruitful source of waste in lives and treasure, can never be an effective substitute for prewar preparation, it had become—and remained—-Parliament’s invariable habit to wait until disaster was imminent before hastily voting the increase in numbers and supplies required to stave off calamity and build slowly towards victory.

Then, before the echo of the last shot had died away, not only were the additional war- begotten forces ruthlessly scrapped, but opportunity was avidly seized to pare away a little more of the tenuous cadaver upon which they had been erected. Needless to add, this was a form of activity in which the civilian head of the Service Department under dismemberment invariably joined with wholehearted enthusiasm.

In effect, it seems virtually impossible to cure the English-speaking peoples of the imbecile habit of waiting until a conflagration has broken out before addressing themselves to the task of recruiting and training an adequate fire brigade to deal with it.

With so resentful and distrustful an attitude towards the fighting services per se, it is little wonder that there has prevailed an even greater want of faith in their ability to “run their own show,” particularly in the— to civilian eyes—all-important particular of finance.

It would be an affectation to pretend, of course, that instances could not be adduced in support of the want of confidence in the service-leader’s sense of financial probity which the civilian administration nourishes so consistently. There was, for instance, the case of John Campbell of Glenorchy, 1st Earl of Bredalbane, and the chief instigator of the “Massacre of Glencoe” (February 13th, 1682). Entrusted by “Dutch Billy’s” government with a large sum of money with which to further the “pacification” of the Highlands, on being asked by the Earl of Nottingham how the funds had been distributed, he sent back the following crisp reply:

“My lord,

The Highlands are quiet; the money has been spent; and that is the only way of accounting between friends.”²

This was pretty cool; but it is as nothing compared with the bland, shameless insolence with which the Earl of Sandwich, civil head of the Admiralty at the time of the American War of Independence, dipped his fingers into the public cash-box till the bottom of it scraped his nails. With war conditions revealing the hopeless inadequacy and general decay of the Fleet, panic legislation, over a period of less than seven years, placed upwards of £6,000,000³ at the First Lord’s disposal, exclusive of the money voted for personnel and their alimentation. But the Navy actually received no more than a tithe of it. Vast sums were appropriated for the repair of ships that were rotting in harbour and which, in fact, never had a penny expended on them. Estimates were falsified; ships were counted twice in the Weekly Progress Lists; and to “gratify”—i.e. bribe— political supporters, vessels were put into commission with no smallest intention of fitting them out for active service. No wonder ingenuous James Boswell found “Jemmy Twitcher”⁴ “a jolly, hearty, lively man, and free with his money”!

Compared with—say, that automatically suspect military figure, Field Marshal the Marquis of Granby, the financial probity of this civilian head of department hardly shows up very favourably. For so inadequately equipped and supplied were the British troops fighting in Germany throughout the Seven Years’ War, that their Commander- in-Chief was reliably reported to have spent £60,000 of his own money in the provision of necessities and small comforts for the men who served him with such unwavering fidelity. Nor must it be thought that there was any singularity about the absolute integrity with which Granby handled public funds, or was prepared to supplement them out of his own pocket, should the need arise. Washington was in the same exalted category, as was the Duke of Wellington; and the same may be said of the vast majority of Officers, naval or military, famous or obscure, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have rejoiced to put their men’s and their country’s interests before the advancement of their personal welfare.

The theory, so obstinately cherished by Civil Administrations, that public money is safer from misapplication and abuse in the hands of a civilian functionary then in those of a member of the Fighting Services is one, indeed, that historical investigation is rarely apt to substantiate.

The civil office of Paymaster-General, for example, endowed its holder with opportunities to line his pockets which were virtually without limit; and of which, heaven knows, the successive incumbents exhibited no puling modesty in availing themselves. Sir Stephen Fox, the first to hold the appointment after the Stuart Restoration in 1660, did remarkably well for himself and pouched a comfortable fortune. But handsomely as he contrived to feather his nest, his pillage amounted to little more than pilfering the petty cash compared to the raids on the public purse indulged in by his successors.

For it had become the practice of the Paymaster-General intermittently to submit to the Treasury an estimate of the sum required for the service of the Army over an impending period. Whereupon the Treasury, without in any way testing the accuracy of his computation, or ever} ascertaining the amount of the balance remaining in his hands, simply paid over the money to him. In no fear of any further check, the Paymaster was at liberty to accumulate as large a balance as he could, and to use the interest thereon for his own profit!

Subsequent scrutiny revealed that by mid-eighteenth century the average yearly balance in the hands of the Paymaster-General was some £586,000; the average monthly balance about £869,000.

The average balance to the credit of Lord Holland,⁵ Paymaster-General between 1757 and 1765, was £455,000; that of his successor, a Mr. Rigby, about the same amount. So that over a period of nine years these two pretty gentlemen had, between them, enjoyed the use of some £900,0006 of the public money. With such unexampled opportunities for self-enrichment, it is small wonder that Charles James Fox’s dissipation of a fortune of over £140,000 before he attained his majority made no visible dent in the Holland family resources!

In addition, the usage, “sanctioned by antiquity,” of the Paymaster retaining his balance, after quitting office, until such time as his accounts had been finally passed, was open to the wildest malfeasance. With Lord Lincoln’s retirement from the post, for example, some £470,000 was found to have “vanished” beyond all hope of recovery.

In the same openhearted racketeer tradition, “Scotch Harry” Dundas, having proved the most egregiously incompetent Secretary of State for Colonies and War with which the country had ever been inflicted—-with the possible exception of the numbskull Lord George Germain—was ingloriously “kicked upstairs” to the Treasurership of the Navy. In this capacity he eventually found himself impeached for “gross malversion and breach of duty” in his handling of naval funds; and only his close friendship with the Prime Minister served to spare him the worst penalties of his offence.

Obviously, if the purpose of the regulations confiding the control of service finance to civilian hands was to afford protection to the public purse, it can only be said to have failed most signally in its intention. Alternatively, if its design was to deny the services the right to be rulers in their respective houses, then it can only be allowed to have succeeded to absolute perfection.

Where the furnishing of their consumable supplies were concerned, once again the services found themselves completely at the mercy of the civilian officials in control of the financial sinews of war; fonctionnaires who at one period extended their grip over no less than seven separate and distinct “War” departments.

If the Duke of Marlborough, as was alleged, in three years had received—more or less legitimately—the sum of £63,319 from the War Department’s principal contractor, Solomon Medina,⁷  imagination reels at the thought of what that rapacious individual had contrived to deflect into his own capacious and ever-gaping maw.

The shameless greed of the contractors throughout the Seven Years’ War—complacently winked at by the responsible Departments in return for very handsome “pickings”—is the subject of complaint in every surviving memoir of the time; and we have already noted the toll exacted from the Commander-in-Chief’s own resources in his praiseworthy attempt to make good some of the reprehensible deficiencies.

The War of American Independence saw the Treasury’s appointment of a herd of commissaries, of whom one, by name Brook Watson, laid the foundations of a fortune which took him to London’s Mansion House and the dignity of the Lord Mayoralty. Of another successful adventurer, Chamier (the alleged “Comptroller of Accounts”), even “good-natured Billy Howe” was constrained to confess that he knew neither the duties of the gentleman’s office nor whether he had ever exercised them; but that he was confident that the end of the campaign would find him “pretty comfortable.”
 
Washington’s progressively aggravated difficulties with Congress and its civilian- controlled Board of War, are only too well known to every student of the period. It is true that the Administration was hard put to it for funds, other than rapidly depreciable paper money. But it is equally without question that of any “hard money’ ’ that was available, a disparate proportion found its way into the hands of the commissaries, contractors and middlemen who, by one means and another, had secured to themselves Congressional favour.

In the British campaign against the French, of 1793-95, the Treasury’s principal appointee in the field was the aforementioned Brook Watson. Immediately subordinate to him, “the principal contractor,” in the words of a contemporary military diarist,⁸ “was a Mr. Eckhardt, a Hanoverian Jew, a clever man who did his best for the army and himself,⁹ made a large fortune and became Baron Eckhardtstein.”

Incidentally, retrenchment in the army, at the insistence of the civilian authorities of the Treasury, had been so draconic that, with the outset of the campaign, the British Expeditionary Force—scraped together with infinite difficulty—consisted of a single Brigade of Guards and a handful of artillerymen; in all, well under 2,000 men.

In a speech to the administration, Washington had voiced a great fundamental truth when he affirmed that “to be prepared for war is one of the most effective means of preserving peace.” So impressed were the august Congressional ears upon which this wise exhortation fell, indeed, that by the law of April 30th, 1790, authorisation was given for the increase of the Army of the United States from 700 to the stupendous total of 1,126!

Washington was very largely in the hands, and at the mercy, of the Civil Administration: yet when Pitt thundered out “In time of peace prepare for war,” and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to implement his own recommendation, to all intents and purposes he was the Administration. Nor were things bettered when he was overtaken by actual conflict. For at every turn the clammy miser’s hand of the fonctionnaire intervened to stultify military enterprise. As the late Sir John Fortescue so rightly affirmed, “Politicians can neither conduct war properly themselves, not will they permit it to be conducted properly by others.” Certainly there is one thing of vital importance they seem quite incapable of grasping—- that a numerically adequate army, properly trained and equipped, does not spring from the ground as did the horde of warriors from the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus: that a navy takes even longer than an army to build and to perfect. It would appear to be beyond the wit of any man to convince the civil controllers of the public purse that the twin enemies of security are excessive disarmanent and inter-war economy. Yet it is patent that a nation with undernourished fighting forces is committed, inevitably, to a policy of timidity; for political ideals and intentions are only as strong as the force with which they are supported. Moreover, every penny grudged to prewar preparation means a pound spent in wasteful improvisation once strife has broken out. And the navy or army that is not ready to get right into the fight the moment the bugle sounds, has dangerously surrendered the initiative to the enemy. All else being equal, the effectiveness of a country’s armed forces in battle fighting is in direct ratio to the scope permitted it in time of peace to perfect itself as a full-scale instrument of aggression. Wars are not won by standing on the defensive, the role of all fighting forces crippled and hamstrung by unwise retrenchment. As Admiral Mahan sternly reminded an earlier generation of his countrymen, and the world in general:

“If time be, as is everywhere admitted, a supreme factor in war, it behooves countries whose genius is essentially not military, whose people, like all free people, object to pay for large military establishments, to see to it that they are at least strong enough to gain the time necessary to turn the spirit and capacity of their subjects into the new activities which war calls for. ... If what forces it (such a country) has can be overthrown and crushed quickly, the most magnificent possibilities of natural power will not save it from humiliating conditions.”

The price of safety is not only eternal vigilance, but ungrudged expenditure.

As for the myopic utopianist, who persists in his shrill asseverations that, under modern conditions, “war simply can’t happen again,” let him ponder this: in the last 3,400 years only 268 have been free from war—less than one in thirteen!

The degree of miserliness displayed by a country’s treasury towards its fighting forces differs, of course, with the political complexion of the government temporarily in power. An Administration of pronounced sentimentalist “liberal” sympathies, labouring under the delusion that you can shoo war away if only you harp with sufficient hysteria on its “wickedness,” and generally more preoccupied with parish-pump politics than with world-wide issues, will never give heed to the military voice of warning, whatever the authority and distinction of the spokesman.

During the long, somnolent years of peace following on Waterloo, for example, the Duke of Wellington, with all the weight of his enormous prestige, solemnly warned the country that:

“There is nothing so necessary as to look forward to future wars and to our early preparation for them. Our wars have always been long and ruinous in expense, because we were unable to prepare for the operations which must have brought them to a close, for years after they were commenced.”

They were words of the profoundest wisdom, but they fell on ears entirely deaf to them. It was a time of burgeoning industrial expansion, as of turbulent political controversy. The mercantile classes were obsessed with the delights of profit taking; the Government and Opposition were in the throes of a violent polemical conflict over the virtues and dangers of far-reaching political reforms. In short, what Lecky has described as “the prevailing climate of opinion” was resentful and impatient of the recommendations urged upon them by a military Cassandra, of whose cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” they had grown sick and tired.

The outcome was the departure to the Crimean campaign of as ill-found and indifferently nourished an expeditionary force, naval and military, as Great Britain has ever put into the field.

“We are never ready for war,” pronounced Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, “yet we never have a Cabinet that dare tell the people this truth.” And it was no fault of the Gladstonian-Liberal school of thought that this challenging affirmation was not penalised by Wolseley’s military eclipse.

No country carries the burden of armaments laid upon it by the parlous condition of the times in which it lives without regret. But it is an insurance policy no nation dare permit to lapse, even if its upkeep necessitates the tightening of its purse-strings in other and more meretriciously attractive directions. As Adam Smith put it, “Defence is more important than opulence.” Even the social services cannot be given priority over the Fighting Services and their paramount importance. For there can be no such thing as social security unless you first make sure of national security.

There are not wanting those advocates of civilian control over service expenditure to insist that it is a necessary measure of precaution, since, it is averred, no Admiral has ever been known to have enough ships; no general enough men and guns; no air commander sufficient aircraft. It is certainly to be conceded that perpetual denial of the requisite has tended to produce a “defence mechanism” in the service chiefs which makes them demand more than, actually, would content them; knowing only too well that whatever they ask for, they will eventually have to make do with considerably less. They set to work, in short, rather on the lines of the suk carpet-seller, who demands 2,000 piastres for a rug, knowing full well that he will have to rest content with 750.

Now, if, as it would appear, it be an article of faith with the English-speaking peoples that responsibility to the administration for a service department cannot be entrusted to a minister drawn from the service itself, it is equally the conviction of a large number of soldiers, sailors and airmen that the alternative of a civilian head of a fighting service is almost invariably unsatisfactory, particularly in the matter of policy—-a thing very largely governed by finance. A political head superimposed over the chiefs of the respective departments lacks the necessary “knowhow” to adjudicate on their frequently warring claims on finance. The result is a series of unworkable and disheartening compromises, and, not infrequently, of that unbalance which is the outcome of a partiality for one particular service begotten, as often as not, by the excellence of its “publicity” or the persuasiveness with which its spokesmen have built up their case.

What would seem to be required—particularly between wars—is a Service Financial Adviser, drawn from one or other of the fighting services, of widest possible experience in command, and of appropriate seniority of rank,¹⁰ to whom all estimates (appropriations) would be submitted for scrutiny and subsequent endorsement or revision. He would, ipso facto, be a man of unimpeachable integrity; and the fact that he would in no way be concerned with the employment of the facilities he recommended, or with the actual handling of the money voted for the services, or the award of the contracts involved, would secure him against any wanton charge of peculation, corruption or self- interest. Equally, in these days of close integration between all branches of the fighting services, his experience should be such that his sympathies would be distributed impartially over the claims and pretensions put forward by land, sea and air. Given these qualifications—and the man to possess them should not be impossible to find—and his endorsement of an estimate should be accepted by the civil Head of Department, as by the Treasury, without further cavil or equivocation. As with all men in great positions of responsibility, he would have to be trusted and supported or dismissed. But he should be interfered with never.

Finally, the ordinary taxpayer, who has to foot the bill, should be brought to realise— despite the popular adage to the contrary— that the man who pays the piper is far wiser to leave the calling of the tune to someone who knows a good deal more about music than he does.

Only by a clear-cut modus operandi of this kind can the public rest confident that, throughout the dangerous ’tween war periods, when unwise retrenchment is so liable to supervene, its armed forces would be ensured of the finances required to keep them at hairtrigger efficiency; and the services themselves spared the undernourishment, anxiety, bickering and frustration that a policy of purely civilian control almost invariably entails.

In 1593 Mathew Sutcliffe laid it down in his widely-read Lawes of Armes that:

“Whosoever for envy or feare or other cause goeth about to persuade Princes to pare their Generali’s authoritie and to binde them to strait conditions, hath an evil mind himself, and as much as in him lyeth, ruinateth the affairs of his Prince. For what service can they doe that are not onlie pinched in their provisions,¹¹ but also bound by their commissions? Nothing is more hurtful to the proceedings of warres than miserable niggardise.”

Clear across three and a half centuries of time, the voice of Mathew Sutcliffe rings out in a clarion note of undissembled and unquestionable truth.