Army Apostles: Imperial Officers on Loan and the Standardization of the Canadian,Australian and New Zealand Armies,1904–1914

In July 1912 Major General Alexander Godley, the General Officer Commanding (GOC) New Zealand Military Forces, addressed a gathering of senior officers from the territorial and permanent forces of New Zealand and a handful of British army officers who, like him, were on loan to the government of the dominion. ¹ Godley had gathered them in Wellington to plan army training for the coming year, and to set the tone for the work ahead he started with a reading from the second volume of The Army Review. ² He chose a portion of a five-page message by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), Field Marshal Sir John French: ‘I ask officers to remember the links which unite us indissolubly with our brothers-in-arms in the great self-governing dominions, the Crown Colonies and India; to lose no opportunity of helping our comrades in the development of their military strength; and to act as missioners [sic] of Imperial ideals.’ ³ The ‘mission’ to which French alluded was more than just the evangelization of imperial ideals and military training, though; it was also about the standardization of armies.

This was the essence of Godley’s work in New Zealand – making the military forces of New Zealand compatible with the British army so that they might someday be efficiently integrated into a larger imperial army. And there were others like him doing the same thing all across the British Empire. In his memoirs Godley linked his appointment in New Zealand to the same ‘missionary’ work that sent Douglas Haig back to India, Colin J. Mackenzie to Canada, George Macaulay Kirkpatrick to Australia, and George Aston to South Africa. ⁴ They were, to stay with French’s missionary metaphor, some of the army’s most important apostles.

But we know very little about them or the nature of their work. In 1990 the Australian military historian Jeffrey Grey wrote that the system by which imperial officers such as Godley, Kirkpatrick, and others

were posted around the empire to oversee the development of the colonial and dominion forces is too little understood. It is not clear whether the attempts to impose a policy whereby dominion forces were raised and trained to act as a wartime reserve to imperial forces [were] in response to the promptings of local politicians, the urgings of London, or the individual advocacy of the imperial officers themselves. ⁵

Despite some excellent scholarship in the fields of British and Commonwealth military history, our understanding of these matters has little improved in the past quarter century or so. ⁶ The reasons for this are several. To begin with, our appreciation for what the army apostles did as a group is hampered because most of the military histories for this period are studies of national armies, not examinations of imperial defence. Some examples make this point clear. Brian Bond’s The Victorian Army and the Staff College ably explains aspects of doctrine, training, planning, and development, but it is an understandably British-centric work, as is The Edwardian Army by Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly. ⁷ James Wood, Ian McGibbon, and Annette Seegers have produced major works on the armies of Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, all of which mention imperial officers on loan to those dominions and offer insights into military developments in the armies concerned, but each restricts itself to the study of one army. ⁸ Only a few works have examined the military forces of more than one country. Richard Preston’s seminal work Canada and ‘Imperial Defence’ is, despite its title, a multinational analysis of defence policies in the British Empire, 1867–1919, that touches on the work of some imperial officers on loan to the dominions, but mostly deals with their occasional clashes with dominion authorities. ⁹ A PhD dissertation by Stephen J. Clarke examines the work of 17 British officers seconded as commandants to the military forces of New Zealand and the Australian colonies, but the study ends in 1901, well before the post-Boer War reforms. ¹⁰ The chapter entitled ‘The Imperial Design’ in John Gooch’s The Plans of War does a fine job of describing the development of the Imperial General Staff, and it gives aggregate numbers for imperial officers serving in the dominions (1909–11), but it too is a strategic-level analysis that provides no examination of how these men carried out their work. ¹¹ Keith Jeffrey dismisses the work of on-loan officers when he writes that pre-1914 ‘coordination of defence matters on an imperial basis was largely confined to secondments of individual officers between British and dominion forces’, but he attempts no examination of what they actually did. ¹² No study has yet adequately addressed Professor Grey’s questions as to why and how imperial officers were attached to dominion forces in the decade before the First World War. This article attempts to remedy this deficiency by addressing these issues in the cases of three dominions: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. ¹³ It also assesses what effect on-loan imperial officers had on the dominion military forces in which they served.

There can be little doubt that the initiative for army standardization came from London. The British War Office and its newly formed general staff had every intention of leveraging the manpower of the empire; making the contributing armies compatible was fundamental to that goal. This was not a new idea in 1912. The Colonial Defence Committee, a small standing committee of Britain’s Colonial Office that included military and naval officers, had espoused similar ideas as early as the 1890s, and a succession of British officers seconded as GOCs or commandants to Canada and the Australasian colonies before 1900 had tried, with disappointing results, to create imperial reserves of troops. ¹⁴ The difficulties experienced by the field force in South Africa and the potential for future confrontation with large and well-organized continental armies gave an added impetus to military reform and imperial cooperation. In 1901, five years before the creation of the British general staff, an Intelligence Department appreciation entitled ‘Military Needs of the Empire in a War with France and Russia’ outlined War Office hopes for dominion contingents in the future: ‘The day may come – there is no reason why it should not come – when 10,000 of such troops may be ready in Australia, 10,000 in South Africa and 10,000 in Canada.’ ¹⁵ Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain bundled such notions into a larger proposal for an Imperial Council and presented it at the Colonial Conference of 1902, but the premiers of Canada and Australia dashed it for fear of being forced into what Richard Preston described as an ‘imperial defence straightjacket of British design’. ¹⁶

This fact did not mean that Canada or Australia lacked a strong sense of imperial nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Quite the contrary: there were significant majorities in both countries who demanded that their military forces should stand resolutely, and in force, with Britain in time of war. But there were also politically significant groups in the dominions for which the bonds of empire were not nearly so strong – French Canadians in Canada, Afrikaners in South Africa, and segments of the Irish Catholic population in Australia, for example. Dominion leaders simply wanted to protect prerogatives that would allow them to balance imperialist demands for closer ties with the mother country and the desire of anti-imperialists to avoid military commitments in areas where they had little interest.

Sensing the dilemma of dominion leaders, the War Office decided on a new approach that owed much to the adroit calculations of Secretary of State for War Richard Haldane: make the dominion armies usable, ask for no commitments, and trust that they will rally to the cause when needed (as dominion authorities consistently assured would be the case). ¹⁷ Taking this tack at the 1907 Colonial Conference, Haldane managed to secure dominion agreement to the development of an Imperial General Staff, with local branches in each of the dominions, as an ‘advisory’ source on all military matters – with no binding commitments. This was an important first step, and it led logically to further agreements on standardization, helped along, as it were, by the challenge posted by continental powers, the Russians on the North-West Frontier and the Germans on the Continent. By the end of the 1909 Imperial Conference, the dominions had even agreed to concrete proposals that would work towards a more ‘homogenous Imperial army’, including common war establishments for units and formations and the adoption of standardized training manuals to be issued by the War Office. ¹⁸ But, because their military establishments were so small, and because they had so few qualified instructors and general staff officers, the dominions would need some help.

The Godleys, Haigs, Mackenzies, Kirkpatricks, and Astons of the Regular Army who provided that help found that making the Indian and dominion armies into sizeable and usable elements of the ‘second-line’ army was a tall order. With the exception of India, none had armies worthy of the name at the turn of the twentieth century. ¹⁹ The dominions had only the smallest of professional cadres to train part-time militias, they had politicians who hated military spending (but loved patronage), they had governments that were not bound to accept direction from London, they had militias or territorial forces that were effectively liable for home defence only, ²⁰ and all but the New Zealanders were unwilling to make a military commitment in advance of hostilities.

However, the land forces of the dominions and India had the potential to expand and put combat-effective forces in the field, providing that they and the British army that would receive them were organized for it. The Elgin Commission of 1903, which had been established to look into the prosecution of the war in South Africa, chronicled a litany of systemic problems and failures, but it also recorded that the dominions, the South African colonies, and India had provided almost 23 per cent of the 448,435 troops who had served with the field force – not an insignificant contribution. ²¹ And although the commission made few concrete recommendations, it did conclude definitively that ‘the true lesson of the war is that no military system will be satisfactory which does not contain powers of expansion outside the limit of the regular forces of the Crown’. ²² An imperial army, in other words, had to be organized for imperial expansion. Change came accordingly. War Office reform and a general staff along the lines of those in place on the Continent followed both the Elgin Commission Report and the recommendations of Lord Esher’s committee on War Office reconstitution a year later. ²³ By 1906 the British and Indian armies had settled on standard divisional organizations. And three years after that, there were common Field Service Regulations (FSRs) that established basic principles for army operations and administration. The British army was changing and the dominion armies had to change with it, if there was to be any hope of ‘expansion outside the limit of the regular forces of the Crown’. Sending officers to the self-governing dominions with the ‘new gospel’ of a reforming army was a relatively small investment.

Common military education was a crucial foundation. On-loan officers would have served no purpose had they not been schooled and trained in common ways of doing things. A general staff paper laid before the Imperial Conference of 1911 made the point: ‘Education is the keynote … The necessity for preparatory and higher education is so apparent that its importance need not be further insisted upon.’ ²⁴ In this respect, the staff colleges at Camberley and Quetta were central. They taught imperial-standard staff procedures and doctrine, based (after 1909) on the FSRs. They produced qualified officers for the Imperial General Staff, including the Indian and dominion sections. They provided commandants and instructors to the cadet colleges at Sandhurst, Woolwich, Kingston, Duntroon, and Bloemfontein. Starting in 1903, they trained a small but important group of dominion officers. In all, 12 Canadians, 6 Australians, 5 New Zealanders, and 2 South Africans passed through the staff colleges before the end of 1914. ²⁵ And common military education extended beyond the walls of Camberley and Quetta. A good number of the permanent force instructors from the dominions qualified at the royal schools of artillery and engineering at Larkhill and Chatham. ²⁶

Other measures also helped. The empire-wide acceptance of the Imperial General Staff as a source of guidance and advice (though not direction) was also an important component of the standardization process. If the dominions chose to accept guidance in terms of military doctrine, staff procedures, organization, and equipment, their land forces would be made compatible with those of a larger imperial army and therefore much more usable as contingents for an imperial war effort, even if mention of any continental commitment was skilfully avoided. Indeed, Haldane pitched the idea of a general staff for the empire in terms of how it would benefit local defence arrangements, using Canada as an example. ²⁷ This was clever, for armies organized according to standard establishments, equipment, and procedures for home defence would also be suitable for expeditionary operations. Regular interaction, in the form of meetings at imperial conferences and exchanges of liaison letters between Whitehall and the Indian and dominion sections of the Imperial General Staff, went a long way to ensuring that everyone stayed abreast of the latest military developments and doctrinal changes. So, too, did the publication and dissemination of standard training pamphlets, the submission of reports by inspectors general to dominion governments, and the attachment of dominion officers to imperial army formations. The arrangements were not perfect by any means and there were significant shortfalls: there were never enough trained staff officers for armies that were supposed to expand in wartime, the British army still lacked permanent corps and field army headquarters, ²⁸ and there were a good many doctrinal issues that remained unresolved. ²⁹ However, the military establishments of the British Empire were definitely better prepared for working together in 1914 than they had been in 1899. For example, in September 1899 the War Office had to tell the Australian colonies and the dominions how to organize the companies they might be sending to South Africa. ³⁰ There was no such requirement in 1914. By the time the war broke out, all the respective armies were following the same training manuals: Infantry Training (1905 or 1914), Cavalry Training (1904, 1907), and Training and Manoeuvre Regulations (1910, 1913). ³¹

A system of loans, attachments, and interchanges was also vital to ensuring that the dominion armies reformed and developed in concert with the British army. The exchange of officers with the dominions was a high pay-off programme that was implemented at relatively low cost. It required no strategic decisions on whether an imperial army would assemble in India, Europe, or one of the colonies or dominions, and it required no commitment on the part of the dominions beyond making improvements for their own defence. Officers on loan to the dominions were normally requested by the governments concerned to fill particular roles. Occasionally, this meant regimental officers to work in units or training establishments, but, after the agreement to establish an Imperial General Staff, it increasingly meant general staff officers to operate in national, formation, or district headquarters, as well as the cadet colleges. ³² In all cases, the dominion governments bore the entire cost for the moving expenses and salaries of the on-loan officers, all of whom had to volunteer for dominion service. Attachments worked in the other direction. In these cases, officers went from the military forces of a dominion ‘to the regular army [or Indian Army] for instruction or duty, but not to fill a vacancy on the authorized establishment of that army’. ³³ The attachment regime was an on-the-job training scheme, and the dominion governments paid the full cost of any officer on attachment. Finally, interchanges were one-for-one arrangements designed to encourage the dissemination of ideas and the extension of personal relationships across the armies of the empire. Since the system entailed no net gain or loss of officers for the participating countries, the governments involved simply paid the salaries of their own officers, wherever they happened to be on interchange. The vast majority of the army’s apostles went to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand on loan.

Their mandate was essentially twofold: to fill gaps (where dominion forces had no qualified personnel) and to teach. In modern parlance, they were part of a ‘surge’ in the War Office’s effort to extend the reach of the Imperial General Staff and to put all the military forces of the empire on a common footing. (See Table 1.) Canada had established its general staff in 1905, and therefore started taking imperial officers on loan earlier. By 1907 the dominion had 12 imperial officers on loan, including the Chief of the General Staff (CGS), a Director of Military Operations (DMO), and 7 instructors at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC Kingston). ³⁴ By 1913 the number of imperial officers on loan to the Dominion of Canada had tripled, to the point where they held the highest appointments on the general staff in Ottawa, as well as most of the general staff appointments in the six militia divisions and three military districts in Western Canada, and comprised the majority of instructors at RMC (Kingston). ³⁵ It should also be remembered that the Canadian permanent force at the time had a grand total of 250 officers on its strength, so 38 imperial officers in key positions had a disproportionate influence. ³⁶ The surge, if we can call it that, started a bit later in Australia and New Zealand, where the numbers of imperial officers on loan went from 2 each in 1907 to 19 for Australia and 18 for New Zealand in 1914. ³⁷ Again, these numbers were proportionately significant because the Australians had only 80 officers (plus 218 with temporary commissions) in their permanent force by early 1914, while the New Zealanders were still 30 officers below their establishment strength of 112 officers. ³⁸ Like the Canadians, the New Zealanders employed most of their imperial officers on loan in general staff appointments, both in Wellington and in the military districts. The Australians, on the other hand, retained most of the general staff appointments in Melbourne for their own officers, preferring instead to farm out their imperial officers to appointments in the military districts and at the Royal Military College at Duntroon, where they held nearly all the military instructor positions.

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Table 1.

Imperial officers on loan to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (1907 and 1913–14) and permanent force officers from the dominions (1913–14).

	Imperial officers on loan (1907)	Imperial officers on loan (1913–14)	Permanent force officers (1913–14)
Canada	12	38	250
Australia	2	19	80 a
			218 b
New Zealand	2	18	82

a

Permanent. ^bTemporary.

Source: Information gleaned from TNA, CO 42/976, ‘Report of the Inspector General of the Oversea Forces of the Military Institutions in Canada’, 1913, p. 5; WO 32/4818, ‘Report of an Inspection of the Military Forces of the Commonwealth of Australia by General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., D.S.O.’, May 1914, p. 52; WO 32/4819, ‘Report of the Inspector-General of the Oversea Forces of the Military Forces of New Zealand’, 1914, pp. 8, 38; The Quarterly Militia List of the Dominion of Canada (Corrected to 30th June 1914) (Ottawa, King’s Printer, 1914), p. 38; Officers’ List of the Australian Military Forces, 1 August 1914 (Melbourne, Albert J. Mullett, 1914), pp. 14–35; The Quarterly Army List for the New Zealand Forces for January 1914 (Wellington, Government Printer, 1914), p. 18.

Having established that the loan of imperial officers rose in concert with efforts to reform and standardize the armies of the empire, we can now examine more closely who these officers were and how they were assigned. Table 2 gives us a snapshot of the 75 officers on loan to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in the summer of 1914. They were a well-qualified lot, roughly 20–40 per cent of them being staff trained, depending on the dominion. New Zealand had the highest proportion of staff-trained officers on loan, putting most of them to work in general staff appointments. The Australians, however, had only one Camberley graduate on its general staff (as Director Military Training); their other staff-trained imperial officers worked either at RMC Duntroon or in the military districts. ³⁹ In Canada, 4 of the 10 Camberley-qualified imperial officers worked at RMC Kingston, while 5 held general staff appointments in Ottawa or in the militia divisions. The relatively low number of imperial officers holding Canadian general staff appointments in 1914 was the result of an increasing number of newly qualified Canadians taking up junior staff (second- or third-grade) appointments, plus a growing number of Militia Staff Course-qualified (msc) officers taking on the duties of brigade major in the militia formations. Canada and Australia had more Royal Engineers and artillery officers because the curricula at Kingston and Duntroon demanded their expertise, and neither the Canadians nor the Australians had enough qualified gunners or sappers to fill those billets. The high proportion of on-loan instructors at the two dominion military colleges also speaks to the centrality of military education in the overall effort to homogenize the imperial armies.

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Table 2.

Imperial officers on loan to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by trade and function in 1914.

	Total	Passed staff college	General staff appointments	RMC instructors	Artillery/Engineers	Ordnance/Service
Canada	38	10	5	11	12	2
Australia	19	4	4	9	10	3
New Zealand	18	7	7	N/A	2	4

Source: Information gleaned from The Quarterly Militia List of the Dominion of Canada (Corrected to 30th June 1914) (Ottawa, King’s Printer, 1914), p. 38; Officers’ List of the Australian Military Forces, 1 August 1914 (Melbourne, Albert J. Mullett, 1914), pp. 14–35; and The Quarterly Army List for the New Zealand Forces for January 1914 (Wellington, Government Printer, 1914), p. 18.

Assessing what the on-loan officers accomplished in the dominions is not a simple matter. While it is impossible to attribute all the changes or developments in the dominion armies solely to men such as Lake, Kirkpatrick, and Godley – one has to keep in mind that they were part of a combined effort that also included the establishment of an Imperial General Staff, the work of permanent forces in the dominions, and the governments involved – they were nevertheless key players in a dynamic process that transformed the dominion armies with which they served. The changes that took place could not have occurred without the on-loan officers, so it is still worth examining the challenges, successes, and failures of their tenures.

In many ways, Canada snagged the quintessential army apostle in Percy Lake. As CGS Canada (1905–8) and later as inspector general (1908–11), he earned a reputation as an imperial soldier who could get results without causing political problems for his civilian bosses. In fact, Frederick Borden, the Canadian minister of militia and defence, deliberately sought him out as Canada’s first CGS in the summer of 1904. ⁴⁰ Lake had recently served in Ottawa as quartermaster general, so Borden knew him fairly well, and the two men had maintained a correspondence since Lake had vacated that post in 1898. Lake’s abilities were well known. General Lord Methuen, the GOC-in-Chief South Africa recommended him to the British high commissioner to South Africa on the eve of the South African Union, and the Government of New Zealand also sought his services, unsuccessfully as it turned out, shortly thereafter. ⁴¹ Lake was politically astute, technically competent, and personable. Above all, he understood what was achievable in the dominion – at that time.

And Lake accomplished much. When he became Canada’s first CGS in 1905, the Canadian Militia comprised a permanent force of 1,079 officers and other ranks, plus 35,674 militiamen – all volunteers. ⁴² (See Table 3.) Scattered over 13 military districts, in 4 regional commands, and serviced by 2 schools of cavalry, 2 schools of artillery, 6 schools of infantry, 1 school of musketry, and 2 royal schools of instruction, the Canadian Militia was not at all organized for war. It had no general staff. It had no formation staffs. It did not even have formations. It was a collection of militia units that had sprung up over the years without any regard for war plans or purpose. But, by the time Lake left Canada in 1911, the permanent force had tripled to 3,021 officers and other ranks, which meant an increased capacity for training the militia, and the number of active militiamen had grown accordingly to 42,452. ⁴³ More importantly, Canada had a small but functioning general staff in Ottawa, 6 militia divisions (albeit with significant deficiencies in personnel and equipment), a Militia Staff Course that would eventually produce 129 graduates, ⁴⁴ and an expeditionary force plan for sending an infantry division and a cavalry brigade of volunteers to ‘a civilized country in a temperate climate’. ⁴⁵ Military education was fully in line with the British army’s way of doing things as well. The commandant and 7 of RMC Kingston’s 10 military instructors were on loan from the British army, and the college’s rate of officer production increased during this period, nearly doubling the output of the pre-1904 years. ⁴⁶ The return on the RMC Kingston investment was a good one too. Nearly 95 per cent of the 1,178 RMC graduates available for military service in 1914 joined either the Canadian or imperial forces, and they accounted for 22 per cent of all officers in the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF). ⁴⁷

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Table 3.

The Canadian Militia in 1904 and 1911.

	1904	1911
Permanent Active Militia (permanent force officers and other ranks)	1,079	3,021
Non-Permanent Active Militia (militiamen)	35,674	42,452
Organization	No general staff	General staff
	Scattered militia units	6 militia divisions
	No formations	Royal schools
	Royal schools	RMC Kingston output increased
	RMC Kingston	Militia Staff Course
	All volunteer	All volunteer
		Expeditionary force plan

Source: Information gleaned from TNA, CO 42/976, ‘Report of the Inspector General of the Oversea Forces of the Military Institutions in Canada’, 1913.

Unfortunately, Colin J. Mackenzie, who became CGS Canada in 1911, had less success than Lake, mostly as a result of his rocky relationship with the erratic and headstrong Sam Hughes, who succeeded Borden as minister. ⁴⁸ The heart of the problem, as historian Stephen Harris has argued, was that Hughes, ‘a long-time militia officer … could not bring himself to embrace the view that the permanent force and its professional ethos should be the foundation of Canada’s national defence’ – even as a cadre for training for the militia. ⁴⁹ Hughes’s disdain for professional officers had deep roots that reached back at least as far as the South African War, when Major-General E.T.H. Hutton, the British army officer holding the appointment of GOC Canadian Militia, denied Hughes command of a contingent. That command of the first Canadian contingent went instead to a permanent force officer, Colonel William D. Otter, only fuelled Hughes’s contempt for professional soldiers, British and Canadian, whom he habitually and publicly accused of colluding against him. ⁵⁰ He also openly criticized the performance of the British Regular Army in South Africa. Not surprisingly, Hughes’s pathological antipathy to regulars was at odds with War Office plans to start with the professionals when standardizing the armies of the empire. The odd thing was that neither the government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden nor Hughes, a devout Orangeman, were against the idea of participating in expeditionary operations, especially if the security of Britain itself was at stake. But Hughes believed in the innate superiority of volunteer citizen soldiers, un-stultified by regular army procedures and prejudices, or so he thought. He was not alone in that belief. The militia lobby in Canada had tremendous political clout. With many of its colonels sitting as members of parliament and senators, the militia resisted being brought under the control of the permanent force, especially when it came to key command and staff appointments, which its supporters preferred using for patronage purposes.

Hughes understood neither the staff system necessary to control anything larger than a company nor the importance of standardized drills, procedures, and organization, so he clashed constantly with his British CGS. Mackenzie was a stern officer with strong convictions, which certainly did nothing to foster an agreeable relationship with the irascible minister, but it is doubtful that even an officer as affable as Lake could have got along well with Hughes. Hughes and Mackenzie clashed over everything from the role of the permanent force to the workings of the Canadian general staff. ⁵¹ For example, Hughes thought the best way to train more militiamen and make up deficiencies was to open 45 ‘provisional schools’. These schools would have to be staffed overwhelmingly by other militiamen because there were barely enough professional soldiers to man the 13 schools currently in operation, and Hughes refused to increase the size of the permanent force. Mackenzie, on the other hand, thought that militiamen training militiamen would be the equivalent of the blind leading the blind and said as much to his minister. The whole point of sending permanent force officers to imperial schools and staff colleges, and making them sit the same promotion examinations as their British army counterparts, was to ensure that they could impart imperial standards to the militia. But Hughes, who referred to permanent force soldiers as ‘bar-room loafers’, did not see the point. He reduced the size of the permanent force and cancelled their training camps in the summer of 1912.

Mackenzie was furious. He complained directly to the CIGS, Sir John French, that Hughes was ignoring the advice of the Militia Council, appointing untrained militia friends and cronies to important command and staff positions, and bullying the general staff. ⁵² Hughes even cleared the way for promoting himself to major general, although the promotion did not take effect until 1914. The affair was ludicrous, but Mackenzie lost in the end. Hughes often behaved foolishly, but he was a minister of the Crown in a self-governing dominion and, so long as his prime minister did not rein him in, he was free to pursue foolish policies over the advice of his CGS. ⁵³ Mackenzie resigned in April 1913, frustrated and dispirited, and Hughes appointed the capable and perhaps more pliable Willoughby Gwatkin, also an imperial officer, to succeed him.

Still, in spite of Hughes, the Canadian Militia was a much more capable and British-army-compatible organization in 1914 than it had been in 1904. It still had many problems and deficiencies, which the Inspector General of Overseas Forces, General Sir Ian Hamilton, highlighted in his report of 1913. The Canadian field army, which at that time comprised an on-paper establishment of 6 divisions, 7 mounted brigades, 3 mixed brigades, and various line-of-communications units, was a staggering 2,100 officers and 110,000 other ranks short. ⁵⁴ In other words, the army did not even have close to half the men it needed to fill out its establishment, to say nothing of the 48 artillery batteries, 34 ammunition columns, 8 field troops of engineers, and 2 infantry battalions that the field force would be short if it were ever mobilized. Stores of ammunition and supplies were wholly inadequate, and there was also the problem that the 1904 Militia Act effectively restricted the units and formations of the Canadian Militia to home service, for anything but a direct threat to Canadian territory. But the Canadian army was organized into skeleton ‘British army’ divisions, it had adopted the FSRs and British training manuals as the holy writ for building formations and conducting operations, it had a general staff that was in regular contact with the Imperial General Staff in London, and it had general staff officers who had qualified psc (passed staff college) in all 6 militia divisions, an increasing number of msc-qualified officers in the brigades, and British general staff officers at RMC Kingston. ⁵⁵ Canadian army weapons, equipment, and ammunition, with the notable exception of the Ross rifle, were all of British army pattern. And, perhaps most important for the War Office, Canada had a plan to mobilize composite units of volunteers and form them into an expeditionary force of one infantry division and a cavalry brigade for overseas service, should the government decide it wanted to participate in an imperial war effort. ⁵⁶

In Australia, George Kirkpatrick arrived just after the Fusion government of Alfred Deakin and Joseph Cook had passed legislation for compulsory military service. By training and experience, Kirkpatrick was well qualified for his imperial mission. He was a Camberley graduate and he had served as Deputy Adjutant General (Intelligence) under Ian Hamilton in South Africa. He had held appointments as Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General in Canada (1902–4) and at the War Office (1904–6), while the general staff was being formed. In fact, he had played the part of chief of staff for British forces during the famous 1905 war game that the Directorate of Military Operations held to test the feasibility of deploying an expeditionary force to Belgium in the event that Germany rolled through that country en route to invading France. ⁵⁷ Kirkpatrick also had worked for Kitchener at army headquarters in India (1906–10), and he had served as the field marshal’s principal staff officer during the latter’s inspections of Australia and New Zealand (1909–10). Indeed, Kirkpatrick drafted Kitchener’s reports on the military forces of both dominions. ⁵⁸

The impetus for the compulsory training scheme was clearly Australian, and driven as much by domestic motives for conditioning the nation’s youth as it was by defence-related concerns, but Kirkpatrick and the other imperial officers on loan to Australia had a role in shaping and directing it. ⁵⁹ By the time Kitchener inspected the military forces of the Commonwealth, the Australians already had a draft plan to train males between the ages of 12 and 20 – cadet training to the age of 18 and proper military training thereafter. ⁶⁰ The principal author of the Australian legislation and the plan to enact it was Lieutenant Colonel J. Gordon Legge, a permanent force officer then holding the appointment of quartermaster general. Legge, who also had a law degree, worked closely with Kirkpatrick during Kitchener’s visit. In the end the inspection report recommended that the training be extended to the 26th year to provide enough citizen-force soldiers for the 80,000 troops, organized into 21 brigades, which Kitchener (and Kirkpatrick) believed Australia needed to defend itself until such time as the Commonwealth could be reinforced by imperial troops and the Royal Navy. He also recommended that Australia should have at least 350 professional officers, from second lieutenant to colonel, and he suggested that they be combined into a staff corps, or training cadre for the citizen forces, and drawn from a single military college. ⁶¹ Kitchener counselled that the Australian military college be modelled on the military schools at Kingston, or West Point, a recommendation that almost certainly emanated from the Canadian-born Kirkpatrick, who was a graduate of RMC Kingston. ⁶² The recommendations were well received. The Australian government, which had been looking for an endorsement of its compulsory training scheme, accepted them practically without reservation. ⁶³

Perhaps predictably, there was a mixture of successes and failures during Kirkpatrick’s tenure as inspector general. Both the militia (Citizen Forces) and the permanent force (Administrative and Instructional Staff) grew. (See Table 4.) The permanent force went from 1,455 (all ranks) in 1910 to 2,468 in 1913. ⁶⁴ And the size of the Active Citizen Forces increased from 21,877 to 45,915 during the same period. Just as important as the increase in size of the Australian Military Forces (AMF) was the change in their organization. By 1914 they had been grouped into 6 military districts comprising 19 brigades – 14 of infantry and 5 of light horse. RMC Duntroon was up and running by 1911, with 7 of 8 military instructors on loan from the British army and an RMC Kingston alumnus (Colonel William T. Bridges) as its commandant. By the autumn of 1912 the Australian general staff had also worked out plans (with military authorities in New Zealand) for a combined Australian-New Zealand expeditionary division of volunteers. ⁶⁵ Political sensitivities precluded making any of these plans public, but Kirkpatrick kept the War Office informed through private correspondence with Henry Wilson, the DMO. ⁶⁶ These were significant achievements.

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Table 4.

Australian Military Forces, 1910 and 1913.

	1910	1913
Permanent force (all ranks)	1,455	2,468
Citizen force (all ranks)	21,877	45,915
Organization	General staff	General staff
	Scattered units	14 infantry brigades
	Start of compulsory training	5 light horse brigades
		Compulsory training
		RMC Duntroon running
		Aus/NZ expeditionary force plan

Source: Information gleaned from TNA, WO 32/4818, ‘Report of an Inspection of the Military Forces of the Commonwealth of Australia by General Sir Ian Hamilton, G.C.B., D.S.O.’, May 1914, pp. 17–35.

But there were shortcomings. Unlike Lake, Kirkpatrick occasionally failed to distinguish what was desirable from what was possible. He annoyed the political sensibilities of the Minister for Defence, George Foster Pearce, when in 1911 he proposed forming a brigade of volunteers for immediate service outside Australia. And the concomitant recommendation that the four battalions of the brigade be designated ‘Saint George’s English Rifle Regiment, the NSW Irish Rifle regiment, the NSW Scottish Regiment and [the] Victorian Scottish Regiment’ offended Pearce’s Australian nationalism. ⁶⁷ There were also flaws in the military organization of the Australian brigades and the corresponding military areas, which can be traced to the recommendations of the Kitchener report, as Ian Hamilton noted when he inspected the AMF in 1914: ‘The organization of a nation for war is one thing, the military training of its youth is another, and a totally different thing.’ ⁶⁸ The system rarely provided individual training beyond basic weapon skills and drill, and collective training above the company level was practically non-existent. Hamilton even lamented the ‘lack of an ounce of practice’ on field exercises. ⁶⁹ Australia’s compulsory training scheme, geared as it was for the peacetime training of youth, was not even up to the task of producing the soldiers it needed for war, as Hamilton made clear. Making projections out to 1919–20, he made the case that not only would the compulsory training system fail to produce sufficient trained replacements (calculated at 50 per cent of the total force strength to account for wastage), it would still be 12,320–29,000 men short of basic field-force requirements. And the training system, which was based on a junior officer and a few non-commissioned officers (NCOs) per military area, could not make up such deficiencies on mobilization. Dual-hatted brigade majors, who supervised training for their areas in peace, would be whisked away to brigades on mobilization, leaving the area subalterns and captains without guidance to train and organize replacements. Worse, whereas the Canadians had at least started to fill brigade-major billets with officers who had received rudimentary staff training on their Militia Staff Course, ⁷⁰ none of the brigade majors in Australia had received any formal staff training, while only three of six military districts had general staff officers who had qualified at either Camberley or Quetta. ⁷¹ Australia also had far fewer permanent schools than Canada. RMC Duntroon, a musketry school at Radwick, and a gunnery school at Sydney were clearly insufficient to sustain a national mobilization. The Australian staff and training system, although it had made significant improvements in a short period of time, was not ideally prepared for rapid expansion or the proverbial long haul.

In New Zealand, Alexander Godley found soldiers and politicians who were more inclined to accept imperial assistance than Kirkpatrick had encountered in Australia; certainly the New Zealanders were far more cooperative and deferential than anyone Mackenzie met in Canada. In 1911, when Australia had only 4 imperial officers on loan from the British army, New Zealand had 12, including Godley as GOC, Lieutenant Colonel E.S. Heard as Director of Staff Duties and Military Training, ⁷² Lieutenant Colonel J.T. Burnett-Stuart as DMO, and 4 other staff college graduates. ⁷³ But, although Godley and company found military forces that were compliant, they had a long way to go in terms of meeting any kind of imperial standard. The Volunteer Force was having a difficult time attracting new recruits and its numbers were dwindling. Any kind of training, let alone training to an imperial standard, was difficult in such an environment of low interest and absenteeism, a situation made even worse by the policy of appointing officers by election. Change was necessary, and New Zealand’s Minister of Defence (also Prime Minister) Joseph Ward sought advice on how best to go about it. While in London for the Imperial Conference of 1909, he asked the CIGS how New Zealand should organize its forces for home defence and potential expeditionary operations. ⁷⁴ Two weeks later he had the Imperial General Staff’s ‘Scheme for the Reorganization of the Military Forces of New Zealand’ in hand. ⁷⁵ It proposed that New Zealand needed a field force of 30,000 troops to defend the islands, or at least to force any invader to embark a force of such size that it could not possibly avoid detection or attack by the Royal Navy. It also recommended that New Zealand be divided into four military districts of 7,500 men, each of which would be composed of a mounted rifle brigade, an infantry brigade, and the necessary attachments. Each district would be subdivided into ‘battalion’ areas with affiliated cadet corps to feed them. In other words, New Zealand should establish a territorial army much like the part-time, second-line Territorial Force in the United Kingdom. Given such a structure, the general staff estimated that the New Zealand Territorial Force (so named after 1911) should have little difficulty generating an expeditionary force of a mounted rifle brigade, a mixed brigade, and line-of-communications units for a total strength of approximately 10,000 troops.

The trouble for New Zealand was that a 30,000-man territorial army was all but impossible to assemble on a basis of voluntary enlistment, certainly not if recent trends in the Volunteer Force were any indication. Reluctantly, in December 1909, the Ward government passed a new Defence Act, which put in place a programme of compulsory military training and service for all males aged 12 to 30 years. ⁷⁶ Under the new scheme, boys entered as junior cadets at the age of 12 years, then proceeded through senior cadet training under military instructors (14–18 years), general training and service with the Territorial Force (18–20 years), and service with the Reserve (18–30 years). Not only would the system keep the 30,000-man Territorial Force up to strength, it would also produce a large surplus of trained men who could be called to ‘emergency’ service up to their 55th year. The Defence Act also scrapped the elective system for officer appointments, replacing it with one based on compulsory examinations and district selection boards. New Zealand was putting in place a scheme similar to the Australian one, and at roughly the same time. Just as Kirkpatrick had inherited a compulsory service scheme already in motion, Godley had to work with what New Zealand had already initiated, and mould its nascent Territorial Force as best he could.

Godley was the right type of soldier for the task. He was a capable if somewhat aloof officer of the Irish Guards who had passed out of Camberley in 1900 and had a fairly active career, which included appointments as staff officer to then Lieutenant Colonel Herbert Plumer in South Africa (1900), Commandant of the School of Mounted Infantry (1903–6), General Staff Officer 1st Grade (GSO1) of the 2nd Division in Aldershot (1906–10), and Commander of the East Lancashire Territorial Brigade (1910). Understanding that his mandate in New Zealand was to implement the Territorial Force scheme and ensure that the dominion’s forces were made compatible with the other armies of the empire, Godley took some time on his way to Wellington to see what other dominions were doing. He stopped in Canada, where he visited RMC Kingston to consult with the commandant, Colonel J.H.V. Crowe, whom he knew from Camberley. He also stopped in Australia, where he held discussions with Kirkpatrick and Bridges at the site of the soon-to-be-established Australian military college at Duntroon. Godley listened and began to make plans.

By the time he arrived in Wellington, Godley had a clear idea of what he wanted to do. He started with the staffs and the instructors in the units and brigades. He wanted to place one permanent force officer as an adjutant in each of 16 infantry battalions, 12 mounted rifles regiments, and 4 artillery brigades, and he wanted each of the 56 areas to have a sergeant major as an instructor. But in 1910 New Zealand was well short of the professional officers and NCOs he needed. There were only 22 officers in the New Zealand Staff Corps, 35 NCOs on the New Zealand Permanent Staff, and 300 gunners of all ranks in the Royal New Zealand Artillery. ⁷⁷ And Duntroon would not produce any graduates until 1914 – New Zealand was to send 8 to 10 cadets to Duntroon annually – so Godley needed to make permanent force officers and NCOs quickly. To this end, he immediately arranged a two-month training camp at Tauherenikau (January–March 1911), under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Heard, to assess and select officers and NCOs to fill out the permanent force. Godley chose 41 officers and 42 NCOs at the end of the training exercise, adding them to the full-time cadre on a provisional basis. Before the end of the Tauherenikau camp, he also gathered all Territorial unit commanders and district staffs for practical instruction on tactics and staff procedures.

A competent trainer, Godley set in motion the most ambitious and successful training regimen of any imperial officer on loan to the dominions. Registrations continued under the compulsory training scheme and individual training started in the areas before the end of 1911, but Godley understood that numbers of troops were only a small part of the story. They had to be shaped into battalions, brigades, and, eventually, a division. As he told those officers who gathered in Wellington during the summer of 1912, ‘[W]e want to make an Army. We don’t simply want to draw a number of men to simply drill and shoot. We can never make an Army unless, with the [least] possible delay, we get the Army into an organized body.’ ⁷⁸ By the time Hamilton arrived for his inspector general’s visit in the spring of 1914, the military forces of New Zealand were well equipped, comprising 578 permanent force personnel and 25,902 active territorials. ⁷⁹ (See Table 5.) Godley held battalion and regimental camps in 1912 and brigade camps in 1913, a remarkable accomplishment, considering the sad state of the Volunteer Force only a few years earlier. ⁸⁰ He may not have been loved by New Zealand’s soldiers, but there can be no doubt as to the substantial gains he made with the Territorial Force before the First World War.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 5.

New Zealand Military Forces, 1910 and 1914.

	1910	1914
Permanent force (all ranks)	314	578
Volunteers/Territorial (all ranks)	14,249	25,902
Organization	No general staff	Small general staff
	Scattered units	4 rifle brigades
	Start of compulsory training	4 mounted brigades
		4 districts
		Compulsory training
		Cadets training at RMC Duntroon
		Manoeuvres to brigade level

Source: Information gleaned from WO 32/4819, ‘Report of the Inspector-General of the Oversea Forces of the Military Forces of New Zealand’, 1914, p. 8.

There was progress, albeit in varying degrees, in all the dominion armies, and it was by design. Army apostles such as Godley were an element of a conscious and renewed effort on the part of the War Office to standardize all the armies of the empire. The origins of that policy were complex. It had emotional underpinnings from the swell of early twentieth-century imperial nationalism, which was channelled into action by both the challenges posed by potential adversaries on the Continent (all of whom had large general-staff-driven armies) and concerns arising out of the exposition of British army weaknesses in South Africa. The British army had to reform and so did the other armies of the empire if there was to be any hope of wartime expansion. The agreements of the 1907 and 1909 imperial conferences to establish an Imperial General Staff and make the armies of Britain, India, and the self-governing colonies more compatible resulted in sharp increases of the numbers of imperial officers on loan to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, a definite reflection of the relative importance of the initiative. Dominion authorities cooperated because neither an Imperial General Staff nor the casting of their land forces in the British army mould (ostensibly for home defence) entailed peacetime commitments that could cause domestic political problems. At the same time, dominion politicians knew that army reform and standardization also prepared their militaries to serve effectively in the expeditionary forces that the more imperial-minded elements of their respective populations would demand if Britain went to war.

By 1914 the dominion armies were much more compatible with the British army than they had been in 1899, and they were far better poised to grow, mostly as a result of the work done by imperial officers on loan. There were problems, obstacles, and setbacks. But, in retrospect, the investment of a few dozen on-loan officers to help build frameworks for future expansion can hardly be seen as anything but a success. During the First World War the dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand put a combined total of ten combat-effective and compatible divisions on the Western Front alone. That they were able to do so owed much to foundations laid by army apostles such as Lake, Mackenzie, Godley, and Kirkpatrick.