ARMY SCIENTIFIC CORPS. (Hansard, 24 April 1856)

CAPTAIN LEICESTER VERNON

said, he rose, according to notice, "to call the attention of the War Department to the prospective promotion and the establishments of the scientific corps, with a view to maintaining their efficiency in peace for the purposes of war." He thought he should be able to show the House that it was of such consequence to maintain the efficiency of the two most important branches of the service that it was a national rather than a departmental question. At the commencement of the Peninsular war the brandies of the army to which his 1445 notice referred were exceedingly deficient, there being few gunners and no sappers and miners, while the senior officers were far advanced in the decline of life, and the junior wholly destitute of experience. The demand, however, produced men of the requisite talent, and a Burgoyne and a Smith, a Dickson and a Ross, speedily appeared on the scene. The Duke of Wellington then remodelled the artillery, and introduced sappers into the service for the first time. If the English general had had but a single company of the latter corps at Burgos—the only instance in which he failed in all his Peninsular campaigns—that place would have been carried by our forces. Peace at length returned, bringing with it reduction and stagnation; and when the late war broke out we were in no better preparation as regarded the personnel of our scientific corps than in 1808. In fact, so low had our artillery become that it could not carry on the siege of Sebastopol without help from the naval brigade. The sappers comprised only about 2,000 men, scattered over the whole world and engaged in every variety of scientific duty. But for the defective strength of these corps most of our disasters in the Crimea might have been completely avoided. Apart from higher considerations, and regarding the matter simply in an economical point of view, the maintenance of the scientific branches in a state of efficiency in time of peace would have been a course preferable to the one adopted. If our engineers, artillery, and sappers and miners had been in adequate force, the redoubts at Balaklava would not have been left to the charge of the Turkish troops; and if those redoubts had been raised under the direction of such men as Gordon and Chapman, the. Russians would never have seen the inside of them, for they could have been successfully held by British artillery. Moreover, had they been entrusted to such good keeping, we never should have had to deplore the disastrous military massacre at Balaklava, as it might be fitly termed. He thought the House was scarcely aware what that disaster cost the country. An infantry soldier, before he was thoroughly equipped and brought into the field, cost the country £100; a cavalry soldier, who required far more training, cost double that sum; and, inasmuch as a dragoon without a horse was no dragoon at all, his charger, when perfectly seasoned and five years old, could not be valued at less than 1446 another £100. The Times, speaking the other day of the troop horses in the Crimea, reckoned them at £200 each; and, accepting that figure as accurate, which he was willing to do, the mounted dragoon at Balaklava with sword drawn and ready to fight, cost the public not less than £400. The disastrous charge at Balaklava killed and put hors de combat 422 men; but, taking the number at only 400, the aggregate loss in money occasioned by what The Times described as "this fool's promenade" amounted to £160,000. If the sappers and miners, at the opening of hostilities, had been in sufficient strength, they would have themselves made a road between Balaklava and the camp, thereby obviating what he should always consider as a great blunder, the creation of the Army Works Corps, for which the House only the other night voted upwards of £400,000. The same body would also have constructed the railway in the Crimea, the whole expense of which, it seemed, we were never to know precisely, though from first to last it would doubtless reach the rate of at least £70,000 per mile. Again, an adequate corps of sappers and miners might have housed our troops, stabled our horses, enabled us to defend Inkerman, and, in short, prevented the series of misfortunes which were our regiments down to a shadow, and under which the 63rd Regiment in particular, arriving during the inclement season, in something like one brief week, melted away and vanished from the list. From the extinction of that regiment, at the rate per man already mentioned, the public sustained a pecuniary loss of at least £100,000, and, adding those various items together, the total sum sacrificed by reason of the inadequate strength of the scientific branch when the war commenced could not, therefore, amount to less than would have sufficed to maintain those corps on a war footing throughout the whole intervening period of peace. Coming next to the question of promotion, when the military branch of the Ordnance service was transferred to the Horse Guards, it was hoped that a modification of the system would have been extended to the scientific corps, and that they would have been benefited by something like the army promotion, but to their dismay they found that there was a disposition shown to turn the army into that slough of despond, a seniority corps. It was thought by many that, under the purchase system, money without merit would advance, and 1447 merit without money remain stationary; but, in the service at least, there was not that feeling against purchase which was frequently imagined to prevail. A work, entitled Memoirs of Peninsular Generals, showed that fourteen of these commanders—all men who had won for themselves positions of the highest distinction—had all risen in the service by purchase. The author of that book, a gentleman of good family, a nephew of Sir Lowry Cole, but without wealth, stated in his preface that he entered the army after a regular preparatory training at an early age, and with an ardent desire to earn promotion; but that, in consequence of his want of money, he was repeatedly purchased over—that, nevertheless, he felt bound in justice to admit that the juniors, who by the regulations of the service and the accidents of fortune had stepped over his head, with scarcely an exception, were all fully qualified to discharge the duties of their position and zealous to promote the efficiency of the service. The fourteen generals mentioned in Mr. Cole's book were officers who had highly distinguished themselves in the Peninsula, and every man of them had been promoted by purchase. The children, so to speak, of that system, they were pitted against French Marshals, most of whom had risen from the ranks, and whose eminence had been very generally attributed to that fact. What was the consequence? The English purchase-men closed with the French Marshals wherever they met them, fought them foot to foot and hand to hand, and drove them back from the lines of Lisbon to the gates of Paris; beat them collectively, beat them individually, from Jourdan, who, from being so constantly beaten, was called the "anvil," and Massena, the enfant cheri of fortune, down to Soult, the best French general who ever lived, with forces inferior in number, and Babel-like, from being composed of many nations. Now, it was well known that the East India Company's Service did not profess to acknowledge the purchase system; yet the officers were obliged to establish a kind of purchase of their own. They raised money among themselves to buy out the officers who impeded their promotion, and were it not for this practice the service would come to stagnation and be intolerable. But then it was said, "Look at the French service." That system had been greatly commended as one that harmoniously combined three principles of promotion—merit, 1448 seniority, and interest—but there was reason to doubt whether it worked quite as well as was generally supposed. Some French and English officers, coming home the other day from the Crimea in the same transport, conversed about promotion—of all topics the most attractive to military men. The English officers were, as usual, loud in their praises of the plan adopted by our allies, but they were corrected by an old French officer. "Be not deceived, gentlemen," said the vieille moustache; "you may disabuse yourself of that idea—to advance with us you must have a relative in the bureau of the Minister of War." That observation showed that things did not go on quite as smoothly in the French army as was commonly supposed. Moreover, it should be borne in mind that, under the French system, a man who had not attained a certain rank within a certain time was compelled to leave the service—a regulation which was continually depriving it of some of its best members. Men still vigorous were mercilessly turned out of the army, though unfit for any other profession. They lingered disconsolately about the estaminets of Paris, their soldierly walk and gallant bearing denoting what they once had been, while their threadbare coats and haggard faces too plainly indicated what they now were. Now, he would ask, was it desirable that the officers of the English army should be reduced to such a condition? Like the benevolent individuals who, unmindful of what was happening at Whitechapel, sent missionaries to Timbuctoo, our military reformers drew their illustrations of the seniority system from foreign countries, forgetting that there were three branches of the British service—the Marines, Artillery, and Engineers—in which that system obtained, and in no one of which did it work well. Its effect in the Marines was to officer the force with old men. The hon. Member for Richmond (Mr. Rich), when the question of purchase was before the House on a former occasion, had referred to statistics to show that our present system produced captains of thirty years of age, and majors of forty years of age; and he wished that we should go back to the seniority system. But the hon. Gentleman appeared altogether to ignore the fact, that there were in the British army three seniority corps—the Marines, which he (Captain L. Vernon) placed first, as being the worst off, the Artillery, and the Engineers. He remembered some years 1449 ago being on church parade at Woolwich, when the Marines, which corps was brigaded with the sappers, came on the ground, and that a brother officer, Sir William Denison, noticing that the adjutant of the Marines was a tolerably young man, exclaimed, "A wonder out of Heaven—a young marine!" The Engineers were almost in an equally bad case. General Du Plat once wrote a pamphlet to show that as regarded promotion they were the "worst off" corps in the service, and he mentioned the case of one officer in particular who was the worst off man in the corps, and consequently the worst off man in the whole army. The officer in question had served in every climate, wherever the drum beat he had followed; yet he was twenty-four years a lieutenant, and he was forty years of age before he was a captain. To the truth of that statement he could bear his personal testimony, for he happened to be the unlucky individual referred to. He had served for nearly half a century in a branch of the service where education, incessantly progressive, might be said to begin with the cradle and end with the coffin, and during that period his pay was something less than that received by the driver of a Paddington omnibus. So much for the seniority system. The Duke of Wellington used to say that an infantry soldier might be formed and made fit for service in four months. Napoleon proved that less than two would suffice, for he conquered at Lutzen and Bautzen with conscripts who had only been seven weeks in his army. A soldier of artillery or the sappers could not be formed in less than two years, but at the end of that period he was thoroughly accomplished in his profession, and was competent, not only for his own peculiar duties, but for those also of an infantry man. It was a wise economy, therefore, to encourage such a soldier, even though his pay exceeded that of the infantry man. The fortified places should be held chiefly by battalions of Artillery and Sappers. In peace the Sappers, he was certain, were the cheapest troops to maintain. He regretted occupying the time of the House so long, but he had thought it desirable to show the necessity of maintaining, in due efficiency, a scientific corps, so that it might not happen again, as it had recently happened, that, for want of such a corps, thousands of men and millions of money were sacrificed.