The general result of the arrangements is that a scant proportion of reserve officers is provided in the junior ranks, where they would be most wanted, and that the system does not lead towards any automatic improvement in this respect.

The arrangements in Continental armies for supplying a reserve of officers have been shown in Chapter VI., p. 80.

In this country, hitherto, no direct attempt to fill the junior ranks of the reserve has been made, yet it seems probable that, constituted as society is, certain classes might be found willing to give a qualifying service in order to enjoy a position of honour if it were understood that the obligations entailed were due only on emergency.1

1986 captains and 1,249 subalterns are known to have retired from the volunteer service in the last four years. In the great majority of cases these officers did not belong to the reserve, and their services have become lost. The number of subalterns who thus retire from the volunteers is about 300 each year, and in very many cases their retirement is occasioned solely by a change of residence, which makes it impossible for them to continue to serve with their corps.

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CHAPTER XX.

THE STAFF.

1. Definition.

THE term Staff-État-major-Generalstab-designates the body of officers who act as agents of the generals in command, in caring for and directing the proceedings of the troops and in the administration of the affairs intrusted to the said commanders. It is in this sense that the "staff” and the "staff officers of the army" are generally understood in common parlance.

But the expression "staff" has a wider signification, and is used almost in its lay sense. We recognise the staff at headquarters, i.e., the officers employed in army administration at the War Office; each battalion, or cavalry regiment, has its "staff" of adjutant, quartermaster and riding-master, -so-called because they do not belong to the companies or components of the regiment but to its headquarters administration; also those officers, sergeants, and others of a militia battalion, who are maintained at its headquarters on duty when the men are dismissed to their homes, are known as its "permanent staff." Besides these uses, the term is freely employed in the British service; all general officers or colonels in command of districts, &c., are gazetted to the staff of the army, and their pay is shown under that head in the army estimates. We have also the Indian Staff Corps, on the list of which are borne the officers serving with the native regiments of the Indian army, and in other appointments under the government of India; and,

The headquarters staff and their duties in administration are dealt with in chap. xxiv. (War Office).

latterly, the word has been made use of in the title "medical staff," conferred on the body of medical officers of the imperial

army.

In spite of minor differences, the idea of the staff in the sense of agents ministering to a higher power, is prevalent throughout all these uses of the word, which, however, is employed, as is customary in the English language, not in accordance with any precise theory but as may be most convenient.

It is with the staff of the army in the sense first spoken of in this chapter that we have now chiefly to deal.

2. Historical.

From an early period during the wars succeeding those of the middle ages, when armies ceased to be composed of the personal following of knights and chiefs of feudal times, and were regimented, we find the duties of the officers who assisted the commanding general as his staff to have been grouped under two heads; the numbering, arming, and ordering the troops fell to the adjutant-general, and the camping, quartering, direction of marches, and of provisioning to the quartermaster-general. In some armies an intendant was concerned with the supply of provisions. This dual government of adjutant and quartermaster-general, alternately in the ascendant, gave rise to friction; it was retained in some countries, e.g., Austria, to a comparatively recent date,1 and in England still later, but Napoleon's staff, under Berthier as major-général de l'armée or chief of the staff, was a homogeneous body, and the “chef de l'état-major" was an institution in every French army corps. In the British service we find a "chief of the staff " recognized for the first time in the Crimea, and again in the Indian Mutiny campaign in the person of Sir W. Mansfield. Since then the necessity of focussing, so to speak, the labours of the staff was, in the British service, realized progres sively, and, for operations in the field, a "chief of the staff" has since 1857 been usually appointed. The practice thus established became law in 1888, when an army order directed that in every general officer's command one officer should always be named as chief staff officer; but a first step towards facilitating such a change had been taken in 1871 when the practice was introduced, in appointing officers to the staff, of gazetting them as deputy, assistant, or deputy-assistant adjutant and quartermaster-general, whereby it was left for ulterior arrangements to determine the precise line of duty they should undertake from time to time.

Again, this had been facilitated by the circumstance that in the conflict or at least inharmonious working between the old adjutant-general's and

i

'Brockhaus' "Conversations-Lexicon," 1865,-Stab and Generalstab.

quartermaster-general's offices in districts and at stations, the former had come to, so to speak, swallow the latter so far as influence and initiative was concerned; the adjutant-general had become the recognized issuer of all orders and the officer to whom the troops looked as the principal agent of the general commanding; the quartermaster-general was still occupied with movement and quartering, but with limited functions, since the executive part of such work, as to quartering at least, fell to an army department.

The arrangement above referred to of appointing officers to the staff as assistant adjutant and quartermaster-genera was continued until 1888 when, in connection with increased financial and other responsibilities entrusted to the Commander-in-Chief by the Order in Council of the 21st February, 1888, the duties of the general staff were revised and extended and a great change was effected.

The commissariat and transport staff, which had previously been represented in each command, was permitted to lapse, or rather the officers actually occupying this position, and who were responsible for the supervision and control of supply, transport, and certain other services, were amalgamated with the general staff. As vacancies occurred amongst them, however, they were filled indifferently from officers on the supernumerary list of the old commissariat and transport staff now converted into the army service corps, (an old title revived), and from officers of the general staff.

The effect of the change referred to was that although the whole staff was now styled as of the adjutant-general's branch, whereby it gained or retained prestige and influence, and while the whole direction and conduct of military operations, in the strategical and scientific sense, tended to be exercised more and more by the general in command in person, with the adjutantgeneral proper as his mouthpiece, the functions recognized of old as belonging to the quartermaster-general's section of the staff were restored to it; thus new life and power was given to what was dead, and, at a time when it was a matter of policy to give generals in command real financial responsi bility, the duties, which had before been performed by officers of the commissariat, transport, and barrack departments with a quasi individual responsibility, were assigned to officers on the staff of the general commanding, acting in his name and towards him as his responsible advisers. We refer to the division of the staff termed "adjutant-general B," the precise nature of whose duties is described in the following chapter.

The change of system, as here indicated, was a remarkable one, and peculiar to the British service. The result of the amalgamation, so far as such was effected, was a levelling up of what were formerly regarded as departmental and somewhat inferior duties to their proper consideration and importance, whilst, at the same time, a new sphere of activity was thrown open to the officers of the army at large who were enabled, by means of a careful system of instruction in the duties formerly known as commissariat, to qualify themselves to perform interesting and responsible work which previously had been to them as a sealed book. Moreover, the new system tended to spread through the army at large a knowledge of these duties so that at need a greater number of officers would be found capable of undertaking them than heretofore. It is in accordance with the temperament

of our race to desire practical work to do, and to prefer this during the long years of peace to study and make-believe; it is difficult to get an Englishman to prepare for what he cannot practise; regret may be felt for this, but it is well to take account of the fact, and therefore we may the more welcome a system which gives a wide field of selection and a good economical method of preparation for a section of staff duties of the most important kind whether in peace or war.

The title quartermaster-general is still retained for greater convenience at headquarters, War Office, for the head of the department and for his assistants. Although all are distinctly under the adjutant-general their duties at headquarters are sufficiently special to make it useful for them to be known by a distinctive name, but this fact lends no argument for the extension or restoration of the title of quartermaster-general to any members of the staff elsewhere, for they are not members of the quartermastergeneral's department at headquarters, but officers under the general commanding, some of whose duties correspond merely to those of the quartermastergeneral at headquarters.

3. Staff Systems in Continental Armies.

As the staff system was developed to meet the requirements of increasing and more highly organized armies, it became evident that, if good results in the field were to be obtained, the officers employed would not only have to be carefully selected, but would have to undergo a thorough training in the duties with which they were to be entrusted. To meet those requirements a special body of officers was created for carrying out the duties more immediately connected with military operations, and institutions came to be established at which officers selected from regiments underwent a special course of training.

This system has for many years been extended to all European armies, but with important differences in application. It is in Prussia that the general staff system has of late years received its highest development. It will, therefore, be useful to give a brief description of its organization in the German army before proceeding to describe our own system.

The future officers of the staff (Generalstab) are taken from their regiments to be trained at a special military school (Kriegs-Akademie) and afterwards with the great general staff (Grosser Generalstab) at Berlin. When ultimately