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LORD KITCHENER AND THE ENGINEERING WORK

OF THE WAR.

BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR GEORGE K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF, K.C.B., K.C.M.G., C.I.E.

IN the Life of Lord Kitchener,' which gives us such an admirable picture of the great leader, his work, and his character, it is pointed out that he owed much of his success to the fact that he had been an Engineer officer. This fact is not unduly laboured; to do 80 would have tended to obsoure the broader and greater issues involved, and might have interfered with the due perspective with which we are called to contemplate his work as a whole, dealing as it did with many complex personal and national matters, in which technical knowledge had little part. Yet the early training which taught him to balance the end in view with the least means available. a training which constitutes the very essence of engineering science and practice permeated the whole of his life's work, and produced a result which might not have been achieved had his early experience been different. It was by his own choice that he entered that branch of the army where this training was possible, and it was not until he had spent long years in carrying out useful technical work that he was called upon to a larger and wider sphere of public service.

It might have been expected that in the record of his work in the Great War some allusion would be made to the share which he took in the development of military engineering in a war where, as never before, that science came into play. That this is not the case is no cause of complaint. The work he did was so vast, the difficulties he had to overcome in other respects so stupendous, that they were in themselves quite sufficient to absorb the author's energies, and to demand our attention in the biography. It is well that these achievements should be presented for consideration rather than the comparatively minor part which belonged to the special branch of the profession in which he received his early training, and in which, in the war, he left his mark just as really as he did in the greater problems which devolved on him. It may, however, be permitted to one who was honoured in being at the head of that branch of the service under him during that period, and who enjoyed his confidence in such a position, to supplement what has been given to the world, and to tell something of that great mind which, while occupied with far wider issues, was ever cognisant of

the part that engineering had to play in the great conflict. As in every other branch of the military profession, the war demanded military engineering on a scale far in excess of anything ever contemplated, and infinitely beyond anything ever actually carried out. The coast defence programme in these islands alone was greater even than the great scheme brought into play by Lord Palmerston's energy in the years following the Crimean War-a soheme which, fortifying the English Channel alone and a few other places near the Continent, was not complete when the Franco-German War broke out in 1870. The provision of hutting, which after the Boer War was confined to some few thousands of troops, was during the raising of the New Armies on a soale providing for hundreds of thousands. The materials required for the engineering works of the troops actually in the field, provided in England and sent all over the world, ran into tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of tons every month. The personnel required for the execution of these works, in all their variety of specialised knowledge, went up by leaps and bounds from a small nucleus of some 6000 to what was in itself a vast army of 300,000. Moreover, all these varied needs had to be adapted to the circumstances and exigencies of the situations, and not merely a constant varying with the numbers of the troops and the weight

VOL. CCVIII.—NO. MCCLX.

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of opposition expected. problems were varied, the means were limited, but the end in view was the same— namely, the ultimate victory. He did not live to see the victory, but he provided the means.

His work in this respect began in the Coronation year, when he was called upon to be chairman of a Committee at the War Office dealing with engineering organisation. There had been in 1903 a ohange brought about by the Esher Committee, which affected the Engineers perhaps more than any other branch of the army, Up to that date the Inspector-General of Fortifications, one of the principal heads of the War Office organisation, and in elose touch with the Secretary of State and his chief military advisers, was responsible for all engineering matters, and was the authorised inspector of all Engineer troops. The Esher Committee abolished this post, dividing up the duties among other members of the newly-formed Army Council. It is understood that this was done on the analogy of the navy: if so, it seems to have been forgotten that the conditions of land warfare differ from those at sea. Whatever may have been the intention, it soon became evident that the change produced unsatisfactory results. It involved a separation between the administrative control of works in peace and the combatant duties of the Royal Engineers in war, and the application of the seience of

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engineering to warlike purposes. It also produced friction in administration, and many complaints of a varied character. Consequently, the Secretary of State, in answer to questions in the House in 1911, stated that the whole subject was being referred to & Committee under the chairmanship of the most distinguished Engineer officer of the day.

Lord Kitchener assembled this committee early in May, and it sat twice a week, except during the actual Coronation time, until late in August. The terms of reference were very wide, comprising not only the numbers of Engineer units for varied work in the army, but the composition in detail of those units, the duties and training of both officers and men, the relations of military engineers to civil experience and civil engineers, the employment and organisation of works carried out in peace for the army, the system of signalling, and of the units composing the signal service, railways, coast defence, electrio lights, and the technical troops required for all the above special branches, with the financial considerations involved in all of the above matters. There was an immense amount of detailed work involved, as well as broad questions of military polioy: such as the organisation in war corresponding to the policy, then accepted, of an Expeditionary Force of six

divisions.

To be member of such a

committee under Lord Kitchener was no sinecure. He divided up the work into sections, allotting to each member certain portions which he had to work out in detail, and present to the chairman for careful discussion and deliberation. Nothing was allowed to be dealt with in a perfunctory manner, and, in addition to the evidence of many witnesses, previous reports of committees had to be searched and examined.

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The members of the committee were all, with one exception, officers either on the headquarter staff or quartered in London. The one exception was the Chief Engineer of the Aldershot command, an appointment which I then held, At Aldershot, at that time, with the full concurrence and support of the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief, we were endeavouring to train R.E. field units, as far as our limited means admitted, in the application to military purposes of materials which hitherto had been considered entirely outside the sphere of field operations. We construoted field casemates (afterwards known in the war as "dug-outs") of concrete and steel. We built field bridges of steel girders and plates, and then blew them up. improvised trench mortarsvery crude affairs, but useful enough in their way. The underlying principle in all this was that we expected that in the next war we should have such forces brought against our works as could not be met

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by the old-fashioned combinations of timber and brushwood. Moreover, we expected that we might have the resources of modern building and engineering materials of all sorts available, from which we could draw our supplies. Our aim, generally, was to bring into modern war the science and practice of civil engineering.

This, however, was not the view held by the General Staff, a distinguished member of which was one of the other members of the Kitchener Committee. He held-and this was (broadly speaking) the view of the General Staff up to 1914-that the increased

range of modern weapons, and the increased facilities for moving troops, would involve operations at far greater distances than in former wars, and render engineering works so rarely necessary as to be hardly worth constructing. The experiences of South Africa and Manchuria, he held, had shown that field defences, although very valuable tactically, were principally those which could be hastily construoted, and hence skilled artisans would be rarely required a few carpenters, perhaps, and possibly bricklayers, might be useful; but as for other trades, such as plumbers, draughtsmen, painters, &o., there could be no war employ ment for them, and to retain them in our field units was sheer waste of money. It is only fair to say that the distinguished officer in question, and also another equally

eminent general, both of whom commanded armies in the war, afterwards expressed to me their complete change of views, as a result of the bitter experience of the war. One went so far as to say that he always told his corps commanders that the most important man in their corps was the Chief Engineer. Although this frank avowal of a past mistake was characteristic of the charming and chivalrous nature of the men who expressed it, the fact remains that we started the war with a heavy handicap owing to the mistake.

The controversy between these opposing schools of thought often often waged waged hot. Lord Kitchener listened, as a rule, with a grim smile, not interfering with either. But he wanted more men and more units, and his sound economioal mind realised at once that some compromise was needed, whereby the financial effect would be the same, though the ideal of perfection might not be attained.

He therefore advocated a larger number of unskilled men, with a nucleus of tradesmen, and to pay for the increase he recommended certain drastic reductions in other matters.

Writing of the summer of 1911 brings to mind memories of many things-the splendid pageants of the Coronation, the beauties of the country near Aldershot, with hot fielddays at Woolmer Forest and Chobham, the thoughts that we had of possibilities of fiercer and hotter conflicts overseas,

for the Agadir incident brought us very near to war; but to those of us who were associated with Lord Kitchener either on the Committee or in command of Coronation troops (and I was concerned in both), the recollection of his personality is perhaps the most important. I had served under him in India, but my duties were confined to one part of the N.-W. Frontier, and though there we realised that he, more than any of his predecessors, had taken pains to acquaint himself at first hand with the problems involved, yet naturally one saw little of him. He had, like Julius Cæsar (as quoted by Lord Haldane in his book, from the words of Mommsen), the quality "of discriminating between the possible and the impossible. .. What was possible he performed, and never left the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better." In his work, therefore, of the Committee in 1911, he recognised that a compromise between the extreme views of his colleagues was the practioable course to recommend, and this he did.

At the conclusion of our labours, one day, walking away with me, he said that it had been a long task, but he hoped it would result in good. When I expressed the fear that it might not be approved by higher authority at the War Office, he said that surely they would not have called on a man of his position to advise unless they meant to follow his advice. The argument was

unanswerable, but I feared it might be otherwise.

And so it turned out. I was, very much to my regret, transferred from Aldershot to the War Office shortly afterwards, and there, naturally, watched the result with interest. The reductions which Lord Kitchener had recommended were at once carried out with avidity. The increases, for which these reductions were to pay, were shelved. Except for some improvements in the signal service, the branch of the army concerned was really in a worse state in 1914 than it was in 1911. A little had been done in the intervening years to train R.E. units in siege-works, and some increase was allowed in the quantity of explosives carried by field units, and the method of supplying them, matters which bore fruit in the early days of the war. In the main and essential features of the problem, no improvement was effected.

I was in Cairo in the early part of 1914, and briefly discussed the matter with him. As in all other, and more important, national questions, his loyalty to orders from above was always supreme, and he spoke about it without bitterness. He said, however, that he thought a grave mistake had been made, and that we should find it out when we went to war. I do not think that he ever imagined that it would fall to him to effect the change.

Then came the war. The Expeditionary Force mobilised and slipped over to France

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