HC Deb 06 June 1867 vol 187 cc1684-98
MAJOR JERVIS,

in rising to call attention to the Report of the Committee appointed to inquire into the Administration of the Transport and Supply Departments of the Army, expressed his surprise and regret, after the appeal which had been made by the Secretary of State for War to the right hon. Member for Inverness-shire to postpone his Motion for a Committee of Inquiry on the War Department until the Report had been placed on the table, at not finding anything in the Report beyond a mere repetition of what had been inquired into year after year. The Committee had no sooner got into the inquiry than they found the War Department so disorganized and so unfitted to carry on the details which it had to deal with that they asked the Secretary of State to give them leave to inquire into the whole system of the War Office. It was at once found that the duties of the head officials so jarred that no head of a Department knew exactly what was expected of him, and the confusion extended down through all the subordinates. The Committee, therefore, soon made up their minds that the entire of the store and material of the service should be brought under one head. Then came the question how that head was to be represented whenever there was a General in the field or in garrison. They recommended that the several departments of commissariat, stores (excepting munitions of war), purveying, and Treasury accounts, &c., should be placed under one chief—the Chief Controller. Now, it might have struck any ordinary mind that up to this time the Chief Controller was the permanent Under Secretary for War. It appeared, however, that the various heads of Departments looked to the Secretary of State for War; and it was impossible that any one man in that position could master all the details. The question which the House had to consider was whether the proposition made by Lord Strathnairn's Committee would carry out what they wished. As far as the War Office was concerned, there could be no doubt that a Chief Controller, having charge of five departments, would relieve the Secretary for War of a great deal of daily work; but they had to consider how far such a system would lighten the Secretary's work as regarded that House. He would still be responsible to the House of Commons for all the expenditure in all the departments. As to the position of the Controller with regard to a General in the field or in garrison, Lord De Grey, in a letter which he addressed to the Treasury in 1864, proposed to make the Controller adviser to the General, the former to be responsible to the War Office, and not to the General. That appeared to have alarmed the Committee; for in every paragraph which they had written on the subject he found the statement that the Controller should always be under the orders of the General Officer. He must say that the Report was one which it was difficult to understand—it was not written with the clearness desirable in a Report of such importance. But he should have thought it was hardly necessary for the Committee to dwell on the point that the Controller should be subordinate to the General Officer. It was all very well to talk of a General Officer being responsible only for strategic movements; but would any General Officer who was worth anything allow any one in his army to move a little finger without his instructions or authority. Either in the field or in garrison the General Officer ought to be responsible for everything, and unless you made him so he would not be worth anything. A very important point was whether all the stores in the field ought to be amalgamated under one chief, or whether there ought to be a division. The Committee seemed to wish to make a distinction between ordinary stores and actual munition of war. He (Major Jervis) was of opinion that they might be blended, for while all the artillery stores in the field should be under the charge of the Ordnance Commissariat, it was essential that all stores having to be conveyed to a distance must be placed under the management of a Controller. On board a ship you could not have two systems of management. The person who shipped all the stores must be responsible for them all. This question of a Control Department was raised by Mr. Godley, of the War Office, in 1855, and Commissary General Fonblanque had written most ably on it some ten years ago. Yet during the last ten years there had been various Committees differently constituted, and yet things remained in confusion to the present time. He would instance the office of Director of the Ordnance. It had always been understood that he was responsible to the Secretary of State for all the Ordnance Department; but what was really the fact? We had large manufacturing departments in connection with that Department. Each of these had heads whose instructions were that they should consult the Director General on all questions which required a higher authority, but that they were to be responsible themselves to the Secretary of State for the manufactures in their department, the management of which was to be left entirely in their hands; so that we put an officer in a position of important trust, and then told him that he was not to interfere with anything. Lord Strathnairn recommended in his Report that there should be two officers of high position, one of whom should discharge the duties which now devolved on the Director of the Ordnance, in addition to the charge of the Ordnance Commissariat, while the other should be head of the Control Department. It would be very satisfactory to him if the right hon. Baronet the Secretary for War would state to the House whether it was his intention to carry out that recommendation—because it was impossible for the right hon. Baronet to superintend all these details himself. Indeed, he believed that the public had not the slightest idea of the multifarious duties which the Secretary for War had to perform. Some Secretaries, indeed, had broken down under them. No man in the public service was more zealous, for instance, than the late Lord Herbert, but he killed himself by overwork; and with regard to Sir George Lewis, if the amount of work did not actually kill him, he died from weakness occasioned by his excessive application and attention to the duties of his office. It had killed Sir Benjamin Hawes; it had killed Mr. Godley. He might also mention that the late Director of Ordnance had to rise at half past four in the morning to get through his papers and had to work until midnight. He understood the present permanent Under Secretary of State had to do the same. Now, that was an amount of work which no man in this country ought to be obliged to undergo. This Report of Lord Strathnairn only touched a small portion of the War Office work — namely, the stores, the purveyors in chief, the commissariat, and the barrack department. But, in addition to that, there was all the work connected with the army—the clothing, equipment, hospitals, the fortification branches, Chelsea Hospital, pensions, and many other matters. What he desired, therefore, to point out was that it was not simply necessary to reorganize the War Office, as far as the Office itself was concerned, but also that a revision of the War Office was required as regarded that House, which naturally expected that every item in the Army Estimates should have been carefully scru- tinized by some Member of the House responsible for the detail, and such a scrutiny could not be conducted by one person. Before the amalgamation of these departments they had about seven representatives in Parliaments who could go into all the details; but now the departments were united under one authority, who, if he could toil forty-eight hours instead of twenty-four in the course of the day, could not get through all the work. This Report merely simplified the working of the War Office by uniting five of the sections under one head, but it in no way lightened the duties of the representative of the War Department in that House. He thought the House should, before going into Committee of Supply, clearly understand what was the present position of affairs with regard not only to the reorganization of the various proposed sections under one head, but also what was the relative position of the Department with that House.

GENERAL DUNNE

said, bethought that the House must cordially concur in many of the remarks of his hon. and gallant Friend. It was quite impossible that one person could manage the unwieldy business of the War Department. The present War Office was a compound of what was formerly the War Office and the old Ordnance Department. Now, although it used to be generally imagined that the old War Office was by far the most important of the two, such was not in reality the case, because the whole finance of the Army was under the control of the Ordnance Department; and he could assert from his own experience—having for a short time been connected with the latter—that the business of that Department used to be conducted in the simplest, the easiest, and the most efficient manner. He hoped a return would be made to a similar system. In treating of the re-organization of the Army, two things were likely to be confounded together—the organization in the field, and the organization in the Department at home. In the field, of course, everything ought to be under the control of the General in command. He thought such matters as the lodgment in tents and huts, the purveyor's, the commissariat, and the cash departments, ought to be under the control of an officer of high rank, attached to the head-quarters of the army, and always with the General Officer. That he believed was the system in vogue in the French army, and he could not conceive why it should not be carried out in every other. As to the manner of carrying out the arrangements, he might point out that there were in the Ordnance Office papers on the subject drawn up during the Peninsular War — reports from the Duke of Wellington and other officers of great eminence — which contained hints which might be found very useful under present circumstances. A Committee of that House was about the worst tribunal, except a Royal Commission, to carry out the object which the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. H. Baillie) had in view. It should be remembered that the present arrangements were hastily matured to meet an emergency; and there was no reason why there should not be a return to the system under which, through the exertions of Lord Hardinge, large additions of guns and materials were made for the Crimean war. He could see no reason why the Audit Department should not be swept away—he would put it at Somerset House. It was most undesirable that any department should audit its own accounts. In the manufacturing department, what need was there for the great mass of offices at head-quarters, and why need there be Inspectors of Contracts there? He hoped that in the course of a short time the right hon. Baronet would effect a re-organization, and thereby benefit the country both in efficiency and economy. There was no nation on earth that got so little for the money it spent.

CAPTAIN VIVIAN

said, the House was under obligation to the hon. Member (Major Jervis) who had opened the discussion, but the subject was too large for debate at that time. He had once introduced it in moving for a Committee on the Organization of the Army; and the Report of the Committee, of which Lord Herbert and Sir James Graham were Members, had effected some beneficial reforms in the administration of the War Department. No Department had been so unfortunate, for it was reorganized at a time of great difficulty, when we were carrying on a great war, when our military resources were taxed to the utmost, and when our existing administration had completely broke down. Since its formation it had had difficulties to contend with which no other Department of the State ever had, and it was not now so much a matter of suprise to find it in a state of confusion, perhaps greater than those who had not gone into the details bad any idea of. If the War Office were put into a proper system, there would be no difficulty in its administration: and he looked with confidence to the great administrative ability of the right hon. Gentleman the present Secretary of State for War to correct the confusion that now existed. He looked also to the Report of Lord Strathnairn's Committee as one step towards a colossal reform of the Administrative Departments. There were five Departments that were to be consolidated and put under a Controller, who would look to their proper administration, and with whom alone the Secretary of State for War would have occasion to communicate. This recommendation to some extent followed the French system; but that was not always perfect. General Trochu, in his recently published work, complained that owing to bad administration the French troops suffered privations in the plains of Lombardy; and he said that while he wept over the misfortunes of the English army in the first year of the Crimean war, which were to be attributed mainly to our ignorance of active service, he found that experience improved our system until it became superior to that of the French, who suffered more than our soldiers did in the second and third years of the war. Although the Report of Lord Strathnairn's Committee fell short of what was required, it would lead to the introduction of much needed reforms, and would not only improve the army, but go far to produce order where disorder prevailed. He would not then enter into the general question of the re-organization of the army; but he hoped the Secretary for War would apply his attention to that subject. He hoped that before long the right hon. Gentleman would be able to improve upon the Report, and that he would be able to devise a scheme by which the evils now existing might be swept away.

SIR CHARLES RUSSELL

said, that while highly approving of the Report to which reference had been made, there were some details of it in which he could not concur. The radical difficulty to be encountered was the complication which existed at the War Department. That was so great that if we went to war to-morrow we should find things as bad as they were when we went to the Crimea—if not indeed worse. A book of Regulations for the Supply of an Army in the Field, issued by authority as a manual for the guidance of officers, stated that an English corps d'armée would have 16,010 combatants, and the transport required for them was 10,371 animals, and 5,390 officers and men of transport corps. A Prussian corps d'armée consisted of 36,317 combatants, and its transport was 4,278 horses, and 3,201 officers and men. In plain English the Prussians had less than half the transport for more than double the number of combatants. Such a statement in a handbook showed the necessity of some reform at head-quarters. The Report which had been presented proposed to give all control to one chief officer, to be denominated the Controller, and to divide the transport department into two — one for ordnance stores, and the second for all other articles—stores, clothing, medicine, and what the French called munitions de bouche. The Report, again, recommended the separation of naval from military stores; suggesting that the navy should supply itself from its own arsenals, without taxing the military arsenals. The practice of charging all the maritime transport connected with the army in the Navy Estimates had long appeared to him the most extraordinary jumble of accounts—the expenditure really belonged entirely to the army. But a more extraordinary thing, still, was the system of audit, under which an official paid money with his right hand and audited it with his left. Not a single voucher was examined or checked; and anybody who knew anything of accounts or public companies must know that this was no audit at all. A good practical illustration of the working of the system fell under his own notice some years ago. Extensive barracks were ordered to be painted, four years earlier, as it was reported to him, than the average period when such works were necessary. After the usual difficulty in discovering the proper official from whom to make inquiries, he ascertained that the order had been given because a Vote of money having been taken for the purpose, it would complicate the accounts to pay it back again. Had there been any officer to control the expenditure he would cheerfully have received back the money, and applied it to some other purpose. The proposal now before the country was a step in the right direction, and the right hon. Baronet, he trusted, would be able to afford some hopes that it would be carried into effect.

COLONEL PERCY HERBERT

said, his hon. and gallant Friend (Sir Charles Russell) might have accurately stated the nature of the transport of arrangements for a Prussian corps d'armée, but those could hardly be sufficient where operations were carried on at a considerable distance from their base. If, for instance, a ship were loaded with stores for some distant service, the stores should be put on board under the charge of one person, and received at their destination. The right hon. Baronet the Secretary of State for War, he trusted, would carefully consider before accepting the recommendations of the Committee that Ordnance stores should be separated from the other stores. There had been trouble enough about these things during the Crimean War, and unity of control in the matter of stores he looked upon as absolutely essential. It was likewise indispensable that Transport Corps and all military bodies should be treated like other soldiers, and placed under the same military control. It was not likely that command would ever devolve upon an officer belonging to the Transport Corps; but a rule could hardly be laid down that if a senior officer of that service were staying where there was only a subaltern of infantry or cavalry, he should not do the duty. As to the Controller not being under the order of the Commander-in-Chief, that arrangement might hold good at home when the Secretary of State for War was enabled to have communication every day with the Horse Guards, if necessary; but when the army went abroad for service the officer in command represented not merely the Commander-in-Chief but also the Secretary of State for War, and, consequently, the Controller was as much under his orders as any officer in the service. An error which was very prevalent seemed to have found its way into the minds of some of the Members of the Committee by whom this Report was drawn. The Controller was not to be in; communication, as it was called, with the Military Secretary, the Quartermaster, or the Adjutant General, but was to take his orders personally from the Commander-in- Chief. Every military Member in the House, however, must know that orders from the Commander-in-Chief were never given in person, and could only be received through one or other of these staff officers, who were the hands of the Commander-in-Chief. The Military Secretary had cognizance of all matters relating to finance, the Adjutant General of all matters connected with discipline, and the Quartermaster General of all matters connected with the quartering of troops. These three officers conducted the whole of the correspondence emanating from the Commander - in - Chief's department; and it would be ridiculous and preposterous, as well as dangerous to the efficiency of the service, if the Controller were to receive his orders other than through the ordinary channels just as the commander of a corps d'armée received them.

SIR HARRY VERNEY

said, the right hon. Baronet the Secretary for War, who entered on the duties of his office with the confidence of Members on both sides of the House, had the opportunity of conferring greater benefits on the army than almost anybody else; and he trusted he would not fail to apply to the question of army reform that capacity for administration which he had shown in other Departments. It was unfortunately too true that if war were to break out suddenly in Europe, or attempts were made at invasion, we should not be prepared. A dozen years ago a French officer did come to this country, formed a plan for an attack upon England, which he communicated to foreign Governments. He described the; points which could be most easily assailed, and the means of communication existing with different parts of the coast, laying particular stress on the mistake which had been made in our break of gauge upon the railways. Our army always fought well and was generally victorious, but at an enormous expenditure of life and money; and the cause, he believed, was to be attributed to the system. He trusted the right hon. Gentleman would endeavour to obtain the same efficiency at less expense. We wanted the means of immediately commencing effective operations which other nations possess. A French General had nothing to do but to fight his troops—an English General would have to see to everything in addition to what should be his sole duty. Some years ago, when riding on the Plains of Chalons with General Canrobert, he remembered asking him what he should do if a telegram came to apprise him that France was going to war with Germany. He said he should do nothing but continue the march upon which the column was engaged at that moment; everything in camp was in readiness for immediate departure; he should send for his Intendant General, telling him the places at which he required to halt on successive nights, and desire him to have everything prepared for the soldiers when they arrived. "In your country," said General Canrobert, "you do not understand marches of that description. You have got the best soldiers in the world, but your organization is not to be compared to ours. I should have nothing to do but think how to fight the enemy. Your General would have not only to fight the enemy, but to consider how best to take care of his troops." The late Mr. Hume said that the House of Commons would always vote money for the army and navy if they were convinced that it would be well expended; but they objected to the money being spent upon the civil part of the service, instead of for the benefit of the soldiers. There were many points of our service in which, as compared with the French service, we showed a lamentable want of attention to economy. Every soldier in the French army was taught a trade, and why should not our soldiers have that which would be preferable to a pension—instruction in a trade which would contribute to their amusement and benefit while in the service, and by means of which they could earn their living when the period of service should expire. He believed that the task which the right hon. Gentleman had to perform in the reorganization of our army was one which only demanded deliberation and consultation with those who were able to advise him, and that the British army might then be made perfectly efficient without further expenditure of money.

THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON

said, he did not think that until they had heard the answer of the Government to the observations of the hon. and gallant Gentleman the Member for Harwich they were in a position to enter upon the discussion of the Report; and under any circumstances it was impossible to suppose that this could be the final discussion of a subject so important. Hon. Members might have had time to read the Report of the Committee, but probably few among them had had time to read the whole of the Evidence and the Memoranda attached to it, both of which he thought were of extraordinary interest. The proposals of the Committee had justly been described as little short of revolutionary, and it was hardly possible that the Government could yet have come to any definite resolution respecting them. There were one or two points to which he should like to call attention. He wished, in the first place, that the right hon. Gentleman would explain a point which appeared at present to be somewhat ambi- guous, and that was how far the Government were pledged by the right hon. Gentleman (General Peel), his predecessor in office, to an approval of the principles contained in the Report. In a letter dated September 27, 1866, Sir Edward Lugard expressed on the part of the right hon. Gentleman (General Peel) approval of the general principles recommended by the Committee in their preliminary Report, But he (the Marquess of Hartington) was unable to find from the blue book what that preliminary Report was. It was true there was a series of opinions upon points submitted to them; but these could not be the preliminary Report referred to in the letter. It was useless to criticize the Report until they knew what course the Government would take respecting it. The Committee was a very able one, and well qualified to give an opinion upon transport and supply; but it could hardly carry with it the confidence of the army or the country when it extended its labours so vastly as it had. He did not wish to show the least disrespect to Lord Strathnairn, or any of the officers composing the Committee; but it should be remembered that the Committee which prepared this preliminary Report was a purely military one, with the exception of Sir William Power, the Commissary General; and when great questions like these were to be considered, it was not possible that a Committee so composed should carry with it the full confidence either of the army or of Parliament. As to the single civilian, Sir William Power, no one had a higher opinion of his ability; but Sir William Power had for a considerable time formed very definite views upon this very subject, and had drawn up, he believed, the greater part of this very Report. In general it was a very able Report; but under the circumstances it was not wise to adopt without grave considerations the recommendations of such a Committee. He fully approved the suggestion of the Committee that the supply departments should to some extent be amalgamated and placed under some department of control — and indeed the previous Government had formed some plan of the kind. In moving the Army Estimates last year he informed the House that a proposal of a similar kind, though a much more limited one, was made to the Treasury by his predecessor at the War Office, Earl De Grey, and the correspondence upon that subject would be found in the Appendix to the Report of this Committee. That proposal involved nothing revolutionary, but the principle that in each military station and district the supply departments should be brought to a focus under an officer called the Controller, Intendant, or what you like. To a certain extent, therefore, he concurred in the suggestion that some change of this sort should be made. The Committee proposed to intrust to the Chief Controller duties which, in his opinion, it was impossible for one man adequately to supervise; but even if it were possible, he did not at all see the necessity of making so great a change in the organization of the departments themselves. Any one who had read the Report of the Committee with attention would see that in the supply departments of the army they had hardly left one stone upon another. The military store department was to be broken up, the surveyor's department was to be broken up, the barrack department to be entirely done away, and the duties of these departments to be divided among various persons. Now, he did not mean to say that the departments were formed at present in the best possible way; but such great and fundamental changes as were recommended by the Committee could scarcely be needed, and must produce much inconvenience for a considerable time. There was one part of the Report which did not seem quite clear—namely, where the Committee referred to the Accountant's branch. As far as he could make out, the whole of the Accountant General's branch, as well as all the supply department, was to be placed under the direction of the Chief Controller, and if that were so he had no hesitation in saying that the duties proposed to be intrusted to that officer were very much greater than he could possibly superintend. With regard to the formation of a new Ordnance Department, he quite concurred in what had been said by the hon. and gallant Member for Harwich (Major Jervis). As far as he could make out, this new Ordnance Department, to be composed, as he understood, of artillery officers and noncommissioned officers, would be entirely independent of any civil control whatever; and knowing as he did the difficulty there was of keeping the expenses of the department within bounds without civil control, he could not discover what means the Committee had recommended for preserving the control of the Secretary of State over the Department and check- ing unnecessary expenditure. On these two points, then—namely, the arrangements of the Controller's Department and the arrangements of the Ordnance Department—further explanation was needed. And now a word as to the way in which the Committee recommended that their new system should be introduced. In that part of the Report which dealt with this point, the Committee appeared to him to begin entirely at the wrong end. They urged very strongly, if the proposals were to be adopted, that no time should be lost in the appointment of a Chief Controller. In his opinion, however, it was extremely dangerous, when the supply department had been got into proper order, to supersede the heads of the different branches by intrusting the duties to one gentleman who could not possibly be acquainted with the work. If changes were to be made it seemed to him that the plan proposed by Earl De Grey in his letter to the Treasury was the right one—that the new system should be introduced gradually, station by station, and district by district. It would be a most dangerous experiment to supersede at once, without further preparation except the appointment of a Chief Controller, the heads of the existing departments. He did not know what answer the right hon. Baronet was about to give to the hon. and gallant Member for Harwich, but he would do well if before making the changes which he was urged to make in the War Department he would refer the most valuable materials contained in the blue book to—he would not say more able men, for he did not know that more able men could be obtained—but to men whose report would carry with it more of the confidence of the House of Commons.

MR. ALDERMAN LUSK

considered it was strange that the army of a country whose manufactures were never equalled, whose ships could sail against any ships in the world, and who could successfully compete at farming with any nation on the earth, should cost more, man for man, than the army of any other country, and that they should be always in trouble respecting it. He apprehended that it was owing to the fact that the men who had the management of the affairs of the army were not men of business. They had had Committee after Committee of Inquiry into its organization and management, but no men of business to conduct it. The right hon. Gentleman at present at the head of the War Department possessed good administrative ability, and he trusted he would give his attention to putting the machinery of the army into better condition, making it at once more efficient and less expensive.